Full text of "The Catholic world"

THE 



CATHOLIC WORLD. 



MONTHLY MAGAZINE 



OF 



GENERAL LITERATURE AND SCIENCE, 



VOL. XLI1I. 
APRIL, 1886, TO SEPTEMBER, 1886. 



NEW YORK: 

THE CATHOLIC PUBLICATION SOCIETY CO., 
9 Barclay Street. 

1886. 



Copyright, 1886, by 
I. T. HECKER. 



CONTENTS. 



Antoine Davelny. Helen A tteridge, . . 384 

An Untimely Pilgrimage. W. T. Lamed, . 549 
Archdeacon Farrar's Advice. Rev. H. P. 

Smyth, 116 

Avignon, and the Processions of the Gray 

Penitents. M. P. Thompson, . . . 449 

Baptized Democracy. Rev. Walter Elliott, . 721 
" Broad Church, The."* * * . . . . 101 
By the Rille at Pont-Audemer. Oscar Fay 
Adams, 797 

Catherine Tegakwitha. A my Pope, . . 78 
Catholic Charities of Dublin : The Children's 

Hospital. Mary Banim, .... 48 
Catholic Charities of New York, The. L. B. 

Binsse, ....... 681, 809 

Catholic Church and Civil Liberty, The. 

Ex-Senator John VV. Johnston, . . 232 
Catholic People, A. P. F. de Gournay, . 594 
Cause and Cure./*. F. de Gournay, . . i 
Ce'sare Cantu. James A it-stin Finch, . . 525 
Charms and Charm Medicines. Mrs. L. D. 

Morgan, 322 

Chat about New Books, A. Maurice F. 

Egan, . . . 124, 270, 414, 556, 706, 846 
Children at Work, The. Rev. John Talbot 

Smith, 619 

* "Circuit of Ireland" and the Fortress of 

Aileach, The. T. C? Neil Russell, . . 213 
Czar's Horses, The. E. L. Dorsey, . . 535 

Day Nurseries in France. L. B. Binsse, . 396 
Dr. Hammond as an Amateur Theologian. 

Rev. Henry A. Brann, D.D., . . . 651 
Doctor's Fee, The. (Conclusion.) Christian 

Reid, 35 



Eugenie de Guerin. Kate Vannah, 



695 



Fair Emigrant, A.. Rosa Mulholland, . . 730 
Few Mistakes of Rev. Dr. Newton, A.. Rev. 

Henry A, Brann, D.D., .... 250 

Frangois Coppee. A I/red M. Cotte, Ph.D., . 196 



Gabriel Tellez. Hugh P. McElrone, 



670 



Harboring Day-Schools in France. Louis B. 

Binssi, 187 

Human Environments of the Catholic Faith, 

The. Rev. Walter Elliott, . . .463 

Inception and Suppression of the " Old Land 
League of Ireland." M. Murphy, ex Dis- 
trict Inspector Royal Irish Constabulary, . 23 
In the Jura. M. P. Thompson, . . . 765 
Intellectual Opportunities, Past and Present. 

John S. Vaughan 86 



Jeremiah Sullivan Black. A. J. Paust 

Ph.D 753 

John Marshall's Motto. Anna T. Sadlier, . 349 

Madame Mary Aloysia Hardey, . . . 844 

Marius the Epicurean. Agnes Repplier, 222 

Mary Stuart. Charles Gayarre, . . 37, 777 

Model Alphabet, A. C. M. O' ' Keefe, . . 156 

My Grandmother's Story. L. T., . . 660 

New Pagan or Old Christian? William 

Barry, D.D. , . . . . . 433 

Novels and Novel- Writing. Francis Lavtlle, 513 

Otto Arlesberg. Robert McPhail, . . . 604 
Our Present Troubles H. P. S., . . . 585 
Ozanam's Dante. L. D. Pychoivska, , . 790 

Passion Play of Vorderthiersee, The. Rev. 

Joseph 77. McMahon, .... 289 
Pia de' Tolommei. T. H. Childs, . . .206 

Practical People. Cond^ B. Fallen, . . in 
President Seelye and Religious Education. 

Rev. H. H. Wyman, &zg 

Puritanism, 702 

Question of Ulster, The. John R. G. Hat- 
sard, 821 

"Retributive Justice." Sarsfield Hubert 

Burke, 60 

Richard Honeywood's Bequest. Afnes 

Power, 166 

Royal Irish Constabulary, The. M. Murphy, 
ex-District Inspector Royal Irish Consta- 
bulary, 309 

Saints and Shrines of Switzerland. F. Gau- 

tier, ........ 626 

School Question, The. Rev. Patrick F. Mc- 

Sweeny, 505 

Sigefrey the One-Armed. P. F. dt Gournay, 833 
Solitary Baron, The. W. Seton, . . . 240 
Son Eminence Grise et Son Eminence Rouge. 

Rev. Thomas L. Kelley, . . . 146 

Tour in Catholic Teutonia, A. Part III. St. 

George Mivart, n 

Trade-Brotherhoods, Past and Present. W. 

Seton, 304 

Voice from the Wilderness, A.. Rev. J. Talbot 

Smith, 485 

We Catholics. Rev. Edward McSweeny, . 256 

What is True Education ? By the author of 
" Leaves from the Annals of the Sisters 
of Mercy " etc., 404 

Why do not Anglicans become Catholics ? 

A. F. Marshall, 473 

Woman in Ire'and of Old. Charles de Kay, 372 



IV 



CONTENTS. 



POETRY. 



A Modern Philosopher. Kate Vannah, 

Eustochium, or Saint Jerome's Letter.- 
A ubrey de Vere, 

Judas Iscariot. Evelyn Pyne, 

"Paas-Flowers." Edith W. Cook, 
Publishing the Banns. Edith W. Cook, 

Shelley and the Skylark. H. C.W., 
Songs of Summer. Mary C. Crowley, , 



523 



321 

618 



The Conqueror. Win. Robert Williams, . 47 

The Death of St. Jerome. A ubrey de Vere, 336 
The Legend of St. Pancratius. Aubrey de 

Vere, . ^ . . . . . . 577, 741 

The Mountain and Valley. Rev. Michael 

Barrett, O.S.B., .... 33 

The Poppy-Flower. Rev. J. Costello, . . 231 

The Three Cardinals. M. B. M., . . 796 

The Tramp. Rev. Clarence A. Walworth, 471 
Tomb of Alexander the Great. Rev. J, 

Costello, 87 

True Love. Rev. Clarence A. Walworth, . 650 



NEW PUBLICATIONS. 



Acta et Decreta Concilii Plenarii Baltimoren- 

sisTertii, A.D. MDCCCLXXXIV, . 286 

Armstrong's Primer of English History. . . 287 

Atlas des Missions Catholiques, . . . 429 

Blessed Easter-Tide, The, . . . .284 

Bugle-Echoes, 576 

Cardinal-Archbishop of Westminster, The, . 570 
Catho'ic Memoirs of Vermont and New Hamp- 
shire, ........ 719 

Chemistry : A Manual for Beginners, . . 287 

Chaldean Magician, The, .... 143 

Christian Priesthood, The, .... 283 

Christian State of Life, The, .... 572 

Clothes of Religion, The, . . . _ . 857 

Compendium Gradualis et Missalis Romani, . 717 

De Ecclesia et Statu juridice consideratis, . 569 
Der Goldene Schnitt unddessen Erscheinungs- 

formen in Mathematik, Natur und Kunst, 142 

Divine Office, The, 142 

Easter Carols, 284 

Echoes from the Pines, 288 

Edge-Tools of Speech 144 

Epistles and Gospels, The, . . . .288 

English Catholic Non-jurors of 1715, The, . 140 

Essays on Ireland, 860 



Following of Christ, The, 



574 



Hoffman's Catholic Directory, Almanac, and 

Clergy List, 287 

House of Refuge on Randall's Island In- 
spected, The, 143 

Irish and Other Poems, 285 

King Edward the Sixth, Supreme Head, . 426 

Latin Poems of Leo XIII., The, . . .859 

Leaves from St. Augustine, .... 430 

Lepers of Molokai, The, 144 

Library of St. Francis de Sales, . . . 574 



Life of Margaret Clitherow, . . -575 
Life of the Venerable Joseph Marchand, Apos- 
tolic Missionary and Martyr, The, . . 139 
Lord O'Hagan's Selected Speeches, . . 144 
Lorenz Alma-Tadema, ..... 287 

Moments on the Mount, 286 

Mother of the King, The : Mary during the 

Life of Our Lord, ..... 719 
Mrs. Leicester's School, and Other Writings, 

in Prose and Verse, . .... 286 



Origines de 1'Eglise, Les, 
Our Orange Opponents, . 
Outlines of Universal History, 

Parnell Movement, The, . 
Pax Vobis, 



426 
288 
1.37 



427 

576 

Poet in May, The, .430 

Popular Objections to Catholic Faith and 

Practice Considered, 142 

Primitive Christianity and the Catholic 

Church, 571 

Progressive Orthodoxy, ..... 575 

Reply to Professor Maguire's Pamphlet, A, . 432 

Koman Vesperal, The, 719 

Rule of our Most Holy Father St. Benedict, 

The 574 

Server's Missal, ...... 285 

Shaftesbury (the first Earl), .... 860 

Short Papers for the People, .... 573 

Spirits of Darkness, and their Manifestations 

on Earth, The, 285 

Story of Chaldea, The, 287 

Studies in Greek Thought, .... 576 

Study of Dante, A, 431 

Studies of Family Life, 140 

Theory and Praxis of Melodeon-Playing, The, 576 

Treasure of the Abbey, The, .... 143 

Vagrant Verses, 421 



THE 



CATHOLIC WORLD. 



VOL. XLIII. SEPTEMBER, 1886. No. 258. 



BAPTIZED DEMOCRACY.* 

TWENTY secret societies could not do so much to overturn a 
European monarchy as this one book. Its two red covers hold 
more dynamite in smaller bulk and of deadlier force than any 
bomb yet invented. The resources of civilization for blowing 
up the remnants of feudalism are here brought to the highest 
point of efficiency. Mr. Carnegie proves the case against mon- 
archy and aristocracy by the success, the triumph of democracy. 
His argument is that in America the poor man grows rich and the 
rich man richer because all men are equal. The form of govern- 
ment and the traditions of freedom give every man a fair chance ; 
the result is such a prodigious development of nature's gifts as the 
world never saw before, and such a fair distribution of them as 
would seem Utopian were it not simple fact. One chapter after 
another on trading and educating, manufacturing and home-build- 
ing, mining and voting, tilling the soil and recreating the mind, life 
among the lumbermen and life among the journalists all about 
more than half a hundred million of people who live happily to- 
gether, yoked only by their own laws ; trade together unhin- 
dered by restrictions ; fight together but once a century and are 
at peace profound in half a decade afterwards ; sovereign in one 
indivisible nation, sovereign in nearly twoscore indestructible 
States, sovereign in individual freedom such (to catch the 
glow of the author's own style) is America ; such is democracy. 

* Triumphant Democracy ; or, Fifty Years' March of the Republic. By Andrew Carne- 
gie. New York : Charles Scribner's Sons. 

Copyright. REV. I. T. HKCKER. 1886. 



722 BAPTIZED DEMOCRACY. [Sept., 

What he proves by figures, what he demonstrates by calculations 
(though with a wonderful deal of bragging), he sums up as fol- 
lows : 

" Here is the record of one century's harvest of democracy : i. The ma- 
jority of the English-speaking race under one republican flag, at peace. 
2. The nation which is pledged by act of both parties to offer amicable 
arbitration for the settlement of international disputes. 3. The nation 
which contains the smallest proportion of illiterates, the largest propor- 
tion of those who read and write. 4. The nation which spends least on 
war and most upon education ; which has the smallest army and navy, in 
proportion to its population and wealth, of any maritime power in the world. 

5. The nation which provides most generously during their lives for every 
soldier and sailor injured in its cause, and for their widows and orphans. 

6. The nation in which the rights of the minority and of property are 
most secure. 7. The nation whose flag, wherever it floats, over sea and 
land, is the symbol and guarantor of the equality of the citizen. 8. The 
nation in whose constitution no man suggests improvement ; whose laws 
as they stand are satisfactory to all citizens. 9. The nation which has the 
ideal second chamber, the most august assembly in the world the Ameri- 
can Senate. 10. The nation whose Supreme Court is the envy of the ex- 
prime minister of the parent-land, u. The nation whose constitution 'is 
the most perfect piece of work ever struck off at one time by the mind and 
purpose of man,' according to the present prime minister of the parent- 
land. 12. The nation most profoundly conservative of what is good, yet 
based upon the political equality of the citizen. 13. The wealthiest nation 
in the world. 14. The nation first in public credit and in payment of debt. 
15. The greatest agricultural nation in the world. 16. The greatest manu- 
facturing nation in the world. 17. The greatest mining nation in the world." 

But, Mr. Andrew Carnegie, do you not perceive that such a 
summing-up might be made by your atheistical neighbor, who 
believes not in God nor in a world to come ? Tell me, sir, is any 
nation great whose sum total of greatness can be swallowed up 
by the dismal grave? True, you have a chapter on religion, but 
only a scanty one, with a little share of statistics ; you plainly 
show that if that topic has been given a place in your book it is 
only because you are too kindly a calculator to reject any appli- 
cant having lists and tables to offer, and in summing up you 
leave religion altogether out of reckoning. 

In truth, the author has not got at the main question. He 
has told us what democracy can do for the farmer, for the manu- 
facturer, the author, the artisan, the miner, the inventor, the secu- 
Jar educator. But what can democracy do for the man f That 
is the main question. In the judgment of the majority of man- 
kind secularism at its best and broadest is but one side of our 
nature, and that not the brightest side ; it is the lining, and not 



i886.] BAPTIZED DEMOCRACY. 723 

the garment. The American citizen does not change money, 
delve the soil, spin cotton, dig for iron, grind flour as the ex- 
pression of his manhood. No ; nor is the exercise of sovereign 
authority at the ballot-box the highest human act. The highest 
expression of manhood is the effort to reach the ideal end of man 
the infinite and eternal God. God is man's ideal, not money- 
getting or president-making. 

The weak point in Mr. Carnegie's book is that he has left de- 
mocracy without a head on its shoulders. The true destiny of 
the democratic citizen is the chief problem he has to solve. To 
this the author barely adverts. His one chapter on religion, the 
very shortest in the book, treats this highest question flippantly, 
showing as much weakness here as power elsewhere. As to 
education, he knows nothing but the school without God or im- 
mortality. He forecasts, and wisely, the material future of the 
republic ; but as to future movements in the realm of the high- 
est aspirations of the human soul he has little to say, and we 
fear that he has thought little of what is going to become of his 
democrat in the endless hereafter. He has done well, but his 
work is not up to its subject till he supplies a proper chapter on 
religion. And we are compelled to record our impression that 
his maifner of mentioning Spencer, Huxley, and other such 
doubters indicates his tolerance of, perhaps his tendency to, 
Agnosticism. In respect to religion he is rather an American- 
Scotchman than a Scotch-American ; we suspect that in his 
make-up the substantive part is the European sceptic, and only 
the adjective part is American. Will Mr. Carnegie permit us to 
say that he cannot write seriously of human progress and jump 
the question of man's future destiny ? 

For the democratic man naturally tends to positive belief in 
the higher truths of reason ; he joyfully welcomes the ennobling 
doctrines of the Christian revelation. Does not the unfettered 
human mind, under guidance of divine grace, instinctively long 
to be more ennobled by the highest truth ? Abraham was a typi- 
cal man. God said to him : " I am the almighty God : walk be- 
fore me and be perfect." What so becomes a free man as the 
firm persuasion that his nobility is rooted in the infinite majesty 
of the Deity in whose image he is created? What man is so pro- 
found a contrast with the slaveling as he who will have no king 
but Christ ? That is our view of fundamental democracy, and it 
is plainly a better democracy than Mr. Carnegie's. It is bap- 
tized democracy. He seems to place the triumph of democracy 
mainly in its superior capacity for getting wealth. We extol a 



724 BAPTIZED DEMOCRACY. [Sept., 

democracy which can be triumphant and poor, and we affirm 
that it will never be really triumphant till it has assured the 
triumph of its manhood over greed for money and over every in- 
ordinate desire for material progress ; till then money is its 
king and its god "the almighty dollar." We are far from ac- 
cusing our author of consciously making wealth the test of true 
democracy ; but the trend of his book is that way. Nor are we 
apologists for shiftlessness, under cloak of even religion. But we 
claim that the triumph of democracy is that in this age it is the 
form of government peculiarly favorable to the harmony of 
man's higher and lower nature by the grace of God in our Lord 
Jesus Christ. Furthermore, our democrat must hourly answer 
most pressing questions of the soul about practical right and 
wrong involving time and eternity, or he becomes a slave to the 
most arbitrary and fickle of despots doubt. In the highest 
view of life a democracy without the true religion, or an honest 
purpose to get it, cannot yet claim to be triumphant ; is in dan- 
ger of becoming a defeated democracy, helpless and easlaved. 
Its noblest spirits will struggle in vain with interior difficulties 
which embitter the life of any rational man and make, in his 
case, the epithet " triumphant " a mockery. To know the divine 
principles on which our manhood has been constituted, and to 
live in conformity with them, is the liberty of the inner man. To 
unshackle reason by the power of God's truth is emancipation : 
prejudice holds reason down, passion enslaves it, ignorance 
blinds it. Until prejudice, passion, and ignorance are overcome 
there is only slavery of the man, though the animal may riot in 
every license. 

In reading of the great physical achievements of our people 
we are ever asking, What will not the American democracy do 
when it turns to God ? While the mass of our fellow-citizens 
are seemingly quite absorbed in what they shall eat and drink 
and wherewith they shall be clothed, there are wiser and better 
ones among them who will feel the impulse of the Holy Spirit, 
and will be the first to show what democracy can do for religion. 
We will see in the future the fulfilment of not only Mr. Car- 
negie's prophecies as to material progress, but, better, what a 
baptized democracy can do. The world has been waiting for 
nineteen centuries for a more perfect matrix for the reception of 
Christianity ; perhaps it will at last find it in the democracy of 
the American people. If it does not find it here, where else can 
it hope to find it ? Is this what Mr. Carnegie is struggling to 
express? There is not a pleasant sound nor a lovely sight in the 



i886.] BAPTIZED DEMOCRACY. 725 

universe but a religious mind will make it minister to its higher 
nature and put it into the worship of God ; why not, then, these 
magnificent capabilities of the democracy ? And how will the 
American people turn fully to God ? What will be the charac- 
teristics of their religious activity ? 

In answer we remark that the practical character of our de- 
mocracy is conservative, as our author plainly shows. Theo- 
retically, democracy is progressive ; and, indeed, the last form of 
all that is good in the civil order is to be had in American de- 
mocracy or nowhere. Yet practically this people are more bent 
on preserving than acquiring liberty ; they have grown con- 
servative. They look to the bolts aad locks, though it be for 
the treasure's sake. What will prevent the individual from mis- 
using his liberty by unjustly monopolizing ? What will steady 
the rush of popular passion? What will make the public life of 
this people orderly ? What will make popular movements cen- 
tripetal ? These are the live problems of the American people. 
The answer is, organic unity ; unity with authority, which always 
accompanies it. Unity produces authority, and authority pro- 
duces force.' Without force thus legitimately produced there is 
neither public order nor individual liberty. Americans feel that 
democracy needs a controlling influence which makes for unity. 
The public life of a great democratic people needs to be organi- 
cally one. The individual is secure enough, will be secure 
enough, if his rights can be made one with the common welfare. 
Is not this a dominant idea of the American people ? Does 
not Mr. Carnegie's book prove it? How gladly does every pa- 
triot welcome any influence drawing men together into brother- 
hood! We must have such a unifying power. In order to 
influence this people steadily and in the long run to maintain 
their common lot, a sentiment of unity stronger than any politi- 
cal sentiment is plainly necessary. Something more sacred than 
any civil bond must draw the dominant minds of a nation to- 
gether, or party rancor will in course of time again divide us, 
or local interest, or sectional narrowness. What can offer this 
sacred bond, this higher law of unity ? Religious sects cannot 
do it. When the strain came they broke before the state ; they 
gave out the first ominous sound of the snapping bonds of po- 
litical unity. It is their nature to borrow from the state, and not 
to give. Long before the disrupting of the nation Webster, in 
one of his great Union speeches, lamented the breaking-up of 
Methodism as a portent. The other great sects soon followed. 
Instead of helping us to hold together, the religious sects pre- 



726 BAPTIZED DEMOCRACY. [Sept., 

cipitated disruption. Americans were earlier at civil war and 
the conflict was more bitter because they were not religiously 
a united people. The religion we held as a people had no grace 
of healing. 

But the Christian religion possesses a unity organic, fruitful, 
and divine. Practical men will be attracted to that form of Chris- 
tianity in which they perceive doctrines and an organism which 
are an exhaustless reservoir of the very element which is an 
essential requirement of a free and great people. Whatever can 
unite the children of every race into one brotherhood, by methods 
at once of divine origin and representative of the people, cannot 
fail to elicit the admiration of men whose ambition is to live in a 
commonwealth as vast as it is free. This will be especially the 
case with men who seek the public good from motives of religion 
and philanthropy. We adopt the views of a recent article in a 
religious quarterly as being elevated and voicing the wishes of 
religious men generally : 

" Secularism, in its best sense and in its broadest scope and most hu- 
manizing significance, is but one side of the life of the race. Religion and 
the church are on the other side, and make up a primal factor of all social 
progress." ..." Hence the call for greater unity along with increased zeal 
and energy. Besides, the rising moral and social issues of the time will 
have to be met. Marriage and divorce, as these have been allowed to run, 
require serious and effective control. The education and practical enfran- 
chisement of the colored people, and the industrial training and Christian- 
ization of the Indians, need the guardianship and aid of a united Christian 
people. The rapid increase of the ignorant and dangerous classes in our 
large towns, cities, and business centres warns us that we must join hands 
in bringing these people under proper religious and moral influence. The 
liquor-traffic is a monstrous evil and an aggressive power ; it will have to 
be met and corrected by a no less powerful and determined popular will. 
Pauperism and a multitude of other social problems are already knocking 
at our doors and are asking for a rational solution. These matters belong 
to the civil government, but they cannot be left to its exclusive manage- 
ment. It will be difficult enough to get them under satisfactory control 
when the civil powers are backed up by all the moral support a united 
Christian constituency can give them." * 

We think that Mr. Carnegie could learn something, from such 
an observer, of the office of religious unity in the triumph of de- 
mocracy. The regulative principle without which liberty is but 
free to its own destruction is authority, and authority springs 
from unity. 

So far the practical American. But another class among us 

* The Reformed Quarterly Review, July, 1886, " The One Sign," by the Rev. J. E. 
Graeff. 



1 886.] BAPTIZED DEMOCRACY. 727 

will be turned towards religion from a higher motive. The 
Catholic Church will sooner or later attract those noble souls 
who long to live solely for the ideal. Oh ! when will we become 
aware that in the church and out of it there are souls who can 
live only for the ideal ? God calls them only by that sublime 
way. They are not many, but every one of them is a type of 
a large class of their fellow-beings. They will seek for the ideal 
religion ; none but the best will satisfy them. It must be one that 
brings God nearest to man ; that will be its most essential re- 
quisite. But, in addition to that, it must be one which answers 
in the spiritual order the ideal of democracy a religion based 
on truth and the dignity of man, aiming at universal brother- 
hood. Now, what religion so much as pretends to these notes 
except one? By baptism the Catholic becomes a child of God. 
From this flows the brotherhood of the race in the highest 
sense. Understood of the natural man as a creature of God and 
made in his image, the brotherhood of the race is the corner- 
stone of our democracy : it has been laid by Divine Providence. 
All men are created equal : understood in its right sense, under- 
stood as Americans understand it, this makes the democratic 
citizenship of the nation an outgrowth of nature. The religion 
of nature is true but insufficient: it looks for a perfect that is 
to say, a supernatural religion. The democracy of the free state 
is but a suggestion of the divine brotherhood wherewith Christ 
has made us free. That all men are brethren makes the Ameri- 
can democracy a true realization of native human dignity. But 
to be brethren with Christ in the supernatural state of children of 
God is the boon of Christ's true church to man, and it accepts 
and strengthens the equality of citizenship in the free state. That 
men may be co-heirs with Christ of celestial glory, partaking with 
him of the Godhead, he essentially and naturally, we by adoption 
and supernaturally these are the fruits of the organism called the 
church of Christ. 

Democracy is founded on the natural brotherhood of men 
Catholicity is founded on a higher brotherhood than that of na- 
ture : it is given us through the divinity of Christ. The first 
leads up to the second, and can only by it best secure its results. 
The Catholic Church contains the ideal of the democracy, and in 
the long run will be found necessary as well for its preservation 
as for its continued advance towards perfect human brother- 
hood. 

For this people to become mainly Catholic is the chief work 
of Divine Providence in this asre. How shall this work be done? 



728 BAPTIZED DEMOCRACY. [Sept., 

What shall be the methods and who the instruments? Not, 
dear Catholic reader, angels from heaven, but you and I and 
every one of our faithful Catholic people must be the apostles of 
America. Nor does this Gospel need other miracles than the 
perennial one of our good lives and the resistless truth of the 
cause of Christ. 

But what shall be the methods ? What shall we do ? How 
shall we make our faith most presentable? Shall we "minimize" 
paring down and paring down till we cut the quick ? Shall we 
present the church to our fellow-citizens like a shorn sheep bear- 
ing everywhere the mark of the shears? Will you treat honest 
men and women as you do youK sick babies, and attempt to give 
them the truth of God as if it were a doctor's pill, coating it 
over with sugar, slipping it in between the honest democrat's 
teeth as if afraid he would bite you? Will you treat him to re- 
ligion as you serve medicine to children? Or shall we "maxi- 
mize"? Shall we model after some national type of the Old 
World ? Shall we stand so straight that we lean backwards ? 
Shall we force our customer to carry home not only the fruit but 
the indigestible wooden measure to boot? Shall we be so sus- 
picious of God's persevering grace that we shall not let our neo- 
phyte begin his course till we clutter up his big young limbs with 
"opinions," and "views," and "devotions," and "tendencies" 
which have long since failed to attract the active spirits of even 
the Old World ? In truth, it looks as if some consider the apos- 
tolic office to consist nowadays in an exhibition of the religious 
antiques of Europe. Shall we transport the failures of Europe 
to the New World, and set them to work on our people ? Is this 
what you call " maximizing" even orthodoxy ? Then there is an 
immense difference between sentimental orthodoxy and rational 
orthodoxy. 

No; we shall neither "maximize" nor "minimize." If we 
wish to succeed it can only be by delivering the truth, the whole 
truth, and nothing but the truth. Not " minimize" except you 
so call the cutting-away from about Catholicity what has grown 
up from the roots of nationality ; what has grown up from the 
roots of Catholicity itself must remain. Whatever was an adap- 
tation of Divine Providence to far different or long-past human 
environments, racial, national, or personal idiosyncrasies, must be 
minimized. To cherish every essential product of the divine 
action in the church, to domesticate it all, to make it at home 
among us and among our people this is maximizing in the true 
sense, unfettered by inverted commas. 



1 886.] BAPTIZED DEMOCRACY. 729 

What is French or Irish, Italian or German, is for its own race 
Catholic, but it is not Catholic elsewhere ; we shall do the will of 
God if we minimize it for Americans. What is eve^where and 
at all times Catholic, to give this a fuller development is to maxi- 
mize wisely. 

Let us discriminate. Does this or that particular devotion 
attract Americans to any thoroughly Catholic sentiment. Let it 
be propagated with every zeal. Is there question of ritual ? Let 
us not suppress it and freeze it up, but bring it out with greater 
splendor, so as fitly to symbolize the inspiring dogmas of the faith. 
Religion must ever furnish a sufficient symbolism for any people 
in their worship of God ; their nature requires it, for they are 
physical and spiritual in one personality. But where there is a 
choice, let us discriminate between what bears directly on dog- 
mas of the faith and what is the accompaniment of a particu- 
lar or a national devotion. As to doctrines, it is our duty to 
preach them, write about them, and converse about them, each 
one in his sphere as a man instinct with the Holy Spirit ; and let 
it be doctrines, and not probabilities or opinions : leave opinions 
to the schools. 

It is ourselves that we have got to liberalize, and not our 
Catholicity ; and to liberalize ourselves by the development and 
maximizing of Catholicity within us and around us. 

It is astonishing how much more liberal the Catholic religion 
is than Catholic people. Where is the Catholic man who will 
say that he is as liberal as his religion ? The highest encomium 
that can be passed on a man is to say that he is as broad as the 
doctrines the Catholic Church teaches. 



730 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Sept., 



A FAIR EMIGRANT. 

CHAPTER I. 
ALONE IN THE BUSH. 

ARTHUR DESMOND, an Irish gentleman, left, in the year 18 , his 
native country under unhappy circumstances, and found his way to 
Minnesota, where, following as far as white settlers had then ven- 
tured, he took land, built himself a wooden house, and began life 
in solitude. Though quite a young man, a gray look of blight 
on his countenance and a dejected droop in his walk told plainly 
that whatever might be the mainspring of the energy that kept 
him laboring from morning till night, and from night almost till 
morning again, with little sleep and no recreation, hewing down 
the woods and turning up the virgin soil for future harvests of 
gold, there was at lefcst no hope in his toil. Young though he 
was, he was a broken man, who, with a canker in his heart that 
could not be cured, had isolated himself voluntarily from the 
society of his fellow-men. 

Hope put out of the question, the motive for his persistent 
labor was not far to seek. A man of keenly sensitive organiza- 
tion, of fine rather than strong brain, he had wit enough to 
know that for one like him a load of unsurpassed mental agony 
is not to be borne except face to face with nature, alone in some 
of her magnificent solitudes and under the yoke of such bodily 
toil as leaves little leisure for consecutive thought. Obeying 
the instinct for self preservation, he had taken hold of the only 
means that could save him from the doom of insanity. 

He had brought nothing with him to the backwoods but his 
workman's clothes and tools, the miniature likeness of a woman, 
and a packet of letters which he wore sewn round his neck till 
they began to crack in the folds and fray at the edges, and, later, 
deposited in a small box of pine- wood carved rather skilfully by 
himself. He never looked at the miniature and he never read 
the letters, but when he came in from work his first glance was 
towards the casket, and at night it was placed with his revolver 
by the side of his lonely bed. 

His beard grew long and untrimmed, and white hairs began 
to creep in among his dark locks. He held little intercourse with 



1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 731 

men, yet whenever a human being passed his way, whether white 
traveller going- to or from St. Paul, or Indian straggler from far out 
on the prairie that stretched from his door to the horizon, the 
wayfarer was sure to receive kindly hospitality from the lonely 
squatter in his log-built home. The cries of animals, the songs 
and calls of birds, and the ring of his own axe were often the only 
sounds he heard for weeks. Sometimes the concert of the woods 
and the murmured, exquisite music which Nature makes for her- 
self in her great solitudes charmed the gray look of blight from 
his face, or the sumptuous coloring of the primeval scenes around 
would fascinate his eye and smooth away the furrow that agony 
had already dug deep between his brows. And it was these 
momentary relaxings of too taut a string, these almost unnoticed 
yieldings to the great mother's power to soothe, that saved his 
reason and enabled him to give continuity of purpose to his 
work. 

Whatever may be the motive of long and determined devotion 
to labor, it is generally rewarded by a harvest of success. Ar- 
thur Desmond sa\v his work begin to prosper and its profit to 
teem upon him before he had realized that any other result was 
to be expected from his toil than the dulled state of memory 
which had enabled him to keep sane. All that he had touched 
seemed to turn to gold, and, as he saw it pour into his hands, 
he asked himself bitterl} T : " Of what use is this to me? What 
am I going to do with it?" He flung it into the earth again 
arid forgot it, but when another year had passed it returned to 
him doubled and trebled. Again he buried it in his wider and 
wider-spreading meadows and fields, and again it found its way 
back to him with an increase that made it more burdensome than 
ever. 

Master of a vast and teeming territory, he still lived in his 
log-house, content with that rude harbor for his own person, 
while his granaries and farm-buildings multiplied and extended. 
No comfort came to him with his success, no joy in his riches, 
nor hope for happiness in his future years. To his farm-servants 
he was a liberal and kindly employer, to those with whom he 
dealt in business upright and fair, but no man grew intimate with 
him or called him friend. 

At last an event occurred which made a change in Des- 
mond's forlorn life. Returning one evening after a solitary day 
with his gun in the woods, he found two travellers at his door 
waiting to ask his hospitality for the. night. They were father 
and daughter, had come from St. Paul, and were on their way 



732 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Sept., 

far out into the Indian country. The man was a travelling mer- 
chant, who had dealings with the Indians, and the girl was his 
only child. Both had evidently seen better days, were refugees 
from more civilized lands, belonging to the large class whom 
folly, wrong, or misfortune reduce to beggary every day. The 
girl was beautiful, with that peculiar, delicate beauty which 
speaks eloquently of gentle blood. Arthur Desmond, seeing 
her standing at his door, with the setting sun burnishing her 
golden hair and lighting up her pale face, was struck by her 
loveliness, but only as he was struck daily by the grace of the 
flowers that sprang up through the grass on the prairies. Had 
the heart within him not been dead he might have fallen in love 
with her. As it was, he looked at her with interest, and his 
melancholy brow unbent as he led her into his home. 

She was ill with weariness, quite unfit for the journey she 
had undertaken rather than remain behind her father in the wil- 
derness about St. Paul. Next morning she declared herself able to 
proceed ; but the two men, looking at her, saw that if she did so 
it would probably be at the cost of her life. The father was 
deeply distressed and uncertain of what course to pursue, but 
his host came to the rescue. 

" Leave her here," he said, " and she will have time to rest 
and recruit her strength while you are away. Your journey ac- 
complished, you can call for her as you return. The wife of one 
of my most trusty servants shall wait upon her, and she shall 
have every care so rude an establishment as mine can afford." 

This seemed the only reasonable solution of the difficulty, and, 
though the girl wept and clung to him, her father insisted on her 
accepting Desmond's hospitality. Promising to return soon, he 
mounted and travelled away across the prairie, looking back and 
waving his hand to her till he was out of sight. And then the 
girl crept trembling to her seat at Desmond's fireside. 

The delicate courtesy with which her host treated his young 
guest proved that he had been born for other scenes than that of 
the wild prairie and the backwoodsman's hut; and as the girl 
gathered strength and was able to walk a mile, hoping to meet 
her father returning from his journey out West, and as week fol- 
lowed week and the father did not appear, Desmond forgot his 
own sorrows in devising means to occupy her mind and keep her 
from observing the unexpected and unaccountable length of his 
absence. It was long before the terrible likelihood dawned upon 
her that he had met his death among the Indians, and that she 
should see him no more. At last passing travellers from the 



i886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 733 

Indian country brought certain news that he had been killed by 
some of the savages, whom he had been imprudent enough to 
offend. 

After the first agony had exhausted itself the desolate creature 
raised her head and proposed to set out with her broken heart 
for St. Paul, there to seek a livelihood for herself. But as little 
as a dove is fit to fight among hawks, so little able was she to 
carry out her gallant intention. So thought Arthur Desmond, 
looking on her stricken face and transparent hands ; and yet he 
knew not what to advise. She could not stay with him, and 
there was no woman to whose care he could think of confiding 
her. 

On the night before her proposed departure for St. Paul, as 1 
she sat opposite to him at his fireside for the last time, with her 
slight hands folded in her lap and a look of patient determina- 
tion on her child-like face, a strange trouble for her came down 
upon Desmond and a sense of remorse, as if he alone were driv- 
ing her out into the dangers and miseries of a hard world from 
the safe shelter of his nome. Violently agitated, he rose up and 
went into the woods, where he wandered all night, a prey to the 
most unhappy thoughts, beset by intolerable memories, torn with 
the struggle to cast off the claims of a cruel past, to free himself 
from the power of its dead hand, which, after so many years, still 
clutched murderously at any pale hope that might venture to 
spring up in his heart. Flinging himself on the earth, he sobbed 
in the solitude and darkness, not even a star to witness or a bird 
to overhear, nothing to intrude on the sacredness of a strong 
man's secret agony. At dawn he rose up with the marks of the 
conflict on his face, and went slowly back to his dwelling, where 
at the door stood already the conveyance which was to take his 
visitor back to St. Paul. 

" My dear," he said, taking her by the hand, " I cannot bear 
to see you go. There is one way by which you can stay with 
me, if you will. I am a careworn, broken man, and you are a 
young,' fresh, and lovely girl, but we are both lonely and unfor- 
tunate. Can you make up your mind to marry me ? " 

The young wife bloomed across her husband's desolate life 
like a wind-flower in the fissure of a rock ; and though she could 
not bring him actual happiness, yet the sweetness of her nature 
and her tender adoration of him comforted his starved and 
frozen heart, and his gratitude for her love and faith in him 
amounted to passion. She knew little of his early life, and, un- 
derstanding that the subject, was painful, did not press for further 



734 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Sept., 

information. With a woman's instinct she had divined that some 
other woman had broken the heart of which the noble wreck 
was her own ; but that any darker cloud than that Cast by a 
cruelly disappointed love had ever rested on him she did not 
live long 1 enough to find out. After one happy year she bade 
good- by to the forest shades, the sunny prairies, and her idolized 
husband leaving an infant daughter in her place. 

When Bawn, the child, was ten years old, Fate made another 
raid on Desmond's small store of hard-earned happiness. For 
his girl's sake he fell into one of those sad blunders which men 
in his position so often stumble upon. At a distance of some 
miles from his own possessions a family of French settlers had 
established themselves, and of the group was a middle-aged 
spinster of bustling and active turn, who soon showed a lively 
interest in Desmond and his motherless daughter. Looking on 
his far-spreading fields and teeming granaries, the thrifty Jeanne 
quickly resolved to share that extraordinary prosperity which 
seemed so little appreciated by the melancholy Arthur. How 
she managed it is needless to relate, but in a very short time 
after she had made up her mind she became stepmother to Des- 
mond's little girl. 

Desmond soon discovered that in his solicitude for his child 
he had been led into an irretrievable mistake. Jeanne was a 
masterful woman, and rather than fight with her the man of hap- 
less fortune was fain to let her have things her own way. The 
wooden home which had satisfied him and his girl was deserted, 
and a fine new dwelling-house was built. All the ways of life 
were changed for father and daughter. Servants were scolded 
and well looked after, abuses corrected, waste was put an end 
to, and peace for ever banished from the Desmond fireside. A 
governess was engaged for Bawn not a day too soon, certainly 
all the prairie maiden's pretty, wild ways were condemned, and 
a good education was energetically administered to her. 

In submitting to the new state of things Bawn was influenced 
by her all-absorbing love for the father whose sole consolation 
she knew herself to be. She was now a woman, emancipated 
from her stepmother's control, yet living on the most friendly 
terms with her father's wife. Within the big house Jeanne 
reigned paramount, and every one bowed to her will ; but deep 
in the wild woods, lost in the lonely wildernesses of the forest, 
father and daughter held their meetings and their councils, and 
were as happy as Desmond's recurrent fits of melancholy occa- 
sionally permitted them to be. 



1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 735 

CHAPTER II. 
THE SECRET OF A LIFE. 

" BAWN! Bawn !" 

Mrs. Desmond was calling loudly in her deep contralto tones 
to her stepdaughter from the front door, shading her eyes with 
her hand from the strong sunlight that flooded the land light 
that intensified the beauty of everything, suggesting corn, wine, 
and oil, overspreading flowers, teeming fruits. 

" Where can that girl have got to, and her father out of the 
way as well? I don't know what would have become of Arthur 
Desmond's goods if I had not taken them in hand ! Shouldn't 
wonder if she was over in the log-house encouraging him, as 
usual, in his whims." 

Jeanne crossed the flower-laden sward towards the old wood- 
en house, smothered in bloom, which still stood at an opening of 
the woods some distance from the new house with its gardens. 
Jeanne, though quick arid energetic, was plump and portly, with 
a swarthy skin, keen black eyes, and intensely black hair. She 
was dressed in a calico wrapper of red and white stripes and a 
large Holland morning-apron with pockets, in which she jingled 
her keys, and looked neat, thrifty, active, and aggressive. 

" Coming, Mother Jeanne ! " cried Bawn from within the log- 
house, where she was busy arranging her father's books, wea- 
pons, and various belongings, and beautifying the place in a way 
of her own. Desmond had forbidden the old wooden home to 
be swept away, disputing on this one point the will of his wife ; 
and he used it as a sort of den, his only substitute for a club. 

" A pretty state of things !/' panted Jeanne. " Here is a man 
from St. Paul about wheat, and nobody to speak to him but my- 
self. I'm sure if I did not work myself to death I don't know 
what would become of us all." 

** Is not the steward to be had ? " 

" Oh ! of course, if you leave it to servants. Give me the man 
who looks after his own business." 

" Father labored long years, and now his hair is white," said 
Bawn, with a pathetic vibration in her voice. " I think we may 
sometimes manage without troubling him." 

" Well, I'm sure it's not for my own benification I trouble ! " 
snapped Jeanne, who, having ail her life been accustomed to 
French on one side and English on the other, often unintention- 
ally coined words of her own to suit her momentary convenience. 



736 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Sept., 

" And pray, is it by your father's ordeal that you spend so much 
time in this old hutch ? " 

Bawn laughed. " Come, now, Mother Jeanne, look at these 
exquisite roses. Smell ! " 

" It's no kind of use talking to you, Bawn. Here is a ques- 
tion of so much for wheat, and and there you are offering me 
roses to smell, as if nothing was needed in this world but a nose ! 
But you are too old now for my tutition." 

" The business is done by this time, I warrant," said Bawn, 
placing the despised roses in a glass on her father's reading- 
table, where, amid a litter of his favorite books, stood the old 
wooden casket which he had fashioned and carved so many years 
ago. " And you know, Jeanne, even if sixpence a bushel less 
than possible is had for the wheat, we can well afford the loss 
better, perhaps, than the dealer who buys it." 

Mrs. Desmond drew back a step^ from her stepdaughter and 
eyed her with contempt. 

" I do believe," she said, " that you are at heart a Communist, 
or a Vincent de Paul, or something of that kind. You don't 
know how to grasp your own and hold it tight when you have 
got it. You would let every one be as rich as yourself. You 
seem to think whatever you have got more than you actually 
need must have been taken from somebody else, and that you are 
bound to restitute it." 

" Jeanne, Jeanne ! I can't help laughing. Fancy what you 
would' do to me if you caught me at it ! But seriously, dear, 
you know we are actually rolling in money." 

" And if we are, how much of it is owing to my care ? Not, 
I'm sure, that I want it for myself. I've no children to think of, 
and it is only for your father and you I need toil. From morn- 
ing till night I wear the flesh off my bones " 

Bawn bit her lip to hide a smile. A good deal of the said 
flesh still adhered to the framework of Mrs. Desmond's abundant 
person, but Jeanne could not have been happy without her chro- 
nic grievance of perpetual overwork. 

After her stepmother had bounced away Bawn went on smil- 
ingly with her occupation, and, when it was finished, set out 
to meet her father on his return from the forest, where he had 
been wandering alone since morning. This had been one of Des- 
mond's bad days, when the ghost of his past a ghost that would 
not be laid dogged his steps, voices none but himself could hear 
tormented his ears, and faces long unseen pursued him, gazing on 
him with eyes of hate or turning away from him in loathing. On 



1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 737 

such days all the old agony grew young again within him, a 
cruel mist rose all round him and shut out his actual world, 
blotting out even Bawn's comfortable countenance. His gun 
and dog were the only companions he tolerated at these mo- 
ments, and, ranging the woods from morning till evening, he did 
battle in solitude with his foes. 

Now, toiling homeward through the forest, he carried the 
marks of the conflict on his face and in his gait, in the dull pal- 
lor of his skin, the sunken, dark eye, the fine-drawn lines of pain 
hardening a mouth naturally sweet, the pinched look of his fea- 
tures. Yet even with this blight upon him he had a peculiar air 
of nobility all his own. The snow-white hair waving over a fore- 
head which was that of an idealist, and the dense darkness of his 
eyes and brows, would alone have given him distinction in a 
crowd. 

Coming slowly through a long aisle of shade, he looked up and 
saw Bawn waiting for him in the full sunset light at the nearest 
opening. 

" Thank Heaven ! " "he sighed to himself, feeling like a man 
who, having toiled all night through stormy breakers, finds that 
he is suddenly in sight of shore. 

" My darling, I almost took you for a goddess of the woods, 
what with that white gown, your May- blossom face, and all this 
shining hair ! " 

'"That comes of reading poetry and romanticizing in the for- 
est, Daddy dear," said the girl, giving him a loving hug. " I 
wonder is there a goddess of Matter-of-fact among their deity- 
ships ? Look here ! " And, linking her arm through his, she drew 
him forward. 

A fire had been kindled on the ground, and a steaming gipsy- 
kettle was slung above it. On a little stand near were cups and 
saucers and a dish of newly-baked cakes. 

" Your favorite cakes, sir, and the tea is just made. Now sit 
down and give an account of yourself, you unsociable, rambling, 
unaccountable darling of an old Daddy ! " 

"Give me your tea first. Thank Heaven for tea! No, I can- 
not tell you where I have been. So many miles away, my girl, 
that you never could follow me." 

" Ah ! " said Bawn quickly, "if you would only try me." 

Desmond looked at her in surprise, and the hues of life that 
had stolen back to his face paled away again. It was the first 
time Bawn had ever hinted at a desire to intrude on his secret. 

" No, no, do not mind me," she cried, seeing the effect of her 
VOL. XLIII. 47 



7.58 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Sept., 

words. " I would rather break my heart than give you one extra 
pang." 

<' My little girl ! my poor little girl ! " said Desmond, startled 
at her passionate tones. " You break your heart ! That would 
be the worst thing that Arthur Desmond, with all his ill-luck, was 
ever guilty of." 

" My heart is pretty strong," said Bawn stoutly. " It could 
bear a good deal, if a good deal were laid on it. Emptiness is the 
one thing that could hurt it like Mamsey's boiler, that cracked 
with heat because it was not kept properly filled." 

Desmond rose and paced up and down for a few moments, a 
flush on his thin cheek and a strange excitement burning in his 
eyes. Bawn went up to him presently and put her arms round 
his neck. 

" You shall not tell me anything, if it distresses you," she 
whispered. 

Desmond clasped her in his arms and looked fondly in her 
eyes. 

"My only joy and comfort! there is much I would willingly 
confide to you, if I thought my confessions would not damp and 
blight the young glory of your life. * You are still so young " 

" I am twenty," she said quickly ; " and I feel so old that I 
cannot believe I shall ever grow any older. Trust my ripe age, 
father at least if it will help you, as I often think it might, to 
share your painful memories with another. As for damping 
me why, I am not easily crushed. Jeanne says I am like an 
india-rubber ball : the harder you try to put me down the higher 
I spring up again." 

" I have always intended you should know my whole story, 
Bawn after my death. You know the wooden box that stands 
on my table ? " 

" Yes." 

" It contains papers that will be yours when I am gone ; letters 
belonging to my youth, a portrait which you will cherish, and a 
statement written out in my own hand my history, jotted down 
from time to time on sleepless nights. If you strongly desire it 
you shall have that statement to-morrow, and after you have read 
it we will talk the matter over, if so be you do not shrink from 
or suspect your old dad." 

" Father ! " flinging herself into his arms. " Shrink from you ! 
Suspect you of anything but what is noblest and best ! " 

"Ah! Bawn, there were others who loved me, and yet cast 
me out." 






1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 739 

" Fiends ! " muttered Bawn, tightening her soft arms round 
his stooping neck. 

" No, not fiends, dear. Stanch, true men and a sweet, soft 
woman like yourself." 

"Are they still alive?" 

" I think so. I hope so ; yet for my own sake I ought not to 
wish it, seeing that released spirits may, perhaps, know all truth.' 1 

" Is there no way of making it known to them before their 
release ? " 

" None. And if there were I would not seek it now." 

"But I would." 

" You ? " 

" Do you think," said Bawn, unclasping her arms from his 
neck and linking her hands behind her back, while she leaned for- 
ward and looked into his face" do you think I could live in the 
world for the fifty years or so I may possibly stay in it, without 
finding out those people and making them ashamed of their con- 
duct? If there be a lie against you living in the world, I will 
take it in my own hands and strangle it." 

She laid her white, firm palms together as she spoke, and 
knotted her fingers as if she were in reality wringing the life out 
of a viper. 

Desmond smiled his sweet, melancholy smile. 

" Now, who could think there was so much passion, in my 
smiling Bawn ? My dear, you speak of an impossibility. The 
error went too deep ; has strengthened its roots in the soil of 
time. There are lies, Bawn, that will walk up to the judgment- 
seat clothed like truth, and only at the crack of doom shall their 
faces be unveiled." 

Bawn looked away into the depths of the twilight forest with 
an obstinate light of determination in her deep gray eyes. 

" Daddy," she said presently, putting her hands on his tall 
shoulders and bringing her face close to his " Daddy," kissing 
him, " what do they call the thing that you were accused of? 
Don't" kissing him again " be afraid to tell me. I can't wait 
till to-morrow." 

" It was murder," said Desmond, with a blanching face. 

" O the fools ! " cried Bawn, holding her warm cheek firmly 
against his. "The fantastic idiots! To think of a man like this 
in connection with such a crime ! " 

"No, Bawn, none of them were fools." 

" Then there was a villain among them," insisted Bawn. 



74Q A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Sept., 

" May be so, my dearest may be so. But all that lies among 
the mysteries that will never now be solved." 

"Why?" 

" Because death is always sealing up the lips of truth." 

" Are all the actors in your story dead ? " 

" I told you just now, my daughter, that I do not know. For 
long years I have not had the heart to make an effort to inquire. 
Very long ago I used to receive, from time to time, letters from 
one who promised to send me word if anything in my favor came 
to light. As his letters ceased, I believe him to be dead. In the 
course of thirty years death will have reaped a big harvest from 
every inhabited land of the earth. He will not have spared the 
spot where the tragedy of your father's life was enacted." 

They walked up and down together, Bawn with her cheek 
against his shoulder and her hands clasped over his arm. The 
round, yellow moon rose above the darkening tips of the trees 
and cast a misty radiance over the distant prairie. Odors of cul- 
tured flowers mingled with the sweets of hay, and the breath of 
cattle stole towards them at times, and the low, burnt-out fires of 
the sun smouldered and died in the forest thickets. 

"I know all this happened in Ireland, of course," said Bawn. 
" It was not in your own south, where yoya were born ? Was 
it in those beautiful northern glens you have sometimes told 
me of?" 

" It was there. On an evening as lovely as this, in the midst 
of scenery far more beautiful, more picturesque, in the flush of 
my youth a youth full to the brim of happiness and hope my 
bitter doom came down upon me. But ask me no more to-night, 
my darling. To-morrow everything shall be told." 

TO BE CONTINUED. 



i886.] THE LEGEND OF SAINT PANCRATIUS. 741 



THE LEGEND OF SAINT PANCRATIUS A.D. 287. 

PART II. 

PANCRATIUS' grandsire left him ever free. 

" If good the heart," the man was wont to say, 
" Feed it with lore, but leave it liberty ; 

The good, wise heart will learn to choose its way : 
Virtue means courage : man must dare and do : 
Who does the right shall find at last the true." 

The boy, though gay, was studious; swift to learn, 
To him the acquest of knowledge was delight, 

For his was still the instinct to discern 

How high true knowledge wings the spirit's flight. 

The youth of Rome no comrades were to him : 

Triflers he deemed them, fooled by jest and whim. 

Often on that great plain which circles Rome 
He spurred his fiery courser ; oftener far 

In that huge wood which girt his lonely home 
Sat solitary, while the morning star 

Levelled along some dewy lawn its beam, 

Or flashed remote on Tiber's tremulous stream. 

Pacing its glades at times, he seemed to hear 

Music till then unknown, a mystic strain 
That sank or swelled alternate on his ear 

Like long, smooth billows of some windless main. 
" Is this a dream ? " he mused ; " if not, this wood 
Houses some Spirit kind to man and good." 

One day he sat there, sad. The year before 
That self-same day his parents both had died. 

" Where are they now ? Upon what distant shore 
Walk they this hour ? " For them, not self, he sighed. 

" They have not changed to clay; they live: they must. 

But ah ! their state I know not. Let me trust ! 



742 THE LEGEND OF SAINT PANCRATIUS. [Sept., 

" What loyal love maintained they each for each ! 

With what bright courage met they peril's hour! 
How just their acts, how kind and true their speech ! 

They never drave the outcast from their bower : 
Some great belief they must have held ! In whom ? 
Believe I will! My altar is their tomb." 



Wearied with grief, the orphan sank asleep, 

And, sleeping, dreamed. In dream once more he heard 
That mystic music sweeter and more deep 

Than e'er before ; and now and then a word 
Reached him, he deemed from shadowy realms beneath : 
At times that word was " Life " ; at times 'twas " Death." 

Then, o'er the sheddings which the west wind's fan 
Had strewn beneath the pine-woods, he was 'ware 

That steps anear him drew ; and lo ! a man 

Beside him stood. The sunset touched his hair 

Snow-white, down-streaming from that reverend head, 

And on his staff cross-crowned a splendor shed. 

The dream dissolved : upright he sat, awake: 

The Apostolic Sire of Christian Rome 
Beside him stood Cornelius : thus he spake : 

" Fear naught! I come to lead a wanderer home: 
Thou mourn'st thine earthly parents. They are nigh 
More than in life, though throned in yonder sky. 

" God's angel brought to each in life's last hour 

That Truth they sought, both for their sake and thine : 

They left thee in the flesh: since then in power 
With love once human only, now divine, 

Have tracked thy wandering steps: this day, O boy, 

Through me they send the tidings of great joy. 

" That God who made the worlds at last hath spoken : 
The shadows melt : the dawn of Truth begins ; 

That Saviour God the captive's chain hath broken; 
Reigns o'er the free : our tyrants were our Sins : 

He reigns who rose, that God for man Who died, 

Reigns from the Cross, and rules the Crucified." 



1 886.] THE LEGEND OF SAINT PANCRA TIUS. 743 

He told him all. As when within the East 

The ascended sun is glassed in seas below 
So that high Truth with light that still increased 

Lit in the listener's mind a kindred glow 
Because that mind was loving, calm, and pure 
With courage to believe and to endure. 



In blank astonishment he stood at first, 

By Truth's strong beam though raptured yet half-dazed : 
As when upon the eyes of angels burst 

Creation new created, so he gazed : 
He questioned ; but his questions all were wise : 
Therefore that Truth he sought became his prize. 

Later he mused ; then spake : " Whilst yet a child 
Something I heard my memory is not clear 

Of Christ, and her, His mother undefiled : 
Alas! it sank no deeper than mine ear. 

An old nurse whispered me that tale. Ere long 

She died, some said, for God. Her heart was strong." 

An hour gone by, Pancratius made demand, 
" That heavenly music, came it from above ? " 

Cornelius then : " The persecutor's brand 
Rages against us : not from fear but love, 

Love of Christ's poor the weak, the babe we hide: 

If found we die: to seek our death were pride. 

" Men scoff at us as dwellers 'mid the tombs : 
Beneath your grandsire's woods, till late untrod, 

Extends the largest of the Catacombs: 

There dwells the Christian Church, and sings to God : 

Our hymns betray us oft. Descending, thou 

One day wilt hear them When ? " He answered: " Now." 

That twain in silence passed to where the mouth 

Of those dread caverns yawned ; they stooped beneath : 

Instant upon them fell that heat and drouth 

Which Nubian sands o'er way-worn pilgrims breathe : 

Red torches glared the winding ways among; 

To roofs low-arched the lingering anthems clung. 



744 THE LEGEND OF SAINT PANCRA TIUS. [Sept., 

Their latest echo dies : the Lector reads, 

Then speaks : plain, brief, and strong is his discourse : 

" Brothers ! each day ye know the martyr bleeds ; 
What then ? Does any fear that fleshly force 

Can slay the soul ? God dwells that soul within, 

And God is Life. Death dwelleth but with sin. 



" This day ye heard of David. Who is he 

That strides o'er earth brass-armed, six cubits high ? 

And who that shepherd ? Think you he will flee, 
Unarmed, a boy ? A brook goes warbling by ; 

Its song is glad ; its pebbles laugh : 'twixt whiles 

That shepherd eyes his giant foe and smiles. 

" He bends above that brook ; a stone he lifts ; 

He binds it on his sling ; he waves it round : 
The giant spreads his hands ; he shifts and drifts 

Like drunkards. Dead, he lies along the ground. 
David unwounded triumphed ; sang ; reigned long : 
The martyr reigns in death, and deathless is his song." 

That eve Pancratius mused : " 'Mid yonder vaults 
God holds His court, and love, and peaceful cheer : 

Who rules in Rome? There Vice her crown exalts 
Shameless yet sad ; beside her, Jest and Fear." 

That night his dream was of that Shepherd Boy, 

The sling, the stone. He wakened full of joy. 

Then, with a solace never his before, 

His thoughts reverted to his parents dead ; 

"That Truth," he said, "they sought, yet missed, of yore, 
Is theirs this hour : its crown is on their head ; 

Its sword within their hand. That Christ whom we 

Discern through mist they in God's glory see. 

" Thank heaven, my grandsire lives ! " Straight to his ear 
He brought his tale. Upon that Roman's brow 

Hung thunder-cloud : the things supremely dear 
To him were these, Reverence and Rule ; and now 

A boy, a child that daily ate his bread, 

Had heaped dishonor on his hoary head. 



1 886.] THE LEGEND OF SAINT PANCRATIUS. 745 

" Renounce thy madness, boy, or hence this day ! " 
Pancratius answered, with that winning smile 

Dear to the sad man's heart, " Not so : I stay ! 
There cometh one your anger to beguile ; 

I told him you were good : thus answered he, 

1 Good-will means Faith : the Truth shall set him free.' " 



Thus as he spake the mitred Sire of Rome, 
Without disguise, his pastoral staff in hand, 

Entered : " I seek, great sir, your ancient home, 
By you unbidden, at this youth's command : 

If this molests you, you can have my head : 

The law proscribes, the Emperor wills me dead." 

Silent the Roman noble sat : anon 

A glance on that strange guest at random thrown 
Wrought in him change : then first he looked on one 

Of presence more majestic than his own. 
" Cornelius is your name ; unless I err, 
Yours is that ancient stock Cornelian, sir. 

" Within this mansion I abide recluse ; 

I with the Emperor slight acquaintance boast, 
None with his court. Such things may have their use ; 

They pass us quickly. As becomes a host 
All guests alike I honor, old or new ; 
I war on no man, but converse with few. 

" Perhaps you come with tidings : if from me 
Aught you require, speak briefly, without art." 

Cornelius smiled, then answered placidly, 
" To each the self-same tidings I impart : 

Beside your house a gold-mine lurks; with you 

Remains to sink your shaft or miss your due." 

At first that Roman sat, yet scarcely listened ; 

Ere long he gave attention : by degrees 
The strong, imperious eye now flashed, now glistened ; 

Point after point he seemed in turn to seize. 
He proffered question none ; he spake no word, 
In mind collected, but in spirit stirred. 



THE LEGEND OF SAINT PANCRATIUS. [Sept., 

Lo ! as some statued form of art antique, 

Solon or Plato, sits with brow hand-propt 
And eyes the centre of the earth that seek, 

So sat he, when that strain majestic stopt, 
In silence long. He raised his eyes, and then 
Spake thus alone : " In three days come again." 

Three days went by ; in that dim room once more 

Cornelius spake : inly Pancratius prayed ; 
His grandsire listened mute. His message o'er, 

The Venerable Sign the Pontiff made 
Above that low-bent forehead. With it grace 
Fell from on high and lit that hoary face. 

Then questioned thus that old man staid and grave : 
" What was the birthplace of this Creed decried 

Which in all lands attracts the meek and brave ? " 
To whom the Roman Pontiff thus replied : 

" Juda not Greece ! Fishers, not seers, went forth ; 

They preached that Creed, and died to prove its worth." 

His host : " This Faith is then at least no dream 
No dream, not even the loftiest, noblest, best, 

In depth of thought, in breadth, of love supreme; \ 
Pity 'tis new ! 'Tis Time doth Truth attest." 

The answer came: " This Faith is old as man : 

' The Woman's Seed.' It ends as it began. 

" This is that Faith which over-soars the sage 
Yet condescends to him, the shepherd's boy : 

This is that Hope which brightest shines in age 
All others quenched : this is that Love, that Joy, 

Which all retrieves ; to patriots worn that cries 

Thy great, true Country waits thee in yon skies." 

The Roman next: " The Creeds of ages past 

Lived long ; yet most have died ; the rest wax old : 

Yours is the amplest: it will prove the last : 
For he who, having clasped it, slips his hold 

Shall find none other. Of the seas of Time 

This is high-water mark, stamped on the cliffs sublime. 



i886.] THE LEGEND OF SAINT PANCRATIUS. 747 

" Not less that question, ' Is it true? ' recurs. 

What Virtue is, by virtuous life is shown : 
She lights the paths she walks on ; no man errs 

Who treads them. Would that Truth might thus be known ! 
Sir, I must ponder these things. Aged men 
Perforce are slow. In ten days come again." 



In ten days more that Christian priest returned : 

The Roman Noble met him at the door, 
But altered. " You are welcome ! I have yearned 

To see your face and hear again your lore. 
At times I grasp it tight : but I am old : 
Close-clutched it slides like sand from out my hold. 

" Mark well yon Sabine and yon Alban ranges ! 

The north wind blows; clear shineth each ravine : 
Thus clear stands out your Creed : the north wind changes ; 

The clouds rush in, and vapors shroud the scene : 
Thus dims more late that Creed. My end draws nigh : 
Honest it were Truth's Confessor to die." 

Cornelius answered, " Sir, not flesh and blood 
But God's own Finger wrote one sacred word 

Upon your heart when by you first I stood : 

That word was ' Christ.' Brave man ! In this you erred, 

Not seeking then and there that conquering light 

Which shines, like sunrise, on the baptism rite." 

Hour after hour, and far into the morn, 

Those two conversed of God. That saintly sage 

Witnessed, not argued. " Truth," he said, "is born 
Alike in heart of childhood and of age, 

A spirit-birth. Invoke that Spirit by whom 

God become Man hallowed the Virgin's womb." 

To all demands he made the same reply : 

Within that old man's breast by slow degrees 

Stirred like Bethesda's waters tremulously 

God's Truths put on God's splendor. " Men like trees 

Walking," in mist at first such seemed they ; then 

They trod the earth like angels, not like men. 



748 THE LEGEND OF SAINT PANCRA TIUS. [Sept., 

Sudden that old man rose ; he cried, " I see ! 

Thank God ! The scales are fallen from mine eyes ! 
I see that Infant on His Mother's knee, 

That Saviour on His cross, man's Sacrifice. 
It could not but be thus ! From heaven to earth 
That Cross fills all ; all else is nothing worth ! " 

At sunrise he received baptismal grace ; 

And ever from that hour its radiance glowed 
A better sunrise on his wrinkled face, 

For all his heart with gladness overflowed, 
And childhood's innocence returned ; and all 
His childhood loved seemed near him at his call. 

Once more the aspirations of his youth 

About him played like pinions ; by his side 

More sweet, more fair than when her nuptial truth 
To him she pledged, beside him walked his bride ; 

And to that love he bore his Land returned 

That hope, long quenched, wherewith it once had burned. 

Still as of old his country's past he praised : 

" Numa revered one God ; no idols crowned ; 
Two altars holy were they both he raised ; 

One was for Terminus who guards the Bound ; 
One was for Faithfulness who keeps the Pledge : 
These spurned, he taught, all rites are sacrilege. 

" A matron wronged dragged down the race of Kings ; 

A virgin wronged hurled forth those Ten from Rome : 
Omen and auspice these of greater things : 

Of Truth reserved to make with her its home. 
Man needs that aid ! The proof? Man lives to act ; 
And noblest deeds are born of Faith and Fact." 

Yet, though before him ever stood the vision 
Of that high Truth which gives the human soul 

Of visible things sole mastery and fruition, 
More solid seemed he, and in self-control 

More absolute, than of old ; and from his eye 

Looked lordlier forth its old sobriety. 



1 886.] THE LEGEND OF SAINT PANCRATIUS. 749 

In him showed nothing of enthusiasm, 
Of thought erratic wistful for strange ways, 

Nothing of phrase fantastic, passion's spasm, 
Or self-applause masking in self-dispraise : 

Some things to him once great seemed now but small : 

In small things greatness dwelt, and God in all. 



Three months gone by, he freed his slaves ; above 

That rock, the portal of that Catacomb, 
He raised an altar " T the Eternal Love " 

Inscribed : more low he built his humble tomb: 
" Not far," he said, " repose God's martyrs ; I, 
Albeit unworthy, near to them would lie." 

In one month more serene and glad he died ; 

An hour ere death painless the old man lay, 
Those two that loved him watching at his side : 

" In Christ, yet not for Christ," they heard him say ; 
" This is the sole of Faiths, for which to bleed 
Were wholly sage. My son had loved this Creed." 

The tidings that a noble of the old race 

Had spurned the old rites transpired not till that hour 
Which laid him in his woodland burial place ; 

'Twas Diocletian's day : the Imperial power 
Had made decree to trample to the ground 
God's Church. A worthy victim it had found. 

For when about the dead the Romans thronged 
Much wondering at the unwonted obsequies 

Nor pleased to see their old traditions wronged, 
Pancratius answered, " Christian rites are these " ; 

Then made proclaim to all men far and nigh, 

" My grandsire died a Christian : such am 1." 

Two pagan priests to Diocletian sped : 

" Yon man who died an Atheist left an heir ; 

Asian he is, a Christian born and bred : 

Shall that new Faith with Jove and Caesar share ? 

Usurp a Roman noble's place and pride ? " 

" Bring here that youth," the Emperor replied. 



7$o THE LEGEND OF SAINT PANCRATIUS. [Sept., 

That Emperor looked upon the Gods as those 
Who shared his reign. In majesty and mirth 

They sat enskied above the Olympian snows : 

The Goddess Rome, their last-born, ruled the earth ; 

The Roman Emperor was her husband. He 

Partook perforce in their divinity. 

The inferior Gods of barbarous realms scarce known 
Rome's latest conquests in the utmost East, 

Revered the Roman Gods. One God alone 
Refused with them to traffic, share their feast; 

His votaries served Him only ; Gods beside 

They banned as Idol-Gods, and Rome defied. 

That Emperor was not cruel ; from the height 

Of that imagined greatness gazing down, 
To rule he deemed his duty as his right; 

The world his kingdom was, and Rome its crown : 
Who spurned that crown he deemed as sense-bereaven, 
Rebel 'gainst earth, and blasphemous 'gainst heaven. 

Next day at noon within his judgment court 

He sat, by all his pomp of majesty 
Compassed and guarded ; lion-like his port; 

Then whispered man to man : " That terrible eye 
Without yon Lictors' axes or their rods, 
Will drive the renegade to his country's Gods." 

Pancratius entered entered with a smile ; 

Bowed to the Emperor; next to those around 
First East, then West. The Emperor gazed awhile 

On that bright countenance ; knew its import ; frowned : 
" A malefactor known ! Yet there you stand ! 
Young boy, be wise in time. Hold forth your hand ! 

" Yon censor mark ! It comes from Jove's chief fane ; 

See next yon vase cinctured with flower-attire : 
Lift from that vase its smallest incense-grain ; 

Commit it softly to yon censor's fire : 
Your father, boy, was well with me ; and I 
Would rather serve his son than bid him die." 



1 886.] THE LEGEND OF SAINT PANCRATIUS. 751 

Pancratius mused a moment, then began : 
" Emperor, 'tis true 1 am a boy ; no more : 

But He within me changes boy to man, 

Christ, God and Man, that Lord the just adore. 

A pictured lion hangs above thy head : 

Say, can a picture touch man's heart with dread ? 

" Thou, too, great Emperor, art but pictured life : 

He only lives who quickened life in all : 
Men are but shadows: in a futile strife 

They chase each other on a sun-bright wall. 
Shadows are they the hosts that round thee throng ; 
Shadows their swords that vindicate this wrong-. 



" What Gods are those thou bidst me serve and praise? 

Adulterers, murderers, Gods of fraud and theft. 
If slave of thine walked faithful in their ways 

What were his sentence ? Eyes of light bereft ; 
The scourge, the rope ! Our God is good. His Name 
Paints on His votaries' face no flush of shame. 

" Exteriorly, 'tis true, thy Gods are great, 

They and their sort : this hour they rule the lands: 

Ay, but, expectant at an unbarred gate, 
A greatness of a different order stands, 

The Babe of Bethlehem's. He thy Gods shall slay 

Though small His hand, and rend earth's chain away." 

The Emperor shook: as one demon-possessed 

He glared upon that youth ; his wan cheek burned : 

With wonder dumb panted his struggling breast : 
Silent to that Praetorian Guard he turned ; 

He pointed to Pancratius. " Let him die ! " 

Pancratius stood, and pointed to the sky. 

That night a corse beside the Aurelian Way 
Lay as in sleep. Hard by, two maidens fair 

Now knelt and lifted high their hands to pray, 

Now bent and kissed his cheek and smoothed his hair: 

Two daughters of a Roman matron these: 

A grove not far shook, moonlit, in the breeze. 



752 THE LEGEND OF SAINT PANCRATIUS. [Sept., 

O fair young love for when could love show fairer ? 

O maids, should earthly love e'er house with you, 
With love thus heavenly may that love be sharer ; 

Like this be cleansing, hallowing, self-less, true ! 
Thou too, O boy, love's guerdon hast not missed 
Though young ; by lips so pure so kindly kissed. 

A youth he lay of fourteen years in seeming ; 

A lily by the tempest bent, not broken : 
Round the lashed lids a smile divine was gleaming ; 

And if that mouth, so placid, could have spoken 
Surely its speech had been : " Thank Heaven, 'tis past ! 
The secret of the skies is mine at last." 

Softly those maidens with their mother bore 
Pancratius to that grove, and made his grave: 

O'er his light limbs the radiant scarfs they wore 

Softly they spread. Such wreaths as grace the brave 

On him they strewed next morn, and buds of balm ; 

And by that grave planted the martyr's palm. 

Near it the Roman Walls ascend, and Gate 

Aurelian called of old, Pancratian now, 
Honoring that youth who smiling met his fate 

So soon, so gladly kept his baptism vow. 
King Numa's " Faithfulness " in him was found ; 
Therefore old " Terminus " guards still that bound. 

Some say that when that Gate to him was given 

A mystery therein was signified : 
Earth hath her " Holy City " ; but in heaven 

A holier waits us ; one that aye shall bide: 
Twelve gates it hath : each boasts high trust and fief : 
The Gate of Martyrdom of these is chief. 

Yea, and the Martyr is himself a gate, 

Since through the fiery ether of his prayer 

Which Vision blest kindles and doth dilate 

Who strives for heaven finds help to enter there. 

O Martyr young, by Death made glad and free, 

In Death's dread hour pray well for mine and me! 



1 886.] JEREMIAH SULLIVAN BLACK. 753 



JEREMIAH SULLIVAN BLACK. 

" All my life long 

I have beheld with most respect the man 
Who knew himself, and knew the ways before him ; 
And from amongst them chose considerately, 
With a clear foresight not a blindfold courage ; 
And, having chosen, with a steadfast mind 
Pursues his purposes." 

SiR HENRY TAYLOR, Philip Van Artevelde. 

IN the mid-summer of 1883 a large funeral cortege left the 
spacious grounds of Brockie, a few miles from York, Pennsyl- 
vania, and passed through its thronged and silent streets to the 
cemetery just beyond the limits of the town. That York was for 
eight months the seat of the Continental Congress in the last cen- 
tury, and was the place of residence and of burial of a distin- 
guished publicist in this, are the two historic facts which give 
to the ancient town an especial interest. In the transition from 
one to the other are involved all the memorable scenes which 
connect the first and the second centenary of our years as a na- 
tion from the stirring associations which the early days of the 
Republic awaken to those revived by the career of the illus- 
trious dead whose obsequies now hushed the busy shops of 
York and rendered the historical retrospect doubly impressive. 
The remains thus conveyed to sepulture, amid a silence so pro- 
found that it seemed augmented by the very tolling of the church- 
bells, were those of a great American, known far beyond the 
town in which he lived, the commonwealth in which he was 
born, and the country which he so faithfully served in a most 
critical period of her history Jeremiah Sullivan Black, a name 
identified with the highest juridical learning of this age and of 
this land. 

" O thou beloved and most merciful Father, from whon\ I had 
my being and in whom I have ever trusted," he said a short 
time before his death, " grant, if it be thy will, that I no longer 
suffer this agony, and that I be speedily called home to thee." 
Thus confident as a little child in his faith he died, and thus fol- 
lowed by mourning citizens of every class he was buried. But 
his work lives after him, and his voice is still potent among men 
in the volume of his writings collected by Mr. Chauncey F. 
Black, his accomplished son, who has made an honorable fame 
VOL. XLIII. 48 



754 JEREMIAH SULLIVAN BLACK. [Sept., 

as lieutenant-governor of Pennsylvania. Other and larger claims 
for recognition among the master-minds of our country than that 
of eminence in the jurisprudence of his age will suggest them- 
selves when the career of Judge Black is calmly and impartially 
considered, and so long as true greatness is held in honor, so 
long will his name occupy a lofty and enduring place. What- 
ever may be the dominating motive moulding the destiny of 
man, it is certain that true greatness can never be dissociated 
from loyalty to principle that hostage which fame exacts as the 
ultimate criterion of character, and without which there can be 
no real success. Putting aside the popular distinctions with 
which our common speech confuses the ethical quality of cour- 
age, moral and physical, in the integrity of life, we know, as 
George Eliot has so admirably said, that it is an " inexorable 
law of human souls that we prepare ourselves for sudden deeds 
by the reiterated choice of good or evil that gradually determines 
character."* Fidelity to noble aims and worthy purposes is not 
only the pledge of reputation but the test of inspiration in the 
conduct of men. The memory of Judge Black is hallowed, and 
an estimate of permanent value placed upon his writings, because 
he looked beyond the excitement of the times and the dictates 
of self-interest to the supremacy of the essential truth for which 
he strove and to its conservation as an integral force in the body 
politic. 

The early settlements in Pennsylvania f exhibit a fact kindred 
to that seen in the history of other States in colonial and sub- 
sequent periods the large and influential Irish element which 
has left the traces of its genius and power in every department 
of American life and thought. Logan, the friend of Penn ; Al- 
lison, provost of Pennsylvania College ; Ramsay, the historian of 
South Carolina ; Barry and Stewart, of the navy ; Wayne and 
Hand, of the army ; Fulton and Colles, in the art of navigation ; 
Binns, in journalism ; and Carey, in political science, are but a 
few of the distinguished men of Irish birth or ancestry who have 
shed lustre on the annals of the State. And when the future 
historian records the deeds and the fame of those of Celtic lin- 



* Romola, chap, xxiii. p. 206. 

t Mayor Grace, of New York, in his interesting lecture entitled The Irish in America, 
speaking of emigrants prior to the American Revolution, says that they " were widely scat- 
tered and leave no definite trace behind them until we come to the settlement founded at 
Logan, in Pennsylvania, which at that time (1699) was a colony that afforded much greater 
freedom of religious thought than others under British control" (p. 6). He adds that " Penn- 
sylvania continued to be a favorite point of destination, though various settlements were made 
in Maryland and Virginia, and even in North and South Carolina, and in Kentucky." 



1 886.] JEREMIAH SULLIVAN BLACK. 755 

cage, among the foremost on the roll of Pennsylvania's sons will 
be her venerable publicist, Judge Jeremiah Sullivan Black. In 
him the traditions of the fathers of the republic have been borne 
on to a new epoch, and he was the last of that brilliant galaxy 
of statesmen of a former generation whose memory is the glory 
of our own. 

Judge Black was born a few miles from the county-town of 
Somerset, in the rich region lying between Laurel Ridge and 
the Alleghany Mountains. He sprang from a good old Irish stock, 
for the names of Patrick Sullivan and Jane McDonough are on 
the list of his honored ancestors. Of Black's early education in 
the ordinary schools of the neighborhood but few incidents are 
preserved ; but, whether his advantages were great or small, a 
decided taste for special authors in Latin and English was soon 
manifested, and Horace and Shakspere became what they will 
always be to a boyhood in which the intellect predominates the 
companions of studious hours. From them he assimilated thus 
early a profound knowledge of the actual elements of human life, 
its violent contrasts, infinite joys and infinite woes, its subtle 
motives and discordant philosophies, its moral grandeur and its 
appalling weakness a knowledge which usually comes at a later 
period, and from contact with the world rather than with books. 
Like most boys brought up under the influences of a refined Pro- 
testant home, the King James version of the Scriptures was the 
daily manual from which he was taught his duty to God and his 
duty to man, and it was for ever connected with all that was 
gentle and pure and strong in his spiritual growth. What Father 
Faber graphically describes as its "uncommon beauty and mar- 
vellous English " left an impress on the mind of Black as deep 
as the supernatural truth which its text imprinted on his soul. 
Neither change nor strife of professional years effaced the seal 
of its validity. As the Oratorian says of every Protestant who 
has any religiousness, the English Bible was " his sacred thing 
which doubt has never dimmed and controversy never soiled." * 

The quiet and isolated life of young Black, broken only by 
. occasional rambles over the long sweep of highland enclosing his 
home, developed a genuine appreciation of natural phenomena 
which in later years influenced his choice of a permanent abode 
at Brockie. The play of the winds, the hues of the sky, the..^, 
march of clouds, the gathering storm, and the succeeding calm 
unfolded to his observant eye the unswerving dominion of laj 

* "The Interests and Characteristics of the Lives of the Saints," prefixed to tha 
St. Francis of Asst'si, p. 116, vol. xxv. of the Oratory series. i 



756 JEREMIAH SULLIVAN BLACK. [Sept., 

and nature thus became to him the sanctuary of the supreme 
Law-giver. At the age of seventeen he entered upon the study 
of the law under auspices which would have promised success 
even to one less suited for the legal profession. Two brothers, 
prominent figures in the politics and at the bar of western Penn- 
sylvania at that day, were Chauncey and Walter Forward, and 
with them Mr. Henry Black, father of Jeremiah, being an associ- 
ate judge of Somerset County, was united by social as well as pro- 
fessional ties. He selected the office of Mr. Chauncey Forward 
in which to place his son, and under the tuition of this wise pre- 
ceptor the future jurist laid the foundation of his legal greatness. 
It is hardly necessary, in view of his subsequent professional 
eminence, to recount how diligently he worked for the mastery 
of those principles of the law which either narrow or expand the 
mind of the student, producing on the one hand an adept in the 
cunning arts of the mere advocate, and on the other the judicial 
temper of the enlightened jurist. Ten years later we find Black 
not only in the full tide of prosperity which his pre-eminent 
abilities had so speedily won, but recognized, while yet a young 
man, as a leader by the older generation of lawyers at the bar of 
which he was a member. Having married the daughter of his 
instructor, and having attained thus early the realization of his 
dreams, happiness, domestic and professional, seemed spread be- 
fore him like a feast. He loved his vocation and labored in it 
manfully, but with less worldliness of motive than is commonly 
to be met with in the paths of forensic life. A chief characteris- 
tic of the man was a sustained and elevated dignity in which he 
was preserved from the temptations besetting a legal career. 
His heart, steeled against ignoble purposes, kept him undisturb- 
ed by petty jealousies which torment the lives of professional 
men. In the refined seclusion of a home made happy by the af- 
fection of friends and the devotion of his wife he gathered 
strength for his daily work. From her who was the centre of 
that home, " through all the world's clamor, he must win his 
praise ; in her, through all the world's warfare, he must find his 
peace." * 

In no profession does there exist a greater disparity as to suc- 
cess among its members than in the law ; and a career a^ the bar 
more than any other contradicts the theory that all intelligences 
are equal, and that the differences among men are those occa- 
sioned by industry. The world is always full of aspirants whose 
natural gifts are so apparently inadequate for the work under- 

* Ruskin, The Crown of Wild Olive, lecture iii. p. 124. 






. , 



1 8 86.] JEREMIAH SULLIVAN BLACK. 757. 

taken that, unless they are endowed with that nameless talent, 
insisted upon by the late Sir Arthur Helps,* which enables its 
possessor to get " into one or other of the main grooves of hu- 
man affairs," failure results from their best efforts. Natural 
faculty and aptitude, other things being equal, are worth more 
than labor, however much Carlyle may glorify it as the modern 
evangel, and however much success in life may depend upon its 
right direction. The next decade of years in the life of Black 
determined the place he was to occupy among men, and exhibits 
an example of that which the world, whether it comprehends its 
own process of reasoning or not, is always interested in a man 
whose intellectual and moral powers justify his desires and are 
commensurate with whatever objects he elects to accomplish. 
The bench sought him, and not he the bench ; and no jurist has 
ever, at so early an age, attained greater celebrity among his 
brethren for a scientific knowledge of the law and a luminous 
presentation of its principles. Later still, more important pre- 
ferments than president judge of a judicial district awaited him. 
In 1851, under the amendment to the State constitution, he was 
elected justice of the Supreme Court, and his fame became asso- 
ciated in the jurisprudence of Pennsylvania as primus inter pares 
with that of Gibson, Lewis, Lovvrie, and Coulter. Mr. Buchan- 
an called Judge Black in March, 1857, to the position of attor- 
ney-general ; and henceforth till the day of his death he was be- 
fore the public eye, a colossal figure in the moving drama of 
American politics. Walking amidst perils of which compara- 
tively little is even yet known, the target of envious factions and 
intriguing foes on every side, it would seem almost impossible 
that he should not contract something of the Machiavellian spirit 
of the times, or the statecraft engendered of the political dissen- 
sions preceding the civil war. But the transparency of his char- 
acter, and of his methods as an official adviser of the President, 
shows that in no measure did he reflect the double-dealing then 
rife. The man of evasions is unstable in all his ways, and Judge 
Black was unstable in nothing. In private and in public, in the 
council-chamber of the cabinet and. in the court of highest tribu- 

* " Get, if you can, into one or other of the main grooves of human affairs. It is all the 
difference of going by railway and walking over a ploughed field, whether you adopt common 
courses or set up one for yourself. You will see, if your times are anything like ours, very 
inferior persons highly placed in the army, in the church, in office, at the bar. They have 
somehow got upon the line, and have moved on well with very little original motive power of 
their own. Do not let this make you talk as if merit were utterly neglected in these or any 
professions ; only that getting well into the groove will frequently do instead of any great 
excellence " (Companions of My Solitude, p. 57). 



758 JEREMIAH SULLIVAN BLACK. [Sept., 

nal, whether the dispositions of men were to be sounded or di- 
vergent interests to be conciliated, he always stood forth the 
same fearless champion of constitutional liberty. We have not 
the space at our command nor is the time yet ripe for a dispas- 
sionate discussion of the closing- days of Mr. Buchanan's admin- 
istration. The ordeal through which Judge Black then passed 
is the most memorable in his life ; for the crisis had arrived 
which was to test the perpetuity of the union of States and of the 
republic among the nations. It was not uncommon at this 
period for blatant orators and impetuous writers to indulge in 
meaningless platitudes about the constitutional powers of the 
President and the methods to be employed in averting dangers 
then imminent. But many of these men, as Hallam says of 
Cromwell, had so " sucked the dregs of a besotted fanaticism " 
that its poison clouded their reason and drove them in utterance 
to the verge of madness. The principles enunciated by Attor- 
ney-General Black in his opinion entitled " Power of the Presi- 
dent in executing the laws," rendered November 20, 1860, * are 
the only deductions attainable within the limits of the Constitu- 
tion, and all who calmly read that document must admit that 
any other interpretation than that given would be extra-consti- 
tutional in its nature; for we must always bear in mind the fact 
that expositors of law, as Burke says, " have their strict rule to 
go by." Whatever may be the exigencies demanding a pro- 
clamation of martial law, a moment's reflection shows the self- 
contradictory character of the phrase. Taken apart it simply 
means that the term martial interdicts the right to legal trial, 
and the term law the right of a foe to all civilized processes of 
warfare. Inter arma leges silent. Martial law, therefore, can 
never appear to the eye of the jurist in any other light than that 
in which Sir Matthew Hale views it "in truth and reality it is 
no law at all, but something indulged." Amidst the tempests 
of later times Judge Black was not only safe from attack, but 
he was even invoked as an oracle by those who, at the begin- 
ning of the war, would have been the first to denounce him. 
This change in the popular estimate of a character in itself un- 
changed, save in that steady progressive development which 
marks all great minds, is one of the many lessons to be derived 
from a study of his life and writings. It is also, in some mea- 
sure, an exhibition of the worthlessness of public opinion created 
during its irregular and capricious currents, as it is a striking 
proof of the solid and invaluable services of the man himself, 

* Ashton's Official Opinions of tlie Attorneys-General^ vol. ix. p. 516. 



1 886.] JEREMIAH SULLIVAN BLACK. 759 

who by sheer moral and mental force worked out his own justi- 
fication in the face of his countrymen. Revision of judgments 
has already begun to sift contemporary reputations, and while 
the names of some are in the descending scale of ultimate de- 
cision, that of Black has reached its zenith. Under the verse of 
the poet lies a primal truth, and time demonstrates that 

"The great soul of the world is just.'' 

The writings of Judge Black, lately issued,* comprise under 
four general heads, as arranged by Mr. Chauncey F. Black, some 
of the most notable papers in the literature of American civil 
polity, and they illustrate the essential solidity and correctness 
of view taken by that eminent jurist. Philosophic in the founda- 
tion of his mind, there is a degree of skill in the constructive and 
destructive methods which Judge Black employs rarely to be 
met with in argumentation. Persuasive and eloquent as he may 
appear at times, all the links in the chain of his reasoning are 
carefully forged and welded together by a logic which is irresist- 
ible. Under the show of logic, as used by the mere dialectician, 
is visible the skeleton of defective combination, but a trained 
intellect like Judge Black's ranges around his subject its leading 
features with such exquisite tact that every fact and every argu- 
ment follow in the strictest sequence, and, when complete, ex- 
hibit both a consummate power in art and an unrivalled perfec- 
tion in presentation. Valuable as his writings must always be 
considered by those who have any appreciation of conservatism 
of thought, strength of conviction, and fearlessness of expression, 
they possess a still higher claim on our admiration. In every 
utterance of his life is discovered a breadth of thought and of 
charity which endears the memory of Judge Black in an especial 
manner to Catholic hearts not only in America, the land of his 
birth, but in Ireland, the home of his forefathers. Interesting as 
it would be to attempt an analysis of such a mind, so complex in 
operation, so various in acquirement, and so tolerant in temper, 
arid to follow the manifestations of that mind through all the 
masterly expositions of national polity bequeathed to us in his 
Essays and Speeches, we must content ourselves in fulfilling a 
humbler part that of recalling to the attention of our readers a 
few of the lines of thought pursued by Judge Black, especially in 
their relation to questions in which the Catholic citizens of the 
republic are deeply concerned. In portraying the career of one 

* Essays and Speeches of Jeremiah S. Black. With a Biographical Sketch by Chauncey 
F. Black. New York : Appleton & Co. 1885. 



760 JEREMIAH SULLIVAN BLACK. [Sept., 

not of his own belief, the Catholic critic now and then seems to 
act on the supposition that loyalty to truth demands that he 
should take cognizance of that which the non-Catholic ought to 
have thought upon subjects cognate to faith and morals, rather 
than of that which he actually did think. A negative portraiture 
may have its uses, but at best it is one-sided. If we would draw 
the picture in its entirety, the preference which Goethe has ex- 
pressed in regard to Spinoza is a safe rule of delineation : " Ich 
immer varzog von dem Menschen zu erfahren wie er dachte, als 
von einem anderri zu horen, wie er hatte denken sollen " ; * and as 
far as possible we make it our own in reproducing the thought 
of Judge Black in its contact with Catholic interests. 

No periods in our history are fraught with such shameless 
exhibitions of talents prostituted to evil purposes as those which 
have witnessed the outbreak of fanaticism masquerading under 
the disguise of zeal for liberty and religion. Among the advo- 
cates of wild sophistries resulting in the destruction of Catholic 
life and property by frenzied mobs the impartial critic must 
place those clergymen who, forgetting their calling, entered the 
political arena for the prizes it offers. They played for high 
stakes, but in a losing game ; for however much the deeds of pro- 
scriptionists in times of unusual excitement may argue to the 
contrary, politics are not the religion of the American people, nor 
will they make religion, under whatever name professed, subser- 
vient to politics. A desperate effort was put forth to revive the 
Native American party under another name, but it was at once 
recognized as an old foe, particularly of the Irish Catholic, with 
a new face. It was natural that extraordinary means should be 
taken for the propagation of its principles in Pennsylvania, whose 
metropolitan city eleven years before had been the scene of vio- 
lence in a political warfare against Catholics. The inscription, 
" The Lord Seeth," which was visible on the blackened walls 
of St. Augustine's Church f when the mad work of the mob was 
complete, ought to have been a salutary lesson for the future ; 
but the blindness of hate could not read the writing, and the 
blindness of self-seeking would not heed its warning. In 1855 
the Rev. O. H. Tiffany, a professor in Dickinson College, at 
Carlisle, delivered a lecture on the " Cultivation of the Christian 
Elements of Republicanism." The fact was noteworthy, as it 
was currently believed that he aspired to a seat in the United 
States Senate from Pennsylvania, and that he represented the 

* Aus meinem Leben-Wahrheit und Dichtung, 4th Theil, i6th Buch, p. 209. 
t De Courcy and Shea's Catholic Church in the United States, p. 253. 



1 886.] JEREMIAH SULLIVAN BLACK. 761 

prescriptive principles of the new party seeking power in the 
State. In this lecture he indulged in the usual commonplaces of 
Protestant satire, and defended the existence of an American 
party " to meet the subtleties of Jesuitism and the insidious 
policy of foreign despotism." * Judge Black felt that when the 
schools of learning seemed smitten with the virulence of the new 
politics the time had come to utter protest, and, if possible, to 
recall academic thought to a higher plane of Christian ethics. 
Having been invited, a year later, to address the Phenakosmian 
Society of Pennsylvania College at the annual commencement, 
he chose for his theme " Religious Liberty," and gave one of the 
clearest and grandest interpretations of the spirit of the Consti- 
tution upon this question that ever fell from human lips. If in 
regard to a point or two of history we do not commit ourselves 
unreservedly to the views of Judge Black, yet as a whole his 
exposition appears to us unsurpassed in Protestant literature. 
The three heralds of freedom of conscience among the earliest 
settlers of America, whose portraits he draws with matchless 
skill, are Cecilius Calvert, William Penn, and Roger Williams. 
To the first he pays the following tribute : 

" Lord Baltimore was, in some respects, a most fortunate man. He was 
especially happy in having a father to lay out his great work, and a son of 
rare ability to carry it on. To have been the author of the first statute 
that ever was passed to secure entire freedom of conscience gives him the 
most enviable place in the world's history. His high qualities of mind and 
heart made him worthy of that pre-eminent distinction, as a single incident 
will show. A successful rebellion, organized by those whom he had shel- 
tered from the persecution of one another, deprived him for a time of his 
power, and the first thing they did was to persecute the church to which 
he himself belonged. When he recovered his authority he must have been 
tempted to retaliate. But with a greatness of mind which never deserted 
him, and with a fidelity to his own convictions which nothing could shake, 
he reorganized his government upon its former basis of equal protection 
to all."t 

The position and the duties of this country as regards the sub- 
ject of Judge Black's discourse are defined with a power and 
eloquence to which single quotations would be wholly inade- 
quate ; but as an appeal to the educated intellect of the nation 
the closing words are too striking to be omitted : 

" That America should now give up the proud position she occupies in 
the front of the world's great march, and skulk back like a recreant into 

* Lecture on the Cultivation of the Christian Elements of Republicanism, by Rev. O. H. 
Tiffany, A.M., Carlisle, Pa., 1885, p. 24. 
t Essays and Speeches, pp. 56, 57. 



762 JEREMIAH SULLIVAN BLACK. [Sept., 

the rear, is a thought which cannot enter an American mind without caus- 
ing a blush of insupportable shame. She stands pledged to this principle 
in the face of the world; she has solemnly devoted herself to its champion- 
ship ; she has deliberately promised it, not only to her own people, but to 
all others who should fly to her for protection ; and if she breaks her faith, 
it will be such perfidy as never blackened the brow of any nation before. 
To avert a calamity so grievous, and to prevent a disgrace so indelible, the 
country looks to her educated men. The unbroken and uncorrupted heart 
of the people will be always with you on the right side ; but you are the 
body-guard of freedom, and it is your special duty to carry her oriflamme 
in the van of every battle. Perhaps no dangerous service will be needed 
soon. You may safely sit still while your enemies merely talk against the 
equal rights of all the people. But if at any time hereafter, during the long 
lives which I hope you will all enjoy, some great combination should arise 
to stir up the bitter waters of sectarian strife, and to marshal ignorance, 
prejudice, and selfishness into a body compact enough to endanger the 
bulwarks of the Constitution, then let your flag stream out upon the 
wind ! " * 

Among other benefits which the country derived from Judge 
Black, in restraining the extravagant utterances of the pulpit in 
times when the bad passions of men needed a pacific rather than 
an aggressive teaching, is the scathing answer to the Rev. Dr. 
Alfred Nevin entitled " Political Preaching." It was called forth 
by a letter of that divine in the year 1866, addressed to Judge 
Black through the columns of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin. 
Every paragraph of the reply bristles with epigrammatic force 
and pungency of satire, and from the annals of history, American 
and European, he summons illustrations to add pertinency to his 
argument. 

" Can you think," says he, " that the Irish were invaded, and conquered, 
and oppressed, and murdered, and robbed for centuries, merely because the 
English loved and believed in the Protestant religion ? I suppose you 
know that those brutal atrocities were carried on for the purpose of giv- 
ing to political preachers in England possession of the churches, cathe- 
drals, glebe-lands, and tithes which belonged to the Irish Catholics. The 
soldier was also rewarded by confiscations and plunder. The church and 
the state hunted in couples, and Ireland was the prey which they ran down 
together." t 

Fain would we linger over the splendid passages abounding 
in the Essays and Speeches of this remarkable man, so magnani- 
mous in thought and so loyal to conscience in all that he did 
and in all that he said ; but the extract just quoted recalls the last 
time we' saw him in life and heard his thrilling plea for that land 
which the present Secretary of State, Mr. Thomas F. Bayard, 

* Essays and Speeches, p. 67. t Id. p. 74. 



1 886.] JEREMIAH SULLIVAN BLACK. 763 

fitly calls the " Island of Sorrows." In the spring of 1882 Judge 
Black visited the federal capital, and never had we found him 
more interesting. His mind was full of the theme of Ireland, 
her sufferings and her wrongs, her false friends and her implaca- 
ble foes; and as he pictured the greatness of her children under 
adverse fortune, or exposed the hostility of English literary poli- 
ticians like Froude and Goldwin Smith, the warmth of a Burke 
and the sarcasm of a Junius combined to animate the flow of 
conversation which we have never heard equalled. The Irish 
National Land League of Maryland had arranged to celebrate in 
Baltimore the centenary of Grattan's declaration of Irish inde- 
pendence, and Judge Black kindly invited us to accompany him 
thither. If it were appropriate we would gladly recall some of 
the memories of the trip made with such a man, who valued a 
friend, as Barry Cornwall says of Charles Lamb, " for none of the 
ordinary reasons, because he was famous, or clever, or powerful, 
or popular."* But personal incidents, however pleasing in the 
retrospect, become dwaried by comparison with the august work 
in which he was now engaged. Concordia Opera-House, when 
Mayor Whyte introduced Judge Black, rang with the generous 
plaudits of Irish hearts, and the orator was at home with his au- 
dience and his subject. On that night, years before Mr. Glad- 
stone, now without a peer among living statesmen, outlined his 
policy of Home Rule, this " greatest of American jurists," as the 
mayor of Baltimore so well characterized him, developed a plan 
for self-government in Ireland in harmony with the integrity of 
the British Empire. The address at the Grattan Centenary, if 
Judge Black had no other claims on the gratitude of the Irish 
people, would for ever unite his memory with that of her cham- 
pions in all the centuries of her misrule. He sketched in vivid 
colors the long series of her wrongs, cruelty, injustice, and op- 
pression, her struggles, her defeats, the English bigotry which 
was " merely simulated to cover English rapacity " in order to 
force upon the Irish a religion which they did not believe ; and 
from the dark record he turned to ask : 

" What concern have we in this contest ? . . . We owe them a heavy 
debt, which we cannot repudiate without dishonor. They fought by our 
side on every battle-field of the Revolution, and after independence they 
assisted to frame our institutions. At least five times since then their 
exiles settled among us have aided to save our liberty from destruction."! 

The close of the address embodies, as if by prophetic insight, 

* Charles Lamb : A Memoir, by Barry Cornwall, p. 21. 
t Essays and Speeches, p. 162. 



764 JEREMIAH SULLIVAN BLACK. [Sept. 

the great question which is to-day foremost in the thought, not 
alone of England, but of the whole civilized world Home Rule 
for Ireland : 

"If the Irish people were in full possession of the right to administer 
their own domestic affairs, they could perform their duties to the empire a 
thousand times better than now. They would be the pride and the strength 
of England; not what they are the weakness, the misfortune, and the 
shame. When we consider how easily, cheaply, and safely this unspeak- 
able benefit might be bestowed, it is literally amazing to see it withheld. 
It is but erecting one or more political corporations, which you may call 
states, or territories, or provinces, to make, administer, and execute laws 
upon subjects which concern nobody but themselves, and with such limita- 
tions upon the power as may seem necessary to prevent its possible abuse. 
If this, coupled with a satisfactory adjustment of land tenures, would not 
start Ireland on a career of peace and prosperity, then all history is false, 
all experience delusive, and all philosophy a woven tissue of lies. . . . 
Every established state, every supreme government of whatever form, 
has the right of eminent domain that is to say, the power to take private 
property for public use upon making just compensation. It is a distinct 
and well-understood condition of all titles that they shall be surrendered 
upon those terms when the general good requires it. The sovereign 
authority may thus annihilate any monopoly which cannot exist, or is not 
likely to exist, without serious detriment to the public interests. The pro- 
perty of the Irish landlords comes directly within the range of this power. 
The exercise of it would not be agrarianism nor confiscation nor plunder. 
It could not injuriously affect the rights of any human being, but it would 
reach the one great end at which all honest government is aimed the well- 
being of the whole community. I have said that the owners of property 
so taken are always entitled to just compensation. The Irish landlords 
should have that and nothing more. The rule for ascertaining what ought 
to be paid in any case is so plain that no fair-minded man could miss it. 
The actual value of land is not measured by the rent which a landlord could 
extort from a helpless tenant to whom eviction is death, but what a pru- 
dent and industrious man who cultivates it himself could make out of it 
over and above necessary expenses and full payment for his own labor. 
The taking would not include any property actually used by the landlords 
themselves for their own pleasure or profit, nor any lands leased for other 
than agricultural purposes. But the body of the land now under cultiva- 
tion or in pasture, being taken by the public authorities, could be dis- 
tributed among the people in suitable pieces, and held by them subject to 
a tax large enough to pay interest on the actual value. Upon those terms, 
easy to the tenant and just to the landlord, Ireland would be converted 
into a nation of small proprietors, independent and free. 1 '* 

In closing this brief review of a life and work worthy the full 
tribute of an abler pen, we have but drawn the outlines instead 
of filling the canvas. To comprehend a character so strong, so 
rounded, so consistent, one must study his own utterances, which, 

* Essays and Speeches, pp. 169, 170. 



1 886.] IN THE JURA. 765 

embracing-, as they do, the widest range of human thought, have 
always one central idea the liberty of man. The Milligan de- 
cision touching the habeas corpus is but one among the enduring 
monuments of his courage and his devotion to the Right. The 
record of them is before the world, and its perusal brings a 
renewed sense of irreparable loss in the departure of a great 

soul: 

" But nothing can bereave him 
Of the force he made his own 
Being here, and we believe him 
Something far advanced in state, 
And that he wears a truer crown 
Than any wreath that man can weave him." * 



IN THE JURA. 

i 

COMING up from the parched, sun-bleached plains of southern 
France in summer-time, how cool and delightful are the pine-for- 
ests and cloud-capped heights of the Jura how grateful the fresh, 
balsamic air and the perpetual sound of running streams on 
every side ! Most travellers pass these mountains by as a gloomy 
region of perpetual cloud and storm, and are perfectly satisfied if 
the sound of distant thunder will only justify them in repeating 
the hackneyed lines of Byron : 

" And Jura answers through her misty shroud 
Back to the joyous Alps who call to her aloud." 

There is at first something stern and sombre about these 
mountains, to be sure, with their solemn gray ridges, and dark 
forests of evergreens, and narrow gorges where rage the impris- 
oned winds ; but this severity is tempered by the brilliancy of the 
sun and the purity of the atmosphere, and the whole region is 
constantly surprising you with the varied charm of purple moun- 
tain, sun lit slopes, valleys without number, sweet and verdurous, 
and little combes or basins of marvellous beauty, that well repay 
the explorer. Pines and firs generally clothe the upper heights, 
and lower down are broad wastes of purple heather and golden 
broom, with belts of beeches and chestnuts, and terraces covered 
with vines and thriving orchards, giving endless variety of leafage 
and color to the landscape. The upland pastures, too, are filled 

* Tennyson's " Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington." 



766 IN THE JURA. [Sept., 

with herds of cattle, sheep, and goats, enlivening the air with the 
sound of their tinkling bells ; and in the sides of the mountains 
are countless fissures fringed with mosses and ferns, out of which 
trickle gentle rills that soon swell into furious torrents, and are 
beat into foaming cascades as they dash over the jagged rocks 
and leap with mad triumph into the valleys below. Here they 
go rushing away with perpetual song and laughter, and seem to 
invite you to follow their capricious windings till they come into 
broader valleys where the hills recede, the meadows widen, and 
the glowing sun has full play among the trees joyous with 
thrushes, and linnets, and the lark that "at heaven's gate sings." 
These romantic valleys are walled in by rocks and cliffs of every 
imaginable form and hue. On every point of vantage are the 
ruins of an ancient castle or some chapel consecrated by the de- 
votion of centuries, and at every turn are villages that have 
grown up around a hermit's cell or the tomb of some unheard-of 
saint. In such places are gathered all the legends and religious 
traditions of the Jura, as well as curious folk-lore handed down 
from Roman or Celtic times. The ruined castles, too, have all 
figured in the history of the province, and are rich in countless 
stories of border warfare, the private feuds of one old baron with 
another, and the later but more destructive raids of the Swiss 
Calvinists of the sixteenth century, who frequently overran these 
mountains with fire, and sword, and rapine, and outrage of every 
kind. 

One of the most striking and picturesque points in the Jura is 
the mountain of La Chatelaine, which belongs to the outer range. 
There is a village on the very summit, with the remains of a 
castle on the verge of an awful precipice eight hundred feet in 
depth, built by the old counts of Burgundy on the foundations 
of a Roman fortress. You can still see the broad, rock-hewn 
moat, now dry, around the only point of approach, and the once 
impregnable towers that flanked the drawbridge, dismantled cen- 
turies ago by order of Louis XI. And there is the Romanesque 
chapel, though in much better condition, where many a princess 
and high-born dame have worshipped, as well as more than one 
royal train; but it is now the parish church, and the clank of 
armor and the martial tread of knights have given place to the 
rustic clatter of the wooden sabots of the pious mountaineers. 

The castle of La Chatelaine is mentioned in the monastic records 
of Arbois as early as 1053. In the following century it formed 
part of the dowry of Mahaut, widow of Count Otto of Burgundy, 
as well as of her daughter, Jeanne, the widowed queen of Philippe 



1 886.] IN THE JURA. 767 

le Long, both of whom resided here for some time. Mahaut was 
a princess of inexhaustible charity, and spent her widowhood in 
good works, according to the apostolic injunction. She founded 
here a hospital for the poor, and another at her neighboring castle 
of Bracon, gave a hundred ells of cloth annually to the destitute 
at Arbois, and fed the needy in every direction. Her grand- 
daughter, Margaret of Burgundy, after her husband was slain at 
Crecy, also resided here a part of the time. She was very ener- 
getic in defending the country from the ravages of the Free Com- 
panies, and was remarkable for her generous style of living. 

The crumbling ramparts of La Chatelaine afford a magnificent 
view over the surrounding country. Directly beneath is the 
beautiful Val d'Amaous, or Amour a deep basin hollowed out 
among the mountains, into which you look down as through a 
veil of golden green, so brilliant is the verdure lit up by the noon- 
day sun. Through this emerald valley flows with ceaseless 
melody the Cuisance, one of the purest streams that ever issued 
with strong, impetuous d^ish from the innermost heart of a moun- 
tain. Towards La Bresse and Burgundy the undulating hills are 
covered with vines, and at the east are the jagged peaks of the 
inner Jura, looking as wild and solitary as when St. Romam 
sought a hermitage in their pine-forests nearly fifteen hundred 
years ago. 

Descending into the Val d'Amour, you see far up in the side 
of the precipitous mountain of La Chatelaine a yawning baume, 
or cavern a double cavern, in fact, bearing traces of its ancient 
consecration to Druidical rites. In its remotest depths is a dark, 
subterranean pool, restless and seething, and sending out deep 
sighs as of a soul in pain. This is the source of the Cuisance, 
which comes pouring out of the two openings with an awful 
roar, forming a double cascade that unites in the valley below, 
and goes winding off over a rocky bed through meadow and nar- 
row defile, from one beautiful valley to another. The basin it 
first waters merits its poetical name of Val d'Amour, or Valley 
of Love, for it is, in truth, " hallowed with loveliness." It would 
be difficult to find a spot that appeals more strongly to the ima- 
gination. The precipitous mountains that wall in the valley, the 
hanging woods on their sides once sacred to the Druids, the 
mysterious cave devoted to their secret observances, the strange 
torrent that issues from the mountain as if impelled by some 
giant force, and the wonderful verdure of the basin it waters, 
make up a picture of singular fascination. 

In the centre of the basin is the village of Planches, at one 



768 IN THE JURA. [Sept, 

end of which rises the spire of Our Lady's chapel, where the 
patronal feast of her Nativity is annually celebrated with great 
devotion, attracting pilgrims from all parts of the Jura. The 
river is narrow here, but grows broader at the ancient town of 
Arbois, which stands further down between two mountains gar- 
landed with vines to their very summits vines all purple and 
green and gold, and famous for their vintage, fit indeed for a 
libation to the gods. To see the peasants come down with trail- 
ing vines and luscious grapes, shouting in merry chorus the gay 
songs of vintage-time, you would think them Bacchus and all his 

crew, 

" Crowned with green leaves, and faces all aflame, 
'All madly dancing through the pleasant valley 
To scare thee, O Melancholy ! " 

In another part of the valley are tall, gray rocks and pinnacles, 
some of which were undoubtedly associated with Druidical rites, 
such as the two needles that rise to the height of fifty feet on the . 
way from Planches to Molain, and, farther on, the Cre't-du-Feu 
and the Roche Maudru, or Mount of the Druids. The whole 
Val d'Amour was, in fact, sacred to the Druids, like many other 
secluded valleys in the Jura, such as Vogna, near Arinthod, and, 
a little beyond, the Cirque or Vallon des Creux. These basins 
all lie deeply hidden among precipitous mountains, and have 
their consecrated grove, and torrent of limpid water, and uplifted 
peak crowned by ancient towers of defence. They are remark- 
able, too, for their singular verdure and freshness. 

The most ancient Christian places of worship in the Jura 
were built on culminating points, partly for protection, no doubt. 
One of the oldest in this region is the church of St. fitienne, on 
the site of a pagan temple at Coldres, in the outer range of 
mountains, not far from Lons-le-Saunier. It stands on a lofty 
plateau at the west, where the trees in the churchyard may be 
seen many leagues distant. In early times this was the only 
church in the district, and when a station was to be held here it 
was announced to the whole country around by the lighting of a 
signal-fire on the highest point: a true Lumen Christi, proclaim- 
ing in a beautiful and significant manner the Advent, the Coming 
of our Lord in the Eucharistic sacrifice, in the silence and ob- 
scurity of the night night, indeed, when Heaven was united to 
man, and God to earth, the Mass being generally celebrated be- 
fore the full coming of day. 

Near by are the remains of an old Roman fortification, from 
which you descend to the church by eight flights of steps. 



1 886.] IN THE JURA. 769 

Here is a magnificent view across dark mountains, valleys of 
tenderest green, dimpling lakes, and villages of romantic aspect 
which give a human interest to the scene. The church of Col- 
dres itself, though important enough to be mentioned by Frede- 
rick Barbarossa in a charter drawn up at Arbois in 1157, is a very 
unpretending edifice, paved with flag-stones like the houses of 
the mountaineers, with a simple altar turned duly to the east. 
Its chief pride is the flamboyant window of the chancel and an 
ancient statue of St. Stephen, who is held in special veneration 
all through this region. Here died St. Desir6, Bishop of Besan- 
gon, in one of his apostolic rounds, but his remains were taken 
to his native place of Lons-le-Saunier. There they were reve- 
rently preserved for twelve hundred years in the crypt of the 
church which now bears his name, but were for the most part 
sacrilegiously burned by the revolutionists of 1793. His tomb, 
however, is still venerated, and his festival annually celebrated 
with great joy and devotion. 

At Chevraux, in the canton of St. Amour, is another ancient 
church on the top of a high mountain, once the centre of a vast 
parish where the offices of the church were likewise announced 
by signal-fires that cast their blaze afar. 

St. Amour itself is a place of some religious interest, but is 
chiefly known for giving its name to Guillaume de St. Amour, 
one of the great schoolmen of the thirteenth century, and the 
friend of St. Louis' chaplain, Richard de Sorbon, with whom he 
was associated in founding the college of the Sorbonne at Paris. 
He returned to the Jura, however, and died at St. Amour in 
1272. The town is beautifully situated at the foot of a mountain 
range, in the midst of luxuriant vineyards, and might well charm 
the eye of the most solemn old schoolman. It was named for a 
martyr of the famous Theban legion, whose body, with that of St. 
Viatre, or Viateur, was brought here in 585 by Gontran, King of 
Burgundy, and placed in a votive church he erected to receive 
these sacred relics. He was on his way home from a pilgrimage 
to St. Maurice of Agaune, and, his life being endangered by a 
storm in crossing Lake Leman, he made a vow, should he escape, 
to erect a church and monastery in the first town he should ar- 
rive at in his own dominions, and there deposit the remains of 
the two martyrs. He finally came to land, and the road he took 
in coming from Geneva may still be traced an old Roman road 
which is sometimes called the Chemin de Ctfsar. The first town 
he arrived at was Vincia, and he immediately proceeded to fulfil 
VOL. XLIII. 49 



7/o IN THE JURA. [Sept., 

his vow by building- a church out of an old temple of Mercury, 
which became so famous for its shrine that the town gradually 
took the name of St. Amour, and the lord-suzerain himself at a 
later day assumed it with pride. 

The old Roman roads through the Jura, as well as the prin- 
cipal water-courses, were always defended by military posts in 
ancient times, established here and there on adjacent heights. 
One of the strongest of these fortresses was at the southern ex- 
tremity of the Jura, on the lofty peak of Oliferne, or Holiferne, 
that stands like a gigantic sentinel overlooking the four val- 
leys of the Ain, the Bienne, the Valouse, and the Ancheronne, 
and commands an extensive view of the hills of Bugey, the 
broad plains of Bresse and Burgundy, and the mountains of 
Switzerland and Savoy. Mt. Oliferne is noted for its poetic 
legends and folk-lore of all kinds. In Celtic times it was almost 
divinized by popular superstition, and in all ages its woods and 
dells have been peopled with fairies and sprites and hobgoblins, 
who seem to have taken kindly to Christianity and kept their 
footing in the land, unlike their race in England, where, some 
pretend, the " Reformation " put an end to their rings and 
roundelays, as Bishop Corbet pleasantly laments : 

" The fairies 
Were of the old profession ; 

Their songs were Ave Marfes ; 
Their dances were procession. 

But now, alas ! they all are dead, 
Or gone beyond the seas, 

Or for religion fled, 
Or else they take their ease.'' 

: Chaucer gives another reason for their disappearance, how- 
ever. He says, with a tinge of spite, that the charity and piety 
of the holy friars, going about everywhere by land and stream, 
blessing the halls, chambers, kitchens, bowers, cities, boroughs, 
towers, castles, villages, barns, dairies, and sheepfolds, have caused 
the fairies to vanish : 

" This maketh that ther ben no Faeries." 

All Celtic nations have a lingering belief in fairy-land the 
Scotch, the Irish, and many races on the Continent. It must be 
confessed, however, that the good cure's of the Jura take a more 
severe view of such a belief than the poet, and zealously labor to 
suppress it in their parishes. 



1 8 86.] IN THE JURA. 771 

Strange, mysterious animals, too, haunt these mountains, such 
as the Vouivre, a winged immortal serpent, on whose forehead 
glows a carbuncle of extraordinary size and brilliancy, only to 
be found in the heads of these serpents or the dragon a car- 
buncle of magic virtues that shines in utter darkness and gleams 
like a shooting star when the winged Vouivre flies swiftly down 
from the high watch-tower of Mt. Oliferne by moonlight to 
quench its thirst at the cool spring of Lanthenne. This serpent 
is to be heard of all through the Jura. One of the most noted 
lived for a long time in a grotto at the entrance of the romantic 
valley of Mouthiers, whence it came forth in warm summer even- 
ings amid the curling vapors to bathe in the green waters of the 
Loue. 

Moralists will have it that the Vouivre is merely the emblem 
of fickle Fortune, with wings 

" To show her gifts come swift and suddenly." 

The jewel in its head, beautiful as 

"The pearl which crested Fortune wears," 

denotes the brilliancy of her favors. Its serpent-like form and 
winding, uncertain course are indicative of the illusory nature 
of her gifts, 

"Which if her favorite be not swift to take, 
He loses them for ever." 

There are several more of these fabulous animals in this re- 
gion, such as the Itivre du vieux servant, which the herdsmen 
often see moving slowly along before them, but are never, never 
able to overtake ; and the clieval gauvain, something akin to the 
Irish spirit-horse or Phooka or " Pouke," as the poet Spenser 
calls it said to course along the banks of the Vernois at the 
hour of twilight, but whose principal mission in these days seems 
to be, like that of the loup-garou, to terrify refractory children 
with. 

The Roman defences on Mt. Oliferne, originally built to pro- 
tect navigation on the Ain and the Bienne, were at a later day 
so enlarged and strengthened as to become an impregnable fort- 
ress, which, in the middle ages, was one of the four castles that 
defended the old monastic lands of St. Claude. Its most impos- 
ing feature is the formidable donjon, bristling with battlements, 
with walls two yards or more in thickness, which stands on the 



772 IN THE JURA. [Sept., 

sharpest peak, admitting approach only at one point, which 
could be cut off at pleasure by means of a broad, deep moat 
excavated in the live rock. Many strange tales are related of 
this stronghold. At one time it was held by a fierce old border 
knight, who levied blackmail on his neighbors after the bold 
manner of the Highland caterans, and made himself the terror 
of all the country around. The neighboring barons combined 
their forces to take him and his castle; but all known arts of 
war, and even of necromancy, then in vogue, were brought to 
bear without the slightest avail. The lord of Oliferne continued 
his forays through the mountains, and so skilfully eluded his 
enemies that he was believed to be in league with the very 
powers of darkness. His castle, too, defied every assault, and 
was only taken at last by bribing the warder of the draw-bridge. 
The baron, with his usual good-luck, made his escape with a part 
of his band, but his three daughters, left to their fate, were cap- 
tured and most inhumanly thrust into a huge tun, garnished in- 
teriorly with sharp iron spikes, which was closed up and preci- 
pitated into the awful gulf below. In this horrid prison, pierced 
and rent at every turn, these innocent victims dashed from one 
ridge to another till they were finally buried in the rushing tor- 
rent. Their memory has been perpetuated by giving three sister 
peaks of unequal height on the other side of the Ain the name 
of Les Trois Damettes. But the old baron, if we are to believe 
the peasants, still scours the neighboring mountains, and may fre- 
quently be heard with peal of horn and cry of hound, and even 
seen, on certain nights of the year, coursing through the forests 
after the fashion of the Black Hunter of English legend, whose 
" dread voyce " may often be heard calling his hounds on stormy 
nights along the wild moors of Cornwall. 

" And when his hound and horn and horse 

The night-belated peasant hears, 

Appalled he signs the frequent cross 

As the wild din invades his ears." 

Others assert that this Chasseur Nocturne is not the lord of 
Oliferne, but in reality King Herod, of awful memory, doomed 
to roam these dark mountains, where he may be seen the night 
before certain festivals, particularly that of the Epiphany. 

Other lords of Oliferne, skilled in all chivalric exercises of the 
olden time, have left pleasanter memories behind, as victorious 
knights of the tourney, sportsmen in the greenwood, and gallant 



1 886.] IN THE JURA. 773 

wooers of gentle dames, which perhaps inspired the old romance 
of the fourteenth century entitled the Courberan cTOliferne. 

Sir John Froissart gives an interesting account of a knight 
named Agadinquor d'Oliferne, which sounds like a chapter from 
Huon de Bordeaux. This knight figured among the Saracen war- 
riors at Tunis, clad in black armor, with a silvery scarf streaming 
from his helmet, and mounted on a fiery courser of great beauty 
that seemed to fly with him across the downs of the sea-shore. 
He always bore three javelins, well pointed and feathered, which 
he dexterously discharged at any opponent, and displayed such un- 
usual skill and address in various other feats of arms, all for love 
of the daughter of the King of Tunis, that the French knights who 
served under the Duke of Bourbon's fair white banner of Our 
Lady regarded [him with admiration and envy, and tried, but in 
vain, to take him captive. We are not told how this accom- 
plished but renegade knight sped in his wooing, but it is very 
evident that he was a genuine offshoot of the race of the Black 
Huntsman of the Jura. \ 

Beyond Mt. Oliferne are two rugged mountains, and between 
them is the old town of Arinthod, on the banks of the Valouse. 
All the characteristic features of the Jura are to be found here 
the narrow valley shut in by precipitous mountains, the dark 
pines on the upper slopes, the bare, gray ridges, the rills and cas- 
cades of purest water, the tender green of the meadows, the 
chapel rich with sacred memories, and, towering above all, the 
majestic ruins of an ancient fortalice that once protected the 
valley. Here we enter the basin of Vogna, one of the most 
beautiful combes of the Jura, deeply sunk among the mountains, 
but radiant with sunlight and wonderfully green, where the cool 
sound of falling water pleasantly greets the ear, and the over- 
hanging wood tempers the heat, dark against the sapphire sky. 
In Celtic times this valley was one of the sacred places of the 
Druids, and several of their monuments still remain, such as the 
Pierre Enon, a noted dolmen, around which the pale, shadowy 
form of the Dame Blanche may be seen gliding gently along at 
the witching hour of night, 

" Between the night and day, 
When the fairy-king has power." 

This fair apparition may frequently be met in these mountain 
valleys, reminding one of Scott's White Lady of Avenel. The 
latter, however, made her appearance at high noon, whereas the 



774 IN THE JURA. [Sept., 

Dames Blanches of this region, though similarly gifted, come only 
at twilight as if evoked from the silvery stream, and disappear as 
if by enchantment among the floating mists, which, as Mr. Rus- 
kin says, are " changing their shapes for ever among the change- 
less pines that fringe the crests of the Jura." 

A still more mysterious being is the Dame Verte, who haunts 
some of these fairy glens, and is perhaps more in harmony with 
their delicious verdure and the green waters of the mountain 
streams. She often appears by night, offering to guide the lost 
wayfarer through the intricate mountain-paths, and wonderful 
stories are related of her subterranean palace, with galleries and 
endless windings, where live fabulous animals with magic powers. 
But woe to the traveller who allows himself to be beguiled there- 
in ! This fairy tale reminds one of the Fe"e aux Cheveux verts in 
the Provengal ballad, who entices a fisherman to her crystal palace 
beneath the green sea with such fatal consequences. 

At one end of the valley of Vogna is the steep cliff of Buans, 
at the foot of which is a remarkable rock, slender at the base, but 
swelling out above like a wine-glass, and so high as only to be 
ascended by means ol a ladder. A seat has been hollowed out at 
the top, giving it the appearance of a pulpit. The peasants call 
it the selle or chaise d Dieu, and it is said to have been used by 
the early Christian missionaries when preaching in the open air. 
It was doubtless used before them by the Druids, who had a 
sacred wood near by, a remnant of which, called the forest of 
Chastain, surrounds the ruined tower of St. Colombe, a lofty sen- 
tinel that, on the top of an isolated peak, is still keeping guard 
over the narrow defile between Arinthod and Cernon. 

There are several rude oratories in this neighborhood, held 
in great veneration, like that of St. Barbe a mere cleft in the 
rock, where a statue of the saint has been set up. St. Barbara 
is invoked against thunder and lightning, so fearful and destruc- 
tive in the Jura, and she seems, with uplifted tower, to be stay- 
ing the power of the tempest. No mountaineer passes by with- 
out pausing devoutly to beg her protection for man and beast and 
the frugal harvests of these mountain- valleys. 

South of Arinthod is the chapel of Notre Dame de Bon Ren- 
centre, a small edifice of the twelfth century. It stands on the top 
of a cliff, and you ascend to it by winding steps cut in the rock. 
This is the great landmark of the district the milliareum aure-um, 
as it were every part of the valley being spoken of with refe- 
rence to its distance from the chapel. Nearness constitutes the 



1 886.] IN THE JURA. 775 

great mark of distinction ; and the " Faubourg St. Germain," so to 
speak, is directly around the base of the cliff. The more remote 
inhabitants, however, have the advantage of a better view of the 
sanctuary. The parish church is on another height, with equal- 
ly picturesque effect, and is quaintly spoken of as " going back- 
wards," because its altar is at the western end. 

Following the delightful road from Arinthod to Thoirette, you 
come to a pretty valley that opens to give passage to the Balme. 
One side of this valley is bounded by a steep mountain, on the 
summit of which rise the battlemented towers of Vallefin with 
true baronial pride. Here you come once more into the realm 
of fairy-land, if indeed you are ever out of it in the Jura, a land 
which no cold and doubting reasoner should attempt to enter. 
At one extremity are two gigantic menhirs, called " the Stone 
Man and Woman of Soussonne," which look like queer Egyptian 
statues ; and not far off is the source of the Balme, a sacred 
spring in Celtic times, where the people went to purify them- 
selves before ascending the height of Pyramont, on which stood 
the ancient temple of Fire, sacred to Bel, or Belinus, the great 
divinity of the Druids. Here, also, are traces of the old Ro- 
mans, in the Vie Armee, or Via Armata the path of Venus, 
which led up to her embowered altar. And crossing to the other 
side of Vallefin you come to Montgifond, where springs a plen- 
teous fountain, once sacred to Cybele, mother of the gods, the 
waters of which were, no doubt, used in purifying her altar after 
the annual custom of the Romans. 

Returning to the Valouse, on its banks is the village of St. 
Hymetiere, which grew up around the cell of a hermit of that 
name who withdrew from the world early in the sixth century. 
In the course of time the oratory in which he was buried ex- 
panded into a large church, and his cell into a priory. The lat- 
ter was destroyed by the Calvkiists of the sixteenth century, but 
the church, one of the most ancient in Franche-Comte, is still in 
good preservation and greatly frequented on account of the body 
of St. Hymetiere, which is kept in a beautiful shrine of carved 
oak, executed by the mountaineers themselves, who excel in such 
work. This shrine is annually opened for several days at Whit- 
suntide, drawing an immense crowd to venerate the sacred relics, 
and on Whitmonday is borne in solemn 'procession throughout 
the valley, affording an admirable spectacle of Catholic devotion. 
This saint is in great repute, not only in the Jura, but as far off 
as Macon, where he is honored under ^the- name of St. Ythaire. 



776 IN THE JURA. [Sept., 

Like St. Barbara, he is the patron of forges, and is invoked 
against thunder and lightning. Near the church is the spring 
where the holy anchorite used to quench his thirst, gushing out 
of a rock on which may still be seen the impress of his hand 
symbol of his zeal in uprooting the superstitions of the Druids, 
in 'the very centre of whose operations he had the courage to 
establish himself. Many other hermits of early times have left 
marks of their influence as deeply graven in the Jura, such as 
St. Pontius, who, with equal boldness, erected a cell in the Val- 
lon des Creux, hitherto occupied by the Druids. 

There have always been more or less hermits in these moun- 
tains, and some of their cells are still inhabited, like the hermit- 
age of St. Sorlin, on the south side of a height of the same name 
a corruption of St. Saturnin. Over the entrance hangs a bell 
in its gable, inscribed Cloche de penitence ; and beneath, by way 
of admonition, is the scroll, Id on ne parle qua Dieu. Every- 
thing here is steeped in the profound peace of religious solitude, 
that is only broken by the ringing of the bell, the songs of the 
birds in their leafy cells, and the tremulous bleating of the flocks 
on the green hillsides. On the top of Mount St. Sorlin is an 
ancient castle ruined by the army of Louis XL, with an isolated 
tower on the most precipitous side, only entered by a staircase 
wrought in the thick stone walls. This tower is abandoned to 
the Vouivre, which loves such old ruins in high places, and we 
lingered till the evening mists began to rise, hoping it would 
come forth at its favorite hour. But Fortune held us, as ever, in 
too much despite to afford us a glimpse of such good omen. We 
were amply compensated for the ascent, however, by the magni- 
ficent view up the broad valley of the Ain, which pours tumul- 
tuously along its rocky bed, passing village after village ; now 
rapidly shrouded by the gathering mists, the everlasting moun- 
tains standing around in silent majesty, their outlines softening 
every moment in the waning light, and, bending over all, the 
purple heavens where blazed one solitary star, 

" Like Nature's patient, sleepless Eremite." 



1 886.] MARY STUART. 777 



MARY STUART. 

INVESTIGATIONS INTO THE CHARGES AGAINST HER MORAL CHARACTER. 

II. 

FROUDE attempts to establish the fact that there was between 
Mary and Bothwell a preconcerted collusion when the latter 
carried her away, apparently by violence, and married her. But 
there was no conceivable reason for a collusive abduction to be 
arranged between them, if she was so madly in love with him as 
h^r enemies represent. No one regretted Darnley, and there 
was no obstacle whatever to the gratification of what is described 
as her " burning, uncontrollable desire " to marry Bothwell. Mr. 
Froude asserts that a sense of shame prevented her. Shame ? 
He forgets that he has throughout represented her as completely 
dead to that feeling, as " a woman duped by her own passions, 
which had dragged her down to the level of a brute." Where, 
then, was the obstacle? Bothwell was legally, if not justly, 
acquitted. Besides, he had the support of men of the highest 
station and greatest influence, and was publicly, officially, sol- 
emnly recommended by the chief nobility of the realm as the 
fittest person to marry the widowed queen, and they had, under 
their own signature, pledged themselves to aid him in accom- 
plishing that end " for the good and welfare of the public inte- 
rest." The queen, if she loved Bothwell, had nothing to do but 
to accept the advice and earnest counsel of the bishops, earls, 
and lords so opportunely tendered to her. Did they advise 
one whom they believed to be an adulteress and a murderess to 
marry her partner in guilt as a measure of national importance 
for a continuance of the long line of Scottish kings ? What sense 
of shame could have prevented this woman, alleged to be utterly 
shameless, from marrying Bothwetl under such favorable circum- 
stances, and without incurring any reproach from her subjects 
and the rest of the world ? Would not this open marriage, pub- 
licly and officially desired by so many magnates of the land, have 
been a better shield against even suspicion itself than going 
through the flimsy and thin farce of being waylaid and of for- 
cible abduction ? A distinguished Scotch writer, Aytoun, has 



778 MARY STUART. [Sept., 

justly said: " It was a matter of surprise that a story so palpably 
absurd should ever have received credence." 

Therefore Mr. Froude's version of the collusive abduction 
might be dismissed with slight comment. He tells us that the 
queen was moving at the time with a guard of three hundred 
men. The truth is, she had but an escort of twelve persons, 
among whom were the Earl of Huntly, Maitland, and Melville. 
On the other hand, he represents Bothwell as being only at the 
head of. twelve men, thus exactly reversing the respective forces 
of the two parties, because it is established beyond dispute that 
Bothwell came with an attendance, not of twelve, but of a thou- 
sand men in full armor. Such mendacious assertions are over- 
whelming. He further represents Mary as saying, with singular 
composure, " she would have no bloodshed ; her people were 
outnumbered, and, rather than any of them should lose their 
lives, she would go where the Earl Bothwell wished." Very 
humane indeed! But it is another stupendous fiction. Besides, 
it is a contradiction. How could "her people be outnumbered, 
if Bothwell had only twelve men and she an escort of three 
hundred ?" 

Hosack, commenting upon this passage, remarks : " This is 
the speech, not of the Queen of Scots, but of Mr. Froude, who 
has put it into her mouth for the obvious purpose of leading his 
readers to conclude that she was an accomplice in the designs of 
Bothwell." 

Sir James Melville's account is : " The Earl of Bothwell en- 
countered her with a great company and took her horse by the 
bridle. His men took the Earl of Huntly, Secretary Maitland, 
and me, and carried us captives to Dunbar. There the Earl of 
Bothwell boasted that he would marry the queen, who would or 
would not yea, whether she would herself or not" 

Mary herself, after giving her own simple and modest nar- 
rative of the abominable outrage, concludes in these words : 
" Finally, finding us a helpless captive, he assumed a bolder tone. 
So ceased he never till, by persuasion and importunate suit, ac- 
companied not the less by force, he has finally driven us to the end 
the work begun." 

Melville says : " Then the Queen of Scots could not but 
marry him, seeing he had ravished her and lain with her against 
her will." 

Morton's proclamation accuses Bothwell of violence to the 
queen, and finally the whole history of the foul outrage is spread 
out in a solemn act of the Scotch Parliament whose members 



i886.] MARY STUART. 779 

were Mary's enemies acting under the direction of the Regent 
Murray, after she was dethroned and a prisoner in England. 

Walter Scott, in \i\s History of Scotland, says " that not a spear 
was lifted, not a sword drawn to save Mary from the power of 
that atrocious ruffian." 

The honest minister Craig, who was forced to proclaim the 
banns of the marriage after the abduction, records that he did it 
against his free will, and that he " protested against it as being 
odious and scandalous." 

Mary's bridal robes were of deep black. It is recorded that 
" she was the most changed woman in the face that her cour- 
tiers had ever seen." The queen's attendants told Du Croe, 
the French ambassador, "that, unless God aided her, they feared 
she would become desperate " ; and Mary herself told the am- 
bassador " that she could not rejoice, nor ever should again. All 
she desired was death." Sir James Melville relates " that the 
queen was so disdainfully treated and handled, and with such 
reproachful language, that Arthur Agken and I, being present, 
heard her ask a knife to stick herself, or else she would drown 
herself." And even Maitland, her enemy, told the French am- 
bassador " that from the day after her nuptials she had never 
ceased from tears and lamentations, and that Bothwell would 
neither allow her to see anybody nor any one to see her." And 
this is the woman whom Froude represents as a sensual and beastly 
adulteress and murderess, who had married the man whom she 
madly doted upon ! 

To show how profoundly she was attached to Bothwell, Mr. 
Froude quotes two letters, one of which, he says, was written 
"just before the marriage." Indeed ! How could this be? Not 
a single day was Bothwell absent from the 24th of April, the day 
of the abduction, to the I5th of May. How could she during that 
time have written a love-letter to Bothwell, who was always 
present a love-letter, in the condition of mind and body in 
which she is described to have been by ocular witnesses ? Evi- 
dently it is a most awkward and preposterous invention. 

Now comes the other letter after marriage. Again how 
could such a letter have been written? Robertson, who cer 
tainly cannot be accused of too much partiality for the memory 
of Mary Stuart, says : " If there is any point agreed upon in 
Mary's history, it is that she remained at Dunbar from the time 
that Bothwell carried her thither till she returned to Edinburgh 
with him in May." Under what close surveillance she was kept 
by Bothwell, the rebel lords his accomplices in the murder of 



780 MARY STUART. [Sept., 

Darnley, who had assisted him in forcing her to marry him by 
violence have taken the pains to tell us in that act of Parliament 
by which they impeached that brigand, who had become king- 
consort. Here is their own language : " No nobleman nor other 
durst resort to her majesty to speak with her, or procure their 
lawful business without suspicion, but by him, and in his audi- 
ences her chamber-doors being continually watched with men of 
war." Under such circumstances wherefore the necessity and 
occasion for writing any letters to the ever-present Both well ? 

But that second letter is on its face one addressed to Darnley, 
and not to Both well. Is it to Both well, her jailer, the man who 
had committed such an outrage on her person, that she could 
write a letter in which she describes herself as his obedient and 
lawful wife, and refers to his absence and neglect f Darnley was 
always neglectful, and frequently absent not Bothwell, who kept 
her under lock and key, and never was absent an hour ! If the 
letter was written to Bothwell, who could explain how it is that 
Mary refers to two marriages, the one private, the other public ; 
the first as past, the second to come ? which was actually the 
fact with Darnley. Was she twice married to Bothwell? Well 
did the historian Robertson remark " that Mary's adversaries 
were certainly employed very illy when they produced this " as 
evidence. We do not hesitate, in our turn, to say that Mr. 
Froude was certainly employed very illy when he reproduced 
what he must have known to be a silly and easily-detected false- 
hood. 

Besides, how could any one believe that an adulteress, who 
had just murdered her husband, could address her paramour and 
accomplice in that murder in the following language, gratuitous- 
ly blasphemous : " With as great affection as I pray God, the 
only supporter of my life, to give you," etc. ? And she subscribes 
herself as " she who will be for ever unto you an humble and 
obedient, lawful wife." This is suppressed by Mr. Froude, and 
for an evident reason. Such expressions could not have been 
addressed to Bothwell, as he wants it to be. 

When Mary was brought back by Bothwell to Edinburgh it 
was not to Holyrood, the royal residence, but to the castle, 
where she was virtually a prisoner. She was not allowed to 
visit her child at Stirling, and it appears most probable that a 
dreadful scene, which is known to have terminated in a threat of 
suicide on her part, was caused by her resistance to Bothwell's 
demand for the custody of the prince. Access was not allowed 
to her except by Bothwell's permission, and she never appeared 



1 886.] MARY STUART. 781 

in public but on compulsion and guarded. Her wretchedness 
was completed by Bothwell's conduct. " He was so beastly and 
suspicious," says Sir James Melville, "that he suffered her not to 
pass a single day without causing her to shed abundance of salt 
tears." 

Meanwhile a fresh plot was hatched. This time it was against 
Bothwell himself, and a new condition of affairs was evolved 
from it. Of the nine confederated earls at the head of this insur- 
rection, five had signed the bond in which many of the nobility 
had pledged themselves to bring about Bothwell's marriage with 
the queen. In those days there were none but plots within plots 
and counterplots in Scotland, and they exceeded one another in 
the unblushing effrontery of their character. The chief insur- 
gent leaders on this occasion appeared at the head of a large 
force, and Bothwell had to oppose them only two thousand men. 
They met in hostile array at Carberry Hill, some six miles from 
Edinburgh. To avoid bloodshed a compromise was effected on 
the basis that Bothwell should be allowed to depart without mo- 
lestation, which he did, retiring to the Continent, where he sub- 
sequently died ; and that the queen should come over to the in- 
surgents on their assurance " that they would serve her on their 
knees as her most humble and obedient subjects and servants." 
Surely the facility with which she acceded to these terms and 
parted with Bothwell does not show that she was or had ever 
been in love with him. Unfortunately she was abominably de- 
ceived by the insurgent lords, who pretended to be so loyal to 
her and only inimical to Bothwell. As soon as she was com- 
pletely in their hands she was treated as if it was forgotten that 
she was a human being. She was thrown into the common 
prison of Edinburgh and confined to a solitary room, without 
even the attendance of a single female servant. Her conjugal 
connection with Bothwell had not lasted more than a month 
when they were thus separated by this revolution. 

" Such treatment defies comment," says the Edinburgh Review. 
" More disgraceful conduct does not sully the pages of history. 
Even if Mary Stuart were in very truth the murderess of Kirk- 
o'-Field, our sympathies are with her rather than with men who, 
under no equal temptations, were at once murderers, traitors, 
liars, and hypocrites." 

As soon as they were suffered to do so Mary Seton, Mary 
Livingston, and three others of the noblest families of Scotland, 
and all of them Protestants, bravely flew to her side and walked 
with her when, in a horrible night-procession, she was dragged 



782 MARY STUART. [Sept., 

in the mud along the streets from her prison to Holyrood amidst 
the wild hooting, the foul insults, and innumerable outrages of 
an excited and wild populace. But she had with her, however, 
the better part of the population, whose indignation was intense ; 
and, as a rescue was imminent, she was hurried off at midnight 
to Lochleven, a ride of thirty miles, on a miserable horse, and 
was, says Camden, " put under the custody of the Earl of Mur- 
ray's mother, who had been the favorite of James V., and by 
whom she was treated with shameless malice during her many 
months' retreat in that stronghold." 

Mary's imprisonment at Lochleven lasted eleven months. 
Meanwhile Murray, who had become regent, had made himself 
extremely obnoxious. He was called tyrant, robber, and threat- 
ened with death if he dared to lift a finger against the queen. 
The French ambassador reported to his government that two- 
thirds of the people of Scotland were ready to rise against Mur- 
ray in order to liberate the queen, and charged him and his asso- 
ciates with the murder of Darnley. The details of Mary's escape 
from Lochleven are familiar to the public. Mr. Froude makes a 
desperate effort to persuade the reader that the queen's support- 
ers on that occasion were Catholics only. In this he voluntarily 
propagates an error, as he does in everything else concerning 
Mary Stuart ; for he must have known that the leading nobles 
who came to her support were Protestants, such as the Earls of 
Huntly, Argyle, Eglinton, Cassilis, Roches, and Lords Claude 
Hamilton, Herries, Fleming, and Livingston. Well, a battle 
was fought, Mary was defeated, and, at the invitation of Eliza- 
beth, sought a refuge in England to meet imprisonment and a 
scaffold ! 

During the Scottish queen's long nineteen years' martyrdom 
every effort was made by Elizabeth to disgrace Mary by proving 
her guilty of adultery with Bothwell and of the subsequent mur- 
der of Darnley, but in vain. The enemies of Mary relied on 
eight letters alleged to have been written by her and found in a 
casket belonging to Bothwell, which he had left behind him 
when he departed in accordance with the Carberry Hill ar- 
rangement. But those letters were all undated, undirected, un- 
sealed, and unsubscribed. They might as well have been written 
to anybody else as to Bothwell, and they are almost universally 
admitted to be forgeries. Mr. Froude, who quotes them, promises 
to prove their authenticity, but has never yet attempted to re- 
deem his word. The great Dr. Johnson, the mammoth of Eng- 
lish literature, wrote : " That the letters were forged is now 



i886.] MARY STUART. 783 

made so palpable that perhaps they will never more be cited as 
testimonies." 

Denounced from the beginning as forgeries, these letters are 
rejected by such writers as Goodal (1754), Gilbert Stuart (History 
of Scotland, 1762), Tytler (1759), and Whitaker (1786). Tytler 
said : " It is impossible for any sincere inquirer after the truth 
to receive such evidence." Later Lingard expressed the same 
opinion. Chalmers proved conclusively, with a mass of newly- 
discovered testimony, that the accusers of Mary were themselves 
the murderers of Darnley. Sir James Melville in his memoirs 
plainly intimates that the casket-letter invention was a disgrace- 
ful piece of business, and says " that the crafty Cecil persuaded 
Murray to accuse the Queen of Scots in order that Elizabeth 
might have some pretext whereby to make answer to foreign 
ambassadors." 

The distinguished Robert Henry, a Scotch Presbyterian di- 
vine, author of a history of Great Britain praised by Hume, 
Robertson, and Johnson, says : " I have long been convinced 
that the unfortunate Queen Mary was basely betrayed and 
cruelly oppressed during her lifetime, and calumniated after 
her death." 

Sir Walter Scott, in his History of Scotland, rejects those let- 
ters, adding " that the direct evidence produced in support of 
Mary's alleged guilt was liable to such important objections 
that it could not now be admitted to convict a felon for the 
most petty crime." 

The editor of Bishop Keith's Affairs of Church and State in 
Scotland says in relation to the evidence brought out against 
Mary Stuart : " A more outrageous mass of rubbish and false- 
hood never was printed." Hundreds of scholars, fully the equals 
of Mr. Froude in ability and acquirements, are thoroughly satis- 
fied of the forgery of those letters. 

Mr. Jules Gauthier, a French writer, was a firm believer in 
Mary's guilt until, on visiting Edinburgh, he was struck with 
the general expression of the fullest faith in her innocence. 
This led him to examine the subject, and among other archives 
those at Simancas, in Spain. His examination extended through 
six years, and the result is a work published in two volumes a 
work of general research and much power, in which Mary's me- 
mory is entirely vindicated. 

Complicity in the Riccio murder is brought home to Eliza- 
beth and Cecil by the correspondence of that day in the Record 
Offi.ee in London ; and in the Darnley murder the same com- 



784 MARY STUART. [Sept., 

plicity is sufficiently made out, notwithstanding the disappear- 
ance of the English agents' reports from Scotland a month before 
and a month aft&r the explosion. This important fact has lately 
been made known by Mr. McNeel Caird in his book entitled 
Mary Stuart: Her Guilt or Innocence. 

Elizabeth, when Mary was a prisoner in England, appointed 
three commissioners to investigate about the crimes attributed to 
her in Scotland. They were the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of 
Sussex, and Sir Ralph Sadler. Norfolk sent to Elizabeth ex- 
tracts from the alleged " casket letters," and, writes Mr. Froude, 
" left it to Elizabeth to say whether, if they were genuine 
which he and his colleagues believed them to be there could be 
any doubt of the guilt of the Queen of Scots." One would hard- 
ly believe that these words, " which he and his colleagues be- 
- lieved to be genuine," are not in that letter. It is one of Mr. 
Fronde's numerous inventions. Mr. Froude thus gratuitously 
slanders also the character of the Duke of Norfolk, who must 
have been the vilest of mankind if, thinking Mary an adulteress 
and murderess, he nevertheless attempted to marry her, and in 
consequence of it lost his head on the scaffold. On the contrary, 
Norfolk wrote to Elizabeth " that the affair was perplexing and 
perilous, because the queen, if formally accused, would desire to 
be present in person to meet her accusers " ; and Sussex wrote 
" that, in his opinion, it would not be attempted to find the queen 
guilty, because she would deny the letters and present a stronger 
case against the accusers than they could make against her." 

Mary, on her side, had appointed commissioners to meet the 
English ones and take cognizance of the evidence to be pro- 
duced against her. Those commissioners were Lesley, Bishop 
of Ross; Lord Herries (Protestant), Lord Boyd (Protestant), 
Lord Livingston (Protestant), Gavin Hamilton, the Commenda- 
tor Kilwinning (Protestant), Sir John Gordon of Lochmoor, and 
.Sir James Cockburn of Skirling. They were instructed to de- 
mand that she should be permitted to appear personally in pre- 
sence of the Queen of England, the whole of her nobility, and all 
the foreign ambassadors in London, " to answer," she said, " all 
that may or can be alleged against us by the calumnies of our 
rebels." She further instructed her commissioners, in case of 
refusal, to break off the conference. This shows that she was 
willing to meet Murray, Morton, all the rebel lords, their accusa- 
tions, and the casket letters in the face of the whole world. 
Surely this could not be the attitude of a woman not sure of 
her innocence. 



i886.] MARY STUART. 785 

If Elizabeth and her devoted minister Cecil had possessed the 
slightest faith in the strength of the case against the accused, they 
would eagerly have closed with her proposal, because only of 
Mary's free-will could they place her in such a position of pub- 
licity ; for Elizabeth had no jurisdiction over her. Their inclina- 
tion undoubtedly was to take this opportunity of disgracing for 
ever the Queen of Scots; their interest imperiously demanded it. 
But they dared not run the risk of a public failure ; therefore an 
evasive answer was given to the queen's commissioners, who, af- 
ter many delays, returned home without having been shown a 
particle of the evidence which was said to exist against Mary. 
The limits of this article do not permit me to review their long 
and persistent efforts to have access to the evidence which she 
pledged herself to disprove. Neither she nor her commissioners 
were permitted to have a glimpse of it. 

At last Murray and his associate conspirators were sum- 
moned to the royal residence, Hampton Court, and there in- 
formed by Cecil that they might return to Scotland, " inasmuch 
as there had been nothing sufficiently produced nor shown by 
them against the queen, their sovereign, whereby the Queen of 
England should conceive or take any evil opinion of the queen, 
her good sister, for anything yet seen." These last words were 
added by Elizabeth herself. This was clearly abandoning the 
case for want of proof. Murray, of course, was exceedingly dis- 
appointed, but Elizabeth consoled him with a present of five 
thousand pounds. 

A few weeks later a strange event took place. The Duke of 
Norfolk and the Earl of Sussex, who had been the commissioners 
of Elizabeth to examine into the guilt of Mary ; the Earls of Pem- 
broke, Southampton, Derby, Cumberland, Arundel, Westmore- 
land, and Northumberland; the Marquis of Winchester, the 
Lords Clinton and Lumley, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, and 
others, became open supporters of the pretended adulteress 
and murderess. A large majority of them were sound Protes- 
tants, and yet devoted their lives to her cause ! 

Lord and Lady Livingston were both Protestants, and yet 
they both followed Mary Stuart into exile and shared her misfor- 
tunes to the last. It may be remarked here with propriety that 
numbers of the ladies of the Scotch aristocracy earnestly en- 
treated of Elizabeth permission to wait upon Mary in her prison. 
Among them were the wife and daughter of the Earl of Athol, 
Lady Maitland, and the Ladies Mowbray, daughters of the rebel 
Lord Burnbogle. 

VOL. XLIII. 50 



/S6 MARY STUART. [Sept., 

Miss Strickland, in her History of Mary Stuart, very properly 
remarks: 

" It must be obvious to common sense that, if Mary had been so lost to 
shame and decency as her libeller Buchanan pretends and the forged let- 
ters infer, her service would have been held in disgust by every noble lady, 
especially by those who were of the reformed faith. Can it be supposed 
that a man of Lord Livingston's high rank and unsullied honor, a leading 
member of the Congregation withal, would have ruined his fortune and 
outraged conscience and propriety by supporting her cause and permit- 
ting his beautiful and virtuous wife, the mother of his children, to wait 
upon her, share her perils and wanderings, and partake her prisons with- 
out reward, had there been the slightest ground for the odious accusations 
with which the traitors who had murdered her husband, given her over as 
a prey to Bothwell, and usurped her throne, sought to justify their proceed- 
ings and cloak their own crimes ? " 

Mr. Fronde describes Mary Stuart, Queen of France, Queen 
erf Scotland, whom no princess of her time excelled in digni- 
ty and high-mindedness, as the most shameless of her sex, and 
as one making a boastful parade of adultery. She is called 
by him the " murderess of Kirk-o'- Field, a ferocious animal, a 
snake, a panther, a wildcat, a brute." There is no end to his 
epithets. And yet there were many suitors for her hand, among 
whom were the Duke of Anjou, who subsequently became 
Henry III., King of France ; Don Juan of Austria, the heroic 
paladin and the victor of Lepanto ; and Cosmo de' Medici, who, 
in reply to inquiries which he* made about the rumors concern- 
ing her, was informed from London "that it was known to all, 
without the slightest doubt, that she was most innocent and that 
her accusers were guilty of the deed." 

But what is more extraordinary, and almost incredible, is that 
Elizabeth, Cecil, and all those lords before whom the pretended 
proofs of Mary Stuart's guilt had been laid proposed that, on 
certain conditions subscribed by her, she should be acknowledged 
as the successor of Elizabeth she, Mary Stuart ; she, the adul- 
teress and the murderess ! 

In the meantime it was even proposed by Elizabeth to Mur- 
ray, the regent, to replace this same adulteress and murderess on 
the throne of Scotland. But, of course, this did not suit that 
traitor and usurper. 

The Countess of Lennox, who at first had been deceived into 
the belief that Mary had assented to the murder of Darnley, her 
son, knew better before she died. A letter from her to Mary, 
then in one of Elizabeth's dungeons, written in November, 1575, 
and intercepted with many others, has been found among Cecil's 
papers. She says : " I beseech your majesty fear not, but trust 



1 886.] ' MARY STUART. 787 

in God that all shall be well. The treachery of your traitors 
is better known than before," etc.; and she subscribes herself 
"your majesty's most humble and loving mother and aunt." 
Here is Mary acquitted by Darnley's mother of all participa- 
tion in his murder. 

Finally, the Earl of Both well, on his deathbed in foreign parts, 
declared solemnly, in the presence of thirteen of the magnates 
and high officials of the country to which he had fled, that Mary 
Stuart was innocent of Darnley's death, and that only he him- 
self, his friends, and some of the nobility, whom he named, were 
the authors of it. 

Prince Alexander Labanoff has published seven octavo vol- 
umes concerning Mary Stuart. This admirable collection is 
the result of fourteen years' research among state archives and 
libraries throughout Europe. It is composed mainly of letters 
and documents written by Mary Stuart. They number seven 
hundred and sixty-six, of which more than four hundred were 
generally unknown before they were published in that work. 
Out of these four hundred new letters about two hundred, found 
in the English State Paper Office, were mostly intercepted letters 
of Mary's, which consequently never reached their destination. 
In these papers and letters the reader may see Mary Stuart's 
soul and intellect reflected almost day by day throughout her 
reign ; and no man can read them and not be impressed by the 
elevation of her mind, the soundness of her judgment, and the 
purity of her thoughts. Yea, no man can read them and believe 
that these letters and the pretended casket letters could possibly 
come from the same source. 

On her way to the hall of execution she was met by her faith- 
ful servant, Andrew Melville, who threw himself on his knees 
before her, wringing his hands in uncontrollable agony. " Woe 
to me," he said, " that it should be my hard lot to carry back 
such tidings to Scotland ! " 

" Weep not, Melville, my good and faithful servant," she said. 
" Thou shouldst rather rejoice to see the end of the long troubles 
of Mary Stuart. This world is vanity and full of sorrows. I am 
a Catholic, thou a Protestant ; but as there is but one Christ, I 
charge thee, in his name, to witness that I die firm to my reli- 
gion, a true Scotchwoman, and true to France"; and after having 
given him a message for her son, she concluded with these words: 
" May God forgive them that have thirsted for my blood ! " 

Mr. Froude says that when the executioner, as usual in the 
discharge of his duty, raised the head of Mary Stuart to exhibit 
it to the crowd, " he exposed the withered features of a grizzled,, 



788 MARY STUART. [Sept., 

wrinkled old woman." There is a portrait of. Mary Stuart, 
painted on the next day after the execution and bearing the sig- 
nature of the artist. This portrait came into the possession of 
Walter Scott. Hawthorne saw it at Abbotsford, and describes 
it in this fashion in his English Note-book: 

" I am not quite sure that I saw all those pictures in the drawing-room, 
or some of them in the dining, but the one that struck me most and very 
much indeed was the head of Mary, Queen of Scots : literally the head cut 
off and lying on a dish. It is said to have been painted by an Italian or 
French artist two days [one day] after her death. The hair curls or flows 
all about it; the face is of deathlike hue, but has an expression of quiet 
after much trouble and pain very beautiful, very sweet, and very sad ; and 
it affected me strongly with the horror and strangeness of such a head 
being severed from its body. Methinks I should not like to have it always 
in the room with me." 

For those who are not familiar with English history I will say 
that Mary Stuart was not executed for the pretended crimes she 
had perpetrated in Scotland, but for alleged conspiracies attri- 
buted to her, whilst incarcerated in England, against the throne 
and life of Elizabeth. 

Whence the unfavorable impressions which have so long pre- 
vailed against Mary Stuart ? They are all to be traced to the 
historian Buchanan, who first wrote a history of the reign of 
Mary Stuart, which history, being a contemporary one, was con- 
sidered as authentic by subsequent historians, who took it for 
granted, without the trouble of examining for themselves, that 
Buchanan's statements were correct. Hence they blindly fol- 
lowed in his footsteps and accepted his dicta as articles of faith. 
The false conceptions with which the public mind is impregnated 
on that subject are due also to the novels and dramas that have 
been written on Mary Stuart. The authors of such works are 
generally in search of the sensational, and prefer for the subjects 
of their compositions the turbulence of crime and vice rather 
than the placidity of virtue. The sober and cold realities to 
which historians are restricted are not so acceptable to poets and 
dramatists as the wild imaginings which they consider a legiti- 
mate growth in the boundless fields of fiction. 

But who is Buchanan, and what is his authority worth ? He 
was an apostate monk who gradually evolved into an atheist. 
He was saved from the gallows by Mary and loaded with her 
favors. An eye-witness of her dignity, her prudence, and her 
purity, which he eloquently extolled at one time, he afterwards 
denounced her as the vilest of women. He sold his pen to her 
enemies, and has been properly described as " unrivalled in base- 



1 886.] MARY STUART. 789 

ness, peerless in falsehood, supreme in ingratitude." His work 
against Mary, entitled Detection, was published in 1570 in Lat- 
in, and copies were immediately sent by Cecil to Elizabeth's 
ambassador in Paris, with instructions to circulate them ; " for," 
said Cecil, " they will come to good effect to disgrace her, which 
must be done before other purposes can be obtained." This 
shameful book has been the inspiration of most of the portraits 
drawn of Mary Stuart. 

Buchanan was one of the first. Latin scholars of the age. He 
had accompanied Mary to Scotland, and a letter of Randolph, 
Elizabeth's agent in Scotland, speaks of him as reading Livy 
everyday in Edinburgh with the queen. In 1564 Mary presented 
Buchanan with a pension of five hundred pounds Scots, and made 
him lay abbot of Crossraguel Abbey an appointment which gave 
him independence. In 1565-67 he dedicated his admirable para- 
phrase of the Psalms to Mary, although, having been so near her 
person, he must have known her to be the basest and lowest of 
women an adulteress and a murderess, according to his own 
account, endorsed by the congenial Froude after a lapse of almost 
four centuries. To that " Dedication " he had added an epigraph 
in Latin worthy of Virgil as to style, which perhaps excels any 
literary compliment paid to any European sovereign. " Her 
merit," he said, " surpassed her good-fortune ; her virtue her 
years ; her courage her sex ; the nobleness of her qualities her 
nobility of race." 

The most assiduous of Mary's flatterers when she was in 
power, he pursued her in adversity with a malice little short of 
the diabolical. In Murray's pay and attendance as a hireling, he 
was most zealous in producing the forged silver-casket letters 
before Elizabeth's commissioners at York and Westminster. 

The Episcopal Bishop Keith denounces Buchanan as a " vile 
and shameless traducer," and says: "His Detection sufficiently 
detects itself to be a continued piece of satirical romance." The 
same distinguished Protestant clergyman says, further, " that in 
general, by the corrections he has made from original records of 
almost all the facts touched by Buchanan in relation to the queen, 
he [Bishop Keith] is satisfied that he [Buchanan] has grossly, if 
not maliciously, departed from the truth." 

The historian Burton cannot conceal the fact that he consid- 
ers Buchanan "an unmitigated liar." He further says: "Every- 
thing with him is utterly and palpably vile and degrading, with- 
out any redeeming or mitigating elements." 

It is but too true that Buchanan's libel for no other name 
can be given to it is so filthy that no man with any decent 



790 OZANAM'S DANTE. [Sept., 

feelings could read it through without disgust, and that its most 
serious charges are totally unsupported by a tittle of contempo- 
rary testimony. The venerable Protestant Camden relates that 
Buchanan in his last illness expressed the wish " that he might live 
so long till, by recalling the truth, he might even with his blood 
wipe away those aspersions which he had, by his bad pen, un- 
justly cast upon Mary." 

If the limits of this article permitted it we could accumulate 
evidence on evidence to demonstrate that the unfortunate Mary 
Stuart was the most slandered woman whose memory lives in 
history ; but we believe that we have said enough to convince 
the reader of the truth of Walter Scott's assertion in his History 
of Scotland, which we have already quoted, and which we repeat 
as a proper conclusion " that the direct evidence produced in 
support of Mary's alleged guilt was liable to such important 
objections that it could not now be admitted to convict a felon 
of the most petty crime." 



OZANAM'S DANTE. 

" WHATEVER greatness the nineteenth century may claim 
will appear, on closely considering the state of the case, to arise 
from this, that it is a new beginning of the ages of faith. A 
thing most strange, yet undeniable ! " So says a hopeful writer 
of the present day. 

Philosophy tells us that "the soul of man was made for truth " 
let us add, not only to seek, but to find and rejoice in it. It 
was Pilate, the unjust judge, prepared to condemn the innocent 
in spite of the lights accorded to him from within and without, 
who, despairing of verity, asked our Lord, " What is truth?" 
and then waited for no answer. Let us hope that Pilate may not be 
the figure of our questioning age, that it may not finally merit the 
woe menacing " isolated generations which, not having received 
the heritage of instruction, or having repudiated it, are obliged, 
frail and mortal as they are, to begin afresh the work of the ages." 

Encouraging signs of the times are certainly found in the 
facts that St. Thomas has been officially reinstated in his due 
place in philosophical studies, and that during the past fifty years 
the students of Dante have been steadily on the increase. The 
Angelic Doctor is being placed within reach of English-speaking 
people who find him difficult of access in the original Latin, but 
we are still awaiting a thorough English commentary on the 



1 886.] OzANAAfs DANTE. 791 

labors of the great Florentine. Italians, no doubt, have volumes 
supplying- their needs. Dr. Hettinger's recent work on the 
Gottlicke Komodie (not to mention others) will be welcome to the 
readers of German, and Frederic Ozanam's Dante, et la PJiiloso- 
pJiie Catholique au XHIe Sihle must already have enlightened the 
understandings of many who naturally turn to French sources 
for able criticism and clear presentation of ideas. 

In English Gary and Longfellow have given us excellent, 
although not entirely faultless, translations of the Divine Comedy. 
Of T. W. Parsons' fine version only a few cantos of the Purga- 
torio have been seen by the present writer. There are commen- 
tators, such as Foscolo and Gabriel Rossetti, who, however 
learned and eloquent they may be, dishonor the poet by the fan- 
tastic and apocryphal interpretations they offer as his meaning. 
There are others, as Carlyle, Lyell, Ruskin, Butler, Dean Church, 
Canon Farrar, Maria Rossetti, Lowell, Norton, Harris, Miss 
Blow, who (so far as their works are known to the writer) have 
written reverently and appreciatively of Dante, but in a limited 
fashion, and naturally from points of view which fail to command 
the entire horizon swept by the poet-philosopher. No one 
who could really place himself at the central point held by the 
Florentine has yet attempted the task of aiding the English- 
speaking people to comprehend the great Catholic poet. And 
no other could provide English readers of Dante with the know- 
ledge necessary to the comprehension of the inner as well as the 
outer meaning of the poem, giving them not merely a meaning, 
but the meaning intended by the poet. Many gifts would be 
needed to do the work properly, two rare ones in especial 
abundance of leisure and a receptive faculty akin to the creative 
genius of the original author. 

It was this same nobly imaginative, receptive faculty, with 
wide learning, orthodox Catholicity, a pure and devout Christian 
life, and a wonderfully attractive style, which so eminently fitted 
Frederic Ozanam to be the interpreter of the great poet to young 
France. A brilliant genius willing to set aside his own creative 
gifts, and in all humility to devote himself to a sympathetic com- 
prehension and exposition of the gifts and the work of another 
man, is a phenomenon too seldom encountered not to have left 
behind it results worthy of the serious consideration of thinkers 
of whatever nationality. 

Miss O'Meara's charming biography will doubtless have ren- 
dered the name and life-work of the young professor of the Sor- 
bonne familiar to most of our readers. A short analysis of the 



792 OzANAAfs DANTE. [Sept., 

Dante, and Catholic Philosophy in the Thirteenth Century, will show 
the ground occupied and the method employed by the commen- 
tator.* The Preliminary Discourse treats of " The Tradition of 
Letters in Italy, from the Latin Decadence to Dante." 

The author shows that the tradition of letters was handed down 
from Oriental, Egyptian, and Greek sources to Rome. He says : 

"The Renaissance, for a long time placed at the period of the taking of 
Constantinople, has by some been thrown back to the date of the Crusades, 
and by others to the reign of Charlemagne. Even before Charlemagne we 
find the Roman Muses sheltered in Irish and Anglo-Saxon monasteries. 
But we must come to closer quarters with these researches. They should 
be pursued on their proper ground, in Italy, the last refuge of antiquity 
and the starting-point of the middle ages. It is there that we may obtain 
a view of the most memorable transition which has ever taken place. 
Through what phases did letters pass during eleven hundred years, from 
the Latin decadence to the first writings in the vulgar tongue ? How did 
the human mind lay aside its pagan habits to take on a new character ? 
This is the revolution which we shall endeavor to follow, seeking in its 
long course to discover, if we can, the unity of the tradition of letters. 
First we shall consider that tradition as existing among the Romans, such 
as antiquity had made it in the age of Augustus ; then we shall watch it as 
regenerated by Christianity: we shall examine whether it traversed the 
period of barbarism, and how it was reproduced in the works of Italian 
genius, whence in turn it went forth to reign over every literature in 
Europe." 

As we read the eloquent and convincing pages that follow we 
see that the Divine Comedy was by no means what it has been 
called, the voice of ten silent centuries, but that each one of those ten 
centuries had a voice of its own. Illustrious men and illustrious 
institutions "held, as it were, hands together down the ages." 

The Preliminary Discourse is concluded as follows : 

" While inspiration never descended upon more eloquent lips, never 
did tradition find a more faithful heir. Dante, great as he was for having 
dared so much, was perhaps still greater by reason of having known so 
much. During six hundred years commentators have not ceased to study 
the Divine Comedy, and consequently to learn from its pages. It has been 
treated as we treat the Iliad and the ^Eneid ; and I wonder neither at the 
admiration nor at the persevering labor bestowed upon it. There is, in 
fact, an inexhaustible subject of study in the great epics of Homer, of Vir- 
gil, and of Dante, for the reason that they represent three momentous eras 
in the history of the world : Greek antiquity in its budding, the destiny 
of Rome binding the old times with the new, and the middle age which 
touches upon our own day. This it is that makes at the present moment 

* A translation into English of the above-mentioned work is now nearly ready for publica- 
tion. Ozanam also translated the Purgatorio into French prose, accompanied by valuable 
notes. His early death prevented the careful completion of this part of his work, which is, 
however, valuable and suggestive. 



1 886.] OZANAM* s DANTE. 793 

the popularity of the Divine Comedy, and assures to it, not a passing favor, 
not a triumph of reaction, as some say, but a serious attraction, a perma- 
nent authority. What we look for in it is history the genius of the 
thirteenth century, the genius of the troubadours, of the Italian republics, 
of the theological school, of St. Thomas Aquinas. This it is that holds an 
innumerable auditory at the feet of the old poet. When I behold this 
multitude of readers, interpreters, and imitators, Dante seems to me well 
avenged. To the exile who had not where to lay his head, who experienced 
how bitter is the bread of the stranger and how hard it is to ascend and 
descend the stairways of other men, flock a crowd of the obscure or the 
illustrious asking the bread of the word ; and, in his turn, he will make all 
generations of men of letters ascend and descend by his stairways, by the 
steps of his Inferno, his Purgatorio, his Paradiso. And we we also are his 
people ; hence we shall not consider wasted the time we may devote to the 
doing of something in his service, and consequently in the furtherance of 
the great cause which he served religion, liberty, and letters." 

No apology is needed for so long an extract ; indeed, the only 
apology seemingly required is for venturing to use any form of 
words on this subject other than that proffered by so eloquent an 
advocate. 

In the Introduction the question of the respect paid to Dante 
in Italy is treated of, and also the fact that, while he 4s generally 
lauded throughout the civilized world, his work is, if studied at 
all, only superficially appreciated, and without due consideration 
of that part of it which its author esteemed the most highly 
namely, its philosophic purpose. That purpose underlies the 
beautiful form. Dante sets forth the dominant philosophy of the 
middle ages in a melodious and 

" Popular idiom, comprehended by women and children. Its lessons are 
canticles, recited to princes to charm their leisure hours, and repeated by 
artisans to refresh their souls after labor. ... If we try to follow the 
course of its explorations we find it setting out from a profound study of 
human nature, constantly advancing, extending its guesses over the entire 
creation, and in the end, but only in the end, losing itself in the contempla- 
tion of the Divinity. ... If we inquire into the origin of this philosophy 
we learn that it was born in the shadow of the chair of scholastic doctrines, 
that it announces itself as their interpreter, that it proves its mission and 
glories in it. ... The union of two things so rare a poetic and popular 
philosophy and a philosophic and really social poetry constitutes a me- 
morable event, indicating one of the highest degrees of power to which the 
human mind has ever attained. If every power finds its exciting cause in 
the circumstances surrounding it, the event just indicated must lead us to 
appreciate the intellectual culture of the age in which it is encountered. 
. . . We are forced to confess that men already understood the art of think- 
ing and of speaking, even while they still knew how to believe and to pray." 

Then comes a sketch of the general plan of the book, which 
we abbreviate as follows : Part I. treats of the religious, political, 



794 OZANAM'S DANTE. [Sept., 

and intellectual situation of Christendom from the thirteenth to 
the fourteenth century, with the causes favoring the development 
of philosophy. The scholastic philosophy and the especial cha- 
racteristics of Italian philosophy are considered, as are also the 
life, studies, and genius of Dante, the general design of the Divine 
Comedy, and the place occupied in it by the philosophical ele- 
ment. 

Under the last-named head we find two very interesting ex- 
tracts one from Dante's dedicatory letter to Can Grande della 
Scala, and the other from a commentary (still in manuscript when 
Ozanam wrote) by Giacopo 'di Dante, Dante's son both explain- 
ing the inner meaning intended under the external symbols. 
Giacopo di Dante says : 

" The principal design of the author is to show figuratively the three 
modes of being of the human race. In the first part he considers vice, 
which he calls Hell, to make us understand that vice is opposed to virtue 
as to its contrary. . . . The second part has for its subject the transition 
from vice to virtue, which he names Purgatory, to show the transforma- 
tion of the soul which is purged of its faults in time, for time is the medium 
in which every transformation must take place. The third and last part is 
that wherein he treats of men made perfect, and he calls it Paradise, to ex- 
press the height of their virtues and the greatness of their felicity two 
conditions without which we could not discern the sovereign good." 

Part I. thus ends : 

"This philosophy will be eclectic in its doctrines, as were all the most 
illustrious teachings of the time ; poetical in its form and ethical in its 
direction, as was required by the habits of thought of the nationality to 
which Dante belonged ; it will be, like the mind of its author, bold in its 
flight and encyclopaedic in the extent embraced by it. For a philosophical 
system may be compared to a placid spring of living water : the genius of 
him who professes it is like to the basin containing it and giving to it its 
configuration, while the circumstances of time and place resemble the at- 
mosphere which environs it, influencing its temperature and supplying the 
currents of air by which its surface is ruffled." 

Part II. is devoted to the special exposition of Dante's philo- 
sophical doctrines. He considers Evil, as existing in the indi- 
vidual, in society, and in intelligences outside the limits of earthly 
life; Good and Evil, in conjunction and in conflict, whether in 
this world or in the next ; and Good, in man, in society, on earth, 
in heaven, in angelic natures, and finally in the contemplation of 
the Divinity, a participation in that philosophy which is in God 
himself, "the infinite love of the infinite wisdom." 

Part III. examines into the relations subsisting between 
Dante's philosophy and that of the Orient, of Plato, of Aristotle, of 
the scholastics of his own age, and the later notions of modern days. 



1 886.] OZA NAM'S DANTE. 795 

The important chapter on the orthodoxy of Dante closes Part 
III. This is a subject demanding skilful treatment by an expert. 
Too often does its handling call to mind Pope's well-worn line : 

" For fools rush in where angels fear to tread." 

We need scarcely say that Ozanam has treated it admirably. In 
the consideration of Dante's whole life our author by no means 
forgets the especial temptations to which men of genius are ex- 
posed, nor the wonderful secret by which the sins of all men may 
receive pardon namely, repentance. 

" In the thirteenth century the art, now so common, of endeavoring to 
legitimate vice by the advancement of easy-going doctrines was but little 
known. Men came then, sooner or later, to ask at the hands of religion the 
expiation and grace of which she is the ever-during dispensatrix." 

Part IV. contains a consideration of Dante's political position: 
" Was he a Guelf or a Ghibelline?" also a chapter one of the 
most beautiful in the book on Beatrice, the influence of women 
in Christian society and of Catholic symbolism in the arts, and 
on the places filled in the poem by Santa Lucia and the Blessed 
Virgin. Dante's earlier philosophical studies, with the curious 
restoration of Sigier to existence as an historical personage, form 
the subject of the last chapter in this division. 

The appendix contains the bull of Innocent IV. for the re-es- 
tablishment of philosophical studies, and some most interesting 
extracts from the writings of St. Bonaventura, St. Thomas Aqui- 
nas, Albert the Great, and Roger Bacon. 

It has been said that there are certain books which, whether 
their influence be for good or for evil, leave so permanent an im- 
pression on the soul that it cannot, after reading them, be exactly 
the same as it was before. Dante certainly has produced one 
such. If we may judge from our own personal experience we 
should say that Ozanam's commentary falls in this category. We 
are told that to comprehend Dante he must be translated into the 
current thought of our own day. No translation can ever equal 
a great original. Must we not, then, learn the speech of his day, 
and transport ourselves into the wonderful world in which he 
dwelt, embracing all times, past, present, and to come; all modes 
of thought, dogmatic, mystical, imaginative, emotional, practical ; 
and every grade of being, from the lowest to the highest? To 
enter this realm we need a guide. Can we find one more de- 
lightful or more competent than the earnest-minded founder of 
the Society of St. Vincent de Paul Frederic Ozanam ? 



79 6 THE THREE CARDINALS. [Sept., 



THE THREE CARDINALS. 

" Go, get you manned by Manning, and new-manned 
By Newman, and, mayhap, wise-manned to boot 
By Wiseman." Browning, TJte Ring and the Book, book i. 

NOT idly were they named the Hinges three 
That roll the gates of England open wide 
Thro' which to thirsting souls may sweep the tide 
Of Truth and Faith one fatal century 
Diverted from its path to the Great Sea: 
Since when the dried and stony channel's sands 

Are strewed with wrecks of useless, stranded ships ; 
For living waters many parched lips 
Are vainly praying ; many pleading hands 
Reached out for help from the divided lands. 

One showed a Man to strive and not to yield 

A model to a race of meaner men ; 

And one a Wise Man, to whose keener ken 
Wisdom's white light was more and more revealed. 
But Strength and Wisdom claimed a wider field : 
O clearest eyes that see the Blessed Light ! 

O voice that sang the dream of life's last sleep ! 

O fearless feet that climb the thorny steep! 
O hands that help the soldier in the fight ! 
The New Man in the New Day's dawning bright ! 

And one name wakes us with a trumpet-call: 

" Be brave : be men : and with the sword of faith 
Strike from the drunkard's soul the bonds of Death ; 
And spend your strength to lift up them that fall." 
And one : " Be wise : and give all that thou hast 
For Wisdom: her I found in humble homes 

Unchanged as when she lit the Catacombs 
One Faith to link the present and the past." 
And one : " Be ye new-born. Though friends be dear, 

And ivied Oxford seen thro' many a tear, 
Who loves his life shall lose it, and who loses 
Shall keep it: he the better part who chooses 
Come out of her, my people ! Have you been 
Her sin's partakers ? Be ye born again ! " 



1 886.] BY THE RlLLE A T PONT-A UDEMER. 797 



BY THE RILLE AT PONT-AUDEMER. 

THERE are certain rivers that compel your .notice by their 
persistent appearance in unexpected places, and the Rille at Pont- 
Audemer is one of them. There is the Rille proper, as one may 
say, which has a broad quay on the side next the town, and there 
are its many narrow branches winding in and out among the 
houses and crossed by more bridges than one would suppose a 
town council would enjoy keeping in repair. Whether one goes 
south towards Mont Gibet, whose steep side rises like a high 
green wall between Pont-Audemer and the outside world, or 
northward to Mont Carmel with its still steeper front, there are 
branches of the Rille to be crossed. If you stop to rest on any 
of these bridges you will see the water gliding between rows of 
dark houses, with timbered fronts and gabled ends, which throw 
the stream in shadow. Along these old house-walls there is a 
green line which shows the high- water mark. Below this you will 
see various half-aquatic plants growing from the crevices in the 
brick foundations, and from the windows above long strings of 
nasturtiums, moneywort, and other trailing vines are swaying. 
ftere and there you will see a busy washerwoman rinsing her 
linen in the olive-brown water and beating it with her carosse. 
If the particular stream you are pausing at has not too many 
angles and turns you may catch glimpses of other bridges up or 
down its length, their positions emphasized by the line of sun- 
light which falls across them through the gap in the dark line of 
houses. If you are very practical you may perhaps be inclined 
to indulge in speculations as to the health of the people who live 
in such apparently damp quarters ; but if you are in any sense 
alive to effects of light and shade and the picturesque, generally 
quite other considerations will be aroused. True, there are tan- 
neries at Pont-Audemer, and the Rille is no stranger to the fact ; 
but you are not forced to think of this as you watch the water 
slide beneath the bridges, nor when you see groups of women on 
the quay, filling red pitchers and brass jugs from the Rille, to 
which they descend by short flights of steps in the low wall that 
borders the quay, need you think of it either. " Running water 
cleanses itself," say the town-councillors of Pont-Audemer, " and 
one must not be too particular." And as the town-councillors 



798 B Y THE RlLLE A T PONT-A UDEMER. [Sept., 

are very estimable men, why should one wish to be more critical 
than they? 

It is a busy little town, this Pont-Audemer. One will not see 
many loiterers there, or, for that matter, in any other Norman 
town either. There are the many tanneries and cotton-factories, 
filled with workers ; at every convenient place beside the Rille is 
a washerwoman rinsing her linen in the stream, and there are 
always red pitchers needing to be filled and always somebody 
busy filling them. The only idlers at Pont-Audemer are the 
tourists. And they cannot afford to be very idle, if they want to 
see all there is to be seen in the thrifty town. It is on a summer 
evening that Pont-Audemer is gayest. Then one will find the 
broad quay covered with people a lively, good-humored throng 
not above jesting and loud laughter. The steamer from Le 
Havre is perhaps coming in, and those on deck call to their 
friends on shore in tones intended to be heard above the noise of 
the escaping steam. One may hear many very interesting bits 
of family history shouted out in this manner. Henri is going to 
marry Susette very soon, and all his friends at Havre think him 
a foolish fellow ; or the grandmother of the dyer on the Rue du 
Commerce was coming from Le Havre to visit him that very 
day, but fell down-stairs and will never walk again, it is said. 
And so the shrill talk goes on as the poplars across the river 
tremble in the faint red evening light, and the stars come out, 
and the lamps are lighted along the quay. 

We should know some of these good people. That pompous 
man of fifty who is walking along the quay with his wife and 
daughter is Hector Desson, a wealthy tanner, of whom they say 
that his rapid good-fortune has turned his head. He strides 
along, setting his feet down firmly at every step, and so rapidly 
that his wife, who is twice as stout as he and a good deal shorter, 
finds it hard work to keep up with him. But Mile. Desson, trip- 
ping lightly along in an airy way, finds it quite easy. Hector 
would like very much to have his son Bernard accompany him 
also on these evening walks, but that young fellow has no inten- 
tion of ever doing anything of the sort, and has said so more than 
once. And Hector, though he will never confess it, is a little in 
awe of this independent young man who calls him father. And 
Bernard is really a great deal cleverer than his father. That is 
Bernard Desson coming from the steamboat arm-in-arm with 
Edouard Bouvier, his friend. Both are extremely well dressed, 
and in looks there is not much to choose, though perhaps Ed- 
ouard has a little the advantage in this respect. Behind them is 



1 886.] BY THE RULE AT FONT-AUDEMER. 799 

the brother of Madame Desson, a tall, thin man with green-gray 
clothes and green-gray eyes. No one in Pont-Audemer has 
ever seen him in other than green clothes, which hang upon him 
as if he were a pole. Although the uncle of Bernard, he is not 
much older than his nephew, who is twenty-five. He has an idea 
that the two young men have not known of his presence on the 
boat ; but in this he is mistaken, for they saw him cross the 
steamer's plank at Havre, and are quite well aware that he has 
been watching them ever since. Jules Barbier, this green-gray 
uncle of Bernard's, is very fond of watching people. In fact, 
there is nothing he likes so well, and he has therefore been very 
congenially employed on this particular day. 

" And so thou art determined to marry, my friend," says 
Edouard to his companion as they are leaving the boat. 

Jules catches these words, as Bouvier meant that he should 
do, and listens intently. 

" I am, most certainly," is the answer. 

" And when will thy Henriette be ready, thinkest thou ? " 

But the response to this Jules fails to hear, although he al- 
most leans over the shoulders of the two young men in his eager- 
ness. 

But he has heard what he think will interest his brother-in- 
law, and accordingly he imparts the information just gained to 
the tanner at the earliest opportunity. He is quite right : Mon- 
sieur Desson is very much interested. 

" The ingrate ! " he exclaims. " To think of marrying without 
consulting me ! It is terrible ! But I will soon put an end to his 
fine plans." 

Now, Hector would by no means dare to say this to Bernard, 
but he works himself into a desperate rage in the presence of his 
brother-in-law, who is thereby much impressed. 

" And who is this Henriette ? " he demanded at length of 
Jules, who shrugs his shoulders and turns the palms of his hands 
outwards, as if to show that the secret is not written there, at any 
rate. 

" But I must know," storms Hector ; " and it is thou who 
must find out this Henriette for me." 

Two days later Jules comes up to Monsieur Desson. 

" I have to tell thee of Henriette of several Henriettes," he 
adds; " but which one Bernard prefers is unknown to me." 

" Well ? " says Hector savagely. 

" First," says the other, tapping his right thumb with his left 
forefinger and then turning down the thumb, to indicate one 



800 BY THE RlLLE AT PONT-AUDEMER. [Sept., 

damsel already disposed of, " there is Henriette Blanc, who 
washes in the sheds across the Rille. But she is forty years old, 
and 1 do not think it can be she that Bernard is to marry." 

" I should say not," says Hector to this. " My Bernard is 
not an absolute idiot, thou must understand." 

" Very true," responds Jules before continuing his enumera- 
tion. " Then there is Henriette Noir, who is a waiting-maid at 
the Lion d'Or. She is sixteen and very pretty." And then Jules 
turns down his left forefinger. 

" I must see this one," is Hector's comment this time. 

" Then there is Henriette Sandeau," continues Jules, turning 
down his left middle finger. " She is seventeen and not very 
pretty, but her father, the cotton-manufacturer, is very rich, as 
thou knowest." 

" If Henriette Sandeau is the one I am quite satisfied," ob- 
serves Bernard's father ; " but then it is strange that Monsieur 
Sandeau has not been to me in regard to the matter. " 

" Next there is Henriette Beaumont, who works in Monsieur 
Sandeau' s cotton-factory," pursues Jules, turning down his left 
fourth finger and holding it in place with his thumb. " She is 
thirty and said to be very good." 

" Pouf ! " ejaculates Desson. " What is her goodness to me ? " 

" Lastly, there is Henriette Berthier," says Jules, turning 
down the little finger of his left hand. " Thou hast not forgotten 
her, surely. She is cousin to Edouard Bouvier, and is twenty 
years old and one of the prettiest girls in Pont-Audemer." 

" But yes, I know her," Hector makes answer. " But she is 
poor and will have no dot, I am very sure," he continues. " Such 
a marriage would not do at all for Bernard." 

" Thou hast right, my brother ; but Bernard, it may be, would 
not consider that." 

"What of it?" blusters Hector. "Am I not his father?" 
And Jules is silenced, but thinks to himself that his brother-in- 
law will not find it the easiest thing in the world to turn Bernard 
from anything the young man has determined upon. 

" What wilt thou do now ? " he says to Desson after a little 
time. 

" That will be seen later," says the other loftily, the truth 
really being that the tanner has not the least idea of what he 
shall do in the matter. 

A night's interval, however, affords him time for thought, and 
the next day he proceeds to carry out a little plan of his own, in 
the execution of which Henriette Noir, at the Lion d'Or, is ap- 



1 886.] BY THE RlLLE AT PONT-AUDEMER. 8OI 

prised that some one would like to see her, and accordingly she 
presents herself before Monsieur Hector. She is certainly very 
pretty, as Jules had stated, and Hector is by no means unim- 
pressed by the circumstance. " If this is Bernard's Henriette he 
certainly has good judgment in faces," thinks the father criti- 
cally ; and then, remembering that this is not all the aspect with 
which to regard the case, he endeavors to look more dignified 
than before. 

" Hast thou a lover ? " he asks, coming to the point with com- 
mendable directness. 

The unexpected question startles Henriette. What can he 
mean ? Perhaps he means to offer himself as a lover, which she 
would not like at all. 

" But yes, monsieur, I have a lover," she answers. 

Now, this is not strictly true, bat then there is some one 
whom she would like as a lover, and from thinking of this person 
as a lover to actually claiming him as such is a step easily made 
by her. Perhaps this is Bernard's Henriette, thinks Desson in 
some inward agitation at her reply. 

" Is this lover of thine about the middle height, rather good- 
looking, with black hair and moustache ? " asks Hector. 

Now, the person she has claimed as a lover does not answer 
this description at all, but, disregarding this fact, Henriette. 
rather pleased with the description, answers unhesitatingly : 

" Yes, monsieur." 

" What is his name ? " demands Hector. 

But this matter is going quite too far, Henriette thinks, and 
so she shakes her head and will not answer. 

"Well, if his name is Bernard Desson," says Hector incau- 
tiously, '' he cannot marry thee, I tell thee that," and departs 
from the Lion d'Or without getting any further satisfaction from 
its pretty waiting-maid. 

But Henriette knows who Bernard Desson is quite well, 
though she is as far as possible from thinking of him as a lover, 
and she comprehends now very well who her visitor may be. 

" And he would try to frighten me away from his son ! " she 
says indignantly to herself, and then she laughs, and pretty soon 
the nature of Hector's visit is known all over the Lion d'Or. 

Truly, Monsieur Desson, you are making a fine mess of this 
business. Madame, your wife, could have managed it much 
better. 

Hector next makes his appearance at the factory of Monsieur 
Sandeau, whom he knows slightly, and with whom he enters into 
VOL. XLIII. 51 



802 BY THE RlLLE AT PONT-AUDEMER. [Sept., 

conversation in the factory office. Monsieur Sandeau is wonder- 
ing why the tanner has chosen to call this morning, as there 
seems to be no special drift to his talk for some time, but at last 
Hector leads the conversation, very adroitly, as he thinks, to the 
subject of marriage. 

" It is a great responsibility, Monsieur Sandeau," he observes, 
" when one has marriageable children. I often think how happy 
I shall be when Bernard, my son, marries to suit me." 

" Ah ! " thinks Sandeau, " he would marry his Bernard to my 
Henriette. I will soon put that out of his head." And then he 
says aloud : " Yes, it is a great responsibility, Monsieur Desson, 
but, luckily for me, it is all settled for my Henriette. She will 
marry her cousin from Bas de la Roque." 

Hector's face lengthens at this announcement. 

" That is very fortunate," he says, but does not look as if he 
thought so, and after a little while he rises to go. 

It occurs to him after leaving Monsieur Sandeau that he may 
as well see what Henriette Beaumont is like, and with this in 
mind he enters the cotton-factory. He is saved from having to 
ask for her by hearing some one call her name as he enters, and 
seeing her pass near him in response to the summons. She 
appears to be fully thirty and is not bad-looking. 

" Hast thou a lover," Hector says to her, without pausing to 
think in what light she may regard this sudden question. 

" I have a husband, monsieur," she says sternly, and Hector 
retires somewhat crestfallen, but still relieved to think his son's 
choice has not fallen on Henriette Beaumont. 

But others in the factory have heard the question, and there 
is much laughter in the factory for days over the old man who 
wanted to make love to Henriette Beaumont. It is quite true 
that Hector might have much better left this matter to his wife. 
There is one more Henriette yet to see, the cousin of Edouard 
Bouvier for Hector is quite convinced that it is of no use to see 
Henriette Blanc, the blanckisseuse across the Rille and in mid- 
afternoon the tanner presents himself at the door of Madame 
Berthier, the mother of the fifth Henriette. It is a small house 
where Madame Berthier lives, not far from the church of St. 
Ouen. Dark, time-stained timbers form the house-front, between 
which gleam the tiniest of windows. There is a doorway, too, 
somewhere among the dark timbers, but so small as hardly to be 
noticed at first. When the door opens at Monsieur Desson's 
knock he is lost in wonder as to how Madame Berthier ever 
passes through, for the doorway is very low and madame is 



1 886.] BY THE RlLLE AT PONT-AUDEMER. 803 

quite tall and wears the tallest of caps. Madame is somewhat 
old-fashioned and has never discarded her cap, and a most re- 
markable structure it is. There are few like it in Pont-Audemer 
now. A stiff cone of white muslin, furnished with what look like 
short and very stiff wings on each side, and at the top a muslin 
bow such a headgear is likely to inspire the beholder with some- 
thing like awe, especially if, as in Madame Berthier's case, it 
towers above a rather severe visage. Monsieur Desson, behold- 
ing it, feels that it is going to be very difficult to explain to the 
wearer of such a cap the nature of his errand, and when he is 
seated in madame's little salon he is very decidedly ill at ease. 
Madame herself, seated opposite, is regarding him with evident 
disfavor. She knows who her visitor is, though he does not re- 
member ever to have seen her, and she does not like what she 
knows about him. What his errand can be to-day she cannot 
imagine ; but she will not help him in the least to explain, and 
waits with folded hands for him to begin. 

" You haveadaughtef, Madame Berthier? " he says at length 
rather slowly. 

The stiff wings of the bonnet rond tremble slightly as madame 
inclines her head in response. 

" And marriageable, I hear ? " pursues Desson. 

"She is twenty this summer," responds the other in a non- 
committal way. 

Hector finds it very difficult to lead up to the question he 
wishes to ask, and he is forced to come to the point much sooner 
than he has intended. 

" Has she a lover? " he asks this time. 

There is a very decided quiver of the wings of the bonnet rond 
as madame replies. 

" I do not discuss these matters with strangers," she says 
severely. 

Clearly Monsieur Hector is not making much progress at 
this interview. 

" But I have a reason for asking a very good reason, I may 
say," he explains. 

" That may very well be," is madame's answer, " but the fact 
is nothing to me." And by this time there is a heavy frown un- 
derneath the bonnet rond. 

" But I wish to know for the sake of Bernard, my son," says 
Desson, losing the last atom of prudence in his vexation. 

" Has Monsieur Bernard Desson sent his father to inquire for 
him ? " asks Madame Berthier sarcastically. Is is quite plain to 



804 BY THE RlLLE AT PONT-AUDEMER. [Sept., 

her now that Desson has called to see if her daughter has any at- 
tachment for his son, and she determines that he shall go away as 
unsatisfied as he came. " When Monsieur Bernard Desson will 
come to me with similar questions he shall be answered," she 
continues impressively, rising from her chair as she speaks ; " but 
I decline to discuss my daughter with his father." 

Clearly there is nothing for Hector but retreat, but he delays 
a moment. 

"Can I see Mademoiselle Henrietta ?" he asks. 

" Mademoiselle is from home to-day," says the other loftily, 
" but she shall be informed of the honor Monsieur Desson has 
paid her in asking to see her and inquiring so closely concerning 
her welfare." And with these words in his ears Hector takes his 
leave. 

Madame Berthier has won an easy victory this time, and she 
smiles grimly as she watches her adversary crossing the bridge 
just beyond her house. 

The tanner is not at ease respecting this day's work as he 
thinks it over on his way down the Grand Rue. He is not at all 
sure that Henriette Noir may not be the one whom Bernard loves, 
and he has discovered that Henriette Sandeau is not obtainable 
for his son. Henriette Beaumont has certainly placed him in 
a very uncomfortable position, while the behavior of Madame 
Berthier has filled him with the liveliest apprehensions. Per- 
haps it would have been better if he had waited for his green- 
gray brother-in-law to ascertain more definitely concerning the 
Henriettes before he started out himself in quest of information. 
He is not disposed to listen with much patience when Jules tells 
him that evening that he has heard of two more Henriettes. 

" Henriettes ! '' exclaims Desson angrily. " What do I care 
for thy Henriettes ? " 

Now, this is unkind, when Jules has spent a whole afternoon 
in ascertaining details concerning these particular Henriettes. 
It is hard that all this labor should be lost. 

" But thou must know that they are young," he ventures. 

But Hector has had enough of Henriettes for one day, he is 
very sure. 

" Let them be infants, then : I will have nothing to do with 
them myself. Find out for thyself whether Bernard knows them, 
and then come to me." 

Hector says this almost savagely, and Jules says no more. He 
is quite willing, however, to undertake the commission Desson 
has given him, and the next day finds him engaged in prosecut- 



1 886.] BY THE RlLLE AT PONT-AUDEMER. 805 

ing it. In the evening he comes to his brother-in-law in high 
spirits. 

" Well," says Hector, when Jules appears, " what hast thou 
learned? " 

" Much," replies the other, rubbing his hands. " In the first 
place, these two Henriettes are both young." 

" So thou saidst last night," growls Hector. 

"They are young," repeats Jules, a little disconcerted, "and 
pretty, and will have good marriage-portions." 

" That is worth considering," muses the other, somewhat 
softened in his manner by this intelligence. " What are their 
names ? " 

" Henriette Chretien and Henriette Simon," continues Jules. 
" Mademoiselle Chr6tien lives with her parents near the church 
of Saint-Germain." 

" I know Chretien," interposes Hector, " but I did not know 
of the daughter." 

" Henriette Simon is cousin to the daughter of Monsieur 
Chretien," goes on Jules, " and lives with her aunt not far from 
the Chretiens'. The husband of her aunt was Julien, the dyer, 
who died some ten years ago. Bernard goes often to. the Chre- 
tiens ', and has met Mademoiselle Simon there often. But I can- 
not tell which of the two he prefers." 

" It is little matter," says Hector pompously. " Julien left a 
great deal of money, and Chr6tien is very wealthy, and the mar- 
riage-portions of their daughters cannot fail to be large." 

" Wilt thou visit the Chretiens and Madame Julien? " inquires 
Jules. 

But Hector has acquired quite enough experience in journeys 
of this sort. 

" I am much too busy," he rejoins. " I will ask Catharine to 
go and make inquiries." And thus it happens that on the next 
day Madame Desson makes a formal call upon Madame Julien. 

These estimable ladies have never met before, and Madame 
JuJlien is a little puzzled to know why Madame Desson should 
call just at this time. Madame Julien is quite deaf, and her visitor, 
whose voice is husky at all times, and who is now out of breath 
with her walk, finds it exceedingly hard to explain the object of 
her visit. Perhaps on this occasion Monsieur Desson would have 
succeeded better. At all events, he would have come much 
sooner to the point. At last, however, without expressly declar- 
ing that she has come to find out whether Bernard and Henriette 
Simon have any particular regard for each other, Madame Desson 



806 BY THE RlLLE AT PONI-AUDEMER. [Sept., 

manages to ascertain some particulars concerning the niece of 
Madame Julien. " Young people are a great responsibility," 
shouts the wife of Hector. " I shall be glad when my son and 
daughter are safely married." 

" But yes, that is true," responds Madame Julien, who has with 
difficulty caught this sentence. " But my Henriette will marry 
soon, and I shall miss her sorely." 

" And whom is she to marry ? " screams the visitor, who has 
now recovered all the voice she ever possessed. 

" His name is Louis Leroy, and he lives at Conteville," is the 
reply. 

The interest of Madame Desson in the welfare of Madame 
Julien's niece rapidly subsides on the receipt of this information, 
and she presently takes her departure, leaving good Madame 
Julien still wondering why she has had the honor of the visit from 
Madame Desson. 

Madame Desson finds her call upon the Chretiens a much less 
embarrassing affair. She and Madame Chr6tien were friends in 
their girlhood, and have been in the habit of exchanging calls at 
intervals of a year or two since their respective marriages. It is 
quite in the natural order of things that she should call upon 
Madame Chretien about this time. But of the subject uppermost 
in her mind the wife of Hector has no chance to speak, for there 
a're other visitors besides herself, and she goes away with her 
curiosity unsatisfied. On the evening of the same day the Dessons 
and Jules hold a solemn council to decide what shall be done. 

" It is monstrous that Bernard should think of marrying with- 
out consulting us," fumes Hector. 

" That is very true," says Jules. 

" What hast thou to do with it ? " exclaims the head of the 
household, turning savagely upon his brother-in-law, whose only 
reply is a meek shrug of the shoulders. 

" But if Bernard will marry," says Madame Desson huskily, 
" what can we do ? He will not listen to us ; and then it is no 
crime to marry." 

Clearly Bernard's mother is not formed of such stern stuff 
as her husband. Under his fierce exterior, however, Monsieur 
Desson is very sadly perplexed. He is secretly in awe of this 
fine son of his, and is at the same time anxious to preserve a great 
show of paternal authority, and it is not altogether easy to main- 
tain this outward show. 

" He will give in to Bernard," thinks his wife, as she looks 
at her husband. 



1 886.] BY THE RlLLE AT PONT-AUDEMER. 807 

" He will do whatever his son wishes," is the inward com- 
ment of Jules. 

And Monsieur Desson in his heart is very sure of the same 
thing. But nevertheless he blusters, and fumes, and declares 
that if Bernard marries to suit himself instead of his parents he 
shall never speak to him again. And with the launching of this 
awful threat the family conclave comes to an end. 

What Monsieur Hector has been doing is no secret to Ber- 
nard, and, although the young man laughs with his friend Ed- 
ouard about his father's perplexities, he is not over-pleased at the 
light in which he is placed by his father's action in this matter. 

" It is time to end the anxieties of monsieur my father," he 
says to Edouard one evening, " or he will be inquiring at every 
house in Pont-Audemer where there is a marriageable girl if I 
am going to marry her. He is making me ridiculous." 

" Yes, it has gone too far," rejoins Edouard Bouvier. " I 
knew we could rouse the curiosity of Jules and give him some- 
thing to think about, but that was all I looked for." 

" It is thou who must undeceive my father," says Bernard. 

" Quite true," is the reply. " It shall be done this evening." 

Hector Desson is smoking in his garden when the young men 
join him. It is not often that they give him much of their so- 
ciety, and under ordinary circumstances Hector would be quite 
pleased to have their company there in the quiet garden in the 
summer twilight; but he is a little ill at ease just now. If Ber- 
nard has learned of the inquiries that have been made concern- 
ing him it is not easy to foresee just what results will follow. It 
is this thought that makes him unusually uncomfortable while 
Bernard and his friend converse with him on indifferent topics. 
At last Edouard says somewhat abruptly : 

" Thou must wish me joy, Monsieur Desson. I am to be 
married." 

" That is good news, truly, and I do wish thee joy," is the 
response. " But with whom art thou to marry ? " adds Hector. 

" I am to marry my cousin, Henriette Berthier," is the reply. 

Hector Desson gazes bewilderedly from one to the other of 
the young men. 

" What, art thou to marry a Henriette also ? " he gasps at 
length. 

"Why not? It is a good name. But I do not know of an- 
other Henriette who is to be married at present," says Edou 
" Dost thou ? " he adds, turning to Bernard, who sha 
head. 





808 BY THE RlLLE A T PONT-A UDEMER. [Sept, 

Just at this moment Jules comes down the garden-path. 
Evidently he does not see the young men in the dim light, for 
he calls out : 

" Brother-in-law, I know of another Henriette." Then he 
sees that Hector is not alone, and stops in confusion. 

" I have heard quite enough of thy Henriettes," says the elder 
Desson coldly, after there has been an awkward pause. " Ex- 
plain, if thou art able," he continues, " what was thy purpose 
in telling me my son was to marry a person of that name ? " 

Jules does not at all relish this examination before the two 
young men, who have never liked him, as he well knows, but he 
cannot avoid an answer. 

" I repeated only what I heard Bernard and Monsieur Bouvier 
say themselves," he pleads. 

" When was that? " interposes his nephew. 

" On the steamer coming from Le Havre," is the response. 

" So thou played the spy upon us," says Bouvier contemptu- 
ously. 

Jules writhes, but makes no reply. 

" I said to Bernard," explains Bouvier at this juncture, " some- 
thing about his determination to marry, for he had long known 
of my love for my cousin, and had suddenly declared that he 
should marry also. Then I, knowing there was no one woman 
for whom he cared especially, said in jest : ' And when will thy 
Henriette be ready, my friend ? ' 

" Then thou art not thinking of marriage with a Henriette?" 
asks Hector of his son after Edouard has finished. 

" By no means, my father. I shall marry some day, 'tis likely, 
but thou shalt know all about it in due season, and wilt not need 
to depend upon my uncle there," says Bernard, and then he leaves 
the garden arm-in-arm with his friend. 

Truly, matters have not taken an agreeable turn for Jules. 
His industry has brought him very little reward. 

" Thou wert ever a mischief-maker," scolds Hector when he 
is alone with Jules, finding it convenient to forget that he has 
listened to the reports that Jules has brought him : " thou hadst 
far better attend to matters that concern thee." 

And Jules can only shrug his shoulders and be silent beneath 
the reproof. 

Half of Pont-Audemer are present at the wedding of Hen- 
rietle Berthier and Edouard Bouvier at the church of St. Ouen 

the autumn, but Jules Barbier is not one of that gay company. 






1 886.] THE CATHOLIC CHARITIES OF NEW YORK. 809 



THE CATHOLIC CHARITIES OF NEW YORK. 



THE Catholic charities in the city of New York for the bene- 
fit of adults of both sexes, though less numerous than those which 
formed the subject of a previous article, are, as will be shown, of 
great importance and productive of great good. The results of 
their work clearly exemplify how very efficacious are charitable 
labors avowedly for Christ's sake and having him as their prin- 
cipal object. 

Society of St. Vincent de Paul, office 29 Reade Street, incorpo- 
rated April 10,1872. This well-known society of laymen, found- 
ed originally in Paris, in May, 1833, by Frederic Ozanam, and of 
which the Council General is in that city, has spread widely 
throughout Catholic Europe, the United States, and Canada. Its 
first particular council in this city was established in the parish 
of St. Patrick in 1846. Archbishop Hughes gave it his full ap- 
proval by letter dated August n, 1848. It has now 47 particular 
councils in this city. 

The objects of the society are, first, to sustain its members, 
by mutual example, in the practice of a Christian life ; secondly, 
to visit the poor at their dwellings, to carry them succor in kind, 
to afford them also religious consolations; . . . thirdly, to ap- 
ply themselves, according to their abilities and the time which 
they can spare, to the elementary and Christian instruction of 
poor children, whether free or imprisoned ; . . . fourthly, to 
distribute moral and religious books ; fifthly, to be willing to un- 
dertake any other sort of charitable work to which their resources 
may be adequate, and which will not oppose the chief end of the 
society, and for which it may demand their co-operation upon 
the proposition of its directing members. The report of the 
Superior Council of New York to the Council General in Paris 
for the year 1885 shows a membership of 1,075 ; 5,202 families re- 
lieved during the year ; 19,667 persons in families relieved ; 46,483 
visits ; 698 families on roll December 31, 1885 ; 164 situations pro- 
cured ; 45 members assisting in Sunday-school, and 10,913 boys 
attending same. 

St. Vincent's Hospital of the City of New York, at Eleventh 
Street and Seventh Avenue, incorporated in 1870, was founded 



8io THE CATHOLIC CHARITIES OF NEW YORK. [Sept., 

by the Sisters of Charity in the year 1849 under the auspices of 
the late Archbishop Hughes. It was the first charity hospital 
in this city depending on voluntary contributions, the only two 
other at that time being New York Hospital and Bellevue. In 
its small beginnings, extending through seven years, it had to 
struggle with great and very discouraging difficulties. Its firjt 
location was in a three-story brick building situated on East 
Thirteenth Street, which was rented and fitted up by the joint 
contributions of the late Very Rev. Wm. Starrs and the mother- 
house at Mt. St. Vincent, and was opened on the first day of No- 
vember, 1849, f r tne reception of patients. The hospital at 
this time contained thirty beds, all of which being required for 
patients, the sisters in charge had to endure every possible in- 
convenience. In May, 1852, an adjoining house of like dimen- 
sions was rented and accommodations thereby secured for seventy 
patients ; but, there being neither gas-light, Croton water, closets, 
nor baths throughout the house, the increased room added still 
more to the labor and embarrassments of the sisters, and not a 
little to the discomfort of the patients, and the want of these neces- 
sary conveniences was made more sensible during the prevalence 
of typhus fever in 1852. 

In 1856 the building corner of Eleventh Street and Seventh 
Avenue, then used as a Half-Orphan Asylum, was first rented, 
and afterward, in 1868, bought, from the managers of the Roman 
Catholic Orphan Asylum, and made the main building of the 
present hospital. It required extensive alterations and repairs 
to adapt it to this new purpose ; and to raise the funds required 
the ladies of the several Catholic churches of New York were 
appealed to, and gave a grand fair at the Crystal Palace, and 
through this effort, and a similar one in 1860, the aggregate sum 
of $45 ,000 was realized. This fund enabled the sisters to make 
the necessary repairs, purchase an adjoining lot, and erect two 
wings, and have a balance on hand. The hospital, thus enlarged, 
was capable of accommodating 140 patients, of which those who 
could afford to pay were charged $3 weekly ; but, the demand for 
free admission increasing, it soon became evident that the hos- 
pital must be hopelessly involved pecuniarily unless some ar- 
rangement could be made for patients who were able to pay for 
their maintenance and treatment. In 1883 a new building was 
erected on West Twelfth Street, and formally opened on Decem- 
ber 9 of that year. It is arranged exclusively for the reception 
and treatment of private patients, who may enjoy in it the com- 
forts as well as the privacy of home. 



1 886.] THE CATHOLIC CHARITIES OF NEW YORK. 811 

Patients of all religious denominations are admitted, and any 
minister who is desired by a patient has free access to the wards. 
No non-Catholic patient is required or expected to attend religious ser- 
vice, which is, of course, Catholic. The hospital has never had 
any permanent source of income. During the first year the sum 
of $400 was received as donations; since that time up to 1875 
about one-half of the income has been derived* from annual sub- 
scriptions, bequests, donations, and from State and city grants, 
the latter having been neither certain nor annual. To meet the 
burden of enlarged expenses and indebtedness brought by the 
growth of the institution the sisters depend entirely upon the 
charity and generosity of their friends. From the humble begin- 
ning of 259 patients treated in the first year the number has in- 
creased to 1,842 in 1884 (no report for the past year being obtain- 
able), and from a personnel of five Sisters at the opening of the 
hospital to one of twenty-six at the present date. The medical 
board consists of two visiting physicians, two visiting surgeons, 
one ophthalmic surgeon, one gynaecologist, a house physician and 
surgeon, with one senior assistant and two junior assistants. 

House of the Good Shepherd, foot of East Ninetieth Street, in 
charge of the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shep- 
herd. They came to this city from Louisville, Ky., a little before 
1857, and were incorporated October 2, 1857. Their first estab- 
lishment was in East Fourteenth Street. Their mother-house is 
at Angers, in France, and their first house in the United States was 
at Louisville, where they came at the instance of Bishop Flaget. 
The order was founded about 1643 at Caen (France), by Rev. Jean 
Eudes, whose beatification is now in process. They have now 
about 30 houses in the United States. The principal object of 
their work here, as elsewhere, is to permanently reclaim those of 
their own sex "whom the world first ruins and then casts away." 
For such unfortunates the seemingly inexorable feeling of the 
world is tersely expressed in the lines of the French poet : 

" L' honneur est comme une tie escarpee et sans bords, 
On riy peut plus rentrer des qu'on en est dehors." * 

Hence this charity offers greater difficulties than any other. 
It is comparatively an easy task to take care of the sick, to harbor 
the aged, to instruct the ignorant ; these are under no stigma, feel 
no sense of degradation, and for them there is always and every- 
where more or less sympathy. 

* Boileau, Satire X. : " Honor is like an island steep on all sides, and with no shores : once 
out of it, there is no way to get back in it." 



8 1 2 THE CA THOLIC CHARITIES OF NE w YORK. [Sept., 

The work of the religious in question embraces three objects. 
The first and principal one is to recall fallen women to the path of 
virtue ; next, the reformation of wayward and unmanageable girls 
between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one ; and, lastly, to assist 
women addicted to drinking to cure themselves of the habit, those 
of better social condition having special provision made for them. 
The order has under its government a minor auxiliary one, separate 
and distinct, called The Magdalens, which is composed of girls 
either thoroughly reclaimed, or who, not having fallen, choose to 
enter out of a spirit of humility. 

Since the organization of the institution up to the present year 
the total number of inmates received has been 7,241. The pre- 
sent inmates consist of 80 magdalens, 190 penitents, 91 wayward 
girls (who form St. Joseph's Class), 36 habitual inebriates, and 
26 women, either widows or otherwise alone in the world, who 
have been allowed to find in the house a happy and quiet retreat. 
The work of the house where constant, industrious employment 
is the strict rule and its varied duties are looked after by 118 
sisters, under the direction of a superior and her assistant. 

The sisters have been subjected to considerable expense 
so far upwards of $5.000 in consequence of injuries to part of 
the convent building resulting from shocks to the foundations 
caused by the explosions carried on (three or four daily) at Hell 
Gate. It is to be hoped that, after the ameliorations of the 
channel have been completed, Congress will be induced to grant 
a proper indemnity, to which the sisters seem to be justly 
entitled. 

St. Francis' Hospital, at 603-611 Fifth Street and 169 Sixth 
Street, founded in 1864 for the gratuitous care of the sick poor 
of all creeds and of all nationalities, incorporated in the same 
year, is under the charge of the Sisters of the Poor of St. 
Francis, a German community, whose mother-house is at Aix-la- 
Chapelle (Rhenish Prussia). They are a mendicant order and 
find the resources needed for the sick under their cafe, and their 
own support, by begging from door to door. By that public 
charity, on which they solely rely, they and their work have 
ever been not only well but generously supported. They also 
give assistance to out-door poor. Between thirty and forty sis- 
ters (invalids included) make up the personnel of the hospital. 
The most scrupulous regard is had by them to the religious 
rights of the numerous Jewish and non-Catholic poor who come 
under their care. Protestant ministers and Jewish rabbis have 
ready access at visiting hours to patients of their respective be- 



1 886.] THE CATHOLIC CHARITIES OF NEW YORK. 813 

liefs as often as the latter call for them ; and when a non-Catholic 
patient is believed to be in danger of death the sisters in charge 
notify him or her accordingly and suggest calling in a minister 
or rabbi, as the case may be, who, under such circumstances, may 
see the patient almost at any time. Catholic patients only are 
invited to attend Mass in the chapel of the hospital. This fail- 
treatment is duly appreciated by the non-Catholics, and particu- 
larly by the Jews, of the district ; the latter are very friendly and 
always generous, as, indeed, are their co-religionists throughout 
the city whenever appealed to in behalf of the institution. The 
medical staff consists of two visiting physicians, two visiting 
surgeons, two visiting physicians for the diseases of women, and 
six house physicians and surgeons. There is no selection made 
in the cases admitted, the only question asked being, Can room 
be found for them ? The number of patients treated during the 
year 1885 has been 1,956; there were discharged cured 1,012, 
improved 494, unimproved 72. Total number of deaths 179, 
being a percentage of 9.15 per cent. 

It may not be known, but it is a fact, that St. Francis' Hos- 
pital has a larger field and even more patients than any hospital 
in the city of New York, except Bellevue and Charity, under 
the control of the city authorities. Its patients for the year 
1885 have been of twenty-two nationalities other than the United 
States. 

St. Joseph's Home for the Aged, at Nos. 203-2 1 1 West Fifteenth 
Street, was opened in May, 1868, and incorporated April 4, 1870. 
It is under the care of the Sisters of Charity and confines its 
work to indigent aged females only. Its foundress, as she may 
truly be called, was a Miss Elizabeth Kelly, who in 1866 deeded 
some lots on Third Avenue to the Sisters of Charity in trust for 
the establishment of a home for the destitute aged. These lots 
were sold to advantage and a portion of the present eligible site 
secured. The late Thomas Devine by his will left a legacy of 
certain stocks to the institution, which, by the skilful manage- 
ment of his executor, were made to produce $47,285. Up to 
the time of her death in 1883 Miss Kelly continued to be a 
benefactress, and other friends, prominent among whom was 
the late widow of Daniel Devlin, were a constant reliance and 
support during years of struggle and poverty before the home 
became what it now is. As it is by no means self-supporting, its 
appeals to the charitable have to be of constant recurrence. The 
majority of its inmates have been, from the beginning, without 
means and without friends. Sometimes a new-comer brings in a 



8 14 THE CATHOLIC CHARITIES OF NEW YORK. [Sept, 

small amount, but the sisters' practice has always been to give 
credit accordingly to each of such contributors, since, owing to 
the fickleness of mind consequent on old age, inmates sometimes 
leave. A large and well-ventilated ward situated on 'the third 
story has been set apart for the especial use of the sick, where 
they are well provided with what is needed for their convenience 
and comfort, and are under the especial care of the infirmarian, 
who can, by this means, give them better care and attention than 
could possibly be given them in their own rooms. The home 
has a beautiful chapel, dedicated in January, 1873. The present 
average number of inmates is 300, of which only about 50 con- 
tribute anything to their support. 

St. Elizabeth's Hospital, Nos. 223-225 West Thirty-first Street, 
under the charge of the Sisters of the Third Order of St. Fran- 
cis, founded in 1869, incorporated May 20, 1870, receives the 
sick without distinction of sex, color, nationality, or religious be- 
lief, and can comfortably accommodate ninety patients. It will 
receive patients from any doctor in good standing, and allow him 
to retain full charge of them. 

As the order is not a mendicant one, the support of the insti- 
tution renders it necessary that a weekly charge of $7 be made to 
ward patients, and of from $10 to $25 to patients -occupy ing pri- 
vate rooms. As many free patients are admitted as the income 
of the hospital will allow. The most scrupulous regard is had 
for the religious belief of non-Catholic patients ; and if in danger 
of death their friends are promptly notified to send a minister, to 
whom all needed facility for access to the patient is afforded. 
Perhaps it is in consequence of this, joined to other causes, that 
they get more Protestant than Catholic patients. The sisters 
are about to open an out-door patient department, and contem- 
plate the erection of a new building. They have so far never re- 
ceived aid in any shape from the city or county, nor from any 
public entertainments given for their benefit. The medical staff 
consists of one consulting and seven visiting surgeons, three con- 
sulting and three visiting physicians, and one ophthalmologist. 

St. Joseph's Institute for the Improved Instruction of Deaf 
Mutes, Fordham. Incorporated in 1875. It is provided by a 
statute of the State of New York, passed April 29, 1875, that 
whenever a deaf-mute child under the age of twelve years shall 
become, or be liable to become, " a charge for its maintenance on 
any of the towns or counties of the State," such child, upon ap- 
plication of its parent, guardian, or friend, setting forth the facts, 
shall be placed in one of four institutions named in the act 



1 886.] THE CATHOLIC CHARITIES OF NEW YORK. 815 

(only one of which, the Le Couteulx St. Mary's, at Buffalo, is un- 
der Catholic direction), " or in any institution of the State for the 
education of deaf mutes " ; and the children placed in such insti- 
tutions are to be maintained at the expense of the county from 
whence they came, not exceeding a stated sum, until they attain 
the age of twelve years. Thereafter, and until they have attain- 
ed seventeen years, they become pupils of the State, upon pro- 
curing a certificate for admission from the Superintendent of 
Public Instruction at Albany, and their board and training are 
paid for by the State. 

A very large proportion of the deaf-mute children, beneficia- 
ries under the statute in question, are of Catholic parentage and 
have been baptized Catholics. In non-Catholic institutions they 
have no opportunity of being taught their religion, and grow up 
in entire ignorance of it. In the uninstructed deaf mute certain 
instincts of an animal nature incline to strong development, and 
it takes long and patient training and teaching to bring them 
under habitual restraint. The salutary influences of religious 
teaching can be of great assistance to this end, and, as the instruc- 
tion of this unfortunate class is accomplished from the beginning 
through the eye and by object-teaching, it is manifest that the Ca- 
tholic religion must be particularly well adapted to their wants 
and capacities. Accordingly Madame Victorine Boucher, a 
French Catholic lady, sought to do in this respect for the city of 
New York what had before been done for Buffalo. Assisted by 
a number of charitable ladies, who formed themselves into an 
association under her direction, she established at Fordham, in 
the fall of 1869, the St. Joseph's Institute. In 1874 a branch 
house was opened in Brooklyn. The undertaking had to strug- 
gle in the beginning with great difficulties, and, but for the loans 
advanced by friends from time to time, would probably have 
sunk under the weight of its pecuniary difficulties. In 1875 an 
act was passed by which the institution was empowered to re- 
ceive county pupils, and by a later act, passed June 2, 1877, it was 
placed upon the same footing with similar institutions in the 
State. About 1877 a branch institution for boys was opened at 
Throgg's Neck. Madame Boucher, after having presided over 
the institution thirteen years, died in April, 1883. 

The institution deserves to be ranked among Catholic chari- 
ties, because it specially attends, during other than school hours, 
to the instruction of Catholic pupils in Catholic doctrine and 
practice, as in any other branch of useful knowledge. There is 
a pretty and well-equipped chapel on the premises. Rev. Fa- 



Si6 THE CATHOLIC CHARITIES OF NEW YORK. [Sept., 

ther Freeman, S.J., who is familiar with the sign-language, at- 
tends as chaplain. The management prefers to receive Catholic 
children only, but accepts others exceptionally upon an express 
and urgent request for their admission. Non-Catholic inmates 
do not attend religious worship, and are assembled in the parlor 
while the Catholics are in the chapel. This once led to a com- 
plaint on the part of one of the former. " What is there in your 
Catholic teaching," she asked, " that you are unwilling to let me 
know it? " Most of the children return home to spend the sum- 
mer ; the few girls at present remaining were examined, in the 
presence of the writer of these lines, on questions from the cate- 
chism, and wrote down correct answers. The more frequently 
they approach the sacraments the more docile, tractable, and 
kind they become. During the official year ending September 
30, 1885, the number of pupils connected with the school was 
271. They were supported as follows: by the State, 160 ; by 
counties, 87 ; by relatives or the institution, 24. 

Home for the Aged of the Little Sisters of the Poor, at 207 Seven- 
tieth Street, east of Third Avenue, and at One Hundred and 
Sixth Street and Ninth Avenue. Founded at East Seventieth 
Street September 27, 1870 ; incorporated August 23, 18-71. 

The mother-house of this mendicant community is at La Tour 
(Ille-et-Vilaine), France. It was founded about 1840 at St. Ser- 
van (France), by the Abbe Auguste Le Pailleur, * vicar of the 
parish, with the assistance of Jeanne Jugan, a poor servant-girl, 
and Marie Jamet, a dressmaker. The order has spread all over 
Europe, and in the United States, where it has at present thirty- 
four houses, and has met with great sympathy and encouragement, 
particularly in this city. The well-known object of the charity 
is to take care of the aged and disabled poor of both sexes over 
sixty years of age. No distinction is made as regards creed or 
nationality, the only requirement being that the applicant be of 
good moral character. The sisters have to provide for their old 
inmates food and clothing, and to nurse and watch them when 
sick. They have no income whatever from any fund or endovv- 

* In the Figaro of the i2th of June last there is an account of the great and general interest 
taken by visitors to the Paris Salon of this year in the portraits, by Cabanel, of Abbe Le Pail- 
leur and Marie Jamet ; Jeanne Jugan died a few years ago at the mother-house. Among some 
curious and touching facts connected with the labors of the two living founders above-mention- 
ed, the writer of the article mentions, as having been stated by the abbe, that in the houses in 
France up to a recent date 74,000 old people had found a peaceful and happy death ; that, al- 
though that number comprised Protestants and professed atheists, all, before dying, of their 
own accord, without any solicitation thereto, asked to receive the sacraments of the Catholic 
Church. There are received at the mother- house annually more than 20,000 letters, irrespec- 
tive of telegrams. 



1 886.] THE CATHOLIC CHARITIES OF NEW YORK. 817 

ment ; they depend entirely on charity, and are obliged to go 
around to solicit its offerings. Their rule is that, in the matter 
of food, the needs of the old people under their care have prio- 
rity over their own. But in this land and in this city, blessed by 
God with such plenty, it seems as if there will never be occasion 
for sacrifices in that direction; the sisters receive from a gene- 
rous public food and clothing in abundance, quite sufficient, in- 
deed, to provide for a larger number than they now harbor. The 
west-side house was first opened May 21, 1881, at Nos. 229 and 
231 West Thirty-eighth Street, and removed to the new build- 
ing, One Hundred and Sixth Street and Ninth Avenue, the I3th 
of April last. 

St. Marys Lodging-House, at No. 143 West Fourteenth Street, 
shelters respectable girls while seeking employment, and was in- 
corporated in May, 1881. St. Joseph's Night- Refuge is in a rear 
building. 

Any person having a right conception of life in a large city 
such as New York will readily understand that in it friendless 
and unprotected girls, depending on their daily labor for a sub- 
sistence, who are out of employment, are often left homeless and 
in very trying circumstances. The instances of such, and of 
laboring women of more advanced years, who find themselves 
at night in the streets with no lodging but the station-house to 
go to, are more numerous and of more frequent occurrence 
than the public has any idea. Charitable souls in the city of 
Paris have been early in the work of providing relief for this 
particular form of human suffering, and have founded L'CEuvre de 
r Hospitalite de Nuit (night-harbor), of which the first house was 
opened June 2, 1878. Two more have since been opened for 
men and two for women. The cities of Vienna and of Pesth, in 
Austria, and certain large cities of France, have been examining 
into the expediency of following the charitable example set them 
in this regard by Paris. 

An unmarried lady, a convert, whose experience and observa- 
tion had made her acquainted with the need for the establish- 
ment of a similar work in this city, made a beginning, with the 
issistance of a few other young ladies, converts like herself, on 
the 8th of December, 1877, at No - J 5 8 West Twenty-fourth 
Jtreet. The progress of the work was at first necessarily slow, 
although steady and constant, and in time required its removal 
to more spacious premises at No. 239 West Twenty-fourth 
Street. Later on it was found advisable to move to a more eli- 
gible situation at No. 235 West Fourteenth Street, and finally to 

VOL. XLIII. 52 



8i8 THE CATHOLIC CHARITIES OF NEW YORK. [Sept., 

the present location, which has afforded facility for establishing 
in a rear building a night-shelter for such applicants as it is de- 
sirable to keep separate from the other inmates of the house, and 
which is now called St. Joseph's Night-Refuge. In order to put 
the management of the work on a good, enduring foundation, to 
obtain for it, besides spiritual benefits, the confidence and sym- 
pathy of the public, the foundress and her colleagues have very 
recently taken the vows and the habit of the Third Order of 
Regulars of St. Francis, and the name of " The Franciscan Sis- 
ters of St. Mary's." For admission to the Night-Refuge there is 
no charge, no questions asked. Admission to St. Mary's Lodg- 
ing-House is without discrimination as to religious belief; but 
on Sundays the inmates are expected to attend the services of 
the religious belief to which they profess to belong. The in- 
come of the House is derived from charitable offerings and from 
such labor as can be made productive in it, and which seems to 
be very poorly paid. 

The number of inmates received from September 30, 1884, to 
October i, 1885, was 835. Present average number is 90 alto- 
gether 40 in the House and 50 in the Refuge. 

As stated at page 687 of the August number of this magazine, 
the Sisters of Mercy have relinquished a certain charitable work 
carried on by them for many years, but they continue that of 
visiting the sick and dying poor, in which they have been en- 
gaged from their beginning in this city. 

The Maternity Hospital, No. 130 East Sixty-ninth Street, un- 
der the direction of the Sisters of Charity, in connection with 
the New York Foundling Asylum. Incorporated April u, 
1881. 

This hospital is intended for two classes of persons : first, 
those in whose cases there is a desire and hope of preserving in- 
dividual character or the reputation of a family, the secrets of 
these, when given, being considered a sacred trust by the sisters ; 
second, married women, who may there receive all the care, at- 
tention, and professional services not otherwise at their com- 
mand. In this latter class may be ranked those who are stran- 
gers in the city, and for whose peculiar condition hotel conve- 
niences are insufficient ; also those who for various reasons can- 
not find in their own homes the necessary attention. 

The experience of the sisters so far is that in the first class, 
Protestants and Catholics inclusive, there is a wide field for do- 
ing great good, and they are conscious that to that class their 
institution has rendered very valuable services. 



1 886.] THE CATHOLIC CHARITIES OF NEW YORK. 819 

The terms for patients occupying- private rooms range from 
$6 to $25 per week for board, payable weekly in advance, with 
the extra charge of from $40 to $75 reception fee. 

The reception fee covers doctors' and nurses' expenses. 

For patients in the wards the reception fee is $25 ; the board, 
$3 per week, payable in advance. These patients must remain 
at the asylum for at least three months after the birth of the in- 
fants, to wet-nurse them. No charge is made during this time. 

Up to 7th of July, present year, the total number of patients 
admitted was 736. 

The Sisters of Bon Secours (Good Succor), at 152 East Sixty- 
sixth Street, between Lexington and Third Avenues. Incorpo- 
rated in 1883. 

Their mother- house is at Troyes, in France, where they 
have at present in all 85 houses. They have 7 in Algeria,* i in 
Spain, i in Rome and 2 others elsewhere in Italy, 2 in Bel- 
gium, and i each in London, Liverpool, and Manchester. The 
congregation was founded in 1840, at Arcis-sur-Aube (France), 
by a devoted priest, vicar of that parish Paul Sebastian Millet, 
deceased in 1880 in his eighty-fourth year. Their first appear- 
ance in this city was in February, 1882 ; a superior and one sister 
came over and took a house in West Twenty-second Street. In. 
May, 1884, they moved to their present habitation, formerly the 
rectory of the church of St. Vincent Ferrer, where they now 
have 16 sisters. The work in which they are engaged cannot 
better be described than in the words of Cardinal Morichini, ta- 
ken from a work on the charitable institutions of Rome, of which 
Pius IX. presented each bishop at the Vatican Council with a. 
copy. He accorded the decretum laudis in favor of the congre- 
gation on the 24th of February, 1863. 

"The sisters belonging to this congregation [of Bon Secours] do no 
work in the matter of education nor do they attend in hospitals. The ob- 
ject of their vocation is unique to nurse the sick in their homes. Often be- 
fore, in bygone ages, Christian charity has taken up this work, in par- 
ticular under the inspiration of St. Francis of Sales and St. Vincent de 
Paul, but the attempts have always proved in vain, and almost from the 
very beginning the original purpose was departed from. God was reserv- 
ing success in the undertaking to our day, in which a need for it. both in 
a temporal and a spiritual point of view, is so- keenly felt. . . . 

" The Sisters of Bon Secours take care of the sick without distinction 

* They are willing to nurse even Mahometans. Hamet, a cadi in Algiers, a neighbor of 
Cardinal Lavigerie, fell very sick, and his eminence advised him to have the sisters called in. 
He consented, and did so well under their nursing that he was got out of danger. But before he 
was quite convalescent the women of his household became jealous of the success and possible 
influence of the good sisters and compelled them to stop their attendance. 



8JO THE CATHOLIC CHARITIES OF NEW YORK. [Sept., 

of age or condition, whether male or female, rich or poor, Catholic or non- 
Catholic ; they are content if they meet in the houses to which they are 
called the regard due to their sex and their religious character," 

"They require no remuneration for their attendance and their labors; 
their only means of support is the voluntary offerings of persons assisted 
by them." 

"The good accomplished by this charitable institution has called down 
upon it the blessing of God, the approval of the church, and an ever-in- 
creasing prosperity. ..." 

Of this last reward they have already had good experience in 
the city of New York, where they have met with a welcome 
and a generosit} 7 which they describe in terms of warmest 
praise. They have bought a site on Madison Avenue, near 
Eighty-first Street, on which they will build as soon as their 
present lease terminates and their means permit. They require 
a central and quiet location, in order that the sisters who have 
sat up all night may obtain rest during the day ; and their pre- 
sent abode, though desirable in other respects, is too near to the 
parochial school about to be erected. 

St. Joseph's Hospital for Consumptives and Incurables, at East 
One Hundred and Ninth Street, founded in 1882, is under the 
care of the Sisters of the Poor of St. Francis, and is connected 
with St. Francis' Hospital in East Fifth Street. It occupies two 
formerly private houses, has room for fifty beds, and received 
last year about 500 patients. 

Mission of Our Lady of the Rosary for the Protection of Immi- 
grants, No. 7 State Street, founded October, 1883. The story of 
the foundation of this charity having been told so perfectly and 
minutely in an article entitled " The Priest at Castle Garden," 
published in last January number of this magazine, a repetition 
here of any more than a brief statement of the objects of the mis- 
sion would be entirely superfluous. These are : To establish at 
Castle Garden, New York, the chief landing-place for immigrants 
to the United States, (i) a Catholic bureau under the charge of a 
priest for the purpose of protecting, counselling, and supplying in- 
formation to the Catholic immigrants who land at Castle Garden ; 

(2) a Catholic immigrants' temporary home, a boarding-house, 
in which Catholic immigrants will be sheltered, safe from the 
dangers of the city, while they are waiting for employment ; and 

(3) an immigrants' chapel. 

Father Riordan has bought for $70,000 which is considered 
cheap the old, very conspicuous, aristocratic mansion, No. 7 
State Street, seventy years old at the very least, and which from 
its style must have been the habitation of one of the wealthy 



1 886.] THE QUESTION OF ULSTER. 821 

families of New York in the beginning of this century. It is the 
most interesting old landmark of that part of the city, and a pho- 
tograph should be taken of it before it is taken down, which 
doom seems to be inevitable. Father Riordan has converted it 
into a temporary home for immigrant girls until they can be either 
forwarded to their destination, meet their friends here, or find 
employment. A room in an upper story has been fitted up as a 
chapel. That there is now plenty to do in the home may be 
readily inferred from the fact that 106 immigrant girls .landed 
from the Britannic, which arrived in May, and 65 from the Au- 
rania, arrived in June. A record is kept of the names, destina- 
tion, and disposition of all the girls harbored in the home. 

In conclusion, let us hope that the number of Catholic chari- 
table institutions, of which an account has now been given, will, 
under the blessing of God on the unfailing, zealous efforts of the 
faithful, continue to increase in the future in proportion with the 
wants of the increasing Catholic population of this city. Would 
that, besides, the assistance of non-Catholic charitable institutions 
could be made entirely acceptable, as regards religious matters, 
to the consciences of the Catholic poor ! What a gain and a 
blessing that would be ! 



THE QUESTION OF ULSTER.* 

THE Question of Ulster, about which so many English politi- 
cians seem to be perplexed, is the question whether, in a repre- 
sentative government, the vote of one man ought to outweigh 
the votes of three. 

Last June there was an anti-Catholic riot in Belfast which 
lasted several days, and, after presenting some of the worst as- 
pects of that sickening ferocity which has so often distinguished 
the upholders of the Protestant ascendency in the North of Ire- 
land, it was suppressed by the armed police. In the midst of the 
disturbance came the news of the defeat of Mr. Gladstone's 
Home-Rule bill, at which the mob testified its delight by wreck- 
ing about a hundred houses and making bonfires of the property 
of Catholics. In nearly all such outbreaks bigots are responsible 
for rousing the brutal passions of the ignorant, but the worst of 

* Tracts on the Irish Question. Dublin : Published by the Irish National League. 



822 THE QUESTION OF ULSTER. [Sept., 

the outrages are actually the work of criminals to whom the dif- 
ferences between Orangeman and Catholic are of far less concern 
than the sacking of liquor-shops and the plunder of dwellings. It 
is hard for Americans to understand how there could be hesitation 
in denouncing such crimes from any pulpit. Least of all ought 
the Protestant clergy to have spared their censures, since it was 
under their standard that the rioters burned, robbed, fought, and 
killed. But the Rev. Dr. Hugh Hanna, a Presbyterian minister, 
preached a sermon in which he treated the persons who lost 
their lives by the fire of the police as martyrs in a holy cause : 

"The loyal celebration of victory enraged the government, which, 
traitorous to its trust, has slaughtered our people. We are resolved to 
maintain our relations with England. If the government thinks that 
Ulter will be easily subjugated by a seditious Parliament, it has signally 
failed in its estimate of us.'' 

And after referring vaguely to means of resistance which would 
be employed at the proper time, he declared that 

"The humblest of the seven victims who succumbed last Wednesday 
under the murderous fire of Mr. Morley's militia presented a higher and 
nobler type of character than does Mr. Morley." 

It is not surprising that the riots were renewed with still 
greater savagery during the Parliamentary elections in July, 
when the Protestant mob fought the police until numbers had 
been shot down on both sides. 

Such riots are not uncommon in the North of Ireland, neither 
are such sermons. Both, however, are especially significant just 
now for the light which they throw upon the Question of Ulster. 
When the ascendency party protest that they will not submit to 
the laws of an Irish Parliament established by the supreme legis- 
lature of the empire, and sanctioned both by the whole authority 
of the government to which they profess allegiance and by an 
overwhelming majority of the people of Ireland, they are only 
asserting a privilege which the Liberal revolters against Mr. 
Gladstone have hastily conceded to them. Mr. Bright cannot 
bring himself to desert them when they ask the help of the Eng- 
lish government in over-riding the wishes of their country. Mr. 
Chamberlain believes that the minority has a right to secede 
unless the majority surrenders its right to rule. Lord Derby de- 
clares that England is "bound to protect loyal Irishmen," and 
that, rather than force people to submit to self-government, she 
must apply herself to " the reconquest of Ireland." In other 



i886.] THE QUESTION OF ULSTER. 823 

words, if the minority does not wish to submit, the majority 
must be made to. It would be " repugnant to employ the 
queen's forces " to compel a few Orangemen of the North to obey 
a law which they do not like, but quite proper to employ the 
same forces in sustaining an obnoxious rule by the " reconquest " 
of the rest of the island. The old and best meaning of loyalty was 
faithfulness to law. The name of Loyalists is now usurped in Ire- 
land by a minority faction whose distinctive principle is that if a 
law which they do not like is enacted by their own government 
they have a right to resist its execution by force of arms.< 

Before we examine this extraordinary political principle any 
further let us see who they are that profess it. The English 
press and public speakers are continually referring to " loyal 
Ulster," " the loyal North," as a distinct and considerable division 
of Ireland, unalterably opposed to Home Rule. Loyal Ulster has 
no existence. The province of Ulster embraces nine counties, 
four are Loyalist, five are decided in their preference for Home 
Rule. The overwhelmingly Protestant region comprises about 
one-quarter of the area of the province namely, the county of 
Antrim and certain parts of Down and Armagh ; and even in this 
little northeastern corner of the island the Catholics, who are 
Home-Rulers to a man, number about 200,000. Western, south- 
ern, central, and southwestern Ulster are Catholic and Nation- 
alist. In the whole province there are 833,000 Catholics and 
909,000 Protestants. But the political parties are not divided by 
a strict religious line. While the Catholics are unanimous for 
Home Rule, the Protestants, even of Ulster, are by no means 
unanimous against it. There is an Irish Protestant Home Rule 
Association in Belfast. The Irish National League has prosper- 
ous branches in every part of Ulster, nearly all of which contain 
a considerable number of Protestants, while many of them have 
Protestant officers. The ratio of the vote to the population of 
Ulster, in the general election of 1885, was about as one to 7.68. 
If the political and religious divisions had been identical the 
Nationalists ought therefore to have polled 108,000 votes and the 
Loyalists 118,000. But in fact, according to the calculations of 
United Ireland, the Nationalists polled 115, 533 votes and the 
Loyalists only 111,405. This calculation includes an estimate 
of the Nationalist strength in certain districts of Ulster where no 
avowed Home-Ruler was nominated, and the voter's only choice 
was between Liberal and Tory. The figures, therefore, may be 
open to some question. In the election of the present year (the 
full returns of which are not accessible while we write) the vote 



824 THE QUESTION OF ULSTER. [Sept. 

on both sides was so much reduced, owing partly, no doubt, to 
lack of money and partly to a reluctance to contend over fore- 
gone conclusions, that comparisons would be deceptive. There 
are some patent facts about Ulster politics, however, which cannot 
be questioned nor explained away. Of the 33 members returned 
by the whole province to the last Parliament, 17 were Home- 
Rulers and 16 were Loyalists. In the new Parliament these 
figures are reversed. The Nationalists lost two seats, after a 
severe contest ; but, on the other hand, they gained a seat in the 
very capital of Orangeism, Belfast itself, while in Londonderry, 
the home of " the Apprentice Boys " and the principal strong- 
hold of the " ascendency " after Belfast, the majority against the 
Home-Rule candidate, Mr. McCarthy, was only three. There 
is not a county of Ulster which has not returned at least one 
Nationalist member. Four of the nine counties are represented 
entirely by Home- Rulers. Thus it appears that the so-called 
loyal province of Ulster is in fact almost equally divided in 
politics, the wavering balance inclining rather towards Home 
Rule ; that the " loyal " corner includes only one-quarter of the 
territory, and that even there the party of Home Rule is earnest 
and powerful. Of the other provinces of Ireland we need not 
speak. In them the vote is all one way. Outside of Ulster, and 
the two seats belonging to the University of Dublin, the Loyalists 
have not elected a single representative in* the Imperial Parlia- 
ment. The Nationalist majorities are almost everywhere over- 
whelming, and in a remarkably large proportion of cases the 
return of the Home-Rule candidate was virtually or literally un- 
opposed. The Spectator justly remarked, after the general elec- 
tion of last year, " Ireland votes with a voice as unanimous as 
country ever gave " ; and this year her voice is the same. 

We are now in a position to understand " the Question of 
Ulster." The opposition to Home Rule is not on the part of the 
province of Ulster, for a majority of the population of the pro- 
vince desire Home Rule. It is not on the part of any definite 
political or geographical entity distinct from the rest of Ireland ; 
for the Loyalists are mixed with the Nationalist population in 
Ulster precisely as they are elsewhere, except that their pre- 
ponderance in the small corner where they have a majority is 
far less positive than the preponderance of the Nationalists in 
every other portion of the kingdom. There is absolutely no- 
thing to distinguish the position of the Ulster Loyalists from the 
position of any other minority party. When, therefore, English 



1 886.] THE QUESTION OF ULSTER. 825 

politicians assert that if Home Rule is granted Ulster will have 
a right to secede, they are putting forth the anarchic doctrine, 
never maintained in any civilized state, that whenever the mi- 
nority in a popular government pleases it may repudiate the de- 
cision of the majority and set up for itself. The most radical 
American secessionists never went to such an extreme as this. 
They at least believed that each State was an independent politi- 
cal organization, with all the powers of sovereignty, including 
the right to compel the obedience of minorities of its own citi- 
zens. They never dreamed that individuals had a right to se- 
cede. But this is what the claim of the Ulster Orangemen and 
their English advocates amounts to. Ulster cannot be treated as 
a homogeneous, autonomous state. It is only an administrative 
division in which political parties happen to be more nearly 
equal than they are in other parts of the kingdom. If the 
111,000 Ulster Loyalists have a right to set up such a government 
as they please, the 115,000 Ulster Nationalists have the same 
right, h fortiori. Nor is that all. If the Loyalists in Ulster must 
have just what they want, it is impossible to deny the same pri- 
vileges to the Loyalists in Leinster, Munster, and Connaught. 
They, indeed, are entitled to rather more consideration than 
their brethren of the North. The Orangemen of Belfast and 
Londonderry seem to be in no special need of protection ; but 
the insignificant little companies who vote for the " ascendency " 
candidates in districts like Galway, Kerry, Mayo, Roscommon, 
Sligo, Tipperary, etc., would hardly be visible if the English 
rule should cease. They certainly are among the clients whom 
England, according to Mr. John Bright, must not desert. They 
must have a government of their own as well as the Protestants 
of Ulster. They must all secede, if they wish to. Even the 
thirty Orangemen who figured last year as the entire Conserva- 
tive constituency in a poll of 3,200 in East Kerry must have 
what they want. But all this admits, of course, the right of 
the Home-Rulers also to have what they want. The few who 
want to be governed by Englishmen at Westminster, and the 
many who want to be governed by themselves at Dublin, have 
an equal right to their own way. So we shall enjoy the novel 
spectacle of two governments, side by side, ruling the same 
country ; and every Irishman will be at liberty to take his choice 
between them. This is the absurdity to which English states- 
men are driven in trying to avoid the fundamental principle of 
popular government, that the majority must rule. 



826 THE QUESTION OF ULSTER. [Sept., 

If the Orange party really entertained a firm and tried attach- 
ment to England, there might be at least a sentimental reason for 
the policy of meting out a generous measure to them and a far 
different one to their Catholic brethren. But it is notorious that 
what they value is not the English connection but the Protest- 
ant ascendency. More disloyal language has never been used 
towards the British crown than in the speeches of Orange orators 
and the resolutions of Orange assemblies when measures for the 
relief of Irish disabilities have been under consideration. Mr. 
Clancy's clever tract on The Orange Bogey (Tracts on the Irish 
Question, No. 5) contains several amusing pages of extracts from 
the Orange literature of the Church Disestablishment period, 
in which armed resistance was pledged in the most emphatic 
language in case Mr. Gladstone's bill became a law. Clergymen 
were especially profuse in their promises to fight. The Right 
Hon. David Plunkett, Q.C., who now represents the University 
of Dublin in the Imperial Parliament, was ready to take the 
field at a moment's notice. Orange meetings on Tamnamore 
Hill, County Tyrone, at Monaghan, at Clones, resolved that if 
Mr. Gladstone's Irish Church bill passed they should " regard 
the Union as virtually dissolved." A resolution to the same 
effect was passed by the Ulster Protestant Defence Association 
in Belfast. The chief Dublin organ of the Orange party, the 
Daily Express, February 20, 1869, said : 

" The Protestants of Ireland are attached to England, not as their 
fatherland, but as the great champion of the Reformed faith, by whom they 
are protected in the exercise of their religion, the enjoyment of civil and 
religious liberty, and the possession of their just rights and ancient pro- 
perty. But if England breaks faith with the Protestants of Ireland, if she 
deprives the descendants of the colonists of Ulster of the provision for 
their religious wants, on the assurance of which their ancestors were in- 
duced to settle in the country, she will sever the tie by which the most 
loyal and devoted subjects of the crown are united in sympathy with Pro- 
testant England." 

At a meeting at Saintfield, County Down, in 1869, on the 
anniversary of the battle of the Boyne, the Rev. Henry Hender- 
son declared, amidst tremendous applause : 

" It was not the Fenians they were afraid of, but that policy which was 
driving the people of Ulster into civil war. It was right they should tell 
their English brethren the truth. It was right they should tell them that 
so long as there was Protestantism in the land, and a Protestant sove- 
reign occupying the throne, so long must there be Protestant ascendency. 



1 886.] THE QUESTION OF ULSTER. 827 

" We see people telling us," exclaimed the Rev. Henry Burdett, chairman 
of an Orange meeting at Newbliss, County Monaghan, " that we should not 
be aspiring to ascendency. Now, I, as long as ever the Lord shall leave 
me breath, will never be content with anything but Protestant ascen- 
dency. I think it is time to stand upon the watch-tower and cry, ' No sur- 
render ! ' ' 

This is what the " Loyalists " of Ulster want of England. 
This is what they are standing for now. Whenever this despotic 
and barbarous ascendency, relic of evil times of which the world 
is fast learning to be ashamed whenever this is imperilled they 
threaten war, as they are doing now. Fortunately they never 
fight. 

Yet because this intemperate faction clamors against justice 
to-day, as it has so often and vainly done before, Mr. Chamber- 
lain, Mr. Bright, Lord Derby, and some other Liberals think 
that justice cannot go on. If the Ulster ascendency faction ob- 
jects to an Irish Parliament, that is the end of everything. " It 
would be repugnant," says Lord Derby's Liverpool manifesto, 
"to employ the queen's forces to compel an unwilling people to 
submit to a government arising out of a system of cruel outrage 
and terrorism." Why, what else have the queen's forces, and 
the king's forces, and the Protector's forces been doing in Ire- 
land ever since the conquest? What civilized government was 
ever founded upon a worse system of cruel outrage and terror- 
ism than the English government of Ireland ? Where was force 
evermore ruthlessly employed to compel the submission of an 
unwilling people? Let Mr. Chamberlain answer his own allies. 
He said only a year ago : 

" I do not believe that the great majority of Englishmen have the 
slightest conception of the system under which this free nation attempts 
to rule the sister-island. It is a system that is founded on the bayonets of 
thirty thousand soldiers encamped permanently as in a hostile country. 
It is a system as completely centralized and bureaucratic as that with 
which Russia governs Poland or as that which prevailed in Venice under 
the Austrian rule." 

Says Mr. Gladstone in a recently-published letter to a Liberal 
politician : 

" I advise you to take resolutely to the study of Irish history. I have 
done in that way the little that I could, and I am amazed at the deadness 
of vulgar opinion to the blackguardism and baseness which have been 
practised on that unfortunate country." 



828 THE QUESTION OF ULSTER. [Sept., 

In a recent speech against the Home-Rule bill an English 
Catholic peer, Lord Arundell of Wardour, remarked that " how- 
ever much they might wish to bring about a reconciliation with 
Ireland, they must regard the question in the first instance as 
Englishmen and from the point of view of the interests of Eng- 
land." This maladroit observation, so beautifully characteristic 
of the English mind, which regards the English point of view as 
the only point from which the universe can be rightly surveyed, 
and the interests of England as the only foundation of the moral 
order, probably did little to clear the mind of the audience to 
which it was addressed ; but it contains a disguised truth. To 
settle the question on the basis of justice is to consult the inte- 
rests of England. There is no other way of saving the honor of 
Englishmen and the prosperity of the empire. Those who be- 
lieve with Lord Arundell of Wardour that they " must regard 
the question in the first instance as Englishmen and from the 
point of view of the interests of England," will realize before the 
contest has gone much further the truth of Mr. Gladstone's 
statement of the benefits of Home Rule, so clearly presented in 
his dignified address to the electors of Midlothian : 

"Among the benefits, gentlemen, I anticipate from your acceptance of 
our policy are these : The consolidation of the united empire and great 
addition to its strength ; the stoppage of the heavy, constant, and demoral- 
izing waste of the public treasure ; the abatement and gradual extinction 
of ignoble feuds in Ireland, and that development of her resources which 
experience shows to be a natural consequence of free and orderly govern- 
ment ; the redemption of the honor of Great Britain from the stigma fastened 
upon her almost from time immemorial, in respect to Ireland, by the judgment 
of the whole civilized world." 



1 886.] PRESIDENT SEEL YE AND RELIGIO us ED UCA TION. 829 



PRESIDENT SEELYE AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION. 

PRESIDENT JULIUS H. SEELYE, of Amherst College, is distin- 
guished as clergyman, educator, and statesman. As a preacher 
he is unsurpassed in his own denomination ; his ministerial labors 
are chiefly in connection with the college church of which he 
is pastor, and scores of young men who go out annually into 
the world of letters and science have been for four years his 
parishioners. His doctrine is strictly orthodox according to 
the standard of Congregationalists ; and the evident sincerity of 
his convictions, his exemplary bearing and earnestness of manner, 
give unusual force to the meagre doctrinal and spiritual teaching 
which his religious system affords. 

\. In the curriculum of the college he holds the chair of mental 
and moral philosophy, for which he is peculiarly adapted by his 
deep knowledge and acute intellect. It is hard, indeed, to see 
how true philosophy can be the handmaid of a fragmentary theo- 
logy ; yet, under President Seelye, Descartes, Kant, Berkeley, 
and Locke appear in their best light. The public life of Julius 
H. Seelye in the House of Representatives at Washington has 
proved him to be also a wise statesman. 

This is the man who has contributed an article in the July 
number of the Forum in which he discusses the question, " Should 
the State Teach Religion? " The sum of his reasoning is this : 

The secularization of education of late is as great as its extension. 
What are the results ? The increase of insanity, crime, vice, pauperism, 
divorce, illegitimacy, vagrancy, and suicide have been proportionate with 
the growth of what is called civilization. Our present educational meth- 
ods do not diminish the real perils of society, but suffer them to increase 
enormously. It is not the illiteracy but the immorality of a people which 
destroys them. No teaching of morality alone, however pure, can cure 
this immorality of the masses. This can be effected only by religion, 
which teaches the necessity of obedience to God. It is evident that the 
religious instruction of a people is indispensable to their very existence. 
Who shall give this instruction? Parents will not do it, as a rule. The 
church is not doing it and cannot do it, unless we give the church the ubi- 
quity and power of the state. The state, for its own preservation, must 
provide for the religious education of the people on precisely the same 
grounds that it provides for instruction in grammar, arithmetic, and geo- 
graphy. The state should provide religious instruction for the people in 
spite of the so-called conscientious convictions of individuals against reli- 
gion, just as it provides an army and navy in spite of the Quakers. Reli- 



830 PRESIDENT SEEL YE AND RELIGIOUS EDUCA TION. [Sept., 

gion is not an end to the state, but only a means for its advancement, to be 
used like any other means. Nevertheless a system of religious doctrine, if 
it were that and nothing more, would be as useless as a system of mere 
morals to secure the inspiration to virtue indispensable in a common- 
wealth. What will succeed is the life of Jesus Christ; that has shown itself 
abundantly able to secure virtuous habits. Christ's history and life should, 
therefore, be taught not simply in Christian families and the Christian 
Church, but in unchristian families and the unchristian world as well. We 
have the authentic records of Christ's life so well established in the Gospels 
that intelligent persons cannot doubt their general accuracy. The funda- 
mentals of religion are in the four Gospels, and the quickening germ of all 
morality is there. Hence the state should provide for instruction in the 
four Gospels for its own preservation. 

Such is an abstract of President Seelye's article. 

If there is any government on earth that can stand the strain 
of secular education, it is ours ; for with us, generally speaking, 
ample liberty is given to churches and private educational enter- 
prises. But the state having taken the control of the education 
of the masses, it has been thought necessary to exclude religious 
instruction from its schools. President Seelye has truthfully 
pointed out the evil results of such a course, and has proposed a 
remedy. His remedy is, as we have seen, that the state should 
teach religion in the public schools, and that the form of religion 
should be the life and doctrine of Christ as contained in the four 
Gospels. We hope, from his guarded statements, that he would 
not make this one more function of an already overloaded public 
department; there is nothing in his article which forbids a fair 
arrangement between the state and religious societies or private 
institutions conducting free religious schools. 

Let us look at his proposals more closely. Having settled 
that religious instruction must be given, he asks, "Who will give 
this instruction?" Many would consider this a very strange 
question. Who but the parents or their chosen representatives ? 
they would answer. And when Professor Seelye insists that 
parents will not because they do not, his opponents will cry, Non 
sequitur. And, in truth, it is by no means demonstrated that pa- 
rents will not provide for the religious training of their children. 
What is plainly seen is that the bulk of them will not or cannot 
do it at home, and are unwilling to have it done at school if that 
involves sacrifices. And, furthermore, if this is true enough of the 
non-Catholic people of America, it is not so with all Americans. 
Catholics have always maintained that religion is necessary for 
the existence of society, and that secular schools are an evil to the 
state as well as to religion. Throughout this country the Catho- 



1 886.] PRESIDENT SEEL YE AND RELIGIOUS EDUCA TION. 831 

lie Church has sought to remedy this evil by the establishment 
of schools, academies, and colleges under religious influence, and 
with marvellous success ; for in some dioceses the schools are 
almost as numerous as parish churches, and but a small percent- 
age of Catholic children attend the public schools. In establish- 
ing these schools love of country as well as love of God has been 
the inspiring motive. From these schools have gone forth those 
whom the knowledge of God has made more dutiful and patri- 
otic citizens. It might as well be supposed that this religious 
education could make a man a less faithful husband, or a woman 
a less devoted wife, or one a less honest tradesman or a more 
wasteful servant, as to suppose that it could weaken love of 
country. Religion imposes obedience to the state (except in 
matters forbidden by the law of God) as a divine command. 
Hence it is a great bulwark of the state. Since Catholics hold it 
as certain that the happiness of men for this world, as well as 
for eternity, depends upon their possessing religion, the church 
provides religious schools for Catholic children, and can never be 
turned aside from this policy any more than St. Peter could have 
been hindered from preaching the Gospel. 

When, therefore, President Seelye asks, "Shall we expect it 
[religious schooling] from the church ? " and answers, " But the 
church is confessedly not doing this work," he cannot mean the 
Catholic Church. The Catholic people are, as a matter of fact, 
educating their children in religious schools. From kindergar- 
ten to university, by free schools and pay schools, colleges and 
academies, they are educating their children in religious schools 
to the very uttermost limit of their means, paying all the expenses 
out of their private pockets, and doing the work well. If many 
Catholic children are yet in schools in which President Seelye's 
four Gospels and the study of the life of Christ are forbidden by 
law, it is because we are poor, not because we are confessedly 
not doing the work of religious education. We have now over 
half a million of Catholic children in parochial schools, and as 
sure as day follows night we shall yet have them all there, and 
that at no distant time. 

It is the Protestant churches who are confessedly at fault. 
They took up with the godless plan from divers motives : some 
(we affirm it because representative men among them have often 
avowed it) because they hoped by that means to destroy the 
Catholic faith in the children of the immigrants and these were 
the knowing ones ; others because sectarian rancor prevented an 
agreement among themselves as to the doctrine to be taught ; 



832 PRESIDENT SEEL YE AND RELIGIOUS EDUCA TION. [Sept., 

many from religious indifferentism. But we believe that the 
main reason why the present system got hold of the people's 
little ones was because it has been able, amidst delusions and 
sophistries and parental sloth, to creep gradually into the place 
and privileges of a gigantic monopoly. In matters of education 
state officials have little by little crowded the parent out. The 
state knows citizens and taxpayers, but not fathers and mothers. 
You pay your school-tax and I will train your child such are 
the articles of partnership between parents and the state. 

Is it, however, fair to say that such a state of things indicates 
an unwillingness on the part of the mass of non-Catholics to train 
their children in religious schools? We think not. We shall 
continue to think better of our Protestant brethren till they have 
had a fairer trial. Give them a chance ; amend the laws so that 
private free schools may by some means receive state aid and be 
subject to state inspection or supervision, and we are firmly per- 
suaded that religious schools filled with Protestant children will 
in a few years be so numerous and flourishing as to negative 
President Seelye's forebodings. All that the present state of 
things actually proves against non-Catholic parents is that, as a 
body, they are not as willing as their Catholic fellow-citizens to 
make sacrifices for the sake of the religious instruction of their 
children ; there is, in our opinion, no evidence that they are 
hopelessly indifferent in the matter. 

One thing the article we are considering clearly shows : that 
sincere and enlightened men of all parties and creeds are coming 
to one mind as to the best means of making good citizens. The 
virtuous man is the good citizen. The religious man is the one 
whose virtue is of the highest type and most reliable character. 
Therefore, argues President Seelye, let the state see to it that 
its schools shall be religious. We admit that we do not entirely 
understand his process, his exact method of setting the state to 
work in this new field. But what of that? Perhaps we have not 
yet reached the stage of the discussion when practical expe- 
dients are to be set a-going, unless it be by way of experiment ; 
convictions are not quite ripened enough for that. We have not 
the slightest doubt that a satisfactory accommodation will be 
reached in due time. Only this we wish to say to President 
Seelye and his associates in this movement : the true remedy is 
to leave the education of children where God has placed it, in 
the hands of parents, and especially as they are gathered into 
religious societies. This much we do maintain : the best school 
is where the guidance which the child feels is the right arm of 
the parent and the little finger of the state. 



1886.] SIGEFREY THE ONE-ARMED. 833 



SIGEFREY THE ONE-ARMED. 

AMONG the many legends connected with the life and death 
of St. Genevieve is the touching- history of Sigefrey the One- 
Armed. Paul Feval has told it at length in his usual vivacious 
style, and we are indebted to him for much that is contained in 
our English version of the story. 

In the year of our Lord 493 the city of Soissons was the 
scene of an unusual pageant and of general rejoicing. Yet little 
did the merry crowd that made the streets lively with songs and 
games, or the fierce-visaged warriors and noble ladies of the 
court, dream of the true importance attached to the event which 
awakened so much interest the marriage of the pagan Clovis, 
chief or king of the Franks, with the beautiful and pious Clo- 
tilda, daughter of Gombauld, the Christian king of the Bur- 
gunds. Through this marriage the foundations of the kingdom 
of France were to be laid under the auspices of a Christian king. 

Among the warriors who came with Clovis a young Frank 
attracted general attention for his tall and elegant figure, his 
proud mien, and the singular beauty of his features. His hair 
fell in golden curls upon his broad shoulders. His blue eyes had 
a soft, dreamy look, yet the proud flash that occasionally lighted 
them revealed the passionate soul and quick temper of the war- 
rior. Quite young, he had already acquired fame by his prowess 
in many a battle. 

He was called Sigefrey, and was the son of Count Aubert, the 
favorite lend, or thane, of King Clovis. 

Beautiful were the Burgundian maidens who formed Clotil- 
da's train, yet one, above all, was the cynosure of admiring eyes, 
so wondrous was her beauty. 

Sigefrey was dazzled. A novel emotion filled his heart, which 
up to that time had dreamed only of glory and combats. He 
asked who this young girl was. He was told that her name was 
Batilda the Fair, daughter of Gontran, the Burgund. His infor- 
mant added that she was the godchild of St. Genevieve, and as 
virtuous as she was fair. 

The young warrior remained thoughtful. For the first time 
he loved. During the days of festivity that followed the nuptials 
he met Batilda several times, and each hour spent in her com- 
pany increased his passion. 
VOL. XLIII. 53 



834 SlGEFKEY THE ONE-ARMED. [Sept., 

But Clovis was preparing to leave Soissons with his young 
wife with that Clotilda who, at no distant day, was to make him 
know the true God. The day before their departure Sigefrey 
found himself alone with Batilda for the first time. Bending one 
knee before her, he told her his love in impassioned accents. 
Batilda heard him without anger ; her blushes and downcast 
eyes encouraged him to hope ; but, when he had spoken, she 
drew from her bosom a cross of highly-wrought gold, and asked 
him : " Do you know this sacred emblem ? " 

" Yes," replied Sigefrey, averting his eyes, " it is the sign of 
the Christians." 

" Do you adore it ? " 

" No," stammered the young lover, his heart grown cold with 
a sudden presentiment. 

" Farewell, then, Sigefrey, son of Aubert," said the maiden 
gravely. " I am a Christian, and can never wed one who adores 
not the cross." 

She turned away from him, and Sigefrey, still kneeling, his 
hands clasped in supplication, saw her disappear ere he could 
find words to beseech her to listen to his suit. The next day 
Clovis and Clotilda left Soissons. The queen did not take any 
of her young companions with her. Sigefrey followed his chief. 
He did not see Batilda again. 

She was constantly in his thoughts. Wherever the fortunes 
of war led him he made earnest inquiries to discover her abode, 
but his efforts were fruitless. The information he obtained 
went no further than this : She was a stranger in Soissons, and 
had come thither with other noble ladies on the occasion of the 
royal marriage ; she had not been seen after Clotilda's departure. 
No one could tell whither she had gone. Sigefrey lost all hope 
of finding her, but his passion, for being hopeless, became only 
stronger. 

Three long years had elapsed. The young Frank was but a 
shadow of his former self; a settled melancholy preyed upon his 
soul; nothing could rouse him except the signal of combat. Then 
he would throw himself in the thickest of the fray, courting 
death, and only succeeded in winning new laurels. 

The battle of Tolbiac was fought. History tells us that 
Clovis, who had resisted until then the prayers of his beloved 
queen, seeing his army in danger of being cut to pieces, exclaim- 
ed : " O God of Clotilda ! O Christ ! I call thee to my help. 
. . . Give me victory on this day, and I will give myself up to 
thee for ever! " 



1 886.] SIGEFREY THE ONE-ARMED. 835 

" Christ ! Christ ! " echoed the soldiers. 

" I swear that I will receive baptism," continued the king. 
" O Christ ! thou shalt be my God." 

" The God of Clovis shall be our God ! " cried his brave fol- 
lowers. 

Filled with a new ardor, Clovis and his Franks rushed upon 
the Germans, shouting, " Christ J Cnrist ! " The enemy, dis- 
mayed at this fierce onslaught, gave way ; their ranks were bro- 
ken, they fled panic-stricken, pursued by this new war-cry. The 
victory was won. 

Faithful to his plighted vow, Clovis prepared to receive bap- 
tism at the hands of the venerable St. Remi. The lends of the 
royal neophyte and their fierce soldiers will join their blood- 
stained hands, and naively, filled with blind confidence, will fol- 
low their chief in this regenerating act, even as they followed 
him to the baptism of blood on the fields of battle. They know 
nothing as yet of Him crucified; what does it matter? He is 
the God of Clovis, the God who gave them the victory that is 
enough. 

Among these future Christians was one to whom the new 
faith was the harbinger of hope. Sigefrey glorified Clovis for 
authorizing him to worship the God of Batilda. Once a Chris- 
tian, he would be worthy of the Burgundian maiden. To find; 
her was now his sole aim, and hope, so long since fled, entered 
his heart anew. 

Howbeit he did not receive baptism with his chief. After 
the battle of Tolbiac, Ciovis, according to the custom of the 
time, made a fresh distribution of land among his lends. Count 
Aubert, who had displayed his usual daring and helped not a 
little in the enemy's defeat, received for his share all the land on 
the banks of the Seine comprised between the two points where 
now stand St. Cloud and St. Denis, and including, consequently, 
Mount Mars known in our days as Montmartre. 

Aubert called his son, Sigefrey, and ordered him to proceed 
forthwith to their new estate and take possession thereof in his 
name. Sigefrey departed on his mission, taking with him only 
one retainer. He had reached the woody country in the vicinity 
of Mount Mars, and, plunged in deep thought, was following a 
path through the forest, when a sudden noise caused him to look 
up. A stag, pursued by a pack of hounds, was crossing a clear- 
ing a little distance up the road ; then came a lady on horseback, 
who passed with the swiftness of an arrow. 

" Batilda ! " cried the young lover. Though it had been but 



836 SIGEFREY THE ONE-ARMED. [Sept, 

the vision of a moment, he had recognized her. He urged his 
horse in pursuit, but too late : she had vanished from sight, he 
knew not in what direction. Had she recognized him? 

It was nearly dark when Sigefrey stopped his jaded horse at 
the gate of a small farm-house, where he asked for shelter for the 
night. Magnificent trees shaded this house, and numerous flocks 
grazed in the green meadows around. In the distance Mount 
Mars rose, crowned with an old feudal tower. This manor was 
evidently inhabited ; he must, perforce, eject the present owner. 

"Who lives in that tower? " he asked. 

"Old Gontran, the Burgund," replied the farmer; "he is 
suzerain lord of all this section." 

The lord of the manor was, indeed, the father of the long- 
sought Batilda, which accounted for her presence in the neigh- 
boring forest. Twelve years back Gontran had taken forcible 
possession of this estate the law of might made and unmade 
titles to property in those days and no one had disturbed him, 
for he had been the faithful lend of Clotilda's father, King Gom- 
bauld. 

While Sigefrey was making this discovery Batilda sat at her 
window in the old tower, thinking over the past and dreaming 
sadly of the future. She loved Sigefrey, and an insuperable ob- 
stacle separated them. She wept ; and yet the saint, her god- 
mother, had told her one day : " Fear not, child ; thou shalt 
be happy." And never, to man's knowledge, had Genevieve 
spoken a word that was not strictly true. Batilda remembered 
this and tried to hope, but she wept. 

Old Gontran entered his daughter's room hurriedly. He 
was the bearer of bad news. A friend had managed to send him 
word that Clovis had made a distribution of lands, and Mount 
Mars was now the property of the fiercest of Austrasian 
counts. 

" I despoiled the former proprietor of this land," the old man 
was saying sadly to Batilda ; " to-day a new-comer, stronger 
than I, is going to turn me out. It is right. I cannot complain ; 
but you, my darling, what is to become of you?" 

At this moment the sound of a horn was heard, and a man- 
at-arms came up to announce that a Prankish lord and his atten- 
dant demanded admittance. The stranger was shown in. It 
was Sigefrey. 

" Gontran," said he, after he had made himself known as Au- 
bert's son and representative, " I come not to strip you of your 
possessions. I have loved your daughter Batilda ever since I 



1886.1 SIGEFREY THE ONE-ARMED. 837 

first saw her at King Clovis' marriage three years ago; give her 
to me for a wife and let there be peace between us." 

Gontran, much astonished, looked inquiringly at Batilda. 

The maiden blushed; then, raising her downcast eyes, she said, 
with proud candor: 

" It is indeed three years since I first met Sigefrey. I will 
admit that I reciprocate his love ; but he worships strange gods, 
and I am a Christian. I cannot be his wife, and he knows it." 

" I wish to be a Christian, too," said the happy lover ; "I 
could not stay to receive baptism with our great King Clovis, 
but let Batilda teach me. Her God will be my God." 

Was the saint's prophecy about to be fulfilled ? 

Sigefrey remained a welcome guest at the tower. Every 
day he listened to the pious exhortations of old Gontran ; every 
day he saw his dear Batilda. He lived as in a dream, forgetting 
everything his father, Clovis, his own fame as a warrior. For 
him the world did not extend beyond the walls of the old castle. 
It had been arranged that the marriage should be celebrated on 
the day following that of his baptism. Sigefrey proclaimed him- 
self ready for the latter, but Batilda wished her future husband 
to be thoroughly prepared to receive the two sacraments. He 
had become so dear to her that she began to fear her great love 
might displease Heaven. 

"Perhaps I love you too much," she said one day to her 
lover. " Let us go and consult my godmother, the saint." 

They crossed the Seine and sought Genevieve's humble 
home. The saint, now almost an octogenarian, was still beau- 
tiful; hers was the beauty of the angels. She smiled sweetly 
when she saw her godchild coming hand-in-hand with the 
young Frank. 

When Batilda had told her the story of their love and her 
own scrupulous fears, Genevieve took the hands of the two 
lovers and held them for a long while clasped in her own. She 
gazed at the young couple with infinite sweetness. At last she 
spoke. 

"Go in peace, my children," said she "go; you shall be 
happy." And having traced the sign of the cross on their brows, 
she bent over and kissed them. 

The happy lovers returned with light hearts, free from doubt 
and fears. But Sigefrey, all absorbed in his new life, had for- 
gotten to communicate with his father. Old Aubert grew un- 
easy at this unaccountable silence. 

"I must go and find out what is become of my son," he 



838 SIGEFREY THE ONE-ARMED. [Sept., 

mused; "perhaps those Burgunds have killed him. I will 
avenge his death tenfold ! " 

Aubert hated the Burgunds and did not believe in the God of 
the Christians. Notwithstanding Clovis' example, he had refused 
to let himself be baptized. He assembled his numerous followers 
and went in search of the missing Sigefrey. 

It was night when he came in sight of Mount Mars, and, like 
Sigefrey, he stopped at the farm-house and made inquiries. He 
learned that Gontran lived in the old tower. Some time since a 
handsome young warrior had come with one attendant. He had 
asked questions about the castle and its owner, and had taken the 
road thither. He had not been seen since. Aubert jumped at 
the conclusion that his son, if not murdered, must be held prisoner 
in the tower. He would rescue or avenge him. The place was 
strong and well defended, but there was a secret passage by 
which it might be entered. The farmer knew this secret way, 
and, what between terror at Aubert's threats and awakened ava- 
rice at the prospect of a rich reward, the wretch betrayed his 
master. He guided the count and his party through a subterra- 
nean passage which led directly to the apartments of the castel- 
lan. Gontran, Batilda, and their servants were taken prisoners 
without resistance. So complete was the surprise that the garri- 
son was not aware of the capture of their lord. Sigefrey slept 
in another wing of the building. 

This easy victory disposed Aubert to clemency ; and when 
Gontran offered to pay ransom for himself and daughter, the 
wily Austrasian consented, deferring his inquiries concerning his 
son's fate until he had possessed himself of the old Burgund's 
treasure. Gontran had but one thought : to save Batilda from 
being carried off by their unknown captor. His old majordomo, 
also a prisoner, was graciously permitted to go for the money. 
It was in the cellar, and, the doors of the apartments being 
guarded, there was no chance of escape. As the majordomo 
was leaving the room he exchanged a glance full of meaning 
with Batilda. 

The faithful old servant tarried long on his errand, and Au- 
bert was growing impatient, when he made his appearance, bear- 
ing the iron casket which contained his master's treasure, and 
scales to weigh the gold. 

Gontran possessed in all two hundred gold marks. He of- 
fered one hundred and fifty of these for his ransom. Aubert 
made a motion of assent, and the weighing commenced. It was 
a slow process, made doubly so by the old majordomo's clumsi- 



1 886.] SlGEFREY THE ONE-ARMED. 839 

ness in piling up the gold-pieces. At last he announced one 
hundred and fifty marks. 

" Very well," said Aubert ; " but you have not counted the 
weight of the sword." 

And he threw his heavy weapon on the scale tha.held the 
weights. 

At this juncture a secret door, concealed in the woodwork, 
was thrown open, and a warrior of commanding stature entered. 
His shoulders were covered with a huge bear-skin, and the ani- 
mal's head, drawn down over his brow, concealed his features. 
Crossing the room, he stopped opposite the count. 

" Against the weight of the sword I bring the weight of the 
axe!" 

As he spoke these words he drew a battle-axe from under his 
bear-skin and threw it upon the pile of gold. The other scale 
flew up. 

"Who art thou?" cried Count Aubert, pale with rage at this 
audacious interference. 

" I am, like thee, a noble ; like thee, a lend and a Frank," re- 
plied the unknown. 

"Take up thy axe and prove thy words!" shouted Aubert, 
who wrested a francic from the hand of one of his men-at-arms 
and brandished it aloft. 

The mysterious stranger made no motion. 

Aubert, blind with rage, struck the defenceless man, whose 
right arm fell, severed at the shoulder. 

The bystanders uttered a cry of horror. Batilda sprang to- 
ward the wounded man, but the latter, motioning her away 
gently, threw back the bear's head that had served him as a 
mask. 

Count Aubert recognized his son ! 

The fierce old man felt his heart breaking. The only soft 
feeling he had ever known had ;been love for that son, the 
pride and hope of his declining years ; and he had destroyed him 
in the flower of his youth. No man could survive such a wound. 
He wept, he cursed his blind fury, but the evil done could not be 
repaired. The dying man made him swear that, as the price of 
blood, he would leave Gontran and Batilda in peaceful possession 
of the estate. Then he bade him good-by, begging to ' be left 
with her for whom he had given his life. 

Aubert departed, wild with grief. His last act before leaving 
Mount Mars was to hang the farmer who had led him into the 
tower. He disappears from our story. We will merely mention 



840 SIGEFREY THE ONE-ARMED. [Sept., 

the fact that a short time after this sad event he found an honor- 
able death on the battle-field. 

Sigefrey did not die of this terrible wound. Love performed 
a miracle. Sigefrey recovered, was baptized, and married his 
Batilda. The young bride fairly worshipped her husband. Un- 
known to Sigefrey, she had had that arm embalmed which he had 
sacrificed in her defence. This dear relic she kept locked up in 
an ebony casket, the key of whbch she always carried about her. 
Often, when alone in her chamber, she would open the box and 
shed tears of love and gratitude over her treasure. Few, if any, 
in the household knew of the existence of this casket ; none had 
any suspicion of its precious contents. 

But Sigefrey was not happy. An idle word, spoken carelessly 
in his hearing, had wounded him deeply : " The one-handed 
man," a neighbor had said, speaking of him. He brooded over 
his misfortune until his mind was full of morbid fancies. Though 
Batilda surrounded him with unmistakable loving care, he per- 
suaded himself that no woman could love him, that all these 
marks of affection were inspired only by a feeling of pity for his 
helplessness. The birth of two children tended only to increase 
his sadness. He dwelt on the bitter thought that his daughter 
would not have the protection of a father's strong arm ; that he, 
the disabled soldier, could not teach his son to handle a sword. 
Sigefrey was slowly dying of melancholy. 

Poor Batilda saw all this and was miserable. She wept and 
prayed in the secret of her chamber, for she tried to show a 
cheerful face to her husband. At last she felt that she could not 
stand this much longer : she betook herself to Paris to see Gene- 
vieve. She was refused admittance, as the saint was lying at the 
point of death and was engaged at that moment in saying her 
last orisons. But even as the attendant was explaining this to 
the disappointed visitor the saint's voice was heard, saying : 

" Let my godchild, Batilda the Fair, enter. I wish to see her 
before I go to God." 

Batilda entered. 

The Virgin of Nanterre was lying on her bed ; around her 
head a holy nimbus shone ; her gentle features already wore the 
calmness of death. 

Batrlda fell on her knees by the bedside. 

" O saint ! saint ! " she cried, " help me in great trouble ! . . . 
You told me one day that I would be happy, and now Sigefrey 
wants to die, and there can be no happiness for me. Oh ! have 
pity on me, godmother! ..." 



1 886.] SlGEFREY THE ONE-ARMED. 84! 

" My child," said Genevieve faintly, " I know all that you suf- 
fer. I have been praying for you this long time past." 

" Sigefrey wants to die ! ..." was all poor Batilda could say 
amid her sobs. 

" My beloved godchild," the saint replied, " I don't want him 
to die ; . . . and, since I have told you that you shall be happy, it 
must not be that I have spoken falsely even once in my life." 

And the dying woman pressed the crucifix to her lips. 

" Listen," said she, after a silent pause " listen, and remember 
well what I am going to say to you. . . . This evening, when 
the setting sun marks the fifth hour, I shall be dead. . . ." 

" Dead ! . . ." repeated Batilda, sobbing. 

" Yes," said the saint, and a blissful smile illumined her pallid 
face, " I shall be dead. If my own wish were granted I should 
be buried at Nanterre, near my mother; but Queen Clotilda will 
not permit it. ... On the twenty-fourth day after my death my 
poor body, enclosed in a rich casket, shall be made to lie in state 
in the church of SS. Peter and Paul. On the morning of that 
twenty-fourth day you will take the ebony casket which you hide 
so jealously from prying eyes ..." 

Batilda looked up, astonished. The existence of this casket 
was her secret. She had never mentioned it to her godmother. 

Genevieve smiled. 

" God blesses a pure and true love," said she. " You will have 
this casket carried before you to the church of SS. Peter and 
Paul. You will walk thither holding by the hand your two chil- 
dren. Sigefrey will accompany you, mounted on his war-horse. 
Regnier, his faithful companion, will carry his sword. Your old 
father, Gontran, must go also. 

" When the candles round my catafalco shall have been lighted, 
you will take the casket, and you will tell Sigefrey to take off his 
tunic and to kneel down. . . ." 

She ceased speaking. Batilda, after waiting for her to con- 
tinue, asked in a tremulous voice : 

" And then, godmother, what shall I do next? " 

" Then, daughter," replied the saint, " a voice will speak to 
your soul. It will be my voice. . . . You will do what my voice 
bids you. . . . Go." 

She gave Batilda her blessing and motioned to her to leave 
the room. 

When the setting sun marked the fifth hour Genevieve's soul 
left her perishable body to ascend to the abode of the blessed. 

The news, " The saint is dead ! ' startled all Paris. The 



842 SlGEFREY THE ONE-ARMED. [Sept., 

king, the queen, the great and the lowly, the poor and the rich, 
every one wished to go and do homage to her whose intercession 
had twice saved Paris. 

The last words spoken by Batilda's godmother were verified. 
Queen Clotilda asked that the body be embalmed and enclosed 
in a casket of massive silver ornamented with precious stones. 
Immediately the king, the lords, the liege-men gave ; not a beg- 
gar-woman so poor but came with her offering. Soon a huge 
pile of silver and gold rose in the vestibule of the saint's humble 
abode. 

On the twenty-third day the casket was finished. The body, 
which had been carefully embalmed, was placed in it, and it 
was carried with great pomp to the basilica of SS. Peter and 
Paul. 

Batilda followed religiously the instructions of the departed, 
and, strange as it seems, neither Sigefrey nor Gontran ques- 
tioned her motives ; they obeyed silently. 

The church was crowded. At the fifth hour the beginning 
of the twenty-fourth day the upper clergy entered by one of 
the doors of the choir, while the king and queen, escorted by the 
noble lords and ladies, made their entry from the opposite side. 
The magnificent, heavy casket was placed on a litter. King Clo- 
vis, his lends, and the bishops grasped the handles of the litter 
and lifted the pious burden, which they carried in procession 
round the nave. 

When the casket was brought back to its resting-place before 
the altar, Batilda, who had remained kneeling, recollected herself 
and called thrice in her heart: " Genevieve ! Genevieve ! Gene- 
vieve ! " 

And in the innermost recess of her heart she heard a voice that 
said : " My godchild, I am with thee." 

Then, rising, she took the ebony casket from the hands of her 
maid and turned towards her husband. A deep silence fell upon 
the immense assembly. Every one felt that something strange 
was about to happen. 

Batilda inserted the key in the lock of the casket, and said : 

" My beloved Sigefrey, I pray you take off your tunic." 

Sigefrey obeyed without showing any surprise. 

" My beloved husband," continued Batilda, her voice trem- 
bling with emotion, " I pray you kneel before the remains of my 
sainted godmother, Genevieve." 

She opened the casket and stood motionless, pale and anxious. 
She was awaiting the further fulfilment of the promise. Then 



1 886.] SlGEFREY THE ONE-ARMED. 843 

a happy smile lighted her beautiful features. The VOICE was 
speaking 1 in her heart. She took the lifeless arm from the casket 
and lifted it above her head. 

" O Christ ! " said she, " listen to the prayer of thy servant, 
Genevieve, who is even now at thy feet, and who beseeches 
thee to grant us the happiness she had promised us in thy 
name. " O Christ ! hear thy servant, so that it shall not be said 
that she hath spoken falsely even once in her life ! " 

A soft melody, which seemed to descend from the vault, filled 
the church, and the head of the saint appeared, surrounded by a 
glory. 

Batilda tore open the linen which covered Sigefrey's shoul- 
der. The fearful scar was exposed to view ; it reddened slowly, 
slowly, and three drops of blood oozed from the tender skin. 
Batiida lowered the lifeless arm she still held aloft, and pressed it 
against her husband's bleeding shoulder. 

From the vault a voice was heard which said distinctly amid 
the concert of harmonious murmurs : 

" Behold, O people, the first miracle of St. Genevieve ! " 

The crowd knelt, awe-struck. 

Meanwhile Sigefrey had risen, staggering, uncertain, as one 
who knows that he is dreaming and dreads to awake. 

He moved his right arm tentatively. The arm held firmly 
and naturally to his shoulder. 

" A miracle ! a miracle ! " cried the crowd. 

Sigefrey, his eyes brimming with grateful tears, turned to- 
wards his young son. " Child," said he, " I will teach thee how 
to hold a sword. Grow up and be a warrior ! " 

And to his little daughter: "I have an arm to protect and 
defend thee, my darling ; thou mayest grow to be as beautiful as 
thy mother ! " 

Then he drew Batilda to his breast. " Saint ! " he cried, 
" I thank thee ! For the first time I hold my beloved wife to my 
heart ! " 

He glanced around proudly, and grasping his sword, which 
was borne on a cushion by the faithful Regnier, he waved it three 
times wildly, and cried out in a voice that resounded through 
the church : 

" Glory be to God ! I am once more a warrior ! " 

Thus ends the legend of Sigefrey the One- Armed. 



844 MADAME MARY ALOYSIA HARDEY. [Sept., 



MADAME MARY ALOYSIA HARDEY. 

THE death of Madame Hardey, which occurred in Paris, June 
17, 1886, has deprived the religious of the Sacred Heart in this 
country of a most efficient directress and of a loving and most 
tenderly beloved mother. 

Madame Mary Aloysia Hardey was born in Maryland in 
1809. Her parents came of that good old Catholic stock which 
preferred to leave its native soil in order to enjoy religious 
liberty in the wilds of the then new colony; and well were the 
virtues of her ancestors shown forth in the life of this truly 
valiant woman. 

While she was yet in early childhood the family removed to 
Louisiana, and the young Aloysia was placed in the convent 
school of the Sacred Heart, then under the direction of Madame 
Aude. Here she remained until after her fifteenth year, when 
she left her school duties only to assume the habit of a novice in 
the society. From the first Madame Hardey was eminent for 
her rare prudence and extraordinary virtue, and she was soon 
chosen to aid in the government and extension of the order. 
She accompanied the gifted Mere Aude to Paris, where she re- 
ceived the approbation and blessing of the Venerable Madame 
Barat, the foundress of the society ; and then Madame Hardey 
went to Rome, where His Holiness Pope Gregory blessed the 
young American and strengthened her zeal. After many fruitful 
labors in the South Madame Hardey, then but little more than 
thirty years of age, was appointed to direct the important mis- 
sion .confided to the society in these Middle States, especially in 
New York. Here the first convent of the Sacred Heart was 
opened in Houston Street ; but the community and academy in- 
creasing rapidly, they removed, first to Astoria, and finally, about 
the year 1847, to their present locality at Manhattan ville, the 
ancient country-seat of the Lorillards. Thence Madame Hardey 
projected and accomplished many important foundations and 
works of zeal, and her wonderful energy and unselfish devotion 
to the interests of souls led her to spare neither fatigue nor 
anxiety in her arduous and responsible tasks. Convents were 
opened in Rochester, Albany, Philadelphia, Boston, Providence, 
Detroit, Cincinnati, Halifax, St. John's, Montreal, and in many 
other cities of the Western States and the Provinces, either by 



1 886.] , MADAME MARY ALOYSIA HARDEY. 845 

her direct action or with her charitable concurrence ; and before 
her death she had the happiness of seeing her spiritual daugh- 
ters carrying the standard of the Sacred Heart even into the 
centre of Mexico and far beyond the seas to New Zealand and 
Australia. Only the Master for whom she toiled can tell the 
extent and importance of her good works ; but the many who 
knew her in life, not only among the religious but among the 
clergy and laity, now review with astonishment the magnificent 
successes of that noble career. In 1872 Madame Hardey was 
called to Paris to assist in the general government of the society, 
which had spread thence over nearly all the civilized parts of the 
globe, and since that time she had thrice visited this country, 
always in the interest of her American houses. Her advent was 
ever a signal for universal rejoicing only equalled by the sorrow 
that accompanied each departure ; and the innumerable recipients 
of her bounty, as well as a host of important and influential friends, 
shared heartily in the enthusiasm and affectionate demonstra- 
tions of her devoted religious daughters. Great, then, were the 
mourning and desolation which followed in the train of the 
cablegram that brought the fatal tidings of her death, and many 
a long day will pass ere the hearts of the multitude that knew 
and loved her will cease to grieve over her loss, while her 
memory will remain in benediction for ever. 

Madame Hardey had the gift of mingling in the world, and 
of being an excellent administratrix, without losing anything 
of the exalted asceticism of the religious life. Although obliged, 
from her care of the temporalities of the institutions over which 
she presided, to come in relation with things and persons natural- 
ly calculated to wear off the sheen of high spirituality, she pre- 
served among seculars the fervor of the novice. This rare ex- 
cellence of leading a contemplative in the midst of an active life 
arose from her punctilious fidelity to the rules of her order, from 
the observance of which she never allowed anything to make her 
swerve. Thus faithful to every point of her rule, she edified the 
religious community in which she lived; while her sweet yet 
firm character, her cultivated manners and magnetic virtues, 
won the respect and the love of seculars. 



846 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Sept., 



A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 

RUSSIAN novels are just now very fashionable. Count Tol- 
stoi's religious vagaries have strengthened his popularity as a 
novelist, and even the interminable Peace and War published by 
Gottsberger in New York in six volumes finds many readers. 
It is neither a history nor a novel ; its claims to be an historical 
picture interfere with its interest as a work of fiction, and vice 
versa. The earlier volumes in which Russian life is depicted are 
good specimens of Tolstoi's best manner. In his later essays he 
seems to have revised some of the conclusions of My Religion. 
He has discovered that it is not necessary to give all that one 
has to the poor, but only one's labor. He congratulates himself 
that the eye of the needle is much larger than he imagined so 
large, in fact, that a heavily-loaded camel may pass through it. 
From this it is evident that Count Tolstoi's " religion " is still 
capable of transitions. Tolstoi is now better known to the Eng- 
lish-speaking public than any other Russian writer, except Tur- 
gueneff. Pushkin is comparatively unknown ; Gogol is begin- 
ning to find translators because the introduction of Tolstoi has 
created a taste for Russian literature ; but Gontcharoff, Ostrovsky, 
and Pisemsky are only names as yet, although they are held in 
their own country to be worthy of a place beside those of Tur- 
gueneff and Tolstoi. 

Count Tolstoi's Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth (New York: 
Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.) is a valuable addition to our means 
of understanding how life goes on in Russia. It is hardly a bio- 
graphy of Count Tolstoi, since he mixes up much that is fiction 
with what is true. All this makes it, like Peace and War, tantaliz- 
ing and unsatisfactory, but does not destroy its fascination. It 
is the revelation of a new life, and it brings us nearer to a com- 
prehension of the effects of the lamentable Greek schism on the 
morals, manners, and thought of the higher classes in Russia 
than any book has hitherto done. It is at once idealistic and 
realistic. If Count Tolstoi has changed somewhat the facts of 
his outward life, he has set down those of his inner life without 
reserve. He has painted frankly the brutality that lies so very 
near the varnish of cultivation a sort of French lacquer, that 
covers but does not hide the crude passions of a semi-civilized 
race. He has left out nothing from a desire to make the best of 



1 886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 847 

the Russian youth, so typical of Russian youths in general. He 
does not hesitate to make his mental and moral toilet in public. 
His egotism, his pride, his foolishness, his self-consciousness, his 
vanity, are all put on or taken off in our presence. Count Tol- 
stoi has idealized those he loved, and perhaps added here and 
there a touch of high color to some characters and surroundings, 
but the truth of the book in the main is startling and unmistak- 
able. And the manner of the narrative is simplicity itself. This 
quality has been scrupulously preserved by Isabel F. Hapgood, 
who has translated the book from the Russian. 

The progress of a young Russian of the privileged classes 
from the surveillance of his teachers foreigners, German first, 
and French afterwards to the university is carefully noted. The 
thoughts and fancies of childhood color the dreams of youth, and 
it is interesting to note as a proof of Tolstoi's fidelity to nature 
how much of a child the swaggering student remains even in his 
carouses and amid all his affectations of knowledge and expe- 
rience of the world. 

A curious chapter is that in which Tolstoi now professing to 
be a believer in the Scriptures, but not in immortality or the re- 
surrection tells how he prepared to receive the Blessed Sacra- 
ment at Easter : 

"To-day I shall be free from sin," I thought, "and I shall never com- 
mit any more. (Here I recalled all the sins which troubled me most.) I 
shall go to church without fail every Sunday, and afterwards I shall read 
the Gospels for a whole hour; and then, out of the white bank-bill which 
I shall receive every month when I enter the university, I will be sure to 
give two rubles and a half (one-tenth) to the poor, and in such a manner 
that no one shall know it and not to beggars, but I will seek out poor 
people, an orphan or old woman whom no one knows about." 

Very well satisfied with his present condition of sanctity, the 
young student loses himself in day-dreams that lead him to the 
verge of sin, but he recovers himself and resumes his rather 
elaborate and ostentatious contempt for the world, the flesh, and 
the devil. The time for confession comes. The priest is at the 
house, and the family gather in a small room to await their turn. 
The young Russian enjoys the sensation of terror and devotion 
that strikes him when his turn comes. In truth, Count Tolstoi's 
later religious eccentricities are more easily understood in the 
light of the perpetual egotism of his youthful religion, in which 
" I " and the feelings of this " I " seem to be more important than 
the love or fear of God. The student leaves the priest in a re- 
freshing and comfortable state of mind which lasted until he 
went to bed. 



A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Sept., 

" I had already fallen into a doze," he writes, " as I was going over in 
imagination all the sins of which I had been purified, when all at once I 
recalled one shameful sin I had kept back in confession. The words of 
the prayer preceding confession came back to me and resounded in my 
ears without intermission. All my composure vanished in a moment. 
'And if you conceal aught, so shall ye have greater sin.' I saw that I was 
such a terrible sinner that there was no punishment adequate for me. 
Long did I toss from side to side as I reflected on my situation, and await- 
ed God's punishment, and even sudden death, from moment to moment 
a thought which threw me into indescribable terror. But suddenly the 
happy thought occurred to me to go or ride to the priest at the monastery 
as soon as it was light, and confess again ; and I became calm." 

He could scarcely wait for the morning. He rushed to the 
monastery before dawn, and made his confession and felt happy. 
As he went homeward in a jolting drozhky he began to reflect 
" that the priest was probably thinking by this time that such 
a fine soul of a young man as I he had never met, and never 
would meet in all his life, and that there were no others like me." 
Wanting to talk, he confides his feelings to the driver, who looks 
incredulous, but does not understand what he means. He, how- 
ever, does not lose the belief that this personage looks on him 
as a heroic young person until he fails to find the forty kopecks 
with which to pay his fare, and tries to borrow it from his fa- 
ther's servants. Then the driver's real opinion was delivered in 
forcible and uncomplimentary language. When he began to 
dress for church, in order that he might receive communion 
with the rest, he forgot his resolutions and " sinned to an incal- 
culable extent." " Having donned another suit, I went to the 
communion in a strange state of agitation of mind and with utter 
disbelief in my very fine proclivities." 

It is a pity that Count Tolstoi did not write "autobiogra- 
phy " on his title-page instead of "novel." It is neither a novel 
nor an autobiography ; but, nevertheless, it gives a fuller picture 
of this strange Russian, who has been for some time an object of 
intense interest to the world, than a biography by another man, 
however correct in the matter of dates, etc., could do. 

Tar as Bulba is the first of a series of Gogol's works, translated 
by Isabel F. Hapgood from the Russian and published by Crow- 
ell & Co. " Taras Bulba " is a Cossack of the fifteenth cen- 
tury. He is a Russian in his native state, untrammelled by any 
of those artificial restraints which press so awkwardly on him 
to-day. He carouses, watches fiercely and distrustfully over his 
house and horses, is as free as the wind. In a week, at the sum- 
mons for war, he joins a horde ready to devastate new lands 



1 886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 849 

like a flock of locusts. "Who knows?" replied one of these 
Cossacks to the sultan who had inquired how many there were. 
" We are scattered all over the steppes ; wherever there is a hil- 
lock, there is a Cossack." 

The Cossacks of original, or southern, Russia admitted the 
authority of their hetmen, but the Polish kings were too well 
versed in the Cossack character to demand more than they were 
likely to get, and the Cossacks were willing enough to fight for 
them on demand for the spoil, a ducat apiece, and, above all, 
the delight of fighting. Beyond that their allegiance did not 
go. Gogol, one of the great novelists of the modern Russians, 
has revived the Cossack life of that fierce time by means of tradi- 
tions, old songs, and folk-tales. And terrible and repelling times 
they were. The ferocity and restlessness of the Cossacks per- 
haps saved Europe from a Mongolian invasion, but the preven- 
tive itself was a horrible one. Taras Bulba opens with the re- 
turn of the two sons of the old Cossack from the Royal Semi- 
nary at Kief. Taras was of the old brood " dragon's brood," to 
borrow a phrase from Goethe that knew no pity and little love. 
He and his followers made their own laws ; they were indepen- 
dent of the rest of the world ; they knew well all primitive 
trades ; he was always ready to use the sword in defence of the 
Greek schism against Catholics, Mussulmans, or Jews, although 
the latter were tolerated and despised. He classed with serfs 
those of the Cossack leaders who adopted the luxurious customs 
of the Polish nobles. He welcomed his sons by insulting one of 
them, and he was delighted when one of them pummelled him 
soundly. In spite of the tears of their mother women in Rus- 
sia were hardly more than slaves when in the rest of Europe 
Christianity had elevated them into objects of chivalrous re- 
spect he carried them off to the Setch, which was a meeting- 
place for the Cossacks. 

The story is eombre. The religion of the Cossacks did not 
soften them. They made it a pretext for all kinds of crime, and 
excused a breach of faith with Poles or Turks on the pretext 
that the church in the Setch needed new ikons or decorations. 
One son of Taras, somewhat more human than the rest of the 
Cossacks, deserts to the Poles, whom the Cossacks have con- 
cluded to despoil. He is killed by his father almost as a matter 
of course. Ostrop, his other son, is executed by the outraged 
Poles, and the story ends with a recital of the horrible ven- 
geance that the Cossacks took for this. This is a part of his- 
tory : Taras was burned for his atrocities. His last words had 

VOL. XLIII. 54 



850 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Sept., 

almost the force of prophecy : " Wait ; the time will come when 
ye shall learn what the Russian Orthodox faith is ! Already the 
people scent it far and near. A czar shall arise from Russian 
soil, and there shall not be a power in the world which shall not 
submit to him." 

Gogol's narrative is simple and direct, almost blunt. In it 
he has mirrored the weakness and the strength of that people 
whose ancestors were Taras Bulbas, and who have sprung from 
nomads to be rulers of the world. 

Won by Waiting, by Edna Lyall, the author of Donavan, We 
Two, and In the Golden Days (New York : D. Appleton & Co.), 
will be a disappointment to readers who have come to regard 
Miss Lyall as a forcible, interesting, and elevating writer. Won 
by Waiting is what may be called a "goody-goody" story. M. 
de Mabillon, a French Protestant, has a daughter called Espe- 
rance, who is a hopeless kind of person. Her mother is dead, 
and she suffers a great deal from the unpleasantness of her Eng- 
lish relatives. Her eyes are the color of " Smyrna raisins," but 
she has a hard time of it in spite of that remarkable fact, as any- 
body who has the fortitude to follow her through nearly four 
hundred pages will find out. It is a mistake for this author to 
push on the public earlier and inferior works because the pub- 
lic has found her maturer productions worthy of praise. 

Mrs. Craven, whose Sister s Story, Eliane, and Fleurange are 
read and reread by thousands of admirers, has written a new 
novel, Le Valbriant (Paris: Perrin & Co.), now in its sixth edi- 
tion. It has been published in England under the title of Lucie, 
and it will shortly appear with an American imprint. 

There are not so many novelists offering antidotes to the 
literary poison that permeates society that any book of fiction 
written with a high motive can be neglected. Mrs. Craven, 
who is acknowledged by critics entirely out of sympathy with 
her motives as a writer of the first class, is in the first rank of 
those who use all the graces of a polished style, a refined art, a 
vivid but restrained imagination in the interest of Christian mo- 
rality. Le Valbriant has all these attributes. It has been com- 
plained of Mrs. Craven that she limits herself too much to the 
atmosphere of the Faubourg -Saint-Germain, that all her char- 
acters are drawn from the life of the society which is called 
" good," and that she is too sentimental. Mrs. Craven does well 
to confine herself to the society she knows best. In no novels of 
the present time is there less snobbishness shown. If her people 
have been affected by an artificial and very rarefied state of so- 



i886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 851 

ciety, it is not because she wills it so, but because they are so. 
The lesson of all her books that of Le Valbriant as well as the 
others is, life is not long enough for love. Its best expression is 
the famous motto of the ring in A Sister s Story La Vie, cest trap 
court. In one of the closing passages of Le Valbriant she re- 
peats it : 

" The sun a winter's sun, but pure and brilliant rose the next day in 
a cloudless sky. All the people of Valbriant, we may well believe, took 
part in the festival. Father Severin was at the altar, at the foot of which 
Lucie and Gauthier had just knelt. It was not an ordinary marriage. Suf- 
fering had left deep traces in the two lives that were about to mingle, and, 
for these spouses, happiness was not without gravity. But in the souls of 
both a sort of security which the most ardent hopes of earth are powerless to 
give assured them of the future, the undefined future. If it had been said to 
them that they were united for life, they would have answered : ' C 'est trap 
court, la vie / ' ' 

If this is sentimentalism it is of a very high order so high, 
indeed, that Mrs. Craven deserves all praise for teaching it. In 
nearly all novels marriage is the end. The books close as soon- 
as the union of the hero and heroine is announced. They are 
supposed to have attained the sum of human happiness. They 
enter into a flowery garden spanned by perpetual rainbows which 
will last for ever. Life is long enough for them, and they desire 
nothing better. But Mrs. Craven's teaching is very different. 
She believes with Madame Swetchine that marriage is the be- 
ginning, not the end ; that the Sacrament of Matrimony is a pre- 
paration for eternal life, and that human love would be worthless 
if it were not irradiated by the hope of eternal love. 

When this doctrine is taught by a writer who in exquisite 
taste, style, and force of interest is the equal of the novelist of 
fashionable France, Octave Feuillet, we ought to be grateful that 
Providence has raised up such a teacher. A Sister s Story has be- 
come a classic, Fleurange has been translated into all the languages 
of Europe, and we are justified in considering the appearance of 
Le Valbriant or Lucie, as we understand it will be in English- 
as an event of great literary importance. The scene is laid near 
a quiet village of France, where stands the Chateau de Bois 
d'Harlay. Count Geoffrey lives in the old house with his ser- 
vants. He had been an emigrant. In London he had met LeV 
ontine de Lerens, whose father had been slaughtered during the 
Terror. Leontine was working hard to support her grandmother, 
the Duchess de Lerens. He and all the London colony of 
French gentlemen were toiling as they had never before dreamed 



852 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Sept., 

of working. Charmed with Leontine's beauty and self-sacri- 
fice, he married her at London just as the white flag was un- 
furled in honor of the accession of Louis XVIII. Madame de 
Bois d'Harlay, who had accepted misfortune so bravely, was not 
equal to her sudden accession to the splendid place that was her 
own by birth. She saw no difference between the France of 
Louis XVI. and that of Louis XVIII.; and her good-fortune was 
embittered by her husband's disposition to accept things as they 
were. 

The character of the Countess de Bois d'Harlay is described 
with fineness of perception. It is one of the most important in 
Le Valbriant. Although the countess is made to die in an early 
chapter, her influence moulds the lives of her husband and 
daughter. Mrs. Craven has made a very instructive and subtle 
picture of the state of mind of so many French aristocrats who 
found wealth and luxury, shorn of the privileges of their order, 
more 'than they could endure. 

Lucie de Bois d'Harlay has made an unhappy marriage, but a 
splendid one in the eyes of her late mother. Count Geoffrey, 
alone in his chateau, knows that his daughter has married a vil- 
lain, and he suffers with her in imagination. He is a dignified 
and noble personage. He finds some consolation in the friend- 
ship of his neighbor at Le Valbriant a village. which has been 
made a model for the vicinity and all France by Gauthier d'Arcy, 
whose father had accepted the new order of things and turned 
his chateau into a foundry. Mrs. Craven's solution of a social 
problem will doubtless meet with some vigorous criticism from 
the irreconcilables who read her novels ; there are not many of 
them who would be willing to save the country around them from 
poverty and the crimes that extreme poverty fosters by devoting 
their castles to the purposes of trade. The usual French novelist 
would have made a thrilling romance out of the unhappy married 
life of Lucie, in which passion would play a great part. Mrs. 
Craven gives us the picture of a wife who has received the Sacra- 
ment of Matrimony worthily; and who knows the duty of a wife. 
It would be a pity in this case to tell by what means Lucie finally 
marries the proprietor of Le Valbriant and enters into the plans 
of her husband for the improvement of his workmen. It is suffi- 
cient to say that it is brought about by no violation of probability 
or propriety ; and when we close Le Valbriant we feel as if we 
had spent our time in the society of people whose lives are im- 
pregnated with Catholic teaching, though there is no word of 
controversy in the book. 



i886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 853 

Mr. E. W. Howe's The Story of a Country Town was an unex- 
pected success. The Moonlight Boy his latest novel will no 
doubt find many readers. . It is less sombre than his first book ; 
it is characterized by directness and novelty of manner. There 
is no analysis, no self-consciousness. Mr. Howe sketches from 
life as he sees it, without reference to the old masters. His lights 
and shadows are sometimes exaggerated; he has none of the deli- 
cate manipulations that are so noticeable in Messrs. Howells and 
James ; but he has the courage and the power to interpret things 
for himself. The moonlight boy is a foundling who has been 
adopted by a kind-hearted husband and wife, Tibby and Mrs. 
Cole. Tibby is a musician, a teacher of singing-schools, country 
brass bands, and a seller of organs. Just about the time that the 
supposed paternity of the moonlight boy is discovered, and he 
is sent to take his place as a " Courtlandt, of Bleecker Street," 
" Queen Mary," the only child of the Coles, appears, and Tibby 
leaves off drinking. From this time the downfall of the Coles 
begins, in the opinion of the moonlight boy. Tibby was so 
much more genial as a singing-master in his cups than out of them 
that his chronicler regrets his reform ! The experiences of the 
country boy, with neither good looks, good manners, nor educa- 
tion, in New York, are told in a crisp and original manner. Mr. 
Howe's hero has nothing to recommend him to the reader or 
to that fate which awards glory to the heroes of novels, except 
good impulses and a lively sense of gratitude. The humor of 
the book is natural and seems unconscious. It has the merits of 
Dickens' earlier novels, without being at all an imitation of him. 
The moonlight boy has an experience in the office of the Night 
Watch, a religious weekly of immense circulation in the country. 
The only man who believed in the highly moral doctrines taught 
in this great weekly was the figure-head of the concern, who was 
not allowed to do anything. Barton, the manager of this con- 
cern, runs away from his family, with some reason, it must be 
confessed. It is regrettable that Mr. Howe should have permitted 
Barton, who is represented as a man to be pitied and even ad- 
mired, to abet his wife in obtaining a divorce. The Moonlight Boy 
is a collection of odd people who have hearts or parts of hearts 
but no souls to speak of. 

The Sphynx's Children and Other People's, by Rose Terry Cook, 
author of Somebody's Neighbors (Boston : Ticknor & Co.), is made 
up of short stories of New England life. They suffer from the 
literary limitations which injure the effect of short stories. It is 
only a very great master who can write a thoroughly satisfactory 



854 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Sept., 

short story. The weakness of Miss Cook's stories is the weak- 
ness of most short stories the sudden transitions at the end. 
No more graphic pictures of New England farm-life have ever 
been put into print. The dreariness of Millet's French peasants 
striving to wrest a living from small patches of soil, and working 
from dawn to sunset, is gayety itself in comparison with the awful 
grimness of the life of the New England farmer of the last gene- 
ration. The French peasants have their consolatory and hopeful 
Angelus, symbolical of theif religion of joy and hope ; but for the 
Puritan New-Englander there was no joy on earth and little hope. 
The " Account of Thomas Tucker " is one of the best things in 
the book. Thomas, the son of a hard New England farmer, be- 
comes the pastor of a fashionable church, and makes himself un- 
popular by calling a spade a spade and pointing out the sins of 
the people, until his congregation resolve to get rid of him. Miss 
Cook tells of the life he and his sister had led under the rule of 
their father, " who ploughed the brown sod of the sad New Eng- 
land hills under the full force of the primeval curse." 

" Amasa was a hard man, gathering where he had not strewn, and reap- 
ing where he had not sown, and a tyrant where a man can be tyrannical in 
safety in his own home. Two children out of ten survived to this pair. 
Abundant dosing, insufficient food, and a neglected sink-drain had killed 
all the others who outlived their earliest infancy ; but these two avoided 
the doom that had fallen on their brother and sisters, by the fate which 
modern science calls the survival of the fittest, and spindled up among the 
mullein-stalks of their stone-strewn pastures as gray, lank, dry, and forlorn 
as the mulleins themselves ; with pale eyes, straight, white hair, sallow 
faces, and the shy aspect of creatures who live in the woods and are 
startled at a strange footstep. They were taught to work as soon as they 
could walk, to consider sin and holiness the only things worth considera- 
tion, to attend meeting as a necessity, and to take deserved punishment in 
silence. To obedience and endurance their physical training, or want of 
training, conduced also ; alternate pie and pork are not an enlivening diet 
to soul and body, and play was an unknown factor in their dreary exist- 
ence." 

The deacon in Aceldama Sparks is appealed to to save his 
wife's mother and her husband from being sent to a drunken 
half-breed who had made the lowest bid for the " keep " of them 
in their quality of paupers. The deacon is an exceedingly pious 
man ; he does not, however, mind his wife's tears as she hears a 
neighbor suggest a way by which her mother may be kept from 
becoming an inmate of " Indian Peter's " wretched hovel : 

: _ " Well, Brother Steel," the deacon declared, " I don't feel no call to help 



i886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 855 

'em. I don't mind Mis' Sparks sendin' of 'em bits an' ends now an' then ; 
but payin' out money's a different thing, and I can't see my way clear to be 
sinkin' ten dollars a year, jest so's to pamper them old folks. If Dan Case 
had had a grain of common sense he could ha' had a house over his head 
to-day and got his livin' ; but now he ought to be thankful to be kep' from 
starvation, and he'll profit by experience, I guess." 

A very touching- story is ' } LiaVs First Christmas. 'Liab is a 
New England farmer of the hardest kind. An accident forces 
him to remain in the cabin of a French -Canadian family. There 
he hears the " Adeste Fideles " sung by the children and their 
parents in the wilderness. 'Liab is much impressed, and when 
the mother tells him devoutly the story of Noel, and why she has 
tried to make her children remember the Adorable Infant, the 
Yankee says : 

" But you hev to work real hard to get them things, and Jack has to 
foot it a long stretch to fetch 'em ; ef 'twas to give to missionaries, now, 
why 'twould look reasonable." 

The lesson taughl by these faithful Catholics sank into 'Liab's 
heart; he softened so perceptibly when he reached home that 
his wife felt obliged to say : 

" I thought pa would die certain when he came home ; he was real 
flabby and meechin' for a spell, and to my mind he hain't never been him- 
self since ! " 

After reading Miss Cook's descriptions of New England life 
in the country, it is easy to understand why one meets New-Eng- 
landers everywhere but in New England, and why the Congre- 
gationalists have reacted with violence from their old religion of 
inhumanity. 

Frederick Lucas was a very great man- a man whose appear- 
ance and work made an epoch in the world. A convert of 
Quaker parentage, he was a Catholic above all, and so truly Ca- 
tholic that he could not fail of being purely patriotic and a poli- 
tician in the highest sense. His Life, written by his brother, Ed- 
ward Lucas (London : Burns & Gates ; New York : The Catholic 
Publication Society Co.) is late in appearing, but it is all the 
more welcome since it has been so long needed. Men will dif- 
fer as to the accuracy of Lucas' judgment of some of the impor- 
tant characters who mingled with the threads of his career, but 
there can be no difference of opinion among capable critics as 
to the importance and value of the book as an historical contri- 
bution to our knowledge of a time that has incalculably affected 



856 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Sept., 

ours and us. In the two volumes of this book Frederick Lucas 
tells his own story so far as possible. It is the biography of an 
earnest and many-sided man, whose genius was tempered by the 
most rigid virtue, and whose very impetuosity had its cause 
in indignation that was righteous. He was a great journalist, 
a powerful orator, a well-versed parliamentary debater, a fine 
literary critic all these things were fused into one great instru- 
ment to be used for the church by his noble and intense earnest- 
ness. Lucas, who has been much talked of as the founder of the 
London Tablet, will now be better known to a generation which 
needs his example. His Life cannot fail to inspire zeal and for- 
tify courage in Catholic laymen. " His theology," writes his 
biographer, " was not merely speculative, but eminently practi- 
cal. To the religious test he brought all questions of politics, of 
statesmanship, of that minor department of statesmanship politi- 
cal economy ; all questions of right and duty in the various con- 
ditions of public life." He made bitter enemies among his fel- 
low-Catholics, as well as eager friends, but never from rancor or 
malice. He was keenly sarcastic whenever he heard the cheap 
assertion, " country first, religion afterwards." " Ah ! " he said, 
when an enthusiastic Young-Irelander, who was a Catholic, de- 
clared that he was an Irishman first and a Catholic afterwards, 
" but which are you going to be last ? " 

"What does mean," he wrote to a friend, " by saying he prefers 

his country to his church ? I regard that as essentially not different from 
the man who says he prefers his belly to his church. The former may be 
the more dignified and respectful humanist, but I have the greater grudge 
against him as sinning against greater light." 

There is a great deal of strong meat in this Life. In the old 
days, before the art of printing, a student who copied it from end 
to end in order to possess it would have well spent his time, 
because the slowness of his work would have forced him to think 
while he wrote. It is a book to be read only by those who have 
been taught to think, and who do not run and read books as if 
they were newspapers. 



1 8 86.] NE w PUB LIC A TIONS. 857 



NEW PUBLICATIONS. 

THE CLOTHES OF RELIGION : A Reply to Popular Positivism. In two 
Essays and a Postscript. By Wilfrid Ward. London : Burns & Gates ; 
New York : The Catholic Publication Society Co. 

The reading world is not likely to speedily forget the celebrated conflict 
between Mr. Herbert Spencer and Mr. Frederic Harrison, which took place 
about a couple of years ago, when Agnosticism and Positivism clashed to- 
gether, and, being both earthen jars, each pretty effectually smashed the 
other. The controversy between these two leaders forcibly brought to 
mind the famous conflict of the Kilkenny cats, who went at each other 
tooth and nail until they had completely annihilated each other. 

It is easy to destroy that which has no solid foundation. When leaders 
of Agnosticism and Positivism, and of other isms built upon foundations 
of sand, fall upon each other, mutual destruction follows. But nature ab- 
hors a vacuum. The world must inevitably turn from these exploded 
isms to find the dome of St. Peter's still towering aloft. The church built 
upon a rock must sooner or later claim undivided attention. 

Whoever helps in allaying the clouds of dust that these false isms have 
stirred up performs a great work to humanity by aiding a distracted peo- 
ple to feel and to perceive God's own sunlight. The little book before us 
contains a very complete and satisfactory answer to Positivism especially 
satisfactory because it does not content itself simply with the work of de- 
struction Positivism, after all, has found few adherents but also has in it 
a strong argument for the claims of religion. In his preface Mr. Ward 
says : 

" A religion which is to do the work of a religion, and to influence the lives of the mass of 
mankind, must have that within it which can appeal to the multitude as a motive force for ac- 
tion, and no amount of ingenuity expended in the superstructure will enable it to stand if this 
foundation is wanting. Suppose that the cardinal ideas of Christianity were deficient in this 
respect suppose that the character of Christ entirely failed to appeal to mankind as an inspir- 
ing model, and suppose it were impossible to lead men to trust in his merits or to believe in 
the reality and efficacy of his aid ; establish these simple defects in the Christian system and you 
have sounded its death-knell so far as its capabilities as a really influential religion go. There 
is no occasion to criticise St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas. Suarez, Vasquez, or to touch on 
the elaborate and ingenious developments and superstructures wrought by subtle intellects in 
successive ages above the root- doctrines. The foundation is rotten, and all that rests on it, how- 
ever intrinsically beautiful or well constructed, must fall with it." 

Mr. Ward shows most clearly how rotten is the foundation of Positiv- 
ism, and at the same time makes us feel the strength of Christianity. His 
work, therefore, is something better than the mere work of destruction. 
The two essays which make up the little book were originally printed in the 
National Review. The first essay, " The Clothes, of Religion," was published 
soon after Mr. Harrison's essay, "The Ghost of Religion," which shows the 
absurdity of Mr. Spencer's worship of the " Unknowable." While agreeing 
with Mr. Harrison as to the absurdity of the worship of Spencer's " Un- 
knowable," Mr. Ward goes further and shows the absurdity of Mr. Harri- 



8$ 8 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Sept., 

son's worship of his god Humanity. Mr. Ward explains what he means 
by the clothes of religion : 

" By the clothes of religion I mean those ideas and corresponding emotions with which we 
invested the objects of religious faith, and which were their natural and due adornment, and the 
phrases which had become associated with religious feelings and belief. The saying of the 
Psalmist, which was applied to other slayers of their God, may be used of these also : ' Divise- 
runt sibi vestimenta mea, et super vestem meant miserunt sortem ' ' They have parted my gar- 
ments among them, and on my vesture they have cast lots.' 

" The ideas of Infinity, Eternity, and Power, which have hitherto clothed the Deity, fell to 
Mr. Spencer's share, together with the correlative emotion of awe. Mr. Harrison came in for a 
larger quantity though perhaps less indispensable, and more allied to the perfection of dress 
which Christianity introduced than to the simple clothes of natural religion, necessary for de- 
cency and dignity. Brotherly love, the improvement, moral, mental, and material, of our fel- 
low-men, self sacrifice for the general good, devotion to an ideal here are some of the ' clothes 
of religion ' which Mr. Harrison and the Positivists have appropriated. And having appropriated 
them, both these philosophers try to persuade themselves and the world that, after all, the clothes 
are the important part of religion, and that if they dress up something else in the same clothes it 
will do just as well as the old faith. Mr. Spencer dresses up the Unknowable with infinity, 
eternity, and energy ; Mr. Harrison dresses up Humanity with brotherly love and the worship of 
an ideal. But the clothes won't fit. The world may be duped for a time, and imagine that where 
the garments are, there the reality must be ; but this cannot last. It is not the cowl that makes 
the monk, and it is not the clothes that make religion." 

Further on Mr. Ward goes on to show how totally inadequate Positiv- 
ism is as an incentive to moral conduct. He uses this very apt illustration : 

" That a man should refrain from beating his wife because he believes in a God whose 
claims on him are paramount, and who will reward him or punish him according as he refrains 
or does not refrain, is reasonable and natural. But that love for the human race should make 
him refrain when love for his wife was an insufficient motive is hardly to be expected. ' Keep 
yourself up for my sake,' said Winkle to Mr. Pickwick, who was in the water. The author re- 
marks that he was probably yet more effectively moved to do so for his own sake. And to tell 
a man to be good to his wife for the sake of the human race has in it a considerable element of 
similar bathos. It is exactly parallel to the well-known method of catching a bird. No doubt 
if you can put salt on his tail you can catch him. And so, too, if you can get a man to love the 
human race with a surpassing love, no doubt he will treat his wife well. But the first step in 
putting the salt on is to catch the bird ; and the first step towards loving the human race is to 
have tenderness for those who are nearest. " 

The author then goes on to show what poor consolation Positivism 
offers to the bereaved and suffering; and, in summing up, contrasts Posi- 
tivism with religion under Mr. Harrison's three heads belief, worship, con- 
duct. He shows us how Positivism masquerades in the clothes of religion ; 
bids us keep the feeling of trust without the reason for trust ; bids us pray 
without giving us anything real to pray to ; bids us be moral, but gives us 
no adequate motive for morality. 

We have given so much space to the admirable essay, " The Clothes of 
Religion," that we can but very briefly refer to the second essay, " Pick- 
wickian Positivism," and its postscript. Here Mr. Ward shows from Mr, 
Harrison's own statements how much this Positivist has veered and shifted 
of late from his original position. Truly Mr. Harrison contradicts himself in 
a most astonishing manner. If he has not struck his colors entirely they 
now at best but hang at a sort of dreary half-mast. We regret that we 
have not space for some quotations from this most excellent article. We 
hope, however, that our readers will peruse the book itself. It deserves to 
be very widely read not only by Catholics, but by men of all creeds and of 
no creeds. 



1 886.] NE w PUBLIC A TIONS. 859 

THE LATIN POEMS OF LEO XIII. Done into English Verse by the Jesuits 
of Woodstock College. Published with the approbation of His Holi- 
ness. Baltimore : John Murphy & Co. 1886. 

Catholics in this country who cannot read the poems of His Holiness 
Leo XIII. in the original Latin will hail this book with much pleasure. It 
seems fitting that these beautiful poems should be translated by members 
of that order who gave to Leo his early education, and the book bears 
ample testimony to the fact that they have well performed this labor of 
love. Of course there is something lost in all translations, and in translat- 
ing Latin poetry into English especially the thought must be somewhat 
diluted, for the words must be multiplied. Every student of Latin knows 
how much more pithily thought can be expressed in that tongue than in 
English, and how often, in translating poetry, an idea must be spun out 
to meet the requirements of English metre. Readers of the translations 
will therefore lose something, of course, of the beauty and flavor of the 
original verse, but can still feel assured that the translations are most ex- 
cellent ones, as all those who read the Latin verse, which is given on the 
pages to the left, will most readily avow. We wish we had space to quote 
at length from these poems, but will have to content ourselves by giving 
but one- of the shorter poems, which breathes a prophecy for whose speedy 
fulfilment every earnest Catholic will most devoutly pray. It is called 
" The Triumph of the Church Foreshadowed " : 

" Thus do I prophesy : A flaming light 

E'en now with radiance bathes the eastern sky, 
And from the starry heavens flashing bright 
The rosy dawn lights up the glistening eye. 

" Then straightway to the nether pools of fire 

The hated monsters plunge affrighted down, 
And in the fetid, ever-burning mire 

Sink once again with many a horrid groan. 

" Constrained at length this wonder to confess, 

The race that waged erewhile relentless strife 
Against its God turns now that God to bless 
And mourn the errors of its sinful life. 

" Their hatred long indulged and bitter grown, 

And angry combating against the right, 
Cease, and, by virtue's magic power won, 
All hearts in blissful harmony unite. 

" Nay, men who scorned to love with fervor burn, 

And virtue's path bestrewn with roses find ; 
Peace once again and modesty return, 
And the sweet face that speaks the guileless mind. 

" That wisdom which so brilliant shone of eld 

Upon us now an equal lustre sheds, 
And error, by new charity repelled, 

No longer through the land infection spreads. 

" O fair Ausonian land ! O happy home ! 

O crowned with glory and with victory ! 
O powerful in its glorious faith of Rome, 
The birthright dear that Peter left to thee ! " 

The book is handsomely gotten up and beautifully printed, and should 



860 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Sept., 1886. 

find its way to the book-tables of many Catholic families throughout the 
land. 

SHAFTKSBURY (THE FIRST EARL). By H. D. Traill. English Worthies. 
Edited by Andrew Lang. New York : D. Appleton & Co. 1886. 

In this very readable biography Mr. Traill has attempted to steer a sort 
of a middle course between Christie's whitewashed Shaftesbury and the 
man who is pictured as Achitophel in Dryden's immortal satire : 

" Of these the false Achitophel was first, 
A name to all succeeding ages curst : 
For close designs and crooked counsels fit, 
Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit, . 
Restless, unfixed in principles and place, 
In power unpleased, impatient of disgrace," etc., etc. 

Though Mr. Traill treats Shaftesbury with gloved hands, he by no means 
makes him out a lovely or a heroic character. Gloved hands may deal 
very hard blows; and the author does not attempt to distort the truth, and 
Shaftesbury is shown to be a time-server, a hypocrite, and a self-seeker in 
all things. Mr. Traill does seem to attempt to palliate matters somewhat by 
assuring us that Shaftesbury was no worse than others of his political con- 
temporaries ; but it is a doubtful way of whitening a man's character by 
saying that it is no blacker than those of other rascals about him. There 
has been much discussion as to how much of a hypocrite Shaftesbury was. 
Dryden pictures him thus: 

" Bartering his venal wit for sums of gold, 
He cast himself into the saint-like mould, 
Groaned, sighed, and prayed while godliness was gain, 
The loudest bagpipe of the squeaking train." 

Christie denies that Shaftesbury was a hypocrite at all a denial that history 
will not sustain. Mr. Traill, steering his middle course, says : 

" I imagine that in the Barebones Parliament he sang and prayed with the rest, not, doubt- 
less, more vociferously or unctuously than others, but with enough of voice and unction to sustain 
a reputation for godliness and to preserve the influence which the suspicion of any other charac- 
ter would unquestionably have lost him." 

Altogether the book is a very readable one, though it is here and there 
marred by a narrowness and bigotry toward Catholics which almost leads 
one to believe that the author has some lingering belief in the " Popish 
Plot," for pretending to believe in which he vigorously denounces Shaftes- 
bury, who used the rancor it created for his own selfish ends ; or, at least, 
that he believes in the possibility of such a plot being sanctioned by the 
church. There are several errors of date in the book, but for these the 
proof-reader is evidently responsible. In two places, for instance, the dates 
are exactly one century too far forward a sort of centennial hop. 

ESSAYS ON IRELAND. By W. J. O'Neill Daunt. Dublin: M. H. Gill & 
Son. 1886. 

Mr. Daunt has here collected a number of his essays dealing with the 
past and present of Ireland, most of which are reprinted from the Dublin, 
Contemporary, and Westminster Reviews. The essays contain much solid 
information put into clear and terse English, but perhaps it would have been 
better if they had been arranged with reference to their chronological 
order. 



THE 



CATHOLIC WORLD. 



VOL. XLIV. OCTOBER, 1886. No. 259. 



THE BORGIA MYTH. 

MR. ASTOR, in a recent number of the North American Review, 
has vindicated the character of Lucretia Borgia. Following in 
the wake of distinguished historians, he shows that the charges of 
murder, poisoning, and incest brought against her by scurrilous 
poets and vindictive scribes who hated the Borgia name are 
groundless. But while he spares the woman of the notorious 
family, he is unmerciful, and perhaps unjust, to two of its male 
members the head, Pope Alexander VI., and his son, the re- 
nowned Caesar, Duke of Romagna. In his novel, Valentino, he 
repeats and accentuates the charges made against Caesar by the 
gossiping Burchard, the vindictive Infessura, the purchasable 
forger Paul Jovius,* the calumnious Guicciardini, and the Nea- 
politan poetic libellers Pontano and Sannazaro. That these 
epithets are not undeserved the reader who has studied their 
works can attest. The last edition of Burchard by Thuasne, at 
Paris, shows the old papal master of ceremonies to be a mere re- 
corder of gossip. It is fertur and dicitur on every page of his 
diary the "on dit " and the " it is said " of the modern detractor. 

Besides the hostility of Burchard to the Borgias, so clearly 
pointed out by Gregorovius in his work on Lucretia Borgia, the 

* Tiraboschi (Letteratura ffa/iana, tome vii. pp. 3, 903, Modena, 1792) shows that Jov^us 
is unworthy of belief and a forger by his own testimony. Gregorovius (Lucretia Borgia, Stutt- 
gart, 1874, chap. ii. p. 10) points out mistakes of Jovius and Infessura in the simplest matters 
affecting the Borgias. Litta holds that Caesar's mother, Vanozza an abbreviation of Giova^ma 
was of the Farnese family. But Gregorovius contradicts him (ibidem, p. 10). So discord>nt 
are authorities even in small matters regarding the Borgias. 

Copyright. Rev. I. T. HECKBR. 1886. 



2 THE BORGIA MYTH. [Oct., 

fact that the edition of the ancient Diarium is not authentic for 
there are slips and unquestionable interpolations in it throws 
doubt on many of its statements.* Paris de Grassis, another 
chronicler of the early portion of the sixteenth century, for a 
time Burchard's associate, says of him that he was " not only 
not human, but above all beasts the most beastly, the most inhu- 
man, and the most envious." As to Infessura, he was a radical, 
a revolutionist, a strong partisan of the Colonnas and therefore 
hostile to the Borgias, bitterly opposed to the temporal sove- 
reignty of the popes, and so foul a writer that the learned Mura- 
tori, in his Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, was obliged to expunge 
obscenities from the Diarium of the Hortan chronicler before 
publishing it ; and of the writer he says : " I have to admit that 
he was very prone to calumny." Paul Jovius in his letters con- 
fesses that his pen is purchasable, that he is a writer for sale like 
the mercenary Condottieri of the times ; and Caesar Cantu calls 
him " the lying gazetteer of the epoch." Paul Jovius, the im- 
moral bishop of Nocera, whose chief grievance against the pope 
was that he would not give him a better see viz., that of Como 
because his holiness considered him unfit for it, as Tiraboschi 
states, is rivalled in lying by the Florentine Guicciardini. This 
man, who owed all his fortune to the popes, showed his gratitude 
by maligning his benefactors. Full of the Florentine hatred of 
the temporal sovereignty of the Papacy, which Caesar Borgia did 
so much to re-establish in the Romagna, the Italian historian uses 
all the graces of style and his wonderful powers of expression to 
calumniate those whom he considered the foes of the political 
influence of his beloved republic. Audin, in his Life of Leo X., 
tells us that conscience smote Guicciardini at the hour of his 
death, and that when the notary asked him what he was to do 
with the History of Italy, he replied, " Burn it." Caesar Cantu, 
whose reputation for impartiality is above suspicion, says of him 
" that he measures the justice of a cause by success alone. He 
blames the popes for everything and attributes to them all the 
.calamities of the age." \ The hatred of the Venetians and Floren- 
tines towards the increase of the papal sovereignty in the fif- 

* A learned critic of Thuasne's " Burchard," in the Zeitschrift fur Katholische Theologie 
-(i Quartalheft, Innsbruck, 1886), points out, ist. That Eccard's text, from which that of Thuasne 
is taken, is corrupt " Seven copies but no original " of Eccard's original exist ; 2d. The Chigi 
copy which Thuasne follows is not proven to be faithful to the Vatican original, still unpub- 
lished ; 3d. The Diarium from A.D. 150010 the end is not authenticated because not signed by 
Burchard ; this covers the "ball" story, to which we refer later on. Other breaks in the narra- 
tive are pointed out, as well as the quarrel which caused the enmity of Burchard to Alexander 
at the beginning of the pope's reign. .-.^ 

t The Historians of Italy ', discourse uc t 



1 886.] THE BORGIA MYTH. 3 

teenth and sixteenth centuries is well known. Both republics had 
interests in the Romagna. Its rebellious feudatories looked to 
them for aid in their struggle against the conquering Caesar of the 
house of Borgia. The Colonnas and the Orsinis were always se- 
cretly, and sometimes openly, aided and abetted by their Floren- 
tine and Venetian allies ; both interested in thwarting the plans 
of Alexander VI. for the destruction of the " tyranni," as they 
were called, in Central Italy. Hence the Venetian and Florentine 
ambassadors, whether at Naples or at Rome, sent to their respec- 
tive governments malicious reports of all that was done at the 
Vatican. Paolo Cappello and the rest show bias in all their de- 
spatches ; and the compilation of the Venetian Marino Sanuto is 
a mixture of gossip, fable, fact, and fiction ! * 

The league of the Borgias with the French under Charles 
VIII. and Louis XII., and the war of Alexander against Ferdinand 
of Naples, caused the pontiff to be detested at the court of that 
monarch. Gibes and satires against the Borgias became the 
amusement of his table, and epigrams against Alexander, Lucre- 
tia, and Cassar the stock in trade of the court poets. Pontano, 
one of them, while he satirized the pope and Lucretia, did not 
spare even his royal master and benefactor, whom he afterwards 
deserted for the French conqueror in A.D. 1501. Sannazaro was 
more faithful, for he followed Ferdinand into exile. These poets, 
in common with others of the Renaissance, affected to imitate 
their pagan exemplars in obscenity as well as in style, and to 
such excesses did they go that, according to Roscoe in his Life of 
Leo X., they surpassed even Catullus and Martial in libertinism 
and indecency. Ulrich von Hutten and the other early Reform- 
ers of the sixteenth century imported into Germany the writings 
of these Italian satirists, and sent the flood of licentiousness and 
falsehood of which the}" were the source rolling down the cen- 
turies to the present day. It is not astonishing, therefore, that 
serious writers like Roscoe, Ranke, and Gregorovius, who believe 
that history should be a faithful record of facts proven by docu- 
ments and other trustworthy testimony, instead of a gazette of 
gossip, should protest against the slanders forged against the 
Borgias and aid in restoring their character to the level of truth 
and justice. These writers deserve credit for having to a great 
extent conquered their prejudices of creed and nationality in the 
interest of historical truth. 

Along with them we must name Edoardo Alvisi, a liberal 
Italian, who published, a few years ago, a work entitled Cesare 

* Alberi, Relazioni degli Ambasciatori Fenett, Firenze, 1864. 



4 THE BORGIA MYTH. [Oct., 

Borgia, Duca di Romagna* This book is a model of historical 
style and fairness. It is honest and unimpassioned. The author 
extenuates nothing and sets down naught in malice. The style 
is clear as Caesar and terse as Tacitus. He produces the original 
documents or the unquestionable proof of every fact stated. 
Had Mr. Astor read this work before writing Valentino or the 
article on Lucretia, we are sure he would have changed the plot 
of the one and modified many of his assertions in the other. 

Anyway, when Mr. Astor vindicates Lucretia does not he also 
vindicate Alexander from some of the foule&t crimes charged to 
him ? Does not the father share in the benefit of his child's vindi- 
cation ? If Lucretia was not guilty of incest with her own father 
or brother, then her father and brother were not guilty of incest 
with her ; and if Caesar is not as black as he is portrayed, may we 
-not begin to suspect that Alexander's offence^ are less than they 
; are said to be ? If Alvisi's authority on Caesar is as good as Mr. 
Astor's on Lucretia, both of these members of the Borgia family 
throw light on the dark shadows that surround their father's 
ilife. 

However, let us forget Mr. Astor for the present. He has 
simply retailed the stories of other writers. He hardly pretends 
to be an historian, whatever he may be as a novelist. Let us, 
then, examine the chief charges brought against the Duke of 
Romagna, with a single eye to historical truth : 

The first charge is that Caesar murdered his brother, the 
; Duke of Gandia. This charge was not made until a year after 
the assassination ; and it was made first in Venice by the Fer- 
rarese orator Pigna. His words are: " I have just heard that the 
cause of the death of the Duke of Gandia was his brother the 
cardinal" Cassar. f Caesar had just declared his purpose of 
giving up the cardinalate and celibacy to return to a layman's 
ambitions and the possibility of matrimony. It was currently 
reported in 1498 that both he and Lucretia, just divorced from 
Giovanni Sforza, were about to contract marriages with mem- 
bers of the royal family of Naples. The Borgias were going 
to increase their temporalities. The children of Alexander 
born, according to excellent authorities, before he had received 
holy orders were about to become princes in Central Italy, 
and thus become rivals of Ferrarese, Florentine, Venetian, and 
even Neapolitan power. At once Venice becomes a forge of 
attacks against the Borgias, Alexander, who had been lauded by 
the Venetians, during the first four years of his pontificate, for 

* Imola, A.D. 1878. t Alvisi, p. 44. 



1 886.] THE BORGIA MYTH. 5 

his economy, sobriety, and " divine virtues," began to be repre- 
sented as a glutton and a debauchee, Caesar as an assassin, and 
Lucretia as a courtesan. 

On the i4th of February (1498) the body of a certain Pierotto 
or Peter Calderon, a servant of the pope, was found in the Tiber. 
Burchard, living in Rome and not friendly to the Borgias, says 
he did not fall in "of his own free will." In Venice the story is 
circulated by Cappello that Pierotto was assassinated by Caesar 
before the very eyes of the pope, one of whose favorites Pierotto 
was. About the same time Lucretia is reported as having be- 
gotten an illegitimate child, and Alexander as having imported a 
beautiful Spaniard for his amusement.* The " black as a crow " 
in Rome in those days became " the three black crows " in Venice, 
Ferrara, and Florence. A hint in Burchard becomes, under the 
pen of Cappello, Jovius, and Sanuto, a vividly-colored picture, 
as erotic as a story of the Decameron. 

There is not a solitary fact to show that Cassar murdered his 
brother. The Orsinis, in exile in Venice, helped to spread the 
tale, and Cappello and the exiled Savelli recorded it. The first 
reports of the assassination attributed it either to Giovanni 
Sforza or to Antonio Mario Pico della Mirandola as agent of 
Cardinal Ascanio Sforza. Neither the Neapolitan, nor the Peru- 
gian, nor the Florentine, nor the Modenese, nor the Ferrarese 
chronicles of the day accuse Cassar of the crime.f 

Gandia had killed an adherent of the Sforzas and refused to 
give them satisfaction. They had other reasons for seeking ven- 
geance on the Borgias, because one of their family was divorced 
from Lucretia on account of impotency, and the new marriage 
proposed for her endangered their family possessions. On them, 
therefore, rather than on his own brother, properly rests the sus- 
picion of having murdered the Duke of Gandia. 

But even in smaller matters lies against the Borgias have been 
transmitted by respectable writers. We may mention an in- 
stance by way of diversion. Vasari, in his lives of the Italian 
painters, says that Pinturicchio, a favorite artist of those times, 
painted in the Torre Borgia, in the Vatican, Julia Farnese as the 
Madonna, and Alexander VI. worshipping her. Well, as Julia Far- 
nese was a very handsome woman, who married in 1489 the pope's 
grandnephew, it is quite probable that Pinturicchio may have 
taken her face as a model for his Madonnas, but it is absolutely 
false that he painted the pope in any such surroundings as Vasari 

* His son John, the Duke of Gandia, is reported as the pontifical pander on this occasion 1 
t Alvisi, p. 34. 



6 THE BORGIA MYTH. [Oct., 

states. The Madonna which he describes is in a panel " over the 
door of the third room, with angels around her ; but the pope is 
not in that picture, but in one of the Resurrection in the second 
room, where Alexander is really portrayed in the act of prayer." * 
Julia was married to Ursino Orsini, son of Adriana Mila, a Bor- 
gia and Alexander's niece. Julia had a son that looked like the 
pope, and the scandal-mongers in Rome, pretending to forget 
that the child came by his looks by legitimate descent, spread 
the report that he was Alexander's son. There is not one iota of 
historical proof for the statement. And although to a class of 
men who do not believe in the possibility of clerical chastity, be- 
cause they judge the clergy from their own subjective stand- 
point, the presence of a handsome relative of Alexander for a 
time in the Vatican will always afford an opportunity for a sneer 
or a gibe, those whose experience of human nature is better will 
discredit the unproved aspersions of the calumniator against the 
character of a pontiff then nearing the seventieth year of his age. 
On a par with the story of this murder is the statement made 
regarding Caesar's complicity in the divorce which the King of 
France, Louis XI L, obtained from his old queen that he might 
marry Anne of Bretagne. Machiavelli, who was the incarna- 
tion of the perfidy and duplicity of the Italian republics of his 
time, in a despatch to the Florentine authorities states that Caesar, 
going to France to marry Charlotte d'Albret, and carrying a car- 
dinal's hat to De Rohan, prime minister of the king, brought 
also a private decree of divorce for Louis, and that it was to be 
sold to his majesty for a considerable sum of money. This state- 
ment is a falsehood. The decree was so notoriously public 
that the Ferrarese orator Manfredi speaks of it in a despatch 
of October 2, 1498, ten days before Caesar had reached Mar- 
seilles on his way to the French court. The facts are that on 
the 1 7th of December in the same year, the day before Csesar ar- 
rived at Chinon, where the French court then was, the three 
papal commissioners, the Cardinal of Luxembourg and the bi- 
shops of Albi and of Setta, publicly pronounced " the defini- 
tive sentence " of divorce in the church of St. Denis in Am- 
boise. The marriage between Louis and Anne was solemnized at 
Nantes January 7, 1499, about a month after the judgment ren- 
dered by the papal commissioners. From all which it appears 
evident that Caesar did not carry the decree of divorce to France, 
and that he did not sell it, as Machiavelli and novelists assert. 
Machiavelli says further that the Bishop of Setta was put to 

* Alvisi, p. 15. 



1 8 86.] THE BORGIA MYTH. 7 

death by order of Ccesar for having revealed the existence of the 
secret decree of divorce, while contemporary chronicles show 
that this bishop was alive two years afterwards and took part 
with Caesar in the siege of Forli.* 

Having seen what to think of some of the murders by the 
sword or dagger attributed to Caesar, let us now examine one 
said to have been caused by him by poison. Cardinal Borgia, 
Caesar's cousin, died at Urbino in 1499. The worthy Sanuto first 
starts the story in Venice that Caesar poisoned him because " the 
pope loved him and was going to give him a place." Paul 
Jovius, this time using his iron pen,f says " Caesar murdered him 
because he had been friendly to the Duke of Gandia." Bur- 
chard, after noticing the death of the cardinal, adds it was " sus- 
pected by the physicians." A certain Prato, in a Storia di Milano, 
" says that the cardinal and his friends were cut to pieces by Ro- 
mans." Such are the contradictory reports. Now, the fact is 
that the cardinal died of fever seventeen days' journey away 
from Duke Caesar's camp, as we know from the chronicles of 
Forli and the Cesenan Diary. There is not an item of proof for 
this charge against him. He was at that very time engaged in 
subduing the papal vassals at Forli. BrantSme says that his 
coat of arms was "a dragon devouring several serpents." No- 
thing could be more appropriate to express the task in which he 
was engaged. The Romagna was full of petty tyrants, every 
one of whom made his castle a nest of vultures. Even the wo- 
men of the Colonnas and Sforzas were tigresses4 Catharine 
Sforza, feudal sovereign of Imola and Forli, is an instance, for 
she tried to poison the pope. The people everywhere detested 
these rulers ; sometimes the mobs rose in the towns and murdered 
them. Everywhere Csesar was hailed as a deliverer by the op- 
pressed populace. According to all authorities the serfs suffered 
unendurable misery under the tyranny of the rebellious vassals 
of the Holy See. Of all the fiefs of the pope, Cesena alone was 
faithful and paid its taxes. Astor Manfredi had not paid his 
taxes in years, and when summoned to do so by the papal officers 
the Venetians came to his rescue. The Malatestas, Savellis, and 
Orsinis were also in arrears and unwilling to obey. The Vene- 
tians and Florentines protected the " vicars," as they were called. 
Exiles from the oppressed fiefs were continually going to Rome 

* The chroniclers of Forli speak of the death of this bishop, Ferdinaado d'Almedia, and 
describe his funeral. Alvisi, p. 54. 

t He said he had an iron pen for his enemies, a golden, one for his friends. 

\ " Viragoes," as they were then called. Gregorovius describes them well in Lucretia Bor- 
gia* . Alvisi, p. 63. 



8 THE BORGIA MYTH. [Oct., 

with complaints against these rapacious barons, and the aid of the 
pope, the legal sovereign of the Romagna, was continually in- 
voked. The Venetians sheltered the rebel Sforzas, and protected 
Pandolfo Malatesta and Astor Manfredi in their refusal to obey 
Caesar, the pope's lieutenant. The Florentines, on the other 
hand, to save Forli tried to form a league among Bologna, Fer- 
rara, Forli, Piombino, and Sienna. Not being able to contend 
against Valentino in the field for he marched through the Ro- 
magna, conquering wherever he went his enemies tried to avenge 
themselves by creating a public opinion against him by the pub- 
lication of all manner of calumnies against his family. Certainly 
we do not claim that any of them at that time deserved canoniza- 
tion, but a historian should be just to them. 

Among those who assailed the character of the Borgias most 
violently was the Venetian orator in Rome, Paolo Cappello.* 
He is the chief authority for the charge so often made since, and 
repeated by Gregorovius, that Csesar murdered his brother-in-law, 
Lucretia's husband, Don Alfonso di Biselli, of the royal family of 
Naples. This unfortunate prince was found dangerously wound- 
ed on the steps of St. Peter's on the night of July 15, 1500. On 
the ipth of the same month the Venetian orator sent a despatch 
home stating that Csesar had forbidden, under pain of death, any 
one to appear under arms between St. Peter's and the Castle of 
St. Angelo. Alfonso remained ill for thirty-three days, nursed 
by his wife, Lucretia. The Venetian states in this despatch that 
no one knew who were the assailers of Alfonso, but that suspi- 
cion fell on Caesar. The orator knew what would please his 
government. In a subsequent despatch in September Cappello 
states as a fact what he had recorded before as a mere suspicion/}- 
Yet Burchard, who was living in the Vatican at the time, does 
not say that Caesar was the assassin. On the contrary, he states 
that Cassar denied that he was the assailer4 The difference be- 
tween Burchard's statement and that of Cappello or rather of 
Sanuto, who " doctored " Cappello's despatches becomes more 
marked when they tell of the subsequent murder of Alfonso on 
August 1 8, A.D. 1500. Burehard says: 

" On the i8th of the month of August Don Alphonsus de Aragon, Duke 
of Biselli, . . . was strangled in his bed. . . . fhe physicians of the dead 
prince and a certain hunchback who had been caring for him were arrested 

* The despatches attributed to Cappello are not his, however, but the work of a Venetian 
compiler, Marino Sanuto. (See Les Borgias, by Clement. Paris, 1882.) 

t This if we are: to believe Sanuto's Diarii, which Clement accuses of falsehood and 
forgery (Les Borgias, p. 53)^ 

\ Burchard, vol. ii., Thuasne's edition, p.. 68. 



1 886.] THE BORGIA MYTH. 7 9 

and imprisoned in the Castle of St. Angelo. An investigation was ordered ; 
but they were afterwards liberated, for they were guiltless a fact well 
known to those who had ordered the murder." * 

Burchard adds that the body of the dead prince was brought 
to St. Peter's and buried in the chapel of St. Mary de Febribus, 
under the supervision of Francis Borgia, Archbishop of Cosenza. 
Not one word of Cassar or of his complicity in the crime. Now, 
the Venetian, or rather his editor, Sanuto, says that Caesar en- 
tered the room of the sick man, caused his wife and sister to be 
put out, and, calling Don Michele (Caesar's Spanish lieutenant), 
strangled the prince. The duke said that he strangled Don Al- 
fonso " because he had tried to kill him (Cassar)." Thus, while 
Cappello says that Caesar wounded first and afterwards mur- 
dered the prince, Burchard excludes Cassar altogether from the 
wounding and attributes it to several ; and while Cappello says 
that Caesar publicly boasted of being the murderer, Burchard 
says that whoever was the chief, the mandans, in the crime, 
tried to throw the blame on the physicians. Other contemp( - 
raneous chroniclers say that the assassins were unknown, or, ig- 
noring the murder, say that the young prince died of the wounds 
first received. Even the author of the Neapolitan chronicle, hos- 
tile to the Borgias, is not able to name the guilty party, though 
he tells that King Ferdinand sent a physician to heal the wound- 
ed Don Alfonso. In course of time, however, hatred of the 
Borgias caused writers to attribute the deed to Cassar. Yet if 
public opinion could be impartial enough to do justice to any 
Borgia, it would have to acquit Cassar of the murder, or at least 
to bring in a Scotch verdict of "not proven." Cappello's testi- 
mony, even if Sanuto have not added to it, is not sufficient, in de- 
fault of Burchard, to convict any one, especially a Borgia. f The 
family, a Spanish one, surrounded by Spanish officials, was detest- 
ed by the Italians, whose power, benefices, and fiefs it was gradu- 
ally absorbing not only in Rome but in the rest of Central Italy. 
There were Sforzas enough alive to kill a prince who had taken 
their property as well as a wife divorced from one of them, and 
French partisans enough in Rome to kill a prince who was one 
of the bitterest enemies of French ambition in Naples, without 
seeking for the assassin in his brother-in-law, the Duke of 
Romagna. 

Cassar was only thirty-one years of age when he died. He 

* I quote from the last edition of Burchard's Dtartut/t, published in Paris by L. Thuasne, 
1885, vol. ii. p. T$. 

tAlvisi, p. 114; Clement, p. 53. 



io THE BORGIA MYTH. [Oct., 

was not much better than the princes of his time or the ave- 
rage aristocratic young man of our day on the score of purity. 
Certainly he did not wish to live a life of hypocrisy in regard to 
women. Although a deacon and a cardinal, and thus entered on 
a career that might lead him to the highest honors in the church, 
feeling that he had no vocation for clerical life, he obtained at the 
outset of his career a dispensation from the law of celibacy and 
laid aside his cardinalitial long robe to assume the short frock of 
the secular. Yet he was not guilty of all the offences against 
morality laid to his charge. Thus Bembo states that by order 
of Csesar a young lady of the household of the Duchess of Urbi- 
no was carried off by a party of soldiers while on her way to 
marry Caracciolo, a captain of infantry in Ravenna. Yet there 
is no foundation for the charge except rumor. The event hap- 
pened in the evening of February 15, and is thus recorded by 
Pascoli, one of the duke's secretaries, writing on the same day 
from Cesena to his wife : 

" I have no other desire than to go to you, but we must travel with 
leaden feet in these times. This very night a young lady of Urbino was 
carried off between Cervia and Ravenna, and her escort wounded." 

The criminals who committed the rape were probably disbanded 
soldiers of the company under Russi and Granarolo.* The Ve- 
netians at once complained to Csesar, who promised to make dili- 
gent inquiry as to the perpetrators of the outrage, in order to 
have them punished. He further expressed regret that it should 
have occurred so close to the borders of his dukedom. In fact, 
the woman was liberated and sent to her husband, by whom she 
afterwards had four children.f Csesar might have well said, as 
one of his defenders remarks, that a prince like him could find 
women enough for his amusement without forcing into his ser- 
vice strangers whom he had never seen. 

A statement based on seemingly better authority than that of 
Bembo, affecting not only the character for decency of Caesar, 
but of Lucretia and Alexander, is found in the third volume of 
Burchard's famous Diarium. This passage has given opportu- 
nity for painters and novelists to represent the Borgias in the 
most indecent light It is worth translating entire from the old 
chronicle. He is speaking of the festivities in Rome on the 
occasion of the marriage of Lucretia with Prince Alfonso of 
Ferrara, her third husband : 

" In the evening [the last of October, 1501] fifty honest prostitutes, called 
* Alvisi, p. 162. t Delia vita e de" fattidi Guidobaldo. Di Baldi, Milano, 1821. 



1 886.] THE BORGIA MYTH. 11 

courtesans, supped with the duke [Caesar] in his room in the apostolic pal- 
ace. These after supper, at first clothed, afterwards naked, danced with 
the servants and others present ; . . . the pope, the duke, and Lucretia, his 
sister, being present and looking on." * 

The credibility of Burchard's testimony is doubtful. This 
part of the Diary, as we have already noted, is not authenticated. 
The editions of the Diary are faulty and interpolated. Eccard, 
Leibnitz, Thuasne, and Gennarelli, who published editions of it, 
were enemies of the Borgias ; and until the original manuscript 
of the work, still in the Vatican Library, finds the light of day, 
doubt must rest even on Thuasne's copy. This is the conclusion 
to which the reader of his preface and notes must arrive. Is the 
passage above quoted an interpolation? Did Burchard write 
this, or does he give what he saw or knew, or merely retail gos- 
sip, as he so frequently does ? It is true that \he fertur and dicitur 
so usual to the chronicler when he is telling an interesting story 
is wanting to this passage. Yet there are grave reasons for sus- 
pecting that the chronicler merely copies the fictions of the great 
libel published against the Borgia family just at this time. It is 
in the form of a letter supposed to be written to Silvio Savelli, 
an outlawed enemy of the Borgias, then at shelter in the impe- 
rial court of Germany. The author first of all congratulates 
Savelli on having escaped from the hands of the thieves who had 
confiscated his property by " the crime and perfidy of the pon- 
tiff," and at having found refuge in the court of the emperor. 
Then the anonymous writer blames Savelli for asking the pope 
to restore his property, for being so credulous as to suppose that 
a pontiff " who is the betrayer of the human race, and who spends 
his time in follies," would ever do anything just except under 
compulsion. Between Savelli, betrayed and proscribed, and the 
pope there should be eternal war and eternal hatred. Savelli 
should try other means than petition ; he should make known to 
the emperor and the German princes the crimes of " this infa- 
mous beast " Alexander " a disgrace to God and religion. This 
pope has committed murders, rapines, rapes, and incests too nu- 
merous to mention. "f Caesar, Lucretia, and all the other Borgias 
have had a share in them. The pope's simonies, perfidies, and 
rapes are enumerated ; and the ball with fifty meretrices honestce 
of Burchard is laid to Lucretia's charge. She and Caesar are 
accused of incest. Caesar is the murderer of Alfonso of Biselli 

* Burchard, tome iii. p. 167. 

t The letter is found in Thuasne's Burchard and Sanuto's Diaries. Sanuto very probably 
embellished Cappello's despatches with extracts from this letter. Alvisi, p. 224. 



12 THE BORGIA MYTH. [Oct., 

and of Pierotto ; Caesar has ruined the Romagna, from which he 
has driven the lawful sovereigns. All fear him, the fratricide, 
" who was a cardinal and has become an assassin." 

This letter is a summary of all the charges ever made by 
angry Italian writers in Milan, Venice, Naples, and Rome against 
the strong-willed Spanish intruders. Burchard's Diarium tells 
us that the pope asked to see the famous letter. He was accus- 
tomed for years to the style of the Roman satirists, the most vio- 
lent in Europe, reading daily, for the amusement of his courtiers, 
all that Marforio and Pasquino could say against himself. But 
Csesar was angered by it, and, a short time after its publication, 
caused a Venetian who had written calumnies against the Bor- 
gias to be put to death ; and a Neapolitan rhetorician, Jeronimo 
Mancioni most probably the author of the Savelli letter who 
had previously slandered them, to be mutilated. The stocks, and 
sometimes death, were then the punishments for the calumniator, 
as they were long after in our own New England.* 

Is the famous " ball," then, a calumny, or did it actually take 
place? Must we admit that Kaulbach'sf obscene picture of it 
has as little foundation in truth as Donizetti's opera or Victor 
Hugo's tragedy ? Certainly, if the ball be genuine, Mr. Astor 
would have to take up his pen again in defence of his heroine, for 
she is said to have been present at it. Or is the text of Burchard 
interpolated by Eccard, the enemy of the popes ? The original 
Vatican manuscript alone, when it comes to light, will solve 
the doubt. Alvisi insinuates that the Burchard story is taken 
from the Savelli libel. The diarist does not say that he was at 
the ball. He is giving only a report of what he heard. What 
is meant by fifty meretrices konesta, anyway " fifty respectable 
prostitutes " ? Was it not easy for the copyist to mistake Bur- 
chard's word granting for the moment the authenticity of the 
text and to assume it to be meretrices ? Certainly Burchard's 
penmanship was not easy to read. He was a German, accus- 
tomed to use peculiar characters in his writings, and his calli- 
graphy sadly puzzled the Italians who tried to read it. Even his 
associates could not make out what he wrote. Paris de Grassis, 
his fellow-master of ceremonies and afterwards his successor, 
says : " The books which he wrote no one can understand ex- 
cept the devil, his aider, or the sibyl ; for such crooks, most ob- 

* Even pontifical briefs and bulls were forged in those days. Floridus, Archbishop of Co- 
senza, was put to death by Caesar for such forgeries. 

t Kaulbach is an instance of the tendency of certain artists to assume that the indecent is 
true art. Lucretia Borgia's dance is not the worst sin of a Kaulbach against decency. 



1 886.] THE BORGIA MYTH. 13 

scure pothooks, and obliterated and scratched letters does he 
form that I think he must have had the devil for his amanu- 
ensis."* 

The " ball " story is incredible also when we consider the 
character of Alexander and Caesar as given by Gregorovius. 
They were men of refinement and culture, patrons of the arts 
and sciences. Both were wonderfully gifted and of a serious 
character. Both had great executive qualities. Alexander's pub- 
lic acts as head of the church prove him a statesman and a pro- 
moter of the spiritual welfare of Christianity. Even his enemies 
say that he was abstemious. The pious custom of ringing the 
bells in Rome at a certain hour in the evening, called the " Ave 
Maria," comes from him ; and whatever may be believed of his 
private life, no true historian has accused him or Csesar of being 
gross, vulgar, or boorish. The " ball '' is credible of a Russian 
court two hundred years ago, but not of the papal court in the 
age of the " Renaissance," with a pope nearly seventy years of 
age and in presence of a woman whose chastity Mr. Astor and 
Roscoe have vindicated. The fact that the careful and painstak- 
ing historians De Reumont and Gregorovius, both unfriendly 
to the Borgias, reject the " ball " story, is a strong argument 
against its truth. Matarazzo (Arch. Star. Ital., t. xvi. p. 189) 
says that the dance was performed by ladies and gentlemen of 
the court cortigiane, improperly translated in this case " courte- 
sans." The nudity does not mean absolute nudity, but a throw- 
ing-off of the outer robes. The Florentine orator Francis Pepi 
says they were courtiers, and not " courtesans," who danced. 
Shall we believe these authorities, or perhaps the interpolator 
of Burchard ? Must not the impartial doubt, at least, and not 
repeat a charge which is certainly not proven ? Is it not bigotry 
to asperse character without proof ? 

But the Borgian perfidy is attacked perhaps more even 
than the so-called Borgian orgies and murders. Csesar espe- 
cially is singled out as a monster of the worst form of Italian 
treachery in the age which saw Nicholas Machiavelli's Prin- 
cipe. But the duke even at his worst could hardly surpass the 
duplicity of the government whose secretary Machiavelli was, 
or the treasons often repeated of the papal vassals, the Orsi- 
ni, the Vitelli, the Bentivoglios, Vitelozzo, and their confede- 
rates. Under the pen of careful historians the " treason " of 
Sinigaglia laid to Caesar's charge assumes a very different as- 
pect from that which it has in Mr. Astor's prejudiced romance. 

* Note to Burchard's Diarium, Thuasne's edition, Paris, 1883, tome i. p. 2. 



14 THE BORGIA MYTH. [Oct., 

The "confederates" conspired in September, 1502, at'Todi, to 
murder the duke and thus tree the Romagna from his sway. The 
time was favorable. The French contingent in his army had 
gone. The vassals rose. Oliverotto of Fermo took Camerino 
and murdered all the Spaniards found in it. Baglioni besieged 
Michelotto Caesar's Spanish lieutenant in Pesaro ; and the 
Feltrese, violating their oaths, took Tavoletto and ravaged the 
country around Rimini. Caesar knew that no trust could be 
placed in the perjured " vicars." At this time he besieged 
Sinigaglia, where the confederates assembled for the purpose of 
assassinating him. They tried, however, to conceal their pur- 
pose, which had been confessed to him by Remiro di Lorgna, 
his majordomo, a party to the conspiracy, whom the duke had 
put to death for extorting money from the people and defraud- 
ing them in grain transactions " for the duke hated every kind 
of avarice."* The traitors, Paul and Francis Orsini, Vitelozzo, 
Vitelli, and Oliverotto, came out of the town to meet Caesar with 
pretended friendship, not knowing that he was aware of their 
plot. They embraced him. All entered the town together and 
the palace where the duke was to lodge and be assassinated. 
But no sooner were they in than he caused the conspirators 
to be arrested, their army attacked and routed, and the town 
sacked by Caesar's troops. The Vitelli and Enfreducci were 
put to death by his orders, and the ever-treacherous Orsini sent 
prisoners to Rome. This is the fact which Machiavelli praises so 
highly in the Principe, but which other writers condemn as an un- 
pardonable breach of faith. Caesar's own explanation of his con- 
duct is found in his published letters, and agrees with what we 
have written : f that " the Orsini and their confederates, in spite 
of failure in a former rebellion and pardon received, having heard 
that the French troops were gone away, thinking that the duke 
was weak, plotted a second treason ; pretending to help him take 
Sinigaglia, hiding two-thirds of their army in the houses around 
the town, making a secret agreement with the castellan to make 
a secret assault on Caesar at night." He asks all Italy to rejoice 
with him for having anticipated and thwarted the traitorous con- 
spiracy, " for it is well to deceive those who have been masters of 
deceit." Caesar was universally congratulated on his success, 
and Francis Uberti wrote a poem on it in which the victor is 

praised : 

" Forttter et vitulos Siemens, ursosque furentes " 

the Vitelli and Orsini being the steeds and the bears. Cer- 

* Alvisi, Document^ n. 74. f Idem and Vita di Malatesta Baglioni^ Perugia, 1839. 



1 886.] THE BORGIA MYTH. 15 

tainly the end does not justify the means ; but considering that 
the confederates would have murdered Caesar if he had not en- 
trapped them in the snare set to catch himself, we cannot mourn, 
as Mr. Astor does, over the fate of these Italian " tyranni " of the 
sixteenth century as if they were martyrs to liberty or the vic- 
tims of Borgian perfidy. It takes a good detective to catch a 
skilful thief ; and it took Caesar Borgia to outwit the confederates 
of Sinigaglia. 

Pope Alexander VI. died on the i8th of August, 1502. It is 
not true, as stated by Astor in his novel and by some historians, 
that Alexander and Caesar were poisoned, the former dying in 
consequence at a banquet, in which, by the malice of an atten- 
dant, the poisoned wine intended by the pope and " Valentino " 
for others was drunk by themselves. The truth is this : In the 
month of August, 1502, the heat at Rome and in Central Italy 
was excessive. In consequence of it fever spread throughout the 
country. Cardinal Borgia of Monreale, Archbishop of Ferrara, 
died of it. The pope and Caasar both caught it ; Cassar recov- 
ered, but the pope died. Neither Burchard nor any one of the 
ambassadors then at Rome mention a word about poisoning on 
this occasion. On the evening of August 5 the pope, Valentino, 
and many prelates supped at the vineyard of Cardinal Adrian da 
Corneto. The pontiff's death occurred thirteen days after this 
supper. The swollen appearance of his corpse exposed in the 
church of St. Peter gave the gossiping Romans occasion to say 
he was poisoned ; and those well-known historical embellishers, 
Bembo, Guicciardini, and Jovius with his " iron pen," added the 
rest. Not one respectable historian now believes the romance 
about the poisoning of Alexander and Caesar. Voltaire and 
Muratori, as well as Gregorovius and De Reumont, all reject it. 

Clement, in Les Borgias, gives us a portrait of Cassar,* by 
Raphael, which proves that Jovius lied even about the physical 
appearance of the Duke of Romagna. The Venetian orator of 
the time called him " most handsome." Indeed, all the Borgias, 
by the testimony of their enemies, were endowed with physi- 
cal charms, as well as with mental gifts and winning manners. 
Valentino had mild, clear eyes, a smiling countenance, a high 
brow, long face, and firm chin. Yet Jovius tells us that his 
countenance was disfigured with pustules, and that his sunken 
eyes gleamed so fiercely that his friends and servants were in 
terror of him ! He was the friend and patron of scholars, poets, 
and artists. Alvisi gives us a list of the Italian scholars who 

* Still existing in the Borghese Gallery at Rome. 



1 6 A ROYAL SPANISH CRUSADER. [Oct., 

were the duke's friends and companions. The sculptors also 
found in him a distinguished patron. Torrigiano followed him 
to the wars against the " tyrants " ; Michael Angelo lived for a 
time with him in Rome ; Pinturicchio was his friend and bene- 
ficiary ; and so popular was he among the Roman litterati that 
the poets Agapito Gerardino, Vincenzo Calmeta, Justolo, Francis 
Sperulo, and Orfino, all members of the Academy of Paul Cor- 
tese, took up the sword to aid him in the subjugation of his 
father's rebellious vassals. The bad character given to him and 
hi femily is not from the litterati of his own dominion, but from 
foreigners like Burchard the Alsacian ; from Jovius and Guic- 
ciardini, the Nprth Italians ; from Pontano and Sannazaro, the 
Neapolitans ; from Infessura, the disciple of Rienzi ; or from 
Venetian, Florentine, and Neapolitan writers whose interests 
lay ift a direction contrary to that of the house of Borgia. No 
court of justice, no jury of honest men, no impartial mind would 
convict an accused on such testimony. 



A ROYAL SPANISH CRUSADER. 

IN the shining muster-roll of kings who wore the cross and 
led their mail-clad chivalry to Palestine to win the Holy Sepul- 
chre from the infidel, there is no Spanish name. For two cen- 
turies, from iioo to 1300, during which the idea of the Crusade 
still dominated the imagination of Christendom and sent its 
knightliest and bravest in myriads to fight and perish on the hot 
sands of Syria, nearly every country of Europe, at one time or 
another, contributed its monarch to the crusading ranks. Kings 
of England, France, Denmark, Hungary, and, we may add, Scot- 
land if David the king can be credited with the deeds of David 
the prince made that futile and fatal campaign. No less than 
three emperors of Germany led mighty armies to the Holy Land, 
where one of them, the most famous, Frederick Barbarossa, died 
on the threshold of his enterprise. As many kings of France 
risked life and fortune on the same glorious venture, one, the 
saintly Louis, leading two crusades, and, like the German Frede- 
rick, dying at the outset of the second on Saracenic soil before 
the walls of Tunis. 

.Amid all this ferment of royal devotion and chivalry no Span- 
ish king is found marshalling his hosts to the rescue of the Holy 



1 886.] A ROYAL SPANISH CRUSADER. 17 

City. We cannot say no king of Spain, for the kingdom of Spain 
as yet had no existence ; but not one of the smaller kingdoms 
into which the Christian part of the Iberian peninsula was divided 
neither fiery Aragon, nor stately Leon, nor proud Castile sent 
any royal pilgrim with lance in rest to clear the path first marked 
out by Peter the Hermit and Godfrey of Bouillon, and strewn 
since with the bones of thousands upon thousands of the faithful 
who had fallen in sight of Jerusalem beneath the edge of the Mos- 
lem scimeter or the still more deadly blasts of the Moslem desert. 
For a people possessing the Spanish temperament devout to 
the point of fanaticism and brave to the verge of ferocity, natu- 
rally warlike and trained by constant conflict to the use of arms, 
passionately fond of the exercises of chivalry, nurtured, more- 
over, from the cradle in a vigorous hatred of the Saracen such as 
more northern nations who had never felt his yoke could never 
know, such an omission seems particularly strange. Spanish . 
kings, it should seem, would have been first to lead the crusade, 
the last to leave it. But the truth is, a Spanish king of those days 
had no occasion, even if he had the time or will, to cross the 
water in search of his crusade ; it was brought to his very doors. 
For eight centuries, from the woful field of Xeres, where Rode- 
rick lost life and kingdom, to the taking of Granada and the final 
subjugation of the Moors by Ferdinand and Isabella, the history 
of Spain is one long crusade. For eight centuries of almost 
constant battle Spanish chivalry and valor upheld the cross 
against the crescent with varying fortune now successful, as 
in the glorious struggle of Simancas, where 40,000 Moors were 
slain ; again overthrown, as on the disastrous day of Alarcos, 
where Alonzo the Noble led the knighthood of Castile to slaugh- 
ter; and finally triumphant, as in the crowning victory on the 
Navas of Toloso, where the Moorish power was broken, and, with 
the help of good St. James, 100,000 infidels were left dead upon 
the field, the Christian loss being but 25. 

With such neighbors to keep them busy, kings of Castile or 
Leon, or even Aragon though this, from its northernmost posi- 
tion, had less to fear from Moorish incursions than either of the 
sister kingdoms had scant leisure to follow in the footsteps of 
Richard Cceur de Lion and Philip Augustus, of Andrew of Hun- 
gary and St. Louis of France. Even if the Paynim gave any 
one of them breathing-space he would still have been kept at 
home by distrust of his Christian neighbors, ever on the alert to 
gobble up a stray kingdom left forsaken for the moment by its 
unwary master. Yet it cannot be doubted that more than one of 
VOL. XLIV 2 



iS A ROYAL SPANISH CRUSADER. [Get,, 

those chivalrous Catholic and Moslem-hating monarchs had to 
stifle many a secret yearning for that martial pilgrimage which 
every monarch of the time felt it his bounden duty to make, and 
which one of them, Robert Bruce by name, was so grieved at 
not making that his death-bed could only be consoled by brave 
Black Douglas' promise to bury the king's heart in that Holy 
Land his foot had never trod. It was these same pestilent 
Moors of Spain, who kept so many good kings of Castile and 
Leon and Aragon from going to fight for the Tomb of Christ, 
that now would not even suffer the dead Bruce's heart to reach 
that sacred goal. For the brave Lord James, on the way to fulfil 
his mission, being tempted by his love of fighting to take a hand 
in the Spanish wars, was there slain after performing prodigies of 
valor, and the royal heart went back to Scotland and to the royal 
palace at Scone. 

But the day of retribution for the Moors was still to come, 
and the beginning of their doom was written in the crushing de- 
feat on the Navas (Plains) of Toloso, already mentioned, where, 
if their loss was less than contemporary accounts would make it, 
their army, at least, was destroyed, and their power received a 
blow from which it never fully recovered. This was in 1212. 
The conquest of Valencia, twenty-six years later, repeating the 
most famous exploit of the Cid a century and a half before, 
completed the discomfiture of the Moors, plucked from them 
their terrors as an invading force, and put them almost wholly 
on the defensive. It was a king of Aragon who achieved this 
most notable victory, and, having secured himself in his king- 
dom by a few more conquests, and by the marriage of his daugh- 
ter to the king of Castile and Leon, now united in one, he seems 
to have bethought himself that the time had come when a 
Spanish king might win that battle of the cross in . Palestine 
which so many other Christian kings had failed in. Killing 
Paynims in Spain was, no doubt, well enough a most merito- 
rious work ; but killing Paynims in Palestine was, after all, the 
real business of a genuine crusader. So good King Jayme I., 
surnamed El Conquistador " The Conqueror" recking nothing 
of the sixty-six years that might have unnerved an arm or a heart 
less stout than his, buckled on his harness and set his face toward 
the Holy Sepulchre to strike a blow for the glory of God and 
the honor of Aragon. In his Chronicle* written by himself in 

* The Chronicle of James /., King of Aragon, surnamed The Conqueror, written byhimself. 
Translated from the Catalan by the late James Foster, M. P. for Berwick ; with Historical In- 
roduction, etc., by Pascuale de Gayangos. 2 vols. London, 1883. 



[886.] A ROYAL SPANISH CRUSADER, 19 

Catalan that forgotten language of troubadour and knight, and 
only lately rendered into English he tells us with what pride and 
satisfaction he received a summons from Pope Gregory X. to at- 
tend the Council of Lyons, A.D. 1274: 

" I was much pleased and very joyful," he says, '-'when summoned by 
the pope to give him counsel and aid in the business of the Holy Land 
beyond the sea. I sent him word that I would be there with him on the 
day he had named. So I accordingly prepared to go to the council at 
Lyons, as he had requested. And a long time before this I had my hostelries 
taken in the city, and sent thither whatever I thought would be necessary 
for two months or more. And in the middle of Lent I left Valencia and 
went to Lyons. . . . When I got to Viana [Vienne] the pope sent me his 
messengers in state, praying me to wait a day at St. Symphorien, that he 
might the better prepare for my reception. I did so. The place was three 
leagues from Lyons. Next day I rose at dawn and went into Lyons. It 
was the first day of May. All the cardinals came to meet me a league out- 
side the city, and the Master of the Temple beyond seas, En Juan Gil, En 
Gasper de Rosellen, who held the city for the pope, and many other bishops 
and barons ; and it took me to make my entrance, for the distance of a 
league, as far as the pope's palace, from morning till noon, so great was 
the throng of people who came out to receive me.'' 

He got there at last, however, and when the pope, who was 
in his chamber, was told the king was coming, 

" He came out in his full robes, and I saw him pass before me. He sat 
down in his chair, and I did him that reverence which kings do to a pope, 
according to the established custom. A chair was set for me near his own, 
on the right, and I then told him how I had come the day he had appointed 
for his meeting, but that I would not speak with him of any business till 
the morrow, when I would be present and hear what he had to say to me." 

Accordingly on the morrow he expounds his views in pre- 
sence of the council. He tells the pope, first, that he has come 
" for three purposes two of your own, and for a third of mine. 
The first is that you sent to me for advice ; the second, that I 
might give you aid. I have come here to give you the best ad- 
vice I know or that God will inspire me with. The third is en- 
tirely a reason of mine own that 1 may denounce others who 
have no heart to serve God." Certainly this exordium is not 
without a ring of the true crusading mettle. Then, premising 
that he " desires to speak before any one, as there is no king here 
but myself," he sets forth his plan for the crusade: 

" I give you first my advice, which is to send to the Holy Land five 
hundred knights and two thousand footmen, and forthwith to send your 
letters to the Masters of the Temple and of the Hospital, to- the King o.f 
Cyprus and the city of Acre, and let them know that it is for the sake 



20 A ROYAL SPANISH CRUSAJ>ER. [Oct., 

of the land beyond the sea that you hold this present council ; to send at 
once that company as vanguard, and set the others in motion to cross over. 
These first will not go to fight, but merely to garrison the castles and hold 
them till the great crusade goes that is, two years next St. John's day. 
For the rest, I say that if you yourself go beyond sea, as you have pro- 
posed, I will accompany you with one thousand knights ; but then do you 
aid me with the tithes of my land." 

Unluckily, in the midst of these 'warlike proposals and plan- 
nings there came a trifling financial difference between the high 
contracting parties. King Jayme desired to be crowned by the 
pope, and for that purpose had brought ftls crtwptt with him., 
" made of gold and set with precious stones, worth more than 
one hundred thousand sous tournois. Not so good a one could 
be got in Lyons." The pope's advisers, however, insisted that, 
as a condition to the crowning, the king should pay certain ar- 
rears due to the Holy See. Thence arose a squabble, the upshot 
of which was that King Jayme went home uncrowned and in 
some dudgeon, and the crusade was indefinitely postponed. 
With the pope, however, he parted on the best of terms : 

" I took him apart and said : ' Holy Father, I wish to leave, but not as 
the proverb says : " He who goes to Rome a fool comes away a fool" \Qui 
foil sen va a Roma foil sen torna}. Let it not be so with you. I never saw 
any pope but yourself, and so I wish to confess to you.' He was much 
pleased and content, and said he would confess me. . I told him my sins, 
and, on the other hand, what I could remember of the good deeds I had 
done. He imposed no other penance on me but that I should keep from 
evil for the future and persevere in good. Then I went on my knees be- 
fore him, and he put his hand on my head and gave me his blessing full 
five times. I kissed his hand and took my leave.' 

Don Jayme never got any nearer to Jerusalem than this. 
Before the allotted two years of preparation were completed 
death seized upon him at Valencia, six days after he had ab- 
dicated in favor of his eldest son, the Infante En Pere. But, in 
or out of Palestine, the warrior-king of Aragon was a born crusa- 
der. His whole life was a battle against the Crescent and " the 
hosts of false Mahound," and it was, no doubt, but an accident 
of fate which prevented the banner of Aragon from floating on 
the walls of Jerusalem. One has but to read the Chronicle to see 
how deeply the crusading spirit tinged the life and guided the 
actions of its author. His first great exploit, performed when 
he was barely twenty-one, was conquering " a Saracen kingdom 
in the sea" the Balearic Isles; his dying aspiration, as we have 
seen, was to lead a new crusade " to the Holy Land beyond the 
sea." Nor was this merely the ardor of the soldier longing 



1 886.] A ROYAL SPANISH CRUSADER. 21 

for new conquests ; there was in it, too, something of the 
zeal of the missionary. In a time and country wherein the 
flame of religion, fanned on either side by counterblasts of in- 
fidelity and heresy, burned brightest, Don Jayme was essentially 
a Catholic king a type of the stern Christian warrior for whom 
Simon de Montfort may stand as a model, who " denounced those 
who have no heart to serve God," and thought it fitting to pun- 
ish heretics because "they were bad and dangerous citizens." 
It is to serve the Lord that Don Jayme sets out on his expedition 
against Mallorca ; in danger of shipwreck, he puts up a " prayer 
to our Lord and his Mother," which is given in full in the 
Chronicle; he leads his knights to the charge "in Our Lady's 
name." Almost the last act of his life, as we have seen, was to 
receive absolution from the pope ; and it was his intention, 
frustrated by his sudden death, to retire upon his abdication to 
a monastery, and, like his great successor, Charles V., die wear- 
ing the religious habit. 

Yet the stock from which Don Jayme sprang gave scant pro- 
mise of such a scion. His father was Don Pedro II. of Aragon ; 
his mother Dona Maria, daughter and heiress of Guillen VIII. 
(William), Count of Montpellier (where Don Jayme was born), 
by Eudoxia, daughter of Manuel Comnenus, Emperor of Con- 
stantinople. Dona Maria, indeed, was a pious Catholic and a 
good woman " if ever there was a good woman in the world it 
was she," says her son in the Chronicle. And he adds : 

" This Dona Maria was called the holy queen, not only in Rome, where 
she died, but all over the world besides. Many sick are to this day cured 
by drinking, in water or in wine, the dust scraped from her tombstone in 
the church of St. Peter at Rome, where she is buried, near Santa Petro- 
nilla, the daughter of St. Peter." 

She was a great favorite of Innocent III., who upheld her 
rights against her father when he sought to disinherit her in 
the interest of his children by a second marriage, and afterwards 
against her husband when his profligacy and violence drove her 
to seek the pope's protection. The account of Don Jayme's 
christening at the church of Notre Dame des Tables at Mont- 
pellier (a bit of autobiography in which the royal chronicler may 
be supposed to have had collaboration), gives a notion of the 
good queen's simple-hearted piety. It was a question of naming 
the child : 

" So she made twelve candles, all of one size and weight, and had them 
all lighted together, and gave each the name of an apostle, and vowed to 



22 A ROYAL SPANISH CRUSADER. [Oct., 

our Lord that I should be christened by the name of that which lasted long- 
est. And so it happened that the candle that went by the name of St. James 
lasted a good finger's breadth more than all the others. And owing to that 
circumstance and to the grace of God I was christened El Jaime." 

It was a strange and cruel fortune which married this good 
woman and pious Catholic thrice to husbands of licentious life 
and heretical leanings. Barral, Count of Marseilles, and Bernard, 
Count of Comminges, her first two husbands, were, like so many 
of the nobles of Provence, Languedoc, and Aquitaine, deeply in- 
fected with that taint of heresy which came to them partly as an 
ancestral legacy, partly as a deposit from the retiring flood of the 
first Crusades, and an importation from the Jews and the Moors 
of Spain. In that stronghold of Gothic Arianism, scotched but 
not killed when Clovis slew Alaric the Visigoth on the plain of 
Vouille in 507, because it " displeased him mightily that these 
Arians should possess a portion of the Gauls," all strange doc- 
trines took root and flourished. Jew and Saracen, the Talmud 
and the Koran, Manictiasan and Gnostic, Henricians who spat 
upon the cross because it was the instrument of Christ's tor- 
ture, and Paterins who held the Lord's Prayer to be the only 
lawful form of petition all contributed to swell the mass of er- 
ror professed and taught by the sectaries known to history as 
the Albigenses, though they called themselves, with the modest 
self-assertion of their kind, Cathari (xaBapol, pure).* In Aqui- 

* By one of those perversions of history on which evangelical fanaticism and ignorance are 
fed, the Albigenses have been elevated, faute de mteux, to the rank of Protestant martyrs. Yet 
not only did they hold doctrines which even Protestantism would reject with abhorrence and 
Calvinism would have refuted with stake and fagot, but they were punished not so much be- 
cause they were heretics as because they were law-breakers and rebels. Their teachings were 
subversive of society and a menace to the state. Their defiance of all authority, civil and eccle- 
siastical, which sought to curb their excesses, was indeed but another manifestation of that unruly 
spirit which, from the time of its subjugation and settlement by the Visigoths in the fifth century, 
made all Occitania assert a quasi-independence of the French kings. This feeling survived to 
a much later period than the thirteenth century, in which it led the great lords of Languedoc and 
Provence to head the Albigense insurrection, and it was, no doubt, a powerful support to the Eng- 
lish domination in Aquitaine. 

So far from being mainly chargeable with the chastisement of the Albigenses, it was the 
Papacy which, for at least three-quarters of a century, interfered to postpone it. Legate after 
legate, to the number of thirteen, besides numberless missionaries of lesser rank, had been sent 
to lure back these lost sheep to the fold. St. Bernard himself, as early as 1145, had preached 
to them, winning multitudes of the common folk, but failing utterly to touch the hard hearts of 
the nobles, who even hid themselves in their houses, that they might not hear him ; so that on 
leaving Vertfeuil, in the district of Toulouse, where " were at that time a hundred knights abid- 
ing, having arms, banners, and horses, and keeping themselves at their own expense," the good 
saint was moved to shake the dust from his feet and to curse the town, saying : " Vertfeuil, Gcd 
wither thee ! " Sixty years later the great St. Dominic had no better success. But it was not 
until the papal legate, Peter de Castelnau, had been foully murdered at Saint Gilles, whither 
he had come at the instance and invitation of Count Raymond, that Pope Innocent III. lost 
patience and commanded the crusade. The merit of a cause is, to some extent, indicated by 



i886.] A ROYAL SPAWIS& CRUSADER. 23 

taine the Albigenses found the bulk of their votaries, and in 
Aragon, akin to Aquitaine by community of blood and language 
for both spoke the Catalan tongue they had sympathizers, if not 
disciples. In Pedro II. they found not only a sympathizer but 
a leader who, with his brother-in-law, Count Raymond of Tou- 
louse degenerate grandson of that Raymond who had fought 
with the Cid against the Moors, and, with Godfrey and Bohe- 
mond, had led the first Crusade made ineffectual head against 
Montfort's relentless onset until he was overthrown and slain 
in the bloody battle of Muret. It is related that King Pedro 
was almost the first one struck down in the fight, and, although 
he cried out lustily, " En sol rets" (I am the king), the crusaders 
speedily despatched him. Perhaps, like the Flemish weavers 
who slew Count Robert of Artois a century later on the field 
of Courtrai, while begging for quarter, " they couldn't under- 
stand his lingo." 

The son of a king killed in arms against a crusade proclaimed 
for the extirpation of a heresy which he protected if not pro- 
fessed, and the descendant of those emperors of Constantinople 
in whom the first Crusaders found a foe scarcely less bitter, and 
even more crafty, than the Saracen himself, would not be expected 
to develop much of the crusading fervor. But Don Jayme's 
training made amends for any defect of ancestry. His first 
tutor was grim Simon de Montfort himself, to whom his father 
committed him soon after birth, perhaps for some reason of poli- 
cy ; perhaps, as was not unusual in those days, that his martial 
education might be conducted under the eye of him who was 
beyond dispute the first soldier of his time. According to the 
Chronicle, it was at Montfort's own wish : 

"And after my birth En Simon de Montfort, who had the lands of Car- 
cassonne and Bedarieux and of Toulouse, what the King of France had 
conquered, desired to have friendship with my father, and asked for me 
that he might bring me up at his court. And my father trusted so much 
in Montfort that he delivered me to him to bring up." 

But when the battle of Muret had left the young prince an 
orphan in his fifth year, the lords of Aragon demanded his resti- 
tution, and, at Pope Innocent's request, Montfort surrendered 
him to another tutor who could most fitly continue his own 
teaching. This was En Guillen de Montredon, the Master of the 

the character of its leaders ; and the leaders of the Albigenses, almost without exception, from 
Pedro and Raymond to the apostate monk Henri, were men of loose morals and abandoned 
life. 



24 A ROYAL SPANISH CRUSADER. [Oct., 

Temple in Spain, who received Don Jayme when he was six years 
and four months old. Such was the poverty of the country after 
Don Pedro's wastefulness and wars that it is recorded in the 
Chronicle : "When I entered Monzon [the fortress where Don 
Jayme was to reside with the Master of the Temple] I had no " 
food for one day, the land being so wasted and mortgaged." 

Don Jayme's school-days were destined to be brief. In those 
perfervid times, and among that warlike race, the soldier's career 
began early. The Knight of Bivar, afterwards to be immortal- 
ized in his country's history as El Cid Campeador, while yet a 
boy had made his name a terror to the Moor ; nor was Bernardo 
del Carpio older when he slew the mighty Roland in the Pass of 
Roncesvaux. At a later and less legendary period we find Don 
John of Austria, while yet in his teens, acclaimed the most ac- 
complished knight in Europe, and winning the battle of Lepanto, 
which saved Christendom, at an age when nowadays his coevals 
are at college. But surely never did hero of legend or history 
make his maiden battle younger than Don Jayme. At nine years 
old his stern master put him in the field at Sagua against the 
treacherous kinsmen who were conspiring for his throne, "a 
knight, whose name I do not remember, lending me a light coat 
of mail (gonio), which I put on ; and that was the beginning, the 
first arms I ever wore." One king history tells of, indeed, who 
wore arms at an age more tender. That was Louis, variously 
surnamed the Debonair and the Pious, whom his father, Charle- 
magne, in the hope to curb the rebellious restiveness of Aqui- 
taine, sent, when three years old, to be king of that most unruly 
province. Says Eginhard, the annalist of Charlemagne: 

" From the banks of the Meuse to Orleans the little prince was carried 
in his cradle. But once on the Loire, this manner of travelling beseemed 
him no longer; his conductors would that his entry into his dominions 
should have a manly and warrior-like appearance : they clad him in arms 
proportioned to his height and age ; they put him and held him on horse- 
back ; and it was in such guise that he entered Aquitaine." 

But this was merely a peaceful parade, while the nine-year- 
old prince of Aragon donned hauberk and took sword in hand 
for the serious work of war. Thenceforward for the space of 
nearly sixty years the harness was rarely off his back. 

The same precocity marked his marriage. It was the counsel 
of his liegemen that he should marry while still young 

" Because there were great anxieties for my life, either from maladies or 
from poison, and likewise because they wished on my account that I should 
have an heir, so that the kingdom should not go out of the royal line ; for 



*886.] A ROYAL SPANISH CRUSADER. 25 

Count Sancho, son of the Count of Barcelona [it was against him the young 
soldier had taken arms at Sagua], and Don Fernando, my uncle, wished 
each to be king, and had tried for it in my childhood when I was at 
Monzon." 

That touch about his childhood from the mature monarch of 
twelve is delightful. So at the age of twelve Don Jayme was be 
trothed and presently married to Dona Leaner of Castile, and, 
what seemed to him probably a much more important cere- 
mony, was knighted, making his knightly vigil and receiving the 
knightly spurs at the church of St. Mary's of Orta. After that, 
he says, with a gravity which makes one smile, " I went into 
Aragon and Catalonia, and my wife, the queen, with me." 

Married thus young, the bold spirit of the Conqueror-to-be 
chafed under the subjection in which his barons sought to keep 
him, and he meditated flight. 

"I went to the queen and said to her: 'Well do I know and see the 
hurt and dishonor that you and I are suffering, and, though I am still a 
child, I intend having my revenge, and you also, if you will only follow my 
.advice." 

But as this advice included a descent from a window by 
means of a rope, the poor child-queen shrank from the danger. 
11 Know you," she made answer, "that for nothing in the world 
will I be lowered by a board on ropes." This is the same queen 
who a few years later conducts, with the skill of a trained diplo- 
mat and the nerve of a veteran campaigner, the negotiations for 
the surrender of Valencia. Deliverance came at last, and free- 
dom of action was no sooner secured than the first thought of 
the young prince is conquest. At a banquet in Tarragona " a 
citizen of Barcelona who had great knowledge of the sea" tells 
him about the rich and (fertile island of Mallorca, a Saracen king- 
dom at his very doors. Don Jayme summons his Cortes at 
once, and after telling them how he intends "to serve the Lord 
in this expedition that I mean to make against the kingdom of 
Mallorca," sets about his preparations. Finally he sets sail from 
the harbor of Salen in September, 1229, with twenty-five ships, 
eighteen tartanas, seventeen galleys, and one hundred transports. 
En Guillen de Moncada, Master of the Temple in Aragon since 
the promotion of En Guillen de Montrdon to the grand-mas- 
tership of the order, led the van, and the king brought up the 
rear " in the galley of Montpellier." In his train, by an odd 
caprice of fortune, were many of the rebel, and now refugee, 
lords of Aquitaine who had led the Albigenses and been beaten 



26 A ROYAL SPANISH CRUSADER. [Oct., 

and dispersed by De Montfort. The Vicomte of Carcassonne, the 
lords of Lo and Laurac, of Saissac, Cabaret and Castres, Termes 
and Miraval, now wore the cross they had once warred against. 

All went well until a treacherous wind from Provence where, 
to the fervent imagination of the time, the very airs of heaven 
may have seemed tainted with heresy and inimical to the cross- 
threatened the safety of the squadron, but gave the king also oc- 
casion to show his piety and trust in God : 

" A wind from Provence springing up, the ships found themselves taken 
in a white squall. Cala! Calal cried the sailors, but there was a bad sea 
with that Provence wind, and no one in my galley spoke a word. The 
vessels were driving around us. I saw the danger we were in. I was 
greatly discomforted, but I turned to our Lord and his Mother and prayed 
thus: 'I well know thou hast made me king of the land and of the goods 
my father held by thy grace. Until this time I had not begun any great 
or perilous enterprise, seeing that thy help has been felt from my birth up 
to this time, and thou hast given us honor and help against our bad sub- 
jects who would overthrow us. Now, O Lord, my Creator, help me, if it 
please thee, in this so great danger, that so good a work as I have begun 
may not be lost ; for I alone would not lose, but thou wouldst lose more. I 
go on this expedition to exalt the faith that thou hast given us, and to 
abase and destroy those who do not believe in thee ; and so, O thou 
true and powerful God, thou canst guard me in this danger and fulfil my 
will, which is to serve thee. And I should remember thee, for as yet no 
creature ever called to thee for mercy that did not find it, and especially 
they who have it in their heart to serve thee and to suffer for thy sake ; 
and I am one of them. And, O Lord, remember so many people who go 
with me to serve thee ; and thou, Mother of God, who art a bridge and a 
pathway for sinners, I beseech thee, by the seven joys and seven sorrows 
that thou hadst for thy dear Lord, to remember me by praying to thy dear 
Son to take from me this affliction and danger in which I am, and those 
with me." 

Happily the storm blew over, a landing was safely made in 
the bay of Palamera, and battle joined with the Saracens at once. 
After a stubborn conflict, in which the Christians were three 
times beaten back, the Saracens took to flight and were pursued 
to the walls of Mallorca. The city was formally invested and 
battered with fonnevals and cliattes, mangonels and trebuchets, and 
all the enginery of mediaeval warfare, until, on St. Sylvester's eve, 
orders were given that the army should, after hearing Mass, de- 
liver the assault. So at daylight they charged "in Our Lady's 
name," and through the breach the dismayed Saracens " saw a 
knight on horseback, in white armor, enter first. My belief is 
that it must have been St. George, as I find in history that in 
many other battles of Christians and Saracens he was frequently 



1 886.] A ROYAL SPANISH CRUSADER. 27 

seen." It is a little curious that Don Jayme should have fixed 
upon St. George as his heavenly ally, since it is St. James (Sant- 
iago) who generally figures in the Spanish legends in this charac- 
ter ; and St. James was not only the patron saint of Spain, but his 
own especial patron and name-saint. The victory was complete, 
the King of Mallorca and his son being taken, and thirty thou- 
sand infidels flying to the hills. Don Jayme set a guard of Do- 
minicans over the palace and treasury (his fighting men, it 
seems, were scarcely to be trusted there), and then, " wearied out, 
went to sleep, for the sun had already set." The next morning 
he naively records how lucky he thought himself to be asked to 
breakfast by "a man who had cooked some very good beef" a 
touch that veterans of our own war will appreciate. 

By the end of the ensuing summer the island of Mallorca was 
entirely subjugated and Don Jayme returned to Tarragona. 
The following year he was recalled to Mallorca by a rumor that 
the King of Tunis meant to cross there ; and, finding this false, 
took occasion while he was on the spot to reduce Minorca and 
Iviga. These, however, and some minor conquests during the 
next ten years, were only preparations for his great exploit, the 
conquest of Valencia, which he achieved in 1238, when he was 
thirty years of age. The great military orders of Spain, the 
Templars and the Hospitallers, were ever ready to urge and aid 
him to fresh enterprises against the infidels, and it was the Master 
of the Hospital who now pointed out to him that his glory would 
be incomplete without the capture of Valencia. Mallorca was 
nothing, he said ; in Valencia there would be found men so innu- 
merable as to prevent approach to her walls, so that a king who 
could take that might well say he was the greatest king in the 
world. This was touching the king on his tenderest points his 
pride as a soldier and his zeal as a Christian and he forthwith 
set about redeeming the city of the Cid. This he accomplished 
after a campaign so admirably planned that the Master of the 
Hospital was sure "the Lord must guide a man whose resolu- 
tions were so good." Valencia was surrendered, and the Chroni- 
cle goes on : 

"When I saw my standard upon the tower I dismounted, turned myself 
to the East, and wept with my eyes, kissing the ground for the great mercy 
that had been done me." 

So our Conqueror went on from triumph to triumph, and 
from conquest to conquest (he was victor in thirty battles), ex- 
tending the boundaries of his kingdom, and winning great glory 



28 A ROYAL SPANISH CRUSADER. [Oct., 

of men and, let us hope, what he himself would have valued 
more the approval of Heaven. Indeed, from all contemporary 
accounts, James I. was a just and enlightened monarch, who 
earned his subjects' love by his solicitude for their welfare. In 
the intervals of his campaigns he devoted himself with equal 
earnestness and ability to regulating the internal affairs of his 
kingdom, and in particular to protecting the peasantry and 
farming class from the oppression and rapacity of the great 
lords. In his leisure moments, when freed from the cares of 
war and administration, he was fond of making little excursions 
into the neighboring friendly kingdoms, and especially to Mont- 
pellier, where he was born and christened, and for which he 
seems to have retained a fondness through his life. On his way 
to the Council of Lyons, already referred to, he stayed eight 
days at Montpellier, and at another time he made a formal visit 
there to entertain his kinsmen, the Counts of Toulouse and Pro- 
vence. These were his cousin, Raymond VII., son of that Ray- 
mond of Toulouse who had headed the Albigense rebellion and 
been by Simon de Montfort so wofully mauled and battered ; 
and Raymond Berenger, celebrated by Dante as the father of 
four fair daughters who all became queens.* Don Jayme's at- 
tachment to Montpellier was shown in other ways. In that vo- 
tive chapel of Our Lady built by Guillen VI. of Montpellier, 
adjoining his castle, and afterwards known as the Sainte Chapelle, 
he established a college of canons for the daily celebration of 
Mass. And once when he fell sick there he had himself carried 
to the church of Notre Dame des Tables, where he was chris- 
tened, and, being suddenly healed after prayer, he caused a 
votive picture commemorating the event to be placed in the 
church. This ancient sanctuary was sacked by the Huguenots, 
and destroyed in the Revolution. 

Such is, in brief, the story of Don Jayme El Conquistador, 
as told in the pages of his Chronicle. It reveals him as a valiant 
knight and a skilful captain, a good king and a devout Catholic, 
fearing God and hating the infidel, as a true man should. In per- 
son he was the model of a mediaeval knight. Of almost gigantic 
stature, the most powerful man of his time, and expert in all the 

* Of England, France, Sicily, and the Romans. Marguerite, the eldest, "held," say the 
chronicles, "to be the most noble, most beautiful, and best educated princess at that time in 
Europe," was married to St. Louis. It was then that, the Count of Provence being anxious 
about the immense dowry he would have to give his daughter, Romeo de Villeneuve, his senes- 
chal, gave him the famous advice: " Count, leave it to me, and let not this great expense cause 
you any trouble. If you marry your eldest high, the mere consideration of the alliance will get 
the others married better and at less cost." 



1 886.] "SOMETHING TOUCHING THE LORD HAMLET" 29 

exercises of chivalry, he must, indeed, have carried terror to the 
Moors on whom he charged shouting his favorite war-cry, " In 
Our Lady's name ! " Of him, no doubt, might be repeated what 
he says of his father, Don Pedro: " He was a good man-at-arms, 
as good as any in the world." His body was buried in the mon- 
astery of St. Mary of Poblet, to which his will bequeathed it ; and 
there, though the church was ruined in the Carlist wars, his 
tomb may still be seen, with his effigy wearing the frock and 
sandals of a Bernardine friar, in which he was interred. 



"SOMETHING TOUCHING THE LORD HAMLET." 

THE acting conceptions of Hamlet have been almost as nu- 
merous as the tragedians who have personated him. Burbage, 
the great Hamlet of Shakspere's own day, is said to have re- 
quired from the dramatist's hand the queen's description of the 
prince as " fat and scant of breath." Betterton, of course, omit- 
ted it, being (as indeed were Garrick, Kean, and as is Edwin 
Booth) small of stature and of meagre build. Betterton also 
omitted the passage commencing 

" Angels and ministers of grace, defend us," 

while Garrick discarded the entire graveyard scene of the fifth 
act, and took such other liberties as became a true inheritor of 
the traditions of Dryden and Davenant, who worked over the 
great text quite .at pleasure, turning Macbeth's witches into a 
ballet, giving Miranda a brother, and making Shylock a low 
comedian with a red nose, or Portia a soubrette, with imitations 
of leading local barristers, as happened to hit the ribald tone of 
their day. 

But while the actor may not be asked to overlook exigencies 
of taste and audience, or managers to maintain a purity of con- 
text at the expense of empty houses and bankruptcy, editors, 
commentators, and critics cannot be permitted an equal license 
of interpretation. These may, indeed, put their multitudinous 
knowledge into foot-notes ; but between the foot-notes and the 
text a broad line is to be drawn, below which is their preroga- 
tive, but above which they can only read like the rest of us. 

And yet when Ophelia exclaims, "Oh! what a noble mind is 
here o'erthrown," she appears to have given the keynote to 



3O "SOMETHING TOUCHING THE LORD HAMLET" [Oct., 

about two centuries of commentary. Doubtless to that gentle 
lady so did appear the princely lover, who chided her in brusque 
speech, and with rough denials dismissed her from his presence. 
But I cannot help thinking that the exegesis which credits Ham- 
let the Dane (as we have him in the First Folio) with madness, 
indecision, a disjointed and diseased will, or other insignia of a 
mind diseased, is drawn not so much from a desire to corro- 
borate Ophelia as from a certain finical overstudy of the crude 
" Hamblett " of Belleforest, or that earlier Saga of a rude and 
formative literature, the " Amleth " of Saxo Grammaticus; if, 
indeed, it be anything else than a supercilious and redundant 
sapiency and show of profundity in the commentator himself. 
That our average Shaksperean commentator is given to over- 
much "letting of empty buckets into empty wells" is very fa- 
miliar criticism. There are many commentaries to write and 
very little to write about, and the temptation to archaeological 
minutiae on the one hand, or aesthetic rhapsody on the other, 
is perhaps too strong for resistance. But a ruthless sweeping 
away of both alike will, I think, reveal the Hamlet that Shak- 
spere himself wanted ; and this Hamlet, I think, will turn out a 
very different sort of person from the one the commentators 
manufacture for us. 

Prince Hamlet as we have him in the First Folio seems to 
me a manly, punctilious, and rational gentleman, with a legally 
balanced mind, conservative in method and tendency, with a law- 
yer's caution and respect for the conventional and established 
order of things ; above all, suspicious of intuitions, surmise, and 
guess-work. Far from being infirm of purpose, like that whilom 
Macbeth who let " I dare not wait upon I would " who dared 
not to think, much less to look upon what his own hands had 
wrought here was, it seems to me, a man whose deliberate 
and solemn judgment, once committed to an act, was suffered 
neither to relax nor hurry its due issue and performance. Surely 
that was an impatient and impertinent ghost who came a second 
time from his prison-house to complain of the "almost blunted 
purpose " of such a man as this ! He had taken a prince's word, 
this ghost, that while memory held its sway his message should 
be remembered, and should have rested in the assurance. For 
the prince had weighed long and considered deeply before giving 
his word or putting any reliance upon or believing in ghosts at all. 
He is rather disposed, on the whole, to jeer at the very idea of 
such things as unpent spirits, released from their confine, revisit- 
ing the glimpses of this moon; albeit in the days of Shakspere 



1 886.] "SOMETHING TOUCHING THE LORD HAMLET" 31 

all kinds of spectres, supernatural and disembodied shapes, were 
conceded a constant interposition in sublunary matters. 

The story of Hamlet is not a record of usurpation, murder, 
blood, and death like Macbeth, nor of domestic tragedy like 
Othello, nor of madness like Lear. Rather is it the history of 
purposes adhered to and of the end which compassed them. 
The man who, living consecrated to a purpose, accomplishes that 
purpose before he dies, is not ordinarily held to be a failure, 
infirm of resolution, weak and listless of his purpose. To every 
self-regarding, trustful, determined, and just man must come, at 
some time, deliberation as to method ; as to consequences, hesi- 
tancies, interruptions of time and circumstances. Did not Prince 
Hamlet, perhaps, eat and sleep between the ghostly interview 
and the catastrophe of his revenge, during the visit of the 
players, their rehearsals and performance, the murder of Polo- 
nius, the embassy to England, the escape, the return, the funeral 
of Ophelia? Was there no more interval to these than the waits 
and betweens of the play at our theatres? 

Had the dramatist whose completed work is before us in the 
First Folio desired to portray a madman named Hamlet, be had 
plenty of models at hand. The Belleforest " Hamblett " would 
rend his clothes, " wallow in the mire, run through the streets 
with fouled face, like a man distraught, not speaking one word 
but such as seemed to proceed from madness and mere frenzy ; 
all his actions and gestures being no other than the right counte- 
nance of a man wholly deprived of all reason and understanding ; 
in such sort that he seemed fit for nothing but to make sport to 
the pages and ruffling courtiers that attended in the courts of his 
stepfather." But is it not the patent fact that Shakspere fol- 
lowed .no such model ; that he deliberately rejected the childish 
Saga and the almost equally crude " Hamblett " tale, and created 
a new Hamlet with attributes of his own, whose story bore only 
the most attenuated resemblance to these? And if Shakspere 
deliberately discarded all the former Amleths and Hambletts, 
why should we restore them ? What have they to do with Ham- 
let the Dane, in inky cloak, who did not rant nor grovel, but cher- 
ished only 

" That within which passeth show " ? 

To me this sombre and stately prince bears no likene 
decessors who were very mountebanks in silly ap 
diseased. Is it not the very paradox of assthetic^ 
leave the perfect work of a master, and go back to 




32 "SOMETHING TOUCHING THE LORD HAMLET?' [Oct., 

of a re-utilized tale for an inconsequent and irresponsible lunatic 
" who fails to act in any definite line of consistent purpose ; neg- 
lects what he deems a sacred duty ; wastes himself in trifling oc- 
cupations; descends to the ignoble part of a court-jester; breaks 
the heart of a lady he dearly loves ; uselessly and recklessly kills 
her father, with no sign of sorrow or remorse for the deed ; in- 
sults a brother's legitimate grief at her grave, and finally goes 
stumbling to the catastrophe of his death, the most complete fail- 
ure, in the direction of the avowed purpose of his life, ever re- 
corded "? The Aesthete who thus declaims might, perhaps, have 
labored trncl-er ptfdVitictal disadvantage. Old Dr. Johnson, to be 
sure, once delivered himself of a valuable note to the effect that 
" the pretended madness of Hamlet causes much mirth " ; but 
surely, not since the old doctor's day has a metropolitan Eng- 
lish stage so interpreted the masterpiece of a master. 

To begin with, it is to be remembered that our Hamlet is an 
Englishman, and the Denmark in which he moved an English 
court, ruled by an absolute monarch of the Tudor cast, one 
Claudius, a very passable Henry VIII., not quite so far along in 
uxoriousness at his taking-off, perhaps, but well in for it. No 
amount of scenic or critical realism will enable us to confess a 
further obligation in Shakspere to Denmark than for a very 
limited stock of allusion and nomenclature. There certainly is 
neither habitude, cast of thought, method, or custom that can be 
called Danish, or that suggests itself as characteristic of Den- 
mark's warlike, simple, sturdy, and unphilosophic inhabitants 
of any dynasty or date, in the salient points and characters of the 
play. 

The characteristic of the particular tragedian who enacts 
Hamlet the blonde wig, the Danish court-dress, the mantle of 
fur; the portraits hung on the chamber- wall or worn " in little " 
on the actor's breast ; the Tudor scenery which Garrick used, or 
the barbaric court with its rude arches and columns hung in 
arras ; its figures draped in habit of old Scandinavia all these, 
while alike creditable to the study and conception of this or that 
actor (and valuable as relieving the spectator from a too mono- 
tonous usuetude), are still redundant, if we are to ask who, after 
all, Hamlet, in the mind's eye of his creator, Shakspere, was. 

Hamlet to the true critic, " in spite of all temptations to be- 
long^to other nations," must ever be and remain an Englishman. 
Eipnj-the. prince's philosophy of lifeand duty, the courtier phrases 
i&f >? 4 oloniuS'.an.d Osric, to the burlesque dialect and dialectics of 
fthfe grave-diggers, every speech and sense put into the mouth 




1 8 86.] "SOMETHING TOUCHING THE LORD HAMLET." 33 

of the -dramatis persona is purely English English thought, 
methods, habits of reasoning, analogies, and expression are every- 
where before us. There was nothing incestuous in the marriage 
of Claudius to his brother's widow, by Danish laws, traditions, or 
customs. The technical denial of consecrated sepulture to sui- 
cides, the polishing of young gallants at the French court, the 
employment of strolling players every act, law, tenure, or cus- 
tom on which the action of the play is anywhere suspended is 
English, and English only. 

Add to all these that the succession from Claudius is stated in 
such unmistakable terms of English law that nothing but sheer 
good-nature can admit a flavor of Denmark into it. 

"... Our valiant Hamlet 

Did slay this Fortinbras, who by a sealed compact, 
Well ratified by law and heraldry, 
Did forfeit, with his life, all those his lands 
Which he stood seized of, to the conqueror; 
Against the which, a moiety competent 
Was gaged by our king, which had returned 
To the inheritance of Fortinbras 
Had he been vanquisher, as, by the same cov'nant, 
His fell to Hamlet." (I. i. 87.) 

Had the wager between the two kings been a legal one in 
England (and by importing the legend Shakspere so assumed 
it), then the above is an exact statement of the result, by Anglo- 
Saxon tenure, in equity. Technical terms of the lawyers' craft 
are " packed into this passage so closely as to form the greater 
part of its composition," says Mr. Davis. Others have shown 
that not only was the argument of the grave-digger a legitimate 
travesty on the old case of Hales vs. Petit, but that in the entire 
graveyard scene clowns, priests, court, and all travel closely 
within the customs sanctioned by English canon law of the peri- 
od. And Horatio, at the last (as if conscious that a Platonic sui- 
cide were out of place in Denmark), explains that he is " more an 
antique Roman than a Dane." 

What we are contemplating, then, is not a Danish but an 
English Hamlet a Hamlet as he left the hands of Shakspere, 
his creator ; a Hamlet dispossessed of the personal equation of 
his particular interpreter, or the dust-heap of this or that par- 
ticular annotator ; the Hamlet, in short, of the play as we have 
it finally in the First Folio, not as it might have been or ought to 
have been according to this or that more or less adult alienist or 
protagonist. He is simply an English prince in waiting ; in his 

VOL. XLIV. 3 



34 " SOMETHING TOUCHING THE LORD HAMLET." [Oct., 

minority entitled to princely maintenance, but only so long as he 
remains a cipher in the state. In this sense only can the King 
say to him, " Be as ourselves in Denmark." The crown-prince 
who should trifle with state affairs would have become, in Tudor 
or Elizabethan usage, on the instant a crown prisoner instead. 

This Prince Hamlet is restive. His first speech is a sotto voce 
bitterly expressive of this very status. Left alone a moment 
later, a friend, a late arrival from a German university, tells of a 
ghostly visitor, and brings witnesses jto his story of the appari- 
tion, which, however. Hamlet declines, even upon the testimony 
of these three, his sworn friend among them, to believe. But 
his curiosity is aroused and he proposes to see for himself. 
Just here the industrious gentlemen who find " trilogies " and 
" groups " among the Canon Plays might well pause to point us 
to the fact that this ghost of Hamlet's father is the only ghost 
in all Shakspere which allows itself to be visible to outsiders, to 
spectators, who are merely third persons to its business or mes- 
sage. Cassar and Banquo, and Henry and Clarence, and the 
young princes sent their shades only to the party who had un- 
kindly assisted in their mortal taking-off. Even if not an inten- 
tional proof, certainly it is an afforded proof of the conservatism 
and manliness of Prince Hamlet that to convince him some- 
thing even more than " the sensible and true avouch " of his 
own senses is despatched ! A disbeliever in ghosts is to be made 
over into a believer, and the mettle to be worked upon requires 
nothing less than cumulative presumptive evidence. This stage 
passed, however, Hamlet consents to see the Ghost alone. But 
even afterwards, although half-convinced and profoundly im- 
pressed with the interview, he will not yet admit to his friends 
that he believes. He makes light of the whole affair, and, to as- 
sure them how faintly the eerie interview has touched his reason, 
puns and quibbles and jokes about it with careless, even heart- 
less, badinage. We had supposed that it was only your true 
German mind, with its strata of " under-soul " and "over-soul," 
which can see in this badinage, even if it be a little forced, the 
gambols of a maddened mind. But it seems there are others 
who forget that it is only with things familiar that we joke and 
trifle. Had Hamlet been afraid of that ghost, those of us who 
are willing to allow Shakspere somewhat to say of his own crea- 
tions will not be indisposed to admit in the teeth even of the 
-vast German introspection that Shakspere's text might, per- 
haps, have so made it appear. 

But whether Hamlet be or no, Hamlet's friends are afraid of 



1 886.] "SOMETHING TOUCHING THE LORD HAMLET." 35 

it; and so, like the prince that he is, he puts himself courte- 
ously into a frame of tolerance with their mood. In heroic vein 
he swears them on his sword to secrecy ; and then, when ready 
for the whisper, puts them by with platitudes in short, acts as 
any gentleman would who finely, but firmly and irrevocably, 
wrests it out of any one's power to trifle with what he will, 
nevertheless, in private deeply ponder over. Firmly, but yet 
playfully, so as not to wound the feelings of those to whose 
kindness he is, and may hereafter wish to become, indebted for 
his evidence, he refuses to share his secret ; and when, from re- 
flection, causation, and rational assessment of cumulative proof, 
he finds the ghost's statements walking all-fours with his own in- 
tuitive perceptions, even then this legal-minded, this exact young 
prince will press to no conclusion will neither upon superna- 
tural testimony nor intuition base an overt act. He will, for the 
present, do nothing more than doubt ; and, lawyer-like, he still 
gives the benefit of the doubt to the de facto King. Even the 
vision which three other sane men have seen may yet be the 
chimera of his own melancholy : 

" The spirit that I have seen 
May be the devil : . . . yea, and perhaps 
Out of my weakness and my melancholy, 
As he is very potent with such spirits, 
Abuses me to damn me." 

And then he adds again the lawyer and acute and accom- 
plished weigher of evidence : 

" I'll have grounds 
More relative than this! " 

Wherein lies the " madness," so far at least, in the mental pro- 
cesses of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark? 

There is a play, out of the Italian, made upon the murder of 
one Gonzago. Here are strolling players, who have a power, 
nevertheless, of recitation of which Hamlet himself has felt the 
force. Hamlet has heard that one's conscience may be nay, 
has been reached by such players as these. He conceives a 
plan of using this very play about the Gonzago murder to test 
the story he has heard, if so be it may deduce " matter more 
relative," He revises the dumb-show of the act of murder to 
suit the one portrayed by the Ghost, interpolates a speech or two 
of his own, and gives minute direction to the actor entrusted 
with them how to render his lines, beyond all peradventure, 



36 "SOMETHING TOUCHING THE LORD HAMLET." [Oct., 

effectively. And in the result, and not till then, will the prince 
recognize " the sensible and true avouch " not only of those 
senses to which the apparition has appeared, but of a whole 
court. Then, and not till then, will this " madman," this crazed 
Hamlet, " take the Ghost's word for a thousand pounds." 

And now ensues a scene which for two centuries or so the 
chorus of commentators has declared to be a breaking -forth of 
Prince Hamlet's dementia. But what says the play ? Shall not 
this pensive, this calm and self-repressing Hamlet at least allow 
himself a burst of exultation at the complete success of his long- 
r maturing schemes ? That he does not declaim in rotund periods, 
that he does not call on the avenging gods, is purely character- 
istic of the balanced and self- correcting brain. Why he says, 
in relaxing vein, to his friend if my fortunes should some day 
turn against me, don't you think I could get a living with a 
strolling company of players myself? Yes, indeed, I think 
you might at least claim in time half a share in the profits of 
the troupe, says Horatio. To which Hamlet replies, still in 
complaisant mood, Nothing less than a whole share for me, 
and recites in the popular vein a verse, wanting the final rhyme, 
which Horatio suggests could have been completed in perfect 
.appropriateness to the occasion : 

" For thou dost know, O Damon dear. 

This realm dismantled was 
Of Jove himself ; and now reigns here 
A very CLAUDIUS!"* 

'Only for Claudius Hamlet says " pajock " (that is, " peacock," or 
anything that is mere pretence and show without substance). 
The playfulness of two friends unbending may hardly pass as 
madness with minds not maddish themselves ! 

The parry of harsh words with poor Lady Ophelia, leading 
up to the abrupt dismissal, affords another recitemerit for the 
" madman " view. Perhaps all lovers' vows and dicers' oaths are 
madness. But here are lovers' vows reconsidered ; and recon- 
sideration is not quite the regulation act of a madman. In the 
leisure of a prince, no doubt, Hamlet has had love-passages with 
the sweet lady ; perhaps had given her his heart of hearts, as, in- 
deed, she has surely given hers to him. What matters it to the 
now gruesome story of the play ? Now that the Ghost's story 
has become a truth to the deep-thinking man, now that he sees 
how henceforth his is a life committed to great purposes, there 

* This reading is suggested to me by Mr. Davis. 



i886.] "SOMETHING TOUCHING THE LORD HAMLET" 37 

must be no more sports with Amaryllis in the shade nor with the 
tangles of Nerea's hair, no more of marriages. There must be 
harsh words sooner or later, and abrupt speeches. They may as 
well come now as further on. A murderous and usurping king 
is to be done for, a dear father murdered to be avenged. After 
that, Ophelia again, perhaps. But until the times have been set 
right and the cursed spite of duty performed, it is needs must to 
wipe away all trivial fond records. They, with all saws of books, 
all forms, all pressures past, all dilettante matter in idle courtier 
life or at Wittenberg by youth and observation copied, must be 
expunged from the book and volume of a brain hereafter to be 
filled alone by that dear father's commandment, brought by that 
father's own perturbed spirit to mortality again. Indeed, we 
have found no madness yet. Perhaps it were better for Prince 
Hamlet if we had. Even in this inter-scene it is not hard to re- 
cognize the tender reluctance of the gentleman who is obliged, 
in harsh half-dialogue and half-soliloquy, to tell the lady that she 
must release for ever all thought of the man who perhaps loved 
her once. It might, we even think, have been kindlier done by 
taking the Lady Ophelia herself into a prince's confidence. The 
woman who loved a Hamlet might have acquiesced in his honor 
and the noblesse oblige of it. At least a woman like Macbeth's 
lady would have acquiesced. But perhaps Ophelia was not a 
Lady Macbeth. So far we go with the text. Hamlet so de- 
cides, and we are reading, not composing, his story reading it, 
not from Saxo Grammaticus, or Belleforest, or the aesthetic 
commentators, but from Shakspere. Hamlet assumes aberra- 
tion, perhaps to soften his cruelty, perhaps in cold blood ; but, 
anyhow, Ophelia is to be sacrificed, and sacrificed she is. 

Thereafter, the Ghost's word once taken, we see Hamlet 
sword in hand. Twice he strikes at the King, who has, in the 
face of the court, confessed the murder of his predecessor (con- 
fessed it certainly as plainly as Macbeth at the banquet revealed 
the taking-ofif of Banquo). The first time Hamlet drops his point 
because King Claudius is at his prayers, and the prince will not 
run the risk of having England (that is, his Denmark) take its 
priest's cue and canonize a sovereign slain, like Becket, at the 
altar ; the second time, so luck will have it, kills Polonius instead. 
Conscience-stricken as he is, Claudius yet proposes to make 
things endurable for himself. He has this troublesome prince 
announced as mad to the court (to whom explanations of the 
killing of Polonius and of that scene at the play are in order), 
and announces that the throne in tenderest solicitude will ar- 



38 "SOMETHING TOUCHING THE LORD HAMLET" [Oct., 

range that he be sent abroad for change of scene and treatment. 
Outside it is bulletined to the populace that Prince Hamlet is 
despatched on embassy to England to exact a long-delayed in- 
stalment of tribute-money. But such items leak through the 
sieve of courts, and the very grave-diggers have the truth of 
it. Had Hamlet been the madman the commentators make him 
and Ophelia thought him, he had, perhaps, never penetrated 
the subterfuge. But he had been on his guard against plots to 
get him out of the way. Even when the King had called him 
" cousin " and " son," and invited him to " be as ourselves in 
Denmark," Hamlet had been swift to interpret the purposes for 
which Rozencrantz and Guildenstern were imported, and had 
mentioned to those insinuating gentlemen that he was not quite 
yet bereft of reason ; nay, nor a pipe to be played upon. 

He sees it to his advantage to accompany and outwit them, 
and he does it with rare effectiveness. But our commenta- 
tor is not disconcerted with this ruse contre ruse, and is ready 
with his hermeneutics ; cites many learned works in mental 
pathology, and shows how normal to a mind diseased is a cer- 
tain penetrating shrewdness. Hamlet having been pronounced 
stark mad to begin with, all the res gestce is to be bent to that 
end, and bent it accordingly is. 

But one scene more is to intervene ere .the purpose of a 
prince is made a fact accomplished the scene at poor Ophelia's 
grave. To read madness into the intense pathos and philoso- 
phy of that monologue over Yorick's skull and the mortality 
that turns Caesars into clay puts even our commentators to 
their reading. But they do it somehow. It is a tribute to the 
vast penetration of the people, to the great common consent 
of mankind, that this scene will subdue and dominate and 
hold the breath of vast audiences, and that not an individual 
will miss the modulated lesson of it all. How many of these 
vast audiences read or think of reading a volume of our com- 
mentators in order to comprehend that exquisite height of dra- 
matic intensity ? Doubtless not one. And yet our commenta- 
tor will write, and the old book-stalls will teem with the books 
so written, and the copies are always choice finds because " un- 
cut." 

That could hardly be a chronicle of a human life which re- 
corded that its subject never lost his patience or his temper. It 
must be confessed that, a very few moments after this high strain, 
Prince Hamlet is human is sane enough to entirely lose his. 
He has been through much. And to a man so deeply conscious 



1 886.] "SOMETHING TOUCHING THE LORD HAMLET" 39 

of the perspective of events, so keenly cutting below the surface 
and into the motives and hearts of men, so contemptuous of mere 
words and noise and phrases, to see Laertes, tricked out in the 
fopperies of France, playing maudlin mourner where he, Ham- 
let, had suppressed everything it was hardly to be borne with- 
out a little touch of nature. But he is not long beside himself. 
He knows that he rants, and that a hostile court are taking notes 
to pin lunacy once more upon him. He contents himself: 

" I loved you ever: but 'tis no matter; 
Let Hercules himself do what he may, 
The cat will mew, the dog will have his day !" 

The excitement of return ; of the meditation on mortality, on 
Yorick's skull, and on Caesar turned to clay; of the funeral in 
consecrated ground, and the sudden confronting of the court, 
are subdued into only just this little measure. After all, the cat 
will mew, the dog will have his day and so, enough. 

With unerring perception, once more a calm and determined 
man, Hamlet falls in with the King's second subterfuge of the 
wager, and instantly recognizes the perfect and fitting oppor- 
tunity for all these days, months, and years awaited sent by 
Fate at last. At last he will have a weapon in his hand in full 
view of the court and in the presence of the King a King not at 
prayers, but on his throne. He will make short work of him 
now. The matter is out of scheming, and the prince has only 
to bide the hour. The weight of the disjointed times off his 
mind, he has leisure and mood for trifling. He can fool Osric to 
the top of his bent, or he may for the first time talk of himself to 
his only friend : " Thou wouldst not think how ill 's all here 
about my heart: but it is no matter." But when Horatio would 
undertake to put off the sword-play, "Not a whit. ... If it be 
now, 'tis not to come ; if it be not to come, it will be now ; if it 
be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all." The readiness 
of long years, the readiness that never has relaxed through all 
the interruption of events the readiness is all ; and here it is ! 

There is surely very little of the "court-jester" in the cloV 
ing scene, when the dying Hamlet, although he has accomplished 
his never- relented-from purpose, and has no wish to live, yet, as 
his blood ebbs, remembers that this accomplished purpose may 
be set down to a moment's impulse, and the long, silent struggle 
for opportunity, the once more accorded lesson of revenge, be 
never known by those whose judgment he could yet wish kind 
to the last prince of a lapsed dynasty ! Perhaps Hamlet foresaw 



40 "SOMETHING TOUCHING THE LORD HAMLET." [Oct., 

let us admit the fancy for a moment the long line of com- 
mentators who to-day, as for the last one hundred years, are in- 
terrupting the reader of Prince Hamlet's story at every word by 
superimposed numeral or asterisk, or other zodiacal sign, to ask 
him if he is quite sure he understands what he is reading, and 
wouldn't rather please stop and see what a nice little wheelbar- 
row-load of archaic and dusty debris he has just trundled up and 
emptied at this, that, and the other point ; who is bending, per- 
haps, all his little sapiency to prove the incapacity, the shiftless- 
ness, the puling imbecility, vacillation, and all the rest of it, of 
Hamlet the Dane. Perhaps Prince Hamlet saw all this in his 
mind's eye when he said to Horatio: 

" O good Horatio ! what a wounded name, 
Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me ! 
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart," 

(for Horatio was himself proposing to drink the cup and follow 
his friend,) 

"Absent thee from felicity awhile, 
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, 
To tell my story." 

Endure the bufferings of life to say a word for me ; show why 
I broke Ophelia's heart, by mischance killed her harmless old 
father, why I took the Ghost's word for a thousand pounds ; put 
down the poisoned cup, and tarry here to report me and my cause 
aright nothing extenuate, but tell them the story of harsh fate, 
and of my duty all, all done ! " If thou didst ever hold me in 
thy heart," do this for Hamlet ! " The rest is Silence ! " 

We confess that, unless, indeed, Hamlet is a mystery for each 
man to read himself into, unless every man is to make of Hamlet 
w c hat he himself under the circumstances would have been, and 
unless it is of no sort of consequence what Shakspere drew him to 
be, we cannot read any blunted purposes into the soul of this Eng- 
lish prince. Under what standard of comparison does he merit 
the interpretation? Surrounded by Claudius, the conscience- 
eaten ; Polonius, the parasite ; Osric, the flunky ; Laertes, true 
cub of Polonius^ coming from dissipation in Paris to remouth his 
father's platitudes and do the cat's paw for a murderous and 
cowardly King surely not by confronting him with these does 
Prince Hamlet appear " cruel, evasive, dilatory, infirm of pur- 
pose, a court-jester" ! Surely not out of this precious directory 
shall we select Hamlet as the madman L In Macbeth, indeed, we 



i886.] "SOMETHING TOUCHING THE LORD HAMLET." 41 

had the man who would " proceed no further in this business " ; 
in Brutus one whose " whole mind," spurred amid his rhetorical 
patriotism to a single overt act, 

" is suffering the nature of an insurrection " ; 

but not in the Hamlet of Shakspere can we find one of these 
paradoxes. 

And yet what little necessity for any analysis at all to find a 
madman, when we consider that Horatio is at Hamlet's side ? 
Surely to no one but a Shaksperean commentator is it neces- 
sary to suggest that Horatio was no keeper of lunatics, nor quite 
the person to figure throughout the play as the friend, confidant, 
and alter ego of a madman. The aesthetic critic who can conceive 
of Horatio, clear- minded, strong-headed, acute, practical, who 
checks his friend with a 

" 'twere to consider too curiously to consider so," 

and who, when all is over, can say above his lifelong and now 
lifeless friend : 

" Give order that these bodies 
High on a stage be placed to the view ; 
And let me speak to the yet unknowing world 
How these things came about : so shall you hear 
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, 
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, 
Of deaths put on by cunning, and forc'd cause, 
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook 
Fall'n on the inventors' heads " ; 

continuing, during the entire period covered by the Shak- 
sperean chronicle, the follower of a man who had better have 
been in a madhouse is perhaps best as he is: an aesthetic critic ! 
To such a one Hamlet the Dane may have been a candidate for 
Bedlam. But at least King Fortinbras knew better when he 
pronounced the proper and fitting eulogium of this just man, 
tenacious of his purpose : 

" Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage ; 
For he was likely, had he been put on, 
To have prov'd most royally : and, for his passage, 
The soldiers' music and the rites of war 
Speak loudly for him." 



42 A CATHOLIC VIEW OF PRISON LIFE. [Oct., 



A CATHOLIC VIEW OF PRISON LIFE. 

IT must be doubted whether any government in the world, 
in this year of grace 1886, has grasped the whole ideal of the 
object of punishment, and therefore of its method or its spirit. If 
I may hazard an opinion where so many of the wisest thinkers 
have differed both in principle and in detail, I should imagine 
that to change the heart and the character of a criminal was the 
first and last motive in all punishment. If it be replied that this 
is not the legal idea, because punishment means the legal pay- 
ment of a debt which has been incurred both to the law and to 
society, I should rejoin that this may be so from a law-court 
point of view, but that it is not so from a Christian or a philoso- 
phical. If punishment be regarded as a deterrent from crime 
(a deterrent both in endurance and in prospect), it must follow 
that, since to prevent crime is a chief object in punishment, to im- 
prove the criminal must be a means to the same end. " I punish 
you that you may not do it again, or that others may be fore- 
warned of the penalty," is only half of that motive which, Chris- 
tianly and philosophically, should influence the legislative mind. 
" I punish you that, in the process of your being punished, you 
may be built up into a totally new character," seems much more 
suggestive of the divine ideal of punishment, which I should im- 
agine to be " purification by pain." 

Yet when we use the word " pain " we are using a loose 
word which may be interpreted in a variety of senses. Pain 
may mean physical or mental suffering, without a touch even of 
motive or of object. It may mean simply the infliction of a woe 
not the endurance of, the submission to, a woe, with high cour- 
age, religious patience, a penitent spirit ; it may mean nothing 
better than a detested evil, a thing to be hated for its own self. 
Now, this wrong estimate of pain both physical and mental pain 
is just precisely that estimate which ninety-nine prisoners out of 
every hundred naturally take of their law-inflicted punishment. 
I say " naturally take," for neither in law-courts nor in prisons 
is there any earnest recognition of the duty of suggesting a higher 
estimate. Barring only the "attendance at divine worship " and 
the kindly sympathies of the chaplain of a jail (with, of course, 
the use of libraries in prisons, and also the practically helpful 
service of " learning a trade "), there is positively, at least in Eng- 



1 886.] A CATHOLIC VIEW OF PKISON LIFE. 43 

land, scarcely any attempt whatever at the rebuilding of the 
whole character of a convict. A prison means only a place of 
working out a sentence, whether it be for six months or for a 
whole life. It is not a place for Christian penance and edifica- 
tion, any more than for intellectual invigoration. It is rather a 
place where the one sentiment is degradation ; the one object, to 
"get through " the horrid task. 

I have visited Catholic prisons in France and in Italy, and 
have recognized the high intention of the officials. Particularly 
at Belle Isle, near St. Nazaire, I was wonderfully struck with 
three excellent characteristics : the prominence given to the 
attractiveness of the prison chapel, the constant, affectionate 
fatherliness of the prison chaplain, and the soothing influence of 
the surrounding sea and tranquil country. The idea of the place 
was that of a retreat ; there was nothing which was repugnant 
or degrading. And some of the worst classes of criminals were 
sent there. I talked to some of them, in the company of the 
prison chaplain, and they all seemed resigned, not degraded. 
(This was twenty-two years ago.) I compared, in my own mind, 
such a penal religious house with some of the dens of demorali- 
zation I had seen in England. The atmosphere of the two " sys- 
tems " was quite opposite. It appeared to me that in this Ca- 
tholic prison the first object of the officials was to refine, and 
so to purify, the prisoners' characters ; whereas it had always 
seemed to me that in England the (at least) result of prison life 
must be to degrade prisoners down and down to semi-brutedom ; 
as though a criminal, because a law-breaker, ought to be made to 
realize the possibility that he might, after all, be not human. 

I know nothing of American systems of penal servitude, and 
must therefore build up my inferences, and also my " philo- 
sophy," on the foundation of my English experience. It has 
appeared to me that even inspectors have stopped short at the 
inquiry : " Is the discipline carried out according to law ? " Now, 
it is the very law as to the whole matter that I should object to. 
I may be presumptuous, but it seems to me that the English 
judges, as well 1 as the whole legislative body, utterly fail to ap- 
prehend that punishment is first curative, and only afterwards 
penal or retributive. I cannot conceive of erring mortals, be 
they judges or criminals, taking any other view of human pun- 
ishments than that they are designed for the improvement of the 
delinquents. Let us first discuss the " religious " view of the 
subject. It is obvious that, spiritually, no one man can judge 
another man ; nor can he (therefore) mete out to him exact pun- 



44 A CATHOLIC VIEW OF PRISON LIFE. [Oct., 

ishment. Ne Jtidicas, et non judicaberis, has obvious reference to 
our intellectual incapacity, as well as to our fitting Christian hu- 
mility. Punishment, therefore, can never be intended as the ad- 
ministration of the lex talionis, since it is absolutely impossible to 
know (none but God can know) what "measure for measure" 
would be in any case. To know what would be " measure for 
measure," it would be necessary to know, (i) the whole nature of 
a culprit, his constitution of mind, heart, and nerve ; (2) the exact 
pressure of the temptation on that whole nature at the exact mo- 
ment when the offence was committed ; (3) all the incidental cir- 
cumstances, auxiliaries, incitements, which constructed a momen- 
tary attitude of the will. God knows all this no one else. So 
that, spiritually, all "judgment" is both indecent and imbecile, 
save the judgment which we may perhaps pass on ourself. The 
only fact of which we are sure (in another's crime) is that there 
must have been some moral defect; and, therefore, since we 
are sure of the defect, but not sure of the (precise) guilt, what 
we have first to try to do is to cure the defect. The very effort 
at being cured will be the punishment. What is Christianly 
called penance involves a combat with the lower will, as well as 
the foregoing of lower pleasures ; it is punishment both in will 
and in deed ; and the more superlative the penance the more 
superlative will be the frustration of the promptings of the 
lower will to gratification. But if you take away the conversion 
of the will you take away the real object of the penance. Pen- 
ance without good-will is not penance. It is punishment, but it 
is spiritually of little use. And it is just here that we touch the 
point where the utter hoilowness of the penal system is made 
transparent to the Catholic mind. Punishment can frighten', 
it can disgust, it can pay the bill which the culprit owes to the 
law, but it does not of itself do the mind the smallest good ; 
nay, of itself it may only harden the disposition. Penal servi- 
tude, as it is understood in England, is the dry performance of a 
task which is not improving that is, which is not necessarily im- 
proving which cannot remotely touch the confines of the spiri- 
tual man; which degrades but cannot elevate, sours but cannot 
sweeten, hardens but cannot soften ; demoralizes by the self-con- 
viction of one's own ignominy, and demoralizes all the more be- 
cause it does not take into recognition the capacity of the con- 
vict's soul for what is highest. 

How, then, it may be asked, would you so administer law- 
punishments as to combine the penal with the spiritualizing ele- 
ments ? 



1 886.] A CATHOLIC VIEW OF PRISON LIFE. 45 

First, by setting steadily before the minds of all prisoners 
that they are to improve themselves by the opportunities which 
are given them. I know that this is impossible, save in a limited 
degree, in any prison which is not Catholic in its whole control. 
I know that no non-Catholic apprehension can initiate, still less 
develop in execution, that perfect system of " supernatural " 
education which is possible only within the ark of the church. 
Yet it is necessary to speak only as a Catholic in order to speak 
truthfully on the whole subject. The first idea, then, in a Ca- 
tholic prison is purification. I do not use the word " sanctifica- 
tion," because it would sound too " interior " in any essay upon 
a lay view of penal servitude. Purification in a mental or moral 
sense ; purification of purpose, and therefore of habit ; purifica- 
tion of the intellectual conceptions of the highest aims this ap- 
pears to me to be the first object in punishment, as it is also its 
last and happiest fruit. I cannot believe that in this little life we 
can ever regard another's punishment save as a means to an end 
which shall be the best. And what is that " best," save the eter- 
nal regeneration of the whole being of the man who has "gone 
wrong"? In simple fairness apart from all hypocrisy, all pre- 
tence, all cant or affectation let it be asked : What is the dif- 
ference between a sinner who is in jail and a sinner who has the 
luck to be out of it ? The difference is that the one has been 
" caught " in an overt act of breaking an act of Parliament, while 
the other has only broken perhaps half a dozen divine laws, and 
has not been caught, and could not be. Be it remembered that 
the breaches of the criminal laws need not be exceptionally hor- 
rid " sins," save only so far as they are breaches of the divine 
laws, which alone are of the essence of obligation. So that a 
man may be condemned to penal servitude for twenty years for 
some offence which, in the judgment of the Divine Mind, was but 
a very small infraction of a divine law some offence which was 
as nothing when compared with the colossal sins which the " man 
of the world " commits gaily every day, but which society gra- 
ciously pardons in " men of position." It is the criminal code, 
not the divine law, which the prisoner has dared to mock ; it is 
the penal statutes, not the commandments of the New Testa- 
ment, which the vulgar thief or drunkard has outraged. And 
if every man who should commit a mortal sin, by breaking a law 
of God or of the church, were to be tried and sent to prison for 
each offence, we should be obliged to have a prison attached to 
every big house a prison which would be much more tenanted 
than would be the big house. This puts the truth candidly, 



46 A CATHOLIC VIEW OF PRISON LIFE. [Oct., 

without cant or hypocrisy, without lies, either social or conven- 
tional. Therefore, when we treat of prison life let us remember 
that we are treating of the punishment of those few who have 
been " caught " breaking civil or criminal laws ; -we are not 
treating of the lucky exemption of the many who walk the streets 
in the serenest liberty of their complacency, while breaking daily 
one or more of the divine commandments. 

How, then, with any justice, with any manliness or mag- 
nanimity, can we fail to admit that we owe to " criminal " pri- 
soners some exceptional reparation or restitution, since it is 
partly through our own fault our neglect of duty or our bad 
example that they have been snared into committing vulgar 
crimes, and since they are not, in the eye of God, any worse 
than, if so bad as, the habitual worldling or schemer or voluptu- 
ary ? This reparation, this restitution, ought to be, as I have 
suggested, their "education," both spiritual and intellectual; 
their building up in the science of the spiritual life and their 
building up in intellectual apprehension ; their being taught such 
honest trades as shall remove future temptations, with such in- 
vigoration as shall make them brave and industrious. Will it be 
objected : " Then where will be your punishment?" I call this 
objection most unintelligent. Who does not know that restraint 
for liberty, sharp discipline for lazy self-pleasing, the devotion of 
the mind and habit to lofty ideas for the habitual looseness of 
immorality or turpitude, are exchanges which are necessarily 
penal in the extreme, however softened by the loving spirit of 
the whole object ? If the " religious life " be a life of mortification 
that is, a resistance to the lower will must not the penal 
life, which adds chastisement to the mortification, be essentially 
"punishment" in severe sense? To my thinking, if you made 
prisons religious houses, plus only forced industrial retreats, you 
would preserve every element of just punishment, while getting 
rid of every element of degradation. It is that " degradation " 
which is the bane of our prisons. It is the wrong, the obvious 
injustice, of our prisons. A prisoner is degraded by being " con- 
demned." What you have now to do is to undegrade him. You 
have to lift up, not to beat down ; you have to encourage, not to 
depress ; you have to improve the mind, not to weary out the 
body ; you have to make a Christian out of an assumed pagan, a 
fair scholar out of an ignoramus, a sensible man out of a dull 
libertine, a good workman out of -a waif-and-stray. In doing 
this you would regenerate "the criminal classes." You would 
make it impossible that " the dog should return to its vomit, the 



1 886.] A CATHOLIC VIEW OF PRISON LIFE. 47 

sow to its wallowing- in the mire." Why is it that "returned 
convicts " go to the bad again and commit precisely the same 
offences as before ? For two reasons : first, that you have not 
taught them ; secondly, that society that cruel, canting, unjust 
hypocrite shuts its doors upon the returned convict who has 
done his penance, while it is careful not to do penance for its own 
sins. But if prisons were made schools as much as prisons, re- 
ligious retreats rather than coarse penal cages, society would 
not have the excuse (which it most certainly has now) lor refus- 
ing to give work to the unimproved. If society were .assured, 
on the authority of prison officials, that the returned convict was 
a criminal no longer, that he was a thoroughly renewed and 
taught man, society, for very shame, could not refuse to give 
employment to a man whp was at least as good as itself. I 
would have the whole prison system radically altered in some 
such respects as the following : That all prison life should be 
probationary ; that no sentence passed by judge and jury should 
be considered to be absolutely final in its allotment, but that the 
prisoner's prison conduct, his progress, his real improvement, 
should be the ultimate awarder of his length of punishment ; that 
prison guardians of the highest character and personal fitness 
should be continually in communication with all prisoners, and 
should take counsel with chaplains and with governors, and also 
with regular standing committees, as to the advancement which 
had been made by each prisoner, and as to the (possible) misap- 
prehension of judge and jury; and thus I would put an end to 
the flagrant wrong which is now normal the passing hasty sen- 
tences on a hasty trial ; the trusting the keys of a life's liberty to 
one fallible judge, who may be a savage or who may be illusion- 
ed ; the leaving no locus penitentice to the victim of a temptation, 
who may or may not be bad in will, but whose trial was a one- 
sided affair. And, above all, I would never commit any young 
person to the same character of punishment as I would commit 
matured persons a disgraceful mistake in the English system, 
which is equally barbarous and imbecile, and which stamps the 
nation which commits it as hardly civilized. 

Manifestly, for young persons say for youths under twenty 
a much gentler and more sympathetic treatment is required than 
for those who have grown old in their iniquities. In nine cases 
out of ten very young persons have gone wrong through defects 
in their moral education, through the neglect or theincompetency 
of their guardians, or through having no guardians at all. No- 
thing can be more absurd or more wicked than to treat the 



48 A CA THOLIC VIE w OF PRISON LIFE. [Oct., 

fledgling, " the flighty and frisky juvenile," as one would treat a 
man of, say, thirty years of age, who might be presumed to have 
sown his wild oats. Yet in England it is quite common to con- 
demn a mere youth to incarceration along with the " hardened 
criminals " of the worst class, whose society he has given to him 
to reform him ! Now, I should imagine that if the " probation- 
ary " principle, which I have ventured to advocate in all cases, can 
be justified in one case more than in another, it must be in the 
case of a first offender, whose youth and whose ignorance are his 
apologists. I should maintain that in no instance whatever 
ought a youth to be sent to prison at all. He ought to be sent 
only to an industrial retreat. It is true that in England we have 
no such retreats none that are even worthy to be mentioned. 
In Rome, in the days of Pius IX., I well remember that there 
were such institutions. I am informed, too, that they are still 
to be found in exceptional states. But why are they not a first 
requirement in every state? Take any huge metropolis say 
London or New York and it follows necessarily that a certain 
proportion of the population, must be " neglected " in every 
moral and social sense. And how monstrous that, when the 
young criminals come to be "tried," they are to be dealt with, 
in punishment, precisely as though their antecedents had been 
most favorable to the development of their characters ! Nay, as 
a rule, it is the irresponsible the almost irresponsible youth 
or neglected young man who " catches it hardest " from the 
Christian judges; while the youths of fair position who have 
been well brought up are let off with a fine or a mild rebuke ! 
That there is " one law for the rich and another for the poor ' is 
true not only in regard to relative punishment, but in regard to 
the inciting causes which poverty vainly pleads, but which "re- 
spectability " usually pleads with great success. 

I have said that society owes reparation and restitution to the 
criminal classes who have been netted in overt crimes, and I sup- 
pose it is natural that society which sets a bad example should 
be indifferent to the reformation of the captives. Yet society, be 
it remembered, is not the government ; is not the judicial or 
ecclesiastical power of the realm ; is not the de facto responsibly 
paternal authority at whose door lies the duty of perfecting pun- 
ishment. How is it that our bishops I mean our Anglican 
bishops or dignitaries do not busy themselves with this subject 
of supreme import ; do not hold congresses, and make their sug- 
gestions to the government, on matters which are most especially 
within their province? True, non-Catholics cannot grasp the 



1 8 86.] A CATHOLIC VIEW OF PRISON LIFE. 49 

whole of the subject : they have not the " spiritual science " at 
their command ; yet the Christian aspect of penalty would seem 
to be a study which ought to come within the province of their 
ministry. Nor is it possible not to regret that, even in Catholic 
countries, this most delicate groove of "charity" is not more 
cultivated. Spite of the hardness of governments, it might be pos- 
sible for ecclesiastics to exercise much more influence over them 
than is attempted. In England we can scarcely look for such 
influence : there is not the motive, the apprehension, the instinct. 
In England the inspectors of prisons are the sole counsellors. 
They appear to think themselves quite equal to their task. So 
they are from the standpoint which they profess. They give 
us their official reports by the dozen ; and these reports are 
almost always highly complacent. I have read every volume of 
such reports which has been issued for a long series of years. 
The " reading " is somewhat heavy and dry. The chaplains 
usually tell the same tale : " they have every reason to think the 
system is working well." The medical inspectors pile up cate- 
gories of the invalids, but always tell us that the sanitary arrange- 
ments are excellent. The disciplinarians are of opinion that recent 
improvements will work wonders in the reformation of even the 
worst class of criminals. And the governors and the committees 
of inspection publish volumes on the amount of labor which has 
been accomplished in the way of building a magnificent break- 
water, or some great basin in a dock-yard at Chatham, or pos- 
sibly a new harbor or lighthouse. We have also the assurance 
that the convict classes earn (for the country) about a quarter 
of a million sterling per annum ; that the " educational depart- 
ments " are in most respects progressive ; that the prisoners are 
generally anxious to read good books (the Bible, Pilgrim s Pro. 
gress, and books of travel), and that the new system of separating 
first offenders from old offenders gives promise of most beneficent 
results. So far, so well. No one doubts that " prison reform " 
is not neglected. No one supposes that, in eighteen hundred and 
eighty-six years, some advance has not been made over the 
pagan Roman style of prisons, where the only appreciable ob- 
ject was to punish, the only ethical indoctrination was to com- 
mit suicide. 

Yet what does all such "advance" really amount to, whether 
Christianly, philosophically, or experimentally? To tell us that 
there are now tailors' shops and basket-makers' shops in which 
some of the prisoners may learn such trades ; that there are two 
thousand volumes in a prison library, and that some prisoners 

VOL. XLIV. 4 



50 A CATHOLIC VIEW OF PRISON LIFE. [Oct., 

" prefer reading to having their dinners"; that the worst class 
of prisoners acquire habits of steady industry by working at 
stone-masonry or at carpentering,, or that the sanitary and the 
culinary arrangements- have been brought up to a high standard 
of efficiency : all such items of " reports " and they are weari- 
somely repeated only touch the mere outline of the machinery 
of prison life ; they do not even suggest the highest objects. Let 
us, for a moment, put together a few of the aspects which we 
have touched upon, and see if we can arrive at some conclu- 
sions. 

Why do some of the criminal classes get into prisons ? 
Chiefly for three reasons : because they have been badly brought 
up, because they have been maddened by extreme hardship, 
because society sets them a bad example. It comes to this, then, 
that most of the criminal classes might plead misfortune as at 
least auxiliary to the climax of their career. And as to the ques- 
tion of morals, the criminal classes might plead gravely that the 
laws are not framed with a view to morals so much as with a 
vie,w to social security to the protection of the property of the 
individual. It is most important to bear in mind what the laws 
appear to him\\\\en we are judging the law-breaker who has been 
caught. Such laws, in regard to honesty, are mainly constructed 
on the principle that you must not thieve save in some business 
or some trade; but that "in business" you may thieve as much 
as you like. " Business " may be denned, equally in truth and in 
pleasantry, as the art of extracting money out of other persons' 
pockets without getting into the hands of the police. And the 
criminal classes see around them many thousands of examples of 
the world bending its knee to successful villany, while at the 
same time the world turns up its nose in sovereign contempt at 
the unsuccessful industries of virtuous men. The criminal classes 
know well that if they had the means to start companies or to 
embark in any speculative kind of enterprise, with the certainty 
of making fortunes by injuring the poor, society would hug them 
to its bosom and eat their dinners and drink their wines with pro- 
found respect. They know, too, that in most businesses there is 
trie kin ess and shabbiness, over- reaching, over-charging, and legal 
robbery ; and that the laws are not designed to place any sup- 
pression on such rogueries, but, on the contrary, to protect the 
business-man in practising them, " Morals," therefore, as the 
criminal classes apprehend them, mean the science of robbing 
legally and respectably, and, above all, of robbing with success. 
It would be unpardonable affectation to speak of the criminal 



1 886.] A CATHOLIC VIEW OF PRISON LIFE. 51 

classes save as being created out of the bad morals of the success- 
ful classes, or to deny that the successful classes differ chiefly 
from the criminal classes in having superior opportunities and 
education. 

More than this, the average selfishness of the employing 
classes, their want of delicate sympathy with the employed, 
engenders the feeling in the working-classes indeed, the convic- 
tion more than the feeling that they are not cared for morally, 
but only financially. They are cared for as being the instru- 
ments of fortune-making by those who are so lucky as to h'ave 
capital, and who would give them in charge for a paltry theft of 
half a dollar while they themselves swindle the public every 
day. 

If, then, the moral relations of the criminal classes to those 
classes on whom they make a rough war are such as society has 
first created, it must follow that society owes a deep debt of 
reparation to thousands of those prisoners who would not have 
stolen had the)' not learned the trick from their " superiors." 

And it must follow that deep pity and compassion, the utmost 
magnanimity of charity, ought to be extended to those victims of 
misfortune who, in a really Christian society, would have been 
too well taught and exampled to have fallen into law-breaking 
enormities. I have said that it cannot be expected of society 
that it should play the part of the Catholic priest to its own vic- 
tims. But it can be expected of Christian governments that they 
should take counsel of the best authorities of men renowned for 
their sanctity and their wisdom as to the purest philosophy of 
"penal reform." I have in particular mentioned three points on 
which the discretion of government might with great advantage 
be exercised. First, I have advocated that no sentence of any 
judge should be accepted as final in regard to time, both on ac- 
count of the personal caprice which measures sentences and the 
inadequacy or injustice of many trials. In connection with this 
reform I would make all punishment probationary, dependent, as 
to severity, on the prisoner's conduct, and subject to such modifi- 
cation as the after-light on a criminal's story might show to be 
reasonable or equitable. At present, at least in England, no 
after-light on a hasty estimate, on a hasty trial, on a hasty ver- 
dict of twelve intelligent (?) jurymen can modify the extent of 
any punishment without a cumbrous appeal to the Home Secre- 
tary ; and since it is nobody's business to take the trouble of such 
appeal, the poor prisoner has to work out a hard sentence. 
Thirdly, I would do away altogether with the practice of send- 



52 A CATHOLIC VIEW OF PRISON LIFE. [Oct., 

ing young persons to jail ; sending them, on the contrary, to an 
industrial home, and subsequently placing them under the care 
of chosen guardians, who should be responsible to the govern- 
ment for wise conduct. These three points are comprehensive of 
many minor points, and, in particular, of the after-career of ex- 
convicts. 

In regard to that after-career, there exists in England - 
though on a small scale what is called the Prisoners' Aid So- 
ciety, a modern invention, which has unquestionably done good, 
and which is prospered by the wisest philanthropy. Yet it is 
obvious that no society can work with great success against the 
obstinate and stupid verdict of society, which has gone forth all 
over the country in the anti-Christian formula: "Let the excom- 
municated remain outcast for evermore." Society wont forgive 
any one who has been in prison ; wont give him " a clean bill " 
and start him afresh. Society orders the police to hunt down 
every ex-convict, and the police obey the mandate most scrupu- 
lously. The cruelty of such conduct is only equalled by the 
hypocrisy with which society pretended to be shocked by the 
" crime." If society were really shocked at any " crime " it 
would take every care to draw a veil over it, to welcome the 
sinner to true repentance, and to insure his having no further 
provocation. But that detestable hypocrite, society, which rev- 
els in divorce-cases and in every scandal, and positively gloats 
over every fall of a fair famed woman, will not hear of receiving 
back to its impure arms the wretched culprits who have done a 
sharp penance, and who would lead virtuous lives if they were 
permitted. Now, this fact is absolutely inseparable from the con- 
sideration of the whole science of prison life, prison reform, prison 
consequences. We have to teach society the first principles of 
Christian philosophy before we can persuade it to take an inte- 
rest in those criminals who have been sent to prison through, the 
.evil example ; in most cases, of society. This may perhaps be a 
hopeless task. The world is too old to become regenerate. It 
is too rotten to be converted to magnanimity. It is too soaked 
in conventionalism, in the puerile falsehoods of " propriety," to 
face truth with manliness or common sense. But though society 
,must be despaired of, as abandoned to its vanities, its toilets, its 
money-worship, its animalism, there is still the huge army of 
Catholic ecclesiastics who might take the whole subject into 
their care. 

May it be respectfully noted that the points which have been 
touched upon are never alluded to from the pulpit nor in 



1 886.] A CATHOLIC VIEW OF PRISON LIFE. 53 

pastorals ; that in " fashionable churches [the expression has 
some warranty !] the frock-coated or silk-costumed congregation 
is seldom outraged by allusion to prison life." Lacordaire once 
fulminated in a Paris pulpit against the " crimes of heart which 
make respectable persons criminals " ; but it is not usual to hear 
preachers honestly informing their congregations that they may 
be much worse than prison convicts. Still less do they urge on 
them their own moral responsibility in first creating a criminal 
class by their own selfishness, and then not caring one straw 
whether that class continue criminal or be encouraged by Chris- 
tian kindness to a better life. Now, might not this subject be so 
elaborated by ecclesiastics as to gain the attention of Christian 
governments, so as to lead governments to call in the aid of ec- 
clesiastics to counsel them on the most interior points ? Is it a 
matter of no serious interest that, say in England alone, some ten 
thousand ex-convicts should be roaming about, not precisely 
" seeking whom they may devour," but seeking how not to be 
devoured by society ? These men cannot live. They are not 
allowed to live. They are driven by society to hide in holes and 
corners, out of the sight of every " respectable " person. Then 
they starve. Then they thieve again. Then society says : " What 
can we do with the criminal classes, who are so incorrigible, and 
seem to like being sent to prison ? " Well, if society had to go 
without a dinner for a fortnight it would probably relax its 
morals on the subject of taking food when no one would make it 
possible to earn it. I could not blame a man who stole my forks 
and spoons if, after he had asked me to give him work, I had 
pointed him out to a policeman. I should hold him to be justified 
against me ; and I should regard myself, not him, as the thief. Yet 
this is how society acts in England ; and cannot the bishops and 
clergy take the subject up in earnest and teach society its duty to 
ex-convicts ? The two grand objects to be achieved as I have 
ventured to suggest are, first, to make prison life probationary, 
and, next, to provide homes for ex-convicts. To do either requires 
a desperate amount of earnestness. And this is just what cannot 
be looked for from society, but what can be looked for can be 
respectfully asked from the clergy. The whole subject may be 
"surrounded with difficulties." No one doubts that a certain 
proportion of the criminal class are " bad," in the worst senses 
of the unpleasant word " bad " ; that they are the self-constituted 
enemies of society, and that society is not responsible for them. 
Say about one-quarter of the criminal class is " bad," one-quarter 
the victims of sheer ignorance, one-quarter the mere dupes of 



54 MORNING. [Oct., 

evil associates, and one-quarter not criminal but weak. Here, 
then, we have three out of the four quarters arbitrarily classed 
with the one quarter, " bad " ! This is cruel. It is false. It is 
anti-Christian. The probationary system which I have ventured 
to advocate would be a God-send to these three-fourths of the 
" criminal class " ; would be an act of justice to them as well as a 
benefit to society, which would cease to compel men to become 
criminal against their will. In this year 1886 we ought to have 
arrived at an apprehension of two truths which are still fear- 
fully obscured : that moral guilt and legal guilt are not twins 
nor necessarily brothers, and that there are more criminals in 
society than there are in jails. 



MORNING. 

A GLEAMING opal in a sapphire sea 
Flashing across the orient seems the sun, 
His bright crest topped with rubies all ablaze, 
While o'er the distant hills a purple haze 
Hangs with a royal splendor. 

The grasses lift their shields of living green, 
The birds sing fervently their matin song, 
A thousand blossoms burst to perfect flowers ; 
It is day's resurrection! Happy hours 
So pure, so rare, so tender. 

I quaff in draughts the perfume-freighted air, 
Elixir pure of life that youth restores ; 
I watch the bee within the rose's heart 
Steal her life's wine, then (changeful lover 1) dart 
And woo the lily slender. 

I feel the fresh, free breezes on my face, 
I feel my being thrill with wild delight ; 
Like Adam when he stood in Paradise 
And knew he lived, I feel the glad surprise 
Of life and all its splendor. 



i886.j FRANZ LISZT. 5$ 



FRANZ LISZT, 

THE personal adventures of Franz Liszt were so peculiar, 
and his individual traits were so interesting, that in making a 
romance out of his career biographers have been apt to overlook 
the importance of his place in the history of modern music. 
That will be more justly and more highly valued hereafter, 
when apocryphal stories of his eccentricities and his escapades 
are no longer sought with avidity by a sensation-loving public, 
and supplied in quantities and patterns to suit the demand. In 
truth, there was matter enough in his early and middle life to 
keep gossips busy. He was not only one of the most astonish- 
ing pianists who ever lived, but he was also one of the most bril- 
liant and erratic personages who ever dazzled that alluring 
world where art and society, genius and fashion, condescend to 
each other and frolic in company. The Parisian Bohemia in 
which he reigned was not a paradise of beer and tobacco, popu- 
lated by jovial poor students and reckless journalists ; it was a 
land flowing with Burgundy and sparkling with wax-lights, a 
pleasure-land of unconventional aristocrats, prosperous poets, 
and successful artists, among whom nobody shone without rank, 
or fame, or at least some piquant kind of notoriety. Only the 
union of remarkable gifts with the most audacious vagaries could 
have made Liszt what he was to the Paris of half a century ago 
the despair of other artists, the wonder of the concert-room, the 
favorite of the salon, the idol of susceptible women, at once a 
fascination and a riddle, by turns a recluse and a man of the 
world, a fashionable rout and a St. Simonian philosopher, the 
most striking figure in a circle of notabilities which even Paris 
has not often matched, and the most impressive musician in an 
art-epoch to which Chopin was teaching the poetry of the piano 
and Thalberg revealing unimagined possibilities of execution. 

His later life was more decorous than these years of riotous 
triumph, but it was not less picturesque. When he gave up the 
exciting rdle of a virtuoso, it was to play the benign part of a 
general musical Mentor. In his quasi-retirement he never shrank 
very resolutely from the public gaze. At the grand-ducal court 
of Weimar he made the opera-house illustrious by a model repre- 
sentation of neglected master works, and the connoisseurs of 
all Europe learned to watch that little capital, long famous by 



56 FRANZ LISZT. [Oct., 

ks artistic and literary glories, for interpretations of the musical 
drama unique in their high purpose and reverential fidelity. 
When he received the tonsure and betook himself to Rome for 
intervals of monastic quiet the public tongue wagged faster 
than ever. He never "entered the church," as many imagined. 
He only haunted the gate of the outer courts and rested there 
awhile in its shadow, assuming no clerical obligations, and no- 
thing of the clerical character except an unmeaning courtesy- 
title and a close row of buttons on his straight coat. He was 
now the greatest living master of his art, and perhaps it seemed 
convenient to borrow a little sobriety from the sanctuary. But 
Liszt was also sensitive to religious impressions and profoundly 
moved by the grandeur and beauty of the church, and in his last 
years all his finest thoughts were inspired by sacred themes. I 
met him at Bayreuth in 1876, where a little court clustered 
around him, comprising ladies of title, distinguished artists, and 
young musicians from many parts of the world. He passed his 
days receiving incense ; but in the early morning I used to see 
him at Mass in the church, alone, and very simple and devout in 
his demeanor. He was a man in whom the religious tempera- 
ment, at all events, was highly developed. He has been the sub- 
ject of a copious literature, scandalous enough in early days, but 
overflowing in these recent years with testimonies of strong 
affection. For he not only founded a splendid original school of 
playing, but by his charm of manner, his tender and sympathetic 
disposition, his gentleness towards the young and earnest, and 
his fine generosity he converted his multitude of pupils into ar- 
dent disciples, who have traversed the world telling stories in 
his honor. 

The appearance of Liszt was a part of the general movement 
of Romanticism, which, after deeply affecting literature, especially 
in Germany and England, began to exercise a remarkable in- 
fluence upon musical and dramatic art. In England the romantic 
drama had always flourished since Shakspere, while in music 
romanticism had never obtained, and has not yet obtained, the 
slightest foothold. In Germany the reaction against classical 
formality could be traced as far back as the later works of Bee- 
thoven, and was clearly marked in Schumann's songs and piano 
pieces. But it was in France that romanticism presented the 
most curious study. Here the new movement was for a while a 
noisy revolution. The poetry of Victor Hugo and the acted 
plays of Hugo and Dumas, with their bold defiance of conven- 
tionalisms which French art had regarded almost as axiomatic 



1 886.] FRANZ LISZT. 57 

truths, produced a comic disturbance in mercurial Paris, where 
the literary debate quite reached the fervor of politics. The 
romanticists broke with the established school in their choice of 
subjects, in their feeling for the past, and in their imaginative 
treatment of purely ideal conditions ; but their rebellion was also 
a defiance of certain stringent rules of composition, for which no 
better reason could be given than that, like Sir Anthony Absolute, 
they were old and arbitrary. Perhaps it was the best service of 
romanticism, not that it extended the choice of literary subjects, 
but that it made this fight for liberty the final and successful 
contest against the periwig style of poetry, the drama of dress- 
swords and red heels, of togas and buskins. 

The three men who did most to extend the principles of the 
new school into the domain of music were Franz Liszt, Hector 
Berlioz, and Richard Wagner. Only the second of these was a 
Frenchman, but all three happened to be working in the French 
capital at the same time. Liszt was at the height of prosperity, 
so fortunate and so fond of pleasure that his capacity for serious 
undertakings was probably not suspected. Wagner, hungry and 
disheartened, earning a miserable pittance by hack-work for the 
music-sellers, and rebuffed by the opera-houses, looked up at the 
famous pianist as Lazarus looked up at Dives. They only 
brushed each other's skirts in passing ; one little suspecting that 
the shabby young German was a transcendent genius, the other 
as little imagining that the illustrious Hungarian was to become 
his best friend and interpreter. Berlioz was not on intimate 
terms with either of his great musical contemporaries, though in 
art matters he had more in common with both of them than they 
or he, perhaps, ever acknowledged. Proud, sensitive, irritable, 
poor, misunderstood, neglected, raging at the insincerity and 
mediocrity of popular favorites and the ignorance and frivolity 
of the public, he was doubtless unhappier than Wagner, because 
the source of so much of his misery lay less in the injustice of 
fortune than in his own heart. He did not live to taste the re- 
ward of appreciation. It was not until long after his death that 
the world realized what he had done for the progress of music ; 
and even then the popularity of his compositions was a fashion 
rather than a well-grown fame. In Liszt and Wagner the roman- 
tic spirit expressed itself in the choice of subjects quite as plainly 
as in the method of treatment. In Berlioz the subject was of less 
consequence ; the great innovation was the discarding of estab- 
lished forms for the sake of the fullest possible development of 
the poetical idea. Possibly one of these days the rules of con- 



58 FRANZ LISZT. [Oct., 

struction observed by the classical composers, especially in large 
works such as symphonies and operas, will seem as pedantic as 
the laws of the mediaeval mastersingers. Berlioz, at all events, 
found them absurd. In his zeal for their destruction he became, 
if not the founder, certainly the most successful apostle, of " Pro- 
gramme Music," which undertakes to illustrate a definite poetical 
text, and to follow it, thought by thought, without reference to 
the conventional restrictions as to form. The principle of free 
expression is carried into every department of music, including 
the song and the opera ; but its most striking use is in the sym- 
phony, and in those complex works for many voices and instru- 
ments for which no precise designation has yet been agreed upon. 
The habit of Berlioz was to write out a synopsis of a poem or 
poetical fragment, and to represent every item in this text by an 
appropriate musical passage. To understand the music it was 
necessary to read the programme as one listened. Sometimes 
the effect was admirable, for Berlioz had moments of high in- 
spiration ; in his musical setting of Romeo and Juliet, for example, 
there are pages of ravishing beauty, which bring before us scenes 
of the drama even more vividly than the acting stage. But it is 
obvious that the system must often confound the provinces of 
music and speech, throwing upon the former art a function to^ 
which it is essentially incompetent, or else reducing it from the 
dignity of an independent exponent of noble and poetical thought 
to the humbler place of a mere accompaniment of the printed 
line. Berlioz not only marred his music by thus degrading its 
r61e, but in trying to be faithful to his text he was sometimes 
betrayed into the most prosaic realism. Thus in the famous 
Marche au Supplice, which enters into the opium dreams of his 
love-sick artist, the representation of the procession to the scaf- 
fold closes with an imitation of the chop of the headsman's axe 
a contrivance which is probably the most hideously vulgar effect 
in any reputable piece of music. He had that imperfect percep- 
tion of the grotesque which seems to be a common defect of the 
French genius. In his occasional inability to distinguish between 
the poetic and the merely sensational, his lack of that fine, incom- 
municable, sure artistic sense which we call taste, he sometimes 
reminds us of Victor Hugo. Moreover, for the conception of the 
purest music there is surely need of a serenity, dignity, and ab- 
straction of mind which lift the composer above turbulence and 
passion. We doubt whether Berlioz ever attained repose of soul 
except for brief and infrequent moments. If we read his painful 
Memoirs, filled with extravagance, bitterness, contempt, despair, 



1 886.] FRANZ LISZT. 59 

vanity, self-pity, and absurdity, and saddest when they are most 
absurd, we shall understand why his music speaks to us so often 
of grandiose fancies and so rarely of lofty aspiration, so often of 
vexation and struggle and so rarely of calm delight. 

Liszt also has been classed among the writers of Programme 
Music. That place, perhaps, may suit him if we call the compo- 
sitions of the Berlioz school " Panorama Music " ; but between 
the French and the Hungarian master there is an important dif- 
ference of method. Liszt never attempted to make music repre- 
sent language, or even definite thoughts ; he seldom used it as 
an illustration of any particular words or actions ; at most he 
wished it to call up in the listener the state of mind which was his 
when he wrote it. The series of compositions for the orchestra 
to which he gave the name of S3 r mphonic Poems are the best 
examples of his plan. These are all based upon a text a poem, 
a poetic extract, a painting, a biography but the musician em- 
ploys it" only as an inspiration for himself and a general hint for 
his audience. It is not at all a guide to the contents of the com- 
position. It is sometimes a help to enjoyment, but the music, 
whose value is absolute and complete in itself, can always do 
without it. I say sometimes a help to enjoyment ; the Tasso, for 
instance, is made more interesting by the prefatory lines which tell 
us that it symbolizes the sufferings and triumph of the poet, and 
that it is founded upon a song in which the Venetian gondoliers 
celebrate his memory ; on the other hand, I am by no means sure 
that the magnificent movement of Les Preludes derives any 
additional effect from the fragment of Lamartine by which it 
was suggested. The text, with Liszt, is only the point of depar- 
ture. The idea which he proceeds to follow out is not literary, 
but purely musical, and he treats it by a purely musical method, 
with all the art of the classical symphonist. There is no thought 
of forcing his musical theme into correspondence with the 
changes of the poet's fancies ; the object is only to develop 
its own beauty and suggestiveness. Thus it is that the Sym- 
phonic Poems are distinguished by a simplicity and unity in 
which the parallel works of Berlioz are lacking. They are not 
all beautiful, for Liszt's imagination sometimes led him a strange 
road ; but when they are charming their charm is complete and 
continuous, while the most striking music of the Programme 
school, exhibiting snips and patches of unrelated melody, too 
often reminds us of a crazy- quilt. 

Liszt therefore differs from Berlioz essentially in the manner 
of looking at his subject perhaps it would be better to say of 



60 FRANZ LISZT, [Oct., 

feeling his subject. It is in their independence of hampering 
rules of construction that the two masters agreed. Subject only 
to certain well-understood principles of rhythm and harmony, 
they claimed entire freedom in the musical expression of their 
feelings. The classical school allowed no such liberty. First 
subject and second subject, theme and variation, development 
and combination, must follow one another in due order ; and in 
the older writers each subdivision was rounded off with a little 
flourish, which meant nothing musically, but served to mark the 
boundary-lines and keep the sections apart. Somebody has com- 
pared these separation passages to the stuffing in which eggs are 
packed. In Haydn's symphonies they are quite obvious ; in the 
opera, until Wagner's time, they were so conspicuous that a large 
part, even of the most popular works, consisted of worthless fill- 
ing ; they were thought indispensable in the song, and they 
figured largely in solos for the pianoforte. Liszt had no use for 
them, because he paid no respect to arbitrary divisions.* There 
is no trace in the Symphonic Poems of the systematic arrange- 
ment of sections and subsections in which the art of musical con- 
struction was supposed largely to lie. Even in the two longer 
works, the Faust and Dante, to which Liszt gave the name and 
something of the conventional outline of " symphonies, 5 ' the. 
musical impulse flows steadily on without regard to customary 
boundaries. The pianoforte music of Liszt, embracing almost 
every species of composition for that instrument, is characterized 
by similar, or even greater, freedom ; and in his songs the subor- 
dination of the constructive plan to the poetical and musical sen- 
timent is complete. The same principle of free feeling is carried 
out in his sacred music. Although not much that he has done 
in this department has been adopted by the churches, nearly all 
of it is profoundly religious in spirit. The oratorio and the sa- 
cred cantata, perhaps, owe him a new lease of life. It needs 
courage to speak disrespectfully of those allied art-forms, illus- 
trated by the genius of Handel and so often consecrated to noble 
purposes ; but it is certain that they have no hold upon the peo- 
ple except in backward-looking England, where the middle-classes 
regard them with the same just, measured, and respectful affec- 
tion which is extended to the British constitution and the lord- 
chancellor's wig. Here they have never been cultivated save 
from a sense of duty, and at present we can hardly say that they 
are cultivated at all. Some excellent persons persuade them- 
selves that they enjoy oratorios ; but in most cases this is an 
amiable delusion. There are passages, of course, in all the great 



1 886.] FRANZ LISZT. 61 

works of this class, to which no one with musical sensibilities can 
listen without delight. But the complaint that oratorio belongs 
to an antiquated pattern of composition is not unreasonable. 
Old-fashioned things are not always the best. The formality of 
the oratorio is hopelessly at odds with the restless and impulsive 
modern temperament. It is impossible to imagine a man of our 
time inventing such an art-form ; and it is an unwise reverence 
for ancient authority which induces composers to go on repeat- 
ing devices adapted to the taste of an earlier generation. The 
oratorio of the future must differ widely from the oratorio of the 
past. It is not to be supposed that Liszt's Christus will ever dis- 
place Handel's Messiah ; but it may well turn out that the Hun- 
garian composer has indicated the lines upon which Handel's 
successors will have to modify the sacred music of festivals and 
concert-rooms. 

While we assign a high importance to Liszt's innovations, we 
must all admit that their immediate success with popular audi- 
ences has been questionable. The most remarkable and original 
of his orchestral works, the Symphonic Poems, have always been 
a puzzle. Ten years ago, in a conversation with him about 
music in America, I mentioned that the whole series of these 
compositions had been performed in New York. He shook his 
head, with a serious smile, and remarked that no city of Europe 
had treated him so well as that. One, at least, of the poems had 
never been played anywhere except in New York. With us, in 
several cases, the performance was at best a curious experiment ; 
it cannot be said that more than two or three of the set really 
won acceptance with the public, and the interest in them for a 
few years past has been growing not greater but less. The 
truth is that, while Liszt possessed the artistic temperament in a 
phenomenal degree, his aesthetic perceptions were always im- 
perfect. The last refinements of a cultivated sensibility strug- 
gled in him with the inherited instincts of a half-barbaric taste- 
barbaric delight in splendors and surprises of sound, in passion- 
ate movement, in startling and changing rhythm, in strong sensa- 
tions, in fierce contrasts. Hence there is a great deal of his 
music which astonishes but does not please. It can only be de- 
scribed as ugly music. This is enough to account for the failure 
of his symphonic compositions to keep their ground after their 
novelty was gone. It is still more significant that they have 
not been imitated. Saint-Saens has produced a few Symphonic 
Poems, but they are illustrations of particular incidents rather 
than poems in Liszt's sense, and they do not constitute an ex- 



62 FRANZ LISZT. [Oct., 

ception to the general statement that composers have concurred 
in rejecting the new art-form and keeping to the old style of 
symphony, with its divisions and fences and laws of form sub- 
stantially intact. They are doubtless wise. The free system 
may suit a musician of genius whose thought is clear and 
manageable ; but most composers will fail to produce a sym- 
metrical, compact, intelligible work unless the ground-plan is 
measured out for them in advance. 

The influence of Liszt, then, has not been at its strongest in the 
establishment of new forms, but it has infused freshness and the 
spirit of freedom into the treatment of the old. There is no suc- 
cessful composer of the present day who has not felt the life-giv- 
ing impulse which pulses in Liszt's vigorous genius, and who has 
not learned from him many a secret of poetical expression. In 
the art of pianoforte playing, as well as in compositions for 
that instrument, he brought in a new era, enormously enlarging 
the capacities of the performer, while he gave a new richness -and 
meaning to the music. Here he reached an unbounded popular 
success, which time has not impaired. It used to be thought 
that Thalberg had carried the technique of the piano to the 
furthest possible point ; it seemed as if he had found what pian- 
ists had long wanted a third hand to fill up the middle parts" 
while right and left were busy at opposite ends of the key-board. 
But Liszt surpassed even Thalberg's wonderful technique. His 
music sounded fuller, his harmonic combinations more extended, 
his command of the range of the instrument more complete ; and 
with all this was the abounding passion whose intense accents 
made us forget the marvels of execution. Such brilliant effects 
were not altogether the result of Liszt's personal accomplish- 
ments and temper. Most of them he taught to his pupils and 
perpetuated in his printed scores. They are reproduced, more 
or less imperfectly, in every concert room and in thousands of 
private houses ; and, like all the other manifestations of his poeti- 
cal spirit, they have left an impression upon the character and 
tendencies of the art which will not soon be obscured. 

In a record of his services to music it would be a great error 
to overlook his influence in raising the standards of excellence 
among the working members of the profession. How much he 
did for the advancement of the technique of the piano every 
amateur understands. What he did for the orchestra is not so 
well known. He shares with Hector Berlioz the credit of in- 
venting many daring and beautiful combinations of instruments, 
and of treating individual instruments in novel and delightful 



1 886.] FRANZ LISZT. 63 

ways. Berlioz probably excelled all other masters of our time 
in the intimate knowledge of the characters and capabilities 
of every component part of the band ; but his felicity in the 
arrangement of striking tone-effects sometimes led him into ex- 
cessive indulgence in such experiments. Liszt's use of a paral- 
lel talent was more discreet, and his orchestral coloring", while 
hardly less brilliant and original than that of Berlioz, is more 
homogeneous and satisfying. As a painter would say, he under- 
stands " values." The inventions and methods of both these 
masters have become the common property of musicians, and 
nearly all the best recent works for the orchestra are full of 
them. But the new mode of writing supposes a very different 
sort of band from that which the old symphonists worked with. 
An orchestra is now treated as a company of virtuosi, and the 
principal men in such organizations as that of Thomas are re- 
quired to be artists of high training. The ability of orches- 
tra-players has been rising for many years. A wonderful im- 
provement has taken place since Beethoven had to lay aside 
a Leonora overture because the opera-band could not play it. 
Only forty years ago, however, some of the most respectable 
orchestras of Germany found the music of Berlioz beyond their 
powers wh-en the French composer made a professional tour of 
that country. The condition of things has changed very rapidly 
since then, and the change has been hastened principally by the 
new demands of the new composers. Liszt's influence in this 
direction was incalculable. He not only gave a powerful incen- 
tive to technical training, but he taught orchestral players to 
bring to their work feeling, expression, and a sense of indivi- 
duality ; and he taught conductors how to use the new powers 
of their men. 



64 ENGLISH HYMNS. [Oct., 



ENGLISH HYMNS. 

THE average hymn is an anomaly in literature. Its wide- 
spread influence, so seemingly disproportionate to its real merit, 
is due to the swift communication of a welcome thought, rather 
than to any comeliness of language with which that thought is 
dressed. In a minor degree this is also the case with national an- 
thems struck off at a white heat and crudely strong, like new 
wine ; with patriotic war-songs, where the fervor of the moment 
atones for all deficiencies, and with those wisely commonplace 
poems which have succeeded in rendering faithfully back to us 
the conventional emotions of our own hearts. But the national 
anthem can only arouse us when the nation's honor or interests 
are at stake ; in calmer moments we are languidly unconcerned 
about the star-spangled banner, and listen to " God save the 
Queen " as to a decorous prayer. The war-songs cease to thrill 
us when the battle-flags are furled, and after many years' acquain-^ 
tance with " A Psalm of Life " we no longer find in it that depth 
of moral philosophy which can be relied on for a vigorous sup- 
port. But the strength of a hymn lies in the few great facts it 
represents, and with which our interests are too vitally connected 
to permit us to grow weary of the theme. To the mourner it 
whispers consolation ; to the despairing, hope ; to the weary, 
rest; and what wonder that, listening to this voice of comfort, 
we cease to be fastidious about halting numbers and imperfect 
rhymes. Wide as the sea is its sphere of usefulness; to the illit- 
erate, to the commonplace, and to the learned it carries a healing 
message, proving by its catholicity the hidden source from which 
it draws its being. 

Mr. Samuel Duffield has recently published a bulky and 
rather pretentious volume, entitled English Hymns: Their Authors 
and History, in which he has sought to gratify that pious curi- 
osity which a great many good people are presumed to feel con- 
cerning the origin and vicissitudes of their favorite songs. Here 
we find Newman and Watts, Faber and Wesley, Keble and George 
Herbert, with a host of less famous writers, whose poems are 
alphabetically indexed and made the subject matter for some 
harmless criticism and a vast fund of anecdotes, which go far to- 
wards swelling the six hundred and seventy-five pages of which 
the book is composed. Some of these tales have so little connec- 



1 886.] ENGLISH HYMNS. 65 

tion with the hymns that we are at a loss to imagine why they 
were inserted. Episodes of the late war, village stories on the 
" Shepherd of Salisbury Plain " order, and trifling incidents in 
the lives of ordinary men serve only to rob the volume of its 
literary compactness, while adding sorely to its weight. We 
turn, for instance, to 

" Guide me, O thou great Jehovah," 

and find a detailed account of an estimable old lady, who wore a 
black silk gown, a white muslin kerchief, a cream -colored shawl, 
and a mob-cap, and who sat in an elbow-chair, with " a little para- 
dise of a conservatory " opening out from her drawing-room. 
Beyond the fact that the old lady was heard on one occasion to 
sing a few verses of the hymn in question, there is absolutely no 
reason why all these particulars, and a great many more, should 
have been related about her, and it is hard to understand just 
what she is doing in a book at all. On the same principle Mr. 
Charles Wesley's admirers are edified with the history of old 
William Hiskins, of Fexham, Wiltshire, who came to church one 
fine morning, notwithstanding his years and decrepitude. Wes- 
ley's hymn, 

" Arise, my soul, arise ! " 

being given out, Hiskins joined in devoutly, and on his way 
home stumbled into the canal and was drowned a climax for 
which we were hardly prepared, and which, to say the least, is 
discouraging to the church-goer. Again, why should Mr. Duf- 
field think it necessary to commend to our notice a hymn by 
William Knox, on the singular ground that another poem by the 
same author was a favorite with President Lincoln ; and why 
strain our credulity by relating the conversion of a young man 
on hearing a companion recite during the pauses of a storm the 
following wretched verse : 

"The God that reigns on high, 

And thunders when he please, 
That rides the stormy sky 
And manages the seas " ? 

The lines, which are by Dr. Watts, are probably the very worst 
he ever wrote, and ought not to be associated in any sane mind 
either with the majestic voices of nature or with the awful attri- 
butes of God. 

Notwithstanding its serious defects, Mr. Duffield's work has 
been received with an unstinted praise which compels us to 
VOL. XLIV 5 



66 ENGLISH HYMNS. [Oct., 

doubt whether the critics of the press are in the habit of reading 
what they review. One enthusiastic writer assures us, indeed, 
that " the refined enjoyment provided by the book begins with 
the first page and continues to the last " which would seem to 
imply that he has mastered all its contents, but which, we fear, 
only means that he has spared himself the fatigue of its perusal. 
This eulogist is likewise of the opinion that " the beautiful inspi- 
ration of very many of our modern Christian hymns is, no doubt, 
a much stronger argument in favor of the continuance of divine 
inspiration than all the reasoning that has ever been done on the 
subject." Yet we doubt if the evidences of Christianity, as re- 
vealed in the modern hymn-book, will ever greatly ease the theo- 
logians of their burden. The " inspired " hymns are few and far 
between, and the greater number express nothing but a vague 
religious sentiment, emotional rather than instructive, and bear- 
ing no real proportion in their literary value to the magnitude of 
the topic which, even in this age of scepticism, rivets the central 
interests of mankind. The best sacred poems are in no sense 
hymns, and have never gained the widespread popularity which 
belongs to the more simple and direct effusion. Newman and 
Kebleare not household names like Dr. Watts and John Newton ; 
and even Blackie's beautiful " Angels holy, high and lowly " can 
hardly hope to stand side by side in the public estimation with 
such songs as "I would not live alway " and "Rock of Ages." 
In the sustained excellence of The Christian Year, which neither 
sinks into mediocrity nor rises to perfection, we see the well- 
balanced serenity of Keble's mind, and remember gladly that 
he was Newman's chosen friend. The two so widely different 
worked hand-in-hand on the famous Tracts for the Times, the one 
directing, the other eagerly following in his lead. " In the sort 
of warfare they had undertaken to wage together," says a writer 
in Blackwood, " Keble was incapable of keeping abreast with 
Newman, and Newman became almost immediately the master- 
spirit of the campaign. His was then, as it still is, an intellect 
which could not be satisfied with what appeared to him only half 
a truth. He could not, like Keble, rest upon probability. He 
must have certainty or nothing." So one went forward into the 
clearer light, and the other remained behind, dazed and saddened 
by the separation ; happy, indeed, in his clerical duties and his 
domestic life, but "in exceeding doubt and perplexity respecting 
the affairs of the church." There is something inexpressibly 
touching in that last reunion at Hursley vicarage, when, after 
the publication of the Apologia, Newman, Keble, and Fusey dined 



1 8 86.] EwGLZSff HYMNS. 67 

together once more, and once more, before death parted them for 
ever, united the broken links of their affection. 

It is very hard to warm up to Keble's poems. Many of them 
are really fine, and all express with fitting dignity the great 
truths they aspire to handle ; but the flame to light our souls is 
lacking, the true poetic instinct is seldom visible in their creation. 
That they awoke at first as much resentment as admiration was 
naturally due to the extreme Catholicity of their tone. Men said 
they were songs of the church rather than of God, and felt 
stunned by the writer's unqualified admission of the Real Pre- 
sence in the Eucharist and by his loving reverence for the Bless- 
ed Virgin. From a long hymn on the Annunciation we quote 
the last three stanzas, both as proving how tenderly Keble has 
dealt with his subject, and because they are among the most 
graceful and pleasing he has ever written: 

" Ave Maria ! Mother blest J 
To whom, caressing and caress'd, 

Clings the Eternal Child ; 
Favor'd beyond archangels' dream, 
When first on thee with tenderest gleam 

Thy new-born Saviour smiled. 

" Ave Maria ! thou whose name 
All but adoring love may claim, 

Yet may we reach thy shrine ; 
For he, thy son and Saviour, vows 
To cfown all lowly, lofty brows 

With love and joy like thine. 

" Bless'd is the womb that bare him bless'd 
The bosom where his lips were pressed ; 

But rather bless'd are they 
Who hear his word and keep it well, 
The living homes where Christ shall dwell' 

And never pass away." 

It is not possible to compare Keble as a poet to Newman- 
Newman's poems have been well designated as " the work of a 
powerful intellect, unbent for a season from sterner tasks"; and 
while not equal to his incomparable prose, they stand to-day 
without any peer in the world of English religious verse. Keble 
is so lavish of his fancy that his best pictures are indistinct from 
being overcrowded. Newman presents his subject unsoftened by 
accessories, and, with the tranquillity of restrained power, seeks 
rather to veil than to give expression to that depth of thought 
and emotion which reaches the very fibre of our souls. All our 



68 ENGLISH HYMNS. [Oct., 

longings, aspirations, fears, doubts, terrors, are reflected in his 
pages; and the voice that answers them is fraught with human 
sympathy, tempered by that wise, sad resignation which is our 
only strength. Who has not echoed in his heart this passionate 

cry : 

" O Chfist ! that it were possible, 

After long years, to see 
The souls we loved, that they might tell us 
What and where they be " ? 

There is so much sentiment written nowadays on the loneli- 
ness of the forgotten dead a favorite topic with modern morbid 
poets that the real loneliness of the living is well-nigh over- 
looked, and with it that unanswered question, that heart-break- 
ing doubt, as to whether the heaven-centred souls concern them- 
selves about our daily lives. Once our burdens were theirs, our 
pleasures, successes, disappointments shared by them ; now these 
things still mean as much to us as ever, but the dead give no 
token, and we cannot tell whether their radiant eyes are fixed 
upcta us as we go. To this wistful desire to still interest those 
who loved and cherished us on earth comes as a healing message 
a little poem of such pure and tranquil beauty that the two last 
verses are surely unsurpassed in their absolute perfection of form 
and thought. It was written in 1829, and is entitled 

"A VOICE FROM AFAR. 

" Weep not for me : 

Be blithe as wont, nor tinge with gloom 
The stream of love that circles home, 

Light hearts and free ! 
Joy in the gifts Heaven's bounty lends ; 
Nor miss my face, dear friends ! 

" I still am near, 

Watching the smiles I prized on earth, 
Your converse mild, your blameless mirth ; 

Now, too, I hear 

Of whispered sounds the tale complete, 
Low prayers and musings sweet. 

" A sea before 

The Throne is spread its pure, still glass 
Pictures all earth-scenes as they pass. 

We, on its shore, 
Share, in the bosom of our rest, 
God's knowledge, and are blest." 

* The extreme pureness and lucidity of Newman's style often 
deceive uncultivated minds into thinking his poems simple rather 



1 886.] ENGLISH HYMNS. 69 

than profound ; and it is to these good people that an English 
critic offers the sharp reminder that, while such poetry looks 
easy to write, it is in truth very difficult to imitate. " It is al- 
ways possible to be trivial and vulgar; but to unite, as here, 
great simplicity of thought and great plainness of speech to dig- 
nity, is a formidable task." The same may be truthfully observed 
of his prose. It looks so much harder until we try it to write 
like Mr. Pater than like Newman that we do not always under- 
stand the rare perfection which makes every page seem easy to 
our eyes. A marked individuality of style is common enough, 
and we have plenty of striking instances under our notice. Car- 
lyle, Browning, Blackmore, and a host of others can be readily 
recognized by their cultured peculiarities ; but for absolute 
purity of language we have only two great living masters 
Matthew Arnold and Newman; nor are there at present many 
shoulders in training to receive their mantles. 

Father Faber's hymns well known and well loved as they 
are belong to a wholly different order of creation. Some one 
has harshly said that the world lost a poet when Faber became a 
priest, and it is singular that any one so deeply imbued with the 
poetic spirit should have written lines of such unequal merit, or 
have clothed many of his most beautiful thoughts in such loosely 
constructed verse. The delicacy and pathos of his conceptions 
will never be denied ; but these things, while sufficient for a good 
hymn, cannot of themselves make a perfect poem and Faber 
is essentially a poet. No one can doubt this who has ever 
read " Pilgrims of the Night," " The Sorrowful World," or those 
strange verses called " The Creation of the Angels," and begin- 
ning, 

" In pulses deep of threefold love, 

Self-hushed and self-possessed, 
The mighty, unbeginning God 

Had lived in silent rest." 

It is to be regretted that the New England publishers of an il- 
lustrated, " unsectarian " edition of Father Faber's hymns should 
have thought fit to decorate this mysterious and noble poem 
with a woodcut representing a fat little cupid riding in a high- 
heeled slipper, by way of car, with a rose for a pillow, an arrow 
for a whip, and two of Aphrodite's doves for horses. This may 
be what Mr. Gosse calls " unconscious impiety," but as a matter 
of fact it is hard to assign any reason for the unconsciousness. 

The most serious defect that can be urged against Faber's 
hymns is an occasional lack of reverence, a freedom with holy 



jo ENGLISH HYMNS. [Oct., 

things and holy names, which in his case was but the outspoken 
expression of an abiding love, but which nevertheless is a dan- 
gerous precedent to establish. There is no fault more common 
in the ordinary hymns for the populace than the easy assump- 
tion that we are in the full enjoyment of the divine favor, and 
nothing is more rare than any hint of our unworthiness to oc- 
cupy that position. " Perfect love casteth out fear " ; but the 
emotion which is produced by aid of a favorite tune and a 
mellifluous verse is not a perfect love, and can hardly be relied 
on in the practical battles of life. It is strange to see a writer 
like Faber, whose prose works have been considered the most 
severe of spiritual guides, abandon himself so readily in his 
hymns to this confident familiarity with God. It is stranger 
still that the same man who gave us the solemn warning, 

" Prayer was not meant for luxury, 

Or selfish pleasures sweet : 
It is the prostrate creature's place 
At his Creator's feet," 

should ever have written such lines as these: 

" The solemn face, the downcast eye, 
The words constrained and cold 
These are the homage, poor at best, 
Of those outside the fold. 

"They know not how our God can play ] 

The babe's,, the brother's part ; 
They dream not of the ways he has 

Of getting at the heart '' ; 
or these : 

" How can they tell how Jesus oft 

His secret thirst will slake 
On those strange freedoms childlike hearts 
Are taught by God to take ? " 

while in such poems as " The True Shepherd " the same tone of 
familiar freedom is even more apparent. 

We lay stress on this point only because it is a device too 
easily followed, and too aptly developed by coarser hands into 
something infinitely worse. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes has 
expressed himself very strongly on the subject of those dismal 
old hymns, dear at one time to the Presbyterian heart, which 
gave you distinctly to understand that hell was yawning beneath 
your feet, and the vast majority of mankind dropping quickly 
into it. He has drawn a vivid picture of the defiant young soul 
driven to the verge of suicide by the horror of such accumulated 






i886.J ENGLISH HYMNS. 71 

ideas, and tempted, in mingled fear and resentment, to " dare the 
worst" with which she was so pitilessly threatened. And be- 
yond doubt the dreadful certainty with which revivalists were 
wont to promise eternal punishment has, in its time, overthrown 
many sensitive organizations and helped liberally to populate 
the madhouse. Richard Weaver used to boast of shaking a 
dying woman "over hell" until, one by one, she dropped the 
money-bags from beneath her pillow to the floor; and while the 
self-denying devotion of Weaver's life is proof of his sincerity 
in the work of conversion, his methods remind us irresistibly of 
the missionary who carried a Bible in one hand and a revolver 
in the other, and gave the heathen their choice in true high- 
wayman fashion. As for the point which is occasionally made 
by the biographers of these stalwart preachers, that " the Al- 
mighty Arbiter set his seal " upon their denunciations meaning 
that penalties of some sort followed their neglected warnings it 
is well to recollect that several of the unfortunates " cursed " by 
Ludovick Muggleton, the illiterate founder of a forgotten sect, 
actually died from sheer fright, to the great strengthening of his 
cause and the comfort and consolation of his disciples. Never- 
theless, if we take the trouble to peruse some of the modern 
hymn-books, especially those of an exoteric order, we cannot 
fail to perceive how the cheerless visions of judgment and hell 
have yielded place to a most genial assurance of heaven, and 
how sinners are counselled, not exactly to repent and do pen- 
ance, but to cast away all fear, and rejoice in the love of their 
Saviour. Surely Faber is not altogether innocent of this tone 
when he writes thus of God the Father: 

" Thy justice is the gladdest thing 

Creation can behold ; 
Thy tenderness so meek, it wins 
The guilty to be bold." 

But for the keynote to Faber's confidence we must turn to an- 
other and nobler poem, and there learn how awe may be ex- 
tinguished in devotion. He who could say truthfully : 

"O God ! who wert my childhood's love. 

My boyhood's pure delight, 
A presence felt the livelong day, 
A welcome fear at night," 

might well lift his eyes tranquilly to the Judgment Seat; but it 
is hardly safe to assume that we have all cause to feel elated on 
this matter. In too many popular hynins salvation is guaran- 



72 ENGLISH HYMNS. [Oct., 

teed us on the easiest of terms, and with a jovial conviction that 
leaves no room for doubt. The blood of the Lamb has washed 
away our sins one hymn even assures us 

" He's graciously waiting to wash more " 

and Chanaan's happy shores lie stretched before us all. 

As a result of this frame of mind condemned criminals of the 
most brutal type face the unknown future with unruffled com- 
posure, convinced, in the words of one of them, that they " will 
awaken in the bosom of their Saviour"; and men of dubious 
morals live two distinct lives, one of emotional piety fit for Sun- 
day use, and one of tricky dishonesty more congenial to their 
e very-day avocations. All thoughts of God's justice, which will 
not be for most of us 

'* the gladdest thing 
Creation can behold," 

are merged in an assurance of his love ; all fears for our own de- 
ficiencies are lost in the comfortable feeling that we are loving 
him very much in return, and, though giving frail proof of our 
sincerity, are telling him so with unexampled fervor. 

Walter Bagehot has administered to this class of religionists 
a rebuke so sternly and truthfully disheartening that his words 
are not likely to win their way abroad, or reach the ears to which 
they are directed : 

" The attractive aspects of God's character must not be made more 
apparent to such a being as man than his chastening and severer aspects. 
We must not be invited to approach the Holy of holies without being made 
aware painfully aware what holiness is. We must know our own un- 
worthiness ere we are fit to approach or imagine an Infinite Perfection. 
The most nauseous of false religions is that which affects a fulsome fond- 
ness for a Being not to be thought of without awe, or spoken of without 
reluctance."* 

If the young men and women who, in the intervals of gossip 
and flirtation, sing hymns at the sea-shore on Sunday evenings, 
shouting out the holiest of names in a lusty chorus, could realize 
that it was " a Being not to be thought of without awe, or spoken 
of without reluctance," whom they are addressing with such 
careless irreverence, it might occur to them that this species of 
religious dissipation should be conducted on a less broadly hu- 
morous basis. 

Few literary qualifications are required for a popular hymn, 
and few are noticeable in its construction. Some of the best 

* The Ignorance of Man. 



1 886.] ENGLISH HYMNS. 73 

sound like echoes from older voices, as in George Herbert's 
" Said I not so ? " where we see a reflection common to most 
serious poets, from St. Gregory Nazianzen to Adelaide Procter. 
And in the long-drawn weakness of Bishop Ken's " Awake, my 
Soul, and with the Sun " we recognize the same impulse which 
stirred St. Gregory in his " Morning Prayer," now familiar to 
us all through Newman's beautiful translation. But the hymns 
which delight the populace are not Newman's, nor Herbert's, nor 
even Bishop Ken's. They are to be found in vastly different 
compilations, published under the patronage of Tate and Brady, 
or Moody and Sankey, or the Salvation Army, or some equally 
capable literary judges. They abound in grotesque imagery and 
noisy zeal, and assume that the first duty of a Christian is to make 
his religion as clamorous as possible : 

" O God ! my heart with love inflame, 
That I may in thy holy name 
Aloud in songs of praise rejoice 
While I have breath to raise my voice. 

" Then will I shout, then will I sing ! 
I'll make the heavenly arches ring^! 
I'll sing and shout for evermore 
On that eternal, happy shore." 

They are particularly fertile in curious parallels, which are 
presumed to hold the attention of a crowd by presenting some 
well-known image to its mind: We are soldiers marching to 
glory ; we are sailors weathering a storm ; we are wayfarers 
resting in shady places ; we are modern tourists travelling com- 
fortably by rail the last device being particularly welcome to 
the enervated penitent of advanced civilization : 

' The lines to heaven by Christ were made ; 
With heavenly truths the rails were laid ; 
From earth to heaven the line extends, 
To life eternal, where it ends. 

" Repentance is the station, then, 
Where passengers are taken in ; 
No fee for them is there to pay, 
For Jesus is himself the way. 

" The Bible is the engineer; 
It points the way to heaven so clear ; 
Through tunnels dark and dreary here 
It doth the way to heaven steer." 

And so on through several more verses, reading which we no 
longer wonder at Mr. Matthew Arnold's vigorous denunciation of 



74 ENGLISH HYMNS. [Oct., 

hymns, a subject on which he has many times expressed the most 
heterodox views. 

" In the long run," he argues, " bad music and bad poetry, to whatever 
good and useful purposes a man may often manage to turn them, are in 
themselves mischievous and deteriorating to him. Somewhere and some- 
how and at some time or other he has to pay a penalty and to suffer a loss 
for taking delight in them. It is bad for people to hear such words and 
such a tune as the words or tune of 

" ' O happy place ! when shall I be, 
My God, with thee to see thy face ? ' 

worse for them to take pleasure in it." * 

Without thinking that the penalty for such transgressions will 
be a very heavy one, we cannot but regret that religious im- 
pulses should often manifest themselves in this fashion ; not so 
much for the offence given to our more cultivated tastes as for 
their own utter barrenness of purpose. Except in the tempe- 
rance hymns, there is seldom a practical suggestion of reform in 
all these noisy verses. To tell a loafing, swearing vagabond 

that 

" Repentance is the station, then, 
Where passengers are taken in " 

is not making it plain to him that he must cleanse his foul mouth 
and support his little children. He would never shout half so 
lustily over these unwelcome truths. As for the temperance 
hymns, they are perhaps more pointed than pleasing : 

" May drunkards see sobriety 
In an alluring light'' 

is a wish in which we all heartily concur; that they 

" May be brought to hate 
Drinks that intoxicate " 

is a most desirable possibility ; but, as a Blackwood reviewer ob- 
serves, none of these sentiments are presented with any great 
felicity of language. Still, as keeping the idea of one needful 
reformation steadily before a man's mind, they are of more value 
than smoother lines about golden gates, and golden streets, and 
golden harps, and all the wealth of gilded imagery so vaguely 
dazzling to the shrunken conceptions of the poor. 

Mr. Arnold tells us that the German hymns are much better 
than the English, and Mr. Ruskin finds a real merit in the sim- 
ple, pious songs of Italy. Cardinal Antonelli used to say that 
the poorest and most ignorant Italian never lost a certain inborn 

*J*ast Essays onhurch_and Religion, 



1 8 86.] ENGLISH HYMNS. 75 

accuracy of taste which enabled him to know what was beauti- 
ful ; and the same thing has been observed of the Spanish peasant, 
who, hopelessly illiterate, has not, like our own artisan, been 
warped into vulgarity by the sordid ugliness of his surroundings 
and the sharp edge of a contentious life. There is a little hymn 
the prayer of Calabrian shepherds to the Virgin which is oc- 
casionally sung by Catholic choirs, and which for grace and sim- 
plicity can hardly be surpassed. Take but the three following 
verses, and see how easily they express the sentiments natural to 
the rustic suppliants: a loving admiration for their beautiful coun- 
try, a devout reverence for the Mother of God, and a docile con- 
fidence in her protection : 

" Madonna, keep the cold north wind 

Amid his native seas ; 
So that no withering blight come down 
Upon our olive-trees. 

"And bid the sun-shine glad our hills 

The dew rejoice our vines, 
And bid the healthful sea-breeze sweep 
In music through the pines. 

"Pray for us, that our hearts and homes 

Be kept in fear and love 
Love for all things around our path, 
And fear for those above." 

Here we have all the true requisites of a hymn : the emotions 
of fear, hope, and love, a devout and yet definite petition, simple 
thoughts that all can grasp, and language which neither puzzles 
the ignorant by its subtility nor offends the cultivated by its 
crudeness. Such artless verses do not aspire to the province of 
poetry, but they fulfil the purpose for which they were designed : 
penetrating into hearts that the poet has never touched, drawing 
us together in the common fellowship of prayer, and linking our 
wandering; selfish thoughts to the great problems which make 
our interests one. 



76 CHRISTIAN UNITY. 



CHRISTIAN UNITY. 

THE revelation which God has made to man through his Son 
Jesus Christ is one of authority. This is a legitimate aspect of 
divine revelation. A large class of mankind see divine revela- 
tion under this aspect as its most prominent feature, and to this 
class divine revelation must give perfect satisfaction, though the 
essence of Christianity is not authority. True faith brings man 
to the acceptance of the divine authority ; therefore, faith is 
necessary that man may know and worship God aright. 

Faith includes as one of its essential features believing what 
God has revealed on the authority of God revealing. This defi- 
nition implies that God has made a revelation which he proposes 
on his own authority. If this be so, the truths revealed must be 
certain ; if they come from God, who can neither deceive nor be 
deceived, they cannot be questioned without impugning the 
veracity of God ; if they are proposed on the authority of God 
revealing, the rejection of them is the denial of God. It is, more- 
over, the same destruction of faith whether one or all of the 
revealed truths are denied. But how are we to know what God 
has revealed ? St. Paul asks this question : " How shall they 
believe on him of whom they have not heard ? And how shall 
they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach unless 
the} 7 be sent?" (Rom. x. 14, 15). From this text it is evident 
that the hearing of a preacher divinely sent is the means ap- 
pointed for giving us this knowledge. Who have been divinely 
cent to preach the gospel ? -The apostles were ; and an examina- 
tion of their commission will settle the question about others. 
After his resurrection Jesus 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 whatso- 
ever I have commanded you, and behold I am with you all days, 
even to the consummation of the world" (St. Matt, xxviii. 18, 19, 
20). Jesus also said to them : " As the Father hath sent me, I 
also send you " (St. John xx. 21). 

The apostles, as their commission declares, had authority from 
Jesus Christ to teach men to observe all that he had commanded, 
which they were to do until the consummation of the world. 
He made their message complete and the cessation of their office 



1 886.] CHRISTIAN UNITY. 77 

impossible. This living authority necessarily produces and per- 
petuates unity. Authority and unity go together ; unity without 
authority would be something like a circle without a centre. 

Rev. Dr. Caldwell, in the Andover Review, says that " nothing 
but explicit divine command can be the basis for such a perfect 
and indivisible unity " (as organic unity). He also says : " It 
seems almost impossible for all variations in worship to be har- 
monized except by some oecumenical authority/' But divine 
authority in it makes unity an essential mark of the true church. 

Where are authority and unity to be found in Protestantism ? 

Rev. Dr. Richards, in the Andover Review, says: " Protestant- 
ism is something far removed from the ideal of the church as one 
body with one Lord, one faith, one baptism." Yet he says " that 
ideal is not strained or unnatural. One Lord and Saviour comes 
into the world, lives one perfect life, and dies one blessed sacri- 
fice. To one mankind he comes bestowing one full salvation. 
To be of him, to be in him, to be like him is the one goodness 
possible for believers. All are agreed that he founded one spiri- 
tual kingdom. Its essential unity would seem more simply and 
effectively symbolized by a single organic structure, of however 
varied and diverse parts, than by many. . . . Every believer has 
his vision and dream of one body at last ; ... he at least awaits 
it as a heavenly fruition. What we all look to hereafter may we t 
not aspire to now?" He adds, in conclusion : "The prayer of 
Jesus (' That they may be one ' ) shall prevail : the head shall have 
one body, the foundation one building, the shepherd one flock, 
the bridegroom one bride, the Lord of all one kingdom." The 
actual Roman Catholic Church is Dr. Richard's ideal church. 
It is "a single structure of varied and diverse parts." Its unity 
" is not strained or unnatural," for it embodies men and women, 
such as we are. It is more sensitive of race characteristics, 
of nationalities and individualities, than all others. Did Catholi- 
city resist Protestantism on account of these distinctions? How 
could it, when these had always existed, and exist now, among 
Catholic peoples more distinct than among any other? 

Catholicity abhors what Dr. Caldwell calls " uniformity " and 
"absorption." Whoever needs or wishes proof of this should 
look at the races, nations, and individuals in the Catholic Church. 
The church insists, when they have historic value, that different 
religious rites must be retained. Have Celts, Saxons, Italians, 
Spaniards, Frenchmen, Germans, Americans, Japanese, or Chinese 
been denationalized by the church ? 

" Let " every believer who has had his vision and dream of 



78 CHRISTIAN UNITY. [Oct., 

one body at last" rejoice; the one body is here, and, if he will 
be faithful, " the heavenly fruition " will come. 

Dr. Caldwell holds with Catholics that organic unity without 
divine authority is impossible, but Dr. Richards says that such a 
unity is going to be in the future. If it is to come, on what 
basis will it resti 9 Can human authority, perhaps the decision 
of a great body, an elite few, or an individual genius, produce it? 
If so, it would be a despicable surrender of the very thing aimed 
at, which is a unity that perfects liberty. 

But who would dare to call the recognition of a divinely 
established authority anything but a reception of divine light, an 
emancipation, an entrance into liberty. 

Happily, the vocation of the Catholic Christian is to liberty ; 
he is one whom "the truth makes free." He- is one whom a 
church which is " the pillar and ground of truth "/elevates and 
enlightens. " Peter and the eleven " were members of such a 
church. Later on Ignatius, Polycarp, Irenasus, Cyprian, Chry- 
sostom, Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine were not in severed 
churches. 

It is not strange that one who will not " hear " a divinely 
established church has to be regarded " as heathen and pub- 
lican," but it is passing strange that men without guile read 
the commission of Christ to the apostles, admit with St. Paul 
that " sects," like " fornication, idolatry, and witchcraft, are works 
of the flesh " (Gal. v. 20), and persist in sectarianism ! 



1886.] "PROGRESSIVE ORTHODOXY." 



"PROGRESSIVE ORTHODOXY."* 

WHAT is known as Orthodox Congregationalism has been 
shaken to its very foundations by a new departure in theology, 
called " Progressive Orthodoxy." The time-honored and famous 
citadel of Andover has fallen, partially at least, into the hands of 
the innovators, who, conscious of the stronghold which they have 
secured, have boldly proclaimed to the world their nicely-chosen 
interpretations of Christian doctrines. 

Probation after death for those who in this life have not had 
explicit knowledge of the Christian faith is the central idea of 
" Progressive Orthodoxy." A theory of the Incarnation and Re- 
demption has been framed to suit this idea. 

Passing by the many errors which are to be found in the 
whole system, we shall consider in this article only the question 
of probation after death. 

In the first place, we would like to know how a disembodied 
soul is properly in a state of probation ? Is not this life (the 
union of soul and body) the normal condition for moral action ? 
The sin of Adam, which was the cause of the fall, and the actual 
sins of all men have been expiated by the sufferings of Jesus Christ 
in the flesh, because they are the sins of man, as man in the flesh. 
The work of redemption was consummated when the Son of 
God expired on the cross ; the glorified body of the Redeemer 
was on the third day reunited to his glorified soul, because it was 
fitting that the body should share in the glory of the soul, having 
been humiliated with the soul. But the resurrection of the 
Saviour was like what the resurrection of the just will be on the 
last day. Is it conceivable, then, that a man may depart this life 
in sin, leaving behind him a body of sin, and after leaving this 
world his soul by itself repent and on the last day be reunited to 
its body of sin? By no means, unless by an almost unheard-of 
exception, similar to that of the deliverance of a soul from hell 
after death. f The whole man must repent or the whole man 

* Progressive Orthodoxy : A Contribution to the Christian Interpretation of Christian 
Doctrine. By the Editors of the Andover Review, Professors in Andover Theological Seminary. 
Boston : Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 

t The accounts of these exceptions are only pious legends. If true, they cannot be satis- 
factorily explained, unless we suppose that these exceptional persons were restored to this life 
by a miracle, and in this way an opportunity for repentance given. In such cases the particular 
judgment would appear to have been temporarily suspended. 

The opinion that even one person will be delivered from hell after the general judgment is 
against faith. , 



8O "PROGRESSIVE ORTHODOXY:- [Oct., 

cannot be saved. " For we must all be manifested before the 
judgment seat of Christ," says St. Paul, "that every one may re- 
ceive the proper things of the body, according as he hath done, 
whether it be good or evil " (2 Cor. v. 10). 

The proper conditions both for repentance and the commis- 
sion of sin are wanting in the soul of man as separated from the 
body. A man does not renounce the world for Christ's sake 
when it is beyond his reach ; he does not mortify the flesh which 
he no longer has ; his body will not be given up to Satan at death 
and his soul afterwards be given up to God. If he is to have a 
glorified body in heaven, it will be because his " members " have 
been "the temple of the Holy Ghost" ; because he has glorified 
and borne " God in his body " (i Cor. vi. 19, 20). Can a body 
that has not been mortified and subjected to the spirit share in 
the glory of the spirit? Moreover, when the soul l^as been sepa- 
rated from the body by death it may not sin further without hav- 
ing a deeper guilt than at the time of death, which would make 
it unsuitable to be reunited to its body as that body was at death. 

Now, soul and body are to be at least as intimately united for 
all eternity after the general resurrection as they are in the present 
life. But " Progressive Orthodoxy " teaches that a man who has 
knowledge of the Gospel in this life, if he wishes to be saved, 
has got to fight his way to heaven by keeping the command- 
ments, overcoming the world, the flesh, and the devil, while the 
man who has died without the knowledge of the Gospel has got 
no such battle for salvation, because he cannot have it. Once a 
man who had listened to a preacher's lucid explanation of the 
Christian doctrine remarked afterwards to the preacher : " It is 
not the faith but the morals of religion that sticks me." If that 
man could have died without knowledge of the Gospel, perhaps 
Andover could deal with him more lightly than it knows how to 
now ! Whence may we trace the origin of this new doctrine of 
probation after death ? 

We think that the orthodox Protestant notion of hell has had 
a tendency to make many seek for some explanation of theology 
which would keep men out of it. If hell be considered as simply 
and only a place of torment, if both original and actual sin bring 
a soul to endless suffering, there is more difficulty in believing 
that probation ends with this life than, if it be thought not against 
faith, to hold that hell is a place of perfect natural beatitude * for 
those not guilty of actual sin and for those who have deliberately 
sinned, a place where the suffering is rigidly proportionate to the 
actual guilt. 

* St. Thomas Aquin, other saints, and many great theologians hold this opinion. 



1 886.] "PROGRESSIVE ORTHODOXY." 81 

Another source ot the new doctrine of probation after death 
is the theory that explicit knowledge and acceptance of the 
Christian faith is absolutely necessary for salvation. If Chris- 
tianity is for all men, why put such a limit to the operation of 
grace? What is Christianity but divine grace itself? If it be 
believed that sufficient, or at least remotely sufficient, grace for 
salvation is given in this life to every man, and that a man may 
make an act of faith in God as existing and " as a rewarder to 
them that seek him " (Heb. xi. 6) without an explicit knowl- 
edge of the Incarnation and Redemption, the condition in this 
life of those who are invincibly ignorant of the true faith is not 
so hopeless as Andover theologians would wish us to believe. 
They require more explicit conditions for salvation than right 
reason or orthodox theologians of all ages have. It is of no use 
to increase strict conditions which do not follow from reason. 
How can God be the rewarder of those " who believe in his ex- 
istence " and " seek " him and reject those who do this ? With 
this extreme theory of explicit knowledge and acceptance of the 
Christian faith as necessary for salvation, labelled as " orthodox 
ballast," they launch out into the wind and waves with probation 
after death for the heathen who have not had in this life explicit 
knowledge of the Christian faith in flying colors ! We do not 
predict for them a safe voyage. Andover .theology evidently 
does not rely on the general drift of the Scriptures in teaching 
probation after death, but relies on the exceptions that God could 
make if he would, and perhaps has made for some, and makes 
of them a divine rule of action. Error readily proceeds from 
trying to make of exceptions general rules. 

Let us preach what is revealed and what we know, and not 
run after exceptions. Why thrust in our faces an exception which 
tends to weaken in the minds of the faithful a general rule of 
Scripture? Because St. Jerome interprets the Scripture as say- 
ing that God will not judge in eternity* (Gen. vi. 3) those 
who perished in the deluge, should we infer that God never 
judges or punishes in eternity when he does so in this life ? Do 
you think because of this exception that St. Jerome believed the 
unorthodox opinion of a law of pardon for all in like circum- 
stances ? But what do you mean by " Progressive Orthodoxy " ? 
Have you explicitly brought out what \yas implicitly in the 
Christian revelation before? If your doctrine is new it is not 
true. It is too late in the day for us to make experiments on the 

* St. Jerome holds that all these persons were saved by their repentance previous to death. 
VOL. XLIV. 6 



82 "PROGRESSIVE ORTHODOXY:' [Oct., 

Gospel ; we ought to know by this time, if ever, what the Gospel 
generally means. 

" But Orthodox Protestantism makes men's chances of salva- 
tion too small/' you say. Therein lies the difficulty which you 
aim to set aside by probation after death. 

Do you not know that the Catholic faith gives one a larger 
hope for men than Orthodox Protestantism ? By Protestant 
Orthodoxy, however, must not be understood Progressive Or- 
thodoxy. But it will be in vain for you to think that you can 
long maintain Progressive Orthodoxy. Probation after death will 
not stand the test of theological criticism. It can be traced only 
to your individualism. It is an eccentricity of faith as uncatholic 
as Swedenborgianism or Spiritism. Be careful lest, in your anx- 
iety to get the heathen into heaven, you shut yourselves out. 

Missions will not overtax the energies of the church with such 
an appendage to its faith. A missionary is a messenger of God, 
"a shining torch," "a fire on a mountain," sent forth with the 
spirit and power of an Elias, St. John the Baptist, St. Paul, St. 
Xavier to preach by his life and words to a dying world. 

In the single question of probation after death it is easy to see 
that the Orthodox Congregationalists have the advantage over 
the Andover Progressionists. The Orthodox Congregationalists 
have our sympathy in their grief at what has happened in An- 
dover. All upholders of orthodoxy should stand by them and 
help them to combat the new error. Not a few Episcopalians, 
all Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists, are with them heart 
and soul. 

Let the Progressionists shift for themselves. Mr. D. L. Moody 
with his Bible and Scott's Commentary is a better guide than the 
Andover scientists with all their knowledge of Hebrew and 
Greek. 

Is the memory of George Whitefield, who, though not a Con- 
gregationalist, yet preached in the orthodox churches of New 
England, dead ? Were it not for Whitefield's continual holding 
up of Calvinism one would suppose that his sermons were those 
of a Catholic Liguorian missioner ! We say to the Orthodox Con- 
gregationalists : Unseat " Progressive Orthodoxy " from An- 
dover if you can. See if the teaching of the present professors 
(on the Incarnation, for example) is different from what their pro- 
mises or contracts require that it should be. The Massachusetts 
courts should decide whether the trustees can give the emolu- 
ments of those chairs to those who depart from the doctrinal 
standards fixed by the benefactors. 



1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 83 

We think that you once let Harvard University be taken 
away from you too easily. We know the history of Harvard 
University. We know it was founded by an orthodox minister 
to be an orthodox institution, and now we know it is teaching 
Unitarianism and Rationalism ! In our judgment there is noth- 
ing like having men with new doctrines found new colleges and 
seminaries. 



A FAIR EMIGRANT. 

CHAPTER III. 
INTERRUPTION. 

" AND now, dear," said Desmond, " as I have given you my 
serious promise, let me go my own way for the rest of the even 
ing. I want to look over the papers in the old wooden box in 
the shanty, to put them in order for your reading. Don't expect 
to see me again till to-morrow morning, and tell Jeanne I shall 
not come in to supper. I shall spend most of the night at my 
task." 

" I fear it will be a painful one," said Bawn, beginning to 
tremble for the consequences of her own boldness. 

" Not so painful as it might have been. Your faith and con- 
fidence have given me courage, and, after a life-time of silence 
and isolation with my trouble, your sympathy is very sweet.. 
Already I feel happier than I believed it possible I could ever 
feel again. Little daughter, you have comforted me." 

"Daddy, I hold you to be one of God's martyrs." 

" That is wild talk, my darling. Only to-night do I realize- 
fully how wicked I have been. I have suffered morosely, with- 
out admitting the blessedness of suffering." 

" I cannot wonder." 

" My daughter's trust has broken my pride. I freely pardon 
all who injured me. Go, now, my precious one, and pray for 
me if you would help me." 

"lam always praying for you. Sometimes I think I hear 
the angels grumbling, ' Here is this Bawn again, clamoring about 
her father!'" 

" Continue your violence, my dearest. A most unusual hope 
and happiness have descended upon me to-night." 



84 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Oct., 

" Thank Heaven for it ! And after this we shall be so happy ! " 

Then they parted, Desmond going to his shanty and Bawn 
returning to the house, where she baffled Jeanne's inquiries about 
her father, merely saying that she had seen him and that he 
would not return in time for supper. Retiring early to her 
room, the girl remained long on her knees trying once more to 
weary out the patience of the angels. In the vigorous hopeful- 
ness of her healthy youth she was not satisfied with asking resig- 
nation and peace for her martyr, but demanded comfort the most 
complete, a crown of happiness the most absolute, to make amends 
for long years of desolation and pain. How strangely such vehe- 
ment prayers are sometimes answered only those can know who 
have dared to utter them. 

Having made her demands of Heaven, Bawn lingered still, 
looking out of her window, her eyes resting on the sleeping, 
sombre woods, the dreaming prairie spanned by the star-sown 
sky, the white, moon-silvered gables and roofs of the homestead. 
A dog bayed in the distance, a faint lowing came from the cattle- 
.sheds, and the geese gabbled in the farm-yard. Echoes of whis- 
tling and faint laughter floated up from the fields, where some 
of the laborers were amusing themselves. Red fire-side lights 
shone under the eaves and made the moonlight more white, more 
ethereal by contrast. 

While her eyes took in the beauty of the night her heart 
swelled with indignation as she thought over her father's com- 
munication of the evening, and asked herself in amazement what 
.kind of men and women these might be whom he had described 
as good and true, yet who could believe him a criminal, and, 
driving him away from them deliberately, could lose him out of 
their lives for evermore. Stupid, base, inconceivable beings ! 
There was no word in her vocabulary strong enough to express 
her contempt and disgust for them. So patient, so kindly as he 
was, and so quietly brave in spite of that amiable weakness of 
character which his daughter felt in him, and which made him 
more lovable in her eyes ! Why could he not have forgotten 
them? Why could he not despise them as she did? To think 
that, after all these thirty years, the memory of their love should 
live so cruelly within him and would not die ! 

"Oh! that he and I could go back among them," she thought, 
" and force them to believe in the truth. I am not blighted and 
heart-broken, but young and strong, and full of faith. I would 
walk into their homes and reproach them with their falsehood. 
I would tell them of his noble, gentle, and laborious life ; of how 






1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 85 

the poor come to him for help and the rich entrust him with 
their interests. I would ask them to look at his sad eyes, his 
white hair, and I would say, ' Is this the man you branded and 
drove out from you ? ' ' 

Flinging herself on her bed, she cried herself to sleep, and 
soon slept the undisturbed slumber of pure and perfect health. 
After some hours she wakened suddenly with a strange, startled 
feeling, a belief that her father had been standing at her bedside 
the moment before her eyes had opened, that he had bent over 
her and spoken to her. Even when wide awake and aware that 
this must have been a delusion, a dream, she felt uneasy, as 
though intelligence had been given her that something unusual 
had happened. Dawn was already making objects dimly visible 
in the room, giving them that ghostly aspect which all things 
take at the first sign of the approach of another day, and, won- 
dering if her father had returned to the house, she lay listening, 
thinking it possible his entrance might have wakened her. All 
was still, and, with an anxiety that would not be controlled, she 
rose and went to the window commanding a view of one end of 
the log hut. The faint star of light which she could always see 
when he was there at night was burning still. How long he was 
lingering over that painful retrospection ! How tired he would 
be to-morrow ! Full of a tender concern for him, she dressed 
quickly, went noiselessly down the staircase, and let herself out 
of the house, with the intention of persuading him to give up his 
vigil, and of preparing some refreshment which he might take 
before going to his much-needed rest. 

She was soon at the door of the shanty, and, finding it unfast- 
ened, went in, calling softly to her father that it was she. 

There was no answer. The light on the table was burning 
low with a flicker that seemed to struggle with the encroach- 
ments of the dawn-light, and she could see her father's figure sit- 
ting in his chair by the table, his head leaned slightly to one side 
and resting on his hand. His other hand lay upon some papers 
which were before him on the table the letters he had taken 
from the casket, which stood empty by their side. Her first im- 
pression was that he had fallen asleep no unnatural consequence 
of his long day's wandering in the open air, followed by hours of 
vigil. She hesitated, unwilling to disturb him, and waited, ex- 
pecting to see him wake or stir. 

The lamp flickered out, and the daylight grew stronger in 
the room. Desmond's face was in shadow, and his attitude was 
one of such perfect repose that his daughter felt no alarm, only 



86 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Oct., 

remained patiently standing at the window, debating whether 
she should return to the house and prepare some coffee, or wake 
him first and persuade him to accompany her. 

It struck her at last, with a vague sensation of chill, that the 
room was unnaturally still, that she had heard neither breath nor 
slightest movement from the figure in the chair since her en- 
trance into the hut. The moment after this vague alarm had 
seized her she was by her father's side, kneeling at his chair and 
looking fearfully and scrutinizingly into his face. 

Something she saw there made her start with a cry of fear and 
anguish, and seize him by the hands, which were stiff and cold to 
her touch, like hands of the dead. The noble face was gray and 
rigid, with an awful look which even the sweetness on the lips 
and the peace on the brow could not soften. Had death indeed 
found him in this moment of forgiveness and contentment, and 
had the brave heart broken while thus reviewing in a tender 
spirit the evidences of the wreck of its happiness ? How Bawn 
regained the house and summoned aid she never knew, but in 
a short time every remedy that could be brought to bear upon 
the apparently lifeless man had been tried, and not without effect. 
He recovered at last from what was proved to have been a long 
and very deathlike swoon. 

The next day the swooning returned, and the doctor from 
St. Paul whispered to Bawn that, though her father was stricken 
with heart-disease, yet if properly cared for and saved from all 
anxiety he might recover so far as to linger, an invalid, for years. 
It was a shadowy hope, and all but Bawn admitted it to be so. 
No better sign of the seriousness of his case could have been 
given than Jeanne's unwonted control over her tongue, or at 
least her tones ; for had her husband been likely to recover she 
would not have so spared him. As it was, she did all her grum- 
bling in her store-rooms and dairy, where she lamented much 
that she was so soon to be a widow after all the pains she had 
taken to be a wife. 

Meanwhile Bawn sat by her father's bedside, looking neither 
despairing nor melancholy. A run round the garden, morning 
and evening, kept a speck of color the size of a carnation-bud in 
her cheek, so that Desmond should not say she was wearing her- 
self pale with her constant and devoted attendance on him. With 
smiles that never failed smiles, sweet and penetrating, that had 
a restoring power, like good wine she tended, cheered, and 
amused him. If good nursing could bring back any half-dead 
man to life, then Arthur Desmond must soon have arisen and 



1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 87 

walked. For some time he hoped with Ba\vn that he should do 
so, but little by little he learned from his friend, Dr. Ackroyd, 
how small was the amount of such expectation he could dare to 
indulge in. Making- up his mind to die, he felt no regret, except 
for the sake of the beloved daughter he was leaving behind him. 
Watching her sitting at his window, at work on nice things for 
his comfort, to be worn, as she fondly hoped, in the coming win- 
ter, which he knew he should never see, he remarked the beauty 
of her face and form, and the signs of an ardent though con- 
trolled nature which were so clearly visible under her serene 
and smiling aspect. In her pale-blue linen dress and bunch of 
field-daisies he thought her so charming that nothing could be 
added to her beauty. What would become of her when he should 
be laid in the earth ? Rich, handsome, good, with a mind culti- 
vated far beyond those with whom she was ever likely to come 
in contact, how was her life likely to be spent ? Ah ! if he might 
be spared yet a few years longer, the time he had hitherto spent 
in selfish, retrospective sorrow should be used in the endeavor to 
pilot his darling into some secure harbor for life. He would 
make a trip to Europe take her, not to England, but to those 
Continental places where varieties of people are to be met. Who 
would recognize him now or remember his story ? It was not 
possible but that some good man, her mate in heart and mind, 
seeing her, should love this dear Bawn ; and, a shelter having 
been found for her, what mattered about the rest? 

Then, having travelled in imagination as far as Europe, Des- 
mond's thoughts went further still, and the face of another woman 
became present to his mind. After half an hour of dreaming 
he sighed heavily. 

" Daddy, what is ailing you ? " said Bawn, with all her heart 
in her eyes. 

" I have been thinking, dear, it is a pity I told you all I told 
you that evening. What is the use of it now ? The bitterness is 
gone, for ever gone. Under, the shadow of Death's wings all 
things take an even surface. I have often thought to ask you 
about the letters and papers, dearest. I was reading them when 
I got this blow " 

Bawn's heart always stood still when he would speak like 
this, calmly, of death. But she answered in her cheerful way 
" They are all safe in the casket. I have not looked at 
them." 

" Better not look at them at all, then, my dear at least not till 
I am gone." 



88 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Oct., 

Bawn left her seat and knelt by his bed, laying her head on 
the pillow beside his. 

" Do not talk so," she said, " if you would not kill me. You 
are going to be well, and then we will forget and be happy. And 
I must read those letters, though not until you bid me. I have a 
presentiment that in the course of my years I shall meet those 
people who spoiled my father's life ; and I should like to know 
all about it." 

"Dreams, my darling dreams. How should you ever meet 
with them ; and what could come of it but pain? " 

"I don't know how I shall meet them, but I have a long time 
to live in this world, and they are in it, too same of them, surely 
and there is no knowing how things may happen. And as for 
pain, there might be pain, indeed, but the truth might come out 
of it." 

" Well, dear, I feel that I have no right to deny your request 
in the matter, having told you so much as I did. You know the 
worst, and, if your mind will run on the subject, it may be well, 
as you say, that all the circumstances should be known to you. 
Open the casket when you like, and make your own of the con- 
tents." 

" May I speak to you of this again when I have done so?" 

" Dear, I would rather not. My life has been lived, my bur- 
den borne. Peace has come to me at last, and I will not give it 
away again. Make what use you please of your knowledge in 
after-years, but smile and prattle to me now while I am with you. 
I have done with the past, and let us think of it no more." 

Bawn was afraid to move her head lest he should see the tears 
dripping down her cheeks. His perfect peace, forgivingness, 
satisfaction, wrung her heart more than the most bitter com- 
plaints could have done. The peace of approaching death was 
upon him, though Bawn would not have it so. How sweet it 
would be when he should get quite well and would talk like this 
about what in former days had been a horror not to be shared or 
softened ! After a long time of silence she ventured to with- 
draw her head from the pillow and steal a look at his face. She 
thought he had fallen asleep, and so he had ; only she need not 
have feared to awake him, for, though his eyes were fast closed, 
his spirit was already awake in the sunshine of eternity. 



1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 89 



CHAPTER IV. 
FROM THE PAST. 

THE second winter after Arthur Desmond's death had come 
round, and his grave was covered with snow. Bawn, having 
lived through one tragic year, was trying to begin another with 
patience, which was the more difficult to her as Jeanne had begun 
to wear a gold locket and bracelets and to entertain friends and 
relations who in her husband's life-time were not welcome in his 
home. 

One clear, frosty evening she came slowly down-stairs from 
her own rooms, where she had of late lived almost entirely, and 
looked-wearily through the windows as she passed them, up at the 
keen stars and across at the forest darkness, lingering, loath to 
enter the drawing-room, and yet resolved to conciliate her step- 
mother, whose wrath she often excited by her avoidance of the 
obnoxious cousins and friends. 

As she sat down by the fire in the lamp-light she looked very 
unlike the blooming, vigorous Bawn who had lived so full a life 
at her father's side. Near her were the books he and she had 
read together, but she did not read, nor did she sew much, though 
a work-basket stood at her hand with varieties of material for 
such feminine occupation. 

" Bawn, I wish you would talk a little," said Jeanne pettishly. 
" It makes one fidget to look at your quietness. And I want 
particularly to have some communication with you. Very sel- 
dom indeed you allow me to set an eye on you." 

" Well, Jeanne, you cannot say you are lonely. You have 
company that pleases you better than mine." 

" That may be, miss. As you say, I am not fitted for a lonely 
life. Now you, for instance, judging by your ways, are fond of 
mooning all by yourself, and so you will find it easy to grow into 
an old maid, as, from your demeanor to gentlemen, I see is your 
intent. But I can tell you I am of a different character and am 
not going to follow your example." 

"Jeanne," said Bawn, with a gleam of her old smile, " you al- 
ways will make me laugh. And I dare say it is good of you. I 
have not smiled for a long time, I think. How, dear Jeanne, could 
you manage to turn into an old maid ? " 

" Oh ! yoi^ can make pleasantries, can you, though you were 
so angry at my Cousin Henri's clever jest the other day, sweep- 
ing out of the room like the goddess Dinah ! " 



go A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Oct., 

" Don't, Jeanne don't remind me of it, please," said Bawn, a 
slight frown crossing her fair brows. " I fear I am not as good- 
tempered as I used to be. I am growing irritable ; don't provoke 
me till I can get back to my natural ways. Some day when your 
Cousin Henri is tired of coming here you will find me less un- 
amiable than I am now." 

" No, he will not cease to come here, miss ; as long as I 
please he shall come here. And that reminds me. I was going 
to tell you I suppose you are aware that I am a widow a year 
to-day." 

" Yes," said Bawn sadly, and she shivered and drew nearer to 
the fire. 

Bold as Jeanne was, she grew a little nervous as she tried 
to proceed with her communication. Bawn's utter obtuseness 
took her by surprise and made what she had to say more dif- 
ficult. Could not the girl guess what was coming? On the 
contrary, her eyes had fixed themselves on the fire with an ab- 
stracted look. She was evidently not thinking of Mrs. Desmond 
at all. 

" I want to tell you, if you will listen to me," said Jeanne 
desperately, " that I am not a woman to have her life blighted 
by one man " 

Bawn was now sitting bolt upright, startled more by the 
simper that had come upon her stepmother's face than by the 
woman's words. 

" Hush ! " she said sternly, and threw out her hands as if to 
stop -further conversation. 

Jeanne shrank back, shocked by the look on the girl's face. 

" I am acting for the best in all our interests," she said whim- 
peringly, and flourishing a handkerchief of black some inches 
deep. 

Bawn bent her head with one deep sob, and there was silence 
in the room for some minutes. The younger woman struggled 
with her grief and disgust; the elder fumed and told herself that 
she would tell her news that evening, no matter how disagree- 
able her stepdaughter might be. 

" If you would not always intercept me I would tell you 
what I want to say," she burst forth at last. " Well, then, I 
am going to be married." 

" Married ! " repeated Bawn mechanically. 

" You will be jealous, I suppose, that I have had the first 
offer ; but, indeed, I assure you Cousin Henri is serious in his 
intentions, too." 



1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 91 

" Married ! " repeated Bawn to herself. It seemed she could 
not be persuaded that the woman whom her father had dignified 
with his name could be in earnest in making such a state- 
ment. 

" Yes, I tell you. The young man is a patriot of my own." 

" Young man ! " murmured Bawn, more and more amazed. 

" And why not a young man ? I suppose you mean to pre- 
dict that I am not a young woman. Have I a gray hair in my 
head any more than you, miss ? " 

Bawn was silent while all the truth pressed upon her. Jeanne 
was but a year her father's widow, and she was going to become 
the wife of some vulgar acquaintance. 

" I know what you are thinking of, of course," pursued 
Jeanne. " The house and farm are yours, and you can turn us 
out of them if you please. But if you would only be reasonable, 
Bawn, and think of Cousin Henri, we might all live here to- 
gether and make our fortunes again and again." 

Bawn was thinking and did not hear her. After all, the 
woman was only following her natural instinct in returning to 
the coarse associations from which Desmond had withdrawn her. 
Let her go. A few minutes' reflection assured the girl that this 
ought to be a relief to her rather than anything else. Only it 
would leave her, Bawn, so solitary. 

Jeanne's last words rang upon her ear, and the meaning of 
them came back to her after a few minutes. 

" Put me out of the question," she said quietly ; " and please 
do not mention your cousin's name to me again. I will think the 
matter over and tell you what I shall do about the house and 
farm." 

" You could never work it," cried Jeanne ; " and a manager 
would be sure to rob you." 

And this was all that was said on the subject then. 

When Bawn laid her head on her pillow that night she felt a 
bitter sense of renewed desolation which she knew to be in re- 
ality meaningless, but which had to be suffered, nevertheless. 
Jeanne, disagreeable as she might be, was the only creature to 
whom she was bound by any tie. She had shared the past with 
her, and to part from her utterly was to break the last link that 
bound her to it. Yet this was what had to be done, and there 
was only one generous and sensible way of doing it. The most 
rational thing that she, Bawn, could do would be to leave this 
great place, in which she could not think of living alone, to her 
who had been mistress of it so long, who knew how to manage it 



92 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Oct., 

and thrive in it. Yes, she must go forth out of her home and 
find herself a shelter elsewhere. 

Upon this decision she slept ; but in the middle of the night 
she awoke suddenly, as if some one had called her. It seemed as 
if a voice had spoken in her ear, saying : " Why not go to Eu- 
rope to Ireland ? Why not carry out your old idea of seeking 
for your father's friends and enemies ? " As a strong light springs 
up in a darkened room and reveals all the details that had been 
only hidden and not annihilated in it, so the thought that had 
roused her from sleep showed her the deep desire and unshaped 
purpose which sorrow and weakness had held dormant in her 
brain. 

Excellent idea ! To what better account could she turn her 
time and the wealth which her father had left to her? Here was 
a new interest for her life, and closely linked with the beloved 
who had suffered and was at rest. 

She rose, lit her fire and lamp, and unlocked the drawer 
where a year ago she had, with heavy tears, deposited her fa- 
ther's old wooden casket. In proportion as the contents had 
been precious to him they were precious to her, but until now 
she had not trusted herself to look at them. Now she eagerly 
unfolded document after document, as if she would find between 
their pages light and instruction to carry out the plan she had 
conceived. 

Under the papers was a miniature portrait, the face of a 
beautiful girl soft blue eyes, a cloud of dark hair, face like a 
blush-rose, mouth and chin tender but weak. The dress was of 
conventional elegance in the fashion of a by-gone day. 

" You are the woman who loved and yet condemned him," 
she said to the pictured face. " Poor weak creature, I pity you ! 
Perhaps you married a man who was really bad, and so suffered 
for your sin ; or may be at this moment your heart is broken by 
the evil ways of a son. If so you are justly punished for not 
knowing a good man when you saw him." 

The fair face smiled undisturbed by her reproaches, and Bawn 
wept. 

Desmond's own notes and statement ran as follows : 

" I solemnly swear that I am not guilty of the crime laid to 
me ; that I had no act or part in the death of Roderick Fingall, 
who lost his life on the mountain of Aura, in the Glens of An- 
trim, on a May evening in 18 . Even if I were capable of the 
crime I had no motive to urge me to it. 

" It is true we both loved Mave Adare ; but she had given 



1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 93 

her promise to me, and I never dreamed of doubting her. The 
circumstances were these : Roderick and I had been good friends 
enough till he learned of my engagement to Mave, and then he 
took a dislike to me, fancying I had supplanted him. He had 
never spoken to her of his love, nor had she suspected it ; but he 
thought she understood him, and mistook for a deeper feeling 
what was only sisterly friendship for himself. This she declared 
to me, and I believed her ; but he chose to hug his grievance 
and fancy himself wronged. 

" Neither Roderick nor I was rich, but accident had for the 
moment given me a probable advantage over him. An old man 
from Barbadoes had turned up in the Glens, and, though the 
Adares, Fingalls, and I were unconnected by ties of blood, he 
was related in a distant way to each of us. He boasted of hav- 
ing made a large fortune, and, having returned to bestow his 
bones in his native land, intended to bequeath his money to some 
one of his kindred. He constantly declared that he would not 
divide it, but would leave it to whichever of his relatives pleased 
him the best. This was, perhaps, intended to put all on their 
mettle to be good to him, though it might have had the effect of 
keeping some at a distance. I may truly say I did not think of 
him at all, so absorbed was I in my happiness as Mave's accepted 
lover and in the daily enjoyment of her companionship. Still, 
in some way why I never could tell a report got abroad that 
' Old Barbadoes,' as he was called, had taken a fancy to me and 
intended to make me his heir. People said that when Mave and 
I were married he could benefit both Adare and Desmond by 
giving us the bulk of his wealth. I declare that neither she nor 
I believed there was any foundation for this gossip, nor did we 
allow ourselves to wish it might be true. 

" The rumor had the effect of making Roderick more restless 
and irritable. In the bitterness of his disappointment all the 
generosity of his nature seemed obscured for the time, and he 
was heard to say that Mave had preferred me because I was the 
favorite of ' Old Barbadoes.' 

" He was a good fellow at bottom, though of a passionate 
temper and a little melodramatic in his ways, and Mave and I 
did not despair of winning back his friendship in time. But death 
barred that. 

" I was a stranger in the Glens, and my small patrimony lay 
in the south of Ireland. Father, mother, and sister being dead, 
I was the only remaining member of my own family. After my 
mother's death I had been induced to visit Antrim, which was her 



94 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Oct., 

birth-place, and there I spent the happiest as well as the most 
terrible months of my life. Mave, in the midst of her family, 
seemed to me like a wild rose blooming in a poisoned atmos- 
phere; for the Adares were strange people, proud, thriftless, and 
of a morbid turn of mind, who, with failing fortunes and ex- 
travagant habits, considered themselves above the degradation of 
any kind of work. The men led idle and unwholesome lives, and 
were hated and feared by their poorer.neighbors and dependants. 
I delighted in the thought of taking my Mave out of the strange 
company of her people, away from the gloomy hollow of the 
mountain which was her home, and bringing her to my bright 
little Kerry domain. We should not have been rich, but I was 
full of plans for earnest work, for building up my fortunes by de- 
termined industry. I said to myself, ' Idleness is the rock on 
which so many of my class in my country split and go to wreck. 
I will steer clear of it.' 

" Roderick Fingall's statement that Mave had been influenced 
by the fact of my being ' Old Barbadoes' ' favorite stung me 
more than any other of his taunts, and on one or two occasions I 
spoke angrily of his impertinence and carelessness of the truth. 
Mave did her best to soothe me, and seemed, I thought, unneces- 
sarily fearful of a quarrel arising between us. 

" I will make a plain statement of what occurred, as far as I 
know, on the evening of Fingall's violent death. 

" There had occurred that day between Mave and me some- 
thing like a misunderstanding on the subject of Roderick, and I 
was a good deal vexed in spirit when I set out to take a long 
ramble across the mountains, hoping to walk off my ill-humor. 

" 1 had done so. Heaven is my witness that I had forgotten 
all bitterness by the time I found myself climbing the side of Aura. 
My mind had gone gladly back to the contemplation of my own 
happiness, and, full of hope and joy, I felt my veins thrilling with 
the glory of the sunset, often so magnificent among those Antrim 
hills. I had no thought of unkindness towards any one when I 
saw Roderick Fingall approaching me with bent head and 
gloomy eyes ; I felt nothing but pity for his disappointment, self- 
reproach for having allowed myself to be irritated by the expres- 
sions of his morbid jealousy. He was walking to meet me, with- 
out having perceived my approach, and, thinking himself alone 
in this mountain solitude, had allowed his face to express unre- 
servedly the bitterness of his soul. Filled with compassion and 
compunction, I disliked the idea of surprising him, and began to 
whistle that he might be warned of my nearness to him. 



1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 95 

" He misunderstood me and took my whistling for a sign of 
triumph and derision, as I found when, a few moments afterwards, 
we passed face to face on a narrow path above a steep and ugly 
precipice. 

" ' So,' he said, ' you have corn/; to dog my steps even here, to 
flourish your confounded good fortune in my face ! ' or words to 
that effect. 

"'No, indeed, Fingall,' I said. ' I had no such thought. We 
have met by accident. Let it not be an unfortunate chance. I 
feel no ill-will towards you. I wish to God you felt none towards 
me.' 

" I thought I saw a gleam of relenting in his eyes as I went 
on. 

" ' We were once good friends ; let us be so again. I never 
knowingly did you wrong, and if I have caused you pain it is a 
grief to me. On some points I believe you to be mistaken. You 
will live to find it out.' 

" He looked at me scrutinizingly. I think he was beginning to 
believe in me. The bracing, brilliant mountain air, the glorious 
sunlight, the ennobling beauty of the scenery around us were all 
in my favor, and I felt it. He looked up, threw the hair from 
his brow. I saw that a struggle was going on between his natural 
generosity and the evil spirit that had got possession of him. 
Finally his eye sought mine. 

" ' God is around and above us,' I said ; ' let not this glori- 
ous sun go down upon our wrath. Fingall, why cannot we be 
friends?' 

" I stretched out my hands towards him, and he made a move- 
ment. As God is my judge, I do not know whether he intended 
to advance towards me in friendship or to retreat in denial of 
my appeal. His step backward may have been an involuntary 
one; the next moment he might have flung himself forward into 
my arms. My memory of the look in his eyes assures me that 
to do so was his intention. But he stood upon treacherous 
ground. In the excitement of our feelings neither of us had no- 
ticed that he had backed while speaking to the very edge of an 
abyss. He took one fatal step and vanished. I heard his cry as 
he went whirling down the precipice then all was silent. . . . 

" I hurried down the mountain in a terrible state of agitation ; 
met some people and told my story, and we went in search of 
him. He was found quite dead. At the inquest I gave my evi- 
dence, and a verdict of accidental death was returned. His fam- 
ily were in a frantic state of grief. He was his mother's young- 



96 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Oct., 

est and favorite son, and the calamity threatened to deprive her 
of her reason. So deep was my own affliction that it was some 
time before I began to perceive that people were looking 1 askance 
at me. Some one was whispering away my fair fame. A name- 
less horror rose up beside me, dogged. my steps, haunted me like 
an evil spiritf; when I tried to grasp it, it slipped through my fin- 
gers and vanished. I resolved not to see it, tried to forget it, 
ascribed its existence to my own over-excited imagination; but 
still the reality of it was there, asserting itself at every opportu- 
nity. At last one day with a sudden shock I came in front of 
it and saw its face, ghastly with falsehood and corruption. It 
was believed that I had murdered Fingall ! . . . . 

" The whisper grew and swelled into a murmur so loud that 
I could not shut my ears to it. Even in Mave's tender eyes there 
arose a cloud of doubt. Her smile grew colder and colder, and 
a look of fear came over her face when I appeared. I became 
aware that I had a powerful though secret accuser, who, while 
assuming to screen me, was all the time gradually and persist- 
ently blasting my good name. 

" There came a day when I could bear it no longer, and I 
went to Mave and asked an explanation of the change in her 
manner towards me. I said I knew there were evil rumors in 
circulation concerning me, but I should not care for them. I 
could live them down, if only she would bravely believe in me. 
At once I saw my doom in her averted eyes. It seemed that, 
whoever my accuser might be, he had her ear and that her mind 
was becoming poisoned against me. Seeing the despair in my 
face, she burst into passionate weeping ; but when I drew near to 
comfort her she shrank from me. In the agonizing scene that 
followed I learned that some secret evidence had been laid before 
her which she considered overwhelming. Timorous and gentle 
I had known her to be, but that she could be so miserably weak 
and wanting in trust of me, whom she had chosen and dignified 
with her love of disloyalty like this I had not dreamed. I went 
to her brother Luke, who was the dominant spirit in that un- 
wholesome household, stated my case, declared my innocence, 
and asked him, as man to man, to help me to free myself from 
this curse that was threatening to blast me. I found him cool, 
reticent, suspicious, professing to be my friend, unwilling to say 
anything hurtful to me, but evidently firmly convinced of my 
guilt. He said that, for the sake of old friendship and of his 
sister's former love for me, they were all anxious to screen me 
from the consequences of what had happened. I answered that I 



1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 97 

wanted no screen, only to come face to face with my accuser. 
He smiled slightly, saying that that I could never do. 

" I left him feeling as if I had been beating my heart against 
a rock, and for some time longer I held my ground, lying in wait 
for my enemy, striving to kill the lie that was slowly withering 
up the sap of my veins ; but as air escapes the clutch of the hand, 
so did this cruel calumny fatally and perpetually elude my grasp. 
As the wretch doomed to be walled up alive watches stone placed 
upon stone, building up the barrier that separates him from life, 
so, slowly and surely, I saw the last glimpse of light disappear 
from my horizon. One day I rose up and shook myself together, 
and owned that I could bear it no longer. I went to Mave for 
the last time, and, finding her still possessed by the belief in my 
guilt, I bade her an abrupt farewell and went forth like a lost 
soul out of her presence. I shook the dust of the Glens from my 
feet and departed from the country without taking leave of any 
one. Strange looks and wags of the head had so long followed 
me that I believed scarce a man in the place would have cared 
to shake hands with me. I was looked on as a murderer who for 
certain reasons of old friendship had been allowed to escape jus- 
tice, but whose presence was not to be desired in an honest com- 
munity. 

" To understand fully the general abhorrence in which I was 
held one would need to know the character of the Glens people. 
A murder had not occurred among them within the memory of 
man, hardly a theft, or anything that could be called a crime. 
The people had their faults and their squabbles, no doubt, but 
they were, on the whole, a singularly upright and simple-minded 
race, who kept the Commandments and knew little of the world 
beyond their mountains. 

" I went forth from among them with the brand of Cain on 
my forehead, to go on with my life as best I might in some spot 
where rumor could not follow me. No man bade me God-speed. 
Every one shrank from my path as I walked the road, and doors 
were shut as I passed them by. In all this there was only one 
exception. As I walked up Glenan with my heart swooning in 
my breast and my brain on fire, a woman opened her door and 
came a little way to meet me. Her name was Betty Macalister. 
She had been a servant in the Fingall family, and had recently 
married and gone to live in Glenan. Doubtless she knew the 
whole tragedy as well as any one knew it, but she opened her 
door and came out and offered me a drink of milk, which, I 
suppose, was the best way that occurred to her of expressing 
VOL. XLIV. 7 



98 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Oct., 

her good-will. My first impulse was to dash it from her hand 
and pass on. How could she dare to be kind when Mave ? 
But a look in her homely eyes, which had an angel's light in 
them at the moment, altered my mood. I took it and tasted it, 
and returned it to her with thanks. 

"'Good-by, Mr. Arthur/ she said, 'and God defend the 
innocent ! ' 

" I could not answer her. I looked at her silently, and Heaven 
knows what she saw in my gaze. She threw her apron over her 
face and rushed sobbing into the house. 

" I went to London, where I stayed till I had effected the sale 
of my little property in Kerry, and the home that was to have 
been hers and mine was made over to strangers. All that time 
I walked the streets of London like a man in a nightmare. So 
long as I kept walking I felt that I had a hold on my life, had 
my will in control ; but when I sat down the desire for self- 
destruction rushed upon me. I believe I walked the entire of 
London many times over, yet I did not know where I walked 
and remember nothing that I saw. During this time I wrote to 
Luke Adare, telling him I was going to Minnesota and would 
send him rny address when I arrived there. I was not going to 
behave like a criminal who had been glad to be allowed to escape. 
If at any future time I were to be wanted by friends or enemies 
they should know where to find me. 

" After that Luke wrote to me, once to London and two or 
three times to Minnesota. There was nothing in his letter which 
seemed to require an answer, and I did not answer him. Indeed, 
it was, and is still, a wonder to me that he wrote as he did to a 
man whom he believed to be a murdere^ and one who would 
not even confess or regret his crime. There was a sympathizing 
and pitying tone in his communication which surprised me, for 
Luke was no tender sentimentalist. He gave me no information 
about home; he never mentioned Mave. What was the reason 
of his writing at all I could never make out. 

" I received one other letter from the Glens, and that was 
from Betty Macalister, to whom I had also given my address, 
having an instinctive feeling that if anything were to turn up 
to clear my good name she would be more likely than Luke to 
let me know." 

Bawn here turned to Betty's letter, which was as follows : 

*' YOUR HON. DEAR MISSTER ARTHUR : 

" This comes hoppin' you are well as leaves me in this present 



1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 99 

time the same and husband. The hollow fokes is not doin' well. 
The ould Misster Barbados he left all he had to Misster Look. 
The ould house luks bad an' Miss Mave she dozzint walk out at 
all. The gentlemen has quare ways an' the people dozzint like 
them a bit better nor they did. There was great doin's for a 
while, but the munny dozzint last with them, A think, for the ould 
place is lukkin' bad now. My man an' me stiks to you thru 
thick an' thin, but yure better where ye are. 
" Yures to kommand, 

" BETTY MACALISTER." 

This epistle, which bore a date ten years after Arthur's 
departure, Bawn read over and over again, and one piece of 
information it contained struck her as remarkable : " Old Bar- 
badoes " had left all his money to Luke Adare the money 
which it was supposed would, under other circumstances, have 
come to Arthur as his favorite. 

The next letter she opened was from Luke himself. He- 
wrote : 

" I hope you are doing well, for in spite of all that has hap- 
pened I feel a deep interest in your welfare. The New World is 
before you, and your story cannot follow you there. Indeed, it 
is hushed up here, for all sakes, though it never can be quite for- 
gotten. You may yet be a prosperous man, outlive the past, and 
make new friends. I shall always be glad to hear of you and tO' 
know what you are doing, etc., etc., etc. 

" Your sincere well-wisher, 

" LUKE ADARE." 

The remaining letters were much in the same strain, express- 
ing a desire to know something of the exile and showing a leni- 
ency towards him as a murderer which was hard to understand. 
Some of them contained reproaches of Arthur for not having 
written to give an account of himself. " Only that Betty Mac- 
alister has had a line from you I should think you were dead," 
he wrote in the latest date of twenty-five years ago. It was evi- 
dent that Desmond had never gratified the curiosity of this anx- 
ious friend. 

Bawn was very apt to jump, rightly or wrongly, to a con- 
clusion, and by the time she had folded up all the papers and re- 
placed them in a box she had made up her mind that Luke Adare 
was the person who, for his own selfish ends, had whispered away 
her father's good name, blighted the lives of both sister and 



ioo A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Oct , 

friend. Arthur a murderer and banished, and Roderick Fingall 
dead, the inheritance had devolved upon Luke as the eldest of 
the Adares. 

" And this frail creature," she said, studying Mave's portrait 
again, " this was a tool easy enough to work with. Had you 
been a brave, true woman, ready to stand up in his defence and 
fight the lie with him, he might have been able to hunt down the 
liar and clear himself before the world. But you quailed and 
deserted him, you coward ! Luke was the villain and you were 
the fool!" 

The greater part of that day Bawn spent riding alone over 
the prairie, revolving and maturing her project as she went, con- 
sidering the details of it and the dangers and difficulties it might 
include. That evening she walked up to Mrs. Desmond in the 
drawing-room and said in a tone of simple friendliness : 

" Jeanne, I have made up ray mind to let you have the 
house." 

Jeanne was amazed. She had made her demand, well aware 
she had no right to make it, and without expecting to find her 
audacity so quickly rewarded. 

Bawn continued : " I am going to St. Paul in the morning to 
speak about it to Dr. Ackroyd." 

Mrs. Desmond was instantly alarmed. She did not like the 
interference of Dr. Ackroyd, who would make it a matter of 
business. 

"Why need he interfere between us?" she said. "Cannot 
we make our own arrangements? You are of age." 

" I wish to consult him," said Bawn quietly. " It is not long 
since he was my guardian. And you forget, Jeanne: it will be 
necessary for me to find some shelter for myself when I leave the 
place to you." 

" This is very provoking of you," cried Jeanne, "to talk as if 
I wanted to turn you out. Why can we not all go on together?" 

"Let that be; it is my affair," said Bawn. "I have other 
plans for my future." 

" Now what plans can she have?" thought Jeanne, looking 
round the handsome room, and running over in her mind all the 
goodly possessions and advantages she was gaining by Bawn's 
generosity. " It must be that she means to go to Europe and 
figure as an heiress at the fashionable places." And Jeanne 
thought, with an impatient sigh, of how admirably that part 
would have suited her, if she had just been twenty or thirty years 
younger and had not acquired the passion for making money. 



1 8 86.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 101 

CHAPTER V. 
A WILFUL WOMAN. 

THE next day Bawn made a journey into St. Paul to consult 
her guardian. 

Dr. Ackroyd had been her father's oldest friend in Minnesota, 
and the only man who had ever approached to anything like in- 
timacy with him. At a time when the doctor had been hardly 
pressed by pecuniary troubles Desmond's generosity had laid 
the foundation of his ultimate prosperity a fact which he had 
never forgotten. 

" Doctor," said Bawn, walking into the snug room where he 
and his wife were sitting, " I have come to talk to you on busi- 
ness. You know I am a woman of business capabilities now 
twenty-one years of age last month." 

The doctor nodded. " Yes, yes ; she has found it all out. I 
was her guardian a month ago, Molly, but now she will be for 
taking the bit in her own teeth, no doubt." 

" I have a pretty good fortune, haven't I, Dr. Ackroyd ? " 

" As pretty a fortune as any young woman in America, I 
should say at a guess ; and that is saying much. Come, now, 
what do you want to do? Trip away to Paris, and all the rest 
of it?" 

" And quite natural too, Andrew, at her age, and with such a 
fortune and such a face ! " said Mrs. Ackroyd, a motherly old 
lady, with whom Bawn was a favorite. 

The same thought was present in the minds of husband and 
wife as they looked at Bawn's fine, fair face, with its grave sweet- 
ness and a certain majesty of womanly dignity which in her most 
thoughtful moments sat on her brow. At such moments her coil 
of golden hair looked like a royal crown. Now, as she gazed 
into the fire, seeing something which they did not see, they easily 
fancied her in brilliant rooms, shining in white satin or some 
such raiment, with crowds of adorers hovering round her. They 
knew the sort of thing that happens, well enough. Many a lovely 
young heiress sails from America and gets turned into a countess 
or a marquise before many summers have poured their choicest 
flowers into her lap. 

" Yes, I have been thinking of going to Europe," said Bawn, 
" though not to Paris." 

" It is the gayest place and the prettiest," said the doctor. 
" Of course there are the summer resorts " 

" I was not thinking of gayety, nor even of prettiness," said 



102 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Oct., 

Bavvn ; " though the place I mean to go to is, I believe, beautiful 
enough. But if it were the ugliest place on earth, and the dull- 
est, as it probably is, I should want to go all the same." 

She spoke musingly and looked into the fire, seeing in the 
burning wood fairy glens, and mountains with giddy paths from 
which a false step might hurl a man in an instant mountains 
with lonely hollows of their own, and secret paths dark enough 
to overshadow a human being's life. ' 

The doctor gazed at her in astonishment. " Come," he said, 
" I give it up." 

" Doctor," said the girl suddenly, looking at him straight, 
" did it ever strike you that my father had had a great trouble in 
his life, one that must have been more than the ordinary kind of 
trouble?" 

The doctor's face changed. " I always thought it," he said 
gently. 

Bawn turned red and then quite white. " It is true," she said ; 
" and the journey I want to make has reference to that trouble." 

She paused and hesitated. 

" My dear," said Dr. Ackroyd, "if you have anything to say 
to me in confidence, my wife will go away." 

" No," said Bawn firmly, stretching out her hand to the old 
lady, who was regarding her with deep concern. " I can trust 
you both, if you will bear with me." 

Mrs. Ackroyd stirred in her chair with good-natured emotion 
and a little curiosity, and, wiping her spectacles with the hand 
that was not in Bawn's grip, put them on, as if they would help 
her to see well into whatever was going to be laid before her. 

Bawn went on speaking, white to the lips, but with firm voice 
and calm eyes : 

" My father left his country, you know, as a young, quite a 
young man. Well, he left it under a cloud. Some enemy had 
whispered away his good name and blighted his life. He had 
friends, and there was a woman who had loved him and was to 
have married him ; and they one and all good God ! can you 
believe it? they one and all cast him out of their lives, with- 
drew their faith and their friendship from him, and sent him 
across the world with a broken heart and spirit poor heart that 
nothing could ever heal ; noble spirit that is free from pain at 
last!" 

Grief brimmed over Bawn's sad eyes as she finished. She 
suddenly covered her face and sat drowned in tears. 

Her friends did not worry her with questions and consola- 



1 8 86.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 103 

tions, only suffered the floods that had opened to wash them- 
selves away ; and the girl said presently : 

" There, that is over. You are very, very good to listen to 
me." 

" Now," she continued, with a light leaping into her eyes and 
determination straightening the quiver of her lips, " I know that 
he had an enemy who slandered him, or all this could never have 
happened. He himself believed that he was the victim of cir- 
cumstances, but I do not believe it. Certain notes and papers 
have been put in my hands to read, and I have formed my own 
conclusions from them. I shall never rest till I have sifted the 
matter to the bottom in as far as it can be sifted," she added 
wistfully, "at the end of thirty years." 

" Ah ! that is it," said the doctor with a smothered sigh. " And, 
my dear child, I don't want to contradict you I feel with you 
intensely but how, if at the time he found it so impossible to 
clear himself, how do you dream of being able to do it now?" 

" Not by walking into the country, into the houses of those 
people, and saying, 'You are my deadly enemies. I am Arthur 
Desmond's daughter, and you calumniated my father. Confess 
your sins, or I shall I shall go back crestfallen where I came 
from ! '" said Bawn, with lips relaxing into a little smile. " No; 
that is not my plan. I think I have been studying to acquire the 
guile of the serpent during the last few days, and I have laid a 
little plot which I cannot put into execution without the assist- 
ance of a friend." 

"Well? "said the doctor, looking at her inquiringly. "Con- 
tinue." 

" I intend," pursued Bawn, " to go to the place a secluded 
spot it was ; and I believe, I have been told, it is not the sort of 
place that changes much a glenny and mountainy place such as 
we read about but do not see here." 

" I know," said the doctor, nodding, and instantly seeing pic- 
tures in his memory ; for he, too, was an exile and loved Scotland. 

" I shall go there," said Bawn, " not in my own name and char- 
acter, but as the orphan daughter of a farmer, an emigrant, who, 
from what she has heard from her father about his native land, 
has taken a fancy to see it and live in it. She has brought her 
small fortune say five hundred pounds, her father's savings to 
invest in a little farm such as a woman can manage. In this way 
I will settle down among those people, as near them as possible, 
and, without exciting their suspicion or putting them on their 
guard, will try to get at the long-hidden secret, strive to unearth 



104 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Oct., 

the too-long-buried truth. When I succeed I shall disclose my 
identity, pour out the vials of my wrath upon the false or good-for- 
nothing friends, shake the dust off my feet and come back here 
to you." 

" A pretty romance, my dear, but about as wild and impossible 
as pretty." 

" Do not say so." 

" What do you propose to do- if you find it beyond your 
power to get at that long-lost truth ? " 

" Come back here all the same, only worsted," said Bawn ; 
"but it will be long before I confess myself beaten. A number 
of people must be dead first." 

" And if you find them all already dead ?" 

" That is not likely," said Bawn quickly. " Not in such a 
healthy country place, where the people live long. I have 
thought it all out, and the chances are with me." 

Dr. Ackroyd was silent. Wild as the girl's scheme was, he 
saw she was completely in earnest, and he knew her long enough 
and well enough to have had experience of a character indicated 
by the shape of her broad, fair brows and certain expressions of 
her clear gray eyes and good-tempered mouth. There had al- 
ways been a simple and intelligent directness about her intentions 
and a robust fearlessness in carrying them out that made such a 
proposal from her somewhat different to what it might have been 
coming from any ordinary impulsive, romantic girl, who would 
be pretty sure to give up her plan in disgust and dismay after a 
first tussle with a few uncomfortable obstacles. He admitted to 
himself that, if any girl could carry out such an enterprise, no 
better one than this could be found to undertake it. But of 
what was he thinking ? All the strength of his influence over 
her must be exerted to prevent her entering on such a wild and 
uncertain path. 

He was sufficiently a man of the world to know what had 
never entered into the saddest dreams that ever flitted through 
Bawn's golden head to be well aware that there existed a pos- 
sibility, if not a likelihood, that Arthur Desmond had been really 
guilty of whatever crime or transgression had been laid to his 
charge. During all the long life that he had spent in this new 
country Dr. Ackroyd had met with a great number of men who 
in their youth had blundered into evil, and had either come 
out here of their own free will or been sent by their indignant 
friends to begin life afresh where their past was unknown. And 
why might not Desmond have been one of these? He would 
prefer to believe, with Bawn, that the man who had lived here so 



i886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 105 

stainless a life and suffered so deeply had been guiltless from 
the beginning-, and the victim of malice or a mistake. But the 
entire faith of Dawn's heart could not make its way into his. 
Not only did he see the probability of failure for her enterprise, 
but feared that she might be met by some overwhelming testi- 
mony to his guilt guilt long expiated, and perhaps for ever for- 
gotten had not her rash and loving hand rooted it out from the 
past which had buried it. Might not even such a bright and 
strong creature as this be felled by such a blow? 

These thoughts trooped quickly through his mind, and Bawn 
watched the changing expressions of his face. 

" Well," she said quietly, " you are not going to oppose me? " 

" My dear," he said, " I will oppose you with every argument, 
with all the persuasion, I am capable of compelling to my aid. 
Had this occurred some time ago I should have been in a posi- 
tion to forbid you absolutely to carry out so wild an intention. 
As it is, you are your own mistress. I cannot control your ac- 
tions. I can only beseech you to take an old man's advice, and 
let the dead past bury its dead. Your father is at rest; the waves 
of time have rolled over his sorrow. You need never come in 
contact with any one who knows anything of his story. In any 
other plan for your life, in any indulgence you can imagine, I 
will help you to the best of my ability ; but I cannot see you act 
in a way which I believe would be the ruin of every prospect 
you have in the world." 

" I have no prospect," answered Bawn sadly. " What could 
I do with my life while this shadow rests on it ? " 

" Your idea is over-strained. By and by you will form new 
ties" 

" Never!" said Bawn solemnly. " Even if I wished it, and it 
were likely, never could I till this cloud is cleared away." 

The doctor was startled and silent. He had not been told 
what was the nature of the wrong thing of which Desmond had 
been accused, and the look in Bawn's eyes at this moment sug- 
gested that it was something even worse than he had imagined. 
But he spoke cheerfully. 

" Pooh ! " he said ; " you are in a morbid humor. Put off the 
consideration of this matter, for a time at least. You will change 
your mind ; you will give it up." 

" I will never give it up," said Bawn, her soft lips closing 
and tightening with resolution. " The wish has gone too deep. 
There is nothing else to live for in my life." 

This was the beginning of a struggle which lasted for two 
months between Bawn and her ex-guardian, and at the end of 



106 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Oct., 

that time Dr. Ackroyd felt himself obliged to lower his colors 
and let the girl have her way. Rather than allow her to follow 
it without help or protection of any kind, he was forced to yield 
and take the affair into his own hands. Step by step she gained 
upon him ; bit by bit she got all her will. His first concession in- 
cluded the proviso that he was to be allowed to bring her across 
the ocean himself, and that, before he suffered her to go seeking 
her fortune in that unknown spot towards which her desires 
were carrying her, he was to pay a visit to the place as a tourist, 
take note of how things stood there, gather information about 
the people, and make up his mind as to how far her plan for 
coming among them was safe and practicable. To all this Bawn 
uneasily consented at first, fearing much that such protection 
and precaution might excite attention and frustrate her aims. 
Fate in the end decreed that she was to go her wilful way and 
perform her pilgrimage according to the programme she had at 
first marked out for herself. A dearly-loved child of Dr. Ack- 
royd's was discovered to have fallen into a dangerous state of 
health, and he found it impossible to leave her. Bawn must 
either go alone or not at all. She chose to go. 

" You can put me on board and give me in charge to the 
captain," she said ; " and when I land, if I find any difficulty, I 
can telegraph to you, and you can telegraph to your English 
friends, whom I will not go near if I can help it. This will 
surely be protection enough for a steady young woman like me, 
of the class to which I shall belong. Nobody will mind a simple 
farmer's daughter. How many poor girls come out to America 
every day to earn their bread under circumstances so much 
worse than mine ! If I were travelling with you I should be 
always betraying myself ; and if, as you say, ' the world is so 
small,' somebody would be sure to see me who might meet me 
afterwards and find me out." 

Her friends felt themselves unable to restrain her. After all, 
their own child was their first consideration, and Desmond's 
daughter was impatient to be away. Jeanne was married, and 
Bawn felt herself pushed bodily out of her home. There was 
nothing more for her to do here except to procure an outfit of 
very plain clothing to suit the station of life she had chosen, to 
make some money arrangements transferring a few hundred 
pounds to an Irish bank, and, leaving her fortune in Dr. Ack- 
royd's hands, to say good-by to the dear old home and to the be- 
loved grave where peacefully her father slept. 



TO BE CONTINUED. 



1 886.] SECULARIZED GERMANY AND THE VATICAN. 107 



SECULARIZED GERMANY AND THE VATICAN. 

THERE can be little doubt that in this queer world of ours 
very great men, and very wise men too, sometimes say extremely 
foolish things, or, at all events, have exceedingly silly things at- 
tributed to them ; and in one or other of these categories must 
be classed the famous saying for which Prince Bismarck has the 
credit, that " he never would go to Canossa." Of course he 
never would go to Canossa ; how could he ? To go to Canossa 
implies previous excommunication, and excommunication implies 
previous membership. As a Lutheran, it is true, the prince is 
presumably a baptized Christian ; and if the rite were validly 
performed, and if no mortal sin has ever cut him off from a 
state of grace, he belongs to the>soul of the church ; but so long 
as he remains in even unconscious schism he cannot belong to 
the body. Powerful as his highness undoubtedly is, he can 
neither claim the privileges nor incur the penalties of the hum- 
blest Catholic in his dominions. A mosquito which has been 
annoying a shepherd, and trying to divert his attention from the 
flock, might as well vow it would never return to its place in the 
sheepfold ; an urchin who has been amusing himself by throwing 
stones at the steam-cars might as naturally vow that he never 
would return to his duty as conductor ; or if these images be 
unworthy the dignity of the great chancellor the Emperor Nero 
might as reasonably have announced his firm determination never 
to return to the true faith of a Christian, as Prince Bismarck 
that he never would seek absolution from the censures of excom- 
munication. If, by the grace of God, his highness should ever 
desire reconciliation with the church, not penance but baptism, 
conditionally imposed no doubt, must be the sacrament employed. 
There is no need of hair-shirt or of pontifical authority. A 
penny catechism and the nearest priest will be sufficient for the 
exigency. The mediaeval struggle of the investitures was a ques- 
tion of the internal economy of the church, and endured through 
centuries. The Kulturkampf of Prince Bismarck has been from 
beginning to end the device of an alien power to overcome the 
church itself, and has perished in' its own foolishness. 

Perhaps, however, the prince was talking a little at random 
or metaphorically, let us say and all he meant to convey was 
that, having once attempted to force the church into action con- 



to8 SECULARIZED GERMANY AND THE VATICAN. [Oct., 

trary to her conscience, he had no intention of leaving off until 
the conscience of the church had given in. If that were his 
meaning as there can be but little doubt it was he had far 
better have gone a few ages still further back for the metaphor 
addressed to another illustrious persecutor, and have announced 
his fixed determination to go on kicking against the pricks as 
long as any pricks remained for him to kick against. For if his 
highness had studied history with that diligence and generality 
with which he is anxious to inoculate the Catholic clergy, and 
more especially "the epoch-making events " and " motive-ten- 
dencies " of the different ages, he might have learned for himself, 
without illustrating for the thousandth time in his own person, 
that whoever attempts to coerce the Holy Father may cause tem- 
porary bitterness to the church, but will chiefly succeed in per- 
manently undermining his own authority ; that whoever, in short, 
falls on the stone of Peter will be broken, but on whomsoever it 
shall fall it will grind him to powder. The gnat is brushed away 
from the face of the shepherd ; the idle boy runs from the train 
as soon as he has flung his stone ; the Emperor Nero but really 
the Emperor Nero is altogether too grand for the occasion ; and 
what remains but a few cuts and bruises and drops of blood, and 
perhaps a general laugh at the wantonness and the defeat of the 
mischief? 

For, indeed, were it not for these same scars and bruises, for 
the misery, spiritual and temporal, inflicted upon the faithful of 
Germany by these fantastic tricks before high Heaven, for the 
parishes left pastorless, the priests imprisoned, the bishops exiled, 
one could do little else than laugh at this latest, idlest, most 
useless, and most aimless attack upon the liberty of conscience. 
The very battle-cry of the persecutors the Kulturkampf be- 
trays the genuine spirit of " priggishness " which animates that 
which does duty for a soul in the breast of every persecutor ; 
and the business was conducted from beginning to end in a 
spirit worthy of its inception. The campaign commenced with 
the expulsion of the order of the Jesuits. And why the Jesuits? 
one asks with surprise, not haying yet become acclimatized to 
the atmosphere of happy inconsequence pervading all the pro- 
ceedings. Why dismiss, in the name of culture and education, the 
community which, beyond all others, has maintained a reputa- 
tion for educative ability and cultured intellect? Well, it is 
difficult to suggest a reason. Perhaps his excellency was expe- 
riencing a little reaction after his successful "flutters" with 
Austria and France, and that personage who is always ready 



1 886.] SECULARIZED GERMANY AND THE VATICAN. 109 

with some attractive work for idle hands took the opportunity to 
make the suggestion. Or possibly the prince, not having as yet 
the novels of M. Gaboriau for his recreation, was suffering an in- 
digestion from perusing the works of Eugene Sue or the late 
lamented Mr. Charles Kingsley, wherein the Jesuit is for ever at 
work forging wills, upsetting families, caballing against govern- 
ments, or varying these useful and creditable occupations by act-' 
ing, with the permission of his superiors, in the capacity of Ang- 
lican clergymen and retaining at the same time a "dispensation 
from holding " the Immaculate Conception or the infallibility of 
the Holy Father. For our own part, we believe that the prince 
acted upon none of these profound considerations, but upon 
another principle of about equal value namely, the principle 
upon which the late Lord Beaconsfield used to be fond of talking 
about ordering the British fleet to move up into the Dardanelles: 
not, as the event made clear, that any particular object was to be 
gained by his vessels entering those mysterious waters, but that 
the phrase carried with it a delicious ring of high diplomacy, 
and would stand for an excellent sample of a vigorous foreign 
policy. 

The Jesuits expelled, wider measures were to be taken, and a 
brand-new minister with a brand-new broom came forward to 
sweep all the school-rooms of a brand-new empire. Humanity 
was to be enlightened at last. All the ignorance of the miserable 
clergy who had preserved the light of learning as far back as 
Christian learning could reach was to be swept away. The dark- 
minded church to whose influence was due the foundation of half 
the schools and far more than half the universities of Europe was 
to be taught something at last, now that a Prussian minister 
had arisen to teach at once the true theories of religion, of edu- 
cation, and of medicine. For ordinary students the common 
curriculum still sufficed ; but Catholic theologians must spend 
three years beyond the common course in studying everything 
except theology. The arcana of German philosophy were to 
be revealed to them, and they were to understand the mysteries 
of Hegel and of Fichte. Psychology was to tell them all about 
the plastodylic soul, and they were to be learned in all the ways, 
not of virtue, but of Virchow. History was to unfold to them, 
not her simple facts, which were of little value to a German phi- 
losopher, but her most recondite teachings as to her " historic 
moments " and her " inner developing forces," and the ecclesias- 
tical student was to be assiduously trained in the use of every 
weapon in the whole German armory for darkening counsel by 



i to SECULARIZED GERMANY AND THE VATICAN. [Oct., 

words without knowledge. Meanwhile the means by which he 
could maintain himself during the prolonged period required 
for these useful acquirements was a problem to be considered ; 
and as a contribution towards its solution the minister shut up 
the cheap boarding-houses to which the Catholic clergy had 
hitherto resorted. 

Such was the mellifluous invitation which Dr. Falk, like an- 
other Dr. Dulcamara, issued to the Catholic clergy ; and yet, 
strange to say, the ears of those whom he addressed remained 
impervious to its sweetness. Somehow the church persisted in 
thinking that she knew as much about the proper education of 
her clergy as the Prussian state a notion fundamentally opposed 
both to German philosophy and to Prussian officialism. Then 
the strife began in earnest. The empire offered certificates upon 
its own terms. The church refused to allow other hands to 
interfere with the training of her own ministers. The state 
declared it to be illegal to ordain uncertificated candidates. The 
bishops refused to acknowledge secular authority in spiritual 
matters. What followed ? Parish after parish beheld its pastor 
driven away by the government. Bishop after bishop went first 
to prison and then to exile. Thus at one time all the archbishop- 
rics and bishoprics of Prussia were lying without an occupant, 
either through death or banishment, except those of Kulm, Osna- 
burg, Ermeland, and Hildesheim. For years the prince persisted 
in this cruel and idle crusade, until at last it dawned upon his 
highness, who is an acute man and can sometimes take in a novel 
idea when it is very plainly and persistently placed before him 
say for a decade of years together that the only fruit he was 
reaping or likely to reap from this useless struggle was the 
opposition of the Catholic party in the Reichstag. Thereupon 
there came a change. The drum of Dr. Dulcamara ceased to 
beat, and Dr. Falk himself had disappeared from view. Then the 
chancellor looked over his spectacles at the Vatican and vowed 
he never would go to Canossa. The pope gave it to be under- 
stood that there was no question of Canossa in the matter. The 
church desired neither secular dominion over Germany nor spiri- 
tual submission from Prince Bismarck, but simply the right of 
educating her own ministers in her own way. Then the prince 
went a step further. Supposing the full requirements of the 
ecclesiastical laws were not insisted upon, could those laws be so 
far recognized that notification of appointments could be made 
to the state ? Of course they could, provided that such notifi- 
cation in no way interfered with the education of the clergy or 



1 886.] SECULARIZED GERMANY AND THE VATICAN. in 

the spiritual jurisdiction of the Holy Father ; and such, in fact, was 
the response of the Vatican. Then the storm began to abate ; the 
chancellor's teacup sank to a much-needed rest, the exiled bishops 
were brought back, the state payments were resumed, the Crown 
Prince of Germany paid a personal visit to His Holiness; and the 
greatest mess made by the greatest statesman of the age was, 
partly at least, wiped up. 

But though the quarrel thus forced by the chancellor upon 
the church in Germany has been perfectly gratuitous and absurd, 
yet there is a historical aspect of the case, from which it might be 
inferred that a fundamental antagonism exists of necessity be- 
tween the modern empire of Germany and the Vatican, inasmuch 
as the former is the secularized form of the sacred empire which in 
former times acknowledged the Vatican for its supreme head ; and 
Prince Bismarck himself holds the office once belonging to the 
Prince Archbishop of Mainz. It will well repay us, therefore, to 
look back to that empire as it existed at the close of the last cen- 
tury, and to trace the series of extraordinary events whereby the 
relations between Germany and the Vatican have been modified 
so profoundly. 

" It was not strange," says a well-known Protestant writer, 
"that in the year 1799 even sagacious observers should have 
thought that the end of the Church of Rome was come. An in- 
fidel power ascendant, the pope dying in captivity, the most illus- 
trious prelates of France living in a foreign country upon Protes- 
tant alms, the noblest edifices which the munificence of former 
ages had consecrated to the worship of God turned into temples 
of victor}', or into banqueting-houses for political societies, or into 
theo-philanthropic chapels such signs might well be supposed to 
indicate the approaching end of that long domination. But the 
end was not yet." And then Lord Macaulay, with singular per- 
spicacity, goes on to compare the Roman Church with the Grand 
Pyramid, which, according to Arab tradition, alone of all human 
buildings sustained the weight of the waters of the Deluge ; and 
to enumerate the European institutions which the Revolution had 
laid in ruins or swept bodily from the face of the earth. Indeed 
there is, perhaps, no more startling lesson to be learned in history 
than in the total transformation which well-nigh every social and 
political organization, save one, appears to have undergone 
through the action of the Revolution. It is difficult to believe 
that during the last hundred years there have been more terri- 
torial and constitutional changes in Christendom than during the 
entire millennium which preceded them. For a thousand years 



ii2 SECULARIZED GERMANY AND THE VATICAN. [Oct., 

backward we see the two great powers the empire of the church 
and the empire of the false prophet locked in deadly strife, the 
heretical dominions falling one after another beneath the power 
of Islam, the Catholic dominions preserving their freedom and at 
last breaking down the long-dreaded and once irresistible foe ; 
we see dissensions break 'out hither and thither, and provinces 
and kingdoms agglomerate and dissever; but the great outlines 
and landmarks remain ever unchanged, and to go back a century 
is well-nigh equivalent to going back a millennium. Less than a 
hundred years ago the heir of St. Louis was still seated on the 
throne of Capet, to all appearance without possibility of subver- 
sion. Less than a hundred years ago German archbishops were 
petty sovereigns in their own right and made treaties with 
Great Britain to supply the British government with men for 
foreign service. Less than a hundred years ago the Red Sea was 
closed to all " infidel " travellers, and the most tremendous pen- 
alties, both in this world and the next, were denounced by the 
Sublime Porte against any Turkish officer who should allow a 
Christian vessel to approach the port of Suez " the privileged 
route," as the sultan expressed it, "of the holy pilgrimage of 
Mecca." Less than a hundred years ago England was not in 
dread of every accidental change amongst foreign nations for fear 
of her magnificent and suicidal empire of Hindostan ; while Russia 
was a more or less insignificant and more rather than less bar- 
baric power, confining herself pretty much to annoying her 
neighbors in the East of Europe, and interfering little or not at all 
in the general comity of nations. But, above all, two great insti- 
tutions bore every mark of the most venerable antiquity the 
pope still retained the oldest sovereignty in Europe, and still 
obtained recognition as the mediator amongst ^Catholic princes; 
the Holy Roman Empire remained the venerable structure 
founded a thousand years before by Charlemagne and Leo. 

To study the organization of this latter community, and to 
trace the fate of its various elements during the century now pass- 
ing away, is to read the very anatomy of history in its innermost 
operations. For the ancient empire of Germany was a kind of 
political sacrament. It expressed the spiritual authority ruling 
through the temporal power ; and the process to which it has 
been subjected in the crucible of the Revolution has been of 
separation and reconstitution of the two authorities independently 
of each other. 

The contrast between the great empire of Germany which 
came to a close in 1806 and that which arose in its place sixty- 



1 886.] SECULARIZED GERMANY AND THE VATICAN. 113 

five years later is in many respects so violent that no slight 
difficulty may be found in recognizing any connection between 
the two. In the former constitution the secular power was 
based, as we have said, upon the ecclesiastical authority, and as- 
sumed to a very great extent an ecclesiastical form, while even 
the military organization was subject to ecclesiastical as well as 
military direction ; in the latter the ecclesiastical element has ab- 
solutely disappeared, and the civil power rests entirely upon the 
organization of the army. In the former empire a variety of 
states of greater or lesser importance were united by relations ot 
great complexity ; in the latter the whole mass of minor states 
are placed in "the simple relation of regiments under a single 
commander. In a word, the conception of the former empire 
was a kind of republic of Christendom with an elective head, 
subject alike, in general and in detail, to the jurisdiction of the 
church ; the conception of the latter is simply an absorption of 
the German nation into the army of Prussia. 

Yet notwithstanding the opposition in their most distinctive 
features, the two constitutions undoubtedly possess an essential 
and clearly demonstrable connection ; and it may shed no little 
light upon the political relations even of other European coun- 
tries if we trace shortly how far the empire which William 
erected upon the defeat of Napoleon III. is identical with that 
which Francis laid down upon the triumph of Napoleon I. 
For if, following the natural method by which the mind con- 
nects the present with the past, we gaze backwards through the 
vista of the present century, each scene presented is full of inte- 
rest. First, at the present moment we have before our eyes an 
enormous but most compact military organization, wherein each 
citizen is a soldier, each state the section of an army, and the 
monarch himself literally an imperator or commander-in-chief. 
Next, but a few years ago, we see a multitude of states with no 
central executive, but with two great rivals threatening to seize 
it. Then, again, backward from 1866 to 1815, we behold a chaos 
of disconnected atoms, of which the very confusion tells the tale 
of former unit} 1 . Next we come upon that fantastic vision, that 
anomalous congeries of disjointed states, that dream or idea of 
Napoleon the Confederation of the Rhine. Then, further again 
for a brief period of three years, we come upon the mediatized 
Diet, the mutilated form of the Holy Roman Empire, with its 
broken pillars and tottering foundations, foreboding its 
speedy fall. Lastly, that same empire rises up befoi 
existed a hundred years ago, and as it had .existed 
VOL. XLIV. 8 




ii4 SECULARIZED GERMANY AND THE VATICAN. [Oct., 

beyond century, if not with all harmony of outline, at least with 
all variety of detail, and we trace each portion of the ruins to 
their original position in the majestic pile. It is not, therefore, 
so much the history as the framework of the former and present 
constitutions of Germany with which we are concerned, and we 
shall only require to photograph, as it were, the organization as 
it existed in the days previous to its overthrow, and then to 
show its successive states of decline, decay, dissolution, revival, 
and reconstruction. 

The structure of the Holy Roman Empire was unquestion- 
ably one of the most complicated political creations ever present- 
ed to mankind. Originated by Charlemagne and Pope Leo III., 
and more fully regulated by the Golden Bull of Charles IV., it 
received its most distinctive definition in the Diet held at Frank- 
fort towards the close of the sixteenth century, and may be said 
to have preserved its form unchanged till the days of Napoleon. 
Its great fundamental principles of combining territorial repre- 
sentation with the independence of the ecclesiastical and civil 
authorities, and of guaranteeing the freedom of the members by 
rendering the executive elective, were sufficiently complicated in 
themselves ; but the action of the principles became even more in- 
tricate through the modifications imperceptibly introduced in the 
progress of time. One feature, however, marked the whole his- 
tory of the empire in general, and every detail in particular, 
from first to last, and that was the precedence of the ecclesiastical 
over the civil authority of corresponding rank. A somewhat 
similar usage prevailed in England during Saxon times, when a 
bishop, assisted by an ealdorman, sat upon the secular judgment- 
seat. And even to this day in the British House of Lords, which 
affords a faint copy of the ancient College of Princes in the Diet 
of Germany (as the House of Commons, or Communes, paral- 
lels the College of Free Towns), the bishops take precedence of 
all secular barons, and the Archbishop of Canterbury of all peers 
whatsoever. 

This principle of ecclesiastical precedence was carried out 
even in the military organization of the empire, which was alto- 
gether different in itself, and had a different history from its civil 
constitution. And as the military element is much less complex 
than the civil, and as it, moreover, predominates largely in the 
ultimate issue, we cannot do better than to trace first its growth 
and transformation. 

- military system which prevailed down to the fall of the 
inaugurated about the year A.D. 1500, when the 




1 886.] SECULARIZED GERMANY AND THE VATICAN. 115 

ancient provinces were formed into circles, the forces of each 
circle being theoretically placed under the command of an eccle- 
siastical and civil director, although practically, as we shall more 
clearly see in dealing with the constitution of the Diet, the tem- 
poral prince often united both characters in his single person. 
Thus the Archduke of Austria, in view of the primacy of his 
house, was always considered an ecclesiastical as well as secular 
personage, and was sole director of the military circle compre- 
hending not only his own archduchy, but also the Austrian do- 
minions of Carinthia, Carniola, Styria, Switzerland, the Orisons, 
and the Tyrol. So the Elector of Saxony was sole director of his 
circle of Upper Saxony, and the King of Spain of his duchy of 
Burgundy until the detachment of that province by the treaty of 
Westphalia in 1648. But the rest were all subject to double rule. 
The Archbishop of Salzburg and the Elector of Bavaria presided 
over the military circle of Bavaria, the Bishop of Bamberg and 
the Margrave of Baireuth over that of Franconia ; and the circles- 
of the Upper and Lower Rhine, of Suabia and Westphalia, had 
each an ecclesiastic as well as civil dignitary at their head. In- 
congruous as this subjection of the military to the spiritual power 
may seem to a modern conception and certainly what the his- 
tory of England would have been if the Protestant bishops had! 
exercised direct power over particular regiments demands a flight 
which may well take one's breath away yet it is difficult to see 
in what other way any effectual restraint can be placed upon 
the multitudes now in arms, when one nation will go to war at 
an instant's notice for the imaginary succession of a phantom; 
prince to a foreign throne, and another considers the invasion of 
an unoffending country to be fully justified by the supposed re- 
quirement of a scientific frontier. 

However this may be, the ecclesiastical superintendence of the 1 
army was an essential element of the spiritual empire, and with 
the dissolution of that empire came to a natural termination, 
when the supreme jurisdiction over the forces of each state re- 
verted directly to its particular sovereign. In this position mat- 
ters remained until the Germanic Confederation was brought 
about, when a new and a most peculiar organization was effect- 
ed. The scattered kingdoms of Germany were formed once more 
into a single federation, each state preserving its own indepen- 
dence and retaining command of its own little army; but the 
united forces of the community were placed under the direction- 
of the General Diet, which, however, could exercise no direct 
authority over them, but could merely authorize some one or 



i(6 SECULARIZED GERMANY AND THE VATICAN. [Oct., 

more particular states to take command of the general forces 
in order to carry out the decrees of the Diet, or, as it was called, 
to perform federal execution. An arrangement of this kind was 
exactly adapted to afford plenty of opportunities to a statesman 
possessed of many iron generals and very few and extremely 
elastic principles. By the war of 1863 Prussia succeeded in ob- 
taining the command of the forces as executor of the Diet in the 
case of Schleswig-Holstein, and, on the ground of vicinity to 
the seat of war, graciously took the lead out of the hands of 
her Austrian rival. By the war of 1866 the centre of imperial 
gravity was fairly shifted to the north, and a new confederation 
was formed with Prussia for its informing power. Finally, by 
the war of 1870, the whole forces of the late Diet, those of Aus- 
tria alone excepted, became subject to the command of the King 
of Prussia, and the victorious commander-in-chief of so many 
kings and princes was naturally raised to the rank of " impera- 
tor." To peruse the titles of the German regiments is to trace 
the course of the absorption of Germany by Prussia. East and 
West Prussia, with Pomerania and Lithuania Prussia proper, in 
fact form the first two corps ; Brandenburg, the homestead, so 
to speak, of the kingdom, having the third corps to itself. A 
separate corps also is supported by each of the states of Han- 
over, Saxony, Wiirtemberg, Bavaria, and Hesse. Schleswig- 
Holstein, with the Hanse Towns, make up another regiment ; 
while the remainder are furnished by Silesia. Thtiringia, West- 
phalia, and the Rhine. The whole list is a powerful sermon upon 
the prince's favorite text of " blood and iron." So much for the 
military organization. 

In the civil constitution of the former empire the Diet con- 
-sisted of three distinct bodies, a College of Electors, a College of 
.Princes, and a College of Free Towns, of which the first namely, 
that of the Electors though much the smallest, was by far the 
most important in rank and influence. According to the theory 
of the empire, seven personages alone made up the sacred num- 
ber, but after the Reformation had commenced its inroads an 
eighth elector was added to the college. Of the seven origi- 
.nal members the three principal were ecclesiastics namely, the 
Archbishop of Mainz, chancellor for the entire empire ; the Arch- 
bishop of Trier, chancellor throughout the old Roman province 
of Aries ; and the Archbishop of Koln, chancellor through the 
Italian dominions. Of the- other four electors, all being laymen, 
each discharged some feudal duty towards his sovereign: the 
King of Bohemia being grand cup-bearer, the Count Palatine 



1 886.] SECULARIZED GERMANY AND THE VATICAN. 117 

of the Rhine high-treasurer and vicar-general of the empire, 
the Duke of Saxony discharging the office of grand marshal, and 
the Marquis of Brandenburg that of the grand chamberlain, 
just as the emperor himself, when about to receive the imperial 
crown at Rome, held the stirrup of the Holy Father. Yet, not- 
withstanding the feudal duties thus exacted, each elector was 
none the less a sovereign prince, and exercised within his own 
territories the same rights and privileges as the emperor en- 
joyed throughout the entire dominion. 

Although the hereditary and not the elective principle regu- 
lated originally the devolution of the crown, yet the latter was 
adopted for a basis as early as the eleventh century, and was ever 
afterwards preserved with the greatest care and scrupulosity. 
Even when, as not unfrequently happened, the choice of the elec- 
tors fell upon the legitimate heir for generation after generation, 
his hereditary character was considered as a mere incident and 
not as the essence of his tenure. " It is agreed," says the historian 
of the Holy Roman Empire, writing in the seventeenth century, 
" that the imperial power should not accrue through hereditary 
right, as the custom had hitherto been, but that the emperor's 
son, even if he were right worthy, should acquire by election 
rather than succession. But if he were not worthy, or if the 
people in making an emperor did not wish to have him, the peo- 
ple had the matter in their own power." And similar sentiments 
were expressed in yet plainer language, if possible, in the address 
to the emperor when the crown was conferred. To preserve the 
integrity of the electoral process recourse was had to the strict- 
est regulations. Within a month of the emperor's decease the 
grand marshal was bound to convene the electors within a fur- 
ther period of three months for the purpose of solemnly electing 
a " King of the Romans " for the full title was not bestowed til) 
the coronation had been performed by the Holy Father. Frank- 
fort was the legitimate and usual place of meeting, though the 
ceremony was occasionally held at Aachen and elsewhere. A 
retinue of not more than two hundred followers was allowed to 
each elector, and so great was the jealousy of alien interference 
that throughout the whole period during which an election 
might last no other prince or potentate, of rank however exalted, 
was permitted to reside in the city. 

In the second college, that of the Princes, a similar division ex- 
isted to that in the College of Electors ; the house being com- 
posed of two distinct benches, whereof the ecclesiastical always 
t,ook precedence of the secular principality of corresponding rank. 



ii8 SECULARIZED GERMANY AND THE VATICAN. [Oct., 

During the sixteenth century the former house was made up of 
one archbishop, three prelates, twenty-one bishops, ten abbots, 
and the grand-masters of the orders of the Teutonic Knights and 
of Malta ; while the civil bench was composed, nominally at least, 
of about sixty members of the ranks of dukes, margraves, land- 
graves, princes, and counts, but included incidentally both elec- 
tors and foreign and domestic kings. By the theory of the 
law each principality was represented by an immediate tenant 
of the crown holding either a secular or spiritual benefice, but 
in practice all sorts of influences were at work to amalgamate 
and occasionally to divide the seats, and gradually to render the 
franchise rather a personal privilege than a territorial appanage. 
Marriage, succession, alienation, and, above all, secularization, all 
combined to destroy the simplicity of the organization, and some- 
times to introduce elements altogether foreign to the country. 
Thus for several centuries the emperor himself had a seat on the 
ecclesiastical bench in right of his archduchy of Austria, while 
the King of Prussia (or Elector of Brandenburg), besides his seat 
(fourth in rank) on the ecclesiastical bench, which he held as 
representing the grand-master of the Teutonic Knights, held 
also the forty-second ecclesiastical seat in right of Minden, and 
four secular seats for Camen, Halberstadt, Magdeburg, and Fur- 
ther Pomerania. So also foreign kings became involved in 
German affairs, not for any consequence to the nations they 
ruled, but because of their accidental possession of a German 
principality. Spain was represented there at one time, not be- 
cause Spain ever formed any part of the empire, but because its 
king held the duchy of Burgundy ; Sweden became mixed up in 
German wars through Hither Pomerania, Denmark through 
Holstein-Gliickstadt, England through the electorate of Hano- 
ver. A whole chapter of clues to the interference of one country 
or another in the general disputes of Europe may be found in the 
constitution of the German College of Princes. 

As for the College of the Free Towns twenty-four on the 
Rhine bench and thirty-eight on the Suabian bench we cannot 
now say more than that it also betrayed its ecclesiastical origin 
in the fact that every free town was, originally at least, an episco- 
pal city ; and the relations are well worth studying between this 
college and the great mediaeval association of the Hanseatic 
League a league which we may yet see revived in another shape 
by the international organization of labor. 

The first severe blow given to this unique and venerable 
structure came from within. At the dawn of Protestantism, 



1 886.] SECULARIZED GERMANY AND THE VATICAN. 119 

Albert, Grand-Master of the Teutonic Knights, apostatized from 
his vows in A.D. 1525, and, taking the whole appanage of the 
order for his private possessions, married the daughter of the 
King of Poland. This was the origin of the famous margra- 
viate of Brandenburg, from which was developed first by the 
deglutition of bishoprics the kingdom of Prussia, and afterwards, 
by the agglutination of whole states, the modern empire of 
Germany. 

Yet, though the seeds of decay were already implanted, the 
stately fabric remained fair and sound to view up to the very 
close of the eighteenth century. Traces of dissension no doubt 
were to be found, as when the Protestant electors withdrew 
during the Mass of the Holy Ghost preceding the act of election, 
and when assistant bishops had to be appointed to certain offices 
because their official incumbents were incapable of discharging 
the religious duties appertaining to them. But it was a strange 
hand which brought the august structure into ruin. Through- 
out the entire millennium which elapsed from the coronation of 
Charlemagne that venerable edifice remained unchanged, and 
yielded only to the earthquake of the Revolution ; and the pre- 
amble of the treaty of Campo Formio, betraying even in its two- 
fold date the revolutionary impress, marks, as it were, the exact 
spot of time when the mediaeval spirit passed from European 
statesmanship and the spirit of modern politics took its place. 
Every line in that preamble is pregnant with silent instruction. 

Four gentlemen of high distinction, though leaving no mark 
whereby posterity may recognize them, are required to repre- 
sent the " Emperor of the Romans and King of Hungary and 
Bohemia" the Sieur Louis, and Sieur Maximilian, and the Sieur 
de Gallo, and the Sieur Ignace, each with titles dating back for 
centuries and offices covering half a page. And then comes a sin- 
gle line bearing a single name filling a single office : " And on the 
part of the French Republic, Bonaparte, commander-in-chief of 
the French forces in Italy." No dramatist was ever more concise. 
Three years later came the coronation of Napoleon, and the com- 
pensations necessitated by the treaty of Luneville compensa- 
tions, that is to say, granted out of the possessions of the church 
to the states which had lost territory through the wars of the 
Revolution. This was the process embodied in the famous Act 
of Mediation drawn up under Napoleon in 1803, whereby the 
distinctive features of the three colleges were in great measure 
obliterated, the ecclesiastical privileges and those of the free 
towns almost wholly swept away, the territorial representation 



120 SECULARIZED GERMANY AND THE VATICAN. [Oct., 

so altered as almost to become personal, and the whole media- 
tized Diet to bear somewhat the same resemblance to the Diet of 
the former empire as exists between chess-men when set out in 
array and the same pieces when huddled together in a box. No 
human power could now avert the final crash, which yet was hur- 
ried on by the acts of its own members. In 1804 the emperor, 
in a document wherein the crown of Charlemagne quotes as a 
precedent the action of the crown of Napoleon, raised his own 
archduchy to the imperial rank, violating thereby the funda- 
mental rule of equality among the states ; and two years after- 
wards he dissolved the Empire of Germany, laid down the ti- 
tle, and released all princes and people from their oath of alle- 
giance, reserving only his new-created rank of Austrian emperor. 

The sequel of those dissociated states was curious enough. 
Out of the broken columns and fragments of the ecclesiastical 
empire Napoleon reared up his Confederation of the Rhine, still 
preserving the hierarchical form of a College of Kings and a Col- 
lege of Princes, and still retaining a survival of hierarchical con- 
nection in the presidency of the Archbishop of Ratisbon ; but 
the principle of election had wholly given way to the nomina- 
tion of a dictator. That organization it doubtless was which 
suggested to the mind of Napoleon the fatal idea of a general 
confederation of European states, with the pope at their head, 
under the hegemony ot France, which dominated all the rest of 
his career, and which resembled the image set up by the con- 
queror of another holy city, with its head of gold, and its body 
of brass, and legs partly iron and partly clay. This idea it was 
which led to his ill-fated marriage with a daughter of his Aus- 
trian enemy ; which caused him to confer upon his little son the 
title of King of the Romans, borrowed from the disrupted empire ; 
which led him, against his will, to lay sacrilegious hands upon 
the holy pontiff, and finally to destroy his fortunes in the snows 
of Russia in his frantic attempt to restore the monarchy of Po- 
land. Thence came the curse of the excommunication, the thun- 
derbolt of Moscow, the catastrophe of Fontainebleau. The huge 
image was struck upon the feet by an invisible hand, and the 
gold and the silver, the brass and the clay, were shattered into 
a thousand fragments. 

From this point the history of the states of Germany passes 
from the civil into the military form. After the exile of Napo- 
leon, France, to use the exquisite formula of diplomacy, " re- 
entered the limits of 1793," or, in the more brutal language of 
the world, was forced to give up the foreign possessions she had 



1 886.] SECULARIZED GERMANY AND THE VATICAN. 121 

seized, and amongst them the German dominions. Part, therefore, 
of the gigantic task performed by the statesmen assembled at 
the Congress of Vienna in 1814 was the reconstitution of Ger- 
manic kingdoms into a single confederation a work which, in- 
deed, would probably have been beyond the strength of any to 
accomplish, but that every nation of Europe was well-nigh ex- 
hausted by the incessant wars of a quarter of a century. The ar- 
rangement here concluded may seem hi some respects compli- 
cated, and unquestionably had the effect of rendering the German 
nation almost a nullity in Europe, but at least it lasted for nearly 
half a century. In that confederation, as the old elective princi- 
ple was already lost, so now the hierarchical element utterly dis- 
appeared, and the territorial basis of representation was changed 
into a plurality of votes proportional to the importance of the 
state. The events by which the feeble tie thus created was 
broken at last, and how one kingdom after another became 
absorbed in the army of Prussia, has been already narrated ; 
and thus we see the various steps by which the old ecclesiastical 
elective republic (for a republic it was in all but name) of the 
south has been transformed into the secular military empire 
which owns Prince Bismarck as its uncontrolled dictator. 

What may be the ultimate issue of these curious relations 
between Germany and the Vatican is a point too difficult for 
discussion, for it is part of that larger question which looms more 
and more quietly, and yet more and more sullenly, every year 
upon the political horizon : What is to be the relation of the spiri- 
tual to the temporal authority throughout the world? Still, so 
far as the experience of sixteen years will carry us and that is 
but a very little way the antagonism between the empire and 
the Vatican, which one would have naturally inferred from the 
creating of the former, does not appear necessarily to exist; and 
the issue of Prince Bismarck's gratuitous attack undoubtedly 
tends to confirm that impression. The empire would seem to be 
a kind of jolly giant, very fierce, a trifle stupid, but by no means 
radically ill-natured ; and as for the Vatican, that most diploma- 
tic of courts has been accustomed to deal with giants ever since 
it came into existence. It is possible, no doubt, that the revolu- 
tion may yet break out in Germany with tenfold the violence with 
which it ever raged in France, as Heine, if we remember rightly, 
foretold long ago ; and after the wreck of that storm perhaps 
the lines of the old Holy Roman Empire, with their elective 
principle and independent head, ma}' suggest the outlines of a 
plan for the re-edification of Christendom. But at present there 



122 AT THE THEATRE. [Oct., 

is no question of the kind. The jurisdiction claimed by the Holy 
Father is purely spiritual ; the jurisdiction demanded by the em- 
peror and the prince is wholly secular. So long, therefore, as 
the latter require nothing contrary to faith or morals, so long 
there is no reason why, past history notwithstanding, perfect ac- 
cord should not be maintained between secularized Germany and 
the Vatican. 



AT THE THEATRE. 

IF anywhere, it is at the theatre that human nature shows its 
motley side. There the world gathers to see itself as in a mirror 
held up to nature. Youth and age, riches and poverty, gaze 
with riveted eyes upon the mimic scene. Sympathy plays with 
nimble ringers upon the gamut of the human heart, ringing her 
changes from the deep bass of woe to the shrill treble of mirth. 
Eyes moisten and hearts beat faster over the sorrows in the play. 
The world, there looking upon its own picture, trembles and 
weeps, laughs and applauds, and forgets its real existence in the 
fiction of the moment. At the door of the theatre black Care 
hastily dismounts from the weary shoulders he bestrides like the 
Old Man of the Sea, and Sindbad forgets all about the odious 
burden waiting for him outside when he sees the effigy of his 
demon on the shoulders of Sindbad in the play. 

How the human heart responds to the touch of nature, and 
this brief panorama of life stirs it to its depths! A queer com- 
pound this human nature of ours ! See this vast audience with 
bated breath hanging on the words of the actors ! With mouths 
agape and eyes a-wonder they stare at the painted scene, all the 
reality of life absorbed in the narrow compass of the boards the 
players tread. Observe that man with the iron-gray beard in 
the sixth row of the parquette; he is weeping yes, it may look 
odd, but he is actually weeping over the sorrows of the neglected 
young wife in the play. Hers is the old story a selfish hus- 
band whose love cools and whose indifference grows day by day. 
Her tender young heart lies bleeding and bruised under this 
brute's feet. The tears stand in the eyes of the man in the par- 
quette when he sees how bravely, patiently she bears her humi- 
liation, hoping so hopelessly to win the errant love back again. 
The roses fade from her cheek ; the lithe young form grows 



i886.J AT THE THEATRE. 123 

slighter and old ; she wilts like a sweet flower that, hidden away 
in a damp, dark place, gets no blessed sunshine, and so she droops 
day by day for the lack of the warm love that would bring color 
and life back to her faded eyes. The man in theparquette grows 
indignant at the conduct of that brute of a husband trampling 
under foot this tender, beautiful love, so precious, so pure, so 
true ! In his burst of indignation he grips the arms of his 
chair! Between his clenched teeth he mutters how he would like 
to strip that brute to the waist, and bind him to a public 
whipping-post, and lash him till the flesh is raw, crying out 
at each stroke: "This for the wife-killer!" For was not the 
husband in the play killing his wife by inches ? Do not neglect 
and indifference kill as well as blows? So the man in the par- 
quette would execute summary vengeance on the man in the 
play. But not so fast, Mr. Indignity ; this is all make-believe, 
sham brutality, sham sorrow, sham killing, sham everything. 
Whence this hot indignation over shams? Are you shedding 
precious tears of sympathy over shams? Not a bit of it, Sir 
Critic. This is no sham at all. Of course the picture is not the 
thing itself, but it represents one of the saddest realities of life 
the waning of the light of affection, leaving life blank and dark. 
The brute in the play is an excellent portrayal of the brute in the 
parquette, the very man we saw just now weeping over these 
fictitious sorrows. Do you notice that the man in the parquette 
is alone ? At home sits a silent woman, whose heart this man's 
selfishness has long ago buried, and sealed the grave with a great, 
heavy stone to make sure that there may be no escape from this 
living tomb. Yes, he is just such another animal as the brute in 
the play, whom he would lash at the public whipping-post while 
he weeps over the sorrows of the young wife in the play. Brute 
No. i doesn't recognize his own picture in brute No. 2, or he 
wouldn't be so zealous to mete out chastisement to his represen- 
tative in the play. He weeps because in the play he sees clear- 
ly enough the brutality of the husband, whose blind selfishness 
stands out well defined. The skill of the playwright has wrought 
the plot so cleverly that the husband's cruelty is brought out in 
full contrast with the wife's wrong. The man in the parquette 
sees the young wife's heart laid bare, its anguish, the deadly, 
sickening blight of a lost affection, its courage, its hope, its pa- 
tience, its sweet devotion under its heavy sorrow. His sympa- 
thies are aroused, his pity excited, and there is nothing in his 
heart to interfere with their outburst. But at home ah ! that's 
a different thing. There all that the playwright makes so evident 



124 AT THE THEATRE. [Oct., 

is hidden from his dull eyes. At home there are a thousand-and- 
one things happening at every moment to fret his temper, a 
thousand-and-one others to absorb his attention and make him 
forgetful of that silent woman, who bears it all with such sweet 
endurance ; and so he neglects her and acts the part of the brute 
in the reality, while he grows indignant enough to throttle the 
brute in the play ! So vice believes itself virtuous, and grows so 
false that it grows blind. 

But this man is not the only one who weeps. Over there in the 
front row of the dress-circle, to the extreme left, with a dainty laced 
handkerchief held to her eyes, sits a dainty damsel, distilling from 
her sweet eyes pearly drops of sympathy. Her virgin heart is 
moved, and in the glow of her pity she would take the young 
wife in the play to her tender bosom, that they might mingle 
their tears together. Ah! if she could but peep into the future, 
that dark, silent, and unknown sea stretching its vast expanse be- 
fore us all, perchance she would behold the vision of a young wife 
in reality whose cheeks would show the faded rose and the tear- 
stained courses of sorrow. Is the same fate awaiting her out 
there in that dim, shadowy time to come when she, too, shall be 
a young wife? Will the pitiless storm of life rain its fire But 
there, draw the curtain over the scene. Are there not enough 
dreadful realities in this grinding world without borrowing 
them from the unborn future? Cassandra, hold thy tongue! 
Presto! but here's a funny fellow just come in! A merry smirk 
lurks about the corners of his mouth as he gyrates on two toes, 
jingling his bells. Motley's his name, and his quirks and his 
quips, and merry good-humor and pinches of wit, like flashes of 
light make rainbows on the tears of the weepers. Dry your 
eyes, sweet friends; here's cause for merriment. Heyday! 
Life 's a holiday ; put aside your burden, put out of your hearts 
that dull load of care ! Forget and be merry ! How easily we 
are moved to either side of nature ! And the fool in the play 
whisks off the stage, leaving us in great good-humor with our- 
selves and the rest of the world. What a rollicking, jolly thing 
is life! Like a going to the fair on a holiday. Ribbons are fly- 
ing, bells jingling, bands playing, the crowd flowing forward 
and the crowd flowing back, with here and there a strain of song 
from the throats of some happy, jolly dogs out, like the rest of 
us, for a holiday and a going to the fair. Plenty of sunshine and 
the bluest of skies, and the balmiest air ever breathed by merry, 
holiday lungs! What a glorious, glorious thing to live ! Light 



1 8 86.] AT THE THEATRE. 125 

hearts, bright eyes, and the blood dancing in the veins to the 
merriest tune of life ! A great alchemist is the fool in the play ! 
How he changes the dull, sombre metal of sorrow into the bright, 
glittering gold of enjoyment! 

Presto again ! the scene is changed as if by magic, as they 
always do in the theatre. So it is in life : one play is scarcely over 
before another begins. A gloomy, chill, heavy room, its walls 
of massive, solid masonry, looks blankly out upon the audience. 
Above the huge doorway a visorless helmet between two crossed 
swords stares blindly. How oppressing is the atmosphere in this 
room ! A vague feeling of terror seizes upon us, and such an un- 
speakable silence falls upon us that each one can hear his heart 
thundering in his ears ! Some dreadful deed is being perpe- 
trated ! There seems to be murder in the air. Yes, there the 
assassin comes with stealthy step, a brawny man with a fierce, 
red beard, and, horrible ! he holds a bloody dagger in either 
hand. His face is ghastly with fear, and his eyeballs bulge from 
their sockets ! How noiselessly he glides over the damp stones, 
keeping his protruding eyes fixed upon the doorway he has just 
come through ! So intent is he that he does not see the dark- 
haired, dark-browed woman standing in the middle of the room 
watching and waiting for him. She lays her hand on his arm ; 
he starts back, lifting the blood-stained blades as if to strike, but, 
recognizing her, hoarsely whispers, " I have done the deed ; didst 
thou hear a noise?" How breatbless and silent the audience 
now! All that vast throng spellbound with the horror of the 
deed. A pin dropped could be heard all over the house. Every- 
body is on the edge of his seat, with neck craned, eagerly leaning 
forward, lips parted and eyes dilated ! Murder has been done, 
most sacrilegious murder, and this is the murderer before them, 
his fatal daggers yet dripping with the hot blood of his victim 
a venerable, silver-haired man of benign aspect, and this man's 
guest! The horror and the terror of the deed has seized upon 
the audience. But this is only a sham murder, we say; that 
blood sham blood it is all sham terror, sham horror. Again 
you are wrong, Sir Critic; no sham ever held the human heart 
in that way. It is a faultless picture of an awful reality, which 
the great heart of humanity realizes under the master-brush of 
genius. It is the same old story of human nature, this time 
burned up and consumed in the red-hot crucible of ambition the 
demon that has led more than one to murder and infamy, and 
consumed him to ashes. Nothing that is human is foreign to the 
human heart, and the oft-repeated tale of love and hate, of sorrow 



126 AT THE THEATRE. [Oct., 

and wrong-, of life and death, will always hold their fascination 
and mystery as long as that heart beats with the pulse of life. 
That which misrepresents life is only sham. Exaggeration and 
burlesque or false sentiment never strike deep roots in the soil, 
and soon wither away. But the true and natural sentiments, 
whose life is deep-rooted in the universal heart of man, can never 
perish, for they are the realities of life and find an inexhaustible 
fountain-head wherever nature flourishes. 

And the players there what about them ? In a few short 
hours they have lived a whole lifetime ! The'n off go paint and 
powder, doublet and hose all the tinsel paraphernalia of the show 
is laid away, for the play is over. Yes, the play on the stage is 
over, and the play in the world begins again. For actors and 
audience there has been an intermission in the drama of life. As 
the curtain in the theatre goes down, the curtain rises again in 
the world, and the throng that has been witnessing that brief tale 
of love, ambition, mirth, and hate turn once more into the busy 
world to act their parts of love, ambition, hate, or strife. As 
each one goes out he finds his Old Man of the Sea waiting for 
him. There is no escape from him, that relentless, dogging old 
demon, and at best you can only get a respite from his torments. 
So each one accepts his burden and marches home to play his 
part as best he may. Behind the curtain the players hasten away 
from the painted scene and step into the street with the audience 
who have just been witnessing their representation of life's vicissi- 
tudes. The real play for all begins again ; the interlude is over 
and the curtain of life goes up once more. Look at the crowd as 
it empties itself into the street. There goes the man we saw 
weeping in the parquette. Can that man shed a tear ? Who 
would suppose so to look at him ? His face is stern, hard, selfish. 
He is going home, where a lonely woman sits patiently awaiting 
him. He has no sympathy, no tears for her. He doesn't see the 
purple pain in her heart, nor the dreadful gashes the daggers of 
his neglect have made. There just back of him comes the sweet 
face of the young girl we saw weeping so s} 7 mpathetically at the 
sorrows of the young wife in the play. You can see that she has 
been weeping, but she is smiling now as she looks up into the 
face of the young man by her side. Their play is begun again. 
What will be the end of this beginning? On she goes with the 
crowd, one of the many to take her small or great part in the 
world's play, where each shall play his part well or ill until the 
curtain shall fall upon the last act and the play be over. 

My lord who strutted the stage-boards with bright, bespan- 



1 886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 127 

gled doublet and brave plume dancing in his gay cap shall lay 
them aside, and the beggar shall put off his rags, and they shall 
pass out together. His majesty the king shall lay aside his paper 
crown and tinsel sceptre, and his fool shall lay aside his bauble, 
and they shall pass out together. For the play is over, and the 
sombre curtain has rolled down from above, hiding the deserted 
scene where motley life had so bravely trod the boards. 



A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 

EVERY Catholic writer who has been sufficiently successful to 
make him hopeful of earning a living by his pen must undertake 
to solve a difficult problem. He must face an unknown thing to 
which the position of choosing between two roads in an un- 
known country is comfort itself. He must conclude to write as 
a Catholic, openly and squarely, choosing, as Mrs. E. G. Martin 
has done in Whom God Hatli Joined (New York : Henry Holt & 
Co.), subjects dear to his heart, entwined with his daily thoughts 
and inextricably part of his life, or he must, as Christian Reid 
used to do, put aside much that he seems almost forced to utter, 
because he knows that, though he may write like an angel, he 
will lose his audience if he offend its prejudices. 

The experienced author knows very well that he must look to 
the non-Catholic book-buyers for his income. Catholics some- 
times say in print that there is an immense crowd of Catholic 
readers waiting to buy the book of a Catholic novelist of merit, 
but nobody believes this. For instance, we are safe in saying 
that Christian Reid's profits from Morton House were much 
greater than from Armine. One was a delightful novel, but one 
that might have been written by Mrs. Oliphant, let us say, with 
some literary differences. Armine is also a delightful novel, but 
seriously Catholic ; it could have been written only by a Catho- 
lic. 

The Catholic who would make a living income by the pro- 
fession of literature and letters in the United States deserves to 
be called a profession must cultivate reticence and reserve, and 
acquire the " colorlessness " of the public-school plan, or choose 
subjects which he sees through an artificial medium formed of 
the prejudices of his readers. This being the literary situation, 
Mrs. Martin's courage in offering a thoroughly Catholic novel 



t28 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Oct., 

to the general public is remarkable. The readers of " Katharine," 
which now appears under the name of Whom God Hath Joined, 
will at once understand that there is no compromise with non- 
Catholic prejudice in that book, no reticence for the sake of 
making Protestant readers feel comfortable, and no artificial 
medium to soften the rays of truth. There has been only one 
change in " Katharine " to fit it for its new readers. The baptism 
of Marlow's-child one of the strongest situations in the novel 
has been left out. 

It will be wonderful, indeed, if Whom God Hath Joined suc- 
ceeds with the great body of novel-readers. In the first place, 
it is too serious, and it has an evident motive. In the second 
place, it has not enough of what is called "human sympathy." 
Mrs. Martin concerns herself too much with souls. Novel- 
readers do not care about souls. They do not care whether a 
heroine's soul is saved or not, or whether the hero has any soul 
or not. Mrs. Martin's seriousness, her having a perceptible mo- 
tive, and even her Catholic bias, might be overlooked if her 
novel was somewhat risque 1 . If there was a delicately-managed 
bit of impropriety as there is in that very successful novel East 
Angels we could understand why Mrs. Martin should address 
herself to the general reader. As it is, the pure, strong style of 
the book it ranks as among the best specimens of English style 
written by rnan or woman for many a day the true and heart- 
felt feeling, the logic of the narrative, its high morality, will not 
make it sell. Mrs. Martin must turn to Catholics to find readers 
for it. And to such of them as appreciate a good novel, and are 
willing to make the author's sacrifice in writing less of a sacri- 
fice, we earnestly commend Whom God Hath Joined. 

An historical romance which is neither historical nor roman- 
tic is a sad example of bad judgment. Sometimes people are 
inclined to forgive the doubtfulness of the history in romances 
as they do in Sir Walter Scott's if there be interest, brilliant 
color, and dramatic movement ; but when the history is doubtful, 
and the doubtfulness of it does not flavor the story with pungent 
spice, -a romance of that kind has no reason to give for its exist- 
ence. Constance of Arcadia (Boston : Roberts Brothers) has a 
good name. It calls up associations at once picturesque and 
tender. It is suggestive of romance and of times in which an 
author could find dramatic contrast and gorgeous color. It is 
anonymous, too, which is in its favor. And yet the author has 
contrived to make a very dull narrative, full of absurdities about 
the Jesuits, written with a ver}' solemn air. It is not necessary 



i886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 129 

to warn anybody against them, for the character of Constance is 
too uninteresting to excite interest. Her mother-in-law, Henri- 
etta de la Tour, is another puppet, and Charles and Claude de 
la Tour are, like Charnace, only names without anything but the 
author's assurance that they ate, drank, talked, and thought, to 
justify their place among human beings. 

Constance de la Tour is the wife of Charles, who was lieu- 
tenant-governor of Arcadia when Arcadia was liable to be 
seized at any moment by Charles I. of England or Louis XIII. 
Constance is a Huguenot from La Rochelle. She loved in 
France the Sieur Charnace', but Charnace' was a Catholic and 
she refused to marry him. She took Charles de la Tour, a canny 
Frenchman, who was making a fortune in Arcadia in the 'fur 
trade. De la Tour was strictly a man of business, an Arcadian 
Vicar of Bray. And Constance begins to ask herself whether she 
would not have done better to have married the " Papistical " 
Charnace, when the latter appears in Arcadia. Charnace" has 
been sent out by the superior of the Jesuits. He is, it seems, a 
Jesuit of the " short robe." So soon as he hears that Constance 
is alive he fancied that she had died during the siege of La 
Rochelle he, in his cheerful " Jesuitical " way, thinks on means 
for destroying Constance's husband. 

" He would not," writes the author, "be too scrupulous. It was surely 
an accusation of the enemies of the holy church, emanating from the great 
adversary, that he himself " (Charnace, not the devil), " in obeying his su- 
perior, was willing to do evil that good might come. Is not all evil in the 
motive ? The motive is good the greater glory of God. Does not this 
holy end make holy the means needful to reach that end ? The .life, or at 
least the liberty, or at least the carnal prosperity of La Tour must be sac- 
rificed for the good of the church, the state, the holy Hundred Associates 
who were to plant Catholic colonies, and also for the spiritual good of La 
Tour himself." 

Charnace', having convinced himself in this manner that it is 
his duty to ruin Constance's husband, goes to " his priest, Fra 
Cupavo, and receives the sacrament." This confessor is a Jesuit, 
too, but, according to the author of Constance, he is also-a friar. 
Later Charnac6, in spite of his piety, shoots off the lobes of his 
confessor's ears, who looks on the sieur as his " master." This 
condition of affairs has evidently been evolved from the inner 
consciousness of the author. Charnace longs earnestly to dispose 
of De la Tour, that Constance might perhaps, under his influence, 
become the founder of a house of religious. Both Charnace 
and Constance die Charnace' very suddenly without having- 
VOL. XLIV. 9 



130 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Oct., 

spoken the affection they feel. After this the singular Jesuits, 
who call one another " Fra," begin to conspire to get Charnac6's 
fortune, which he has left to Constance's son, who is to be in 
charge of a Huguenot guardian. The Jesuit "friars" arrange 
that a very charming widow shall declare that she is Charnace's 
wife ; and on the head of this are written these exceedingly silly 
sentences: 

"Jean Cupavo [Charnace's confessor] did not, however, in his mourn- 
ing altogether lose his wits. " What is to become of the governor's pro- 
perty ?' asked the priest. ' Is our mission of St. Ignatius to exist only on 
paper ? ' To be sure his excellency left no will or wife, but with the church 
all things are possible. Was it possible, also, that the church would 
avenge the father confessor for the loss of the lobes of his ears, which he 
had borne without a wrinkle or apparent disturbance of temper ? Silent 
grudges have often borne an important part in the great crises of history. 
Why not in Arcadia ? " 

De la Tour, for reasons of a pecuniary nature, finally marries 
the widow, who 

"Accordingly, at the suggestion of her confessor, mingled in her hus- 
band's cup of the wedding-wine powder of relics of Saint Brebceuf, the 
Jesuit father who suffered martyrdom at the hands of the Iroquois. And, 
after that, neither she nor the friars had reason to suspect Governor La 
Tour of heresy ! " 

It is a pity that the author of Constance of Arcadia should have 
written such a book. His enemies have reason to rejoice. 

Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson has taken advantage of the popu- 
larity he has acquired, by writing book after book in rapid suc- 
cession, each better than the other. His Kidnapped (Cassell & 
Co., limited) is a De- Foe-like narrative of the adventures of a 
Scotch youth, David Balfour, who was kidnapped and cast away, 
who suffered on a desert isle, lived among Jacobites in the High- 
lands, and who begins another series of adventures at the end of 
the book. The characteristics of this story are manliness and an 
exact comprehension of the Highland character. The dialogue 
between David Balfour, a Presbyterian, and Alan Stewart, whose 
conceptions of Christianity may be described as " Highland," 
shows a keen perception of the motives of that strange people, 
whose fidelity and bravery are proverbial : 

"Troth and indeed!" said Alan, speaking of a hated Campbell, "they 
will do him no harm ; the more's the pity. And barring that about Christi- 
anity " David had reproved him for the " un-Christianity of blowing off 
; so many words in anger" "barring that about Christianity (of which my 



1 886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 131 

opinion is quite otherwise, or I would be nae Christian), I am much of 
your mind." 

" Opinion here or opinion there," said David, " it's a kent thing that 
Christianity forbids revenge." 

"Ay, it's well seen it was a Campbell taught ye ! It would be a con- 
venient thing for them and their sort if there was no such a thing as a lad 
and a gun behind a heather bush." 

The Highlands were in process of conversion, however, by 
various catechists sent from Edinburgh, some also appointed by 
local dignitaries. One of these was accused of highway rob- 
beries. And of him another catechist says : 

" It was MacLean of Duart gave it to him because he was blind, ' But 
perhaps it was a peety,' says my host; ' for he is always on the road, going 
from one place to another to hear the young folk say their catechism, and 
doubtless that is a great temptation to the poor man.' 

" We had no sooner come to the door of Mr. Henderson's dwelling 
than, to my great surprise (for I was now used to the politeness of the 
Highlanders), he (another catechist) burst rudely past me, dashed into the 
room, caught up a jar and a small horn spoon, and began ladling snuff into- 
his nose in most excessive quantities. Then he had a hearty fit of sneez- 
ing, and looked around upon me with rather a silly smile. 

" ' It's a vow I took,' says he. ' I took a vow upon me that I would nae 
carry it. Doubtless it'e a great privation ; but when I think upon the 
martyrs, not only to the Scottish Covenant but to other points of Christi- 
anity, I think shame to mind it.' " 

Kidnapped is a novel without a love-story running through- 
it, and it is the more to be commended for that. The old 
Germans held that there was a great deal to be done in life by 
their young men before the} 7 should "turn to thoughts of love," 
and David Balfour is an exemplification of this opinion, for which 
modern society would be better and more manly. Kidnapped is 
decidedly the most popular novel of the month. 

An American political novel does not entice the cautious 
reader of light literature. One knows rather well what to ex- 
pect by this time. The caucus, the convention ; the point-lace 
candidate admitting plebeian voters into his house ; the agonies 
of his wife when the " heeler " expectorates on her carpet and 
brushes against her bric-a-brac ; Saratoga, high white hats, big gold 
chains, and German and Irish slang borrowed from the news- 
paper reporters all this we have had, and all this is considered 
to be an epitome of American political life. Mrs. Myra Sawyer 
Hamlin, in A Politician's Daughter (D. Appleton & Co.), has intro- 
duced us to new scenes. She takes us to a Massachusetts country 
town. A Boston snob of the kind fortunately growing less 



132 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Oct., 

common who fancies that the fact that his great-grandfather 
worked hard to live around Plymouth Rock gives him a patent 
of nobility, walks home with Miss Harcourt, the politician's 
daughter, from church. His name is Arthur Bradley, and he 
carries a tightly-rolled umbrella after the English fashion : 

" The avenue to Elmholm was a long, winding walk, quite an eighth of a 
mile in extent ; but, arrived at the great iron gate, solidly guarded by two 
lions, young Bradley paused, charged with his umbrella the turf at his feet, 
and began rather awkwardly : ' You know you see you will understand, 
my dear Miss Harcourt, how impossible how utterly impossible it is for 
me to go further. My party principles,' my personal feelings, my family 
and education are so opposed to your father's political attitude that I should 
compromise my dignity by even entering the gates. It must have seemed 
very strange to you that I have so repeatedly excused myself from accept- 
ing your invitations, especially as I have been unable to conceal from you 
or myself the unbounded admiration I have for you. You are the only at- 
traction which holds me in Terratine. Coming here transiently on busi- 
ness, I have been held here week after week in the hope of a casual meet- 
ing with you, and I have been rewarded here and there, as you know first 
by Mrs. Allen in allowing me to take you out to dinner, and then by other 
kind people who have given me impersonal social opportunities. And 
here, at the end of six weeks, I cannot go and I have no right to stay. 
You know what my family is " 

It is understood that the sentiments expressed in this speech, 
which is suddenly cut short by Miss Harcourt, are quite proper to 
a Bostonian whose ancestors have grown in grandeur, like Becky 
Sharp's, because their descendant has concentrated his mind on 
them, and for no other reason. They seem to mean insufferable 
conceit to the outside Englishman or American who is not a 
Bostonian. But we all have our weaknesses. The Philadelphia 
matron who would die rather than visit persons that live west of 
Broad Street and north of Market ; the Baltimorean who posi- 
tively cannot bow to vulgar people without a pedigree from 
the Cecils ; the New York maiden who must drop all acquaint- 
ances who cannot afford to join the proper dancing classes all 
smile at the pretensions of the Bostonian. Probably there was 
caste in early Rome when the third generation of the somewhat 
dubious and tarnished gentlemen who founded that ancient co- 
lony refused to know anybody not descended from the Sabine 
women. 

Miss Harcourt has no amiable tolerance for the Bostonian's 
belief in his family. She sacrilegiously declares that she does not 
entirely understand what his family is. He answers that " they 
have been cultured gentlemen; they have been educated men; 



i886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 133 

they have never been in politics." Then Miss Harcourt makes 
a speech that, if delivered on the stage, would " bring down " 
the gallery. She asks if the gentlemen of '76 had kept out of 
politics, what would have become of the republic? 

Miss Harcourt bears herself in a spirited manner throughout 
the novel, rejects a typical politician's son, and marries Bradley. 
After this she was, we presume, translated alive to the heights 
where the Boston Brahmins sit on high and meditate on their 
great merits. A Politician s Daughter is a clever story, sketched 
rather than filled out. There are some good satirical hits, and 
some speeches worth remembering. The style is interesting 
but careless ; it is evidently the work of a woman of refinement, 
whose observation of life is quick but not far-reaching. 

George Manville Fenn's Double Cunning (Appleton & Co.) is a 
sensational novel, nothing more. Katharine Blythe, by Katharine 
Lee, is a harmless and flavorless story of the kind that English 
writers turn out by the hundred every year. 

Sefior Juan Valera is one of the modern Spanish novelists 
who, from a literary point of view, deserve recognition from the 
world. He knows and loves Spain ; he has a delightful style, 
crisp and with a sub-acid, humorous flavor ; and he knows how 
to tell a story. Pepita Ximinez (Appleton & Co.), translated into 
English, is the best known of his works. Sefior Valera has writ- 
ten a long explanatory preface to the American edition of this 
work, in which he explains how it came to exist. He knows 
what life in the United States is, for he was till recently Spanish 
minister at Washington. Sefior Valera's preface is like a heavy 
stone tied to the tail of a light and ascending kite. It is too 
heavy for it, and the kite would fly through the air all the more 
gracefully without it. The preface contains some wise sentences, 
more absurd ones, and several replete with that delicious Spanish 
humor with which Pepita Ximinez is seasoned, and which is ob- 
scured, but rendered nevertheless, as well as is possible, in the 
English translation. 

It seems strange that Sefior Valera had thought it necessary 
to study the religious mystical literature of Spain in order to 
create a pastoral like Pepita Ximinez. It would be a very charm- 
ing book if it were not for an episode which will prevent it from 
having a place in the family library an episode which was not 
needed and which spoils a story as na'ive and reflective of the An- 
dalusian life as any of Fernan Caballero's, and with a higher 
literary finish. Sefior Valera pretends in his preface that he in- 
tended to do a number of high-sounding things in writing Pepita 



134 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Oct., 

Ximinez. He has, after all, taken a young theological student, fer- 
vent, pure, docile, but without a religious vocation, and showed 
how, during a vacation at home, he fell in love with the young 
widow, Pepita, and married her. A Catholic reading the story 
feels that Senor Valera knows his hero and his hero's surround- 
ings. Being a Catholic himself, though, he confesses, not a very 
devout one, Senor Valera does not shock our sensibilities by any 
of those exasperating misrepresentations that make absurd books 
touching on the life of Catholics and written by non-Catholics. 
It is a pity that Senor Valera did not leave out one objectionable 
scene and keep his preface for his biography. We cannot recom- 
mend Pepita Ximinez because of that one scene in which the stu- 
dent succumbs to temptation. It spoils a fresh and true pastoral 
comedy. The old dean is an excellent specimen of the Spanish 
priesthood, and the student himself is a witness for the inspiring 
power of the Catholic Church and the wisdom of her discipline. 
Senor Valera very superfluously supplies his lesson in a high- 
flown paragraph : 

" What is certain is that, if it be allowable to draw any conclusion from 
a story, the inference that may be deduced from mine is, that faith in an 
all-seeing and personal God, and in the love of this God, who is present in 
the depths of the soul, even when we refuse to follow the higher vocation 
to which he would persuade and solicit us even were we carried away by 
the violence of mundane passions to commit, like Don Luis, almost all the 
capital sins in a single day elevates the soul, purifies the other emotions, 
sustains human dignity, and lends poetry, nobility, and holiness to the 
commonest state, condition, and manner of life." 

The absence of that cynicism to be expected from a man of 
the modern school of literature which would deny the dignity 
and solemnity of the priestly vocation is a consolatory character- 
istic of Senor Valera's work. The letter of the old dean, Don 
Luis' preceptor, in which he says that a theological student of 
" more poetry than piety " had better not become a priest, is 
worthy of Cervantes. 

Aphrodite (New York : Gottsberger) is a romance of ancient 
Greece, without any particular merit. It is translated from the 
German of Ernest Eckstein by Mary J. Safford. 

It gives us great pleasure to describe Flights Inside and Out- 
side Paradise by a Penitent Peri (George Cullen Pearson ; New 
York : G. P. Putnam's Sons) as utterly unworthy of a compli- 
mentary adjective that can be applied to a book, except that it is 
short. An air of frivolous vivacity, generally forced, makes it re- 
semble the European letters of N. P. Willis at his worst. It has 



1 886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 135 

been pronounced by several journalistic reviewers as a valuable 
book on Japan. The writer might have made it valuable ; but, 
as he considered the condition of his own stomach while in Japan 
more interesting than anything else, he has given the result of 
this preoccupation in a sprightly way. This sprightliness, how- 
ever, is applied to other objects occasionally for instance, to 
a relic of St. John the Baptist at Genoa, and to indulgences. 
Some reflections on page 285, supposed to be made by St. John, 
are not only in bad taste, but without one grain of the comic salt 
which is supposed to make them piquant. The author tells us 
that M. Blanc, late proprietor of the gambling establishment at 
Monaco, was 

"An extravagant believer in the benefits to be derived from the pur- 
chase of indulgences ; but he was a trustful man, and so he put the entire 
sum at the disposition of the prince, who, it is said, did not expend the 
money to the entire satisfaction of the propagators. Madame Blanc, in her 
widowhood, also set aside a like amount for the same pious purposes, but, 
like Mrs. Squeers, she allows no one to administer this cure for sick souls 
but herself. Protestantism, not so readily providing for immediate and 
facile absolution from peccadilloes, was, and I believe is still, forbidden in 
the principality ; only that form of religion which can give the most ex- 
tended indulgences being allowed." 

This is a specimen of "smartness." The book is not immoral; 
it is only vulgar and flippant. 

A very refreshing and honestly written book is Mrs. Abba 
Goold Woolson's George Eliot and her Heroines. It is refreshing 
because it comes at a time when the worship of George Eliot is 
reaching a point at which it becomes a " craze." People are be- 
ginning to put Mrs. Cross on a pedestal higher than Shakspere's, 
and an unreasoning crowd acclaim as supreme an author who 
had great merit as a keen observer of human life around her, but 
whose gloomy, barren, and, we cannot help suspecting, affected 
philosophy distorted much that ought to have been beautiful 
into failure. 

It would be silly to pretend that George Eliot was not a 
great literary artist because her opinions, her objectless altruism, 
her determination to show that most marriages are disastrous, 
and her ponderous self-consciousness interfere with the value of 
her work. But we rejoice that a clear-thinking writer, basing 
her conclusions on Christian teaching, has pointed out the flaws 
that exist in the composition of a literary idol whose worship, 
unstinted and unreflecting, must have an ill effect on minds and 



136 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Oct., 

morals. Mrs. Woolson sums up the tenets of the creed which 
Mrs. Cross taught, more or less veiled, in all her writings: 

" Perhaps the fundamental principles of her belief cannot be more 
clearly and briefly indicated than by giving the words of a personal friend, 
in his report of her conversation : * 

'"Taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as 
the inspiring trumpet-calls of men the words God, Immortality, Duty she 
pronounced, with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how 
unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third. 
Never, perhaps, have sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of imper- 
sonal and unrecompensing law.' 

" Or, in our own words, there was, according to her creed, no supreme 
Creator, demanding right conduct from his creatures, and himself furnish- 
ing the instinctive sense to determine what right conduct is; no life be- 
yond this, to supplement our existence here, to atone for its suffering and 
to recompense its steadfast adherence to duty ; no comprehension of duty, 
except as a generous impulse we may chance to feel to extend aid and 
comfort to fellow-creatures as hopeless as ourselves creatures who have 
no home in any other world, and, like the butterflies, are fashioned but for 
a day, and that a day, not of warmth and bloom and fragrance, but often- 
er of searching blasts, sullen skies, and frozen fields." 

Of the heroines of George Eliot, Mrs. Woolson truly says : 

"They d not die ; they do not plunge wildly into sin, suffer stout mar- 
tyrdom, or surrender proudly to fate. They simply live and live on. What 
was a leaping flame becomes a lingering smudge. There are no graves for 
us to weep over, no consoling visions of a translation to the stars." 

Dorothea, admirably depicted by the touch of genius, fails 
miserably ; Romola floats away into self-sacrifice that seems to 
hold no compensation for her ; Maggie, in the Mill on the Floss, 
owing to a crooked view of morality, suffers horribly ; Gwen- 
dolen becomes a wreck ; Savonarola, a shadow in her hands, fails 
miserably ; Tito, the most masterly of her characters, falls little 
by little ; Grandcourt, Lydgate all pass before us disconsolate, 
unsatisfied, unconsoled. 

Mrs. Woolson's critique is thoroughly comprehensive and 
very sound in both an ethical and literary sense. It is a distinc- 
tion, and a valuable one for her, that she has not let herself be 
carried away from her honest conclusions regarding George 
Eliot and her works by the uncritical estimate which a great 
part of those who form public opinion have made of the works 
of a woman of genius who deserves a place as a novelist beside 
Mrs. Gaskell and Miss Austen rather than near Thackeray or 

* F. W. H. Meyers, in the Century Magazine, November, 1881. 



i886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 137 

Balzac, and as a philosopher to be ranked among those that 
tried to pull down while the Light that enlighteneth the world 
shone full upon them. Fortunately, generations to come will 
" skip " her theories, as they have forgotten the purpose of Gulli- 
ver, and read her novels for the stories which, once read, can 
never be recalled without admiration and wonder at such po- 
tency and vividness of imagination and expression. 

We are so ready to pounce on the non-Catholic who, through 
carelessness or ignorance, makes a mistake in statements concern- 
ing the church, that it would be unfair not to praise the honesty 
of Mrs. Clara Erskine. Clement in doing all in her power to make 
her Christian Symbols and Stories of the Saints (Boston : Ticknor 
& Co.) correct in every detail. Mrs. Clement has had the vol- 
ume revised by a hand entirely competent that of Miss Katha- 
rine E. Conway, a lady whose writings are well known to the 
public, and whose position in literature is well established. Miss 
Conway is in every way qualified to make Christian Symbols 
worthy of its dedication to the Most Rev. Archbishop of Boston. 
The purpose of the work is fulfilled religiously and artistically. 

" It has been undertaken," writes the author, " to satisfy a want often 
felt personally by the writer and often expressed to her by others. Those 
who go abroad and travel in Christian lands meet at every step, through 
town and country, in the broad light of day and in the mysterious gloom 
of sacred places, symbolic forms which are known in a general way to 
represent the mysteries and facts of the Christian faith, but which fail to 
recall them in anything like a distinct and accurate manner." 

That the " intelligent " traveller needs such a book the re- 
marks overheard in any church or picture-gallery are sufficient 
evidence. This book will be the means of making the general 
ignorance of " Christian symbolism " less dense. It is excel- 
lently arranged. 



138 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Oct., 



NEW PUBLICATIONS. 

MONOTHEISM THE PRIMITIVE RELIGION OF THE CITY OF ROME. By the 
Rev. Henry Formby. London: Burns & Gates; New York: The Ca- 
tholic Publication Society Co. 1886. 

Father Formby attempts to prove that monotheism was the primitive 
religion of Rome, established by Numa Pompilius, who learned both re- 
ligion and law from the Hebrew nation and the books of Moses during a 
visit which he made to Palestine. Father Formby is a very original, learned, 
ingenious, and instructive writer. His thesis respecting Rome and Numa 
is sustained by very plausible reasoning, which to a certain extent, we 
think, may safely be called probable. We will not venture an opinion 
on its conclusiveness. The whole subject is one upon which we prefer 
to await the final verdict of a consent of competent scholars. 

The discussion of his special thesis has led the author to enunciate his 
opinions upon the more general topic of God's providence toward the 
heathen world, and the survival of monotheism in the midst of polytheism 
in the pagan nations. He takes a more generous and favorable view of the 
religious and moral state of the ancient pagan world as a whole than the 
common one of Christian writers. We concur with his views in this re- 
spect, and admire their philosophical breadth as well as their conformity 
to real facts and authentic history. Although he adheres to some tradi- 
tional notions of chronology which are now becoming obsolete, yet his 
general ideas are easily reconcilable with recent and improved science 
and exegesis. The work as a whole and in many parts, whatever we may 
think of its most particular thesis, is one of great interest and value. We 
could wish to see its thesis proved and adopted, if that be possible. 

DURING THE PERSECUTION. Autobiography of Father John Gerard, of the 
Society of Jesus. Translated from the original Latin by G. R. King- 
don, Priest of the Society of Jesus. London: Burns & Gates; New 
York : The Catholic Publication Society Co. 1886. 

This book enables us to look back three hundred years through a time- 
telescope, and to realize vividly the dangers to which a priest was exposed 
in England during the persecution waged by Queen Elizabeth. Father 
Gerard was a veritable "Jesuit in disguise," who was not terrified by the 
acts of Parliament framed for the extirpation of Roman Catholics. Not 
rashly did he undertake his dangerous mission, but with remarkable pru- 
dence and unflinching courage. He was many times suspected of being in 
league with the Papists, but he adroitly contrived to throw the burden of 
proof on his persecutors. The priest-hunters constantly pursued him, and 
great was the ingenuity he displayed in his frequent hairbreadth escapes. 
Ultimately he was captured, and suffered the agony of the torture three 
times while in the Tower, whence he escaped in a most extraordinary way. 

The work of the translator is worthy of special commendation. In 
this narrative of a heroic priest there is much that is intensely interesting 
as well as profitable reading. 



1 886.] NEW PUBLICATIONS. 139 

STUDIES IN CHURCH HISTORY. By Rev. Reuben Parsons, D.D. Vol. I. 
Centuries I.-VIII. New York and Cincinnati : Fr. Pustet & Co. 1886. 

Dr. Parsons has prepared a series of historical abstracts from the best 
authorities which students and intelligent laymen will find readable and 
useful. The topics are such as have a polemical bearing in regard to 
dogma, discipline, church polity, etc. The author's work in the second 
volume will be much more difficult than it has been in this one. If it is 
accomplished in an equally successful manner with that in which he has 
executed the first part of his task, the entire collection of studies will make 
a most valuable addition to the library of English historical works. 

S. THOMAS ET DOCTRINA PR^EMOTIONIS PHYSICS, seu responsio ad R. P. 
Schneemann, S.J., aliosque doctrinae scholae thomisticag impugnatores. 
Auctore P. F. A. Dummermuth, Ord. Prasd. Sac. Theol. Magistro, et in 
Collegio Lovaniensi ejusdem Ordinis Stud. Reg. Parisiis : apud editores 
ephemeridis Annte Do minicaine, via dicta du Cherche. Midi, 19, 1886. 

The above work will not fail to interest all serious theologians. Its au- 
thor is regent of the Dominican Studium Generale at Louvain. Since the 
study of St. Thomas, owing to the exhortations and patronage of Pope Leo 
XIII., has been restored to the high and honorable position it formerly oc- 
cupied in Catholic schools, many have eagerly inquired as to who have 
been the faithful guardians of his doctrine. Defenders of certain theologi- 
cal systems, taking up under a new form old and celebrated controversies, 
have presented themselves as the true interpreters of the teaching of St. 
Thomas. But this is an honor which the Dominican Order, quoting the 
words of Pope Leo XIII. in his immortal encyclical, ^Eternt Patrzs, claim 
as peculiarly their own (" Dominicana familia quae summo hoc magistro 
Sancto Thoma jure quodam suo gloriatur"). Particularly in the very im- 
portant question of grace and free will is it desirable that the doctrine of 
the Angelic Doctor should not be erroneously interpreted. It was to pre- 
vent any such evil result that the author undertook the above-mentioned 
work, and all competent to pass a judgment on it will agree that he has 
performed his task in a masterly manner. The work evidently is not ad- 
dressed to the laity; but ecclesiastics whose taste or whose professional 
occupations lead them to a more profound study of theology and sacred 
science will find in it a true light thrown on a profound question. * 

KIHG, PROPHET, AND PRIEST; or, Lectures on the Catholic Church. By 
Rev. H. C. Duke. London : Burns & Gates ; New York : The Catholic 
Publication Society Co. 1886. 

These lectures of Father Duke give a clear and forcible explanation of 
the nature of the church, whose mission is identical with that of our Lord 
Jesus Christ, who was King, Prophet, and Priest. 

The author knows generally how to reason with Protestants without 
repelling them, which is the chief excellency in controversy. He treats of 
the most important of all religious questions the office of the church. It 
is of little use to treat of isolated doctrines of the church, unless the divine 
authority of the church be satisfactorily explained. The conversion of Pro- 
testants depends more upon their understanding this one point of Catholic 
doctrine than any other. Father Duke's lectures explain this point tho- 
roughly, and their publication will do good service to the cause of truth. 



140 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Oct., 

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF R. SOUTHWELL, S.J., WITH LIFE AND DEATH. 
New edition. London : Burns & Gates; New York : The Catholic Pub- 
lication Society Co. 1886. 

The title-page of this volume is misleading, for it does not contain the 
complete works of the poet and martyr, but only his poetical works. The 
present publication is, in fact, a reprint of the edition edited by Mr. Turn- 
bull and published by Mr. John Russell Smith in 1856. Mr. Turnbull's 
preface, however, has been omitted and another one written in its place. 
The bibliographical portion of the life found in the former edition is not to 
be found in the present. The appendix has been placed in its more natural 
position at the end of the volume. The pedigree of the Bellamy family, 
although it is referred to on page xvi., is not to be found. With these ex- 
ceptions the two editions are the same. We may add, however, in com- 
mendation of this volume, that it is very well printed and sold at a very low 
price. 

THE OSCOTIAN. Bishop Ullathorne : The Story of his Life ; Selected Let- 
ters, with Fac-simile ; four portraits of his Lordship ; views of Coventry 
Church and Oscott College. London: Burns and Oates; New York : 
The Catholic Publication Society Co. 1886. 

The Oscotians have made the "Bishop Ullathorne number" of their 
magazine a worthy companion to the Newman and Manning numbers of 
the Month. The bishop's career before he settled down quietly in Birming- 
ham first as a sailor-boy, and then as an Australian missionary was 
eventful almost to a romantic degree, and furnishes some attractive and 
entertaining as well as edifying materials for a biographical sketch. It is 
interesting both for young and old, and boys and bishops may peruse it 
with equal pleasure and profit. 

A PRACTICAL INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH RHETORIC : Precepts and Ex- 
ercises. By Rev. Charles Coppens, S.J., author of The Art of Oratorical 
Composition. New York : The Catholic Publication Society Co.; Lon- 
don : Burns & Oates. 1886. 

In all our institutions of learning increased attention is being given 
to the study of the English language. Formerly an acquaintance with the 
great Latin and Greek models was considered sufficient to make one a good 
scholar in his own language ; but, while we do not believe that the value 
of the ancient classics has been overestimated, we nevertheless see the 
great necessity of giving all our students a special and thorough training 
in the English language. Every one ought to know the rules of his own 
language better than those of any other. Next to the English grammar 
and dictionary comes rhetoric. 

Father Coppens, S.J., the author of the book befone us, has spent 
nearly thirty years in teaching, and over twenty years in teaching English. 
He is distinguished as a professor of rhetoric. Teachers, when they exam- 
ine his Introduction to English Rhetoric, will pronounce it one of the best 
if not the best text-book that they have ever seen. His Art of Oratorical 
Composition has been extensively used in our colleges ; but this book will 
find its way not only into colleges, but also into academies for young ladies. 
In " the first part of the work many matters are explained and exercises 
suggested " which are suitable for young pupils. 



1 886.] NEW PUBLICATIONS. 141 

AN ANCIENT HISTORY FROM THE CREATION TO THE FALL OF THE WEST- 
ERN EMPIRE IN A.D. 476. With maps, plans, etc. By Rev. A. J. B. 
Vuibert, S.S., A.M., Professor of History in St. Charles' College, Elli- 
cott City, Md. Baltimore: Foley Bros. j886. 

This history has been written to serve as a text-book in academies, col- 
leges, and generally for more advanced pupils in schools. 

Originally intended as a revision of Fredet's Ancient History, the author 
was obliged to abandon this attempt and compose a history which should 
embody modern researches and be free from the defects and deficiencies of 
the older work. Father Vuibert brings to the task his own practical know- 
ledge of the needs of students, based on an experience of nearly twenty 
years in teaching history and the classics, careful research and sifting of 
the best and latest authorities Rawlinson, Grote, Merivale, Lenormant, 
Cantu, and others well-marked divisions, clear arrangement, and a plea- 
sant, animated narrative. 

It is manifestly necessary, yet very difficult where so many subjects are 
treated of, to unite brevity and clearness, comprehensiveness and condensa- 
tion, details of facts, dates, and names, with a smooth, continuous, and in- 
teresting narration. This new work, however, combines these qualities in 
an eminent degree. 

Without anticipating the public judgment, we think it will come to be 
regarded as the standard text-book and merit very general adoption. 

The other integral and accidental parts of the book maps, plans of 
cities, index and dictionary of proper names add very much to its value 
and usefulness. 

THE LIFE OF DOM BARTHOLOMEW OF THE MARTYRS, RELIGIOUS OF THE 
ORDER OF ST. DOMINIC, ARCHBISHOP OF BRAGA IN PORTUGAL. Trans- 
lated from his Biographies, written in Portuguese, Spanish, and French, 
by Lady Herbert. (For sale by the Catholic Publication Society Co.) 

Dom Bartholomew of the Martyrs was a holy prelate of the sixteenth 
century, who, like St. Charles Borromeo, was raised up by the Spirit of 
God to promote ecclesiastical discipline. He proposed the most useful 
reforms in discipline and morals decreed by the Council of Trent under 
Pius IV. His influence over the fathers of the council was such that he 
was looked upon as a " mouthpiece full of burning wisdom, zeal, and pru- 
dence." The assembled prelates used to say, "The school of the Arch- 
bishop of Braga is the best school in the world." After the close of the 
council he devoted his energies to the utmost in carrying out in his 
diocese the law and spirit of the Council of Trent. He deserves to be 
compared with the canonized bishops of holy church. The translator of 
this biography deserves more thanks than we are able to express for 
giving us this beautiful and edifying life in our own language. 

WHOM GOD HATH JOINED. A Novel. By Elizabeth Gilbert Martin, 
New York : Holt & Co. 1886. 

This is Mrs. Martin's first novel, and it was originally published in THE 
CATHOLIC WORLD under the title "Katharine.'' It is a psychological 
study, based on experience and observation, very true and very acute. The 
title indicates that the one salient moral lesson inculcated by the story is 
the paramount necessity of obeying conscience and the law of God at 



142 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Oct., 

whatever personal sacrifice, specifically in respect to marriage. The man- 
ner in which the Catholic Church, and it alone, lays down this law in the 
name of Christ, is brought out with distinctness, and also the more general 
lesson is inculcated throughout the story that only the Catholic religion 
can satisfy the reason, the conscience, the heart, the personal and social 
needs of men. 

Mrs. Martin has a fine metaphysical and analytical mind, besides other 
qualities and the practice of literary composition, which fit a writer to make 
an artistic and readable work of fiction. We were best pleased, in reading 
this story, with the earlier part of Katharine's history. The thoughts, 
sentiments, mental and moral processes educed out of the large portion of 
our present American generation, during its transition from the religion of 
the past to something better or worse in the present or the future, are well 
described in the instances of Katharine and several other persons, by 
one who is competent and skilful in this kind of delineation. 

We believe that the author has already attained a very considerable 
fame by this first effort, and we heartily wish her success in future works 
of the same kind. 

ECCLESIASTICAL ENGLISH. By G. Washington Moon. London : Hatch- 
ards, Publishers. 1886. 

This is a criticism, and a severe one, of the English of the " Revised 
Edition " of the Old Testament. The author, who is well known as a purist 
in language, accuses the revisers of " violations of grammar, ungraceful- 
ness of style, and infelicities of expression," and insists "that gross and 
flagrant errors abound in their work " ; and we think he establishes these 
accusations in the volume before us, though we consider him hypercritical 
and even captious at times. 

It would be very difficult, if not impossible, to avoid every error in 
language in so vast an undertaking, but some of the errors Mr. Moon 
points out seem inexcusable, and many of them are extremely inconsistent. 

Much has no doubt been gained in accuracy of translation in the recent 
revision, but not a little has been lost in the strength and purity of lan- 
guage which were the chief merits of the old King James Version. 

THE REAR-GUARD OF THE REVOLUTION. By Edmund Kirke. New York : 
D. Appleton & Co. 1886. 

History has not sufficiently honored the brave men west of the Alle- 
ghanies who fought so well for liberty during the war of the Revolution. 
It was these men who fought and won the battle of King's Mountain, which 
turned the tide of the Revolution and prepared the way for the surrender 
of Cornwallis. These men rushed of their own accord to the rescue of their 
country, without pay and without hope of reward. Their greatest hero, 
John Sevier, lies now in a forgotten grave, without headstone or inscrip- 
tion. With the life of this man, and of two others, his comrades, Isaac 
Shelby and James Robertson, the book is principally concerned. These 
three, in the words of the author, " unknown backwoodsmen, clad in buck- 
skin hunting-shirts, and leading inconsiderable forces to battle in the 
depths of a far-away forest, not only planted civilization beyond the Alle- 
ghanies, but exerted a most important influence in shaping the destinies of 



1 886.] NE w PUBLICA TIONS. 143 

the country." The work of these men is depicted from their settlement of 
the Watauga Colony to the close of the Revolutionary war. A most 
graphic account is given of their struggles with the Indians, and the won- 
derful manner in which they frustrated the English plans, which included 
an attack from the rear by the allied Indians and Tories at the time when 
the Southern seaboard was to have been descended upon. The men of the 
rear-guard of the Revolution deserve to be held in grateful remembrance. 
It is well that a history should be written which does them a tardy justice. 
The book is written in a very engaging manner, and the descriptions of 
some of the skirmishes and of the battle of King's Mountain are very vivid. 
At times sudden transitions from the past to the present tense somewhat 
mar the evenness of the work. 

HENRY GRATTAN : A Historical Study. By John George MacCarthy. 
Third edition. Dublin: Hodges, Figgis & Co. 1886. 

Every Irishman loves the name of Grattan, and remembers with grati- 
tude the great services he performed for his country, yet very little is spe- 
cifically knawn about him. His services were too eminent and their results 
too lasting ever to fall into obscurity, but about the man himself little is 
known ; the mind's eye forms no clear portrait of him. Indeed, his life has 
yet to be written. The book before us, though it gives us some idea of the 
man, is but a mere outline sketch, too brief to be satisfactory. It is a pity 
that Mr. MacCarthy has not written a fuller biography. After speaking of 
how little is generally known of Grattan himself, he says in his preface : 

" In order to find out for myself the manner of man Grattan actually was, to get a clear 
conception of his individuality, to judge whether he was honest or a humbug, to know what he 
aimed at, what he failed in, what he succeeded in, what were his virtues, what were his foibles, 
what were his faults, Kow he looked, spoke, and worked, what was his private life, and what, 
on the whole, was the true tenor of the man's existence in this world, I had to ransack, and get 
ransacked, the dustiest shelves of a dozen libraries in Cork, Dublin, and London, to read scores 
of books long since out of print, and to seek traces of him through all sorts of old memoirs, 
magazines, newspapers, and parliamentary reports. I now respectfully submit the result of this 
investigation." 

After this amount of research we wonder that the author contented 
himself with making a mere sketch. The sketch is very well done, it is 
true so well done that we wish the same hand had given us a full-length 
portrait. 

THE IRISH QUESTION, as Viewed by One Hundred Eminent Statesmen of 
England, Ireland, and America. With a sketch of Irish History. New 
York : Ford's National Library. 1886. 

This book contains a great number of letters from prominent Ameri- 
cans to the editor of the Irish World expressing their sympathy with Ire- 
land in the struggle for Home Rule ; Elaine's speech delivered at Portland, 
Me., last June ; a verbatim report of Gladstone's great speech, April 8 last, 
together with his second speech on the second reading of the Home Rule 
Bill ; Parnell's speech, and other interesting matter. 

The O'Connell Press Popular Library is issuing in a very cheap form 
standard and popular works. The last volumes of this library that we have 
received are the Vicar of Wakefield, by Oliver Goldsmith, On Irish Affairs, 



144 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Oct., 1886. 

by Edmund Burke, and Poems by Gerald Griffin. Each volume is very neat- 
ly printed and is small enough to be easily thrust into the pocket. Good 
literature at a low price is always a great boon. The Library is issued 
by M. H. Gill & Son, Dublin. 



BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS RECEIVED. 

ANNUAL REPORT OF THE OPERATIONS OF THE U. S. LIFE-SAVING SERVICE, 1885. Wash- 
ington : Government Printing-Office. 1886. 

CIRCULARS OF INFORMATION OF THE BUREAU OF INFORMATION. No. 5. 1885. Washing- 
ton : Government Printing-Office. 1886. 

QUARTERLY REPORT OF THE CHIEF OF THE BUREAU OF STATISTICS, Treasury Depart- 
ment, for the Three Months ending March 31, 1886. Washington : Government Printing- 
Office. 1886. 

THE JUDGES OF FAITH : Christian vs. Godless Schools. By Thomas J. Jenkins. Baltimore : 
Murphy & Co. 1886. 

HENRY GRATTAN : A Historical Study. By John George MacCarthy. Third edition. Dub- 
lin : Hodges, Figgis & Co.; London : Simpkin, Marshall & Co. 1886. 

HISTORY OF THE IRISH PEOPLE. By W. A. O'Connor, B.A. Second edition. London: 
John Heywood. 1886. 

SKETCHES OF THE ROYAL IRISH CONSTABULARY. By Michael Brophy, ex-Sergt. R. I. C. 
London : Burns & Gates; New York : The Catholic Publication Society Co. 1886. 

TECHNIC. By Hugo L. Mansfeldt. San Francisco : A. Waldteufel. 

LAND LESSONS, IRISH PARLIAMENTS, AND CONSTITUTIONAL CRITICISMS. By Clio. Dublin : 
James Duffy & Sons. 1886. 

CATHOLIC ALMANAC, Archdiocese of St. Louis. 1886. 

MANUAL OF THE SODALITY. New York and Cincinnati : Fr. Pustet & Co. 1886. 

THE SODALITY MANUAL. Dublin;;: M. H. Gill & Son. 1886. 

GOLDEN SANDS. Translated from the French by Miss Ella McMahon. New York : Benziger 
Bros. 1886. 

PRECES ANTE ET POST MISSAM PRO OPPORTUNITATE SACERDOTIS DICENDA. New York 
and Cincinnati : Fr. Pustet & Co. 

A CATECHISM OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE. Prepared and enjoined by order of the Third Plen- 
ary Council of Baltimore. New York : Benziger Bros. 1886. 

RELIGION IN A COLLEGE: What place it should have. James McCosh, D.D., LL.D. New 
York : A. C. Armstrong. 1886. 

THE ALLEGED BULL OF POPE ADRIAN IV. A Lecture delivered by Rev. P. A. Yorke. 
Dublin : M. H. Gill & Son. 1886. 

SOCIETY OF ST. VINCENT DE PAUL. Report of Superior Council of New York to Genera} 
Council in Paris. New York : Donovan & Londrigan. 1886. 

LONDON OF TO-DAY : An Illustrated Handbook for the Season. By Chas. Eyre Pascoe. 
Boston : Roberts Bros. 1886. 

STUDIES IN MODERN SOCIALISM AND LABOR PROBLEMS. By T. Edward Brown, D.D. New 
York : D. Appleton & Co. 1886. 

A HYMNAL AND VESPERAL FOR THE SEASONS AND PRINCIPAL FESTIVALS OF THE ECCLESI- 
ASTICAL YEAR. With the approbation of the Most Rev. J. Gibbons, Archbishop of Balti- 
more. Baltimore : John'Murphy & Co. 1886. 

THE TIMES PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES FOR THE WEEK ENDING JUNE 12, 1886. London : 
George Edward Wright. Times Office, Printing House Square. 

WARD AND LOCK'S ILLUSTRATED GUIDE TO, AND POPULAR HISTORY OF, DUBLIN AND ITS 
NEIGHBORHOOD. London : Ward, Lock & Co. 1886. 

We have received from Cassell & Co. the following numbers of their National Library : 
POEMS, by George Crabbe. VOYAGES AND TRAVELS OF MARCO POLO. THE MERCHANT 
OF VENICE, by William Shakspere. HAMLET, by William Shakspere. PLUTARCH'S LIVES 
OF ALCIBIADES AND CORIOLANUS, ARISTIDES AND CATO THE CENSOR. SIR ROGER DE 

COVERLEY AND THE SPECTATOR'S CLUB. THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS, and Other short 

Pieces, by Jonathan Swift. RELIGIO MEDICI, by Sir Thomas Browne, M.D. NATURE 
AND ART, by Mrs. Inchbald. VOYAGERS' TALES FROM THE COLLECTION OF RICHARD 
HAKLUYT. ESSAYS by Abraham Cowley. It will be seen that this Library contains most 
excellent reading put into very cheap and very convenient little books. 



ERRATUM. In article " The Borgia Myth," on page 14, last 
line, for steeds read steers. 



THE 



CATHOLIC WORLD. 



VOL. XLIV. NOVEMBER, 1886. No. 260. 



RELIGION IN EDUCATION. 

ELEMENTS fraught with danger are entering American so- 
ciety and rendering the solution of the social problem extremely 
difficult. How shall those elements be treated so that strength 
may be found where weakness is feared, and support where dan- 
ger appears? How shall they be assimilated to the body politic 
and assist in the development of the ideas which underlie our 
structure of government. Socialism and anarchy may be driven 
beneath the surface by the severity of justice, but law alone 
cannot destroy Socialism nor answer its questions. Capital and 
labor, both powerful in organization, have grappled for the mas- 
tery, and the consequences of the struggle outreach any calcula- 
tion. How to reconcile them and save society is a very serious 
problem. The moral degradation, the disregard of God and duty, 
the increase of those crimes that destroy confidence in men, the 
spread of infidelity and its attendant evils, are forcing thoughtful 
men to look about them for means of salvation. Education of the 
masses at public expense has been placed in our plan of govern- 
ment as a panacea for all our social ills, the enemy of crime 
and of pauperism. In accordance with these ideas millions of 
dollars are annually spent upon buildings and in salaries, and the 
energy of the government is directed to the support of the free 
public schools. The results are such that men are beginning; 
to ask if the benefits compensate the outlay. Educators are 
finding defects in the system and are seeking for remedies. 
The Catholic Church, speaking for her own children, boldly. 

Copyright. Rev. I. T. HECKKR. 1886. 



146 RELIGION IN EDUCATION. [Nov., 

asserts that the defect is a radical one, and that the education, 
which is becoming entirely secular, lacks one of the essentials 
necessary for the complete development of manhood, without 
which no harmony can exist in society namely, religion. To 
ameliorate the social condition, to lift man up to virtue and 
keep him out of vice, to teach him his relations to his fellow-men, 
religion is necessary, and, for the Catholic, Catholicity. The 
church loudly proclaims that the world is fast dividing itself into 
the camps of Christianity and infidelity. Society's salvation is 
in Christianity ; it is inseparably connected with the Redemption 
effected by the Son of God. Society's manhood is hidden in the 
child, and the education which draws it forth and develops it 
must be impregnated with and informed by Christianity ; in a 
word, it must be Christian. All that can be said upon the abso- 
lute necessity of religion in education has been so often repeated 
that it seems foolish to recur to it again. The truth must be con- 
stantly told in order to repel falsehood, and the grounds upon 
which Catholics base their objections to the public schools need 
to be kept in view in order that non-Catholic Christians may 
finally accord us justice and sacrificing Catholics may be encour- 
aged to strain every nerve to supply the defects and save their 
children to the church and to God. 

Let us consider education in itself and then examine what 
religion has done for it. What is education ? What does it mean ? 
As the word itself implies, education is the drawing out, the de- 
velopment, the cultivation, the polishing of all the faculties 
of man, and the disposing of man to use these faculties for the 
best interests of man and society. It is a development of man's 
most generous instincts, an expansion of his most legitimate 
wants, a cultivation of his dispositions for good, a curbing of his 
inclinations for evil. Education makes or unmakes the man ; it 
is the mould in which his character is cast. Man has mind, 
intelligence; education trains the faculties of mind to grasp 
the truth. Man has heart ; education trains the faculties of the 
heart to cling to the true and the good. Man has a body, and 
education is to train the physical faculties to maintain a sound 
body as a necessity for a sound mind. Education, then, is the 
training of the entire man, soul and body. In a word, it gives to 
a man's whole nature its completeness and perfection, so that he 
may be what he ought to be and may do what he should do. 
How false, then, the theory of the education that devotes all 
attention to the mind and neglects the soul, forming intellectual 
.giants with depraved hearts ! 



1 886.] RELIGION IN EDUCATION. 147 

Where will education seek for the principles by which the 
heart will be developed in the virtues necessary to control the 
intelligence and guide its knowledge? We know that the source 
is religion, and religion finds its highest expression in Christianity. 
Whence have I come, whither am I going, why am I here? are 
questions of the soul. Education must answer them and assist 
man in working out the ends of his existence. Science and the 
world cannot answer satisfactorily. Christianity alone, which is 
the voice of God, tells man that he is from God and that his life 
should be spent in God's obedience. 

Man, then, demands that education assist him to work out his 
destiny ; that his faculties be trained to interweave in his life the 
two ideas of God and himself ; that he be led by his intelligence 
to know God, and by his heart to love God, and thus attain to 
the highest and best results of his manhood. 

All men have recognized this religious necessity in the educa- 
tion of youth. The pagan between the lines of his favorite 
authors read of the gods of Olympus. The Hebrew children 
were guided by the laws of Moses as the basis of education. 
Among them was the proverb that even the building of the 
temple should be suspended that the children might be educated 
in the law. The Mohammedans used the Koran, and the first 
Christians the books of the Gospel, as school-books ; the early 
settlers in these colonies recognized the necessity of religious 
schooling, as their church schools attest. Our theorists of to-day 
acknowledge its necessity, but they differ as to what religion 
means in this connection. Some consider it an abstract science 
which ought to be taught in the home, in the Sunday-school, in 
the church as if the knowledge of God had no place in public 
instruction, but was fit for certain^ places only ; others would 
make it that grain of spirituality given by a few moments of Bible 
reading, or by the moral influence of the Bible upon a teacher's 
desk ; others those broad principles of general morality which are 
pagan as well as Christian, and which teach a shallow and sense- 
less Deism. 

But with all this no consistent Christian can be satisfied. Re- 
ligion is not an abstract science confined within a limited and 
determined sphere, but a universal science, the science of sciences, 
to be found daily and hourly in the course of study, imparting a 
sweetness to all ; not found in one book but in every book, form- 
ing the heart of a child, correcting his young intelligence, develop- 
ing the trend of young dispositions ; in a word, showing him the 
true source of the beautiful, the good, and the true, finding God's 



148 RELIGION IN EDUCATION. [Nov., 

footprints everywhere in creation. It is the eye of all the sciences 
looking to the great end of all things the glory of God and the 
salvation of man. It is the source of public and private virtue. 
Law and order rest on the moving sand, if religion enter not 
into the character of the youth called upon to sustain them. 
Irreligion breeds a licentious manhood, disrespectful to legiti- 
mate authority, restless under law, shifting with every wind, and 
finally destructive of society. 

Religion tells education man's destiny ; it points out man's 
duties and man's wants; it opens up the field and guides the 
hand that cultivates. The child is a man in miniature, with 
soul and body made to God's image and likeness, destined for 
eternal happiness which is purchased by fidelity to God's laws. 
The child has a character to be formed ; that character must 
be Christian. He has an intellect which demands truth, a heart 
wanting to love truth, passions to be restrained, virtues to be 
developed. The child is clay in the potter's hand, wax ready 
for impressions. He is ready for the mould in which his man- 
hood is to be cast ; and as that manhood should be Christian, 
the mould must be Christian. The child must be fed on Chris- 
tian food, that he may be able to stand in presence of creation 
and interrogate men and things, know the world and its past, 
and build up for the future a social fabric of virtue by which 
he may be saved, and with him society. For the Christian child 
nature bears the imprint of God, and every force in nature 
ought to be made to bear with it some conception of the unseen 
power hidden under its veils. His great want is God, a know- 
ledge of God's laws and obedience to them, by which vice is 
eradicated, virtue inculcated ; by which he becomes an obedient 
child, a virtuous parent, an honest workman, a conscientious 
citizen. 

Government requires that its citizens be educated in their 
duties. Republics demand that they be able to read and write 
in order to exercise the franchise. But ever.y government needs, 
first of all, that its citizens be honest, good, pure. It needs that 
the masses be educated, but as Christians. It is useless to put 
tools in the hands of miners unless you give them means of dis- 
criminating the true metal from the base. Religion does this for 
man. Neglect religion in teaching youth, and what security for 
law, for life, for property? What avail guarantees? Duty and 
loyalty are high-sounding names, but vain, dead, if not arising 
from religion. Neglect religion and you forge links which time 
and chance will unite in producing revolutions which will upheave 



1 886.] RELIGION IN EDUCATION. 149 

society and finally destroy it. If you place keen weapons in a 
vicious man's hands you breed Catilines and Robespierres. 

Intellectual culture, even in its highest development, cannot 
subdue the passions nor enable a nation to attain its destiny. 
The sound mind requires a sound heart to preserve the na- 
tion from the passions of men. Greek and Roman masters 
are the models in modern education, but the arts and sciences 
did not save Greece and Rome when immorality invaded their 
homes. 

Our government needs patriotism, but patriotism founded 
upon morality. Authority, obedience, justice, are the virtues 
upon which a good government is built, and who can teach and 
sanction them except religion ? " Where are these citizens, these 
patriots, to be formed ? In the schools. If virtue, then, be essen- 
tial for good citizenship, if morality be necessary for true patriot- 
ism, and if morality and virtue find their teacher in Christianity 
and what Christian can consistently deny it ? how in the name 
of common sense exclude it from the school which is instituted 
to form it ? 

Religion in modern education is like a foreign language, 
studied or omitted at will. But it requires more than culture of 
mind to make morality ; it requires virtue, it requires Christian 
life, which will make a man love the government because God 
wills it, and not from any fear of dungeon or in accordance with 
theory or self-interest, prompting one thing to-day and another 
to-morrow. It is certain that Christian education alone can rear 
a people Christian. Education without Christianity will rear a 
people without Christianity, and a people s<3 educated will soon 
become anti-Christian. 

All this calls for Christian morality, and society for its own 
preservation must see that these virtues be taught, and public 
education which forms the members of society must incorporate 
in its teaching that which will supply this necessity. 

Leading minds in every age have recognized the necessity of 
religion as an essential factor in education. De Tocqueville, who 
understood our institutions as well as any man, recognized this 
when he wrote: 

" Where virtue and reason prevail the most popular form of government 
may exist without danger; where religion does not rule it is useless to pro- 
claim religious doctrine. You may talk of the people and their majesty, 
but where there is no respect for God, can there be much for man ? You 
may talk of the supremacy of the ballot, respect for order, denounce riot, 
secession ; unless religion be the first link all is vain." 



150 RELIGION IN EDUCATION. [Nov., 

And Bonaparte, that great reader of men and society, ex- 
claimed that "society without religion is like a ship without a 
compass, uncertain as to whither it is going." 

Plato, who reasoned so well, said that " ignorance of the true 
God was the greatest pest of all republics." 

And Robespierre, a short time before execution, was forced by 
truth to utter: "The Republic can only be established upon the 
eternal basis of morality." 

Public education which moulds society, which builds the re- 
public, must be based upon religion in order to found a republic 
upon morality. Statesmen have recognized this. 

Ex-Governor Clifford said : " Moral culture and discipline 
ought to be an essential part of every system of school edu- 
cation." 

President Seelye has said : 

" It is not the illiteracy of any people, but their immorality, it is not 
their knowledge but theirvirtue, on which either their destruction or their 
salvation hinges. But the morality of a people is not secured by teaching 
them moral precepts. Men are not made virtuous by instruction in virtue. 
We have yet to see a moral renovation of society accomplished by the 
teaching of morality, however pure. Without a question the great moral 
reformations of society have been wrought by religion." 

Guizot, the great French Protestant historian, has said : 

"In order to make education truly good and socially useful it must be 
fundamentally religious ; national education must be given and received in 
the midst of an atmosphere religious. Religion is not a study or an exer- 
cise to be restricted to a certain place or hour. It is a faith and a law 
which ought to be felt*everywhere." 

Disraeli, the English prime minister, said : 

" I am not disposed to believe that there is any existing government 
that can long prevail founded on the neglect to supply or regulate reli- 
gious instruction of the people.'' 

Derby, a leading statesman of Great Britain, said : " Public 
education should be considered as inseparable with religion." 

Gladstone, the great leader of the English Commons, said : 
" Every system which places religious education in the back- 
ground is pernicious." 

Huxley, the leader of English infidelity, said: "If I am a 
knave or a fool, reading or writing will not make me less so." 

Horace Mann, the great patron of common schools, said : 

" If the intellect, however gifted, be not guided by a sense of justice, a 
love of mankind, and a devotion to duty, its possessor is only a more splen- 



[886.] RELIGION IN EDUCATION. 151 

did as he is a more dangerous barbarian. We are fully persuaded that the 
salt of religious truth can alone preserve education from abuse." 

In the Church Quarterly Review of July, 1881, are these words: 

"The ignorance of the three R's is not the cause of crime. The real 
cause is our depraved nature our anger, greed, lust; and these will break 
out into crime under favorable circumstances, both among the literate and 
illiterate, unless they are brought into subjection by religious training." 

Men, then, are agreed; government demands; society, the 
family, the child, the soul, all cry out for religion as the basis, 
the life of every system of public education. And, for the Chris- 
tian, religion means Christianity ; and for the Catholic, Chris- 
tianity means Catholicity. 

There are men who will ask if this does not mean to go back 
to ignorance and the darkness of the middle ages. We answer 
that in those days there may have been ignorance of science, but 
men knew God. Better the ignorance of science with a know- 
ledge of God than the ignorance of God with a knowledge of 
science. Better the faith of the middle ages, with all their ig- 
norance, than the enlightenment of to-day with its denial of 
God. St. John Chrysostom says: "Learning is of relatively 
small value in compaTison with integrity of soul. We must not 
give up literature, but we must not kill the soul." 

Those men who fear religion in education forget that truth is 
not darkness, Christianity is not ignorance, and that when we 
clamor for religion in education we are calling for true know- 
ledge, for that true light which enlightens every man coming 
into this world ; we clamor for the torch to guide our footsteps 
through the mazes of science ; we are seeking for a staff to sup- 
port our limbs ; we are demanding manna to strengthen our souls 
in the desert of life. 

We simply ask that Christ be in our life, and especially in the 
school, where character is formed. We ask that Christ be in our 
life to teach us morality. 

The most glowing pages of history are those that tell of the 
labor of religion in education. In the beginning of the Christian 
era Christianity had to contend with the paganism of the tyrant 
emperors, and in education it had the schools of the empire to 
battle against. 

In the days of St. Mark, in Alexandria, under the shadow of 
the bishop's cathedral the first Christian schools were estab- 
lished. Entering Alexandria he found the classics of Greece 
and Rome in the schools, the science of numbers from Egypt, 
the Hebrew scriptures translated into Greek because of the 



152 RELIGION IN EDUCATION. [Nov. 

beauties contained therein. He brought to the schools the 
books of the Gospels, the traditions of St. Peter and St. Paul, the 
Apostles' Creed which contained more true philosophy than all 
the books of Greek and Roman sages and the chant of the 
church ; and these were the first class-books of the Christian 
schools. Clement, Origen, Tertullian are the names of some of 
the great masters of those early Christian schools, where the lite- 
rature of the pagans was studied side by side with the literature 
of Christianity. As we look back to those schools can we won- 
der that the young Christian student found the story of Ovid and 
the Golden Age insipid when compared with the glowing image- 
ry of the prophets painting the kingdom of the Son of Jesse, the 
Saviour of man ? 

Can we wonder that the Christian student laid aside the 
sweetly-flowing verses of Horace and Virgil, and the elegant 
periods of Tacitus, and the glowing story of the gods, to fill his 
heart with the sweet lessons of the Incarnate Word, the God 
made man ? During the first three centuries schools were estab- 
lished at Jerusalem, Edessa, Ephesus, Smyrna, and Antioch. 
These were the beginning of the episcopal seminaries, where 
the young clerics were taught the liberal arts and the science 
of theology. In those days there were also the priests' schools, 
established in each parish under the charge of the parish priest, 
where the children of the poor received their education free. 
The Council of Vaison in 528 obliged pastors to found such 
schools, and to this may be traced the origin of parochial schools. 
Then came the monastic system, which trained the monks, like 
bees, to cull the honey from the flowers of literature and store 
it for future generations. Prominent in that system were the 
Benedictines in 552, the source of the schools of the middle 
ages. The monastery had its interior schools, where the subjects 
of the order were instructed ; its exterior schools, where the 
poor children of the neighborhood received not only their edu- 
cation gratuitously, but were even fed and clothed'. And yet 
men talk of free schools as an institution of this age of ours. 

" The praise of having originally established schools," says 
Hallam, " belongs to some abbots and bishops of the sixth cen- 
tury." Anglo-Saxon records tell of Theodoric, Archbishop of 
Canterbury, sent by the pope in 668 to propagate schools in the 
Anglo-Saxon church. In the beginning of the eighth century 
we find the schools of England under Egbert remarkable for art 
and science. In council at Aix-la-Chapelle in 789 bishops were 
commanded to establish free public schools. The Third General 



1 886.] RELIGION IN EDUCATION. 153 

Lateran Council, 11/9, renewed the order. In. Rome, in 1078, a 
school of liberal arts was placed beside every episcopal school. 
Through the " dark ages " every bishop had his seminary, every 
monastery its exterior school, every priest obliged to sustain free 
parochial schools, as we may see from the Synod of Mentz in 
800, Council of Rome, in 836, and Lateran Council in 1178. In 
1245 the General Council of Lyons spoke of it. In the eleventh 
century the monastic system began to decay, scholasticism arose, 
and with it arose the universities of Paris, Padua, Salamanca, 
Bologna, Oxford. Here it is good to remember that Huber, a 
Protestant, has said : 

" Most of the Continental universities originated in entire dependence 
on the church. This new intellectual impulse sprang up not only on the 
domain and under the guidance but out of ecclesiastical schools." Ranke 
adds : " A sure and unbroken progress of intellectual culture had been 
going on in the bosom of the Catholic Church for a series of ages. The 
vital and productive elements of human culture were here mingled and 
united." 

No man can justly dispute the claims of Christianity and re- 
member, Christianity was then the Catholic Church to the edu- 
cation and civilization of Europe, even that of the barbaric hordes 
who swept across the Continent. No scholar can ignore the 
popes who during all these long ages were the nursing fathers of 
Christian science, whether in maintaining free schools for the 
poor or in establishing and supporting the universities ; sending 
an Augustine to the Angles, a Patrick and a Palladius to Erin, a 
Boniface to Germany, a Cyril and a Methodius to the Slavs. 

We may be pardoned for alluding in a special manner to the 
work of the church in Catholic Ireland when the Green Isle was 
the land of schools and scholars, " the refuge of civilization and 
literature learned Ireland," as Usher says. St. Patrick estab- 
lished a university at Armagh, which in the ninth century had 
over seven thousand students, representing all the countries of 
Europe. St. Finian taught at Clonard, " whence issued," says 
Usher, " a stream of saints and doctors like Greek warriors from 
the wooden horse at Troy." The church of Ireland during the 
sixth and seventh centuries was the leader in education. No 
country at that period could boast of such pious foundations or of 
religious communities for education equal to what adorned that 
land. When the rest of Europe was in barbarism Armagh, Clon- 
macnoise, Clonard, and Lismore had their masters of philosophy 
and sacred science, whose learning had passed into a proverb. 



154 RELIGION IN EDUCATION. [Nov., 

The Irish schools sent forth their scholars to civilize Saxon and 
Teuton and Gaul, and teach them their letters. Camdeu says : 
" Moved by the example of our fathers for a love of reading, we 
went to the Irish, renowned for their philosophy." These were 
the glories of her learning in the days when Ireland was free. 

And these are but fragments of the work of the Christian 
Church in education. What might be said of the epochs of 
Bede, of Alcuin, of Alfred the Great, of Charlemagne, of Leo X., 
Gregory the Great, Benedict XIV., and Louis XIV.? They 
stand forth in letters of gold to give the lie to any man who 
would assert that true science has anything to fear from religion. 
They cry out that Christianity has developed the Christian idea 
in man, that it has been an active principle permeating every 
walk in life, individual, social, and national; that it has pro- 
duced an atmosphere of faith, moulding simple, strong, and able 
characters ; that it preserved the literature of the ancients, and 
clothed art, sculpture, painting, and architecture with immortal 
glory ; that it has laid stone upon stone in those universities and 
schools which made the cities in which they were, and which re- 
peat in undying tones: Christianity built us, and we have edu- 
cated the world ! 

Theorists of to-day would have us forget the past, divorce re- 
ligion from science, and give us, instead of Christian schools, their 
methods for secular education. Greece and Rome tried that 
system, and the republics are long since in ruins. Secular educa- 
tion made men mere machines of the state, mere nationalists, 
and when the crisis came the social structure had no morality 
to sustain it ; its eloquence, art, and philosophy all failed, and 
Greece and Rome fell, leaving the lesson that science is not 
morality, that mind-culture alone "leads to bewilder and dazzles 
to blind," that religion alone can save the state. Secular educa- 
tion, as it is called, has had time even with us to prove itself, and 
what is the result ? Are our citizens better ? Is virtue more 
prevalent? Does vice find no place in public life? The crimes 
that cover the columns of our daily papers are the crimes of 
educated men, not those of ignorance. The disregard of au- 
thority, parental and national; the tendency to deny God's exis- 
tence, to scoff at his sacred revelation ; the infidelity, communism, 
and socialism of the age ; the lack of reverence for all that has 
been considered sacred ; the immorality of society, that might 
shame a Sodom and Gomorrah these are the fruits of secular 
education, of education divorced from religion. 

Secular education has made religion an abstract science and 



1 886.] RELIGION IN ED UCA TION. 1 5 5 

left it to chance. It has reduced science to abject materialism. 
It has taught the lives of statesmen, of warriors, of men of fame, 
but has omitted to tell the heroism and virtues of the Christian 
martyrs and saints, and has spoken of the great Redeemer, 
Christ, as an ordinary hero. It has sent into society a discon- 
tented and grasping youth who think that shrewdness is per- 
fection, that material prosperity is the end of life ; averse to 
manly labor, ready to sit in judgment upon everything and 
everybody, even God himself; creating shallow, conceited scep- 
tics, more learned in law than the judges, more theological than 
the theologians ; hating restraint, disregarding parental authori- 
ty, and becoming in so many cases the masters of intellectual 
vices. And yet they have had the Sunday-school, the home, and 
pulpit influences, and these are the results. 

Secular education cannot be neutral it will at least make 
men indifferent ; and religion is a thing too important to have 
men indifferent about it. Indifference leads to irreligion, and 
how can we, who believe religion to be our life, accept it? 
Men who love Christianity and fear God may well shudder at 
the future of society if the theories of scientists are to be allowed 
to drive religion from our education. 

To the Catholic education is a question of principle as to the 
union of religion and science in public instruction. His guide 
in faith and in life is the old Catholic Church which, amid the 
revilings of centuries, still asser.ts the doctrine of Jesus Christ 
that man is from God and for God ; that the best citizen for a 
state is the man who is faithful to his God, whose morality is not 
only exterior but interior; who obeys authority, not for self, 
ambition, or fear of punishment, but because it comes from God. 
She asserts that her children need more than secular knowledge, 
and she warns educators against the fallacies that strip their 
vocation of its usefulness by removing it from the refining in- 
fluences of Christianity. 

Conscience is our imperative monitor, and conscience tells us 
that knowledge of the sciences with ignorance of God and of the 
soul is a curse and not a blessing; that as our forefathers, the 
early Christians under the Roman emperors, gladly gave their 
lives rather than sacrifice to false gods, so we will gladly make 
all sacrifices necessary to preserve the inheritance of their faith ; 
that as our fathers, under English monarchs, proudly refused the 
food and clothing, ay, and the life, offered rather than yield, so 
we will be true to our religion, which can alone make true men 
of us. 



1 56 RELIGION IN EDUCATION. [Nov., 

How much longer will Christians be deceived by the idea that 
a republic of freemen necessarily depends upon one mould in 
which all its character must be formed, and that that mould is 
the public-school system, which excludes religion, and which 
must not be opposed under the penalty of treason to American 
institutions? What the republic needs is men, and the education 
that develops the best manhood is its best friend : 

" What constitutes a state ? 
Not high-raised battlement or labored mound, 

Thick wall or moated gate ; 
Not cities proud, nor spires and turrets crowned : 

No! men, high-minded men ; 

Men who their duties know, 
But know their rights, and, knowing, dare maintain : 

These constitute a state." 

The strength of manhood is in virtue which springs from faith 
in Christ, whose maxims are to guide in the development of true 
character. Christianity is divinely commissioned to teach all 
nations, and insists that the child be taught according to the 
Gospel. 

Religious men and women, consecrated to education, receive 
the blessing of Mother Church, and teach science and literature in 
an atmosphere of religion in the church schools. America need 
never fear those schools. They are not rivals but co-workers in 
the education of the people. Patriotism is taught there side by 
side with the Commandments of God. Inseparably intertwined 
are country and God. Love of America and her republican in- 
stitutions is inculcated from the first primer lesson. In times 
past Catholic valor was not wanting when the freeman's blood 
was demanded that the country might live. When the crisis 
comes and it comes to every country no stronger power will 
be ready to sustain the people than that springing from schools 
where men are taught to be virtuous and upright according to 
the Gospel of Christ. To socialism, anarchy, the tyranny of 
capital, and the cry of oppressed labor the Catholic Church 
answers with the teachings of her divine Founder, which alone 
can regulate society and save it from ruin ; and she demands 
that society, in justice to itself, educate her children at least 
in those saving precepts. 



i886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 157 

A FAIR EMIGRANT. 

CHAPTER VI. 
AFLOAT. 

" I WAS a madman to let her go," muttered the doctor, taking 
off his hat and wiping his troubled brow. " I ought to have had 
her committed to a lunatic asylum first." 

" I don't see how you could, dear," said his mild, literal wife, 
" as she is not mad. People would have thought you were plot- 
ting for her money." 

The doctor groaned. " There is no help for spilt milk," he 
said. " So wilful though so sweet a specimen of womankind I 
never knew. She has turned me round her finger like a skein of 
worsted. God send it may not yet be the breaking of our 
hearts ; for if anything happens amiss to Bawn we can never 
hold up our heads again." 

That triumphant young woman, having looked her last 
through tears at her receding native shores, had now seated her- 
self in a convenient nook on deck with her face oceanwards, and 
was regarding the boundless, glistening vista before her with a 
strange and solemn delight. It was her first introduction to the 
sea. Most of us behold that great wonder first from afar off, 
then we make acquaintance with it piecemeal ; some blue, sand- 
skirted bay becomes dear to us, or we learn to worship it from 
purple clad cliffs, with the gulls riding on the green waves be- 
neath at our feet. But Bawn had suddenly been lifted from her 
forests and prairies, and flung, dazzled and amazed, upon this il- 
limitable world of waters. As the view became wider and the 
ocean became more and more a living, all-absorbing presence 
to her mind, regret, courage, hope, loneliness, confidence, all of 
which had been shaking her and inspiring her by turns, alike 
vanished and were forgotten, and she sat breathing in long, deep 
draughts of salt air and delight, enjoying her young existence 
with the joy that is the inheritance of sea-birds. 

She had planted herself in a corner, so that her back was to 
the other passengers on board, whose tramp, tramp as they took 
their walk up and down the deck, and the occasional sound of 
whose voices, fell on her ear but did not disturb her privacy. 



158 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Nov., 

She was right in the front of the vessel, all her being going will- 
ingly forward with it, her face set outward towards the horizon 
of sea and sky behind which lay the secrets she had tasked her- 
self to penetrate and the lands she had never seen. The books 
with which the doctor had supplied her were untouched. Who 
could read in a world of such ever-shifting, ever-shimmering 
enchantment? Leaning well forward, her firm, white chin set 
in the pink hollow of her hand, she let the hours go by without 
once turning her head to see how it fared with the humanity 
behind her. The only person who for a minute engaged her 
notice during those first morning hours was a man who had got 
further even than herself into the very end of the vessel, and, 
mounted on a heap of ropes, gazed for some time out seaward 
through a glass. She observed that it was a straight, well-built 
figure, and that the profile had a clean-cut outline. Long before 
he had done gazing through his glass Bawn had forgotten him 
and was again looking out, out far, with fascinated eyes at the 
glittering, ever-shifting boundary lines of the realms of light 
towards which the great heart of the steamer was straining and 
panting. As he turned to spring from his vantage-ground of 
coiled ropes the man glanced towards the figure that had sat so 
persistently motionless during all the first hours of the voyage 
hours when people are generally so full of fidgets and so eagerly 
speculating on the chances of desirable acquaintance among fel- 
low-passengers. Evidently this person, young or old (her back 
had looked young, though muffled in a shepherd's plaid scarf 
and broad-brimmed black straw hat), desired to become acquaint- 
ed with no one, for she deliberately set her face from all. It was 
not for the purpose of seeing what that face was like that he had 
scaled the height of the rope-heap, but, having glanced at it once, 
he stopped a moment, gazing, and then, though she had not been 
conscious of him at alt, involuntarily lifted his hat before he 
sprang lightly back on the deck. 

At evening he noticed her again, thinking : " I wonder how 
much longer that girl will be able to sit still? Will she keep in 
that one position for eight or nine days to come ? " 

On the instant the wind carried off her hat and a quick hand 
caught it, and Bawn stood facing her fellow-traveller sooner than 
he had expected, her smooth gold head laid bare, its locks ruffled 
with the breeze, and her fair cheeks dyed a rich damask, partly 
with surprise, partly from the flame-colored reflections in the air. 

" Thank you greatly," she said with unaffected gratitude, re- 
ceiving her hat from his hands. 



1 8 86.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 159 

" You must take better care of it." 

" Yes ; if it had gone what should I have done ? I have not 
another," said Bawn gravely, and then smiled as the image of 
herself sitting on deck hatless for the rest of the journey rose be- 
fore her. 

" I shall tie a string to it for you. On board ship and on the 
top of a mountain there is nothing else of use. Allow me. I 
know the right place to fasten it," taking the hat from her 
hand. 

" I have never been at sea before," said Bawn, " and so I 
could not know." 

Bawn was standing in the red glow of the sun, heavenly fire 
in her gray eyes, her face gleaming in cool tones against the 
rose-dusk of the sky, like that of some fair saint set in an old 
jewelled window. Her new acquaintance was not observing her, 
busied with his good-natured exertions. 

" There ! " he said, lifting his glance, "that will ' He stop- 
ped short, gazing at her in surprise. 

" Good heavens, how beautiful ! And who sent her off to 
cross the ocean alone ? " 

" That will hold," he went on quickly, as Bawn took the hat 
and put it on her head, suddenly remembering that she had re- 
solved to make acquaintance with nobody, and had been spe- 
cially counselled to keep young men at a distance. 

" They will always be wanting to do things for you, my 
dear," good Mrs. Ackroyd had said ; " but if you allow them it 
will end by their getting in your way, so that you won't know 
how to get rid of them." And Bawn, thinking with a shudder 
of Jeanne's cousin Henri, the only young man she had ever 
come much in contact with, had believed she should find it very 
easy indeed to prevent them from coming within miles of her. 
But this person was not like cousin Henri. 

She made her hat fast, and with a great effort checked the 
pleasant, sociable feeling that had been growing on her, threaten- 
ing to loosen her tongue and make her feel at home with this 
stranger. 

" I am greatly obliged to you," she said in a voice that sound- 
ed suddenly cold, and then, making him a bow the manner of 
which was never learned on the prairie and must have come to 
her by inheritance, like the sheen on her hair, she withdrew into 
the shelter of her corner again and resumed her old attitude of 
solitary reserve. 

He felt his dismissal to be a little abrupt, and yet, continuing 



160 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Nov., 

his walk about the deck as if nothing had happened, the man 
was noway displeased at it. 

" What a brute I was to stare at her like that ! " he reflected. 
" If I had seen another fellow do it I should have knocked him 
down. Had she not curled herself up in her corner after it I 
should no longer feel an interest in her. I wonder how long it 
will be before she allows me to speak to her again ? " 

The next morning, before going on deck, Bawn provided her- 
self with books and some knitting. Her chief desire at present 
was to pass unnoticed and unquestioned on the voyage, as there 
was danger to be dreaded from even the most harmless inter- 
course. Some one might come to identify her as her father's 
daughter, and make her known to some other who might pro- 
bably cross her future path in that yet unknown region towards 
which she was so eagerly travelling. She thought of her friend 
of the evening before, and decided that to no one's curiosity 
would she make the slightest concession, beyond a statement of 
the fact that she was a farmer's daughter from Minnesota and 
alone in the world. The man was a gentleman and would hardly 
ask questions; but things leak out in conversation, and she knew 
herself well enough to be aware that the most difficult part of the 
task she had assumed would be the concealment it was bound to 
entail. For though she owed no confidence to any one, it is so 
much more pleasant to be frank. 

She had scarcely got the needles arranged in her knitting be- 
fore she perceived that one of the many pairs of passing feet had 
stopped beside her, and there was her friend of the evening be- 
fore, cap in hand, regarding her with as much deference as if she 
had been a queen. 

" It is cold to-day, and it is going to be colder. Will you 
allow me to open your rugs and make you a little more comfort- 
able?" 

Bawn looked at him kindly, and for a moment was so incon- 
sistent as to be glad to hear any voice breaking on her solitude ; 
but the next she remembered that here was a possible enemy, 
who, after some time, if he got encouragement, might, voluntarily 
or involuntarily, become aware of her identity. Before she had 
had time to make up her mind whether to repulse him or not he 
was stooping over her rugs and shaking them out. " You had 
better take this chair," he said, bringing one forward. " You 
will soon get tired of your camp-stool." 

Spreading a rug over the chair, he bade her sit on it, and 
wrapped the warm woollen stuff about her feet. All this was 



1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 161 

done so quickly and easily that she felt dismayed to observe how 
soon her power of keeping people at a distance had deserted her, 
another person's power of service having put it to rout. Prying 
and officiousness she had prepared herself to deal with, but genu- 
ine good-nature is not easy to repulse. Feeling at once the im- 
provement in her condition, she felt bound to admit it with 
thanks. 

" I am glad you have books," he continued, picking them up 
to place them beside her. The Count of Monte-Christo and Hia- 
watha were two of the volumes bought almost at random by Dr. 
Ackroyd at the book-stall. " Hiawatha ah ! I meant to have gone 
out to that country, had not business called me home sooner than 
I expected. Have you read the poem, or do you know the 
Dakota country ? " 

Bawn bit her lip. She had a strong misgiving that farmers' 
daughters of the class to which she wished to belong did not 
read poetry, yet how could she deny her acquaintance with the 
poem, every word of which had been read to her by her father 
lying under the forest-trees? 

" My home was in Minnesota,'' she said, "and I have seen the 
Falls of Minnehaha ; and yes, I know Hiawatha pretty well." 

The words came forth reluctantly. How lamentably she was 
breaking down at the very beginning in the acting of her part! 
Should she ever learn to conceal or evade the truth? But the 
stranger was not thinking of her, but of the book. 

" I read it long ago," he said, " and everything concerning the 
Indians always possessed an interest for me. I must read it up 
again. Have you any objection to hear a little of it now while 
you work ? '' 

Bawn breathed a silent sigh and pricked her finger. Was 
this man going to make her acquaintance in spite of herself? 
Oh ! if he were only like cousin Henri, how easily she could 
snub him ; but, as it was, she could not think of any form of denial 
which would not seem like downright rudeness on her part in 
return for his politeness. 

" Do not let me fatigue you," she said, making one great effort 
to discourage him, but he only answered, smiling : 

" It will be a new kind of fatigue, that will savor of rest. 
My limbs have been well exercised of late, my tongue not at all. 
If I do not bore you 

" No," said Bawn with unwilling truth, and keeping her eyes 
on her work. 

" If I do not look at him at all," she thought, "perhaps there. 
VOL. XLIV. ii 



162 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Nov., 

will be less danger of his remembering afterwards what I am 
like." 

The reading began. An earnest, deep-toned voice took up 
the rhythm of the poem and gave forth the words as if they 
were set to music, and a mist came over the listener's eyes as the 
sound of the familiar lines awakened painful memories in her 
heart. She had wanted to forget everything but the future; and 
was this a good or an evil spirit that had crossed her path and 
baffled her intentions? Sometimes she missed the sense of what 
was read while enjoying the melody of the voice and the pure 
intonation of the words, uttered with an accent a little foreign 
to her ears. Of course he was a foreigner. Had he not spoken 
of being called home on business ? The certainty of this brought 
a feeling of relief to the girl as she listened. If he was only an 
Englishman returning from a trip to New York, not having been 
as far as Minnesota, never having met with or heard of her or 
hers while on American soil, what reason had she to imagine 
that discovery of her identity by those from whom she wished 
to conceal it could ever overtake her through his agency ? 
None, if she could only be wise and control her too candid 
tongue. Whatsoever she represented herself to be, as that and 
nothing else must he accept her. Considering this and the ex- 
treme unlikelihood that, having parted on reaching Great Bri- 
tain, they should ever meet again, Bawn felt the anxious strain 
upon her mind relax and her heart rise high within her. She 
raised her eyes fearlessly, and for the first time took accurate 
note of her companion's appearance. The blue cloth cap which 
had replaced the hat he had worn last evening was pushed back 
a little, showing the whole of a broad forehead, the upper half of 
which looked white above the sun-tanned brownness of the rest 
of the face. His crisp, dark hair would have been curly if not 
so closely cut, and he wore a thick brown beard that did not 
hide a somewhat large and sensible mouth. His eyes were deep- 
-set under strong brows, and almost sombre in color, though 
readily emitting flashes of fun. It was altogether a practical 
and keenly sympathetic face, with humor lurking in all its little 
curves. Just now a slight languor, expressive of his enjoyment 
of the rest he had spoken of as desired by him, lent him a charac- 
ter not always his own. Seeing that her observation was unno- 
ticed, Bawn studied him with care for some moments and made 
up her mind that he was worthy of her interest. A pleasant 
and most unwonted feeling of the suitability of their companion- 
:ship grew on her, and as she plied her needles she glanced at 



1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 163 

him again. This time his eyes met her stolen investigating 
glance. 

" Minnehaha, Laughing Water, 
Loveliest of Dakota maideits," 

he was saying as he raised his dark eyes to take an equally stolen 
and investigating glance at his silent and industrious auditress. 
She said she had come from the Dakota country, she had stood 
beside the Falls of Minnehaha; and some analogy between the 
fair face that looked up at times and out to sea beyond him with 
an expression in the wide, gray eyes that he could not fathom, 
some fancied resemblance between this present maiden and the 
Laughing Water of. the woods and prairies, had doubtless oc- 
curred to his mind and caused him to glance at her, unexpectedly 
meeting her gaze. 

Bawn, aware of all the cool observation that had been in .her 
own gaze, reddened, and said quickly : " I have been thinking." 

" Yes?" said her companion, glancing away, planting himself 
more firmly on his elbow, and speaking in the most matter-of-fact 
voice. " So was I. You were going to tell me " 

" Nothing." 

" I beg your pardon. Look! Did you ever see anything so 
marvellous as the sun on the wings of yonder flight of birds ? " 

" Wonderful ! " said Bawn, shading her eyes with her fair 
hand, not yet browned and reddened by farming labors as she 
could have wished it to appear. " How fast they go ! They 
will be there long before us." 

"There? Where?" 

" Oh ! anywhere. Great Britain, I suppose." She was un- 
willing to name Ireland, lest in the very tone of her voice as 
she pronounced the word he should hear her whole history. 

" Are you so very anxious to have the journey over ? " 

" Yes," said Bawn, fervently wishing she could fly after those 
birds and reach her destination at once, escaping perilous t$te-a 
t$tes with strange and possibly inquisitive people. 

" I do not feel at all impatient," said her friend with the blue 
cap ; " though, if I were properly alive to consequences, I ought 
to be, for I am bound to be in London on the morning of the 
eighth day from this." 

" Why, then, not have sailed on an earlier date 
yourself more time? " 

" Why not, indeed, except that Fate plays us curij 
I thought to have done so, but, owing to an accident 




164 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Nov. 

at New York in great haste only at the last moment before this 
steamer sailed. However, I am of a philosophic turn of mind, 
and I said to myself, ' I will take this disappointment as a stroke 
of good luck. Who -knows what may turn up on the way to 
make glad that I was disappointed ? ' ' 

A satisfied smile brightened on his face as he spoke, and, 
though he was looking out to sea and not at her, Bawn felt that 
he meant to conyey that he was already grown pleased with the 
existing state of things, and, partly at least, because he had found 
a companion in her. She could not reflect his contentment. 
Why need his voyage have been inconveniently delayed only, it 
would seem, for the purpose of embarrassing her? 

One grain of comfort she did extract from his statement, how- 
ever. " He is not Irish, at all events," she thought, " and, once I 
land in Queenstown, will, in all human probability, never cross 
my. path again." Reflecting on this, she unbent her fair brows 
a little and consented to become a trifle more friendly. 



CHAPTER VII. 
ACQUAINTANCES. 

WHEN tying awake in her berth that night Bawn, reflecting 
on the swiftness and pleasantness with which her day had flown 
by in the society of the person in the blue cap, acknowledged to 
herself that she had very foolishly departed from her original 
plan of making acquaintance with no one on board, allowing no 
one to intrude upon her privacy. She was running a great risk 
in permitting herself a friendly intercourse with this individual. 
True, she had been very careful, had given him no clue to her 
identity. He did not know her name not even the name she 
had chosen to bear during her stay in Ireland and she now 
made a firm resolve that she would not betray it to him. He 
had certainly not shown any curiosity, though on one occasion 
she fancied he had given her an opening to mention her name, 
possibly wishing to know it as a matter of convenience. She was 
well aware that she had passed over the opportunity, and that he 
had noticed it, and it hurt her that she had been forced to be so 
secretive. But then had she not entered on a course which 
would .necessitate the utmost secretiveness ? Bawn sighed as 
/"'/she thought of how ill she was in this respect fitted by nature 
( . ta play the part she had undertaken, but reflected that she must 

J ' 



1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 165 

make up by determination for what she lacked in other ways. 
In arranging her plans she had never calculated on the likelihood 
of her caring much for what others might think of her, being 
fully persuaded that the loneliness and singleness of her own 
purpose would be sufficient to carry her through every difficulty. 
And now already she winced because she had not been able to be 
perfectly frank with an acquaintance of forty-eight hours. 

" Well," she thought, " the only way to avert this danger is to 
keep him at a distance. It will be but a matter of a few days. 
To-morrow I must begin by staying away from deck all day." 

And, having settled the affair in this way, she slept pro- 
foundly. 

When the morrow arrived it was hard to keep to so unplea- 
sant a line of conduct as that on which she had decided. The 
sun shone, the breeze was pleasant. Down-stairs she felt in 
prison, but still she stayed below in the places inaccessible to 
gentlemen. She appeared at table in her place beside the cap- 
tain, and at lunch her friend of the blue cap hoped she had not 
been ill, and told her how delightful it was on deck to-day. 
Bawn was obliged to admit that she was not ill, but stated her 
intention of resting in the ladies' cabin all day. Her friend 
looked surprised. 

" You are not ill now," he said. " I never saw any one look 
more healthy, more undisturbed by the sea. But if you begin to 
stay down-stairs you will make yourself ill." 

" I hope not," said Bawn serenely, and passed into the prison 
to which she had condemned herself. 

The day passed wearily. All the unpleasantnesses of the 
sea now forced themselves upon her. Her companions were sick 
or unmanageable children who could not be trusted long on deck, 
and a few of those women who, no matter how good the passage, 
are always grievously ill on a voyage. She tried to pass the 
time by making herself useful and agreeable, but when evening 
came she felt jaded and depressed for want of the abundance of 
fresh air to which she had been always accustomed. As soon as 
it was quite dusk she concluded that she must breathe freely for a 
little while before settling to rest for the night, and went boldly 
up on deck. 

It is too late for Hiawatha, at any rate, she thought, as she 
leaned over the ship's side and rejoiced in her freedom. The 
stars crept out one by one, the phosphor-tracks gleamed on the 
water, the breeze was wild and fresh, and the watery world 
boundless around her. Her heart widened within her, and her 



1 66 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Nov. 

nervous little fears took to themselves wings and flitted away 
into the night. How foolish she had been to feel afraid of any 
creature ! A certain power within her that power of heart and 
brain which gave her temper its buoyancy and strength had 
been suffering cramp all day, and now recovered its vigor, so 
that she was able to turn with a quiet smile on hearing the now 
well-known and importunate voice at her side. 

" I ask your pardon," said the Blue Cap, "'for trying to inter- 
fere with your good resolves this morning. I had no idea you 
were sacrificing yourself for the benefit of others. I heard one 
lady singing your praises to another just now, telling how you 
had been acting as a sister of mercy all day." 

" I did not stay for the sake of others, I am sorry to say," she 
answered quickly ; " I was thinking only of myself." 

" I fear I bored you yesterday with Hiawatha" said the Blue 
Cap. His tone was penitent, but Bawn's quick ear detected a 
something which suggested that there was a sly gleam of humor 
in his eyes as he spoke. It seemed that she was making matters 
worse. Not having been clever enough to pretend to be ill, nor 
} r et to allow it to be supposed that charity towards the sick had 
altogether influenced her, she had led him to suspect the truth 
and to imagine himself formidable enough to frighten her out of 
his presence. 

"No," she answered, "you did not bore me," thinking how 
very much pleasanter yesterday had been than to-day, and of how 
ungrateful she certainly was. 

" Thank you. After that I may venture to ask you to take a 
turn up and down the deck. A little exercise before sleeping will 
be quite as good as a little air." 

" I dare say it will," said Bawn readily, and, feeling as if she 
was making some amends for her bad treatment of a friend, she 
accepted his arm and threaded with him the groups of other 
peripatetics, feeling unaccountably at home with this stranger in 
the crowd. 

" How clear the stars are to-night ! " he said. " That is one of 
the best things about being at sea, one gets such a fine view of 
them all round ; and if one only had a powerful telescope " 

" Yes," said Bawn gladly, " how I wish we had !" And by the 
sound of her voice her companion knew that his choice of a sub- 
ject of conversation was a lucky one. It had not been made 
without deliberation, and had been selected among others that 
occurred to his mind as being furthest off from this world of 
cares and dangers, secrets and sorrows, and less likely to scare 



1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 167 

away his reticent fellow-traveller from his side. That this lonely 
girl, with the frank, true eyes, had some good reason for wishing 
to keep her own counsel and to pass unknown through the crowd 
was evident to him ; and though he wished to cultivate her ac- 
quaintance, and, if possible, make her voyage more pleasant for 
her, he was anxious also that she should not feel embarrassed by 
his companionship. Therefore he did not ask her where she had 
been and whither she was going, how much she had seen of this 
beautiful and interesting world and what particular part of it she 
was now expecting to see, but suddenly placed a ladder of escape 
from such questioning at her feet, and mounted boldly with her 
to the stars. 

" 1 suppose you understand something of astronomy," he said. 
" I used to know a little, but I confess I am beginning to forget 
it." 

" I don't know much more than the names of the planets. I 
am a farmer's daughter, and astronomy can hardly be expected, 
of me. Some of the constellations seem like old friends when I 
look up at them." 

The Blue Cap here overcame a temptation to draw out the 
farmer's daughter a little, even to the extent of ascertaining what 
portion of this wide earth her father farmed, and he felt that he 
had gained a victory over her distrust of him when he heard her 
make even so vague a statement as to her circumstances. 

" When I was a youth," he said, " I used to think I would like 
to have a star of my own, a country-house among the cool fields 
above, and a sort of celestial estate, which I could manage in my 
own way, without so much trouble as one is obliged to take 
thanklessly enough here." 

" Rather a solitary state of grandeur to live in." 

" Oh ! I did not mean to be there alone. I was to rejoice in 
the love of some angelic being, an inhabitant of the star, who was 
to be as far above mere ordinary women as my star was above 
the earth." 

" You are not so romantic now," said Bawn, smiling. 

" No ; I was thinking a little while ago, just before I saw your 
head appear above the stair yonder, that those dreams of mine 
were a long way off, and that it made me very old to remember 
them ; and also," he added, as if half to himself, " that I am now 
fain to be content to mate myself among the daughters of men." 

Bawn said nothing, but the query naturally arose in her mind, 
Had some charming daughter of men already taken possession of 
his heart, and, while speaking like this, was he thinking of her ? 



1 68 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Nov., 

And for the first time it occurred to Bawn to think of him as a 
person with a story of his own, with a home, with pursuits, occu- 
pations, loves, and friendships. He was no longer only a trouble- 
some shadow haunting her to her sore annoyance and perplexity, 
but an individual who interested her and had the power to make 
her forget herself and her own affairs. On the instant she felt 
that she would have liked to ask him some questions, but, being 
so resolutely uncommunicative herself, upon what pretext could 
she look for anything approaching to confidence from him ? She 
remained silent with the surprise of these new thoughts. 

They continued their walk mutely, each wrapped in reflec- 
tion. The stars waxed brighter overhead, the night-breeze blew 
freshly against them. Most of the passengers had gone down to 
rest ; a few sat clustered in dark groups or tramped up and 
down deck like themselves. The watery world lay dark, restless, 
and mysterious around, and Bawn experienced the pleasant feel- 
ing of comradeship a feeling which gradually grew on her. 

" I have been thinking," said the Blue Cap, " how very wide 
apart our thoughts have probably flown while we have been 
walking the last three lengths of the deck. Your hand was on 
my arm, but who shall say where you were carried in the 
spirit ? " 

" Or you ? I shall never know where you have been, nor you 
where I have been." 

" I will tell you, if you give me the slightest encouragement, 
all that I have seen and said during the last five minutes." 

" That would hardly be fair, for I am not willing to be equally 
communicative." 

" You have guessed rightly ; I should look for some return. 
But then a very small fragment of your thought would purchase 
a large proportion of mine." 

" Well, then," said Bawn, " part of my thought not the whole 
nor even a large share of it was this : I wondered to perceive 
how two utter strangers like you and me could become so friend- 
ly, enjoy each other's company, exchange thoughts, and all the 
while remain perfectly ignorant of each other's lives, past and fu- 
ture, and content to be so ; and that, having made acquaintance, 
we should immediately afterwards pass out of sight of each other 
and be thought of no more. You see I have not met many stran- 
gers, or 1 suppose such a thought could not have dwelt on my 
mind." 

" Life has often been compared to a journey," said the Blue 
Cap, " for the reason that people meet and part thus at all points, 



1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 169 

exactly like fellow-travellers. Now, my thought was simpler 
than yours ; for I was trying to merely trying to think of you 
as a farmer's daughter, and, for the life of me, I could not do it." 

" I told you the truth," said Bawn quickly. 

" The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth ?" 

" Not the whole truth. My statement was correct, and that 
is all." 

" What an extraordinarily beautiful radiance has that phos- 
phor-light upon the water ! " 

" Yes ; but I am tired. It is time for me to go below." 

He turned at once and led her silently to the top of the stair. 
As Bawn stood on the steps and looked up to bid him good- 
night, her face appeared fairer than ever in the fresh twilight of 
the starry night. 

" By what you said just now," he said, looking at her atten- 
tively, " did you mean to hint that perfect oblivion of each other 
must necessarily descend upon us once we touch our mother- 
earth again ? Why should the sea be so kind and the land so 
harsh ? Is there any reason why we should not continue to be 
friends ? " 

" Every reason," said Bawn decidedly, as she disappeared out 
of the starlight into the well of shadow gaping for her. 



CHAPTER VIII. 
FRIENDS. 

THE next morning Bawn made up her mind that she would not 
be a coward any longer. She fancied she had given the gentleman 
to understand that she wished to remain unknown, and therefore 
might feel herself secure. After what had passed he could never 
press her for information about herself. Upon these terms she 
was willing to be friendly and might accept the pleasure of his 
companionship occasionally. 

Going on deck, she found that he had already prepared a com- 
fortable seat for her, and he soon installed himself at her feet. 

" Shall we return to the Indians?" he said, looking about for 
Hiawatha. 

" No," said Bawn, fearing that this might lead to more per- 
sonal talk concerning her home and native State. 

"You dislike the Indians?" 

" I have known much about them that is noble," she answered 



i/o A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Nov., 

evasively, and then closed her lips and fastened her eyes upon 
her work. 

" I suppose you have been to Paris?" said Bawn suddenly, 
raising her head and looking- at him calmly. She had made up 
her mind to dash into any subject that would lead far from her 
own future and past. Paris would do. A man would be sure to 
have plenty to say about Paris. 

" She is going there, perhaps," thought the Blue Cap, " and 
I wonder in what capacity ? American women sometimes make 
the Grand Tour alone, and I have heard that even charming 
young creatures will do so in case they have no male relations 
to travel with. Perhaps she is going to be a governess there ; 
but no, in that case she would have professed more knowledge 
of astronomy. She may be a princess in disguise travelling to 
meet her friends, who will bring her out in Paris to the delight 
of their world. She has been warned to avoid all young men as 
dangerous, and therein lies her mystery. Yes," he said, pushing 
back his blue cap and showing a broad forehead, the uncovering 
of which increased the look of strength and reliability which 
belonged to his face " yes, I do know Paris as well as most for- 
eigners of my age. And for one who has friends there what a 
charming place it is! You will find it a delightful entrance to the 
European world." 

Bawn bit her lips to prevent words of explanation crossing 
them. Why should she tell him that she was not likely to see 
Paris or to mix with any gay world ? If he persisted in disbe- 
lieving that she was a farmer's daughter, and chose to think of 
her as a young lady debutante on her way to Paris, why, let him 
do so, and it would be all for the best. That he should be him- 
self a frequenter of gay cities seemed to lessen the chances of 
their meeting again. 

"I wonder have I hit the mark?" thought the Blue Cap, 
watching furtively the humorous smile that gleamed in Bawn's 
eyes as she resolved to mislead him. " What affair is it of mine 
that I should trouble myself about it? If I were only sure that 
her circumstances were safe and happy, and that a pleasant future 
lay before her, I certainly should not let curiosity disturb the 
serenity of my mind." 

The breeze was fluttering round Bawn, ruffling the hair about 
her temples and ears, bringing a rosy color to her face, and 
sometimes carrying her skeins of silk a little way out of reach, to 
be captured and returned to her hand by her watchful companion. 
It happened that a small white handkerchief also fluttered forth 



1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 171 

from her lap and was whirled into the Blue Cap's face. Catching 
it as it made a sudden wheel round and tried to escape over the 
ship's side, he was about to return it to its owner when a very 
distinct word of four letters caught his eye, embroidered in the 
corner. " Bawn " was daintily and flowerily stitched on the deli- 
cate bit of cambric in the place where ladies mark their names. 

" Is it your Christian name ? " he asked eagerly. " Come, 
there is no confidence in that. I will forget it again, if you like. 
But let me know it for a few moments. What a curious, uncom- 
mon name is Bawn ! Perhaps the famous Molly Bawn was your 
ancestress ? " 

" Yes," said Bawn placidly. Yesterday she would have been 
distressed at this slight accident, but, having accepted the r61e 
of a debutante on her way to Paris, she was rather pleased than 
otherwise at having been detected as the owner of a lady's pock- 
et-handkerchief. It was testimony to the fact that she was a 
wealthy demoiselle travelling (unavoidably) alone to France, 
where her friends waited to receive her, and behaving with 
proper reserve towards chance acquaintances by the way. This 
was precisely the impression which the sight of the bit of em- 
broidered cambric produced on the Blue Cap's mind, and as 
Bawn, after a stolen glance at his reflecting face, assured herself 
of the fact, a sense of the humor of the situation grew on her and 
a sly, repressed smile curled her lips. 

Her companion saw it and fancied it told him she was not 
sorry to be found out, after all ; that she had been willing to tease 
him. And now he felt willing to tease her. 

" Now that I know your Christian name," he said, " I am 
bound to tell you mine. It is Somerled almost as strange a 
one as yours. After this we shall be more comfortable. It is a 
great advantage to have a name to call one's friend by." 

" Strangers do not call one another by their Christian names, 
especially when one is a man and the other a woman." 

"But we are hardly strangers, are we? On board ship 
friendships spring up so rapidly. And then you and I, being 
each solitary, are thrown upon one another more than in an ordi- 
nary case. However, this is, of course, subject to your approval. 
I will not pronounce that pretty name of yours without your 
leave, not even, with a 'Miss' before it for you see I have 
come to the conclusion that you are not married." 

"No, I am not married," said Bawn, with a look of extreme 
surprise that the question could have occurred to any one. 

" I thought so by your fingers," said Somerled, smiling with 



172 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Nov., 

great satisfaction. " It is always pleasant to know that one has 
guessed aright. I do not like to think of how I should have felt 
had I been told that I must address you as Mistress Bawn." 

" What difference could it have made, after all?" said Bawn 
demurely. 

"Ah ! who knows ? What difference could it have made ? It 
is impossible to answer such a question. Somehow I should like 
to think that when I meet you again in Paris there will be no 
devoted husband hovering round you. I would like that our 
open-air, breezy friendship might continue undisturbed by any 
new element." 

" Why do you think we shall meet in Paris? " 

" Because I have friends there and I sometimes visit them. I 
know I shall find you out, radiant in satins and laces, perhaps 
with your head already turned by flattery. Indeed, I shall then 
perhaps have only the past to live upon. For 1 shall find so 
many newer friends gathered round you that I shall scarce get a 
word." 

Bawn was silent, suddenly carried back to the evening when 
Dr. Ackroyd had concluded that she was bent on coming out in 
Paris as an American heiress. " What do you want to do with 
your fortune ? " he had said. " Trip away to Paris, and all the 
rest of it?" declaring the French capital to be the gayest and 
prettiest place for her. Suppose she had been able to put all 
memory of her father's wrongs out of her mind, and to do as the 
good doctor and his wife had thought but natural she should do? 
She might have been now really on her way to the pleasantest 
city in the world, under suitable protection, and likely to meet 
this young man, as he expected, in those brilliant salons of which 
she had so often heard tell. And suppose that after months and 
years he were to prove that he really valued her friendship as 
much as he now appeared, perhaps pretended to do, and suppose, 
and suppose ! For a few moments she saw herself surrounded 
with these fair circumstances, and thought that, had they been 
realized, she could have been glad at the prospect of meeting this 
blue-capped Somerled again. Such a position, which had been 
so possible to her and was now so impossible, appeared to her for 
a minute sunned by such happiness as she had never yet imagin- 
ed. But it was only for an instant. The dark forests of her old 
home rose sombre and forbidding out of the background of her 
thoughts, and in the well-known leaf-strewn hollow which they 
shaded she saw the lonely grave that held all that had been dear 
to her in life, and which appealed from its solitude and silence to 



iS86.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 173 

the fidelity of her nature. Those dazzling scenes which were so 
familiar to her new friend, and which she could imagine so well, 
were not for her; that gay and brilliant Bavvn whom she had 
seen just now moving light-hearted through the crowd was only 
a phantom of herself, an impersonation of the most volatile side 
of her nature. No, the world of Paris must live on without her, 
as it had always done, and, alas ! was but too well able to do. She 
had bound herself to live on the shady side of life, under the 
gloom of mountains, in the shadow of concealment, with the 
sorrow and wrong-doing of the past always present to her 
mind. 

" Do not look so grave," said Somerled. " Have I been too 
familiar in my manner of talking to you ? If you are displeased 
tell me, and 1 will vanish for the day." 

" No," said Bawn, brightening. " You need not go. I fear I 
should now feel lonely if altogether left to myself." 

This speech was the result of her reflections, which had just 
proved to her how completely apart their future paths must lie, 
and how utterly unlikely it was that they should ever meet again 
in this world. 

He glanced at her gratefully, with that bright smile which 
always looked so good as well as gay. 

"And what about the cross children and the sick ladies? " he 
asked. " With them you could not have been lonely." 

" It is far pleasanter here." 

" Even with me as a drawback? " 

" Even with you as a drawback." 

" For the life of me I cannot bring myself to be sorry I missed 
the boat I ought to have sailed by, though for your sake I ought 
to regret it. I have seen several charming persons gazing at 
you with benevolence, and looking daggers at me. That old 
gentleman with the flowing beard, for instance, is dying to oust 
me from my position as your knight and to step into my shoes. 
Had I not been here he would have spread your rugs and car- 
ried your camp-stool." 

" That prosy old gentleman who worries the captain with 
questions all dinner-time?" 

" The very man. I see you might have found him almost as 
much a nuisance as myself." 

And so the day wore away, and the Blue Cap, as he walked 
up and down deck that evening at dusk, told himself that the 
gold-haired young woman with the broad brow and firm mouth, 
whose peculiar look of strength, humor, and sweetness had fasci- 



174 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Nov., 

nated him, was really surrounded by no unpleasant mystery, but 
was only as reticent and dignified as maidens ought to be. 

He wished he could ask her plainly to tell him her name, 
antecedents, and real position in the world. At first he had 
fancied that she had a downright fear of his acquiring any such 
information concerning her, but now it seemed to him that she 
only took a sly delight in withholding it. He concluded that it 
did not matter to him at present how silent she might be, but 
resolved that before they left the steamer he would persuade her 
to be more communicative. He remembered with a little vexa- 
tion that she had shown an utter want of interest in his affairs 
and no curiosity even to learn his name. That they should part 
in this state of ignorance and indifference was not to be thought 
of. Three days of almost hourly companionship with this girl 
had made him feel that he did not want to lose sight of her. And 
yet he acknowledged that there was in her a certain power which 
would enable her to baffle him, if she pleased. 

While his mind was still occupied with these reflections he 
saw Bawn come forward as if to meet him, -walking with a quick 
step and seeming to have some word of importance on her lips. 
But no, she had not seen him. though she paused at the ship's 
side close to the spot where he stood. At this hour he was gen- 
erally down below and she was resting in the ladies' quarters, 
and she evidently had not expected to see him. He noticed that 
she held in her hands the little, delicate cambric pocket-hand- 
kerchief which he had picked up and restored to her in the morn- 
ing, and saw her deliberately tie it up in a knot and drop it into 
the sea. He watched her with surprise. Was it for having- 
accidentally revealed to him her Christian name that she thus 
punished the otherwise unoffending bit of cambric? 

The truth was that Bawn, having unwittingly allowed it to 
get among her new and plain belongings, and having used it un- 
awares, had now resolved to get rid of it, considering that, though 
it had served her this morning by setting her fellow-traveller's 
speculations on a wrong track, yet it was an undesirable posses- 
sion for a person of the class to which she wished in future to 
belong. And meanwhile the young man, observing her, felt his 
former wonder at her great desire to remain quite unknown 
revive, and did not venture to speak to her as she turned away 
without seeing him and went straight down stairs again for the 
night. 



1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 175 



CHAPTER IX. 
ENEMIES. 

"WHAT a nice sort of hotel this steamer makes!" said the 
brown-faced, dark-eyed man who called himself Somerled. 
Again it, was early, bright morning, and he was sitting idly 
watching Bawn's white hands plying their knitting-needles. " I 
should have no objection to go on as we are going for ever, or 
at least for ever so long that is, if we could only stop at some 
port now and again and have a good walk. A man wants to 
stretch his legs occasionally, but otherwise " 

He broke off abruptly, and, as Bawn did not answer, began to 
whistle softly an air which she knew well, one of the Irish melo- 
dies with which her father had early made her familiar. As the 
strain stole across her ear, memory supplied the words belong- 
ing to it : i 

"Come o'er the sea, 

Maiden, with me, 
Mine through sunshine, storms, and snows: 

Seasons may roll, 

But the true soul 
Burns the same where'er it goes." 

" Are all American steamers as nice as this one ? " asked 
Bawn, interrupting the whistling at the end of the first part of 
the melody. 

" Well, the only other one of which I have had any experi- 
ence was not at all nice. It was an emigrant-ship, and perhaps 
you do not know all that is included in those two words." 

" You came out to America in an emigrant-ship?" 

" I have succeeded in getting you to ask me a question at 
last," said the Blue Cap, smiling genially. 

" You need not answer it unless you please. My organ of 
curiosity is not a large one." 

" I have noticed that you are a remarkable woman. But I am 
willing to be questioned. I have been hoping you would ask me 
many questions about myself." 

" I cannot do that, because I am not anxious to make confi- 
dences on my own part." 

" As I have said, perhaps more than once, I am well aware of 
it. At present I am not disposed to molest you. I own I should 
be glad (as, I think, I have also said before) if a large amount of 



176 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Nov., 

confidence on my side were to purchase even a small scrap of 
yours. But that shall be just as you please. It is a breach of 
good-breeding to ask personal questions, nevertheless I tell you 
plainly I shall not be willing to shake hands and say good-by to 
you when this voyage is over without knowing where and by 
what name I am to find you again. I do not make friends and 
drop them so easily as that. I should not say so did I not per- 
ceive that you have made up your mind that I am a gentle- 
man." 

" Were I not satisfied on that point, I should not sit here day 
after day talking to you." 

" Then, having accepted me as a friend, why be so exceed- 
ingly reticent with me?" 

" You always speak of our being friends, while in reality we 
are only chance acquaintances." 

" But life-long friendships are begun in this way." 

" Must 1 tell you downrightly that there are reasons why we 
can never be friends after we leave this vessel? " 

" I will not believe it without explanation," he answered after 
a slight pause, and in a low voice whose earnestness contrasted 
with his hitherto gay, careless manner. A slight flush had risen 
on his brown cheek. Bawn grew a little paler, but silently con- 
tinued her work, her heart throbbing with the consciousness that 
the thing she most dreaded had happened. 

She had drawn on herself the notice of a person who might 
want to know too much about her and thus increase the diffi- 
culties in her way. Reflecting on her curious position, she asked 
herself why she could not tell him the little tale about herself 
which she had prepared for the enlightenment of those with 
whom she must come in contact after reaching her destination 
inform him that she was the orphan daughter of an Irish emi- 
grant, who was bringing her father's savings to Ireland to invest 
them there in a farm, which she intended to work by her own ex- 
ertions ? Why could she not narrate this little story to one who 
was at once so interesting to, and so greatly concerned about, her? 
Partly because she found it easier to annoy than to deceive him 
explicitly in words, and partly because she would not be driven 
into laying her future open to an interference which might pos- 
sibly thwart her plans. As she quietly reviewed her position 
and strengthened her resolve to remain unknown, the Blue Cap's 
look of disturbance gradually disappeared, and, quitting her side, 
he walked away to a distance and leaned over the vessel's edge. 
Presently she heard him whistling the second part of the air 



1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 177 

which she interrupted, and to which her memory again supplied 
the words : 

" Let Fate frown on, 

So we love and part not ; 
Tis life where thou art, 

Tis death where thou art not." 

Then he went and talked to one of the sailors, and half an hour 
passed before he returned to her. 

" You have not told me yet about the ship," said Bawn, with 
a conciliatory smile. " I do wish to know how you came to be 
there, and I am willing to pay for the information with any little 
experience of my own that you will think worth listening to." 

" Good ! " said Somerled. " That makes me feel better. I 
have been savagely cross for the last half-hour. How 1 wish I 
had a longer story to relate to you ! It will be told too soon. I 
simply went out to America with some hundreds of emigrants, 
that I might know by experience how they are treated on the 
way ; we hear so many complaints of the sufferings of the poor 
on their voyage out to the New World. And I had reasons for 
wanting to know." 

" I see ; reasons like mine, that are not to be told." 

" Exactly. Not until I see my way more clearly towards 
selling them at a profit." 

" I can guess yours easily enough. And so you made com- 
mon cause with the poor. Mr. Somerled, I will shake hands 
with you without waiting for the moment of leaving the ship." 

" Even though we are only chance acquaintances," he said, 
with a brilliant change of countenance, taking the firm, white 
hand that had suddenly dropped the needle and outstretched 
itself to him. Bawn's eyes were turned full on him, glistening 
with moisture and overflowing with a light he had never seen in 
them and thought he had never seen anywhere before. 

"I shall always remember you as a friend," she said, carried 
away by enthusiasm, and with a kind of radiant solemnity of face, 
and manner. 

" Will you ? Perhaps among your dead ? " 

" If you knew how precious are my dead," she answered, withi 
a sudden darkenirig of all her lights, " you would be proud to-be 
admitted into their company." 

" That may be, but I would rather be in the company of youn 
living," he said, dropping her hand which he had held. Andv 
Bawn, wishing she had been less impulsive, picked up her* 
needles again and became busier than ever with her, work... 

VOL. XLIV. 12 



178 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Nov., 

" I want to hear more of your emigrants," she said presently, 
as serenely as ever. " How were they and you treated, and what 
have you been doing for them ? " 

" To the first question I answer, ' Badly.' To the second I 
must admit, ' Not much.' I hope, however, to be able to say 
something about the matter in Parliament one day." 

" Are you in the English Parliament? " 

"You are surprised at the suggestion that so dull a fellow 
could hope to get admittance there. But sometimes it is easier 
to please a nation than a woman." 

"Do you expect to please a nation?" asked Bawn, elevating 
her eyebrows slightly. 

" Not exactly, perhaps, though I expect to get on pretty well 
with that small section of one which will be made up by my con- 
stituents." 

"And the nation will go down before you afterwards?" 

" Perhaps less than that may content me, though I have my 
ambitions. However, I am not in Parliament yet. And now, 
having confessed so much, it is time for me to receive some small 
dole from your hands." 

Bawn's face fell. " What can I tell you ? I have seen a 
prairie on fire; I have spoken to an Indian chief " 

" All my experiences pale before adventures like those," sa'id 
the Blue Cap, trying to read the changes in her face. 

A great change had come over her, for, in thinking of her 
past, events of one sad night had suddenly arisen before her 
mind. 

" I have aroused painful memories," said Somerled, gazing re- 
morsefully at her colorless cheeks and troubled eyes. 

"You would drive me back upon them." 

" Do you mean that you have experienced nothing in your 
past but what is painful?" 

" I do not say that," she said, brightening up again. " But 
what is there to tell about happy days? They slip through our 
fingers like soap-bubbles, glistening with all the colors of the 
rainbow. How can we tell what has made the days so happy or 
the soap-bubbles so beautiful? Common things mere 'suds,' as 
the washerwoman calls them catch a glory from the sunlight 
and vanish. And when they have vanished what has any one to 
say about them ?" 

Somerled sat gazing at her with a slight frown, observing how 
cleverly she always contrived to give him a ready answer with- 
out enlightening him at all, to talk so much and convey to him 



1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 179 

so little. Without saying more he got up and walked away, and 
after a while she saw him down at the other end of the deck 
playing with some children, hoisting the little ones on his 
shoulders and setting the bigger ones to run races along the 
deck. She heard his merry laugh among theirs, and noted the 
fact that her disobligingness had not the power to annoy him. 
Why, she asked of her common sense, should she allow herself 
to be bullied or wheedled into running risks for the sake of mo- 
mentarily gratifying the curiosity of an idle and inquisitive fel- 
low-traveller ? She would not do it. Let him stay among those 
children and their lady relatives (there were one or two pretty 
girls among them) for the rest of the voyage. His doing so 
would certainly be an unexpected relief and advantage to her. 

Having finished playing with the children and conversing 
with their mother and young aunts, the Blue Cap pulled a book 
out of his pocket and threw himself on a bench to read. What 
he read was a very unsatisfactory chapter, and all out of his own 
head. He did not like that girl, after all (his reading informed 
him). There was too much mystery about her, too deeply root- 
ed and watchful a reticence for so young and apparently simple 
a woman. She must have some strong, almost desperate, reason 
for closing her lips so firmly when he tried to beguile her into 
speaking, for changing color so rapidly at times when he pressed 
her, as if she feared he would perceive the very thought in her 
mind. 

He turned the pages of his book impatiently, and owned that 
he would give much to see the thoughts lying behind that wide, 
white brow, which seemed expressive at once of the innocence 
of the child and the wisdom and courage of a woman experi- 
enced in life. What was the story, what were the scenes in the 
background of her youth which were accountable for that sad 
look starting so often unawares into her eyes? With what sort 
of people had she lived, and whither and to whom was she tra- 
velling now in the great, giddy world of Paris? Well, what did 
it matter to him ? He had no intention of falling in love with 
her. He had never fallen .thoroughly in love in his life, and he 
was now thirty years of age. Two or three fresh, pretty faces of 
girls he had known floated up from his past and smiled at him as 
he made this declaration to himself, and yet he persevered in the 
avowal. He had liked them, flirted a little with them, been very 
near falling in love with them ; but either he had been too busy 
setting his little world to rights, or they had lacked something 
that his soul desired, for he had certainly never as yet given the 



i8o A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Nov., 

whole heart of his manhood into the keeping- of any feminine 
hands. . 

As yet he had not seen the woman to whom he could give up 
his masculine liberty ; and still, while he emphatically stated this 
to his own mind, he distinctly saw a vision of Bawn sitting 
knitting at his fireside, the light of his hearth shining on her fair 
face, into which color and dimple would come at the sound of 
his voice, and his care and protection surrounding her with a 
paradisiacal atmosphere. When, at the end of his chapter, he 
found this picture before his eyes, he flung away his book in 
something like a passion, and got up and tramped about the 
deck. 

No, he was not going to fall in love with a nameless, secre- 
tive, obstinate-tempered, wilful woman. His wife must be open 
as the day, transparent in thought, and with all her antecedents 
well known to the world. She must be of a particularly yield- 
ing and gentle disposition, and have exceedingly little will of her 
own. 

CHAPTER X. 

MISLEADINGS. 

"Do please tell me more about Paris," said Bawn, with a 
sweet beseechingness in her eyes and voice, and her lips curling 
with the fun of leading him further and further astray in his 
speculations concerning her. " If you knew how impatient I 
feel to see it ! " 

" Which is true enough," she thought, " only I am not at all 
likely to gratify my desire." ; ,., 

" It is not the place for a person of your disposition." 

" How is that ? " 

" The French are a nation not remarkable for frankness." 

" And you think my natural reticence may increase in Pari- 
sian society ! Now, that is not kind. I have heard the French 
character charged with untruth rather than reserve. I have told 
you no falsehoods, and I might, if I would, have satisfied your 
curiosity with a dozen." 

" True. That is something. How many days have we yet 
got to live ? " 

" On board ? Four, perhaps, or five, I think." 

" Four will finish the voyage for those who land at^Queens- 
town." 



1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 181 

" In what part of England is Queenstown ? " asked Bawn de- 
murely. 

" It is in Ireland the first British port at which we touch. 
But for you and me, who are going on to Liverpool, there remain 
five whole days to enjoy each other's society." 

" Do not let us quarrel away our time, then," said Bawn per- 
suasively. " Five days would be very long if we were to keep 
making ourselves disagreeable to each other all the time." 

" Five days are but a short space for happiness out of a life- 
time," said Somerled brusquely, with an ardent, angry glance at 
her downcast eyelids. 

" Yes, they would be," she said quietly, " but let us hope 
that few lives are so unhappy as not to possess a larger share ot 
happy days than that." 

She heard him shift in his seat impatiently, but, being busy 
with a dropped stitch, she naturally could not see his face. 

" Do you intend to travel on to Paris alone? I hope there is 
no offence in a gentleman's asking such a question as that of a 
lady. The journey from Liverpool to Paris will be a trouble- 
some one. Perhaps you will allow me to give you some hints 
for its safe accomplishment." 

" Certainly," said Bawn, raising her eyes and looking at him 
straight, while she controlled the corners of her lips with diffi- 
culty. " There will be no one to meet me at Liverpool." 

" I will write out a little memorandum of what you are to do 
after you have got out of my reach," he said. " I suppose, as 
we shall both be going on to London, you will allow me to 
escort you so far." 

" If I step into one car there is no reason why you should 
step into another, unless, indeed, you want to smoke " 

" We call them carriages in England." 

" That is nicer. Carriage sounds so much more like a private 
conveyance." 

The Blue Cap was silent. His imagination played him a sud- 
den trick, and showed him a certain well-known private convey- 
ance drawn by certain favorite horses, within which were seated 
a man and a woman, and the man was taking the woman by a 
certain well-known road to his home, as his wife. The man who 
held the reins was himself, and the woman was this golden- 
tressed, aggravating, unimpressionable Bawn. 

" In London I shall certainly have to bid you good-by," he 
grumbled. 

" Until we meet again in Paris ? " 



1 82 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Nov., 

" So likely that 1 should find you ! asking about the streets 
for a person of the name of ' Bawn.' " 

" Is Paris as nice a place as they say for buying pretty things 
clothes and jewelry I mean ?" said Bawn in the most matter-of- 
fact manner. 

"Oh! yes; first-rate for all that kind of thing. And so this 
is what your mind has been running on for the last ten min- 
utes?" 

"Why should it not?" 

" Why, indeed ? For no reason. Only I fancied you were 
not the kind of woman to let your mind get totally absorbed by 
clothes and jewelry." 

" Men are never good judges of the characters of women." 

" Probably not." 

" In my case you have had ample material from which to 
form your conclusions. Why should a young woman come all 
the way from New York to Paris, if not to attend to her ward- 
robe and general personal decoration ? Have you not heard that 
American women pine for this opportunity from their cradle up- 
wards? Now, I feel sure that the very first morning I awake in 
Paris " (she paused, thinking that such a morning would probably 
never dawn, or that, if it did, the hour was so far away as to be 
practically nowhere in her future) " I shall make a rush to the 
shops before breakfast, just to see what they have got for me. 
And I shall probably spend the half of my fortune before I return 
to my hotel." 

" I am really disenchanting him now," she thought. " How 
disgusted he looks ! " 

" Your hotel ! Do you mean to say that you intend to stay 
alone at a hotel ? " 

" I certainly did not intend to tell you so. You betray me 
into forgetting myself." 

The Blue Cap looked pale and displeased, and Bawn bent 
over her knitting and bit her lip, thinking with a sting of regret 
that she would rather he had not obliged her to shock him so 
much. 

"Do you not know," she said, "that American women go 
where they please and do what they have a mind to? " 

" I have heard a great deal that I do not like about certain 
females of your nation. But I did not expect to see them look- 
ing like you." 

" Why?" 

" Why ? why ? Your face, your manner, your gestures, your 



1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 183 

slightest movement, all express a character directly opposite to 
that which you are now making known to me." 

" It is always so with us," said Bawn gravely. " Our appear- 
ance is the best of us. We are not half worth what we look." 

" So it seems, indeed. With your peculiar brow and eyes and 
glance, I did not expect to find you harboring the sentiments of 
a French grisette." 

" My stepmother was half French," exclaimed Bawn. 

" Your stepmother ! That does not give you French blood, 
I suppose," he said impatiently. 

" Neither it does, when I think of it. But might it not have 
taught me French ways?" 

"And opened up the path to Paris for you." 

" You are so quick at guessing that I need to tell you nothing." 

" And so you have been dreaming all this time about clothes 
and jewelry," he reiterated contemptuously. " When you were 
sitting looking out to sea, as I first saw you, with a peculiar ex- 
pression in your eyes which I had never observed in any eyes 
before and yet seemed to recognize when I saw it, I must con- 
clude now that you were merely pondering the fashion of a new 
necklace or the color of a gown." 

" You recognized the expression of all that ? " said Bawn in a 
tone of keen amusement. "This leads me to think you have 
sisters, or cousins, or a wife " 

" I have no wife " (crossly). 

" How fortunate for her! A man who would fly in a passion 
because a woman gave a thought to her dress would not be a 
pleasant husband." 

The Blue Cap scowled. " I hope you may get a better one, 
madam." 

" I devoutly hope so if ever I am to have one at all, which 
is dpubtful." 

" I dare say you would rather continue to go shopping about 
the world alone." 

" I admit that I find liberty very sweet." 

" So I have concluded. Do not imagine that I could desire 
to deprive you of a fragment of it." 

Bawn laughed gaily. " Oh ! no," she said. " Your ideal 
woman (who lives in the clouds, by the way, and will certainly 
not come down to you) will never know the color of the gown 
she has on. But seriously, Mr. Somerled, why have you chang- 
ed so much for the worse since you first began to talk to me ? 
You spoke of the pleasure of meeting me in gay salons of Paris, 



1 84 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Nov., 

and you did not suppose I should vyalk into them in my travel- 
ling dress ? " 

" And seriously, madam, why have you changed so much for 
the worse since you first allowed me the privilege of talking to 
you ? Then you had the face of an angel, with the thoughts of 
an angel behind it. You have still the face " 

" But the thoughts, translated into words, have proved to be 
the thoughts of a " 

"Milliner." 

" I thought you were going to say ' fiend,' but it is the same 
thing, since bonnets and gowns are anathema." 

" How shall I make you feel that you have bitterly disap- 
pointed me?" he said, looking at her with a mixture of anger 
and tenderness. 

" It is," said Bawn gravely, " silly in a man to expect to meet 
an ideal woman that is, an angel in every female fellow-tra- 
veller he may chance to encounter." 

While she said this her gray eyes took an expression he failed 
to read, and a pathetic look which he could not reconcile with 
her late conversation crept over her mouth. Perhaps the 
thought arose almost unconsciously in her mind that, under 
other circumstances, she would have been pleased to have en- 
couraged that delusion of his with regard to the angel that 
might possibly live in her. 

Yet when she lay down to sleep that night she congratulated 
herself on her success in lowering the inconvenient degree of 
interest which this stranger had so perversely taken in her. 
Why could he not have devoted himself to the children and their 
pretty aunts, who always seemed so pleased to speak to him, and 
so saved her the trouble of baffling his curiosity? For that 
curiosity alone was the cause of his devotion to her she was re- 
solved to believe, electing to deny that any genuine liking for 
herself strong enough to influence him could have sprung up 
within the limits of so short an acquaintance. And then certain 
looks and words of his which gainsaid this belief occurred to 
her memory, insisting that here was a good man who was want- 
ing to love her if she would let him. If such was indeed the 
case, then had she so bound herself to a difficult future that she 
could not turn on her steps and allow herself to be carried on to- 
a happier destiny than she had dreamed of? 

Ah ! of what was she thinking ? Forget her father and her 
determination to clear the stain of guilt from his beloved name? 
Confess the whole story to this stranger, merely because he had 



1 886.] CHRISTIAN UNITY vs. UNITY OF CHRISTIANS. 185 

assumed the position of her guardian for the moment ; because 
he had eyes that could charm, now by their grave tenderness, 
and now by their electric flashes of fun, and was also the owner 
of a sympathetic voice and a thinking forehead? Was she to 
own that by merely putting forth his great powers to attract he 
had been able to overturn all her plans, and that she was ready 
to await his disposal of her heart and fortune? Oh! no not 
even if he, being the gentleman she took him to be, could con- 
tinue to interest himself about her, once he knew of the cloud 
that rested on her father's memory. 



TO BE CONTINUED. 



CHRISTIAN UNITY VERSUS UNITY OF CHRISTIANS. 

AN article on " National Christianity in America," by Presi- 
dent Thomas G. Apple, D.D., LL.D., of Franklin and Marshall 
College, which appeared in the Independent of August 5, has been 
read by us with great interest and pleasure. The writer is in 
favor of Christian organization. Although he does not argue 
that the different religious bodies of Protestantism should be 
consolidated so as to form one church organization, if this were 
possible, he nevertheless thinks there may be an effective union 
reached somehow. 

We are interested in the various tendencies to union among 
non-Catholic Christians, because we have dreamed that as soon 
as Protestants aimed at unity the question would be settled prac- 
tically where it is to be found. Moreover, we do not wholly 
misunderstand evangelical Protestants, having ourselves once 
in all sincerity believed as they do, and, knowing their difficul- 
ties, have not forgotten to pray and labor for them as well. The 
question is, How is this unity to be found ? God's grace assist- 
ing, there are many ways of finding it. Lacordaire found it by the 
study of socialism, Overbeck by treading the paths of art, Hur- 
ter by the road of history, Cardinal Newman by patristic learn- 
ing, Haller by political science, Brownson by philosophy; but 
we have thought that the way in which we found the truth 
might be the way in which others similarly constituted and en- 
vironed would, if the evidence was put before them, see it also. 

One key for the solution of the question of unity may be 



1 86 CHRISTIAN UNITY vs. UNITY OF CHRISTIANS. [Nov., 

found by comparing the apostolic church, as we have it described 
in the New Testament, with the churches existing at the present 
day. The first Christians, after the coming- of the Holy Ghost 
on the day of Pentecost, " were persevering in the doctrine of the 
apostles, and in the communication of the breaking of bread, and 
prayers" (Acts ii. 42). "The doctrine of the apostles," since 
Christ had promised that the Holy Ghost should teach them and 
bring to their minds all things whatsoever he had said to them 
(St. John xiv. 26), was, unless we deny that the Paraclete was the 
Spirit of Truth, an unerring rule of faith. What a bond of unity 
was the doctrine taught by the apostles! The teaching of the 
apostles to whom Christ had said, " He that heareth you heareth 
me, but he that despiseth you despiseth me" (St. Luke x. 16), 
could not be departed from, though it was no substitute for the 
interior personal guidance of the Holy Ghost, but was coincident 
and correlative with it. The two were not in conflict, and there 
could be no better evidence of the personal guidance of the Holy 
Ghost than harmony with this teaching. This is what the first 
Christians had external as well as internal witness to the truth. 
Religion is nothing if not personal ; yet the church is not per- 
sonal, as Emerson, Frothingham, and Abbott would make her ; nor 
is she merely an association of individuals having only the interior 
guidance of the Holy Ghost, as the numerous sects affirm ; nor 
national, as Anglicans, and such men as Schelling, Dr. Dollinger, 
and Bishop Reinkens, would reduce her; nor racial, as the Greeks, 
Slavs, and others tend to make her ; but she is that body of Chris- 
tians who, together with the interior guidance of the Holy Ghost, 
have the external teaching of the apostles, with whom Christ pro- 
mised to abide till the consummation of the world. With us this 
definition of the church solves the question of unity. " The doc- 
trine of the apostles " is the work of the Holy Ghost, who abides 
for ever with them, as Christ promised he should (St. John xiv. 
16). If, therefore, the unity of the apostolic church is what Pro- 
testants are aiming at, it must be reached by following the doc- 
trine of the apostles revealed by the Holy Ghost, and which the 
Holy Ghost alone has power to perpetuate. If merely human 
organization is the only thing- to which they may aspire, what is 
to prevent their divergence from the truth as a body? So what- 
ever other advantages may be derived from such a unity, im- 
munity from error cannot be one, and we know that they do not 
think so and have never intimated such a thing. 

Organization merely human, like the sticks in the fable, may, 
however, produce many of the benefits which they look for; and 



1 886.] CHRISTIAN UNITY vs. UNITY OF CHRISTIANS. 187 

Catholics do not ignore this fact, but merely human unity cannot 
supply what is the desideratum of all Christians the unerring-, 
divine teaching of the apostles. Why can it not supply it? Be- 
cause the Holy Ghost gave it, and the Holy Ghost alone is able 
to perpetuate it. Having shown that Christian unity differs 
fundamentally from unity of Christians, and expressed our views 
on Christian organization in general, and our great interest in 
the movement, we will proceed to discuss the method of organi- 
zation which President Apple proposes. He says : 

"The United States'has taken the lead in the establishment of a great 
free republic. It now remains to organize a national Christianity in this 
great republic. The history of Christianity clearly reveals its tendency to 
nationalize itself. Whilst it is catholic in spirit an interest that will, in 
the end, bind all nations in one common brotherhood yet in working out 
this result it adapts itself to the order of human life. As nationality is one 
of the integral forms in which humanity comes to expression in history, 
Christianity becomes national in Christianizing the nations. Even in those 
ages when the centralizing tendency of the Roman hierarchy was in the 
ascendency, a decentralizing tendency manifested itself in the national 
churches of modern Europe." 

President Apple does not take into consideration whether the 
human is capable of producing the divine or not. (We don't be- 
lieve in this evolution.) This is our first objection ; and, secondly, 
if by Christianity he means schismatical or Protestant Chris- 
tianity when he says that "Christianity becomes national in 
Christianizing the nations," this evolution is correct, but of apos- 
tolical Christianity it ought to be said in Christianizing the 
nations it Christianizes nationality. What he calls "the centraliz- 
ing tendency of the Roman hierarchy" is evidence of this. We 
would like to ask him what Christianity was foretold by Isaias 
the prophet when he said : " The nation and the kingdom that 
will not serve thee shall perish ; and the Gentiles shall be wasted 
with desolation"? (Isa. Ix. 12). 

We have had enough of national Christianity ; we want some- 
thing higher. * 

President Apple also says : 

"The question now is, whether we cannot have a national Christianity 
without a national church in the strict sense of the term that is, a form of 
organization in which Christianity shall exert its full moulding power upon 
the national life without the entangling alliances that accompany the 
union of church and state in the Old World." 

Neither individuals nor states can be moulded by Christianity 



i88 CHRISTIAN UNITY vs. UNITY OF CHRISTIANS. [Nov., 

against their own will. We do not see the wisdom of this pro- 
position. Never could we wish for a better field for Christian 
work than we have already got in this country. Faithful and 
zealous apostles of Christianity can reap a harvest of souls for 
the kingdom of heaven here, if anywhere on earth. We can do 
more for Christianity by exerting ourselves to the utmost to 
have the state, as it now is, enforce its present good laws and 
pass and enforce more good laws, than by trying to establish any 
new relationship between the state and Christianity. We are in 
favor of keeping to the political organization that has come down 
to us from the founders of our republic we wonder that it was 
founded so well ; at the same time we are good Catholics ex corde, 
loyal to every proposition of the Syllabus of Pius IX. of happy 
memory, and to the encyclical Mirari of Gregory XVI., and have 
no confidence in any Catholic who is not, but we know who are 
the proper authorities to interpret these documents. Bismarck 
says that there is no man in all Europe that he can get along 
with so well as with His Holiness Leo XIII. We Americans 
are perhaps more attached to our government than any other 
people on earth, and with good reason, because we have the 
fullest liberty without prejudice to law and order. Catholic 
Americans are unanimous in the opinion that we have at present 
the best possible political system for our people. 
President Apple says further on : 

"It is high time, for instance, for the churches of this country to ex- 
press a judgment on the subject of marriage and divorce, on the observ- 
ance of the Sabbath, and other matters of a similar character which per- 
tain to both church and state." 

We do so wish that the churches would do this. Of what 
avail is it, for example, to complain because the state permits 
divorce, if Protestant ministers perform adulterous marriages? 
The church that sanctions such marriages is more to blame than 
the state. Why blame the state for permitting what the churches 
are continually doing? If all Protestant ministers and Christian 
magistrates would refuse to perform unlawful marriages the evil 
of divorce would disappear. 

Why not develop the resources of churches before appealing 
to the state? We have a live state, let us have a live Chris- 
tianity. Christian unity has given the world a live Christianity. 



1 886.] CONSTANTINE IN THRACE. 189 

I. 

CONSTANTINE IN THRACE. 

The Emperor Constantine, the day before he reaches Byzantium, projects the building of 
Constantinople upon its site, esteeming that site the fittest for the metropolis of a Christian 
Empire, or, more properly, of a Christian Caliphate, one and universal, to be created by him. 
He resolves, that task completed, to be baptized. 

HA, Pagan City ! hast thou heard the tidings, 

Rome, the world's mistress, whom I never loved ! 

Whilst yet a boy I read of thy renown, 

Thy Kings, thy Consuls, and thine Emperors, 

Thy triumphs, slow but certain, in all lands, 

Yet never yearned to see thy face. Thy heart 

Was as my heart averse, recalcitrant. 

I left my charge ; I clave that British sea ; 

I crossed the snowy Alps ; I burst thy chain ; 

I drowned thy tyrant in the Tyber's wave, 

Maxentius, him whose foot was on thy neck : 

I sat lip-worship'd on thy Palatine Hill, 

But well I knew that to that heart of thine 

Nero's black memory was a welcomer thing 

Than all my glories. Hast thou heard the tidings ? 

The Cross of Christ is found ! By whom ? Not thee ! 

Thou grop'st and grovel'st in the gold stream's bed 

Not there where lies the Cross ! I, Constantine 

The Unbaptized, am cleaner thrice than thou 

I found it through my mother ! The Cross is found ! 

I left thee : I had heard a mighty voice : 
Eastward it called me : there Licinius reigned, 
Ill-crowned compeer and of my rivals last, 
Who made the inviolate Empire twain, not one : 
One crown suffices earth. Licinius fell : 
I saw him kneeling at his conqueror's feet : 
I saw him seated at his conqueror's board ; 
I spared him, but dethroned. New tumults rose: 
Men said they rose through him. Licinius died ; 
'Twas rumored, by my hand. I never loved him ; 
The truth came out at last: I let it be. 

He died : that day the Empire stood uncloven, 



IC,O CONSTANTINE IN THRACE. [Nov., 

One as in great Augustus' regal prime, 

One as when Trajan reigned and Adrian reigned 

Great kings, though somewhat flecked with Christian blood : 

Whom basest Emperors spared the best trod down ; 

I judge them not for that : not jet had dawned 

That day when Faith could be the base of Empire. 

The Antonines came later; trivial stock, 

Philosophers enthroned. Philosophers ! 

I never loved them : Life to me was teacher : 

That great Csesarian Empire is gone by : 

'Twas but the old Republic in a mask, 

With Consul, Tribune, Pontiff rolled in one ; 

A great man wrought its ruin, Diocletian : 

The greatest save those three who built it up : 

He split his realm in four. Amid the wreck 

What basis now subsists for permanent empire ? 

Religion. Of Religions one remains: 

Who spurns it lives amerced of all Religion. 

The old gods stand in ivory, stone, and gold, 

Dozing above the dust-heaps round their feet : 

The Flamen dozes on the altar-step : 

The People doze within the colonnades : 

The Augurs pass each other with a smile : 

The Faith that lives is Christ's. Three hundred years 

The strong ones and the wise ones trod it down : 

Red flames but washed it clean I noted that : 

This day the Christian Empire claims its own. 

The Christian Empire stranger things have been ; 
Christ called his Church a Kingdom. Such it is : 
The mystery of its strength is in that oneness 
Which heals its wounds, and keeps it self-renewed. 
It rises fair with order and degree. 
And brooks division none. That realm shall stand : 
I blend therewith my Empire ; warp and woof 
These twain I intertwine. Like organism 
Shall raise in each a hierarchy of powers 
Ascending gradual to a single head, 
The Empire's head crowned in the Empire's Church. 
The West dreamed never of that realm twin-dowered 
With spiritual sway and temporal : the East, 
I think, was never long without such dream, 
Yet wrought not dream to substance. Persia failed : 
Earlier, the Assyrian and the Babylonian ; 



1 886.] CONSTANTINE IN THRACE. 19! 

Colossal statues these without a soul. 

The Alexandrian Empire later came 

And more deserved to live. A nobler fault 

Was hers, a bodiless fragment shaped of cloud : 

The Conqueror lacked material ; he had naught 

To work on save the dialectics keen 

And Amphionic song of ancient Greece. 

His dream was this an Empire based on Mind, 

The large Greek Mind. Mind makes a base unstable : 

Large minds have ever skill to change their mind : 

Then comes the fabric down. He died a youth, 

A stripling; ay, but had his scheme been sound 

'Tis likely he had lived. Religion lives. 

Perhaps a true Faith only could sustain 

A permanent Empire's burthen. Mine is true : 

If any speaks against it he shall die: 

'Tis known long since I brook not bootless battles. 

The Church had met in synod, for a man 
Had made division in that " seamless robe " 
Regal this day. Arius schismatic stood 
For what? A doctrine! Fool! and knew he not 
The essence of Religion is a Law ? 
Doctrine is but the standard o'er it flying 
To daunt, to cheer ; daunt foes, and cheer the friend. 
What was that Hebrew Church? A sceptred Law 
Set up in Saul, and, when that strong man died, 
Less aptly in the Shepherd with the harp. 
The Church had met in synod at Nicasa, 
Nicasa near Byzantium. There was I : 
The Church in synod sat, and I within it. 
Flocking from every land her bishops came ; 
They sat, and I in the midst, albeit in Rome. 
My title stood, " Pontifex Maximus." 
They came at my command, by me conveyed. 
A man astonished long I sat; 1 claimed 
To sit " a bishop for the things without." 
Amid those bishops some were Confessors 
Maimed by the fire or brand. I kissed their wounds : 
None said, "What dost thou 'mid the Prophet Race?" 
They saw I honored God, and honored me. 
Day after day went on the great debate, 
And gradual in me knowledge grew. 'Twas strange ! 
I, neither priest nor layman ; I, that ne'er 



192 CONSTANTINE IN THRACE. [Nov., 

Had knelt a Catechumen in the porch ; 

I, patron of the Church, yet not her son, 

Her Emperor, yet an Emperor unbaptized 

I sat in the synod. At the gates stood guards : 

Not all were Christian : two, the best, were bold : 

One from Danubius winked at me ; and one 

From Rhenus smiled at me. The weeks went by, 

And in me daily swelled some spirit new : 

I know it now ; it was the imperial spirit. 

The imperial spirit ay ! I at the first 

Had willed the question should be trivial deemed, 

And license given, " think, each man, what he will." 

The fires had burned too deep for that: I changed : 

I sided with the strong, and kept the peace : 

Rulers must take my course, or stand o'er-ruled. 

That was my triumph's hour: then came the fall. 
I made return to Rome. Twelve years gone by 
My sword had riven the Western tyrant's chain : 
Since then the tyrant of the East had perished : 
The world was echoing with my name. I reached 
The Gate Flaminian and the Palatine ; 
I looked for welcome such as brides accord 
Their lords new-laurelled. Rome, a bride malign, 
Held forth her welcome in a poisoned cup: 
Mine Asian garb, my ceremonious court, 
Its trappings, titles, and heraldic gear, 
To her were hateful. Centuries of bonds 
Had left her swollen with Freedom's vacant name : 
A buskined greatness trampled still her stage: 
By law the gods reigned still. The senate sat 
In Jove's old temple on the Capitol : 
My fame Nicaean edged their hate. The priest 
Shouldering through grinning crowds to sacrifice 
Cast on me glance oblique. Fabii and Claudii 
Whose lives hung powerless on their Emperor's nod 
Eyed me as he who says, " This man is new." 
One festal morning to some pagan fane 
The whole Equestrian Order rode their wont 
In toga red. I saw, and laughing cried, 
" Better their worship than their horsemanship ! " 
That noon the rabble pressed me in the streets 
With wrong premeditate; hissed me; spat at me; 
That eve they brake my statues. Choice was none 



1 886] CONSTANTINE IN THRACE. 193 

Save this, to drown the Roman streets in blood 

Or feign indifference. Scorn twelve years of scorn 

Changed suddenly to hate. A fevered night 

Went by, and morning dawned. 

My Council met; 

Then came that fateful hour, my wreck and ruin. 
Fausta, my wife, hated her rival's son, 
Mine eldest born, my Crispu's ; hated her 
The glory and the gladness of my youth, 
By me for Empire's sake repudiated, 
The sweetness of whose eyes looked forth from his. 
She lived but in one thought to crown her sons, 
My second brood, portioning betwixt those three 
My realm when I was dead. 

My brothers holp her plot. She watched her time: 
She waited till the eclipse which falls, at seasons, 
Black on our House was dealing with my soul ; 
Then in that Council-hall her minions rose ; 
They spake; they called their witnesses suborned, 
Amongst them of my counsellors some the best ; 
They brought their letters forged and spurious parchments; 
And showed it plainlier thrice than sun and moon 
That he it was, my Crispus, Portia's child, 
Who, whilst his sire was absent at Nicaea, 
Month after month had plotted 'gainst him, made 
His parricidal covenant with Rome : 
The father was to fall in civil broil, 
The son to reign. Their league the day gone by 
Had made its first assay. 

That hour the Fates 

Around me spread their net; that hour the chains 
Of OEdipus were tangled round my feet : 
I stood among them blind. 

The noontide flamed : 
1, in full Council sitting I since youth 
A man of marble nerve and iron will, 
A man in whom mad fancy's dreams alike 
And fleshly lusts had held no part, subdued 
By that Religion grave, a great Ambition ; 
I self-controlled, continent in hate itself, 
Deliberate and foreseeing I that hour 
Down on that judgment-parchment pressed my seal:. 
That was my crime, the greatest earth hath known jj 
VOL. xuv. 13 



194 CONSTANTINE IN THRACE. [Nov 

My life's one crime. I never wrought another. 

'Twas rage pent up 'gainst her I could not strike, 
Rome, hated Rome! I smote her through my son, 
Her hope, the partner of her guilt. That night 
My purpose I repented. 'Twas too late: 
The ship had sailed for Pola. Tempest dire, 
By demons raised, brake on our coasts! Five days, 
And in his Istrian dungeon Crispus died. 
I willed that he, but not his fame, should perish ; 
Therefore that deed was hid. With brow sun-bright, 
Hell in my heart, I took my place at feasts : 
At last the deed was blabbed. 

My mother loved 

My mother, Helena, the earth's revered one, 
Cyb6le of the Christians termed by Greeks 
Loved well my Crispus for his mother's sake, 
Wronged, like herself, by royal nuptials new, 
And hated Fausta with her younger brood. 
She brake upon my presence like a storm : 
With dreadful eyes and hands upraised she banned me : 
She came once more, that time with manifest proof 
Of Fausta's guilt. The courtiers had confessed it ; 
My brothers later ; last the Accursed herself. 
Two days I sat in darkness : on the third 
I sent to judgment Fausta and her crew : 
That act I deem the elect of all my acts. 
They died: at eve I rose from the earth and ate. 

But fifteen months before, I at Nicsea 
Had sat a god below ! No more of that ! 
'Twas false, the rumor that by night, disguised, 
I knelt within a pagan fane, and sought 
Pagan lustration from a pagan priest, 
And gat for answer that for crime like mine 
Earth held lustration none. 

I built great fanes, 

Temples which all the ages shall revere : 
Saint Peter's huge Basilica ; Saint John's ; 
I roamed from each to each, like him who sought 
A place for penitence, and found it not ; 
Then Irom that city doomed oh ! to what heights 
I. loving not, had raised her ! forth I fared, 
Never thenceforth to see her. Rome has reigned : 
She had her thousand years. Unless some greatness 



1 886.] CONSTANTINE IN THRACE. 195 

Hidden from man remains for man, her doom 
Approaches dust and ashes. 

I went forth : 

I deemed the God I served had cast me off: 
The Pagan world I knew my foe: the Christian 
Thundered against me from a thousand shores : 
There was a dreadful purpose in my soul : 
It was my mother saved me ! She, keen-eyed, 
Discerned the crisis; kenned the sole solution. 
In expiation of my crime she sped, 
A holy pilgrim, to the Holy Land : 
She spread her hands above the sacred spot, 
As when the Mother-Beast updrags to light 
The prey earth-hidden for her famished young : 
Instinct had led her to it : she dug and dug ; 
She found the world's one treasure, lost till then, 
That Cross which saved the world. With lightning speed 
The tidings went abroad : I marched : last night 
I raised mine eyes to heaven. I ne'er was one 
Of spirit religious, though my life was pure, 
Austerely pure amid an age corrupt: 
I never was a man athirst for wonders ; 
My fifty years have witnessed three alone : 
The first was this while yet Maxentius lived, 
My army nearing Rome, I marked in her, 
Though bond-slave long, a majesty divine ; 
She seemed earth's sum of greatness closed in one: 
Some help divine I needed to confront her : 
That help was given : I looked aloft: I saw 
In heaven the God-Man on His Cross, thenceforth 
My battle-sign, " Labarum." Yesternight 
Once more I saw it ! He that hung thereon 
Spake thus : " Work on, and fear not." 

Those two Visions, 

The first, the third, shine on me still as one : 
The second was of alien race and breed. 
New-throned in Rome, I doubted oft her future : 
One night I watched upon Mount Palatine^ 
My seat a half-wrought column. It had lain 
For centuries seven rejected, none knew why, 
By earlier builders : in more recent times 
Ill-omened it was deemed, yet unremoved. 
The murmur from the City far beneath 



196 CONSTANTINE IN THRACE. [Nov., 

Induced oblivion. Sudden by me stood 

A queenly Form, the Genius of great Rome ; 

Regal her face ; her brow, though crowned, was ploughed 

With plaits of age. She spake : " Attend my steps." 

Ere long I marked her footing the great sea 

Eastward : I followed close. Then came a change : 

Seven hills before me glittered in her light: 

Save these the world was dark. I looked again : 

On one of these she stood. Immortal youth 

Shone splendid from her strong and strenuous face ; 

And all her form was martial. On her head 

She bore a helm, and in her hand a spear 

High-raised. She plunged that spear into the soil ; 

Then spake : " Build here my City and my Throne," 

Then vanished from my sight. High up I heard 

The winnowing of great wings. The self-same sound 

Had reached me while that Goddess trod the sea : 

'Twas Victory following that bright crest for aye. 

Morn broke : I knew that site ; it was Byzantium ; 

So be it ! There shall stand the second Rome, 

Not on the plain far-famed that once was Troy, 

A dream of mine in youth. 

Byzantium ! Ay ! 

The site is there : there meet the double seas 
Of East and West. The Empire rooted there 
Shall stand the wide earth's centre, clasping in one 
That earlier Rome was only Rome rehearsed 
The Alexandrian and Caesarean worlds : 
Atlas and Calp6 are our western bound ; 
Ganges shall guard our Eastern. To the North 
Not Rhenus, not Danubius that is past 
But Vistula and far Boristhenes ; 

Tanais comes next. Those Antonines, poor dreamers, 
Boasted .their sageness, limiting their realm : 
They spared Rome's hand to freeze her head and heart : 
An Empire's growth surceased, its death begins : 
Long death is shame prolonged. Let Persia tremble ! 
Rome's sole of Rivals ! Distance shields her now : 
My Rome shall fix on her that eye which slays : 
She like a gourd shall wither. O my son, 
That task had been for thee ! 

Ha, Roman Nobles ! 
Your judgment-time approaches ! Shadows ye I 



1 886.] CONSTANTINE IN THRACE. I 

Shadows since then are ye. Those shades shall flit : 

My city shall be substance, not a shadow. 

Ye slew the Gracchi ; they shall rise and plague you : 

Ye clutched the Italian lands ; stocked them with slaves ; 

Then ceased the honest wars : your reign shall cease: 

Again, as when Fabricius left his farm 

To scourge his country's foes, Italian hands, 

The hands of Latium, Umbria, and Etruria, 

In honorable households bred, made strong 

By labor on their native fields, shall fence 

Their mother-land from insult. Mercenaries ! 

Who made our Roman armies mercenary ? 

Slave-lords that drave the free men from the soil ! 

Your mercenaries bought and sold the realm ! 

In sport or spleen they chose Rome's Emperor ! 

The British hosts chose me. I, barbarous styled, 

I Constantine decree that in the ranks 

Of Rome the Roman blood, once more supreme, 

Shall leave scant place for hirelings ill to trust : 

The army to the Emperor shall belong, 

Not he to it, henceforth. 

On these seven hills 

The seven of Rome, with these compared, are pigmies 
I build earth's Empire City. They shall lift 
High up the temples of the Christian Law, 
Gold-domed, descried far off by homeward fleets, 
Cross-crowned in record of my victory. 
To it shall flock those senators of Rome, 
Their Roman brag surceased. Their gods shall stand 
Grateful for incense doles diminishing daily, 
If so they please, thronging the lower streets, 
These, and the abjects of the Emperors dead ; 
Ay, but from those seven hills to heaven shall rise 
The Apostolic Statues, and mine own, 
Making that race beneath ridiculous. 
Above the Empire which that city crowns. 
Above its Midland, Euxine, Caspian seas, 
Above its Syrian Paradises lulled 
By soft Orontes' and Euphrates' murmurs, 
Above its Persian gardens, and the rush 
' Of those five Indian rivers o'er whose merge 
The Emathian sadly fixed his eastward eyes, 
Above all these God's Angels, keeping watch, 



198 CONSTANTINE IN THRACE. [Nov., 

From East to West shall sweep, for aye sustaining- 
My Standard, my "Labarum" ! 

It shall last, 

That Empire, till the world herself decays, 
Since all the old Empires, each from each devolved, 
It blends, and marries to a Law Divine. 
Its throne shall rest on Right Hereditary, 
Not will of splenetic legions or the crowd ; 
Its Sovereigns be the elect of God, not man : 
Its nobles round their Lord shall stand, sun-clad 
In light from him reflected ; stand in grades 
Hierarchal, and impersonating, each, 
Office and function, not the dangerous boast 
Of mythic deeds and lineage. Age by age 
Let those my emperors that wear not names 
Of Caesar or Augustus, but my name, 
Walk in my steps, honoring the Church aright: 
The Empire and the Church must dwell together 
The one within the other. Which in which ? 
The Empire clasps the world ; clasps then the Church ; 
To shield that Church must rule her. Hers the gain : 
I, who was never son of hers, enriched her 
Making the ends o' the earth her heritage : 
I ever knew 'tis poverty not wealth 
That kindles knave to fanatic : silken saints 
Like him of Nicomedia, my Eusebius, 

Mate best with Empire's needs. When death draws nigh, 
I, that was ever jealous test the Font 
Might give the Church of Christ advantage o'er me, 
Will humbly sue for baptism, doffing then 
My royal for my chrysome robe. Let those 
Who through the far millenniums fill my throne 
In this from me take pattern. Wise men choose 
For wisest acts wise season. 

Hark that trump ! 

The army wakens from its noontide rest : 
Ere sunset fires its walls I reach Byzantium. 



1 886.] A MAN OF HIS TIME. 199 



A MAN OF HIS TIME. 

No period of history has been more frequently discussed than 
the golden age of French literature. Sev'ignes Letters, Voltaire's 
Siecle de Louis Quatorze, Saint-Simon's Memoirs, and a great num- 
ber of works at least as famous as these, have drawn a picture of 
the reign of Louis XIV. so complete and minute in detail that, 
as we read, we seem to live in the throbbing, feverish pulsations 
of that time. So vivid is the picture that the extraordinary bril- 
liancy of all that surrounded the court of the Grand Monarque is 
as dazzling to our eyes as if its gay pageants were still passing 
before the world, and we are well-nigh bewildered at the exhibi- 
tion of so much wit and sparkle, such genius, beauty, and grace. 
Then, as we read on, the show ceases to charm us. The moral 
turpitude underlying what at first was most alluring and fasci- 
nating becomes apparent. Society is rotten to the very core. 
The condition of the poor is little better than that of the beasts 
of the field. Mme. de Montespan is virtually Queen of France ; 
the high offices of church and state are held by her favor ; the 
royal dukedoms are bestowed on the king's illegitimate children. 
The salons of Paris are swarming with bewigged and powdered 
abbes ; Csesarism having invaded the sanctuary, ecclesiastics are 
transformed into courtiers. Still the church is not completely 
stifled ; there is power, earnestness, and religion at work even 
in France. St. Vincent de Paul is laboring with the zeal of an 
apostle at Saint Lazare ; Bossuet and Bourdaloue are denouncing 
with fearless eloquence the sins of king and court. ' If there are 
preachers, there are penitents too such as La Valliere at the 
Carmelites, such as De Ranee at La Trappe. 

It was an age of extremes, just as this is an age of compro- 
mise. The same awful strength that prompted men to abominable 
wickedness, when once the tide had turned led them to do most 
heroic acts of penance. No sooner were men's consciences awak- 
ened to the sins of their past lives, and to the perils that sur- 
rounded them, than they unflinchingly cut off every tie that bound 
them to the world, and fled into the desert. Penance, silence, 
solitude is the perpetual refrain of these lives. The very vio- 
lence of the disease which infected society suggested violent 
remedies, and this is perhaps the reason why the asceticism of 



200 A MAN OF HIS TIME. [Nov., 

that time is tinged with a certain rigor that reminds us of Jan- 
senism divested of its malice. 

Armand-Jean Bouthillier de Ranee was all through his check- 
ered career a representative man, and we have chosen him as 
the subject of this paper because his life is an epitome of most 
of the characteristics of his time. He was born in Paris the 
9th of January, 1626. His father was a man of the world, ambi- 
tious for his children and for their advancement in life. Armand- 
Jean was his second son, the godchild of Richelieu, who gave 
him his own name. From his infancy the boy was surrounded 
with honors ; his family was not only allied to the noblest in 
France, but he was the pet and darling of two queens, the 
queen-dowager, Marie de Medicis, and afterwards of the regent, 
Anne of Austria. M. de Ranee had incurred the displeasure 
of the regent by his unswerving fidelity to the unfortunate 
Marie de Medicis, and the first-fruit of his restoration to favor 
at court was the bestowal of a canonry of Notre Dame on his 
eldest son, Francois. This was soon followed by a dowry to his 
daughter, Claude-Catherine, and by many other signal benefits. 
The little Armand-Jean was meanwhile giving signs of remark- 
able intelligence and of a capacity considerably above the aver- 
age. His father had destined him for a military career, having 
settled that Franyois should receive as many ecclesiastical honors 
as could be obtained, and become a priest. Armand was ac- 
cordingly taught to dance, to ride, to fence, and to shine in all 
those accomplishments which were then thought necessary for 
a Knight of Malta. But of these projects not one was to be 
realized. Frangois fell ill, and from the first it was recognized 
that his malady, although of its nature a lingering one, would 
prove mortal. If he died from ten to twelve thousand livres 
of ecclesiastical revenue would be lost to the family. M. de 
Ranc6's worldly wisdom was equal to the occasion : Armand 
should be a priest, and heir to his brother's preferments. With 
all speed he procured for him the tonsure at the hands of the 
Archbishop of Paris, and when, less than two years afterwards, 
the Abbe Francois died, Armand was solemnly installed canon of 
Notre Dame in his place. He was eleven years old. In a short 
time his brother's remaining benefices were also transferred to 
him with the consent of the king, and thus the boy was not only 
canon of the great metropolitan cathedral, but abbot of La 
Trappe and of two other monasteries, as well as prior of Bou- 
logne, near Chambord. In 1635 he had come into the possession 
of the abbey of St. Clementine, in Poitou, and, at an age when he 



1 8 86.] A MAN OF HIS TIME. 201 

was still unable to render the least service to the church, was in 
the enjoyment of about fifteen thousand livres of ecclesiastical 
revenue. 

It is impossible to exaggerate the evils which made such a 
condition of things not only possible but a matter of every-day 
occurrence. The abuse was so general, and was moreover coun- 
tenanced by so many persons of merit, that M. de Ranee could 
not be expected to be very scrupulous in accepting such advan- 
tages for his son. But the church had from time to time, under 
several popes, remonstrated against the holding of abbeys in 
commendam, and had repeatedly revoked them. If she at any 
time tolerated the practice, it was less a concession to men's 
weakness than an ostensible proof of the humiliating bondage in 
which the state held her. She had ever opposed the holding of 
more than one such benefice at a time, in spite of the frequent 
practice. 

If anything could justify the choice made of Armand de 
Ranee as the recipient of these contraband favors, the extraordi- 
nary promise and brilliancy of his intellectual faculties might 
have afforded some excuse. It was clear to all that his career 
would be no insignificant one. His memory was no less remark- 
able than his other gifts ; what he had once learnt he never for- 
got, and he was studious in proportion to his grasp of mind and 
capacity. Greek was the language he preferred to all others, and 
in which he loved to clothe his thoughts. He was only twelve 
years old when he published an edition of Anacreon with Greek 
scholia and dedicated it to Richelieu. The work was of such 
recognized merit, and was considered such a marvellous produc- 
tion for a boy of his years, that the cardinal proposed to confer 
on the author yet another abbey in commendam. But Pere Caus- 
sin, the king's confessor, represented to Louis that to heap bene- 
fices on the head of such a child was to pervert the property of 
the church to a wrong use. Nothing could justify it, not even 
the most extraordinary talents; and, after all, who could tell 
what the boy would turn out? The king, informed by Riche- 
lieu of the very high order of the young scholar's attainments, 
replied that the boy already knew more Greek and Latin than 
all the abbes in the realm. 

Pere Caussin, wishing to judge for himself whether such were 
the case, wrote to M. de Ranee, expressing a desire to make the 
acquaintance of his son. The next day the learned young abbe 
got into his carriage and drove to the Grands-J6suites, in the Rue 
Saint Antoine. He was shown into the library, where the Pere 



202 A MAN OF HIS TIME. [Nov., 

Caussin soon joined him. After a few civilities the Jesuit began 
to draw his visitor out on the subject of his studies. He handed 
him a Homer and begged him to translate some passages at any 
place the book might chance to open. Not stopping to read out 
the original text, Armand began without hesitation to give the 
French rendering, and in such perfect language that one might 
have supposed he was reading a French author. This so aston- 
ished the listener that he thought the boy must be translating 
from the Latin in a parallel column. So he turned over several 
pages and threw the abbe's gloves over the Latin part to hide it. 
Armand went on as before, and the Pere Caussin was not only 
convinced of his learning and merit, but was completely won 
over to him. Embracing him with effusion, he exclaimed: 

" My child, you have not only the eyes of a lynx, but a still 
more discerning mind ! " 

Nevertheless no more honors were conferred upon the boy 
for the present, and that was a good thing. 

Thus the years of his education sped on, full of literary achieve- 
ment. Aristotle was studied with avidity ; then for a time the 
fantastic theories of astrology fascinated a mind bent on investi- 
gating every real or pretended science it came across. In 1643 
Armand finished his course of philosophy and began his theology. 
He was just seventeen. " I hope soon to be a great theologian," 
he wrote priggishly to his former tutor, M. Favier. " In eight 
months I shall have got through my scholastic theology, and 
during the sixteen more which must elapse before I can be a 
bachelor I shall devote myself to the reading of the Fathers, the 
councils, and ecclesiastical history ! . . . As soon as ever I can I 
shall begin preaching." 

With the self-sufficiency of extreme youth, he criticises St. 
Thomas, and proposes to give his opinion on the disputes then 
going on between M. Arnauld, representing Jansenism, and the 
Jesuits. Being, however, advised to follow the lectures given 
by some learned Carmelites of Charenton, he is gradually con- 
vinced that St. Thomas is an inspired writer; and is probably 
also set right with regard to Jansenism, for the Carmelites were 
noted for their fidelity to the Holy See, and we hear no more of 
the subject. 

Without ceasing to be a student, De Ranee now began to have 
other interests besides study ; and as it was his nature to throw 
himself heart and soul into everything that interested him, his life 
began to be a sort of wild medley of the most incompatible pur- 
suits. Fencing, shooting, hunting, theolog}', and preaching he 



1 8 86.] A MAN OF HIS TIME. 203 

had a taste for them all. He would sit writing the most erudite 
thesis on the Blessed Trinity, showing the wide difference that 
exists between the Christian doctrine concerning the Three in 
One and the theory of Plato and other philosophers of anti- 
quity ; then, throwing himself upon his horse, he would ride to 
hunt, dressed in the most fashionable costume. He had long 
thought it would be a fine thing to have vast congregations lis- 
tening with bated breath to his sermons, and he actually asked for 
and obtained permission to preach. Then he soon began to shine 
as a preacher, as he had shone as a student. But hunting was 
perhaps, after all, what he most cared for. Often he would pass 
whole days and nights in the forests, bareheaded, worn out with 
fatigue, watching in some hiding-place for a stag or a wild boar. 
Brimful of life and energy, he never stopped to consider whether 
his recreations were altogether suitable for a canon, an abbot/a 
prior, and a preacher. This kind of life was little calculated to 
nurture in him devout aspirations for the priesthood, and, although 
it was an understood thing that he was to receive holy orders, he 
put off the final step as long as he could. At last, however, his re- 
lations urged him to make no further delay. The road to fortune 
lay solely in this direction. The Archbishop of Tours, his uncle, 
was anxious to have him as his coadjutor; but the prelate was al- 
ready old and infirm, and if he died before Armand was ordained 
the post would be lost to him, with the right of succession. 

Armand was not so utterly steeped in ambition and the love of 
pleasure as not to feel his extreme unfitness for the new respon- 
sibility he was about to take upon himself. St. Vincent de Paul 
was forming young ecclesiastics at St. Lazare, and had already 
grouped around him all that was most distinguished for piety in 
the great French metropolis. Gently but surely he was build- 
ing up what the corruption and decay of centuries had been 
gradually destroying. To him De Ranc6 went, conscious of his 
own deficiencies, and put himself into the hands of " le saint 
M. Vincent," as all Paris even then called him. At St. Lazare 
he made a retreat of twelve days, learnt how to meditate and to 
examine his conscience, had himself taught the ceremonies of the 
church, and began to wear a clerical dress. 

In quaint old pictures of the lives of the saints, where every 
incident is told by symbols, a flower rudely outlined sometimes 
shows how a grace was coming to the soul, and afterwards every- 
thing is changed in that life. A grace had now come to De 
Ranee, and if it did not at the time change the whole tenor of his 
way, it was perhaps the first of all his chances. This grace was 



204 A MAN OF HIS TIME. [Nov., 

his intercourse with St. Vincent de Paul, who first startled him 
with regard to the unseemliness of his life and to the unlawful- 
ness of a plurality of benefices, showing him the consequences of 
an abuse like this. De Ranc6 was softened and humbled by all 
he had seen and heard at St. Lazare, but he was not prepared to 
make a sacrifice that would cloud over the prospects of his whole 
career and probably bring him into bad odor at court. He would 
try what good intentions without much personal discomfort 
would do. Still, he had been made thoroughly uneasy, and from 
this moment, although he returned in a measure to his old pur- 
suits, there are occasional rifts in the clouds indicative of some- 
thing within him at war with his other restless, impatient, undis- 
ciplined self. He continued to study everything that came in his 
way, and in the midst of all his history and geography, his her- 
aldry, painting, chronology, and controversy, was ordained priest, 
the 22d of January, 1651. He was to have said his first Mass with 
great pomp and display in the church of the Annunciades, in 
Paris; but during the elaborate preparations he disappeared, and 
went off quite alone to a monastery of Carthusians, where he of- 
fered the Holy Sacrifice in perfect solitude, to the discomfiture of 
all his friends. Strange to relate, this solemn event, earnestly 
and thoughtfully as he had celebrated it, fixed no permanent 
landmark in his life ; his studies, amusements, and dissipation 
went on as before. In 1654 he took his degree of doctor at the 
Sorbonne, his father having died the preceding year. He was 
now in possession of his patrimony, the barony of V6retz, a large 
and beautiful estate in Touraine, and of two magnificent houses 
in Paris. The Abbe de Ranee was one of the richest and finest 
gentlemen in France. When he went to court or to brilliant en- 
tertainments he usually wore a purple doublet of some costly 
material, silk stockings of the same color, a rich lace cravat of 
the most fashionable shape and pattern, long hair well curled 
and powdered, two enormous emeralds as sleeve-buttons, and a 
diamond ring of great value on his finger. In the country he 
carried a sword, wore a fawn-colored coat and a black silk cravat 
with gold embroidery. 

After a time he threw aside his books and gave himself up to 
idleness. From morning till night there was no break in the 
ceaseless round of pleasures, entertainments, visits, day-dreams, 
and extravagances of every kind. Here -and there a friend was 
brave enough to administer a rebuke. " You might do better 
than this," said one day the Bishop of Chalons ; "you are wanting 
neither in talents nor in understanding." But remonstrances 



1 886.] A MAN OF HIS TIME. 205 

were in vain ; by this time the world had taken such hold of 
De Ranee that nothing short of a moral earthquake could break 
the silken bonds with which he was bound. The earthquake 
came in this wise : 

Mme. la Duchesse de Montbazon was one of the reigning 
beauties of Paris. Witty, graceful, and charming, of her the 
ambassador of Queen Christina said that, having seen all that 
was considered beautiful in the French capital, it was as if he 
had seen nothing till he had been presented to the Duchesse de 
Montbazon. 

Her salon, the most brilliant and seductive of the gay capital, 
was the resort of all the beaux esprits of fashion and celebrity. 
Among the guests that assembled there and there was not one 
who was not distinguished De Ranee was the moving spirit, en- 
livening every entertainment with his sparkling wit and that 
keen delight in enjoyment which is almost enough in itself to 
make others enjoy. His remarks were the Attic salt of the most 
lively conversations, and his manners were thought polished even 
in that age of exquisite politeness. 

Veretz was at no great distance from the country-seat of the 
Montbazons, and here, as in Paris, there was a continuous round 
of amusements, of which De Ranc6 was still the life and soul. In 
the spring of 1657 he went to Paris, but in a short time the 
Duchesse de Montbazon was seized with a malignant fever. 
De Ranee" hurried to her bedside, and the sounds of music and 
revelry are still ringing in our ears when we hear him pronounc- 
ing the solemn words, " Not an instant to lose death, repent- 
ance ! " 

At length the scales had fallen from his eyes. " There is no 
hope of 3'our recovery," he said to her, " and but little time ; do 
not put off your reconciliation with God a single moment." The 
third day of her illness, having procured the dying woman the 
last sacraments, he left the house in order to take a little rest, and 
returned towards evening. 

On his way up-stairs he met her son, M. de Soubise, who 
told him that his mother had just died. 

There was something so appalling in the swift end of a life in 
which the thought of death had never found a place, in the sud- 
den passing away of a soul in the midst of balls and fetes, of reck- 
lessness, and perhaps of worse still, that De Ranee was struck 
down to the earth, as by a blow. 

He at once left Paris and shut himself up at Ve"retz. In his 
account of this period of his life he says that his mind was full 



206 A MAN OF HIS TIME. [Nov., 

of darkness and confusion ; that he wandered about his great, 
gloomy corridors a prey to grief, remorse, and desolation, alone 
with the terrible reproaches of his conscience. The world was 
as hateful to him now as it had been attractive before, and, look- 
ing back on the past, one horrible phantom after another rose up 
to paralyze him with fear. In how much he had sinned none but 
his confessors ever knew, but his repentance and heroic, life-long 
penance are matters of history. Here at Veretz he spent whole 
days in the forest, seeing and speaking to no one, and in the even- 
ing would sit plunged in reverie by the empty fire-place while 
the wind swept moaning through the trees in the park and rat- 
tled the window-frames. 

One day, sitting thus, he cried out with tears of repentance : 
" O pauvre Abbt de Ranc^ oil serais- tu maintenant, si tu ttais mart 
dans ce temps-la ! " 

For three months he remained in this state of misery, then, 
taking with him one servant, and travelling in the simplest man- 
ner, so as to attract no attention, he returned to Paris and 
begged hospitality of the Fathers of the Oratory. Here he made 
a general confession of his whole life, after which he put himself 
for direction into the hands of Pere de Mouchy. That which 
caused him the most poignant regret was the unprepared and 
unworthy manner in which he had been used to offer Mass, and 
so intense was now his contrition for this that he imposed on 
himself the penance of abstaining from celebrating the Holy 
Sacrifice for six months. Then he consulted his director as to 
the kind of life he should adopt for the future, but the advice of 
the Pere de Mouchy that he should strive to render himself wor- 
thy of his holy calling only partially satisfied him. 

There was that in De Ranee prompting him to do greater 
things than these an intense longing for something beyond ; as 
yet he knew not what, much less could he define the want. The 
Oratorian referred him to several priests noted for their enlight- 
enment, but they were no help to him. 

By this time it had become known that he was in Paris, and 
one day two ladies of fashion having paid him a visit to invite 
him to return to their receptions, he began to feel that it would 
be dangerous for him to remain longer in such close proximity 
to his old haunts. All undecided as he was, he made up his mind 
to return to Veretz. 

At the Oratory he had put his conscience in order, but it did 
not seem likely that he would be helped on much further by the 
Pere de Mouchy, and on the road to Veretz he made a halt at 



1 886.] A MAN OF HIS TIME. 207 

Port Royal in the hope that Arnauld d'Andilly might give him 
the key to his vocation. 

De Ranch's connection with the Port-Royalists has been too 
persistently misrepresented by them not to need a word of ex- 
planation here. It is quite admissible that the Abbe de Ranee at 
this period was attracted by the severe and rigorous tone adopt- 
ed by the self-styled hermits of Port Royal, and by the long 
penances they prescribed, before it might be hoped that the sin- 
ner was reconciled to God. Nevertheless he never bartered 
away his liberty to them, and, in spite of all their advances and 
his esteem for M. d'Andilly, he never linked himself in any way 
to the Jansenists as a party. When a decision had to be made, 
and it became a question of showing his colors, he proved him- 
self to be what indeed he had ever been a submissive and de- 
voted son of the Catholic Church. 

M. d'Andilly, however, was for a time the chosen director 
of De Ranee's conscience, and the penitent corresponded with 
him from his retreat at Veretz. He consulted him as to the 
books he should read, as to his rule of life, and never left his 
solitude, even for the most indispensable journey, without first 
obtaining permission from Port Royal. This might have led 
to another Babylonian captivity as dangerous as the toils of the 
world had been, for the Jansenists did all they could to maintain 
absolute power at Veretz. None but Jansenistic priests and Jan- 
senistic books were admitted there. But this state of things only 
lasted as long as De Ranee chose that it should last. He was 
no more pledged to Jansenism than he was to Quietism, and the 
more the Arnaulds strove to tighten the reins the more did 
De Ranee show himself to be independent of them. Still, even 
when he broke away from their direction, he continued for a long 
time to keep up cordial relations with M. d'Andilly, and it was 
not till much later that he began to perceive the real spirit of 
hostility to the church which animated the party. 

Three years had passed away since the death of Mme. de 
Montbazon, and the life at Veretz, hidden as it was, full of 
pious aspirations, of study, and of good works, began to seem too 
luxurious to a mind thirsting for penance and a deeper, holier soli- 
tude. It was a life worthy of a Greek philosopher, but scarcely 
one to satisfy a penitent such as De Ranc6. He consulted the 
Bishop of Chalons on the subject of giving up his benefices, and 
was told that he could not lawfully. retain them. 

The Jansenists made one more effort to influence him and 
to allay his scruples, but without success. There were to 



208 A MAN OF HIS TIME. [Nov., 

be no more half-measures, and, above all, there should be no 
sophistry. 

It would lead us far beyond the scope of this paper were we 
to follow De Ranc6 through all the difficulties he encountered 
from his family and from others before he was allowed to di- 
vest himself of all his benefices save one, to effect the sale of 
his beloved Veretz, to make over his houses in Paris to the 
hospital of the Hotel-Dieu, to distribute his fortune among the 
poor, and to retire to La Trappe. Nor, interesting as the study 
would be, may we follow him through the mazes he had to 
thread from the moment when he exclaimed with horror, "Mot, 
me faire frocard ! " at the bare suggestion of his becoming a monk, 
to the moment when we see him, stripped of all his pride, humbly 
craving admission at the novitiate of Perseigne. 

His first plan was to go for a time to La Trappe the one 
abbey he had retained and there establish some kind of reform. 
As yet any idea of taking the religious habit was as remote from 
his intention as it had been in the days of his worldly life. He 
was still in doubt as to the future, a desert in which to pray 
being his only desire. But he was still commendatory abbot of 
this monastery, and the very title was a mark of corruption. 

For more than a century the abbots of the Cistercian monas- 
tery of La Trappe had been ecclesiastics living in the world, 
recognizing no obligations in return for the revenues which the 
abbey was bound to make over to them. 

It will be easily imagined that such an irregularity could not 
have taken place without serious detriment to the monks, who 
by degrees came to have nothing of their state but the name and 
the habit. In 1662 La Trappe was virtually a ruin. The divine 
office had long ceased to be recited, the doors of the monastery 
were allowed to remain open day and night, the cloisters were 
accessible to men and women of the world, and the filthy con- 
dition into which the house had fallen was only equalled by that 
of the church. The walls of the sacred edifice were crumbling 
away, the pavement was unsafe, the roof let the rain in, and the 
altars were in a deplorable and unseemly state. 

It was comparatively easy to remedy these material evils, but 
the reform of the monks themselves was a task that needed all De 
Ranch's firmness, patience, and courage. Not only would they 
listen to none of his remonstrances, but they even threatened to 
take his life if he did not abandon his plans of reform. They had 
degenerated into little else but a band of lawless brigands, the 
terror of the country around. Crimes of every sort lurked in the 



1 886.] A 'MAN OF HIS TIME. 209 

shadow of their forests ; robbers and assassins took refuge within 
the very walls of the sanctuary. 

The difficulties to be overcome before even the first principles 
of religious life were re-established in the community would have 
daunted a spirit less determined than De Ranee's, for neither 
entreaties, menaces, nor exhortations were of any avail. His 
friends besought him to have some regard for his own safety, and 
to abandon a task that seemed hopeless from the beginning. But 
these motives were not likely to have much weight with De 
Ranee, and when he had exhausted all other resources he ap- 
pealed to the king. 

If the monks of La Trappe had lost all fear of God, they had 
a most craven fear of Louis XIV., and this step of their abbot's 
produced an instantaneous result. Their threats gave way to the 
humblest submission, and De Ranee at once profited by the favor- 
able moment to put the monastery into the hands of the Cister- 
cians of the Strict Observance. Six religious were sent from 
Perseigne to introduce the Reform, the old monks, also six in 
number, obtaining permission to live within the precincts of the 
monastery, or to retire altogether on a pension of four hundred 
livres each. 

Thus, then, was the first step gained ; the second led the abbot 
himself into a new path. For months he had been living the life 
of a Cistercian in all its austerity, and with the practice of re- 
ligious life his aversion to the religious habit gradually vanished. 
The old repugnance had now and again to be combated, but dur- 
ing these months of struggle it had become clearer and clearer to 
him that the solitude to which he felt himself called was none 
other than the solitude of La Trappe. His final resolve was taken 
one day after Mass, during his thanksgiving, while the monks 
were singing Sext in the office of the Blessed Virgin. Suddenly 
the words of the psalm fell like rays of light into his soul: Qui 
confidunt in Domino, sicut mons Sion : non commovebitur in ceternum 
qui habitat in Jerusalem. 

The news that the Abb6 de Ranee, the learned doctor of the- 
Sorbonne, the cultivated man of letters, the luxury-loving world- 
ling, was about to put on the humble habit of St. Bernard and 
bury himself in a living tomb for the rest of his days, was a scan- 
dal to his friends in the world. The consent of the king for 
transforming the abbey in commendam into an abbey regular had 
been obtained, and De Ranee had already begun his novitiate at 
Perseigne, before many would believe in the miracle. Even the- 
vicar-general of the Reform could hardly credit the seriousness, 

VOL. XLIV. 14 



210 A MAN OF HIS TIME. [Nov., 

of his intention when he applied to him for admission into the 
order. But to all his objections De Ranee replied: " It is true I 
am a priest, but I have lived in a manner unworthy of my office ; 
I have possessed several abbeys, but instead of being a father to 
my religious 1 have squandered their goods and the patrimony 
of the Crucifix. I am a doctor, but I am ignorant of the very 
alphabet of Christianity." The year of the novitiate was passed 
in the exercise of the most humble offices. No work, however 
repugnant to nature, seemed hard to him when performed in the 
light of fraternal charity and expiation for past sins. His favorite 
maxim was this : " The higher a man is placed in authority over 
others, the more should he humble himself in the spirit of charity 
to those under him." There were two breaks, however, in this 
year of novice life, the one occasioned by a severe illness brought 
on by his excessive austerities ; the other was an order from the 
prior of Perseigne to proceed into Champagne and settle a dis- 
pute that had arisen between the relaxed members of a religious 
community and those who had voted for the Reform. 

On the igth of June, 1664, the bulls authorizing the profession 
of the Abbe de Ranee arrived from Rome, and a day was fixed 
for the ceremony. But before finally binding himself by vows 
he announced solemnly that he saw nothing in the so-called Strict 
Observance approaching to the primitive Cistercian spirit, and 
that it was his intention to revive that spirit at La Trappe. The 
declaration was like a thunder-clap both to the prior of Perseigne 
and the vicar-general. They disapproved of any attempt to re- 
store the ancient order of things more completely than had been 
thought prudent in the Reform actually existing ; and yet in re- 
fusing to profess the Abbe de Ranee they saw that they would 
be depriving Citeaux of one who was perhaps destined to be its 
chiefest support and ornament in that century. After some de- 
liberation they replied that he would be at liberty to do the best 
he could with his own monastery ; but they were convinced that 
he would find no one to second him in his views, and that proba- 
bly, finding his plan impracticable, he would be content to aban- 
don it. De Ranee accordingly pronounced his vows (26th of 
June, 1664), and, after being consecrated abbot by Mgr. Plunket, 
Bishop of Ardagh, in Ireland, proceeded to take possession of La 
Trappe. 

It would have been impossible that a man so distinguished as 
De Ranee should have passed through this solemn crisis unnoticed 
by the world he was leaving behind him. The eyes of France 
were upon him, and friends and enemies were anxiously waiting 
to see what he would do. They had not to wait long. The kind 



1 8 86.] A MAN OF HIS TIME. 211 

of life introduced into La Trappe by the religious of the Strict 
Observance was not very austere. On fast-days they dined at 
eleven ; a liberal collation was allowed, and silence was not very 
strictly observed. There was an hour's recreation every day 
after dinner, and a walk once a week. The religious might still 
receive visits in the parlors. Soon, however, after the consecra- 
tion of their abbot, his fervor communicated itself to those around 
him ; laxity gave way to a relish for penance, and his example 
was a keen incentive to the practice of every kind of mortifica- 
tion. 

By common consent of the religious fish ceased entirely to be 
an article of their food, eggs were only to be allowed in cases of 
sickness, meat was altogether prohibited except in serious mal- 
adies. Hitherto butter had been used in preparing the various 
dishes of vegetables on which they dined, but, the abbot having 
forbidden any butter to be put into his portion of food, the whole 
community followed his example. With regard to the rule of 
silence, De Ranee began by allowing his religious to speak once 
a day ; then, as they were very careful to accuse themselves in 
chapter of every idle word that had escaped them, and of the 
least imperfection they had noticed in themselves or in each 
other, the penance he usually imposed for this kind of fault was 
to keep silence for several days together, thus preparing them 
for the perpetual silence he purposed to introduce among them. 
Then when they appeared ripe for such an austerity he de- 
creed : 

1. That the community being assembled, either in the re- 
fectory, the chapter-house, at conference, or elsewhere, no re- 
ligious should speak except to the superior presiding. 

2. That the religious should have no communication with 
each other, either by word of mouth, by letter, or by signs, and 
much less with individuals from without. 

It was decreed further that, to avoid every occasion for speak- 
ing, no two religious were to be together without necessity, 
and that a breach of this rule should be considered a breach of 
silence. 

This rule of silence came to be so strictly observed at La 
Trappe that the effect produced on the guests, always hospitably 
received there, was like the hush of some vast sanctuary in the 
desert. At the same time each monk was exhorted to open his 
heart to his superior as often as he felt the need, and the Abbe de 
Ranee was always ready to counsel, direct, and encourage his 
spiritual sons, like a kind father, almost with the tenderness of a 
mother. 



212 A QUEEN. [Nov., 

Manual labor, such as ploughing, sowing, reaping, gardening, 
occupied three hours of the day, the monks going to their work 
in procession, one by one, headed by their abbot. 

But the life and soul of their austerities was the prayer and 
psalmody with which this desert place was incessantly vibrating. 
Our Lord's command to "pray without ceasing " was here carried 
out in full. 

Gregorian plain chant was the psalmody in use, and De Ranee 
brought it to such perfection that each word, each note seemed 
palpitating with life. It was as if angels had joined their voices to 
those of the monks to make them so plaintively sweet. At night, 
when they rose to sing Matins, their voices, welling up out of the 
darkness and the deep silence, swept through the great, dim 
arches of the church in strains of unearthly beauty. 

This picture of the white-robed penitents of La Trappe, bare- 
headed and with naked feet on the cold stones, making sweet 
melody in their hearts to God, is pleasanter to look upon than 
the picture with which we began, with all its pomp and splendor. 
Both belong to the past, but this lives on. 



A QUEEN. 

LET happy lovers sing the bliss of June, 

When with life's sweetest chords earth keepeth tune, 

The growing year's full maiden perfectness 

With untried heart and open hand to bless. 

Be mine October's deeper grace to sing 
Of golden sunshine daily shortening, 
Of empty nests and songs of summer stilled : 
With sense of loss each passing hour filled. 

Strong-armed and beautiful she comes, like one 
That holds the labor of her life undone 
So long as from deep fountain of her heart 
Life's crimson currents on life's errands start. 

To-day a queen ; her draperies of gold 
And royal scarlet falling fold on fold 
About the firm-shod feet so swift to move 
On womanly mission of untiring love. 



1 886.] A QUEEN. 213 

Smiling- she stands and softly sings to rest 
With gracious deeds the sorrow of her breast 
The empty nests she never hath seen filled, 
June's loving-cup before her coming spilled. 

In the sharp air the tired earth lies a-cold 
Gently our queen lets fall her robe of gold : 
She heeds not chill nor loss of raiment fine. 
Her lessened shadow lets sun wider shine. 

She lights 'mid wreck the hazel's trembling rays, 
For her blue gentians wait, 'mid untrod ways, 
The brown nuts ripen, and pale April flowers 
Awake to live the dream of summer hours : 

Late blossoming of violets her gift, 
Amid decay, the weary earth to lift 
To thought of joy beyond the dark to be 
May's tender grace her eyes shall never see. 

A queen to-day. To-morrow she shall stand 
Rifled by rain and frost ; her open hand, 
Save her sweet self, scarce holding any gift, 
Her scattered gold on whirling winds a-drift. 

So softly all the sky and sunlit hills 
And leafless woods her gracious presence fills : 
So life's loss veiling with love's tender art, 
Sweet lips betraying not heroic heart.' 

To-day a queen with life at her behest ; 

After of life and kingdom dispossessed. 

Wise spendthrift! whom all loss but readier finds 

To give her sunshine to warm wintry winds. 

To-morrow we shall look for her in vain,' 
Though rest on perfect skies not any stain 
Of tears to tell of earth's beloved dead. 
Who love, shall feel their winsome mistress fled. 

Then, when upon November, naked, cold, 
St. Martin's Summer spreads its cloak of gold, 
Soft we shall murmur: Lo! October's wraith 
That blessing brings beyond the gates of death. 



214 "HAS ROME JURISDICTION" [Nov., 

"HAS ROME JURISDICTION?" 
I. 

SOME little time ago two articles appeared in the London 
Church Times under the above heading. The title is so singular, 
it possesses an air of such startling novelty, that the Catholic 
reader naturally pauses, if only in mere curiosity, to ascertain 
what new tactics can have prompted a question so foreign in its 
wording to the ordinary lingo of Protestant polemics, and particu- 
larly to that of the right wing of the Anglican High-Church party, 
which has always been credited with at least maintaining a re- 
spectful bearing towards the claims of the Catholic hierarchy as 
being the only source and foundation of their own. But a very 
cursory perusal of these articles will clear up the mystery and 
supply the solution of the riddle. Defeated at all points, routed 
along the entire line, their orders discredited, their sacraments 
exploded, their mimicry of Catholic worship and Catholic prac- 
tices proved a delusion and a snare by reason of its very barren- 
ness in producing any of those higher phases of the spiritual life 
without which elaborate ceremonial and orthodox views, even 
coupled with much of earnestness and refinement, are but as 
whited sepulchres, the Ritualists have at last reached that con- 
ventional straw which is represented as the final and but too de- 
ceptive refuge of a drowning man, and in very desperation cry 
out, regardless alike of their own hopeless condition in this re- 
spect and of the invulnerable position of those whom they attack : 
Has Rome Jurisdiction ? 

To us, who for long years have watched the progress of their 
gallant struggle for existence and recognition, there is something 
truly melancholy in this cry ; it is as the last and final challenge 
of a brave and vanquished people, driven from their fair low- 
lands and smiling pastures into some mountain fastness deemed 
by them impregnable, but in vain ! The cohorts of -ever-victo- 
rious Rome can follow them even there; her universal dominion 
and her invincible standards will and must make themselves re- 
spected per totam orbem terrarum, and the defiant shout of the 
defeated but heroic fugitives serves but as their death-cry. 

Just such is the feeling which possesses a Catholic convert on 
perusing the articles referred to. The very fact that at this late 



1 886.] "HAS ROME JURISDICTION" 215 

hour every other question has been implicitly abandoned, as is 
proved by the adoption of this final subterfuge, is in itself a con- 
fession of defeat. We grant you, they say by implication, that 
Parker's consecration was decidedly " fishy "; we admit that the 
arguments in favor of one visible Rome-headed church as a ful- 
filment of our Lord's promise, if only it can be shown to have a 
practical and real existence, are absolutely unanswerable, and 
that the idea is both comforting and assuring ; we know but too 
well that even the last grand effort of so redoubtable a champion 
of Anglo Catholicism as Dr. Littledale, in his Plain Reasons against 
joining the Church of Rome, has fallen flat and innoxious : but we 
have gone on too far and too long to surrender easily ; we must 
attack the enemy, in his very acropolis, and prove in our own 
unique way that this boasted centre of unity and jurisdiction is 
but a phantom after all ; that no jurisdiction can possibly flow 
from, or be rightfully claimed by, the Roman pontiff in conse- 
quence of the very simple fact which we, after three centuries of 
Anglo-Roman controversy, have been the first to discover that 
there has been no canonical election to the Papacy possibly for a 
thousand years, nor possible for about four hundred, and that 
" the Petrine line, if ever a reality," in all probability " ended in 
the tenth century." Risum teneatis, amid? 

For ourselves, in sooth, we do not know whether to laugh or 
to cry ! The witness of the church throughout all these centu- 
ries, the testimony of history, the recognition of the nations, the 
common sense of Catholic and Protestant Europe, all are to go 
to the wall in the presence of this latest discovery of the sages of 
Little Queen Street ! There is no pope, and there has been no 
pope, possibly since the fourth century, probably since the tenth, ' 
certainly since the year 1484 ! 

The above astounding statements have been deliberately put 
forward not merely by the Church Times, but at still greater 
length by so grave and sober a periodical as the Church Quarterly 
Review ; put forward, moreover, with a flourish of trumpets evi- 
dently intended to convey the impression that Rome, the great 
opponent of Anglicanism, is once for all vanquished, her arrogant 
claims demolished, and her very superstructure undermined, 
little recking that their boastful shout, Delenda est Carthago, is but 
the presage of their own permanent immersion into the ocean of 
oblivion. 

Three distinct lines of argument are adduced by these periodi- 
cals as proving the non-existence of the Papacy, and consequently 
the downfall of the whole system of jurisdiction flowing there- 



216 "HAS ROME JURISDICTION" [Nov., 

from ; all are professedly based upon the fundamental principles 
of Roman canon law. They are as follows : 

I. In the course of the tenth century, during a period of some 
sixty years, the Holy See was occupied by a series of usurpers 
infamous alike for the methods adopted to secure their elevation, 
and in their private lives both before and afterwards. This line 
of false pontiffs, which was ushered in by the violent deposition 
of the lawful pope, was maintained by simony, force, deception, 
and the machinations of three disreputable women, Theodora the 
elder and her daughters Theodora and Marozia. This period is 
termed by historians the Tuscan Domination, or, in the refined lan- 
guage of our Anglican contemporary, the scortocracy. The ar- 
gument in general is that, during this long series of invalidly- 
elected pontiffs, the race of validly-appointed cardinals must 
have died out, and that consequently at the end of this period, 
there being no legitimately-constituted body of papal electors, 
the papal office lapsed and came to an end. To make assurance 
still more sure, further instances of a somewhat similar nature 
are given in succeeding centuries. 

2. The second line of argument, to be adopted failing the 
one just exposed, may be best set forth in the ipsissima verba of 
the article : 

" But, in addition to the two huge gaps in the succession to which we 
have already drawn attention, there is another of an equally serious kind, 
and, on the principles of canon law, equally making that succession in- 
valid. We mean the seventy years' residence of the popes at Avignon, 
from 1309 to 1379. It is canonically the duty of all bishops to reside in 
their sees, and it is on this very ground of the alleged residence of St. Peter 
at Rome for twenty-five years that the Roman Church claims him as Bishop 
of Rome rather than as Bishop of Antioch." (Then follows a quotation 
from the Church Quarterly maintaining that just as St. Peter vacated the 
see of Antioch on his setting up his episcopal chair in Rome, so did Pope 
Clement V. cease to be Bishop of Rome and became simply Bishop of 
Avignon, concluding:) '' It is certainly startling, but no less true, the see of 
Rome was ipso facto void during the long residence of the popes at Avignon" 

3. The third argument in favor of this novel theory consists 
in the difficulties connected with the great Schism of the West 
and the action of the Council of Constance. 

The writer of the first article in the Church Times commences 
by laying down the axiom, for which he claims the authority of 
Bellarmine, that a doubtfully valid pope is no pope at all; and in 
this category he places all cases of disputed elections not merely 
those which he considers " distinctly invalid elections " (of which 



1 886.] "ffA s ROME JURISDICTION" 2 1 7 

more anon), but those in which the " valid election of the suc- 
cessful candidate has never been fully proved." 

"The cases of absolute nullity," says the Church Quarterly, "admitting 
of no dispute, are these : Intrusion by some external influence, without 
any election by the constituency ; election by those who are not qualified 
to elect ; simony, and antecedent ineligibility of certain definite kinds. The 
cases of highly probable nullity are those of heresy, whether manifest or 
secret, and whether previous to or after election to the Papacy." 

This short quotation is sufficient to afford a plan of the cam- 
paign, the details of which simply consist in applying to concrete 
instances the principles here laid down in the abstract. The 
names of about thirty popes, reigning during the tenth, eleventh, 
thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, are either 
mentioned or referred to in the course of these two articles as 
having been doubtful or invalid. The Church Quarterly, observes 
the writer, swells the list to yet larger proportions : 

"The names reach from Victor I., A.D. 193, to Leo X., A.D. 1513; and 
within that period, out of the two hundred and three occupants of the 
papal throne, we find twenty-seven popes whose elections were certainly 
invalid according to Roman canon law, and thirty-one probably invalid 
fifty eight in all. The causes of the legal flaws in the several cases are as 
follows : Heresy, eight ; probable simony, three ; intrusion and simony, 
four; intrusion, seventeen; simony, four; disputed election, nine ; doubt- 
ful election, ten ; irregular election, one; invalid election, two." 

It is claimed that none of the disavowed anti-popes are in- 
cluded in this catalogue, and that the " compiler of this most for- 
midable list gives the documentary authority for the statement 
which he makes," As we have not the Church Quarterly Review 
before us, we must content ourselves with examining, as far as 
space will permit, a few specimens of the instances adduced by 
the Church Times and, indeed, they will be amply sufficient. 
Nor is it necessary to dwell at length upon each of them; for, in 
spite of the minute, one might almost say hair-splitting, subdi- 
visions above quoted, we shall see that one and the same reply 
will serve for most of them. 

The writer commences with the year 903, in which he states 
that Pope Leo V., having reigned only about six weeks, was im- 
prisoned by one Christopher, his own chaplain, who usurped the 
apostolic throne for himself. He was expelled by the infamous 
Sergius III., the paramour of Marozia, wife of Alberic, Marquis 
of Camarino.* 

* As regards Sergius III., two of his contemporaries, Flodoard of Rheims and John the 
Deacon, give quite a different account of his character, describing him as virtuous, pious, and 



2 1 8 "HA s ROME JURISDICTION. " [No v. , 

"It was under his auspices," according to the Church Quarterly, "that 
the infamous triad of courtesans, the two Theodoras and Marozia, obtained 
the influence which enabled them to dispose several times of the papal 
crown. They, or Alberic of Spoleto, son of Marozia, nominated to the 
Papacy Anastasius III., Lando, John X., Leo VI., Stephen VII., John XL, 
Martin III.,* Agapitus II., and John XII., the last of whom, a mere boy at 
the time of his intrusion, was deposed for various atrocious crimes by a 
synod convened by the Emperor Otho I. in A.D. 963. The whole series, as 
Baronius declares, consisted of false pontiffs, having no right to their 
office either by election or by the subsequent assent of the electors." 

In the second article the actual quotation from the Annals of 
Cardinal Baronius is given in the following' translation, which we 
have collated with the original, and find, as the reader will see, to 
be substantially correct: 

" What was then the semblance of the Holy Roman Church? As foul 
as it could be ; when harlots, superior in power as in profligacy, governed at 
Rome, at whose will sees were transferred, bishops were appointed, and 
what is horrible and awful to say their paramours were intruded into the 
see of Peter : false pontiffs who are set down in the catalogue of Roman 
pontiffs merely for chronological purposes; for who can venture to say 
that persons thus shamefully intruded by such courtesans were legitimate 
Roman pontiffs ? No mention can be found of election or subsequent con- 
sent on the part of the clergy. All the canons were buried in oblivion, the 
decrees of the popes stifled, the ancient traditions put under ban, and the 
old customs, sacred rights [sic], and former usages in the election of the 
chief pontiff were quite abolished. Mad lust, relying on worldly power, 
thus claimed all as its own, goaded on by the sting of ambition. Christ 
was then in a deep sleep in the ship, when the ship itself was covered by 
the waves and the great tempests were blowing. And, what seemed worse, 
there were no disciples to wake him with their cries as they slept, for all 
were snoring. You can imagine as you please what sort of priests and dea- 
cons were chosen as cardinals by these monsters " t (Ann., 912, viii.) 

The reader will by this time have gained a tolerable insight 
into the bent of the argument. It is throughout an argumentum 

zealous ; while the epitaph on his tomb represents him as " an excellent pastor, beloved by all 
classes." (Cf. Alzog, vol. ii. p. 293.) 

* Called also Marinus II. 

t The original of this remarkable passage runs as follows : Quas tune facies sanctas Eccle- 
sias Romanas ? Quam foedissima, cum Romas dominarentur potentissimaa aeque ac sordidis- 
simae meretrices ? Quarum arbitrio mutarentur sedes, darentur Episcopi, et quod auditu hor- 
rendum et infandum est, intruderentur in sedem Petri earum amasii, pseudo pontifices, qui non 
sint nisi ad consignanda tanta tempora in catalogo Romanorum pontificum scripti. Quis enim 
a scortis hujusmodi intrusos sine lege, legitimos dicere posset Romanos fuisse pontifices ? Nus- 
quam cleri eligentis vel postea consentientis aliqua mentio, canones omnesque pressi silentio, 
decreta pontificum suffocata, proscriptae antiques traditiones, veteresque in eligendo Summo Pon- 
tifice consuetudines, sacrique ritus et pristinus usus prorsus extincti. Sic vindicaverat omnia 
sibi libido, saeculari potentia freta, etc. (Annales jEcclesiastzct, torn. x. anno 912, viii. p. 577. 
Ed. Venetiis, MDCCXI.) 



1 886.] "HAS ROME JURISDICTION" 219 

ad hominem, based professedly " upon the principles of Roman 
canon law." The "pseudo-papacy" of the present day is to be 
convicted, like the wicked servant in the Gospel, out of its own 
mouth and by the testimony of its stanchest adherents ; Bellar- 
mine is to be cited as a witness " that a doubtful pope is to be 
esteemed as not a pope," and the inference will be drawn that 
such false popes could of course themselves, throughout this 
long period of sixty-odd years, create " none but invalid clerical 
electors." Thus the whole edifice of " ultramontane Romanism " 
is to be brought clattering down like the walls of Jericho ; popery, 
that old bugbear of "our pure reformed church," is shown to be 
but a distended bladder after all; the bladder is pricked solvun- 
tur tabulce risu and Anglicanism remains master of the situation ! 

Well, hardly ! We trust that we are not hard-hearted, and a 
man must be callous indeed who could, without a qualm, attempt 
to turn the laugh against those who have thus mapped out their 
plans for the destruction of the Papacy with such winning com- 
placency ; but the interests of truth are paramount, and we trust 
that before laying down the pen we shall be able to show clearly 
that the truth in the present instance, both as regards the real 
nature of all these transactions, the genuine history of the times, 
and the true principles of canon law, has been grossly violated. 

To begin at the beginning : The opening scene of lawlessness 
and violence which represents Leo V. as being imprisoned by 
Christopher, a priest of that pontiff's household, who usurps the 
see of Rome for himself, has for centuries been a matter of con- 
troversy. So far as we know, the earliest writer who records 
these supposed events is Vincent of Beauvais in the thirteenth 
century, who is followed by Platina in the fifteenth, and subse- 
quently by many others, among whom is the illustrious Cardinal 
Baronius himself. But surely these authorities come very late, 
and are scarcely deserving of much credit in the presence of the 
fact that Luitprand, Bishop of Cremona, a contemporary of these 
very -events and a bitter and extravagant denouncer of the cor- 
ruptions of the Papacy in his time, * is entirely silent upon the 
point. Nor is his the only voice we should have expected to hear 
raised in lamentation over so great an evil ; we have other con- 
temporaneous historians whose reputation for accuracy and im- 
partiality is of a far higher order, such as Flodoard, or Frodoard, 

* Of this writer the Abbe Fleury (a favorite with Anglicans) says : " Le style de Luitprand 
temoigne plus d'esprit et d'erudition, que de jugement. II affecte d'une maniere puerile de mon- 
trer qu'il se avoit le grec. II mele souvent des vers i sa prose ; il est partout extremement pas- 
sione, chargeant les uns d'injures, les autres de louanges et de flatteries " (Fleury, Histoire Eccli- 
siastique, vol. viii. book Ivi. No. 22). 



220 "HAS ROME JURISDICTION" [Nov., 

a canon of Rheims, and John the Deacon, the former of whom sim- 
ply records the death of Leo and the subsequent accession soon 
afterwards (mox) of Christopher.* The testimony of these con- 
temporary writers is corroborated by others who, although liv- 
ing- some centuries afterwards, were anterior to the earliest au- 
thority on the other side viz., Peter Mallius, who flourished in 
the twelfth century, an anonymous writer of Salerno of the same 
period, and Leo of Ostia in the succeeding century. Neither of 
these authors know anything of these deeds of violence which are 
supposed to have ushered in what has been called the Tuscan 
Domination ; and, dark as that period may have been and prob- 
ably was, utterly unfitted as some of the occupants of the papal 
throne undoubtedly were for their sublime office, we must not, 
however, allow things to be represented as worse than they in 
reality were, nor admit, in such a discussion and with such issues 
at stake, a class of evidence coming far too late and based upon 
foundations much too slender to support such a superstructure. 
Nor, when the evidence is duly weighed, do the charges against 
several of the other popes in this category appear to be any more 
worthy of credence. More than one of these " monsters " Ser- 
gius III., Anastasius III., Lando, John X., Leo VI., Stephen 
VIII. (VII.), John XL, Leo VII., Stephen VIII. (IX.), Martin 
III. (Marinus II.), Agapitus II., and John XII. given in the list 
of the Church Times, turn out to be respectable and blameless men. 
Anastasius III. and Leo VI. were distinguished for integrity and 
zeal for reform. Even of Sergius III., "infamous " though he be 
in the eyes of the Church Times, there is much to be said. He 
appears neither to have been invalidly elected nor to have shown 
himself a monster of iniquity. Almaricus Angerius, an ancient 
chronicler whose writings are preserved by Muratori, thus re- 
cords the event : 

" Sergius III., a Roman and the son of one Benedict, succeeded the 
aforesaid intruder Christopher by canonical election, and became the hun- 
dred and twenty-seventh pope after St. Peter." t 

The testimony of Flodoard is still more emphatic. Speaking 
of his return from exile, he says : 

" Thence returned Sergius, who, though long since elected to the high- 
est dignity, had been driven away into exile, and for seven long years re- 
mained concealed as a fugitive. Recalled from hence by the suffrages of the 
people, he is consecrated to the exalted office once before awarded to him. 

* Flodoard, Vita Romanorum Pontificum, apud Muratori, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores. 
\ Ibidem. 



1 886.] "HAS ROME JURISDICTION" 221 

On the accession of this pontiff, the third of the name, the entire world en- 
tered upon a period of happiness lasting seven years."* 

The witness of Luitprand, upon whom Baronius mostly de- 
pends, against this pontiff, is in open conflict with the most an- 
cient and authentic records. It was not, as Luitprand asserts, in 
opposition to Formosus that he had been set up as anti-pope, but 
to John IX. ;f he was called back to Rome, not, as that historian 
maintains, by the arms of Albert of Tuscany, but, as we have 
seen, by the voice of the Roman people themselves, and by them 
elected to the Apostolic See;:}: it was not he but Stephen VII. 
who offered shameful indignities to the dead body and to the 
memory of Formosus ; not he but Duke Alberic of Spoleto 
was the father of John IX. It must be borne in mind in this 
connection that Luitprand was a partisan writer of intensely 
Germanic tendencies, who spared no opportunity of defaming 
the Italians, and the Tuscan court in particular. When, there- 
fore, we find the assertions of a chronicler of this description 
conflicting with all other contemporaneous authorities, and par- 
ticularly with one so grave and impartial as Flodoard, we may 
safely refuse to accept the charges as in any way proved. 

Space forbids us to continue this investigation in detail with 
reference to each of the succeeding pontiffs on the list, or we 
might show that even John X., a relative of Theodora the elder, 
was not without apologists in his own day, who, though person- 
ally opposed to him, admitted his good qualities, while Flodoard 
speaks in terms of praise of his government both of the arch- 
bishopric of Ravenna and of the Apostolic See. And if we are 
forced to admit that one or two in this series, especially the pon- 
tiff who closes the number the youthful debauchee, John XII. 
were a disgrace to the church, no argument can be deduced there- 
from prejudicial to the existence of the Papacy or the survival of 
its jurisdiction. The unmeasured terms in which Baronius, as 
we have seen, declares that there was nowhere any mention of 

* Ibidem. " Sergius inde redit, dudum qui lectus ad arcem 
Culminis, exsilio tulerat rapiente repulsam : 
Qui profugus latuit septem volventibus annis. 
Hinc populi remeans precibus, sacratur honore, 
Pridem adsignato, quo nomine tertius exit 
Antistes : Petri eximia quo sede recepto 
Praesule gaudet orans annis septe amplius orbis." 
t Flodoard, De Rom. Pont. Epitaph Sergii III. 
\ Ibidem et Johan. Diac. De Eccl. Lateran. 

The Abbe Blanc, in his Cours cTHistoire^Eccltsiastique, vol. i. p. 703, says: "Les cri- 
tiques s'accordent a reconnaitre dans Flodoard, a un degre eminent, les qualites, qui concilient a 
1'historien la confiance, et dans ses ecrits la source la plus pure pour tous les fails dont il a 
parle." 



222 "HAS ROME JURISDICTION" [Nov., 

election by the clergy or of subsequent consent, which contains 
the pith of the argument adduced by the Church Times, has been 
shown from contemporary authorities, as regards the first instance 
(Sergius III.), to have been incorrect; and drawn, as all his infor- 
mation was, from the jaundiced and untrustworthy pages of Luit- 
prand, we may reasonably suppose that he may have been equally 
misled as to the rest. 

But let us waive the point. Let us admit to the full the alle- 
gations of Luitprand and Baronius, and go so far as to grant to 
the Church Times that all these twelve popes were invalidly elect- 
ed, or even not elected at all, but were thrust by crime, force, 
bribery, cajolery, and deception into the papal throne through 
means of that clique over which the courtesan Theodora and her 
daughters reigned supreme ; does the consequence drawn by the 
articles under review legitimately follow? Are we driven to con- 
clude that, the see of Peter having been in reality vacant for such 
a lapse of time, the succession of pontiffs necessarily came to an 
end by reason of the extinction of the only electoral body capa- 
ble of perpetuating it? The Catholic, of course, with our Lord's 
promise before his eyes and divine faith in his heart, will only 
smile at this question ; but we are not dealing with Catholics. 
Our object is to expose, if possible, to those sincere and well- 
meaning seekers after truth whom the sophistries and misstate- 
ments of such articles as those we are discussing may stagger and 
upset, that the only merit possessed by these specious composi- 
tions lies in the coolness of assumption ; that we are not in the 
slightest degree alarmed at their high-handed and aggressive 
tone ; that we are perfectly willing to meet them on their own 
ground, to accept their challenge, and to prove that, upon " the 
fundamental principles of Roman canon law " and of Catholic 
theology, their fusilade against the Papacy is as futile as it is 
absurd. Ccesarem appellasti? Ad Ccesarem ibis ! 

Our reply, therefore, to the assertion that the see of Peter 
must have been vacant through all these years on account of the 
invalidity of the election of each succeeding pontiff, is simply 
this: The invalidity or nullity of the canonical election in each and 
all of these cases was remedied by the subsequent and ultimate assent ', 
recognition, and acceptance of the entire church. 

That this is so we shall proceed to prove by unimpeach- 
able authorities. 

The entire argument of the Church Times is based upon the 
assumption that, inasmuch as under the present organization of 
the church the Roman cardinals constitute the elective body, 



1 886.] "HAS ROME JURISDICTION" 223 

when a vacancy occurs in the Papacy, should no legitimately- 
appointed college of cardinals be in existence, no pope can be 
elected, at all events until the privilege of electing has been for- 
mally withdrawn from the cardinals and placed in other hands. 
And so, failing any such formal revocation during the interval 
which has elapsed between the accession of Sergius III. and the 
present time, the sovereign pontificate, wanting a legitimate body 
of electors, has been ipso facto vacant. 

To this argument we might reply that it is exceedingly im- 
probable that the election of the pontiffs was at this early date 
confined to the cardinals, but was still in the hands of the Roman 
clergy and people, in which case the plea of our contemporary 
falls to the ground at oncg. There is, however, some contro- 
versy upon this point, more, indeed, in the direction of a later 
than an earlier period for the introduction of the change,* and 
we will therefore cede the point. We may also pass over the 
assumption (for we doubt very much whether the Church Times 
has had the time or the materials for verifying the statement) 
that all the cardinals who had been appointed before the year 
903 were dead in 963. the year of the deposition of John XII. and 
the introduction of a line of reforming German pontiffs. Con- 
sidering the early age at which many youthful scions of noble 
families were admitted to the most exalted dignities in those de- 
generate times, it is quite within the range of possibility that 
some of the original electors might have been living. But be 
this as it may, granting that they had all passed away, granting, 
too, what is merely another assumption on the part of our con- 
temporary, that not a single one of all these twelve popes was 
validly elected, does the conclusion of that journal legitimately 
follow upon those principles of canon law to which it appeals? 

The great canonist Ferraris treats of a cognate question 
which has a distinct bearing upon the matter under review viz., 
the difficulty that might arise in the improbable contingency of 
all the cardinals dying during the conclave. He says: 

" If all the cardinals (which may God avert !) should die before the papal 
election has been consummated, theologians are not agreed upon whom 
the right of electing the pontiff should fall. Many assert that in such a 

* Some authorities place it as late as 1562 under Pius IV., others in 1160 during the pon- 
tificate of Alexander III. The earliest date would appear to be 1059 (almost at the end of the 
period under review), when Nicholas II. held a council at Rome, thus described by Natalis Alex- 
ander : " Nicolaus II. ... Romae concilium habuit anno MLIX,, cui cxm. episcopi interfuere. 
Eadem synodus . . . decretum de Romani pontificis electione edidit, statuensut vacante sede car- 
dinales episcopi convenirent, de electione tractaturi, assumptisque secum clericis cardinalibus, 
communibus suffragiis pontificem eligerent, etc." (torn. vii. p. 12). 



224 "-HAS ROME JURISDICTION." [Nov., 

contingency the right would devolve upon the canons of the Lateran 
Basilica, whose church is, in the strictest sense, the pope's cathedral as 
bishop of the city and of the world ; and some regard this opinion as very 
safe and probable. Others hold that this right would be vested in an 
oecumenical council, because the pope is pastor not only of the city of 
Rome but of the universal church. Others maintain that it pertains to 
the patriarchs." * 

We quote these words of this illustrious canonist, not as hav- 
ing an immediate bearing upon the case under discussion, but 
because they distinctly show that " upon the fundamental princi- 
ples of canon law " the absence of a body of cardinal electors, even 
under the present constitution of the church, is no bar to the 
filling-up of the vacancy which may be provided for in various 
other duly-recognized ways. Schmjflzgrueber, however, an au- 
thority of no less weight, gives a solution directly to the point, 
and entirely sweeps away the contention of the Church Times. 
He says : 

" Question 8. Whether the pope becomes truly such immediately on his 
election by the cardinals ? 

" Resp. A distinction must be made as to whether the election were 
legitimate or otherwise. 

" If the latter, the election of the cardinals, since it is invalid, can confer 
no rights upon the elected. Hence the acceptance of the universal chitrch 
must be waited for, which, should it supervene, // will remedy the defect in 
the election invalidly made by the cardinals, if a condition required by 
human law alone be wanting ; for the church cannot heal the defect of a 
condition required by the divine law.t But since, from the common con- 
sent of theologians, it is credible with di-vine faith that any'pope, after he 
has been accepted as such by the universal church, is the true vicar of 
Christ and the successor of blessed Peter, there can be no danger of the 
church consenting to a pontiff who suffers from the defect of a condition 
required by the divine law." \ 

The rationale of this doctrine, which one would think would 
be palpable to all who profess to believe in the church's indefec- 
tibility, is thus set forth by Suarez : 

" Reply to the first argument in No. i. (The question proposed in the 
number referred to is Whether we can be certain with the assent of faith 
that such and such a man is the true pontiff and head of the church. The 
first argument is as follows : We have said that as, in order that a rule of 
faith should be of utility, it ought not only to be believed simply in confuso 
but also as something determined, and this presupposes an individual or 
something which we can behold with our eyes, and in this sense it is called 
visible ; so in the present instance we inquire whether in like manner the 

* Ferraris, vol. vii.. Papa, art. i. No. 44. 

t Such as heresy, the absence of reason, and so on. 

J Schmalzgrueber, Jus. Eccl. Univ., lib. i. pars ii. tit. vi. No. 93. 



i886.] "HAS ROME JURISDICTION" 225 

true pontiff should be some visible and determined individual, so that we 
should not only believe that there is a supreme head in the church which 
has its seat at Rome, but also that he is such and such a man whom we 
behold with our eyes. This appears not to be so, since God has never re- 
vealed it.) To the first argument (here quoted) we reply that this is re- 
vealed by God in the same way that it is revealed that such and such an 
organization is the true church, whence, when he revealed that Peter is 
head of the church, he equally revealed it in a general way concerning 
each of his successors, and all that is wanting is sufficient demonstration 
that this or that is contained under such and such revelation ; but such 
demonstration is afforded by the universal testimony and approbation of 
the church, which fact is plainly set forth by the example of a similar case, 
for it does not appear that God ever revealed that the bishop of Rome 
rather than he of Alexandria is the sovereign pontiff, because this was 
never stated in express terms, but merely implied in confitso when he re- 
vealed to St. Peter the dignity and perpetuity of his office, because such 
revelation manifests itself in, and has for its object, those bishops or their 
episcopate who hold the succession from Peter after that succession 
has been sufficiently demonstrated through the tradition and universal 
consent of the church ; but seeing that it must be clearly manifest that 
sufficient demonstration has been given to place all under the obligation 
of assent, this demonstration appears to some to be offered when a 
rightly and duly elected and so veritable pontiff is set forth ; and this, 
indeed, is all that is necessary in order that from the precept of obedience 
and charity we should be bound to obey such a pontiff, and that no one 
should rightly be able to disjoin himself from him without schism ; never- 
theless, speaking as we do on the present occasion concerning the assent 
of faith, the demonstration will not, perhaps, be sufficiently sure until it be 
made morally certain that he has been accepted by the whole church and 
is in peaceful possession of his primatial dignity, and so can place all the 
faithful under the obligation of believing whatever he defines ; for in such 
case it is most certainly to be believed that the universal church cannot fall into 
error in so grave a matter as would be a mistake regarding the living rule of 
faith, such an error being tantamount to an error in the faith itself." * 

Hence it is very clear that no such calamity as that imagined 
by the CJiurch Times can ever overtake the church of Christ. 
He founded it upon a rock the rock of Peter f and placed in, 
Peter's see that centre of unity which was throughout all time 
to be the basis and foundation, the radix et matrix, of that visible 
oneness by means of which his church should be unmistakably 
distinguished from surrounding sects; and since any aggregation, 
of beings endowed with free-will is liable to become the subject 
of disagreement and division, he placed that centre of unity in 

* Suarez, De fide, disp. x. sect. v. No. 6. 

t Tertullian, De Prescript., c. 22. Origen, In Exod., horn. v. No. 4. torn. ii. p. 145 
Migne. St. Greg. Naz., Orat. xxxii. No. 18, p. 591, ed. Bened. Migne. St. Epiphanius, 
Adv. Hares. (59), Nos. 7, 8, p. 500. St. Jerome, lib. iii. Comment in Matt,, xvf., p. 124. Sjt. 
Augustine, In Ps. Ixix., n. 4. 
VOL. XLIV. 15 



226 "HAS ROME JURISDICTION" [Nov., 

one man, the occupant of Peter's see. Were it possible that by 
the malice of the devil or the wickedness of man, through the 
violence of tyrants or the intrigues of harlots, that office should 
cease to exist, the church ot Christ would have been shattered 
to its foundations, the rule of faith destroyed, the light shining in 
the darkness extinguished, and the gates of hell would have pre- 
vailed against the kingdom of God. This we, as Catholics, know 
cannot be, and those who pretend to argue with us on Catholic 
principles ought in justice to acknowledge this fact. 

So much, then, for the line of popes who occupied St. Peter's 
chair during the " Tuscan Domination." In the next century, says 
the Church Times, " we have another series of intruding popes, 
who secured their position by simony viz., Benedict VIII., John 
XIX., Benedict IX., and Gregory VI., covering " a period of 
"thirty-four years." Of course, in view of what we have already 
shown regarding the revalidation of all such questionable elec- 
tions by the subsequent assent of the church, it would avail 
nothing were our contemporary able to prove its assertion relat- 
ing to these pontiffs an attempt from which it wisely refrains. 
Of Benedict VIII. Natalis Alexander says emphatically that " he 
succeeded to Sergius IV. by canonical election " (" Sergio IV. 
canonica electione successit Benedictus VIII.")* The same historian 
does, indeed, assert of John XIX., or XX., that he secured the 
Apostolic See by a large pecuniary expenditure, but he does so 
on the authority of a contemporary chronicler, Glaber, who is 
acknowledged as having been biassed, while the contrary is most 
plainly implied in a letter addressed to that pontiff by St. Ful- 
bert, Bishop of Chartres. It is, on the other hand, admitted on 
all sides that the youthful profligate Benedict IX. was elected 
through the bribery of his father, Alberic of Tuscany, and that 
his pontificate was a disgraceful episode in the annals of the 
Holy See ; but he was a true pope : " Son autorit6," says Rohr- 
bacher, " fut reconnue et respectee par toute la terre." f The 
last pope in the list surely nothing but the most inveterate odium 
theologicum would charge with the crime of simony. The scandals 
connected with the life of Benedict IX. had become intolerable, 
and his evil example was producing a disastrous effect upon the 
morals and discipline of the clergy. To obviate these evils he 
was persuaded to resign and accept a pension of fifteen hundred 
livres. That this very moderate allowance was in no sense simo- 

* Natalis Alexander, torn. vii. p. 3. Ditmar, according to Rohrbacher, bears his testimony 
that Benedict was elected by a majority of the suffrages of the people, 
t Rohrbacher, vol. xiii. book Ixiii. p. 481. 



1 886.] ALONG THE GREEN BIENNE. 227 

niacal is proved by the fact, attested by St. Peter Damian at the 
time, that the early councils of the church had awarded as much to 
mere bishops on resigning their sees,* while the exalted personal 
character of Pope Gregory VI. himself, and the manifestly justi- 
fiable motives which prompted his action, render the accusation 
unworthy of notice. 



ALONG THE GREEN BIENNE. 

THE most delightful of all thoroughfares in the Jura are the 
rivers and streams that wind among the mountains, linking one 
beautiful valley with another. One of these water-courses is the 
Bienne the wayward, freakish Bienne which leads the traveller 
through a succession of charming valleys, amazing him at every 
turn with the varied and wonderful beauty of the landscapes. 
And there is no less variety of temperature. Winter and sum- 
mer are often found within a few hours of each other, affording 
great contrasts of vegetation and atmospheric phenomena. In 
one place the river pours through a wild, picturesque gorge over- 
hung by precipitous rocks, through which the wind rushes howl- 
ing, with frequent squalls of snow and hail ; and the torrent, with 
emulous roar, dashes over huge rocks which beat the waters into 
a raging foam, and then, as if by magic, issues with many-tinted 
hues into a vernal region of richest green, radiant with the sun, 
girt by mountains, to be sure, but their bases are covered with 
vines, orchards, and gardens that give out a balmy fragrance de- 
licious to inhale. On every side a beautiful picture meets the 
& Mountains, woods, torrents, verdant glades, woodland 
chapels, little homesteads sheltered among fruit-trees and gar- 
dens, the solitude of the mountains, and the busy hum of the val- 
leys, by turn attract and charm the explorer. To wander on, 
day after day, through this maze of sylvan beauty, following the 
deep bends of 

" That many-winding river 
Between mountains, woods, abysses, 
A paradise of wildernesses," 

is the very height of enjoyment to the lover of mountain scenery. 
We came upon the Bienne just where its clear green waters 

* Darras, vol. ii. p. 59. 



228 ALONG THE GREEN BIENNE. [Nov., 

unite, as if reluctantly, with the blue current of the Ain, a little 
north of Mt. Oliferne of legendary fame. Here, at the meeting of 
the waters, stands the village of Condes so called from a Celtic 
word signifying confluence a little back from the capricious 
stream to escape its frequent inundations, its soil full of Roman 
and Celtic remains. Overlooking it is a votive chapel on the tip 
of a fang-like prominence called a molard, greatly frequented by 
the river boatmen, who annually celebrate here the festival of St. 
Nicholas with picturesque effect. Standing around are the dru- 
idical heights of Mt. Beauregard, the Montagne du Solier, and 
other purple peaks, which at dawn and sunset are lit up with floods 
of living fire, as if once more aflame in honor of the god Belenus. 

At Jeurre the valley grows broader, the gloom disappears, 
the sharp gray cliffs give place to gentler slopes vine-wreathed 
along the grassy meadows. Everything is fresh and verdur- 
ous. The Bienne, no longer pent up, is left free to follow its 
frolicsome instincts, which the people, even in remotest times, 
feared so much as to erect their dwellings for the most part 
above its reach. Pensive willows and stately poplars border the 
stream, which goes rippling merrily along in tune with the boat- 
men, whose cheery songs may be heard echoed on every side 
here, by the washerwomen bleaching their clothes along the ver- 
dant banks ; beyond, by the goat-herds on the heights; and not 
unfrequently by the stern, cloud-capped mountains themselves. 
The latter, in receding, put off some of their gloom. Soft, ghost- 
like flecks of mist disappear among the pines on the upper ridges. 
The sun lights up the glades below, where graze the herds. And 
great patches on the nether slopes are covered with beneficent 
chestnuts and broad-spreading beeches beneath which the rustic 
Tityrus might still practise his lay, " recubans sub tegmine fagi" 
after the good old bucolic fashion. Forsaken towers lend a mel- 
ancholy interest to the sharpest peaks, and higher feelings are 
awakened by legendary chapels with villages piously gathered 
around them. Lzat, for instance, is perched on the top of a 
steep mount, overlooking a narrow gorge through which the 
Bienne dashes swiftly along between tall, jagged cliffs and pre- 
cipitous mountains, the sides of which -are beautifully draped 
with soft moss and graceful, palm-like fronds, kept vividly green 
by the oozing moisture of the rocks. 

Further on the river is overhung by the village of La Mou- 
ille, on the side of a cone, the very apex of which is crowned by 
the church of St. Eustache a saint dear to hunters and foresters. 
This is one of the most ancient churches along the Bienne, and 






1 8 86.] ALONG THE GREEN BIENNE. 229 

in early times the mountaineers were summoned to the Christian 
mysteries, as at Coldres and other places in the Jura, by the light- 
ing of fires. And at the most solemn part of the rite a fresh illu- 
mination was usually kindled for the benefit of those unable to 
attend by reason of infirmity. The porch of this church affords a 
view remarkable for its extent and wild beauty. 

A little to the north is another peak, on the top of which is 
the church of St. Isidore, patron of husbandmen, shaded by two 
immense lindens the tree of the resurrection. And not far off, 
on a lofty plateau overlooking the Bienne, stands Longchaumois 
(a named derived from chaume, a coarse grass of these mountains), 
a town of only fifteen hundred inhabitants, though so ancient as 
to be mentioned in a cartulary of King Lothaire in 855. It is 
peopled with herdsmen, hunters, wood -choppers, fur-dressers, 
carvers, lapidaries, etc., who are grave, intelligent, and noted for 
their industry, like all the people in the Jura. The streets are full 
of life and activity, and resonant with sonorous voices. Well- 
built stone houses bespeak the thrift and comfortable circum- 
stances of the owners, and the spacious, handsomely-ornamented 
Gothic church testifies to their piety. 

In this remote town was born Mannon, or Manno, the cele- 
brated monk of St. Oyan, whose reputation for learning induced 
Charles le Chauve to appoint him successor of Joannes Scotus 
Erigena as master of the Palatine school. But after the death of 
Louis le Begue he returned to the abbey of St. Oyan, in whose 
peaceful solitude he composed his treatises on Plato and Aris- 
' totle, which not long since were disinterred from the libraries of 
Holland. And it was here he died in the odor of sanctity about 
the year 880. 

In the neighborhood of Longchaumois linger many customs 
and beliefs handed down from Celtic times. Around the Fon- 
taine Laurent the witches and sorcerers of former days held their 
unholy sabbaths. The Ruisseau de la Givre, or Vouivre, is so 
called from the winged serpent famous in the Jura. The foun- 
tain of Trepiere (trois pierres) and the height of Mirbey are asso- 
ciated with druidical observances, as well as the monumental 
stone of the Borne des Sarrasins, and the Trou des Sarrasins, a 
deep cavern in the mountain side where the people took refuge 
from the Moors of the eighth century. 

The Saracens have left many other traces in this region, such 
as the Vie (Via, or way) des Maures, the Champ Sarrasin, the 
Chateau Sarrasin, etc. And associated with their ravages is 
Maringa, a village on one of these mountains, which derives its 



230 ALONG THE GREEN BIENNE. [Nov., 

name from St. Marin, who, more than a thousand years ago, fled 
from Italy to escape the honors of the episcopate, and took refuge 
m a cave of this mountain, where he attained such power over 
the wild beasts that the very bears ministered to his wants. 
Hermit as he was, he took such a deep interest in the welfare of 
the peasants that when the country was invaded by the Saracens 
he came forth from his cell to intercede in their behalf. The 
enemy seized him and cast him into a fiery furnace, but he passed 
through the flames uninjured and was finally beheaded, and thus 
went to join the noble army of 

" Martyrs crowned with heavenly meed." 

It is in the legend of St. Marin the first mention is made of 
the ancient town of Moirans, which became the seat of a barony 
on whose escutcheon is a Saracen's head, surmounted by the cross 
of St. Andrew another reminiscence of the Moorish invasion. 
This town stands at the entrance of a narrow gorge between the 
Ain and the Bienne, and its former importance is shown by the 
ruins of two old castles on opposite heights which defended the 
pass and still bear the marks of more than one attack of the Swiss 
Calvinists. These religionists took special pleasure in ravaging 
the monastic lands of St. Claude, to which Moirans seems to have 
belonged at an early period, for the abbot of that monastery was 
obliged to mortgage his castle here in 1296 to Andr6 Chatard, 
lord-chatelain of Arbent. It was soon redeemed, however, and 
the town became a flourishing place under abbatial rule. There 
were weavers, dyers, tanners, carvers, turners, shoemakers, and* 
other craftsmen, all of whom had their guilds. The abbot him- 
self came here from time to time to administer justice, followed 
by a train of dignitaries, both clerical and lay, which increased 
the life and consequence of the town. Standing on the highway 
of travel to Geneva, it carried on a brisk trade with the people of 
the neighboring valleys, especially at fair-times, and on market- 
days, and whenever the abbot held court here. But an end 
was put to all this prosperity by the Calvinists of the sixteenth 
century, who burned the mills, workshops, and farm-houses, 
destroyed the crops, laid waste the lands, and carried off the 
flocks and herds. A more pleasant recollection is that of the 
benign St. Frangois de Sales, whose statue near the presbyttre 
points out the house where he lodged in his apostolic courses 
through the Jura. 

The country around Moirans was once covered with druidical 
forests, and the stones of the Champ Dolent remind one of the 



1 886.] ALONG THE GREEN BIENNE. 231 

menhirs of Dolent in Brittany. It is a place full of folk-lore and 
tales of fairies and fabulous animals, such as the Brack and the 
Cheval Blanc a pale phantom-horse that haunts the old mill at 
Moirans. And there are many Celtic monuments around Lect, 
which stands on the side of a mountain at the south. In full view 
of the old church of St. Pierre is "a dismal cirque of Druid 
stones," several of which are still erect ; and there is a mysterious 
passage or aisle on a cliff, walled in by great blocks of stone, to 
which you ascend by a flight of steps hewn in the rock. This 
now bears the name of the " Fairies' Baume " or Cavern, though 
suggestive of giants rather than of fairies. 

Other places in this vicinity have names more pleasant to the 
Christian ear, such as the Combe St. Romain, the Champ St. 
Pierre, the Combe du Saint, etc. places in which is centred all 
the charm of these delightful mountain valleys. It was in this 
region we came upon the Vie des Pelerins the Pilgrims' Road 
so named because it led to the thrice famous sanctuary of St. 
Claude, where many popular saints once lay enshrined. It was 
in the same direction our pilgrim feet were tending. 

The town of St. Claude is in the very heart of the Jura moun- 
tains, surrounded by some of their loftiest peaks. It owes its 
origin to the abbey of that name one of the countless monasteries 
in Europe whose downfall was the result of state interference, 
such as the sequestration of property, which paralyzed the indus- 
tries carried on by the monks and diminished their power of 
usefulness in other directions; and the appointment of commen- 
datory abbots, which introduced a worldly element, leading in- 
evitably to the decay of the monastic spirit. This abbey became 
famous under three different names. In the fifth century it bore 
the name of Condat, because established by St. Romain at the 
confluence of the Tacon and the Bienne. The next century it 
took the name of St. Oyan, or Oyand, from one of the holy 
abbots, whose tomb had become noted for miracles. But in the 
twelfth century the shrine of St. Claude more especially attracted 
public attention, and his name gradually superseded the others. 

Full of active industry as the town of St. Claude now is, it is 
difficult to realize what an appalling wilderness the place was 
fourteen hundred years ago, when St. Romain came here, leaving 
behind all the comforts of a patrician home at Izernore. Old 
legends tell of the commotion of the elements at his arrival. 
The powers of darkness were let loose against him. Terrible 
storms made the very mountains tremble storms such as long 
after inspired Byron's lines, when the red-bearded thunder leaped 



232 ALONG THE GREEN BIENNE. [Nov., 

from crag to crag, threatening to annihilate him. But nothing 
could daunt the stout-hearted saint. He planted his staff beside 
a spring that gushed out from the mountain-side, overshadowed 
by an immense pine, and betook himself earnestly to watching 
and praying in a way that has grown " obsolete in these impious 
times," as Carlyle says. In a short time he was joined by his 
brother Lupicm and several others, and a kind of laura was 
organized, combining the solitary and cenobitic life the brethren 
living in separate cabins or cells, but coming together to chant 
the Psalms after the custom of the East, and for their frugal meals. 
Thev spent the day in labor and prayer, and in summer slept 
under the forest trees. St. Lupicin's couch, however, is said to 
have been a log hollowed out like a coffin, which he sometimes 
bore into the chapel that he might peacefully slumber sub oculis 
Domini. 

The two brothers were admirably fitted to be a counter-re- 
straint on each other. The gentle nature of St. Romain mitigated 
the sternness of St. Lupicin, and the firmness of the latter strength- 
ened the holy impulses of the former. When the monks, weary 
of rigid fasts, took advantage of the plenteous harvests, and the 
abundance of game in the forests and fish in the streams, and 
spread a bounteous repast for themselves, St. Romain, grieved 
at heart, sent for his brother, who appeared suddenly in their 
midst, and, gazing with astonishment and wrath at the variety 
of dishes, cast herbs, vegetables, and fish all together into a 
huge caldron, exclaiming: "There is the mess a monk ought to 
eat, instead of savory dishes that lead him away from the service 
of God ! " And when those who were weak in the flesh fled back 
in terror to the world, he comforted St. Romain, and said: 
" The jackdaws and crows have taken their flight ; let us who 
remain take such food as suiteth the gentle doves of Christ." St. 
Lupicin, however, was not without tenderness of heart, and he 
always showed himself compassionate to the sick and the afflicted. 
He was a man of greater learning than his brother, and was 
regarded with great respect by King Chilperic, to whom he went 
on several errands of mercy, such as reclaiming the liberty of 
some mountaineers unjustly held in captivity. His influence 
extended even to Rome, where he found means of delivering 
from imprisonment his friend Agrippinus, who had been governor 
of Sequania. 

The monks of Condat, in spite of the severity of their rule, 
increased so rapidly that a new monastery, called Lauconne, was 
founded by St. Lupicin, who became the prior. Around it sprang 



1 886.] ALONG THE GREEN BIENNE. 233 

up a village which now bears his name. It is about seven miles 
from St. Claude, on the slope of a mountain overlooking the val- 
ley of the Lizon, not far from the place where St. Marin was 
martyred. Here the vine is cultivated, which does not flourish 
at St. Claude. A tower of the old priory still remains, and an 
interesting" church of the eleventh century in which the relics of 
St. Lupicin, the titular saint, are preserved in a shrine of gilded 
wood. Clustered around are the well-built stone houses of the 
village, some of the fourteenth century, peopled by industrious 
mountaineers, who, among other occupations, turn and carve the 
so-called articles de St. Claude. 

A few miles distant is St. Remain de Roche, where the two 
brothers founded a convent for their sister, St. lole, who followed 
them into the wilderness, accompanied by a large number of de- 
vout women. No spot could have been more happily chosen for 
them than this lofty plateau, at once secluded and picturesque, 
and at that time nearly inaccessible. The convent stood on a 
broad shelf of the mountain that overhangs a lovely green val- 
ley, through which, far below, pours the swift Bienne. It could 
only be approached from the west, where grew an almost im- 
penetrable forest infested by wild beasts. This convent became 
so flourishing as to contain five hundred nuns, and still existed in 
the year 480, but was eventually given up to the monks of Con- 
dat. Of their monastery nothing now remains but the church, 
which stands solitary on the brink of the precipice, surrounded 
by fragments of tombs and the ruins of the ancient cloister. It 
contains a beautiful shrine in which is kept a portion of St. Ro- 
main's remains, who died here while on a visit to his sister. A 
procession comes here every year from St. Lupicin a touching 
memorial of the tender affection which united the two sainted 
brothers with their sister, St. lole. 

These three monasteries, Condat (or St. Cyan), Lauconne, 
and St. Romain de Roche, became centres of civilization in 
the Jura, around which gathered by degrees the people dis- 
persed in the forests, who preferred to be the vassals of the 
monks rather than of the turbulent barons who involved them 
in wars and oppressed them with exactions of all kinds. But St. 
Cyan, of course, was pre-eminent on account of the size of the 
abbey, the extent of its domains, and the number of its saints. 
Charlemagne, whose name always appears wherever there are 
traces of the Saracens, gave this monastery a large tract of land 
in the Jura, sixty leagues in extent, at that time overspread with 
forests where roamed bears, wolves, and other wild beasts, and 



234 ALONG THE GREEN BIENNE. [Nov., 

covered with snow a great part of the year. The early monks 
clothed themselves with the skins of these animals, after the ex- 
ample of St. Lupicin, but never fully exterminated them per- 
haps never wished to do so, regarding everything as good, after 
its kind. We read that, seven hundred years later, the hunter 
who slew the first wolf of the season brought the tail to the sa- 
cristan of St. Claude, who used it to dust the statues of the saints 
and the carvings of the stalls ; and in return the hunter was pre- 
sented with two loaves of bread and two jugs of wine. 

In the course of centuries the cultivation of these lands, and 
their colonization, rendered the abbey enormously wealthy. In 
the year 1245 it held rule over a great number of baronies, cas- 
tles, villages, and parishes, which comprised thirty-seven priories, 
one hundred and five churches, and twenty-five chapels. King 
Pepin gave th*e abbots the right to coin money the earliest 
known instance of such a privilege being granted to a monastery. 
This right was confirmed by the Emperor Frederick in 1175. A 
spacious abbey was built, more in accordance with the improved 
fortunes and needs of the monks. It stood on a plateau along the 
mountain-side, with terraced gardens overlooking the Tacon, and 
surrounded by embattled walls flanked with towers, built by Jean 
de Chalon, ancestor of William of Orange. Louis XI. built the 
ramparts, of which a portion may be seen on the Place St. Claude. 
And a castle of defence was erected on a neighboring height. 

The sumptuousness of the two abbatial churches was amaz- 
ing, particularly that of St. Claude, in which stood about thirty 
rich shrines of sainted abbots and brethren, hung round with 
lamps of silver and gold and finely-wrought brass. Chief among 
them were the silver shrines of St. Oyan and St. Claude, set with 
precious stones. The stalls of the choir were exquisitely carved, 
the screen was of iron artistically wrought, and along its outer 
walls were ranged statues of the benefactors of the church, be- 
tween which were hung chains of silver and gold and other ex- 
votos of all kinds. 

The monks built a hospice for pilgrims, who came here in 
bands from remote provinces. Alms were constantly given at 
the gates. Every poor person was daily presented with a loaf, 
and meals were furnished to those who wished to be received in 
the infirmary. The parliaments of many cities sent deputations 
of pilgrims in times of public calamity. And princes came here 
with great devotion, such as the Dukes of Burgundy, the Counts 
of Savoy, and the Kings of France and Spain. Louis XL, when 
he came, made many rich offerings and founded a daily service 



1 8 86.] ALONG THE GREEN BIENNE. 

in honor of " Monseigneur St. Claude." There was a special 
influx of pilgrims at the high festival of this saint. It was joy- 
fully announced on the eve by the peal of trumpets, the beating 
of drums, the discharge of cannon, the playing of musical instru- 
ments, and the united peal of all the bells, as soon as the monks 
began to intone the " Magnificat" of the Vesper service. The fol- 
lowing day the feretrum magnum, containing the incorrupt body 
of St. Claude, was brought forth, preceded by one of the great 
barons of the province bearing a lighted torch, and followed by 
another carrying a palm. One holy shrine after another fol- 
lowed St. Oyan, St. Minase, St. Antidiole, St. Injurieux, St. 
Olympe/St. Dagamond, St. Aufrede, St. Auderic, etc., etc. care- 
fully guarded by soldiers as they were borne in solemn proces- 
sion through the narrow, winding streets, the mountains mean- 
while echoing the chanted litanies and pealing bells. In the 
afternoon the " Mystery of St. Claude " was acted in public, to 
the great delight and edification of the people. 

The wealth of the abbey excited the cupidity of the Calvinists 
of Geneva, and in December, 1571, they planned an attack in the 
night. It was, however, two o'clock in the morning when they 
arrived at the foot of the mountain, and hearing the bell ringing 
as usual for Matins, and the drums beating to summon the inha- 
bitants to the office, as the custom was here in Advent, they sup- 
posed themselves discovered and made haste to escape. 

Alas ! that we are obliged to say this thrice glorious abbey 
was finally secularized, and afterwards destroyed by fires and 
revolutionists, and its shrines and priceless treasures of all kinds 
the accumulation of centuries were almost completely swept 
away. Of the monastic churches, only that of St. Pierre re- 
mains, which is now used as the cathedral. Here is gathered 
everything saved from the church of St. Claude, including the 
relics, which were all mingled and confounded, except those of 
St. Oyan, in the Revolution of 1793. In the choir of this church 
are some beautiful stalls of the Renaissance, the work of Pierre 
de Vitry. Prophets, apostles, and the saints of the abbey are 
carved on the panels, which are overhung by a canopy wrought 
with great delicacy and beauty. The altar-piece is another boast 
of the church, painted by Holbein, the friend of Pierre de Vitry, 
who induced him to come here. It is on wood, and represents 
the Prince of the Apostles between St. Paul and St. Andrew, 
with a gradino of scenes from the life of St. Peter. 

The town of St. Claude has a delightful aspect of mediaeval 



236 ALONG THE GREEN BIENNE. [Nov., 

times, quite in harmony with its history, though in reality it is 
chiefly of modern construction, the whole place having repeat- 
edly been nearly destroyed by fire. It is most romantically situ- 
ated between three high mountains, with two beautiful streams 
pouring rapidly through it. It is very irregularly built, but this 
irregularity only adds to its charm by the agreeable surprises it 
affords at every step. The narrowness of the valley forces the 
town up the hillsides, so that the streets are steep and difficult to 
climb, going zigzag around the acclivities, and many of the 
houses are built on the shelves of the mountains, with terraces 
and hanging gardens, or wander down into the hollows along the 
sinuous rivers, or go straying off along the roads that wind 
through the mountains. The most regular street is the Rue du 
Pr6, the very name of which has a pleasant, rural sound. On 
every side may be heard the ripple and murmur of running 
water; everywhere its flash meets the eye, from streams, canals, 
and sparkling fountains. Of the latter there are eleven, brighten- 
ing the crossways and cooling the air quite enough of them- 
selves to enliven so small a place. Some of them have beautiful 
basins, of which one is adorned with cupids riding on dolphins. 
The fountain which used to supply the whole abbey with water, 
and never fails, even in the driest season, is fed by the sacred 
spring of Bugnon, which is further up the mountain-side where 
St. Romain first established his hermitage. The public prome- 
nade is pleasantly overarched by umbrageous trees, and there 
are old bridges of legendary interest and picturesque aspect, like 
the Pont du Diable across the Tacon, and a fine suspension bridge 
of modern workmanship across the Bienne. 

St. Claude is full of life and industry. Everywhere are mills 
and factories and workshops, mingling the sound of their turn- 
ing wheels with the music of the waters; but the various pur- 
suits carried on here lose their usual character of mere vulgar 
industries, for they do not clash with the religious memories of 
the place. They have been handed down from monastic times, 
when the monks themselves practised the mechanical arts and 
taught them to the mountaineers, such as the art of carving and 
turning, so common all through the Jura, which has come down 
from the eighth century, when St. Viventiole, abbot of St. Oyan, 
founded a school near by, the first in Sequania, at a place still 
known as the Maison de Jouvent (Domus Juventutis], in which 
the monks not only taught letters, but various crafts, such as 
carving and the making of all kinds of utensils and furniture, re- 



1 886.] .ALONG THE GREEN BIENNE. 237 

markable for beauty of workmanship. St. Viventiole himself, a 
man of great erudition, versed in Greek and Latin literature, 
sent an armchair of his own handiwork to his friend St. Avitus, 
Bishop of Vienne, who thanked him in a playful letter, hoping in 
return for so commodious a seat that he might be presented with 
a see. This wish was realized shortly after, when St. Viventioie 
was appointed Bishop of Lyons. The school he founded here 
continued in great repute lor a long time, and in the ninth cen- 
tury was under the direction of the learned Manno, before men- 
tioned. 

Within the last century a fresh impulse has been given to 
carving and other industries by several public-spirited men of the 
place, among whom the Abbe Tournier may be mentioned. The 
first cotton-mill in the Jura was established here by the Bishop of 
St. Claude in 1780 to give employment to poor girls, And for a 
like purpose the Annonciade nuns erected a fulling-mill. The art 
of dyeing, too, has been revived, which was so successfully prac- 
tised here in the middle ages that the dyers had a guild and cul- 
tivated saffron (which was used as a dye as well as a condiment) 
on two neighboring farms still known as Saffranieres. And there 
are a great number of goldsmiths, watch-makers, lapidaries, cabi- 
net-makers, clothiers, and manufacturers of paper, wire, matches, 
pottery, etc., so that the whole valley is as busy as a hive. The 
soil being poor, the people require other means of livelihood than 
agriculture alone. Carving especially can be carried on at home 
at all seasons and in the long winter evenings. Hence the im- 
mense number of toys, boxes, canes, pipes, rosaries, statuettes, 
and other objects known in commerce as articles de St. Claude, 
elaborately carved out of bone, ivory, stag's horn, boxwood, and 
bruy'ere, which is a kind of heather. 

Many delightful rambles can be made around St. Claude. 
There are cool, deep valleys, walled in by mountains and over- 
arched by interlaced branches, making them dim and solemn as 
the narrow aisles of some vast cathedral. Other paths lead up to 
groves of pine and larch, or green, sunny pastures along the 
mountain-shelves where sheep and cattle graze, or grassy dells 
among the ridges, kept perpetually verdant by the spray of sil- 
very cascades that pour down the mountain-side. Everywhere 
are wonderful contrasts of color, everywhere green and gold, 
blue sky, and cool, gray rock, the shining of mountain-tops and 
the gloom of deep, umbrageous valleys, and changing lights and 
shadows at every step through hill and dale. One path leads to 



238 ALONG THE GREEN BIENNE. [Nov., 

the hermitage of St. Ann, half-way up the mountain a cavern as 
large as a church, containing a spring of pure, delicious water. 
This was used as an oratory in the middle ages, attended by a 
hermit who was appointed by the abbot of St. Claude. During 
the religious wars of the sixteenth century this cavern was 
strongly fortified, and the relics and other valuables of the abbey 
were brought here for safety. Among the ancient hermits was 
the Blessed John of Ghent, generally styled the fLremite de St. 
Claude, who, divinely inspired, went on a mission to Charles VII. 
of France and Henry V. of England. The former received him 
with respect and more than once profited by his counsels, but 
the latter treated him with contempt and scoffed at his admoni- 
tions. The saintly hermit foretold King Henry's melancholy 
end, and declared that the English would soon be driven out of 
France, as was effected shortly after by the holy Maid of Or- 
leans. His canonization was solicited by Louis XL, whose birth 
he had predicted, but the death of the king suspended the pro- 
cess, and it has never been resumed. 

The most charming excursion around St. Claude, however, is 
up the valley of the Tacon, which is remarkably wild and pic- 
turesque. This stream has its source in a vast cave called the 
Baume des Sarrasins, whence from two fathomless pools issue 
ten or twelve cascades, that pour down the mountain-side from 
one ridge to another with constantly accelerated fury, uniting at 
the base in one roaring, impetuous torrent that dashes over great, 
black rocks, raging and foaming as if lashed by the winds. The 
valley through which it passes is wonderfully beautiful, with 
fairy-like paths in every direction, amid the gloom of intricate 
woods and the majesty of towering mountains. Finally, spanned 
by the Pont du Diable, it empties into the green Bienne. 



i886.] " AT LAST, THOUGH LONG" 239 



"AT LAST, THOUGH LONG." 

WE had just experienced one of those general breakings-up 
that occur from time to time in the history of private families. 
There had been seven of us children, living with mother though 
all grown up. Life with us had been a very easy-going affair 
and not particularly eventful, when suddenly there came a rush 
of exciting occurrences. One brother got an appointment at 
Aberdeen, another was ordered with his regiment to the Cape, 
my eldest sister married, and Herbert, the youngest boy, announc- 
ed his determination to be a farmer, which, as that is a profession 
not easily followed in London, would entail our leaving town and 
settling in some country place, or his making one more absentee 
from the home-circle. After many discussions and a great deal 
of that tiresome process known as "talking things over," we de- 
cided to leave Kensington and move into Sussex, to a country- 
place where Herbert could study practical agriculture. 

I was away at the time of the actual dhntnagcment, and did 
not put in an appearance at the new home until the others had 
been there nearly three months. The house was called Broom- 
er's Hill, and was a nice, old-fashioned place with about thirty 
acres of land around it, situated in the parish of Saxonholt. The 
surrounding country was beautiful, and the village itself not un- 
picturesque, and containing between twelve and fourteen hun- 
dred inhabitants, mostly agricultural laborers. 

There was no squire, properly so speaking ; there were several 
large houses round, but they were all just beyond the boundaries, 
and undoubtedly the chief man of the place was the rector. He 
lived in a fine old house near the church, and wrote himself "hon- 
orable " as well as " reverend," being the younger son of a peer. 
The living was a very large one and he had private means, of 
which, to do him justice, he was not stingy, but was always ready 
to help those who went to him for aid. 

The church itself was an old Norman building, cruciform in 
shape, with some fine brasses in the interior and one or two in- 
teresting monuments. I made a pilgrimage to it with my sisters 
the first morning after my arrival, and they showed me with glee 
the Broomer's Hill pew a spacious affair with red cushions and 
hassocks, and a perfect library of hymn and prayer books. They 
gave me a graphic account of the service how the little clerk 



240 "Ar LAST, THOUGH LONG" [Nov., 

was always behindhand and came in with a quavering "Amen" 
when every one else had finished ; they were getting used to it all 
now, they said, but it had struck them at first as very primitive, 
accustomed as they had been all their lives to the ornate func- 
tions of an extreme Ritualistic London church. 

Not the church only but the whole manner of life at Saxon- 
holt was new and strange to them, and very old-world in its sim- 
plicity. 

" You won't have been here a week before every one in the 
parish will have called on you," said Maude. " They are of a 
most sociable disposition, besides which they are devoured with 
curiosity. A real live Catholic is unknown here. I don't believe 
such a thing has ever been seen, and I am sure that many of 
them expect you to have hoofs, if not horns." 

" They know, then, that this strange, wild creature is coming 
into their midst? " 

"Oh! yes. Daisy has been at great pains to inform every- 
body, for the sake of seeing what she calls ' their pained sur- 
prise.' " 

"Really, Ethel," put in Daisy, " it was amusing when Mr. 
Chandos (that's the rector) and his wife called the first time. 
We had said we would be pleased to help with the Easter de- 
corations, and so forth, but that Maude was not strong enough to 
undertake a Sunday-school class, and mother considered me too 
young. ' Well,' said he, ' perhaps when your other daughter 
comes home she may feel inclined to assist us in that way.' 
' Oh ! no,' mother said, ' I'm afraid you must not count on her aid, 
as she is a Roman Catholic.' ' 

"What did they say?" 

" They both said ' Oh ! ' in a shocked voice, and there was 
quite five minutes' silence before they spoke again." 

" Have you been over to Ashly, either of you ? " 

" Yes, we drove over one day. Does not the prospect of 
seven miles there and seven miles back rather scare you ?" 

" No ; I have been taking long walks lately in order to get 
into condition, and I believe I can do fourteen miles easily, with 
a rest between." 

A sister of my father's had become a Catholic many years ago, 
and when 1 was born she begged my father to let me be bap- 
tized in her faith. He refused then, but later on, when his family 
became more numerous, he was glad to accept her offer of 
charging herself with my education on condition that she was 
allowed to accomplish it in a convent school. At ten years old 



i886.] "AT LAST, THOUGH LONG" 241 

I was placed with the Sisters of Jerusalem, and when, at sixteen, 
I expressed a desire to be received into the church, neither he 
nor my mother made any objection, only stipulating that I 
should in no way allow my religious opinions to obtrude them- 
selves or to clash with family arrangements. When the ques- 
tion of taking Broomer's Hill arose some regret was expressed 
at the distance I should have to go to Mass ; but as it was in 
every other way desirable, it was decided that I must surmount 
that difficulty somehow. At Ashly Park, a place about seven 
miles from Saxonholt, there was a chapel and priest, maintained 
at the expense of Sir James Ashly ; and that was where I intend- 
ed to go when the weather was fine enough to permit so long a 
walk. On wet Sundays I must resign myself to staying at home, 
unless I could induce Herbert to drive me in the dog-cart. My 
first Sunday was beautifully fine. I started about eight, Mass be- 
ing at half-past ten. The way was varied and delightful. After a 
mile or so I left the high-road and struck across an undulating 
common all covered with the golden glory of the gorse ; then 
through an 'ideal English village where the cottages lay up 
round a green, with the church on one side and on the other the 
blacksmith's forge, and the inn, "The Queen's Head," with a sign- 
post out in the road, and a portrait of her Majesty Victoria in 
her robes of state, with sceptre and crown, swaying gently up and 
down in the breeze; then for nearly two miles through the pine 
woods where the path was covered thick with soft brown nee- 
dies and all the air was full of aromatic scents, and then through 
a white gate into the park. 

Oddly enough, both the Protestant and Catholic churches 
were built in the park, the former a funny little gray stone edifice 
with high, pitched roof and lancet windows ; the latter, only a 
short way across the fine, springy turf, and well within sight, was 
modern Gothic, built about twenty years ago by Sir James' fa- 
ther. Each church possessed one bell, and ringing, as they did,, 
within a second of each other, they produced two jerky notes, 
that sounded like " Do come, do come." 

The villagers entered at the west gate of the park, and then, 
divided and went off in straggling groups to their separate des-. 
tinations. The old women with their prayer-books wrapped in 
clean pocket-handkerchiefs, and the old men in wonderfully- 
stitched smock-frocks and high silk hats, harmonized as weUj 
with the landscape as the smoke-colored Alderney cow 
were dotted about in twos and threes ; and once, when- I 

VOL. XLIV. 16 





242 "Ar LAST, THOUGH LONG" [Nov., 

hollow in the ground I saw the broad antlers of some deer toss- 
ing above the bracken. 

To my great joy I recognized the priest as Father Naylor, 
who had been for some time chaplain at the convent. He came 
down to speak to me after Mass, and I went round to his house 
to rest. 

" By the bye," he said, when I had told him where I was liv- 
ing, " there is a co-religionist at Saxonholt I go to see sometimes. 
You ought to make his acquaintance and his wife's." 

"What is their name?" 

"Tugwell." 

"Tugwell? They have not called on me yet." 

" Well, no ; they would hardly do that. Mr. Tugwell earns a 
precarious livelihood as a hedger and ditcher, I believe, and Mrs. 
Tugwell takes in washing; so perhaps you had better call first." 

" I will. Where do they live, and how do they come to be 
Catholics ? " 

" In answer to your first question, they live in one of those 
cottages at the foot of Church Hill ; in answer to this second, he 
is a convert. But you must ask his wife to tell you the story ; I 
can't do it justice, as she can. He doesn't often come to church, 
as it is too far for him to walk ; but he comes at Christmas and 
Easter in great style in a fly. If you ever drive over, give the 
old man a lift if you can." 

" Do you know a Mrs. Tugwell, Sarah?" I asked our house- 
maid a day or two after this conversation. 

" Well, miss, there's a many Mrs. Tugwells. There's her 
whose husband works down to the Red Lion, and there's Mrs. 
Richard Tugwell at the shop, and Mrs. Jim Tugwell does plain 
sewing, and Mrs. John she's a widder ; then there's Mrs. Tug- 
well, her as washes for your ma." 

" I think that must be the one," said I, anxious to stem this 
torrent of Tugwells ; " her husband goes to Ashly Park to 
church." 

"Oh! her. That's Nance Tugwell. Yes, I knows her well 
enough, and so does most people, I fancy. She's a deal too fond 
of giving folks the rough side of her tongue, is Nance. And 
gossip ? My eye ! can't she talk ! " 

" Where does she live ? I want to go and see her." 

& 

Sarah explained, at the same time adding : " I wouldn't go if 
I was you, miss. She doesn't care for the quality. None of them 
ever goes near her." 



i886.] "Ar LAST, THOUGH LONG" 243 

In spite of this discouraging remark I started about six the 
next evening to call on her. I found the house without difficulty. 
There were three or four of them clustered at the bottom of 
Church Hill, a winding road cut through high banks of sand- 
stone, overgrown with birch and hazel, and tangled with ferns 
and creeping plants. The houses were old and built of plaster 
and wood, with immense thatched roofs. A gate opened into a 
garden all full of pinks and larkspur, and tall hollyhocks holding 
up their beautiful cups to catch the dust from the road. 

The door stood open and I could see into the kitchen, a good- 
sized room with a flagged floor as clean as soap and water could 
make it. A large clock ticked away in one corner, and in the 
window was a trestle- table piled high with linen which Mrs. 
Tugwell was ironing. She had heard my step on the gravel and 
came to the door to meet me a tall woman, stout too, though 
not ungainly, and still handsome in spite of the forbidding ex- 
pression of her face. 

" Good-evening, Mrs. Tugwell," I began rather nervously ; 
" my name is Turner" 

" Oh ! I know who you are fast enough," was her not very 
gracious answer; "will you walk in?" 

" As you know my name," I said, accepting her invitation, 
" you very likely know that I belong to the same faith as your 
husband ; and, as we are the only Catholics in Saxonholt, we 
ought to be friends don't you think so ? " 

A loud sniff was the only answer vouchsafed by this very im- 
possible woman, and I was beginning to feel extremely uncom- 
fortable ; however, I started again : 

" Father Naylor " when she broke in : 

" I'm not a papist, so don't think it, though my husband is 
more fool he, says I. I saw you go by on Sunday. ' She's off to 
Ashly Park,' says I to myself ; ' but she'll soon give that up.' 
Dan'l used to do it, but he was fit for naught on a Monday when 
he'd traipesed all the way over there." 

"Your husband is not in, I suppose?" I ventured, thinking 
Mr. Tugwell might prove less difficult than his spouse. 

" No, he's not. He's at work ; that's where he is. It's only 
the gentry who have time to go round visiting and hindering 
folks, keeping them talking while their irons are cooling! " 

" Oh ! I beg your pardon ; I won't detain you any longer," 
I said, mustering all my dignity, but feeling wonderfully small. 
"Good-evening." And I moved towards the door. I suppose her 
conscience smote her, for she said : 



24^ "Ar LAST, THOUGH LONG" [Nov., 

" You mean well by calling, miss, I'm sure, but you must 
come some time when I an't so busy. Mondays, Tuesdays, and 
Wednesdays I am up to my eyes in the clothes, but Thursdays 
and Fridays I gets a bit of peace." 

I was a good deal teased at home about my unsuccessful at- 
tempt to establish social relations with the Tugwells ; and we 
heard such stories about her from Sarah that Herbert gave her 
the name of " The Dragon." All the village seemed to hold her 
in wholesome awe, and there were many legends of her prowess 
and feats of strength. One was how she had returned from mar- 
ket one day to find the colporteur of the Bible Society in her 
kitchen haranguing her husband, who, from all accounts, seemed 
to be a nervous, easily dispirited man. With one thrust of her 
vigorous arm she sent this apostle of the printing-press flying 
down the path to the gate, pursued by a shower of his own tracts 
and leaflets. That was his last attempt at evangelizing the Tug- 
well family, and he was observed, from that time, to avoid the 
road past her house. Another story ran that she had marched 
straight into the cottage where John Millam, the brutal black- 
smith, was beating his wife, and, wrenching the stick from his 
hands, had then and there administered the soundest thrashing to 
him he'd ever had in his life ! 

One afternoon I met her, wheeling a barrow full of clean 
clothes. 

" Well, miss," she began, "you've not been to see me again? 
You aren't so wonderful anxious for us to be friends, after all, it 
seems." 

"Indeed yes I am, Mrs. Tugwell ; but I was afraid of bother- 
ing you." 

"Oh! ah! I daresay. There's more ways than one of roast- 
ing eggs." And with that she took up the shafts of her barrow 
again and went her way. 

Two days after this I screwed up courage enough to once 
more beard the lioness in her den. 

This time I found her darning stockings, with the cottage all 
tidied up, and her husband, " Marster Tugwell," seated in the 
chimney-corner smoking, and nursing his knee. She really 
seemed pleased to see me, and presented me as " Miss Turner, 
the young lady as goes over to Ashly Park, Dan'l." 

" Please sit down, Mr. Tugwell," 1 said, " and don't put your 
pipe away. My brother smokes all the time at home, so I'm 
used to tobacco." 

He was a great contrast to his wife, though he had evidently 



18.86.] "Ar LAST, THOUGH LONG" 245 

been handsome, too. He was a timid, deprecating old man, very 
thin, and bent nearly double, with trembling hands whose joints 
were swollen with rheumatism. His scanty white hair fell round 
a face wrinkled with age and toil, his features were sharp and 
clearly cut, his blue eyes mild and singularly gentle, and every 
line of his person expressed that wonderful, pathetic patience so 
noticeable in old poor people. It was some time before he spoke, 
and then only in answer to a direct question from me. 

" Will you go to Mass with me next Sunday ? " I asked. " My 
brother is going to drive me, and there will be plenty of room 
for you, if you like to come." 

His whole face lighted up. 

" If it an't troublin' you, I should dearly like to," he said. ' 

" Ah ! that he would," said his wife ; " he don't often get a 
chance to go, 'ceptin' twice a year at Christmas and Easter 
when I strains a point and has a fly from the George. Seven shil- 
lin's is a deal of money; but since he is a papist, folks sha'n't say 
he's too poor to be one properly." 

To this somewhat embarrassing remark I replied vaguely by 
saying: " It is a very long way to walk." 

"Ah ! " he said, " I used not to find it so, but it's too much for 
me now. I'm an old man seventy-odd." 

" And old as that," put in his wife, " you wouldn't think there 
was but ten years 'twixt him and me, miss, would you? " 

" No, indeed," I answered, looking at her upright, stalwart 
figure. "Have you been a Catholic long, Mr. Tugwell?" 

" Fifteen years next month, missy ; and, please the Lord, I'll 
die one." 

" Tell her how it happened, Dan'l," said his wife. " I can see 
she's dying to know, though she is too pretty-behaved to ask." 

He lifted his rheumatic leg slowly with -both hands, and 
crossed it over the other one ; then, after two or three pulls at his 
pipe, he began : 

" It was when the duke was building his big church, just after 
he come of age. He sent out notices that he wanted seven hun- 
dred men, and he wanted 'em all from this part of the country, if 
he could get 'em, bein' like his own people. So all who were in 
want of a job went to his agent. There was men came from all 
round, many more than was wanted, but I was lucky enough to 
get on in the first hundred. It's too far to go from here and 
back every day, so I used to go there a Monday mornin's and 
stop till Saturday noon. 

" The duke he used to come round himself sometimes when 



246 "AT LAST, THOUGH LONG." [Nov., 

we was working, and speak to us; a little bit of a fellow he was, 
not much more than a boy, but so pleasant and kind in his man- 
ner. Well, one day it was give out that there was to be a mis- 
sion for the workmen. Some priests were coming from Lunnon, 
and the hours were arranged so that all could attend if they see 
fit ; if they didn't, why they needn't. There was lots of 'em went, 
and I was one ; and the very first sermon that priest preached 
took right hold of me, and before I knew where I was I see it all. 
I went to him that day, and many times arter, and he tried to 
teach me ; but I warn't very bright I never was only I knowed 
it was all right somehow, and he teached me as much as he 
could " 

" He come home one Saturday," broke in Mrs. Tugwell, 
"and 'Nance,' says he, 'I've joined the church.' 'Why, you 
great cuckoo,' says I, ' you an't a Methody,' says I. So then he 
ups and tells me all about it; and I was that mad I could ha' 
knocked him down. And I found his rosary in his pocket, and 
I just ups and chucks it into the midden at the back of Marster 
Home's yard. And I told him what I done when he comes home 
in the evenin', for ' I an't goin' to have no popish clutter about 
here,' says I. ' Nance, lass,' says he, ' you shouldn't ha' done that ; 
I'll have to get another.' ' You won't bring it to this house, 
Daniel Tugwell,' says I, 'so I tells you frank and free.' Well, he 
never says nothin' more till the evenin', and then he tells me he'll 
have to be up earlier than usual the next day. I was surprised, 
for he generally lay abed a bit Sunday mornin's, and ' What's that 
for? ' says I. ' I am goin' to Mass to Ashly Park,' says he ; ' will 
you come with me?' ' No, I won't,' says I. And when he was 
asleep I gets up and hides his clothes, and slips out myself, and 
doesn't come home till past church time and too late for him to 
go. 'There, my. man,' says I, 'you won't talk about Mass to me 
again in a hurry,' says I. ' Don't you ever serve me that trick 
again, Nance/ says he wonderful quiet like ; and he puts on his 
things and walks out. Well, it's ' the still sow sups the milk,' 
you know, miss; and I talks to him all that day about his fool- 
ishness. But lor ! you might as well ha' preached to a stone ; and 
he goes off to work the next mornin' as full of his nonsense as 
ever, and leavin' me as cross as you please, when who should 
come down but Mr. Chandos. ' Mrs. Tugwell,' he begins, ' what's 
this I hear about your husband? ' ' I don't know, sir, I'm sure,' 
says I, firing up ; ' nothing bad, fm sure.' ' Nothing bad ! ' says 
he. 'I don't know what you call bad,' says he; 'but they tell 
me he's become a papist.' ' Oh ! dear me,' says I, trying to keep 



i886.] "AT LAST, THOUGH LONG" 247 

cool, ' is that all? ' says I. ' That's true enough. Father Moxon 
over to Stokesly, where he is workin', has been and converted 
him.' 'And what does Father Moxon mean by interfering with 
a parishioner of mine, I should like to know?' says he. 'I will 
not have such doings in Saxonholt,' says he ; ' and so T would 
have you to understand, Mrs. Tugwell,' says he ; 'I will not have 
such things in my parish.' Now, I was as mad as mad with 
Dan'l myself, but I wasn't goin' to have him ordered about by 
Mr. Chandos, so ' As to that, sir,' says I, ' you can't help yourself ; 
we live in a free country,' says I, ' and if Dan'l bows down to 
wood and stone,' says I, ' there's no man can hinder him.' ' Mrs. 
Tugwell,' says he, ' you've always gone to church regular, and 
as such you've had a deal of work from the rectory, not to speak 
of other things, and I expect you,' says he ' I expect you to see 
that your husband comes to his senses.' Well, a worm will turn 
at last, as you know, mis"s, and that was too much for me, hintin' 
at the work I'd had from him and his, and the drops of broth 
and things when Dan'l was down with the fever; so I ups, and 
' Mr. Chandos,' I says, ' I'm much obleeged for past favors,' says 
I, ' but, washin' or no washin', I am not your black slave; and as 
for Dan'l,' says I, ' I don't care if he turns papist fifty times over, 
and I'll never set foot in your church again,' says I, ' though it's 
not very often you're there yourself, if you can find some one else 
to do your work,' says I. Well, he went the color of that candle, 
and he takes up his hat. ' You're a very impertinent woman,' says 
he. ' Woman yourself,' says I, and I shows him the door, and 
from that day to this I've not seen the inside of a church. And, 
if you'll believe me, I spent the whole of that afternoon in the 
midden lookin' for Dan'l's rosary, and I found it at last ; and I 
washed it and rubbed it, and I took the three o'clock train over 
to Stokesly, and I come upon Dan'l all in the midst on his work, 
and you never see a man so struck of a heap. And ' Here's your 
rosary, Dan'l,' says I, 'and you'll go to church where you please,' 
says I, ' and 1*11 not be the woman to hinder you.' Well, the 
great soft-head ! he bursts out a-cryin', and it was ever so long 
before I could make him understand. We went to see the priest 
together that evenin', and I told him just all about it ; and laugh ! 
I never see a man laugh more in my life. ' You'd better let me 
instruct you too, Mrs. Tugwell,' says he ; 'if you don't go to one 
church you must to another.' ' No, thank you,' says I. ' Once bit, 
twice shy, your reverence; and I've had enough of the clergy,' 
says I ; ' and if Dan'l there wasn't a great chuffin 'ed he wouldn't 
take up with such foolery neither. Not to speak of quarrellin' 



248 "Ar LAST, THOUGH LONG" [Nov., 

with his bread and butter,' says I ; ' for there's no denyin' Mrs. 
Chandos's starched gowns mounts up, and the housemaid's 
aprons, and if we come to the workhouse I shall know who to 
thank for it,' says I." 

" Why don't you move somewhere nearer a church?" I asked 
as soon s I had a little recovered my gravity, which was as 
much upset as Father Moxon's had been ; " then you might get 
the surplices and so forth to wash, and Daniel could go to Mass 
on Sundays." 

They both looked blankly at me, and Daniel shook his head ; 
evidently leaving Saxonholt was too bold a step to have present- 
ed itself even to Mrs. Tugwell's independent mind. 

" The missis has never been further away than Pelbury," said 
he, " though I were in Lunnon myself once.'' 

" And a nasty place it is, if all folks tells you is true," said 
Nance, " with the blacks a-fallin' all the while, and the milk as 
weak as weak. I was bred and born in Saxonholt, and in Saxon- 
holt I'll die ; and if you, Dan'l Tugwell, can't be content to do 
likewise, why it's a pity, says I." 

" Do you work at Stokesly now? " I asked. 

" Oh ! no ; the duke he turned off half the men a year or so 
after I joined the church, and he's cut 'em down still more since, 
though he's building still. Ah ! we had a hard time just then, 
for the quality all took their washin' away, and I only got odd 
jobs. Do you mind that time, Nance ? " 

"Mind it!" she cried. "Yes, I mind it. It was a bitter bad 
winter, and we came precious nigh starving ; but, thank God ! we 
never went near the house or asked help from any one. But you 
wouldn't wonder at his being bent, miss, if you knew what we 
went through, and all along of that great gowk there a meddling 
with matters he don't understand. If he'd 'a' been content to wor- 
ship as his father and mother did afore him, we shouldn't have 
lost the rectory washin'. It's all very well for the likes of you 
to take fads into their heads, but it don't do for them as has their 
living to get. What would become of him if I fell sick, I should 
like to know? And he can't even eat his bit of vittle now like a 
Christian, but must have this, and mustn't have that, on certain 
days ; and won't let his bread look at the bacon fat on a Friday, 
but eats it dry when the Lord he knows we don't pamper our 
inwards, and it's little else we get sometimes." 

" Well, well, Nance," put in her husband meekly, " after all, we 
have only our two selves to look after, and we've always been fed ; 
we've no cause to grumble." 



i886.] "Ar LAST, THOUGH LONG" 249 

"Grumble! No, you've no cause to grumble, but /have. You 
went with your- eyes open and walked into a pit, but it's hard on 
her as you've dragged in with you. As you've made your bed, 
so you must lie on it, Dan'l Tugwell ; but the toad that's put under 
the harrow has a right to complain ! " 

When I left the cottage the old man walked to the gate with 
me. 

" Don't you mind what she says, missy," he said ; " she 
wouldn't have said that much if you hadn't ha' been a Catholic 
too. She always stands up for us to the others, but it's been a bit 
hard on her, and you can't wonder if she complains now and 
then. She's been a good wife to me; her tongue 's her only trou- 
ble. Come again, if you please, miss ; she's taken a fancy to you, 
I can see." 

Poor old Tugwell ! " Her tongue 's been her only trouble ! " 
but what a trouble only a shrinking, sensitive nature like his 
could know. 

" Did you never feel like giving up, Daniel ?" I asked him once. 

He shook his head. " It's been mighty hard at times, miss. The 
men used to badger me at first, but they left that off. And I never 
minded the going short ; there was things that more than made 
up for that. It was through the missis I used to feel it most. I 
won't deny she made me nigh despairin' sometimes, for she's 
never left off nag-nagging me, but somehow, poor soul, I believe 
she'll be sorry for it some day. And though I liked her for 
standing up to the parson, it don't seem right of her not to go to 
church, and so I've told her times and again." 

At home they took a great interest in this couple. " Why, 
the man is a martyr a positive martyr," exclaimed Herbert when 
I repeated the above remark to them. " Fifteen years' nagging is 
considerably worse than wild beasts, / think. Does he ever scold 
back?" 

" No; she told me he never gave her a hard word." 

" More fool he. If he rounded on her sometimes she would be 
all the better for it." 

" Perhaps ; but he is not that sort of man. His is the gentlest, 
most patient temper I've ever met." 

My brother Herbert was a very good-natured fellow, and also, 
perhaps, not a little glad to miss the service at Saxonholt, so 
he used to contrive to take me to church in his dog-cart very 
often, and we always took Dan Tugwell on the back seat. He 
would come down to the gate in a clean white smock, with a 
flower pinned in the breast of it, a bird's-eye handkerchiet round 



250 "Ar LAST, THOUGH LONG" [Nov , 

his neck and another in the crown of the wonderful beaver hat 
that had been his Sunday head-gear ever since his wedding-day, 
for which occasion it was bought. His wife would follow him, 
scolding all the time as he slowly and painfully clambered into 
his place. But poor old man ! how happy he was in church. One 
got a faint idea of the " beauty of holiness" when one stole a look 
at his face during Mass. 

In the summer he had plenty of work in the hay and harvest 
fields, and in the autumn we took him on to do odd jobs in the 
garden. I used to go and have five minutes' chat with him some- 
times, for I found that a little time devoted to him brightened the 
whole of his day. 

" He do think a wonderful deal of you, miss," his wife said to 
me once, and I really think, without vanity, that she herself was 
not indifferent to me. 

I came in from a walk one afternoon towards the end of No- 
vember, and went in search of Dan. I found him in the kitchen 
garden, hard at work as usual. The house was on a hill, and 
the ground sloped down to flat meadows, at this time under water, 
for the floods were out. 

He rose from his stooping position over the celery-trench he 
was weeding, straightened his back with a hardly suppressed 
groan, and stood, his knotted hands crossed on his spud, and his 
bent figure silhouetted against the waste of water where the sun 
was dying away in a sea of crimson splendor. 

" Well, Dan," I began, " I've come to say good-by to you for 
a little while. I am going away to-morrow to stay with my 
brother in Aberdeen." 

" I don't rightly know where that is, missy ; is it far away?" 

" Yes ; I shall be travelling all day, and all night nearly, after I 
leave London." 

" Beant you afraid to go so long alone ? " 

" Why, no ; my brother will meet me, you know. It is not like 
going among strangers." 

" Ah ! that's it. If one has a brother or a father waitin' it takes 
away the fear, don't it ? " 

I knew what he meant, but I was shy of talking to him on 
such a subject, he was so ignorant, and yet so much wiser than T. 

I gave him some muffetees I had knitted for him. 

" Why, bless your pretty heart! "he said, "they be a mort 
too fine for me ! You'll go round and see the missis before you 
go?" 

" I've just come from there. She was getting your supper 



1 886.] "Ar LAST, THOUGH LONG." 251 

ready, and you had better be quick home, and not keep it wait- 
ing, or you'll get scolded, perhaps." 

It was the end of January when I came home. After two 
months' absence there was, of course, much home and village gos- 
sip to be told me. 

We sat round the fire in my room until late on into the night ; 
then, in a momentary silence, Maude said: 

" O Ethel, poor old Daniel is dead ! " 

"Dan Tugwell?" 

" Yes ; he died three days ago, very suddenly. He is to be 
buried on Friday. Mr. Chandos has been very nice. He came to 
see Herbert about it, and said he was sure Dan would choose to 
be buried in the churchyard among all his people, and he asked 
Herbert if he thought Father Naylor would read the service 
there, as it was Protestant ground. Herbert drove over to 
Ashly, and Father Naylor said the ground had been consecrated 
centuries ago, and he had no reason to believe desecrated since ; 
and he thanked Mr. Chandos for his courtesy, and said he would 
come." 

Herbert and I went to the funeral. There were a few, very 
few, mourners at the grave, and when all was over Father Nay- 
lor and I walked down to the cottage with Mrs. Tugwell. 

" Come in," she said, drawing the key from her pocket. 
Everything was in its usual place, but the whole room looked 
bare and desolate, and seemed to have undergone a change. 

" He was sitting there," she said, pointing to the chimney- 
corner, and speaking as though she were talking to herself rather 
than to us. " He had been telling his beads, and I had been going 
on at him, as I always did, when suddenly he gets up and comes 
over to where I stands. ' Give us a kiss, Nance,' he sa}'s in his 
old voice just like his courting days. I was too took aback to 
speak rough to him, and I oh, thank God ! I kissed him. And 
he sat down in that chair with a little gasp, and died." 

Father Naylor tried to comfort the poor woman a little, but 
she seemed almost in despair, and at last he had to go. 

" Come to me or send for me at any time, if you want help, 
as Daniel would have done, Mrs. Tugwell," he said as he went 
away. " Try and persuade her to have a neighbor in ; she ought 
not to be left," he whispered to me. 

Although she had made enemies with her unkind tongue, 
there were several good-hearted women who would gladly have 
stayed with her; but she would have none of them, neither would 



252 "AT LAST, THOUGH LONG" [Nov., 

she listen to me when I wanted her to come to Broomer's, for 
that night at least. 

" Leave me in peace," she said at last, and as I closed the 
door I heard her cry : " I didn't mean it, Dan'l not one word 
of it." 

We woke next morning to a white world. Such a snow-storm 
broke over England that night as had not been known for fifty 
years. Every line of rail was blocked, and train after train 
stopped, some in cuttings where the half-frozen passengers shiv- 
ered for hours before help came to them. London was like a 
city of the dead, all traffic stopped and the roar of the streets 
silenced. 

In country-places the snow drifted, hiding the high-roads and 
completely obliterating lesser tracks, and the wind swirled and 
blew it into wreaths, piling it high above the roofs of lonely cot- 
tages, and burying sheep and cattle in a soft white shroud. 

Many strange stories were told of people snowed up in distant 
farm-houses till the thaw released them after three weeks' im- 
prisonment. More than one poor shepherd perished on the 
Downs near Saxonholt, and we were all frantic with anxiety 
about the fate of Toby Scult, our diminutive cow-boy, till we 
found him, after eight-and-forty hours' search, in the pen with 
the sheep, lying close up against an old bell-wether, and as warm 
as toast. 

It was, as I have said, three weeks before the thaw set in. 
Long before then it was known that Mrs. Tugwell was missing, 
had not been seen since the day of her husband's funeral. 

Gradually the snow melted away, excepting on the hill-tops 
and in the sheltered hollows. Then they found her close by the 
church-door in Ashly Park, with Dan's brown rosary grasped in 
her frozen fingers. 



1 8 86.] PROVINCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND. 253 



PROVINCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND. 

WERE Sir Roger de Coverley to come to life to-day I am in- 
clined to believe he would consider society in the nineteenth 
century a very interesting study, and some of its problems pecu- 
liarly puzzling, so various are the outgrowths of the civilization 
over which he speculated with mild cynicism and the gallantry of 
his period, and so many the forms and fashions we have revived 
from his generation in our pursuit of novelty without in every 
case a corresponding sense of the eternal fitness of things. I 
fancy that our quaint old friend would find himself oppressed by 
some of the most brilliant scenes in Belgravia. The region below 
Half Moon Street and nearer to the Strand and Charing Cross 
might appeal to his senses with something like familiarity, out- 
wardly at least, but Mayfair would be a sorrowful pilgrimage to 
him. Sir Gorgius Midas would startle him ; all his preconceived 
ideas of even mushroom splendor would fail him here, while the 
haute noblesse of Park Lane and Carlton Terrace would afford him 
the material for profound philosophies too deep to utter. We 
can fancy that he might direct his steps hopefully towards the 
suburban places where at least Nature, in her loyalty to the forms 
and colors she first assumed, would welcome him with the green 
fields and blue skies which are as much of his time as our own ; 
while were he to wander down into the provinces of England 
remote from this chaotic London his traditions might receive few 
shocks. 

To assert that the English people cling to social prejudices, 
to forms of thought and feeling about every-day life, is almost 
superfluous, but journeying through the southern and western 
part of England the fact that this is the case becomes at times 
startlingly apparent; the incongruities are often surprising. Peo- 
ple of the most modern influences and necessity for novel action 
cling to early traditions, and preserve customs, and have the spirit 
of the past with the letter of the present, in a way that makes one 
appreciate and understand where the Pilgrim Fathers procured 
that firmness of spirit and dogmatic will which made them perse- 
cute while they declared it their intention to protect. 

Country life in England has many phases, from the state of 
splendid informality of a large country-house where there are 
thirty or forty guests and fifty servants, to the town or over- 



254 PROVINCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND. [Nov., 

grown village where a certain amount of caste feeling dominates 
the community and the rules for society are as fixed as those of 
Mayfair nay, more so, since they are subject to none of those 
fascinating vacillations which are like the caprices of a beauty 
whose every phase has its own charm, and whose whims have the 
grace of an artistic decision. Vibrations such as sway the social 
atmosphere of " passionate Brompton " are welcome to the 
dwellers in provincial England. They accept modern innova- 
tions in a staid and resolute manner, recognizing no power to 
please in the subtleties which make terra cotta effective to-day 
and tiresome to-morrow. They are anxious to look prosperous 
and fashionable, but the variations of " temperament " are little 
known. 

With the life in a conservative country-town I have to deal at 
present, and it seems to me that the best preface I can make is to 
say that it is, in all its essentials except that of human nature, 
radically different from life in a corresponding place in America. 
We take, for example, a town in one of the southern counties a 
market-town, something between the fascinating Casterbridge of 
Mr. Hardy's novels and the Barchester of Mr. Trollope's en- 
chanting chronicles. Leaving the railway-station at such a place, 
we encounter immediately the newest features of the town. Ra- 
diating from this point are some circles of brand-new villas, 
stucco and brick dwellings, with a "smart" look about them, not 
to be called pretentious for architecture in England is generally 
too solid to be thus characterized but perhaps "genteel" in ap- 
pearance ; houses, set back a little, with bow-windows at either 
side of a pretty doorway, and latticed panes in the casements 
above, with here and there a dormer roof or gable end showing. 
Nothing especially quaint, and hardly to be called picturesque. 
New bricks and mortar are what the dwellers within dearly love ; 
new colors, new-looking gardens, freshly-sprinkled gravelled 
walks, bright paint, and a well-laid strip of pavement. 

A green or common exists in this region of the town, tra- 
versed with foot-paths and circled by a low hedge, with gates 
here and there and admitting the foot-passengers who enjoy 
this approach to what may be called a square. One or two 
churches dominate this district. The church a new one, per- 
haps, but governed by English law and rubric stands at a little 
distance from the green, tribute to the modern prosperity of the 
people in the villas round about ; while further up the hilly road 
to the right is the dissenting chapel, which assembles a large 
number of towns-people, and is as defiantly prosperous as " Salem 



1 886.] PROVINCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND. 255 

Chapel," in Mrs. Oliphant's story, in the period of Mr. Togers' 
supremacy. 

Perhaps a certain chill of disappointment settles down upon 
the American visitor who has journeyed south for the sake of 
finding' quaint forms in architecture as well as manners, on be- 
holding so much of to-day in the looks of things near to the sta- 
tion ; but he need only turn his steps up the first narrow street 
back of the smart-looking terrace confronting him, with its twink- 
ling windows and solid style, and the England of the seventeenth 
century is before him. In the town of which I write the High 
Street* was full of quaint picturesqueness, such as made one feel, 
on leaving the new town, as though an unexpected slide in a 
magic-lantern had been pushed in. Houses which were built 
in the reign of Charles I. were converted into shops with as 
little injury to their original form as possible. The butcher sold 
his wares in a building where it was said that the Protector held 
one of his few genial merry-makings, and William of Orange had 
supped in the place where the baker now cooked delicious-look- 
ing loaves and sold buns by the score to the parish-school chil- 
dren. 

Midway in the High Street a circular space was devoted to 
the market on Thursdays. Here was a huge town cross, which 
formed an attractive centre for indifferent-mannered people, in 
smock-frocks or corduroys, who were more interested in local 
topics and the aspect of the weather than the sales more active 
minds were busy over in the porch of the Town Hall. Such 
figures moved about on market-days with leisurely abandon, af- 
fording fine types for the curious observer of the English coun- 
tryman of narrow boundaries and limitless traditions. They gave 
a piquancy to the scene and their animation fitted well with 
their utterances in dialect. Deep in their hearts a belief in 
science and symbols, and brought up on oath few could have 
denied their faith in such witchcraft as lay in the evil eye or the 
virtues of nails buried at cross-roads or bones dipped in wax and 
melted before a fire. Radiating from this centre were small 
streets intersecting the heart of this lovely country like adven- 
turous foot-paths which had outgrown their original intention. 
The houses bordering these were for the most part very quaint 
in form, with bulging upper stories and strangely-devised inte- 
riors. The High Street wandered on past the town cross, widen- 
ing as it neared the open country, and presenting certain digni- 

* The High Street of an English town corresponds to our "Main" or principal busi- 
ness street. 



256 PROVINCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND. [Nov., 

fied landmarks. A large old manor-house, shut in by a brick wall, 
held its own in spite of the poverty of certain places in its near 
vicinity houses which had mouldered into decay, and whose 
original grace was forgotten in the presence of poverty and in- 
difference to anything but the need of walls and roof for a shelter 
and a door-yard for the fast-increasing families. Perhaps such a 
house gave the strongest emphasis to the conservatism of the 
place. It was too well known to suffer any loss of dignity 
through its surroundings, and the maiden lady who resided 
there bore her title of " Honorable " with as much respect as 
though her house, with its quaint proportions dominating a 
poor part of the street, its garden and orchards dipping down- 
wards to the river, were set in the midst of a stately park. 

From this point the country spread itself with luxurious un- 
dulations, dotted here and there with houses belonging to the 
"county" families. The roadways, of gracious width and bor- 
dered by most fertile lands, wound up and down, while the land- 
scape presented every variety of the southern English country, 
the Tors rising bluely in the distance, and the river, which had 
its source further north, flowing in and out of the meadow-lands, 
past the quaint old mill, curving about a bank of pollards ; or 
below the farm-lands of the country, its ripple or its rush giving 
character and variation to the scene. Here in due season the 
otter might be hunted. Here were fords and pools, craggy bends 
in the little river that could tell stories of many an exciting day- 
break chase of the old " fishmonger," as the otter is called, while 
on every side, up hill and down dale, the fox has a skurrying 
time of it as soon as the hunting season sets in. 

Naturally, as a Catholic, one of my first interests in the remote 
little town of which I speak was my church ; and well do I re- 
member the setting-down which I received from my landlady on 
inquiring its whereabouts the only church to her being the recog- 
nized one of England. 

" Oh ! the chapel you mean, ma'am," understanding at last 
" the Catholic chapel," and proceeded to give me the various 
directions by which I found myself led and misled up and down 
some country-looking streets, finally to a lane where stood the 
little building devoted to our Lord's service. 

It was a Sunday morning, and I had been told that the service 
took place at nine o'clock, and I pushed open the little, worm- 
eaten door of the church to find myself in the most cheerless of 
all sacred edifices. It was, perhaps, the size of one of our smallest 
and poorest Catholic churches, say in the far West or in some 



i836.] PROVINCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND. 257 

northern districts of New York State, and where any attempt even 
at cleanliness had been made certain traces were left conspicuous 
from the fact of tjieir making a contrast to the very rough and 
very dingy main part of the building. About six people were 
seated here and there in the broken-down pews; a very feeble, 
venerable priest was officiating. Fortunate for me, thought I, 
that the service is the same and may go on, no matter how 
meagre or how unsuggestive the surroundings ; and I responded, 
of course, in my heart, feeling everything as tangible and real as 
in the cathedral in London. But the poverty, indeed the squalor, 
of the place, the extremely feeble looks of the aged priest, and 
the apparent indifference of the people struck me as being almost 
unnatural even for a poor parish; since the town was large, and 
if the Catholics within it were not prosperous, at least in num- 
bers, they might have maintained the church in better order. 
Wishing to discover something about the week-day Masses, I 
presented myself a little later at the priest's house, to be received 
by the most deplorable-looking old woman, who led me into a 
scantily-furnished parlor, listened to my inquiries, and answered 
at once: " Week-days? No, indeed, miss; it is more than he can 
do to say the Mass on Sunday ." And so, indeed, it shortly proved ; 
for the old man, whose failing health had made it so long almost 
impossible for him to keep up the duties of his situation, and yet 
who had, from desire to administer to his little flock, kept his 
feelings from the bishop, died suddenly about two weeks later. 
I knew that in the neighborhood a well-known Catholic noble- 
man had his own chaplain and private chapel, also that several 
rich Catholics in the county attended elsewhere; yet this little 
chapel had to be maintained, and a very brief search brought to 
light many who, for want of special encouragement or instruction,, 
had been remaining away from their duty, but who professed 
themselves glad enough to attend the services were they recom-. 
menced. Such matters proceed very slowly in England,. The 
bishop was absent at the time, and only by a fortunate chance 
did any one appear in the actual town itself ready to take an 
interest in the religious growth of the place. 

We had passed and repassed very often the quaint old manor- 
house of the town, and knew only that its present occupants had 
but recently taken up their abode within its walls. A doorway 
opened in the garden-wall sometimes and revealed a lady and gen- 
tleman, a happy party of young children and scampering dogs, 
while glimpses were obtained of a. fine old tree on the lawn, of a, 
garden in the rear, and sounds., as of a, perfect rookery in the, 

VOL. XLIV. 17 



258 PROVINCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND. [Nov., 

taller tree-tops. At an evening party, soon after the old priest's 
death, I remember hearing it mentioned that the people from the 
manor-house were expected ; and, sure enough, Mr. and Mrs. 

H were announced. It chanced to be my good-fortune that 

Mr. H took me down to supper, and a little conversation 

brought to light the fact that he was one of those Catholic con- 
verts to whom the Whitehall had given special fame. He had 
been a clergyman of some distinction, holding one of the finest 
livings of the English church, but his conversion had been slow 
and sure. If riot "with the rushing of a mighty wind," it had 
come from deliberate daily convictions which either preceded or 
followed an investigation leading him directly into the Church 
of Rome. Of course his living was abandoned, but, fortunately 
for his family, much of his fortune was a private one, and he had 

felt happier in coming down to B to live in the old manor 

than in remaining in the midst of parishioners he had dearly 
loved and who were now mourning him as one led astray.* His 
wife was bitterly opposed to his conversion, as she told me that 
very evening, but of course she could not, or would not, interfere 
with what her husband considered the only lawful and godly 
thing for him to do. 

I can hardly remember all that passed between us about the 
little church, but I know that it resulted in a decision to do 

something, and that at once. A day or two later the H s 

drove me to a convent situated charmingly two or three miles 
from the town. The order was an enclosed one the motive 
Perpetual Adoration but I believe only two houses of the espe- 
cial order exist, and in the convent to which I refer several ladies 
of noble English families had vowed their lives to the service of 
God. 

We saw the prioress sitting in a little parlor, and talked to 
her across a large window-space from which the grating was re- 
moved, and where we might have shaken hands with her. Her 
dress was spotless white, of a soft, heavy serge, and I think that, 
but for their very evident contentment with their lot, the nuns of 
this convent would have afforded any amount of suggestion for 
the picturesque and romantic to outsiders. The grounds of their 
house were very old ; there were alley-ways and certain cypress 
walks, up and down which the white-robed sisters took their exer- 

* I would like to mention that since then a large number of Mr. H 's former parishion- 
ers, under his instruction, have become Catholics. A significant fact connected with his con- 
version was that when his living came to be sold, so great was the dread of disestablishment 
that it was hard to find a buyer ! 



1 886.] PROVINCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND. 259 

cise daily, and on one or two occasions sang together sweet-toned 
chorals, rehearsing for their daily service, to which outsiders came, 
sitting within the grating. The prioress was a woman of decided 
views and much kindly common sense. She said she believed it 
could readily be arranged for their chaplain to officiate Sundays 
and holydays at our church; and this being the final agreement, 
we set to work to improve the condition of things in the chapel 
and to form a choir. 

I think some of us well remember with much deep satisfaction 
those wintry days in the little church. The cold weather passed 
so rapidly that we had no particularly dreary experiences, and 
when the bloom of February appeared we were able to begin to 
dress the altar with wild-flowers, and by St. Joseph's day it seemed 
as though the woodlands and the hedgerows fairly teemed with 
blossoms. Well do I remember sitting with Mr. and Mrs. 

H on 'the steps of St. Joseph's altar, waiting for the boys 

whom we had sent out in the country-side for a fresh relay of 
flowers; and I can see them now coming up the dimly-lighted 
aisle, fairly staggering beneath their load of blossoms, for the 
daffodils were out, primroses were plenty, and the violets lay in 
great purple clusters amidst the green boughs the boys were bear- 
ing. We thought St. Joseph fared very well that day, and I am 
sure he must have been lonely for years in that neighborhood. 
The altar-linen and the boys' cassocks were mended, and our 
choir, who had done well in all Lenten services, made glad all 
hearts on the feast-day morning ; and it was very soon after this 

that Mrs. H and her husband took a memorable journey, on 

which occasion she received conditional baptism and made her 
first communion, returning to the manor-house a far happier 
woman than she had been for many a day. All this time the 
chaplain of the convent was officiating ; but things were looking 
very prosperous, the congregation had greatly increased, and the 
bishop promised a regular priest, who came in course of time. 
But for that one winter and spring time it was almost like build- 
ing up a house of God in the wilderness, and I am sure that it 
made the service and its requirements dearer than it had ever 
been before to the few who were there constantly and working 
so harmoniously together. 

The opposition to Catholicism which I found in such places 
was like that which our Calvinistic brethren might harbor. It 
was downright bitter and severe. The very priest to whom I 
refer told me once that sooner than walk on the same side of the 
street with a Catholic priest during his own Protestant boyhood, 



PROVINCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND. [Nov., 

he would go a decided distance out of his own way ; and the first 
time a Catholic entered his father's house as a guest he refused 
to be one of the party at the dinner-table. Such places as the 
town of which I write cannot in any way be compared to an 
American place of the same size and importance, so far as our 
church is concerned. Within an area of fifteen miles two private 
chapels were maintained. Consequently, the town chapel ap- 
pealed to a very small number of people. It was not a manufac- 
turing place at best scarcely more than two hundred people ever 
attended service but I have heard from it since that it is flourish- 
ing and vigorous. There is a school-house now. I doubt not 
but that they have also enlarged the church itself. Rumors of a 
fine boys' choir and other such matters have come to my ears, 
and I know that the priest is an Oxford man with an income of 
his own ; but can anything ever make it seem so dear to us as it 
did when, having done all that hands and feet could do to prepare 
the table of our Lord, we few could kneel together, uniting pray- 
ers and the homage of grateful hearts for the light which was 
slowly but surely growing there where once it had so nearly 
come to darkness? 

The country teemed with romance, nearly every great house 
having its story. On the principle that a ghost-story is rarely 
out of place, I will mention one or two household traditions 
which came to my immediate knowledge. Dining at a town 
place one evening, we commented upon a portrait in the library 
of the house, and which represented a beautiful woman in the 
prime of life and wearing upon her neck a collarette of diamonds 
with a pendant of amber-colored stones. Our host informed us 
that the picture had a singular history, which he good-naturedly 
related. In the beginning of the century the heir to the estate 
was seated one evening in his dressing-room, thinking of no more 
emotional subject than the new kennels being built for his hounds. 
His mind was entirely absorbed with practical details, and he was 
startled from a very prosaic reverie by a knock upon the door. 
Thinking it was his valet, he answered " Come in " without mov- 
ing from his position or allowing the interruption to break his 
chain of thoughts. As no sound of an opening door occurred, he 
turned his head, and in the firelight behind his chair saw dis- 
tinctly the figure of a beautiful woman wearing a collarette of 
diamonds and a singular-looking pendant of yellow stones. The 
3 r oung man started, but, as he said later, was by no means alarmed. 
He could not imagine who his visitor might be, and as he moved 
forward to address her she made an appealing gesture with her 



1 8 86.] PROVINCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND. 261 

hand towards the pendant at her throat, and vanished. So unex- 
pected and apparently useless was the apparition that he could 
only conclude he had been dozing unawares ; but late in the 
same evening, as he was going upstairs to an old study in which 
some diagrams of former kennels were kept, he again encoun- 
tered this strange presence. The lady stood at the end of a long 
hall and very distinctly beckoned to the young man to approach. 
He followed this time, overcome with awe-struck curiosity. She 
retreated, still beckoning to him, and vanished behind the study- 
door. He entered the room to find it vacant. The next day he 
related these strange occurrences to the only other person in the 
house at the time an old clergyman who had been his father's 
tutor. The reverend gentleman seemed much struck with what 
he had to say, and informed him that in his boyhood a robbery 

had taken place at G House, and some valuable East Indian 

ornaments belonging to his grandmother, together with her por- 
trait, were stolen. Search had been made, but the only clue to 
either picture or jewels had been the fragmentary confession of a 
man arrested for another crime, and who in dying had murmured 
sentences which were taken down, and on being produced read as 
follows: " Picture left in the west room. Could not break spring 
of locket." As he had admitted to having taken part in the 
famous robbery at G House, these dying words were sup- 
posed to relate to that affair ; but a search in the west room for 
the picture proved unavailing. The father of the young man 
who had seen the apparition had always supposed that the rob- 
bery was planned by a cousin of his who had some covert design 
in securing the jewels. But circumstances were not strong 
enough against him to warrant his arrest. The young man, 
roused to the keenest interest by what had taken place, deter- 
mined to make a thorough study of the west room, and the result 
was that the wall between the study and this apartment was 
taken down. In so doing a secret panel or sliding door was dis- 
covered, and behind it the missing picture together with a small 
box containing the East Indian jewels. Why or how they had 
been deposited there no one could ever tell ; but the owner of 
the house carried the pendant at once to London and had the 
spring of the locket opened by an expert jeweller. A faded 
; piece of parchment, on which something in cipher was written, 
was disclosed. But, like most of ghost-stories, the end was shad- 
owy and mysterious. No one had ever succeeded in decipher- 
ing the writing or in determining as to its origin. There it lay 
while we were talking, locked in a small cabinet in the library at 



262 PROVINCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND. [Nov., 

G House, perhaps some day to be clearly understood. The 

picture was restored to its former place, and in spite of many 
suggestions of the supernatural no one had been found who could 
substantiate any story of the strange lady's further appearance. 
Connected with another house in this vicinity was a weird tale, 
which, however, had become like a commonplace fact to the 
neighborhood. Charles I. had passed a week there shortly be- 
fore his downfall, and on the eve of his execution he is supposed 
to revisit the place and walk, holding his luckless head in his 
hand, up and down a certain corridor where it is said the master 
of the house denounced his king. 

Society in such a town has two distinct phases. Some of 
these are too subtle to define, but for the most part they represent 
rules and prejudices which form governing influences and which 
are respected by all the people as traditions too sacred to be dis- 
turbed. The " county" families rarely visit in the town. They 
have their own gatherings in their fine mansions, detachments 
of visitors from town, gatherings from the county, all forming a 
little world of their own. While the town society pursues the 
even tenor of its way with varied entertainments, all more or 
less formal in character, the winter season having a fair show 
of dinner-parties, afternoon teas and dances ; the more purely 
bourgeois element and the people who are generally known as 
Dissenters form a certain distinct set apart from the upper town 
society, and having a world in which the festivities are sociable 
and decidedly hilarious. Some of the town-people, of course, 
visit among the county families, but the exceptions are few : a 
leading barrister, a clergyman or physician, an army officer or 
naval commander, some lady of blue blood residing in the town, 
being eligible for county invitations; while to the American 
mind certain caste distinctions afford endless variety for study. 
To understand the raison d'etre for some of their closest dis- 
tinctions was very difficult. There were some families who 
seemed to be accepted without any analysis at all or any discus- 
sion, although, from what I used to hear, they did not impress me 
as being of pedigree or position, according to English social 
rules, to warrant such reception. Whether it was that in a weak 
moment they had been taken up and could not be discarded, or 
that they had some claim to recognition too subtle for the Ameri- 
can mind, I could not understand. Nevertheless the fact re- 
mained of their undoubted position among the elect ones, and I 
used to think their cases must cause an additional heart-burn to 
the waiting souls who hovered on the debatable border-line be- 



1 886.] PROVINCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND. 263 

tvveen the leading town-people and the second-rate bourgeoisie. 
It would be hard to find a more agreeably social community 
than the better class formed in this little town. The dinner-, 
parties given among them were delightful. They combined the 
latest novelty in fashion with something of the substantial home- 
life of an older generation, and were in some respects better 
than the more stately entertainments to which one went driving 
five or six miles, sometimes in the wet and darkness, recompensed 
only by the sense that the invitation and the entertainment were 
distinctly to one's credit. The hour of dining was quarter before 
eight ; every one appeared in full evening toilet ; there was evi- 
dent the usual reticence among the young girls present and the 
comfortable affability among the dowagers, while the men talked 
politics and local affairs agreeably enough ; and there was sure to 
be good music and a comfortable hour of conversation on con- 
genial topics among the ladies in the drawing-room. The five- 
o'clock tea-parties brought together the most agreeable elements 
in the town society. The young girls were fond of long walks, 
and would come in fresh from such exercise to discuss all sorts 
of things over a genial fire, and perhaps to flirt a little with the 
young men, who might have spent their morning in the hunting- 
field and were ready enough for this hour of light-hearted amuse- 
ment. The drawing-rooms in which such gatherings took place 
had all the charms, as I recall them, which belong to an English 
home ; there was a sense of being chaperonized, with no special re- 
straint. And if I ventured to be critical with anything, it would 
be of the limited point of view so often found in regard to the 
art and literature of the world beyond their ken. Here conven- 
tional rules which may have been laid down five-and-twenty 
years ago still govern feelings and ideas, in spite of the agreeable 
fact that Mudie furnished the town with plenty of current litera- 
ture twice a week, and nearly everybody went to London during 
the spring exhibitions. An older, quainter, and perhaps more 
entertaining little circle belonged to the place and suggested at 
all times such towns as Cramford to my mind. Small card-par- 
ties were here given, the invitations coming upon pink note- 
paper, with sometimes a suggestion that there would be " a little 
music." We usually went to these at about eight o'clock in 
quiet evening-dress, many of the ladies coming with the escort 
of a maid or man-servant carrying a lantern, and I do not think 
I would have been startled by the appearance of a sedan-chair. 
If it rained we often wore waterproof cloaks, as it was not ex- 
pected that we should always hire a " fly." Little bits of finery, 



264 PROVINCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND. [Nov., 

like hats or laces, might be brought in a paper parcel ; and at one 
house to which we often went, and where we were always most 
agreeably entertained, we used to pin on such last touches in a 
large, roomy bed-chamber, with a four-post bedstead hung in 
damask, and a dressing table with a large mirror that reflected 
our anxious faces and the sober gayeties as well as the vast 
corners of the candle-lit room. To have worn anything very 
new in style at such gatherings would have seemed a trifle out 
of place, for I remember that flowered silks of quite an antique 
pattern, large, solid-looking jewelry, and Honiton laces appeared 
decidedly in keeping. We would go down-stairs to the draw- 
ing-room with a peculiar air of formality, where we were receiv- 
ed cordially, but with a dignity of manner fitting the occasion ; 
and we had a little light refreshment before going to cards. On 
such occasions no men-servants appeared, but the things were 
handed about by the brightest, neatest of maids, who bloomed 
like spring flowers in the large, old-fashioned, stately house. 
Our hostess was a genuine Mrs. Battle in regard to whist; but, 
cards over, her cheerful voice was lifted again, and we always 
had the most bountiful sort of a supper. They always had a 
dish called "jannet" at these parties, which was very delicious 
and tasted as if it had been spiced in some Oriental country a 
long time ago. When we came to leave I think we all felt sorry 
and wished for another invitation soon again. The atmosphere 
of these parties was so home-like yet so quaint, and the flavor 
of everything so unlike anything we had ever experienced 
in America, that it was to us like being set down in the 
middle of some interesting, old-fashioned novel to partake of it. 
It often rained so that going home one could see the lanterns 
swaying over the wet pavements curious little flames of light 
that seemed to suggest large, damp fireflies; but somehow we 
always liked that method of escort better than driving, and the 
friendly good-nights exchanged here and there among us had a 
piquancy of their own, whether uttered in the soft, quiet rain of 
the winter or under the clear, star-lit sky. Everything connected 
with such entertainments appeals to me now in retrospection so 
agreeably that the very prejudices which baffled and amused me 
at the time seem to have gained a dignity of their own. I recall 
the discussions over Mr. So-and-so's marriage with a girl of " no 
family at all " ; the question as to whether it would be possible 
to call upon her ; the horror expressed as to Mr. - 's will dis- 
inheriting his daughter Jane ; the question whether Admiral 

would ever be reconciled to his wife, as among the various topics 



i886.J PROVINCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND. 265 

under discussion at the present time, and the figures in the pic- 
tures suggested rise to mind like characters in some story, and a 
dozen plots such as Trollope would have used to admirable ad- 
vantage are suggested by the incidents of their every-day lives. 
For be it known that in the social condition of things in England 
lies a mine of wealth for any novelist of the day. Every tradi- 
tion suggests a set of circumstances for a writer of any ingenuity 
to weave together, and the merest externals of society in a pro- 
vincial place such as I describe make up the outlines of a picture 
which the story-writer can use without the necessity of resorting 
to any tricks or sensational incidents, or unexpected dilemmas 
and developments. 

While the system of home-education is still popular, even 
among the middle classes, in England, school-life is carried on 
much more admirably of late years than during the first decades 
of this century. Boys are sent to the grammar-schools of the 
towns in which they live, and may compete there for scholar- 
ships in the great public schools of England, whence they go on 
to the universities ; and if the schools for girls fall short of cor- 
responding ones in America, there are decided advantages for 
the gentler sex in special studies. Painting and music are libe- 
rally open to all, while the board-schools are beginning to find 
their way among the masses of people, even in the provinces. 

The general method of life, or what I may call its routine, in a 
provincial English town, corresponds nearly to our own. The 
root of difference lies in the whole system of feeling the point 
of view with which, so to speak, an Englishman is born, and 
which he accepts as a general thing without a murmur. The 
fondness for home-life noticeable among high and low in Great 
Britain might well be imitated on this side of the water, where 
the young people of the present day are always anxious to fly 
away from the parent nest and try their own wings in a new 
atmosphere, One thing further to be remarked in the provinces 
is the admirable manner in which domestic service is viewed. 
The girl who would go into a shop or factory in America regu- 
larly prepares herself for household work in England, and by 
doing well dignifies the labor she undertakes. The positions of 
mistress and maid, if more clearly defined in England than in our 
country, have the inestimable advantage of being so regulated 
that the mistress provides a real home for her servant, and the 
maid is conscious that she increases her own self-respect by 
doing her duty to her employer. I have heard it said, and it 



266 PRESENT STATE OF THE CHINESE MISSIONS. [Nov., 

seems to me with admirable justice, that the middle classes of 
England, the wives and daughters in a provincial town such as 
I have been describing, formed the real backbone of England's 
well-being. The nobility have their rights and their excellent 
qualities, no doubt ; but the middle classes, the professional and 
solid business people of the country, form its standing-ground 
and certainly uphold its position socially among the nations of 
the world. 



PRESENT STATE OF THE CHINESE MISSIONS.* 

THE appointment by the Holy See of Mgr. Agliardi as diplo- 
matic representative to the court of Pekin marks an important 
era in the history of the Chinese missions. The exclusive pro- 
tectorate exercised since the treaty of 1860 by France overall 
the Christians of the Celestial Empire had become an anomaly to 
the other European nations and a cause of offence on the part of 
China. A government engaged at home in making war on reli- 
gion acted in queer character abroad while masquerading as the 
special champion of the faith. For a long period all Christians 
seeking to travel into China did so on the passes of the French 
consuls; and thus, in the course of time, Frenchmen and Chris- 
tians have come to be identified in the Chinese mind, the latter be- 
ing held responsible for the actions or the hostility of the former. 
How disastrously this arrangement works has been revealed in 
the massacres of last year, which were directly provoked by the 
military operations of France in Ton-kin. In the interest of the 
church and for the sake of the Chinese Christians it had become 
necessary that a change should be made, and the Pope has acted 
at last. 

How every resource of patience was exhausted, and how 
every tendarness was shown for French feeling, is demonstrated 
by an elaborate account of the negotiations published in the 
Osservatore Romano. The initiative came from Pekin as far back 
as the month of May, 1881, when Li Hung Chang first sent a let- 
ter to Cardinal Jacobini, Secretary of State, .touching the ques- 
tion of re-establishing diplomatic relations between China and 
the Holy See. Chang expressed much solicitude for the safety 

* Missiones Catholicce Ritus Latini cura S. Congregationis de Propaganda Fide. De- 
scriptae in annum MDCCCLXXXVI. Romae : Ex Typographia Polyglotta S. C. de Propa- 
ganda Fide. 1886. 



1 886.] PRESENT STATE OF THE CHINESE MISSIONS. 267 

of the Chinese converts, and urged that in their interests the 
Pope should send to Pekin a nuncio, for whom he promised the 
honors and the station accorded to the ambassadors of sovereign 
states. At that time the idea was not entertained by the Holy 
See, or at least not acted upon. Last year's persecution, how- 
ever, induced the Pope to address a personal letter to the Em- 
peror of China, to which a respectful answer was returned. As 
a consequence of this correspondence, perhaps, Mr. Dunn was, in 
January last, made the bearer of another letter from the viceroy, 
Li Hung Chang, to Cardinal Jacobim, asking that Mr. Dunn be 
received as a special envoy empowered to open negotiations for 
the establishment of closer and more formal relations. At the 
same time the viceroy took occasion to say that this step was not 
suggested by any European power, but was spontaneous on the 
part of China. Under these circumstances the Holy See felt 
that, while all due regard should be paid to the claims of France, 
this offer of the Chinese government could not well be rejected. 

These facts were communicated to the French ministry, to- 
gether with the assurance that the representative whom the Vati- 
can proposed to send to Pekin would always respect the rights of 
France and cordially co-operate in mutual assistance in the East. 
The French government at once raised objections, and requested 
that the papal representative at Pekin should have no diplomatic 
standing, but be of the same character as the apostolic delegate 
at Constantinople. This would have been equivalent to a rejec- 
tion of China's offer, since the very object desired, according to 
Li Hung Chang's letter, was a fully-accredited ambassador and 
direct relations with the Holy See. Finding that France per- 
sisted in her stubborn attitude, the Holy Father yielded to the 
feelings of France by the appointment of Mgr. Agliardi as diplo- 
matic representative to the court of Pekin, with instructions to 
examine the situation in China and report thereupon to the Holy 
See. 

These momentous proceedings forcibly call attention to the 
present state of the missions in China, and lend considerable ad- 
ditional interest to the account which we find in the volume de- 
voted to the missions under the care of the Propaganda Fide, and 
compiled from the reports of the missionaries. While not so 
strictly accurate and full as one could desire, yet, by a little 
study, a tolerably fair account can be drawn from the badly- 
arranged facts flung together between the two covers of the 
book. 

The first province on the list is that of Chan-si, into which the 



268 PRESENT STATE OF THE CHINESE MISSIONS. [Nov., 

Jesuits introduced Christianity some time during the sixteenth 
century, though the mission is now in charge of the Franciscans. 
Chan-si was separated from the Pekin diocese by Alexander 
VII., and in 1696 it was, in conjunction with Chen-si, erected into 
a vicariate-apostolic by Innocent XII.; in 1762 the region of 
Hu-quang was added to it, but in 1838 the last-named was sepa- 
rated and erected into an independent diocese, the provinces of 
Chan-si and Chen-si being divided and formed into two vicari- 
ates by a decree of February 5, 1844. The present vicariate cov- 
ers an immense area. The number of inhabitants is 17,000,000; 
number of Catholics, 14,980; catechumens, 2,500 ; churches and 
chapels, 10; European missionaries, 7 ; native priests, 9 ; schools, 
31, pupils 1,250; college, I, students 40; seminary, i, seminari- 
ans 18 ; orphans, 578. 

In 1839 tne vicariate of Chan-tong was erected by Gregory 
XVI., including within its bounds the quondam pro-vicariates of 
Hu pe and Hu-nan. This mission has been often and grievously 
afflicted by persecutions. By a decree of December 22, 1885, 
Chan-tong was divided into northern and southern vicariates. 
In Northern Chan-tong the population numbers 29,500,000, of 
whom Catholics are 15,000; catechumens, 6,000; there being 14 
European missionaries; 9 native priests; schools, 36, pupils 
200; seminary, i, seminarians 22; orphanages, 5, orphans 600; 
number of churches not stated. The slimness of the school re- 
port is perhaps owing to the severe persecutions recently suf- 
fered. 

On January 2, 1882, the vicar-apostolic of. Chan-tong, who 
was then Bishop Cosi, nominated the Rev. John B. Anzer, of the 
College of Steyl, Holland, pro-vicar of Southern Chan-tong, then 
in his own vicariate ; the idea was to more thoroughly organize 
the work in a district which had been scarcely touched. The 
College of Steyl has undertaken to supply this mission, and 
several young priests were sent out a few months ago. By the 
decree mentioned above, on December 22, 1885, the province 
was formally erected into a vicariale-apostolic, with Right Rev. 
John B. Anzer as incumbent. There are 2,000 Catholics ; 2,264 
catechumens; 5 churches; 26 chapels ; i seminary with 12 semi- 
narians ; 25 schools, and 2 orphanages. No other statistics are 
given. The vicariate is in a disorganized condition from perse- 
cution. 

The Christian religion was introduced into the province of 
Chen-si in 1640. Its fortunes varied with the alternate favor or 
persecution of the Chinese emperors. By a decree of February 



1 886.] PRESENT STATE OF THE CHINESE MISSIONS. 269 

5, 1844, a vicariate was formed of Chen-si, Kan-su, and the ad- 
joining 1 Tartar regions. On May 21, 1878, Chen-si was separated 
from the Tartar regions and the district known as Ku-ku-noor. 
It extends from the Mon-ku desert on the north to Hu-pe and 
Su-tchaen on the south ; from Chan-si and Ho-nan on the east to 
Kan-su on the west. There are 10,500,000 inhabitants; 21,300 
Catholics; 107 churches and chapels; 8 European missionaries; 
14 native priests; 8 schools, 50 pupils; I seminary, 20 semina- 
rians ; 2 orphan asylums. 

The vicariate of Emoi was separated from that of Fo-kien on 
December 5, 1883. It includes the Formosan peninsula; Fo- 
kien bounds it on the southeast, whence it extends towards the 
northwest to the provinces of Chuan-cheu and Chiang-cheu. The 
continental part of the vicariate is under the Chinese govern- 
ment ; the peninsula of Formosa below Keelung is occupied by 
French troops. There are 4,500,000 inhabitants ; 5,000 Catholics, 
of whom about 1,000 are in Formosa ; 7 churches and chapels ; 
II European missionaries; 3 native priests; 3 schools, 20 pupils; 

1 seminary, 20 seminarians. 

The vicariate of Fo-kien, erected in 1696, included Nankin, 
Tche-kiang, and Kiang-si, the last two being separated into inde- 
pendent vicariates in 1790, and the first-named divided in 1838. 
Emoi was cut off from Fo-kien, as we have shown above, in 1883. 
There are 18,000,000 inhabitants; 30,355 Catholics; 114 cate- 
chumens; 37 churches and chapels; 12 European missionaries ; 13 
native priests; 12 schools, 60 pupils ; I seminary, 20 seminarians. 

In the year 1622 the Jesuit Fathers penetrated Ho-nan and 
planted the seeds of Christianity. They had a very difficult 
work, whose fruits, so far as this world goes, were often trampled 
out by persecutions. In 1774 a firmer footing was .obtained, and, 
in spite of great and persistent afflictions, a nucleus of the faithful 
was formed. Until 1843 the Catholics of Ho-nan were subject 
to the spiritual authorities of Nankin ; then the province was 
raised to a vicariate in 1869; and on August 28, 1883, Ho-nan 
was divided into two vicariates known as Northern and Southern 
Ho-nan. 

In Northern Ho-nan there are 9,000,000 inhabitants; 1,067 
Catholics ; 6 chapels ; 3 European missionaries ; 3 native priests ; 

2 schools, 18 pupils. 

Southern Ho-nan comprises 20,000,000 inhabitants; 5,000 Ca- 
tholics; 45 churches and chapels; 7 European missionaries; 12 
native priests; 20 schools, 100 pupils; I seminary, 17 semina- 
rians. 



270 PRESENT STATE OF THE CHINESE MISSIONS. [Nov., 

Solicitous for the needs and safety of the Catholic English 
soldiers, Gregory XVI. insulated Hong-kong and erected it 
into a prefecture-apostolic, which it remained until 1874, when it 
was raised to a vicariate. It includes the island of Hong-kong 
and the adjacent islands ; including on the continent the districts 
of Fung-koun, Sing-gan-hien, Hay-fou-hien, and Hai-cha-hien, 
with the exception of the city of Quei-tscheo-fou. The islands 
belong to England ; the rest of the vicariate lies in the Chinese 
Empire. There are 3,000,000 inhabitants, speaking Chinese, Eng- 
lish, and Portuguese, or a mixture of the three ; 6,600 Catholics ; 
27 churches and chapels; 11 European priests; 3 native priests ; 
19 schools, 118 pupils; I seminary, 12 seminarians. A Catholic 
journal, the Hong-kong Catholic Register, a very small four-page 
sheet, is published in this city. 

It is conjectured that the Christian religion was introduced 
into Hu-nan about the middle of the seventeenth century ; at 
least records of the date of the reign of the Emperor Kan-si, of 
the Cin dynasty, would lead one to suppose so. From the first 
the faithful of this province suffered severely, persecution follow- 
ing persecution with steady rapidity. Last year's affliction came 
near extinguishing the few remaining sparks in Northern Hu-nan, 
but as fast as the missionaries fell at their posts of duty others 
took their places, and are laboring now to repair the ravages of 
the enemy. In 1856 Hu-nan was separated from Hu-pe ; arid on 
September 19, 1879. the province was divided into two vicariates, 
Northern and Southern Hu-nan. 

Northern Hu-nan numbers 10,000,000 inhabitants ; 100 Catho- 
lics ; 6 European missionaries ; 4 native priests ; I school, 10 
pupils. In Southern Hu-nan there are 10,000,000 inhabitants; 
5,000 Catholics ; 10 churches and chapels ; 3 European missiona- 
ries ; 7 native priests ; 4 schools, 81 pupils ; I seminary, 24 semi- 
narians ; i orphanage. 

In the year 1636 Antonius de Govea, S.J., introduced the 
faith into Hu-pe. For a long period it was included in the 
vicariate of Chan-si ; but in 1870 Pius IX., by his brief Chris- 
tian eg rei procurations, separated Hu-pe from Chan-si, and divided 
it into three distinct vicariates Northwestern Hu-pe, Eastern 
Hu-pe, and Southwestern Hu-pe. 

Northwestern Hu-pe contains 9,000,000 inhabitants ; 8,000 Ca- 
tholics; 26 churches and chapels; 7 European missionaries; 18 
native priests ; 9 schools, 310 pupils ; I seminary, 12 seminarians ; 
I college, 12 students ; 2 orphanages with 28 boys and 68 girls. 

Eastern Hu-pe has 9,000,000 inhabitants ; 16,000 Catholics ; 42 



I886.J PRESENT STATE OF THE CHINESE MISSIONS. 271 

churches and chapels; 16 European missionaries; 14 native 
priests; 16 schools, 525 pupils; I seminar}', 54 seminarians; I 
college, 24 students. There are various other institutions, or- 
phanages, industrial schools, etc., but no statistics are given of 
these. We may remark that the same is the case with other 
vicariates, as regards orphan asylums at least. 

In Southwestern Hu-pe there are 9,000,000 inhabitants ; 3,500 
Catholics ; 13 churches and chapels ; 7 European missionaries ; 4 
native priests ; 2 schools, 82 pupils ; I seminary, 31 seminarians. 

The vicariate-apostolic of Kan-su was a part of the Chan-si 
vicariate until May 21, 1878, when it was erected into an inde- 
pendent vicariate. It includes the province of Kan-su, the Ku- 
ku-noor region, and the wandering Tartars. Missionaries have 
been sent into the unknown interior as far as they can go, even 
beyond the scope of imperial authority. There are a multitude 
of mixed dialects spoken within the limits of the vicariate, but 
they are broadly divided into these three languages : in Kan-su 
proper, Chinese ; in Ku-ku-noor, Sifon ; in Tartary, Turkestan. 
There are 21,500,000 inhabitants; 1,500 Catholics; 9 churches 
and chapels ; 5 European missionaries ; 3 schools, 32 pupils ; I 
seminary, 10 seminarians. 

Towards the end of the sixteenth century Matthew Ricci, 
S.J., preached the Gospel to the Chinese of the province of 
Kiang-nan. Pauli Siu, the reigning emperor, admired the zeal of 
Ricci and his companions, and the good results of their labor. 
Thousands of converts were made, and the Christian religion 
placed upon a firm foundation. In 1660 the vicariate-apostolic 
of Kiang-nan, or Nankin, was formally erected, and Ignatius Coto- 
lendi named its bishop. In 1690 Alexander VII. instituted the 
diocese of Nankin, and made it a suffragan see of the archbish- 
opric of Goa ; and Innocent XII. united to it the provinces of 
Kiang-nan and Ho-nan by his constitution of October 15, 1696. 
Alexander Ceceri, consecrated titular bishop of Macai, February 
5, 1696, was the first to occupy the see of Nankin ; and with the 
death of his last successor, Cajetan Pires-Pereira, a Portuguese, 
at Pekin in the year 1838, the see became practically extinct. 
After his death apostolic administrators continued to rule the 
see until 1856, when the Holy See entirely suppressed it. Then 
the province of Kiang-nan was erected into a separate vicariate 
and confided to the care of the Jesuits. The vicariate comprises 
the whole civil province of Kiang-nan and two sub-provinces, 
Ngan and Kiang-sou. There are American and European mili- 
tary posts at Ou-hon, Nan-king, Tcheu-kiang, and Shang-hai, the 



272 PRESENT STATE OF THE CHINESE MISSIONS. [Nov., 

very gates of the province. There are 50,000000 inhabitants; 
101,206 Catholics ; 606 churches and chapels; Si European mis- 
sionaries; 30 native priests; 667 schools, 1 1,237 pupils ; 2 semi- 
naries, 27 seminarians; I large and 3 small colleges; 2 large 
orphanages at Shang-hai and many smaller ones throughout the 
provinces. 

The Rev. Matthew Ricci did not confine his labors to spread- 
ing the faith in Kiang-nan ; he also pushed into Kiang-si. In 1696 
Innocent XII. confided this region to the care of Alvaro Benevente, 
whose work was very fruitful. But he soon died ; persecutions 
fell thick and fast; no successor was appointed, and the martyred 
missionaries' places were voluntarily filled by priests from other 
provinces. About 1790 Kiang-si was placed under the spiritual 
charge of the Right Rev. D. Carpena, vicar-apostolic of Fo-kien, 
by the authority of Pius VI. ; and it remained a suffragan of Fo- 
kien until 1838, at which time, with the approbation of Gregory 
XVI., the Propaganda Fide named the Right Rev. Alexius Ra- 
meaux vicar-apostolic of Kiang-si and Tche-kiang. On his 
death in 1845 Kiang-si was separated from Tche-kiang, and the 
Right Rev. Bernard Laribe, the dead vicar's coadjutor, was 
named vicar-apostolic. In 1879 Leo XIII. divided the vicariate 
of KiangrSi into two distinct parts, the northern and the southern. 

There are in Northern Kiang-si 14,000,000 inhabitants; 13,007 
Catholics ; 1,368 catechumens ; 49 churches and chapels ; 10 Eu- 
ropean missionaries; 13 native priests; 40 schools, 260 pupils; 
I seminary, 16 seminarians ; 4 colleges, 200 students ; 5 orphan- 
ages, 1,579 orphans; 2 hospitals. 

Southern Kiang-si is very fertile, being traversed by innume- 
rable streams. There are 11,000,000 inhabitants ; 3,753 Catholics ; 
1,440 catechumens ; 25 churches and chapels; 3 European mis- 
sionaries; 5 native priests ; 16 schools, 140 pupils; I college, 28 
students ; i orphanage, 77 orphans.* 

Kuang-si was evangelized in the seventeenth century. De- 
spite the many bitter persecutions, the seeds of the faith were 
never completely destroyed, and, though often separated from the 
outside world, the children of the church, here as elsewhere in 
China, kept up the tradition of their fathers and the practice of 
their religion. In the year 1853 the Very Rev. Father Guille- 
min, then prefect-apostolic of Kuang-tong and Kuang-si, sent the 
Rev. Father Chapdelaine into the western extremities of the 
province of Kuang-si, and there he found abundance of neo- 

* By a decree of August 14, 1885, this vicariate has been again divided, and a new one 
erected, called East Kiang-si, comprising the prefectures of Koan-si-fu and Kieg-tchang-fu. 



1 886.] PRESENT STATE OF THE CHINESE MISSIONS. 273 

phytes. With two native Christians as companions he penetrated 
as far as the city of Si-lin-hien, where, notwithstanding the jealous 
vigilance of the mandarins, he found about 80 Christians living. 
Several missionaries were, from time to time, sent into Kuang-si 
from Kuang-tong. On August 6, 1875, Pius IX. separated the 
mission from Kuang-tong and erected it into a prefecture-apos- 
tolic, with the Very Rev. Father Jolly as incumbent. It is nomi- 
nally subject to the Chinese emperor, but the real rulers, most of 
the time, are the Miao-tse and Tchang-ko tribes. It has a number 
of difficult languages and a confusing variety of dialects. There 
are 8,000,000 inhabitants; 1,013 Catholics; 10 churches and 
chapels; u European missionaries; 4 native priests; 5 schools, 
70 pupils ; 2 seminaries, 20 seminarians. 

In 1850 Kuang-tong, Kuang-si, and Hai-nan were united into 
one prefecture. In 1875 Kuang-si was separated from it and 
erected into an independent prefecture ; at the same time Hai-nan 
and Heung-shan were given to Macao, while the vicar-apostolic 
of Hong-kong obtained three districts of the territory, San-on, 
Kwai-shan, and Hoi-fong. There are in Kuang-tong 25,000,000 in- 
habitants ; 28,076 Catholics; 100 churches and chapels; 41 Eu- 
ropean missionaries; 5 native priests ; 101 schools, 1,000 pupils; 
i seminary, 25 seminarians ; I college, 20 students. 

How long back the Christians from the older evangelized 
field of Su-tchuen penetrated Kuy-tcheou is not known ; but it 
must have been at an early date. In 1708 Cardinal de Tournon, 
legate of the Holy See in China, consecrated Claud Visdelon a 
titular bishop and made him vicar-apostolic of Yun-nan and Kuy- 
tcheou. He died in India in 1737. From that time forward the 
Christians of these regions endured a stormy existence, suffering 
many persecutions. In 1849 Kuy-tcheou was made a separate 
vicariate, with the Right Rev. Bishop Allrand as incumbent. 
The Franco-Chinese war had a disastrous effect upon this mis- 
sion ; but in spite of the obstacles in its way the Christian religion 
has steadily gained ground. There are 8,000,000 inhabitants ;, 
16,892 Catholics; 73 churches and chapels; 26 European mis- 
sionaries; 7 native priests; 84 schools, 1,081 pupils; 2 seminaries,. 
20 seminarians ; 12 orphanages, 700 orphans. 

It must have been under the Emperor Tang that the Chris- 
tians first penetrated the distant regions of Su-tchuen. At least 
there are monumental remains which would lead to that con- 
clusion. Certainly there were many Catholics there before 1630, 
but the atrocities of Tartar war, in ruining the civil state, ap- 
pear also to have annihilated the Christians. When Bishop 

VOL. XLIV. 18 



274 PRESENT STA TE OF THE CHINESE MISSIONS. [Nov., 

Pallu, in 1658, visited Su-tchuen he found nothing but desolation. 
He, however, labored there until his death in 1684. Then Bish- 
op de Syonne was put in his place. Frequent and direful per- 
secutions vexed the church in this province, Bishop Dufierse, 
among others, being martyred for the faith on September 17, 
1815. The number of Christians, however, increased, and it be- 
came necessary to separate Yun-nan from the vicariate in 1838. 
In 1848 Kuy-tcheou was set apart; in 1856 Su-tchuen was divided 
into northern and southern parts; in 1858 the three present divi- 
sions were made, Northwestern Su-tchuen, Eastern Su-tchuen, 
and Southern Su-tchuen. In the three Su-tchuens there are 
45,000,000 inhabitants; 84,079 Catholics; 120 churches and cha- 
pels ; 78 European missionaries ; 83 native priests ; 400 schools, 
4,514 pupils; 5 seminaries, 204 seminarians; 2 orphanages, 171 
orphans. 

Hang-tcheou, the metropolis of the Tche-kiang province, was 
once, during the old Franciscan missions, an episcopal see, a suf- 
fragan of the archbishopric of Pekin. During the sixteenth cen- 
tury missionaries spread the faith throughout the province; in 
the year 1696 Innocent XII. raised it loan independent vicariate, 
with the learned Dominican, Right Rev. Bishop Alcala, as in- 
cumbent. Subsequentlv it was united under one administration 
with Fo-kien and Kiang-si. Fo-kien was separated in 1838, and 
the others in 1845. The Christians suffered many persecutions 
in this province; thousands were martyred between 1858 and 
1864 during the Tchang-mao rebellion. There are 8,000,000 in- 
habitants ; 11,480 Catholics; 39 churches and chapels; 9 Euro- 
pean missionaries; 7 native priests; 37 schools, 500 pupils; 2 
seminaries, 9 seminarians ; I orphanage, 8 orphans ; I industrial 
school. 

The Rev. Matthew Ricci, S.J., went to the city of Pekin in 
1601, where he won the favor of the emperor, Wang-lie, and the 
other men of power, for the Christian faith. He established the 
Pekin mission. In 1688 the episcopal see of Pekin was formally 
erected, having within its jurisdiction Chang-tong, Eastern Tar- 
tary (Leao-tong), the whole province of Tche-ly, the kingdom of 
Corea, and other adjacent regions. In 1831 the kingdom of 
Corea was erected into an independent vicariate, and subse- 
quently the other provinces were separated as occasion seemed 
to demand. On the abrogation of the bishopric of Pekin the 
territory of the see was constituted a vicariate, and in 1856 the 
province was divided into three parts, one of which, Northern 
Tche-ly, contains the city of Pekin. In Northern Tche-ly there 



1 886.] PRESENT STATE OF THE CHINESE MISSIONS. 275 

are 10,000,000 inhabitants; 28,000 Catholics; 166 churches and 
chapels; 16 European missionaries; 13 native priests; 120 
schools, 1,000 pupils ; 2 seminaries, 40 seminarians ; 9 orphan- 
ages, 800 orphans. 

Notwithstanding the various calamities which have fallen 
upon the mission of Southeastern Tche-ly, from wars, rebellions, 
famines, persecutions, the faith has made no little progress in it, 
and it ranks among the first in the number of Catholics in pro- 
portion to the population. On the north lies Northern Tche-ly ; 
on the south Ho-nan ; on the east Ho-nan and Eastern Tche-ly ; 
on the west Chan-tong and Northern Tche-ly. There are 10,000,- 

000 inhabitants ; 33,488 Catholics ; 462 churches and chapels; 32 
European missionaries; 7 native priests; 89 schools, 2,331 pupils; 

1 seminary, 7 seminarians; I college, 170 students; 13 gymna- 
siums, 584 attendants. 

Southwestern Tche-ly has 10,000,000 inhabitants; 21,000 Ca- 
tholics ; 81 churches and chapels ; 7 European priests; 12 native 
priests ; 4 schools, 30 pupils; 2 seminaries, 17 seminarians ; about 
1,000 orphans. 

The first vicar-apostolic of Yun-nan was the Right Rev. 
Bishop Le Blanc, who in 1702 established the mission. He was 
succeeded by Bishop de Martillac, who died in Rome in 1755. 
The vicariate was then attached to that of Su-tchuen, in which 
state it remained until August 6, 1840, when the vicariate was 
re-established, with the Right Rev. Bishop Ponsot as ruler. It is 
the extreme southwestern corner of the Chinese Empire. There 
are 12,000,000 inhabitants; 11,207 Catholics; 53 churches and 
chapels; 21 European missionaries; 8 native priests; 40 schools, 
200 pupils; i seminary, 18 seminarians ; 25 orphans. 

Let us now recapitulate: In the twenty-nine vicariates and 
prefectures of the Chinese Empire there are 390,000,000 inhabi- 
tants ; 485,403 Catholics ; 2,460 churches and chapels; 440 Euro- 
pean missionaries; 303 native priests; 1,779 schools, 2 5> 2I 9 pupils; 
34 seminaries, 666 seminarians. The returns of the sisters, nuns, 
orphans, industrial schools, colleges, students, etc., are so incom- 
plete that no total can be given, but there are proportionate num- 
bers of all these. 

The first thing observable in the careful and accurate survey 
of the Chinese missions which we have just placed before our 
readers is not only the number of Catholic converts in China 
about half a million but also, and much more so, the striking way 
in which they are scattered throughout the territory of the Ce- 
lestial kingdom. There are Catholics, there are missionaries, 



PRESENT STATE OF THE CHINESE MISSIONS. [Nov., 

there are native priests, there are churches, schools, seminaries, 
colleges, orphan asylums, from Thibet to the Yellow Sea, from 
Siberia on the north to Annam on the south. Every province 
has its vicariate sometimes one province has two or three ; 
every vicariate, with the exception of one, has its bishop. The 
complete organization is there. The seeds are planted. The 
500,000 are scattered among the 400,000,000, fruitfully working 
at every point, not massed together in one locality. In this 
respect the condition of China is very much like that of the old 
Roman Empire in the first centuries of the Christian era. The 
early missioners of the Catholic Church did not pause to convert 
every nation they came to ; they pushed on, forming colonies of 
the faithful here and there, until the whole empire was dotted 
with centres of the cross. They knew the fructifying power of 
Christ's religion ; they knew they had but to plant the seeds and 
await the time and season of their coming to maturity. And 
they were justified in their course, for the despised religion of 
the Galilean grew like a giant and soon overthrew the pagan 
mummeries of the ancient world. Just so is it in China to-day ; 
only, perhaps, the Chinese Empire is a more extended and more 
populous field than that afforded by the majestic structure of the 
Seven-Hilled City. Those huge provinces of the strange king- 
dom of the far East are as large as the mighty nations that olden 
Rome chained to the chariot-wheels of her triumphant progress. 
Mere man, unaided from above, would shrink from the stupen- 
dous task of changing the long-settled religion of half a world. 
It is foolish, it is a strange, fantastic dream, which these deluded 
missioners cherish. They can do nothing to move that impalpa- 
ble bulk. But see! The Catholic missioners do not weigh hu- 
man probabilities, or even possibilities. They have upon them 
the charge of God himself ; they have his Holy Spirit in their 
hearts. Against the dictates of reason itself they attack, with no 
weapon but the cross, this uncounted conglomeration of humani- 
ty. They stop at no point ; they push ahead ; they penetrate 
every nook of the empire, and detached bands stray out into 
those lost regions of the earth, the steppes of Siberia, the plains 
of Tartary, the mountain fastnesses of Thibet. In China, from 
Tche-ly to Emoi, from Hong-kong to Su-tchuen, they establish 
a network of flawless organization twenty-nine perfect sees, with 
rulers in them, with clergy, with people, with churches, with 
schools. It is magic ! How can we explain it except upon the 
theory that God is in the work ? And now that the increasing 
numbers of the converts, and the exalted station of many for 



i886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 277 

there are high mandarins in the ranks of the Catholic Chinese 
laity compel such a signal recognition from the emperor as a 
request for closer relations with the Holy See, may we not ex- 
pect to behold something like that old conversion of the Roman 
Empire in the not remote future? 



A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 

Miss VERNON LEE has a great many admirers. She is a lady 
of a Positivist turn of mind. She shows in her writings much 
familiarity with the nastiest works of fiction and poetry. She 
dwells on these with the tenderness peculiar to the new aesthetic 
school to which she belongs, and in her pages we are taught that 
Maupassant's Une Vie, Theophile Gautier's Mademoiselle de Mau- 
pin, and Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mai are oft-recurring topics in 
the only circles where the highest philosophy is talked. It is 
rather hard to grasp this high philosophy as taught in Baldwin : 
Being Dialogues on Views and Aspirations (Boston : Roberts Bros.) 
It has such little body. Mr. Mallock's New Republic has doubtless 
given Vernon Lee who prefers to pose as a man the idea of 
the form of Baldwin, as Lander's Imaginary Conversations probably 
gave Mallock the idea of the New Republic. Mr. Mallock is 
bitten by the pruriency that disfigures Vernon Lee's writings, 
and one of the strongest chapters in Is Life Worth Living? is ruined 
by a quotation from the worst novel written in any language, 
which quotation in Mallock's book, taken with its context, becomes 
blasphemous. 

If Mr. Mallock and Vernon Lee reflect the opinions of the 
English " high thinkers," we have reason to conclude that the 
emancipation from all religious belief which Vernon Lee teaches 
us to believe to be the nirvana of the philosophical aesthete has 
led to a return to the most horrible forms of pagan vice. The 
most remarkable thing about Vernon Lee's writings, aside from 
the constant playing with thoughts forbidden to Christians, is 
the art by which so large a number of well-formed English sen- 
tences are made to cover so little real knowledge. She gives 
one the impression that she has dipped into hand-books and satu- 
rated herself with certain poetry and novels in which the use of 
art for art's sake is made an excuse for positive obscenity. 

It is natural to conclude that a young woman who has written 



278 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Nov., 

in a learned manner on the Renaissance a large book on the 
Renaissance should take the trouble to learn something of the 
Catholic Church. But she is evidently as ignorant of its theology 
and its philosophy as Mr. Frederic Harrison, who considers it 
unworthy of " philosophical consideration " ! 

Baldwin is in the shape of dialogues. Labored efforts are 
made to give individuality to the characters, and descriptions of 
nature are introduced and greatly elaborated. " The Responsi- 
bilities of Unbelief " is the first dialogue in the book. Vere, 
Rheinhardt, and Baldwin talk over the sermon of a Monsignor 
Russell, whom they have heard preach. They are all unbelievers. 
All of them have gotten over the " weakness" of believing in 
God. But Rheinhardt is the most advanced. 

"Ladies," Rheinhardt says, "I admit, may require for their complete 
happiness to abandon their conscience occasionally into the hands of some 
saintly person ; but do you mean to say that a man in the possession of all 
his faculties, with plenty to do in the world, with a library of good books, 
some intelligent friends, a good digestion, and a good theatre when he has 
a mind to go there do you mean to tell me that such a man can ever be 
troubled by wants of the soul? " 

After Rheinhardt asks this question the author drops into one 
of those over- worked bits of description held by her admirers to 
be exceedingly vivid and graphic : 

" Beyond the blush and gold (coppery and lilac and tawny tints united 
by the faint undergrowing green) of the seeding grasses and flowering 
rushes, was a patch of sunlit common-ground of pale, luminous brown, like 
that of a sunlit brook-bed, fretted and frosted with the gray and rustiness 
of moss and gorse, specks of green grass and tufts of purple heather merged 
in that permeating golden brown. The light seemed to emanate from the 
soil, and in it were visible, clear at many yards' distance, the delicate out- 
lines of minute sprays and twigs, connected by a network of shining cob- 
webs, in which moved flies and bees diaphanous and luminous like the rest, 
and whose faint, all-overish hum seemed to carry out in sound the visible 
pattern of that sun-steeped piece of ground." 

This is a good example of the manner in which some modern 
writers overlay words with words in the effort to imitate the 
effects of the paint-brush. Sir Walter Scott's and Cooper's man- 
ner of suggesting natural pictures have gone out of fashion, and 
in return we get this sort of thing. The talkers go on consider- 
ing the responsibility of unbelief. Now, one of the most fascinat- 
ing qualities of unbelief seems to most people its absence of respon- 
sibilities. But Baldwin tries to make it plain, taking for a text 
Monsignor Russell's zeal in preaching the faith, that unbelievers 



1 886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 279 

have resting on them the responsibility of propagating un-faith. 
Whom they are responsible to does not appear, and Rheinhardt 
voices the logical conclusion of the religion of humanity, to whom 
they all belong, when he says : " Upon my word, I don't know 
which is the greater plague, the old-fashioned nuisance called a 
soul or the new-fangled bore called mankind." 

But Baldwin, who is a wretchedly hypocritical and " lalky " 
prig, tries to convince Vere that he ought to destroy the religious 
belief of his wife and children : 

" Do you consider this as complete union with another, this deliberate 
silence and indifference, this growing and changing and maturing of your 
own mind, while you see her mind cramped and maimed by beliefs which 
you have long. cast behind you ? This divorce of your minds, which I can 
understand only towards a mistress, a creature for whom your mind does 
not exist how can you reconcile it to your idea of the love of a husband 
to a wife ? " 

Vere, in real life, would probably answer that a wife without 
religion would run the risk of becoming less of a mother and 
more of a mistress. But in Vernon Lee's hands he only says : 

" I respect my wife's happiness, then, and my children's happiness ; and 
for that reason I refrain from laying rough hands upon illusions which are 
part of that happiness. Accident has brought us into contact with what 
you and I call truth I have been shorn of my belief ; I am emancipated, 
free, superior all things which a thorough rationalist is in the eyes of 
rationalists ; but " and Vere turned round upon Baldwin with a look of pity 
and bitterness " I have not yet attained to the perfection of living a hypo- 
crite, a sophist to myself, of daring to pretend to my own soul that this be- 
lief of ours, this truth, is not bitter and abominable, icy and arid to our 
hearts." 

Nevertheless Baldwin goes on arguing on the responsibility 
of unbelievers to communicate the truth that there is no truth, 
until at the end Vere says : " But you see I love my children a 
great deal ; and well, I mean that I have not the heart to assume 
the responsibility of such a decision." " You shirk your responsi- 
bilities," answers Baldwin, " and in doing so you take upon your- 
self the heaviest responsibility of any." 

All this is mere juggling with puppets and words. And if 
there is any evidence needed to show how inadequate this Posi- 
tivism is for any useful or logical purpose, Vernon Lee's dialogues 
furnish it conclusively. Another dialogue, " The Consolations of 
Belief," is almost as serio-comic in effect as " The Responsibilities 
of Unbelief." Baldwin talks at a young lady named Agnes Stuart, 
who has been a Christian. FinaUy "a strange melancholy, al- 



280 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Nov., 

most like a physical ache, came over Agatha." People who have 
followed Baldwin's limitless flow of talk will understand that this 
was the kind of ache that afflicted the hapless wedding-guest. 
" I think you are deserving of envy," answered Agnes coldly. 
" But I prefer to believe in the goodness of God." This is the 
most triumphant declaration of belief that Vernon Lee permits 
any of her puppets to utter. She cannot conceive of a Chris- 
tian, strong and logical, because she is ignorant of the church, 
and because her studies of life and literature have been all on the 
surface. The arguments of these dialogues can unsettle no clear 
and well-instructed mind. But the allusions to nasty literature, 
similar to the allusions to nasty vices which made Vernon Lee's 
Miss Broivn an indecent book, may help to make thoughts already 
corrupted more corrupt. Vernon Lee is regarded by a certain 
class of shallow thinkers and readers as a strong representative 
of high and refined philosophy and literature. Her work is a con- 
stant example of the truth that pretended belief in Neo-Paganism 
we say " pretended," for it is plain that these infidels protest too 
much their disbelief in God leads to the contemplation of the 
lowest objects under the most high-sounding names. Priapus 
looks well in a phrase of poetry; but it is a symbol of things 
which only the inhabitants of slums and dives dare utter in plain 
English to their fellows. And in this revival of " culture " we find 
the morals of Horace gilded in imitation of the gold of his 
phrases. Progress, with people like the teachers of Vernon Lee, 
means that we are to go back to the Augustan age, but with no 
hope that God will come as Christ to save the world. 

A refreshing book, which reminds one of the cool air of an early 
winter night after the artificial atmosphere of Baldwin, is the Medi- 
tations of a Parish Priest (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.), 
by the Abbe Roux. The Abbe Roux's Thoughts or Meditations 
have excited a sensation among the literary men of Paris, in spite 
of the fact that he is a priest, and evidently a good priest. The 
critic of Pense'es for Blackwood's Magazine frankly acknowledges 
that this prejudice is not confined to the Parisian writers, but he 
as frankly acknowledges the merit of the work. He says: 

" It was the centenary of Petrarch, held in 1874, that first called Roux 
into notice a festival celebrated in southern France by the Felibres, that 
society for the promotion and revival of Provencal poetry, of which Mistral 
is the outcome and to the present time the chief glory. M. Paul Marieton, 
himself a young Felibre, a poet in French and Provengal, made the ac- 
quaintance of the Abbe Roux, and, struck with his work in dialect, sought 
to gain closer intimacy with the author. He unearthed him one day in his 



1 886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 281 

retired nest. ' He appeared to me,' says Marieton, 'like one of the Limou- 
sin giants of his Geste de Charlemagne, with his strong, square frame, his 
deep bass voice. His visage, large and tender, sweet and yet rough-hewn, 
resembled that of those English lords of Henry VIII. 's time, Northern. co- 
lossi, painted by Holbein. With the gentleness of a child and a poet, he 
showed me the simplicity of his life; and I departed more moved than I can 
express.' . . . It was during this visit from the ardent young Felibre that the 
Abbe Roux diffidently confided to him a large number of copy-books, writ- 
ten in a mighty, firm hand a hand that would delight graphologists in 
which were put down the mile-stones of thought marking the way tra- 
versed by this lonely minister of God during his twenty-five years of iso- 
lated life. Delighted, M. Marieton at once proposed to publish a selection. 
At first the abbe demurred. 'You would publish my Pensees' he said. ' Be- 
ware ! I am not independent enough to seek calumny, for I am not an in- 
dividual, but a legion ; and the good Abbe Roux will bear the mountain of 
prejudice that weighs on the clergy of all times, and above all of this time. 
Prudence, my friend ! You would have me think that I shall become a per- 
sonage. I can scarcely hope it. I shall always be an immured. With a 
proud and timid character one never arrives at anything.' But M. Marie- 
ton did not let himself be deterred ; and to-day the world can decide 
whether he did well or not to drag forth this priest from his lonely 
obscurity." 

The greater part of the intelligent world will decide that these 
thoughts which are more like points of the most brilliant and 
concentrated light than anything else, and which are both epi- 
grams and maxims are new treasures of great worth added to a 
literature already rich in similar treasures. It is not exaggera- 
tion to say that the Abbe Roux possesses the keenness of La 
Rochefoucauld without his cynicism, the perception of Montaigne 
without his scepticism, and the sagacity of La Bruyere without his 
prejudice. Above all, the Abbe Roux is Christian without reserve, 
without any sacrifice to the literary spirit of the time. And this 
is a great thing. It is also a great thing to be able, in a trained 
voice of such quality, to declare that the intellect of the civilized 
world must listen, that Pan is dead, but that Christ lives, glorified 
and eternal. The quality of the Abbe Roux's thoughts must be 
our excuse for making him speak for himself, instead of writing 
about him. No man has opened the life of the French peasant to 
us as Abbe Roux has done. The peasants of current French litera- 
ture are as unreal as the Arcadians of Watteau, with their be- 
ribboned perukes and crooks, compared with the peasant as 
drawn from living models. 

"The war of the slaves in Italy, the war of the serfs in France, have be- 
queathed to history a particularly mournful memory. . . . 

"Oh ! ye who rob the peasant of his beliefs and his money, stuffing his 



282 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Nov., 

pocket with vile journals and his heart with brutal desires, beware of the 
reprisals which he will owe you for having put him back into slavery, into 
servitude." 

" The peasant," Abbe Roux says, " passed from paganism to 
Christianity through a great expenditure of miracles; he would 
return from Christianity to paganism at a less cost." He con- 
tinues: "A monster has lately come into existence the infidel 
peasant." 

Of the influence of a modern kind of thrift on the peasant's 
mind he gives a vivid example : 

" Far away yonder the sky appears all red. 

" ' It is the sunset,' says the man. 

" Wrong ! It is his house on fire. 

" One of those wretches, so many of whom pass among us nowadays, 
set a fuse beneath theMoor, and the house has burst into flames. 

" The man darts forward, crying ' Fire ! ' 

"Then he bethinks himself, halts at a reasonable distance, crouches 
down on the trunk of a tree, listening to see if any one is coming, and wish- 
ing that they may come too late. 

"The house is insured. 

"Meanwhile the alarm bell bleats; people rush from the neighboring 
villages. ' The furniture ? Come!' 

"The man stirs not, makes no reply. 

" The furniture is insured ! 

"So burn on in peace, ye cupboards and chests of his ancestors; burn, 
bridal bed, and cradle lately cold ; burn, picture of the Blessed Virgin, pa- 
tron of the dead wife (alas ! he will soon replace her when his house has 
been rebuilt); burn, military tunic; burn, little frame of his First Com- 
munion, souvenirs of glory, of love, and of grief, souvenirs ancient and 
recent, burn on in peace. 

" He is insured ! " 

The Abbe Roux, withal, has a great love for the French pea- 
sants among whom he labors. He sees their faults without an- 
ger, only with a certain melancholy patience. He sees that their 
natural faults have been exaggerated by what is called modern 
progress. They are bad enough, in spite of the priest ; what 
would they be without him .-> he asks. 

" Our peasants tolerate God well : ' He is not there, if he is anywhere; 
and besides he demands neither gold nor silver.' On the other hand, they 
endure but ill the men of God, the pope, the bishop, the cure. 

"To tell the truth, they would tolerate their other masters still less, if 
they dared." 

Of the causes which are helping to ruin France, and which 
the infidel tries to cure by means of atheistical schools, Abbe 
Roux speaks in no uncertain manner : 



1 886.] A CHAT ABOUT NLW BOOKS. 283 

"Absenteeism and Malthusianism are visibly depopulating our country 
districts. The Natchez and the Mohican have had their turn. The next 
subject for a book will be ' The Last of the Peasants.' " 

"The petty peasant who wishes to acquire a competency ; the peasant 
in easy circumstances who wishes to found a family ; the ex-peasant who 
wishes to become monsieur Malthus furnishes the law for all of you, does 
he not ? " 

"If the ex-peasant is father to a male child first of all, it is enough. If 
he has only daughters, he may in time have a son. The tardy son will be 
the .eldest, the only child, to speak rightly. The rest will stir only at his 
beck and call. He will have as many servants as he has sisters. None of 
them will get settled, all of them will devote themselves to monsieur their 
brother and to his wife. If one of them speaks of taking the veil, there is 
a long suit to argue. The good father is inexhaustible in whys and hows 
' So you no longer love me,' he sighs. 'Who will counsel, guide, take care 
of your poor brother ? ' Then he begins to discourse about the clergy who 
tear children from their family, and to rage against that 'era of ignorance 
and fanaticism, abolished by the great Revolution, when the victims of the 
cloister, etc.' The vocation will be finely tempered in this assault of sen- 
sibility and hypocrisy." 

One is forced to agree fully with the Abbe Roux that the 
French peasant, in spite of his " emancipation by the great Re- 
volution," is almost a clod, yet a clod capable of helping good 
things to germinate, but that when infidel is veritably a " mon- 
ster, and a shameless one." 

It would be easy enough to put a great number of these 
"Thoughts" in a kind of paraphrase; but they would lose that 
aroma which has been well preserved in the present translation. 
We cannot refrain from quoting entire from the fascinating chap- 
ter, " Literature, Poets," the Abbe Roux's analysis of the qualities 
of Eugenie and Maurice de Guerin : 

"It is in vain that Eugenie de Guerin praises Maurice; the more she 
recommends him, the more she effaces him. 

" Eugenie never rests from loving ; she ardently desires literary glory 
for Maurice, and, above all, that celestial glory which is preferable. This 
anguish of a Christian sister is something new in French literature. One 
admires and loves this sweet, pious Eugenie, devoted in life and death. As 
for Maurice, he is only insipid and colorless. He has some imagination, no 
character. He does nothing but flutter about in a fickle or, what is worse, 
an undecided way. 

" Maurice disenchants, even in his finest passages, by a certain school- 
boy accent. Le Centaure is only a brilliant imitation of Bitaube, of Chateau- 
briand, and of Quinet. Eugenie conceals, perhaps ignores, her art, which 
is exquisite. She appears solicitous of writing well, without, for that rea- 
son, believing herself to be a writer." 



284 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Nov., 

The Abbe Roux does injustice to Le Centanre, which is most 
exquisite in its individuality, and which preserves the Grecian 
spirit in a far greater degree than any of the poems of Keats. 
But he does no injustice to the character of the poet, who, per- 
sonally, has only the interest of being loved by Eugenie. 

With great regret, only pausing for one more quotation, we 
take leave of one of the most brilliant books that has appeared, 
either in French or English, for many years: 

" St. Thomas d'Aquinas verifies as though he could not believe, and be- 
lieves as though he ought not to verify." 

John Boyle O'Reilly's latest volume, In Bohemia, is one that 
will force the attention of all discriminating lovers of true poetry. 
We may criticise Mr. O'Reilly's occasional boldness of expres- 
sion when his indignation against the existing order of things 
leads him beyond those limits of phraseology within which 
writers careful about their theology keep themselves. Beyond 
this, which may seem like a hypercritical suggestion, In Bohemia 
is warm and cordial, generous and true, and in technical treat- 
ment almost perfect. It is consoling to know that a heart beats 
under the polished rhymes of these poems. 

" A Lost Friend " will be an old friend for ever, since it has 
been given to the world. To many of us it may be a reminis- 
cence ; to all of us it ought to be a lesson : 

" My friend he was ; my friend from all the rest ; 
With childlike faith he oped to me his breast; 
No door was locked on altar, grave or grief; 
No weakness veiled, concealed no disbelief ; 
The hope, the sorrow, and the wrong were bare, 
And ah ! the shadow only showed the fair. 

" I gave him love for love ; but, deep within, 
I magnified each frailty into sin ; 
Each hill-topped foible in the sunset glowed, 
Obscuring vales where rivered virtues flowed. 
Reproof became reproach, till common grew 
The captious word at every fault I knew. 
He smiled upon the censorship, and bore 
With patient love the touch that wounded sore; 
Until at length, so had my blindness grown, 
He knew I judged him by his faults alone. 

" Alone, of all men, I who knew him best 
Refused the gold, to take the dross for test! 
Cold strangers honored for the worth they saw ; 
His friend forgot the diamond in the flaw. 



1 886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 285 

" At last it came the day he stood apart, 
When from my eyes he proudly veiled his heart; 
When carping judgment and uncertain word 
A stern resentment in his bosom stirred ; 
When in his face I read what I had been, 
And with his vision saw what he had seen. 

"Too late! too late ! Oh ! could he then have known, 
When his love died, that mine had perfect grown ; 
That when the veil was drawn, abased, chastised, 
The censor stood, the lost one truly prized. 

[" Too late we learn a man must hold his friend 
Unjudged, accepted, trusted to the end." 

Mr. O'Reilly is a thorough republican, and he voices his con- 
victions very plainly. He cries, in "America": 

" O, this thy work, Republic ! this thy health, 
To prove man's birthright to a commonwealth : 
To teach the peoples to be strong and wise, 
Till armies, nations, nobles, royalties, 
Are laid at rest with all their fears and hates ; 
Till Europe's thirteen Monarchies are States, 
Without a barrier and without a throne, 
Of one grand Federation like our own ! " 

But, above all, even above the passionate poetry of " Erin," 
when the poet's heart burns with a white heat, beyond the 
strength, the subtle and deep poetic thought, of "Songs that are 
not Sung," we prefer " The Dead Singer," in which Mr. O'Reilly 
has found newer and higher qualities than he showed in Songs of 
the Southern Seas or The Statues in the Block. He lacks neither a 
theme nor a heart. And in this he is unlike most modern poets, 
who seem to have neither themes nor hearts, but only what is' 
called technique. In " The Dead Singer " Mr. O'Reilly adds to 
the vivid color and human interest of Songs of the Southern Seas 
and the classic sweetness of Statues in the Block qualities of 
deeper thought and poetic insight, which complete the circle in 
which are all the bays for a true poet's crown. 



286 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Nov., 



NEW PUBLICATIONS. 

SERMONS OF THE REV. JOSEPH FARRELL, late C. C., Monasterevan, with 
an Appendix containing some of his speeches on quasi-religious sub- 
jects. Dublin : M. H. Gill & Son. (For sale by the Catholic Publica- 
tion Society Co., New York.) 

The writer of these sermons died some eighteen months ago in the 
prime of life. He had been a contributor, both. in prose and poetry, to 
Catholic magazines in Ireland. These beautiful sermons are now for the 
first time printed, and they are worthy of the memory of one who seems to 
have been a man of far more than ordinary talent and a most zealous 
priest. They embrace subjects for the whole ecclesiastical year, a few Sun- 
days excepted. There is much originality of thought in them, a very de- 
vout tone, and a literary style which is very attractive. There is hardly any 
commonplace matter and no slovenly writing to be found in these sermons. 
Although the style has the finish and elegance of the essay, it also pos- 
sesses the freshness and unction necessary fora sermon; and there are 
very many passages of really lofty eloquence. 

That one who could write and preach such stately and powerful dis- 
courses was hidden in a country curacy and should have died at the age of 
forty-four are mysterious dispensations of Providence. 

The sermons are none of them long, and the book will be of much prac- 
tical use to the parochial clergy. The speech on education in the appen- 
dix is a fine specimen of a philosophical, and at the same time popular, 
treatment of that question. The publisher's work is well done. 

A COMPANION TO THE CATECHISM. Designed chiefly for the use of young 

catechists and the heads of families. Dublin : M. H. Gill & Son. 1886. 

(For sale by the Catholic Publication Society Co.) 

Those who have had experience in teaching catechism know that one 
of the difficulties most often met with is that the children do not under- 
stand the meaning of the words they repeat. Very frequently they can 
give the answer to the question asked them in the exact words of the 
book, without having any adequate knowledge of what they are talking 
about the very words, to say nothing of the idea, being beyond them. 

The book before us aims at improving this matter. It suggests a 
scheme of class- work to the teacher which, if followed and developed, can- 
not but give the pupils a clearer insight into the subject-matter. The text 
of the catechism is explained, not simply in reference to the ideas expressed 
therein, but especially as regards the meaning of words which little people 
most likely would not grasp of themselves. Thus a great help is given to 
the inexperienced teacher, by showing how to make the children think 
and how to have them understand Christian doctrine, when otherwise they 
would wander aimlessly in a maze of words. 

ORPHANS AND ORPHAN ASYLUMS. By Rev. P. A. Baart, S.T.L. With an 
Introduction by Rt. Rev. C. P. Maes, D.D., Bishop of Covington. 
Buffalo, N. Y. : Catholic Publication Co. 1886. 

This very interesting book gives a full account of the origin and growth, 
up to the present time, of the two hundred and twenty-one orphan asylums 
now in active existence in the archdioceses and dioceses of the United 



1 886.] NEW PUBLICATIONS. 287 

States. It is a most valuable work of reference, and is, moreover, likely 
to exert an instructive and edifying influence on the minds of persons out- 
side of the Catholic Church who may have the good fortune to read its 
pages. 

The introduction treats of the duty which, "as a church, we Catholics 
have to perform towards the orphans of America," and of " the great ques- 
tion " how it is to be done. It describes the main difficulties with which 
the work of taking care of the orphan has to contend, and which are well 
known to observant persons who have had experience in the management 
of orphan asylums : viz., the defects of the "drill-like training " which has to 
be made to take the place of " family life " " that one thing which fits the 
child for its duties and prepares it to meet the many temptations thrown 
in its way." The arduous problem, how to put youths who, from necessity 
in most cases, have to leave the asylum and go out into the world before 
their characters are formed, in the way of earning an honest livelihood, is 
earnestly dwelt upon, and valuable suggestions are given in relation thereto, 
as also to the comprehensive questions, " What shall our orphan asylums 
be? Where shall they be built? How should they be managed? " In the 
matter of providing for orphans we have not certain advantages and facili- 
ties existing in European countries, where the old apprenticeship system 
has been retained. 

The opening chapter, which is entirely historical and statistical, points 
out that among the Gentile nations " little, if any, regard was paid to works 
of beneficence that had the orphan for their object"; and that the Ro- 
mans, of whom St. Paul speaks as a people " without affection, without 
fidelity, without mercy," were reproached by Justin for their inhuman 
treatment of foundlings whom they gathered up into flocks in the same 
manner as herds of oxen, or goats or sheep. To the kindlier feeling of 
the Jews for the orphan, brought about, probably, " by their stricter 
family ties and more exalted notion of religion," justice is done. Then the 
extraordinary progress of beneficence co-existent with the rapid spread- 
ing of the Gospel is explained, as also that bishops considered it their 
duty to provide for the poor and the orphan. " The noblest epitaph 
which could be inscribed on the tombs of the popes was their charity to 
the helpless and destitute, to the afflicted and the orphan." "We read 
in the Apostolic Constitutions that the widows and the orphans were con- 
sidered as 'altars for holocausts or whole burnt-offerings in the temple 
of our Jerusalem ' a text which shows the exalted idea that the church 
entertained of the charity that had the orphan for its object." The singu- 
lar statute is mentioned which was afterwards inserted in canon law "for- 
bidding a bishop to keep a large dog, lest the poor be frightened thereat and 
driven from his door." The progress of the establishment of orphan asy- 
lums is rapidly traced, and the check given to it by the Reformation and 
the confiscation of ecclesiastical property in England and Germany is ex- 
plained. " The fruit of benevolence that springs from the seed of Protes- 
tantism " is, in certain cases, briefly and impartially reviewed. The admi- 
rably-conducted and munificently-supported charitable institutions of Hol- 
land are praised as they deserve. The writer of these lines, who has visited 
the Catholic male and female orphan asylums of Amsterdam, is glad to 
bear testimony to the fact that they effectually carry out in practice one of 
the recommendations given in the introduction of this book viz., the ap- 



288 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Nov., 1886. 

prenticing of orphans and giving them a home while they are serving their 
time. A list is given of one hundred different orders or congregations or- 
ganized for the work of charity to the poor, the sick, the orphan, and the 
foundling; and brief, interesting descriptive statistics are given, in this and 
in the last chapter, of the work they have done and still do. 

We allow ourselves to point out a slight oversight on the part of the 
writer of this very interesting work. He uses the word " orphanage " in 
the sense of a habitation for orphans. It means "the state of being an 
orphan.'' There is in English no single word (if we except "orphanotro- 
phy") which is equivalent to the French word orpheltnat. 

The book is got up in good, clear type, and fair style, the only omis- 
sion being that the name of the particular diocese treated of is not at the 
head of each page, where it'would have been useful for reference. 

THE DUKE OF SOMERSET'S SCEPTICISM ; 
THE CURSING PSALM (cix. of King James' Version) ; 

A LETTER TO REV. S. DAVIDSON, D.D., LL.D., in answer to his Essay 
against the Johannine authorship of the Fourth Gospel. By Kentish 
Bache. Oxford and London : Parker & Co. 1886. 

These three pamphlets are recent re-issues, having been first published 
about fourteen years ago. The first two are very brief, and it is enough to 
say that they are clever and acute. The third one is larger and of more im- 
portance. We can endorse the numerous laudatory notices it has received 
from respectable English periodicals. It is, in fact, learned, while very direct 
and incisive in its style, and quite satisfactory. 

Dr. Davidson's criticisms are indeed so unfair, and even trivial 
worthy in this respect to have proceeded from Renan that they are not 
deserving of refutation. There are extrinsic reasons, however, for taking 
the trouble of refuting them, which Mr. Bache has done remarkably well. 
His work is a little masterpiece of its kind. 

AMONG THE FAIRIES. A Story for Children. By the author of Alice Leigh- 
ton. A new edition. London : Burns & Gates; New York : The Catho- 
lic Publication Society Co. 

Notwithstanding the Mr. Gradgrinds with their cries of '* Facts ! Facts! 
Facts ! " it is well that Fairyland is not allowed to become a thing of the 
past. A child's mind has need of playthings. It would be as cruel to sweep 
away the fairies as to break all the dolls and toys. In the little book before 
us the fairies are brought upon the scene through the medium of a child's 
dream. It is a dream so full of delightful adventures among all kinds of 
good-natured fairies that it must needs be pleasing to every fanciful child. 

SKETCHES OF THE ROYAL IRISH CONSTABULARY. By Michael Brophy, 
ex-Sergeant R. I. C. London : Burns & Gates; New York : The Catho- 
lic Publication Society Co. 1886. 

Together with considerable information though given in a somewhat 
desultory fashion concerning the formation, work, and methods of the 
Royal Irish Constabulary, a number of more or less amusing anecdotes 
and incidents are strung together illustrative of life in the force, and de- 
picting the eccentricities of its odd fish. Though the book is put together 
in a rather haphazard manner, it succeeds in bringing before the mind quite 
a vivid picture of a constabulary which, in the author's words, "has been, 
since its first embodiment in the year 1823, made up of a more curiously 
checkered and miscellaneous class of men than any other police force in 
the empire, or perhaps in Europe." 



THE 



CATHOLIC WORLD. 



VOL. XLIV. DECEMBER, 1886. No. 261. 



THE TRUE MAN OF THE TIMES. 

THE dominant trait of the man of the times should be attach- 
ment to the truth as it is universal. One is attached to the truth 
by personal conviction because he is an honest man, and because, 
however it may be reached, there is no religion without per- 
sonal conviction ; and he is attached to it as a race-heritage by 
tradition : these should hold their place. But the dominant 
trait of our minds as men of the age should be attachment to 
universal truth as children of God. Guileless minds embrace 
universal truth when fairly presented and seen. Catholic means 
universal. We must not stop short of the universal if we would 
meet the needs of the times. The grounds upon which live men 
act, and the motives of their belief, should be such as are appli- 
cable to all mankind ; otherwise we shall be unable to appreciate 
or to display the unity of the truth. If there is any defect in the 
universality of our views our catholicity will not be organic and 
our unity will be defective; nor can our convictions be imparted 
outside of a range narrowed by personal, national, or race char- 
acteristics. This is the spirit of sectarianism. This is the special 
fault of Protestantism. None of its varieties has had room for all. 
Its converts must embrace not only a peculiar doctrine but a 
peculiar civilization. This malady is constitutional in Protestan- 
tism, but Catholics may catch the contagion, at least to some extent. 
Beware of acting as if the controversy were not purely one of 
truth against error, but of man against man or race against race. 
We ought not to confuse th6 defects or excesses of a race with 

Copyright. Rev. I. T. HBCKKR. 1886. 



290 THE TRUE MAN OF THE TIMES. [Dec., 

the errors of a sect. If race-traits have intensified religious 
errors, the cure is not to substitute the traits of another race ; 
the cure of errors which are racial is the application of truths 
which are universal. Christianity is neither Celtic nor Saxon, if 
either race seeks to monopolize it ; it is both Celtic and Saxon, if 
both races are willing to be catholicized by it ; it is above both 
races and all races. There can be no doubt that every race of 
men has a weakness which favors some kind of untruth in reli- 
gion. But it is equally certain that man, as he is always and 
everywhere, is made for the truth ; if it is presented as it is uni- 
versal he will develop sooner or later those laws of his reason 
which attract him to it. For three centuries and more the con- 
traries in religion have been universals against locals, universals 
against nationals, universals against personals. 

Many a man has all his life borne the name of Catholic with 
just pride whose mind is but now enlarged to appreciate its 
true significance. This is owing to the surroundings in which 
he has been placed. Circumstances have brought into promi- 
nence the necessity of Catholics emphasizing the universality of 
the truth which they hold. Nor will this aspect of it weaken per- 
sonal conviction or the sacredness of race-inheritance. It en- 
hances the value of both. As an influence on the individual the 
universality of the truth has an essential office in intensifying 
personal convictions. Right reason, indeed, constrains man to a 
sincere conviction; but if 1 know that what I thus believe is ap. 
proved by human reason, when rightly directed, the world over, 
it strengthens me. As to my neighbor who is in error, the real- 
izing sense that truth is a universal heritage afflicts my con- 
science. If I am devoted to the spread of truth I am driven, ac- 
cording to my place and station, to undertake its diffusion and 
to display its note of Catholicity to others. 

What is religion, if it be not Catholic ? At best racial or na- 
tional Teutonic or Latin, Celtic or Saxon. Or it is less than 
national, as is now the case with Protestantism : it holds but the 
fragment of a nation or a caste in a race as does Methodism 
or Episcopalianism till, by the wasting action of time and man's 
reason, it becomes an affair of little corners of a people, a distinct 
sect for each neighborhood, finally an affair of individuals of 
-weakened convictions, ending in hesitation, doubt, and general 
scepticism. 

Amidst such surroundings how plain is our policy a policy, 
too, forced upon us by the character of divine truth and human 
reason ! It is our duty to say : What ! will you affirm one Lord 



1 886.] THE TRUE MAN OF THE TIMES. 291 

and Father of all, and make his religion not one but sectarian ? 
Will you declare all men brethren and deny them a common 
faith ? 

A man is a fanatic or is feeble-minded who is content with any 
opinion in the natural order of truth which is not buttressed by 
the common convictions of mankind, or who can complacently 
adhere to a view of revealed religion which lacks the approval of 
divine, organic, historic Christianity. 

We can learn a lesson from the martyrs. Doubtless they 
were supported by personal conviction never men more so; such 
of them as were Jews, also, by a traditional faith founded on a 
revelation peculiar to their race. But they were primarily wit- 
nesses of a truth that was universal. The special mission of St. 
Paul, and the vision of St. Peter and his message to Cornelius, 
prove this, and so does the whole history of the apostles and 
martyrs. Furthermore, what the office of the martyr was in the 
eyes of the heathen, that was his office by appointment of Provi- 
dence. And to the heathen world the martyr was primarily a 
witness of a Mediator and Saviour of all humankind. Little do 
we appreciate that if universal truth our dearest birthright 
had not been witnessed to by men superior to flesh and blood, na- 
tionalism and race, perhaps we should not now have it either as 
a personal conviction or as a traditional belief of our kindred. 
Christian truth has come to us sealed in blood, a charter of univer- 
sal liberty, adorned with the palm-branch of victory. But whose 
victory? Not the martyr's alone, but his and ours and all men's 
who love the universal truth. Do we appreciate how much the 
world owes to such heroic witnesses as Lawrence, Agatha, and 
Ignatius ? The martyr was the expression of an elevated type of 
universal manhood. 

Of all ages of the world this transitional age is most unsuitable 
for men who are sectarian in their religious views or convictions. 
God's way now is to break down barriers between races and indi- 
viduals. Not only men but nations are being born again ; they are 
migrating from their ancient seats and filling the vacant conti- 
nents, or migrating into each other and mingling together. Pro- 
vidence has chosen America as the most conspicuous theatre of 
these transformations. More Germans have landed in America 
in the last five years than sufficed to conquer Italy fourteen hun- 
dred years ago. More Celts have settled among us in a single 
year than sufficed to sack Rome. And there is little friction in 
this movement; there is no thought of subjugation on the one 
hand or resistance on the other. The foundations of the deep 



292 THE TRUE MAN OF THE TIMES. [Dec., 

are breaking up without destructive convulsions. Humanity is 
providentially readjusting its relationships all around. Millions 
of men are denationalizing themselves every decade; not outcasts 
either, or the scum, or men of effete nationalities, but the best 
specimens of the noblest races on earth. The emigrants, taken 
as a body, are bringing away from Europe more of true manhood 
than they leave behind. The continents of the New World and 
the islands of the Pacific are receiving the fairest and mightiest 
children of the dominant races of the earth. God has made it a 
virtue for multitudes of men to leave home ; and not in driblets 
of families or to form patches of settlements, not in creeping 
caravans, but swiftly by those newest instruments of divine Pro- 
vidence, steam and electricity, and in half-millions a year. In 
a single year over seven hundred thousand men and women of 
Europe settled in the United States, changing their form of 
government, their homes and neighborhoods, most of them learn- 
ing new tongues and from Europeans becoming Americans. So 
that when you talk of divine truth nowadays, expect that men 
will square your theories with the spiritual aspirations of all man- 
kind. The universal race of man, and not a particular national 
family, is now in the thoughts of men who set out to solve the 
problems of the soul. And, more, God is preparing the human 
race by the inspirations of his providence for something above 
natural and human ideals. If you would be a true man of the 
times seek after that which makes for divine unity. 

Since it is the will of God that human virtue should be tested 
by the most untried liberty in government and the choice of the 
whole earth for a dwelling-place, we can but expect that men will 
demand broad views of religious questions broader, indeed, 
than some teachers are ordinarily willing to impart. Divine Pro- 
vidence in the natural order is but the forerunner of his provi- 
dence in the revealed or Christian dispensation. Any method, 
therefore, of dealing with God and that is the meaning of re- 
ligion which cannot call itself and prove itself universal has 
little hope of winning the intelligence of this age of transition. 
Woe to a religion which can be only personal when men are re- 
adjusting the essential relations of all mankind with God ! Woe 
to a religion which bears the marks of a particular race in an age 
of widening international relations! There are processes now at 
work among men in which sectarianism will be broken up and 
destroyed. 

The religion which has so much as the name of Catholic 
has an immense advantage in this era. Why else do the sects 



1 886.] THE TRUE MAN OF THE TIMES. 293 

enviously claim that name and reach so eagerly after organic 
unity ? What, then, shall be the advantage of a religion whose 
name is not only Catholic, but whose organization is world-wide 
and yet central ; whose doctrines are quod semper, quod ubique, 
quod ab omnibus ; whose worship is familiar to all tribes and na- 
tions, and whose unbroken tradition is of God's dealing, not with 
a petty corner of a kingdom or a little island, but with the hu- 
man race ; whose chief shepherd sends his messengers to speak 
for God as well to China as to Alaska, to Paris and Dahomey, to 
New York and Patagonia, and to all mankind ? No narrow- 
minded man can expound the doctrines of such a religion in this 
epoch ; it requires one conscious of universal sympathies, be he 
pontiff, priest, or layman. 

We are persuaded that much of the difficulty between our- 
selves and non-Catholics is just here : they dread that our re- 
ligion would exclude personal conviction and what is a most 
singular delusion fasten upon them a " system " adapted only to 
certain races. All do not perceive, some had rather not per- 
ceive, that the universal is alone essential with us. Trained 
themselves in the narrowness of sectarianism, their tendency is to 
think that sectarianism is a form necessary to religion. Even the 
better-disposed, those who admire the virtues of Catholics, who 
praise their wide-reaching charity, their heroic zeal as mission- 
aries, their self-denial in establishing institutions of education and 
building splendid churches, attribute these virtues to motives 
purely human. It is esprit de corps, they say, which inspires the 
missionary with heroism. The obedience, the silence, the self- 
restraint of the religious is owing to disappointment of worldly 
hopes, or to the security and peace of a cloister enfolding in its 
gentle embrace spirits too timid for the rough contact of a rude 
world. This is the way they talk. They admire the discipline 
of the church, even submission to authority, and are perhaps 
eloquent in praise. They seek no deep religious motive, but 
they affirm that their own race is not amenable to such discipline, 
and that they are willing to forego the advantages of a perfect 
organization in order to retain their native liberty. 

Now, all this is but attributing to peculiarities of race or to 
the temporary adaptations of Providence what in the innermost 
springs is due solely to causes in their nature universal and eter- 
nal ; in other words, to Christian principles. The same universal 
truths, held in the very same supernatural state of soul, will make 
an Englishman or an American a Catholic hero just as well as an 
Italian or a Frenchman, but by different methods. In the one 



294 THE TRUE MAN OF THE TIMES. [Dec., 

case the heroic results of divine action will be developed by 
methods which consecrate a high degree of personal liberty to 
the service of God, and in the other by methods which utilize and 
sanctify external discipline. Personal liberty and external dis- 
cipline will, in different races, both minister to the same end ; the 
life-giving principle will follow race-characteristics in choice of 
methods. What is servility in one is Christian humility in an- 
other. One may be a martyr in the free spirit of his native 
race, another just as noble a martyr in the instinctive obedience 
peculiar to his people ; both are equally witnesses for the same 
principle. If in your investigations you stop at means and 
methods you will never understand how the Catholic religion 
is equally fitted for different races. Means and methods are but 
adjuncts, however men may be attached to them or however 
prominent they may appear; the efficient cause of religious traits 
lies in principles sincerely held, needed universally, and efficacious 
everywhere. The nearer we approach to God the plainer it 
becomes that the conventional in Religion is of but little force, 
and the real power is in the universal natural and supernatural 
motives of conduct. 

Now, if Catholics, in explaining or even in publicly practis- 
ing their religion, lay too much stress on anything but universal 
and fundamental principles, they will too often confirm the delu- 
sions of honest inquirers. There are many practices which are 
useful to me in my private devotions. Shall I dwell upon them 
in an exposition of the Catholic truth ? They are but the habili- 
ments of religion, useful to me and others, perhaps in a certain 
sense necessary; for religion must have its clothing. But re- 
ligion thus viewed is personal, not universal. If I am not careful 
I may, by my language and conduct, give a sectarian appearance 
to a faith which is the universal and eternal truth. 

For example, will you say that a priest thrown amidst non- 
Catholics shall have nothing to bend or straighten out in his par- 
ticular school of theology, the customs of his order, the religious 
traditions of his race ; nothing in practice or demeanor to change 
for the love of God ? To a class of lookers-on a priest means no- 
thing but Rome and the pope, and Rome and the pope mean no- 
thing but the autocracy of an Italian bishop produced by the 
accidents of time. To them priest, church, and people are but 
exponents of mere discipline, uniformity, obedience, and, alas! 
the substitution of authority for conscience. But, we ask you, 
intelligent Catholic, what does it all mean to you? Tell your 
non-Catholic neighbor the difference between form and substance 



1 886.] THE TRUE MAN OF THE TIMES. 295 

in your religion ; tell him in what manner he may discover in 
your priesthood and in yourself the marks of the indwelling 
Spirit of God and the personal conviction of the universal truth. 

It is possible for one to mistake the motives which lie deepest in 
his own soul. We often notice, for example, that the fervor of con- 
version clothes the whole of Catholicity with the raiment of that 
particular doctrine which led the way to the entire truth. Was 
it the sacramental system which gave the initiative to the Ritualist 
when he became a Catholic ? There is danger of his becoming a 
ritualistic Catholic that is to say, unduly emphasizing the ex- 
ternal channels of grace. Did a man reason his way in by the 
argument of historical continuity ? Such a convert is inclined to 
despise the difficulties of Quakers and others whose attrait is 
towards the guide of the inner light. Was one led on by the 
spectacle of unity and the majesty of the church's authority ? 
Then you may see a tendency to out- Rome Rome itself, clamor- 
ing for the decisions of ecclesiastical tribunals as the exclu- 
sive motive of doctrinal certainty, and a manifest impatience 
with legitimate personal independence. Has another been con- 
verted by the need of a sin-destroyer, flying to the church's 
sacramental aids to escape the deluge of vice ? Expect the 
thunders of the judgment from such a one, the extremest views 
of divine justice; the Mediator lost in the Judge; the sor- 
rows of Good Friday obscuring the joys of Easter morn. Does 
the convert come from transcendentalism ? The danger is that 
he will unduly emphasize the natural order of things, and will 
dream that the only business of the Catholic Church is to antago- 
nize Calvinism. So with the " genuine, original article " of old 
style, born-and-bred Catholicity ; seeking to transplant among us 
a state of things peculiar to the providential necessities of a dif- 
ferent land ; endeavoring to make the priest not simply teacher, 
father, and friend, but boss-teacher, boss-father, boss-friend, per- 
haps boss-politician. 

We have seen a sign set up in vacant lots which, it struck us, 
might apply to the religious world of this age, and especially this 
country : " Dump no rubbish here under penalty of the law ! " 
We have reference meaning no contempt whatever to worn- 
out and cast-off race or national religious expedients. They may 
be consecrated by the tenderest religious memories, and may 
have brought you nearer to God ; to another class of minds they 
may but serve to impede the action of the Holy Spirit, even to 
make religion odious, becoming hindrances cumbering the ground. 
It is the universal truths, the fundamental doctrines, and the uni- 



296 THE TRUE MAN OF THE TIMES. Dec., 

versal and preceptive practices of the church which cannot be 
hindrances, which must advance the soul towards union with 
God, and can only be worn out or cast off by degenerate children 
of heroic ancestors. 

If any man objects to anything- in your Catholicity, and you 
are aware that it is not of the essence of your faith or integral to 
its fulness, he is entitled to know it. Your idiosyncrasy may be 
good German Catholicity or sound Irish Catholicity, but your 
neighbor is entitled to know whether it is Catholicity pure and 
simple. For an active mind the search is not after religious bric- 
a-brac. To earnest men whatever old custom is without a pre- 
sent significance is but a memorial of the dead. Sepeliendum est 
corpus cum honor e. 

Universality is a mark of the divine action, whether natural or 
supernatural, personal or general. The true church is universal. 
A guileless soul is one which acts from universal principles ; as 
soon as they are presented it receives them spontaneously. The 
man who has acted on universal principles of the natural order 
will instinctively accept universal principles in the supernatural 
order. The man of this age who is true to his vocation and who 
lives up to the times will render the universal more explicit and 
make it more emphatic. All true souls aspire after that religion 
which embraces in one grasp the whole natural and supernatural 
truth. 



1 886.] CONSTANTINE AT CONSTANTINOPLE. 297 

II. 
CONSTANTINE AT CONSTANTINOPLE. 

The Emperor Constantine at Constantinople, a few days before his death, A.D. 337. revolves 
his past life and the failure of his design for the creation of an Imperial Church, or Christian 
Caliphate. He calls to mind several of the causes which have forced him with his own hand 
to break up the unity of his Empire : but he suspects also the existence of some higher and hid- 
den cause. His career he declares to be finished; yet he suddenly decrees a new military expe- 
dition. 

A MISSIVE from the Persian King ! Those kings ! 
Their prayers and flatteries are more rankly base 
Than those of humbler flatterers. I'll not read it : 
Place it, Euphorbos, on my desk. 'Tis well : 
The sea-wind curls its page, but wafts me not 
Its perfumed fetor. Leave me. 

From the seas, 

The streets, the Forum, from the Hippodrome, 
From circus, bath, and columned portico, 
But chiefly from the base of that huge pillar 
Whereon Apollo's statue stood, now mine, 
Its eastern-bending head rayed round with gold, 
Say, dost thou grudge thy gift, Helopolis? 
The multitudinous murmur spreads and grows. 
Wherefore ? Because a life compact of pangs 
Boasts now its four-and-sixtieth year, and last. 
Give me that year when first I fought with beasts 
In Nicomedia's amphitheatre ; 
Gallerius sent me there in hope to slay me : 
Not less he laughed to see that panther die ; 
Laughed louder when I charged him with the crime. 
Give me that year when first my wife not Fausta 
That year, when launching from the British shore, 
I ceased not till my standard, my Labarum, 
Waved from the walls of Rome. When Troy had fallen 
That brave and pious exile-prince, ./Eneas, 
Presaged the site of Rome : great Romulus i> 

Laid the first stone : Augustus laid the second : 
I laid the last : 'twas mine to crown their work: 
From her she flung me, and her latest chance: 
Eastward I turned. 




298 CONSTANTINE AT CONSTANTINOPLE. [Dec., 

Three empires to the ground 
I trod. My warrant? Unauthentic they : 
Their ruling was misrule. Huge, barbarous hosts 
I hurled successive back o'er frozen floods : 
Yet these, the labors of my sword, were naught: 
The brain it was that labored. I have written 
The laws that bind a province in one night : 
Such tasks have their revenge. O for a draught 
Brimmed from the beaming beaker of my youth 
Though all Medea's poisons drugged its wave, 
And all the sighs by sad Cocytus heard 
O'er-swept its dusky margin ! Give me youth ! 
At times I feel as if this total being 
That once o'er-strode the subject world of man, 
This body and soul insensibly had shrunk 
As shrinks the sculptor's model of wet clay 
In sunshine, unobserved by him who shaped it, 
Till some chance-comer laughs. 

I touch once more dead times : their touch is chill : 
My hand is chill, my heart. 

I thought and wrought: 
No dreamer I. I never fought for fame: 
I strove for definite ends ; for personal ends ; 
Ends helpful to mankind. Sacred Religion 
I honored not for mysteries occult 
Hid 'neath her veil, as Alexandria boasts 
Faithful to speculative Greece, its mother; 
I honored her because with both her hands 
She stamps the broad seal of the Moral Law, 
Red with God's Blood, upon the heart of man, 
Teaching self-rule through rule of Law, and thus 
Rendering the civil rule, the politic rule 
A feasible emprise. My Empire made, 
At once I sheathed my sword. For fifteen years 
I, warrior-bred, maintained the world at peace, 
There following, 'gainst my wont, the counsel cleric. 
What came thereof? Fret of interior sores, 
A realm's heart-sickness and soul weariness, 
The schism of classes warring each on each, 
And all to ruin tending, spite of cramps 
Bound daily round the out-swelling wall. 'Twas vain! 
Some -Power there was that counter- worked my work 
,Witfy hand too swift for sight, which, crossing mine, 




1886.] CONSTANTINE AT CONSTANTINOPLE. 299 

Set warp 'gainst woof, and ever with my dawn 
Inwove its night. What hand was that I know not : 
Perchance it was the Demon's of my House; 
Perchance a Hand Divine. 

I had two worlds to shape and blend in one, 
The Christian and the Pagan, glorious both, 
One past her day, one nascent. Thus I mused 
Old pagan Rome vanquished ignobler lands, 
Then won them to herself through healing laws: 
Thus Christian Rome must vanquish pagan Rome, 
The barbarous races next ; both victories won, 
Thus draw them to her, vanquishing their hearts 
Through Law divine. What followed ? Pagan Rome 
Hates Christian Rome for my sake daily more ; 
Gnashes her teeth at me. " Who was it," she cries, 
" That laid the old Roman Legion prone in dust, 
Cancelling that law which freed it from taxation? 
Who quelled the honest vices of the host 
By laws that maimed all military pride? 
Who hurled to the earth the nobles of old race, 
And o'er them set his titular nobles new 
And courtier prelates freed from tax and toll ? 
Who ground our merchants as they grind their corn ? " 
Their charge is false ; they know it to be false : 
The Roman legion ere my birth was dead : 
Those other scandals were in substance old ; 
My laws were needfullest efforts to abate them. 
They failed : when once the vital powers are spent 
Best medicines turn to poisons. " God," 'tis writ, 
" Made curable the nations." Pagan Rome 
Had with a two-edged dagger slain herself: 
Who cures the dead ? To her own level Rome 
By equal laws had raised the conquered nations ; 
Thus far was well. Ay, but by vices worse 
Than theirs, the spawn of sensual sloth and pride, 
Below their level Rome had sunk herself. 
The hordes she lifted knew it and despised her; 
I came too late : the last, sole possible cure 
Hastened, I grant, the judgment. 

Pagan Rome 

Deserved her doom and met it. Christian Rome 
'Twas there my scheme imperial struck its root ; 
Earliest there too it withered. Christians cold 



300 CONSTANTINE AT CONSTANTINOPLE. [Dec., 

Cheat both themselves and others. I to such 

Preferred at first the ardent for my friends : 

Betimes I learned a lesson. Zealous Christians 

Have passion that outsoars imperial heats, 

Makes null imperial bribes. To such a man 

Earth's total sphere appears a petty spot 

Too small for sage ambitions. Hope is his 

To mount a heavenly, not an earthly throne, 

And mount it treading paths of humbleness. 

Such men I honored ; such men, soon 1 found, 

Loved not my empire. Christians of their sort, 

Though loyal, eyed us with a beamless eye, 

Remembering Rome's red hand, remembering too 

This, that the barbarous race is foe to Rome 

And friendly oft to Christ. To Him they rush 

Sudden, like herds that change their haunts at spring, 

Taught from above. At Rome the Christians gain 

A noble here, a peasant there. Those Christians, 

I note them, lean away from empires ; mark 

Egypt in each or Babel. I from these 

Turned to their brethren of the colder mould, 

But found them false, though friendly ; found besides 

That, lacking honor 'mid the authentic Faithful, 

Small power was theirs to aid me. Diocletian 

Affirmed that Christians, whether true or false, 

At best were aliens in his scheme of empire, 

At worst were hostile. Oft and loud he sware 

That only on the old virtues, old traditions, 

The patriot manliness of days gone by, 

The fierce and fixed belief in temporal good 

And earthly recompense for earthly merit, 

Rome's Empire could find base. That Emperor erred 

In what he saw not. What he saw was true. 

I saw the old Rome was ended. What if I, 

Like him, have missed some Truth the Christians see? 

Men call the Race Baptized the illuminated. 

The Race Baptized : To me it gave small aid ! 
That sin was doubly fatal. It amerced 
My growing empire of that centre firm 
Round which a universe might have hung self-poised : 
The onward-streaming flood of my resolve 
It froze in 'mid career. The cleric counsel 
Was evermore for peace. The Barbarous Race 



1886.] CONSTANTINE AT CONSTANTINOPLE. 30 1 

For that cause lies beyond my hand this day, 
Likelier perchance to absorb, more late, my empire 
Than be in it absorbed. 

I missed my spring: no second chance was given: 
I failed ; none know it: I have known it long. 
What were the lesser causes of that failure ? 
The sophists and seditious thus reply: 
" The Emperor caught the old imperial lusts ; 
He bound his realm in chains." They lie, and know it: 
The People, not their Emperor, forged their chains: 
The old nobles had expelled the native poor : 
Slaves filled their place ; these gladdened in their bondage ; 
It gave them life inert and vacant mind 
Unburdened by the weight of liberty. 
Slaves tilled the fields. What followed next? Ere long 
Stigma was cast on wholesome Industry. 
The slave worked ill ; the master sought no more 
His wealth from grateful glebe, and honest hand 
But tribute- plagued the world. The Italians bought 
Exemption from the tax world-wide. What next ? 
Through the whole Roman world, thus doubly mulct, 
The o'er-weighted tax crumbled ; brought no return : 
Then dropped the strong hands baffled. Slowly, surely 
The weed became the inheritor of all : 
The tribute withered : offices of state 
Were starved : and from the gold crown to her feet 
Beneath her golden robe the Empire shrank : 
Fair was the face ; the rest was skeleton ; 
Dead breast ; miscarrying womb. A hand not mine 
Had counterworked my work. 

" The slave," they say, 

" Finds lot more kindly in a Christian state " : 
That saying lacks not truth. What followed ? This, 
That freemen daily valued freedom less ; 
At least the Pagan freemen slaves within. 
Slavery with us was complicate in malice : 
From rank to rank half-bondage crept and crept 
Yearly more high and bound the class late free, 
Their burdens waxing as their incomes waned. 
Sorrowing I marked the deadly change ; heart-sore 
I learned my edicts were in part its cause : 
The tribute lost, perforce I had replaced it 
With net-work fine of taxes nearer home, 



302 CONSTANTINE AT CONSTANTINOPLE. [Dec., 

Small but vexatious imposts. Rose the cry, 

" No Roman now can move or hand or foot 

Save as some law prescribes." The Citizen 

Deserted like the soldier. Streets, like farms, 

Became a desolation. Edicts new 

Hurled back the fugitive to city or glebe, 

Henceforth a serf ascript. In rage of shame 

Or seeking humblest peace at vilest cost, 

There were that voluntary changed to slaves ! 

A priest made oath to me, " There's many a man 

Sir, in your realm, who gladly, while I speak, 

Would doff his human pride and hope immortal, 

And run, a careless leveret of the woods, 

Contented ne'er to see his Maker's Face 

Here or in worlds to come." Death-pale he sware it ! 

What help ? I worked with tools : my best were rotten. 

Some Strong One worked against me. 

Let me compare my present with my past. 
My courtier bishops helped me once : this day 
The Spiritual Power hath passed to men their foes. 
Of late I made my youngest son a Cassar : 
I craved for him the blessing of God's Church : 
I sought it not from prelates of my court : 
I cast away from me imperial pride : 
I sent an embassage of princes twelve 
In long procession o'er the Egyptian sands 
To where within his lion-cinctured cave 
Sits Anthony the Hermit. Thus he answered : 
" Well dost thou, Emperor, in adoring Christ; 
Attend. Regard no more the things that pass: 
Revere what lasts, God's judgment and thy soul : 
Serve God, and help His poor." His words meant this : 
" That work thou wouldst complete is unbegun ; 
Begin it Infant crowned." 

Three years of toil 

With all earth's fleets and armies in my hand 
Raised up this sovereign city. Mountains cleft 
Sheer to the sea, and isles now sea-submerged, 
Surrendered all their marbles and their pines ; 
And river-beds dried up yielded their gold 
To flame along the roofs of palace halls 
And basilics more palatial. Syrian wastes 
Gave up their gems ; her porphyries Egypt sent; 



1 886.] CONSTANTINE AT CONSTANTINOPLE. 303 

Athens and Rome their Phidian shapes eterne : 

The Cross stood high o'er all. That work was dream ! 

That city should have been an Empire's centre : 

That Empire had existence, but not life : 

The child it was of Rome's decrepitude, 

Imbecile as its sire. No youth-tide swelled 

Its breast one moment's space, or lit its eye : 

Its sins themselves had naught of youth within them. 

On Rome the shadow of great times was stayed ; 

The shadow and the substance here alike 

Were absent; and the grandeur of the site 

But signalized its lack. To the end Rome nursed 

Some rock-flower virtues sown in years of freedom : 

Music of Virgil thrilled the Palatine : 

Great Arts lived on ; great thoughts. Pagan was Rome : 

Ay, but the Catacombs were under Rome 

With all their Christian dead. 

That Rome was mine. 
I left it for some future man ; for whom ? 
Old Sabine Numa can he come again 
To list Egeria's whisper, or those priests 
White-robed that, throned on Alba Longa's height, 
Discoursed of peace to mortals? Romulus? 
Augustus? These have left their Rome for ever : 
With me they left it. Till some deluge sweeps 
Her seven-hilled basis, life is hers no more : 
Haply some barbarous race may prove that wave : 
Haply, that wave back-driven or re-absorbed 
Into some infinite ocean's breast unknown, 
From the cleansed soil a stem may yet ascend ; 
A tree o'er-shade the earth. 

That Rome I left : 

I willed to raise a city great like Rome, 
And yet in spirit Rome's great opposite, 
His city, His, the Man she Crucified. 
What see I ? Masking in the name of Christ 
A city like to Rome but worse than Rome ; 
A Rome with blunted sword and hollow heart, 
And brain that came to her at second-hand, 
Weak, thin, worn out by one who had it first, 
And, having it, abused. I vowed to lift 
Religion's loftiest fane and amplest shrine : 
My work will prove a Pagan reliquary 



304 CONSTANTINE AT CONSTANTINOPLE. [Dec., 

With Christian incrustations froz'n around. 

It moulders. To corruption it hath said, 

" My sister " ; to the wormy grave, " My home." 

Not less that city for a thousand years 
May keep its mummied mockery of rule 
Like forms that sleep 'neath Egypt's Pyramids 
Swathed round in balm and unguent, with blind eyes. 
That were of dooms the worst. 

My hope it was 

That that high mercy of the Christian Law, 
Tempering the justice of the Roman Law, 
Might make a single Law, and bless the world : 
But Law is for the free man, not the slave: 
I look abroad o'er all the earth : what see I ? 
One bondage, and self-willed. 

I never sinned 

As David sinned except in blood in blood : 
Was this my sin, that not like him I loved? 
Or this, that, sworn to raise o'er all the earth 
Christ's realm, I drew not to his Church's font? 
The Church's son could ne'er have shaped her course. 

Again I mete the present with the past. 
Central I sat in council at Nicaea : 
In honor next to mine there stood a man 
I never loved that man with piercing eye 
And winged foot whene'er he moved ; till then 
Immovable as statue carved from rock; 
That man was Athanasius. Late last year 
A second sacred council sat at Tyre : 
It lifted Arius from Nicsea's ban : 
From Alexandria's Apostolic throne 
Her Patriarch, Athanasius, it deposed : 
Her priesthood and her people sued his pardon ; 
He was seditious, and I exiled him : 
That was my last of spiritual acts. 
Was it well done? Arius since then hath died : 
Since then God's Church is cloven. 

Since then, since then 

My Empire too is cloven, and cloven in five. 
No choice remained. I never was the man 
To close my eyes against unwelcome truth. 
My sons, my nephews, these are each and all 
Alike ambitious men and ineffectual: 



1 886.] CONSTANTINE AT CONSTANTINOPLE. 305 

Since childhood left them I have loved them not, 
And late have learned that they conspire against me. 
No zeal parental warps my life's resolve 
To leave my Empire one, and only one: 
Once more a net is round me. To bequeath 
To one among those rivals five that Empire 
Were with the sceptre's self to slay that Empire, 
To raise the war-cry o'er my funeral feast, 
And, ere the snapt wand lay upon my grave, 
To utter from that grave my race's doom 
And yield the labor of my life a prey 
To Vandal and to Goth. 

Conviction came : 

It comes to all ; slowliest to him who knows 
That Hope must flee before its face for ever : 
It came at first a shadow, not a shape ; 
It came again, a body iron-handed : 
It took me by the hand from plausive hosts ; 
It took me by the hand from senate halls ; 
It took me by the hand from basilic shrines ; 
It dragged me to the peak ice-cold ; to depths 
Caverned above earth's centre. From that depth 
I kenned no star; chanted no " De Profundis." 
One night, the revel past, I sat alone 
Musing on things to come. In sleep I heard 
The billow breaking 'gainst the huge sea-wall, 
Then backward dragged, o'erspent. Inly I mused : 
"The life of man is Action and Frustration 
Alternate. Both exhausted, what remains ? 
Endurance. Night is near its term. The morn 
Will see my last of Acts, a parchment writ, 
A parchment signed and sealed." Sudden I heard 
Advancing, as from all the ends of earth, 
Tramp of huge armies to the city walls: 
Then silence fell. Anon my palace courts 
Were thronged by warring hosts from every land, 
Headed by those disastrous rivals five, 
My sons, my nephews. Long that strife rang out ; 
First in the courts, then nearer shrieks I heard : 
Amid the orange-scented colonnades 
And inmost alabaster chambers dim ; 
And all the marble pavements gasped in blood, 
And all the combatants at last lay dead : 
VOL. XLIV. 20 



306 CONSTANTINE AT CONSTANTINOPLE. [Dec., 

Then o'er the dead without and dead within 

A woman rode; one hand, far-stretched, sustained 

A portent what I guessed beneath a veil : 

She dropped it at my feet : it was a Head. 

She spake : " The deed was thine : take back thine own ! 

Bid Crispus bind in one thy broken Empire !" 

Then fires burst forth as though all earth were flame, 

And thunders rolled abroad of falling domes, 

And tower, and temple, and a shout o'er all, 

"The Goth, the Vandal!" 'Twas not these that roused me; 

It was a voice well loved, for years unheard, 

" Father, grieve not! That deed was never thine ! " 

Standing I woke, and in my hand my sword. 

This was no vision : 'twas a dream ; no more : 

Next day at twelve I wrote my testament, 

Designed, and partly writ, the year before. 

I wrote that testament in my heart's best blood: 

That Empire, vaster far than in the old time, 

That Empire sundered long, at last by me 

Consolidated, and by Christian Law 

Lifted to heights that touch on heaven, that Empire 

This hand that hour divided into five. 

This hand it was which wrote that testament ; 

This hand which pressed thereon the imperial seal: 

Then too I heard those shouting crowds. Poor fools! 

They knew not that the labor of my life 

Before me stood that hour, a grinning mask 

Disfleshed by death. Later they'll swear I blundered : 

'Tis false ! What man could work to save my Empire 

I worked. It willed not to be saved. So be it! 

When in the Apostles' Church entombed I lie 

Five kinglings shall divide my realm. That act, 

Like Diocletian's last, was abdication : 

How oft at his I scoffed ! 

They scoff not less 

The ripples of yon glittering sea! they too 
Shoot out their lips against me ! They recall 
That second crisis in my vanished years, 
When from this seat, Byzantium then, forth fled 
Vanquished Licinius. There, from yonder rock, 
Once more I see my fleet steer up full-sailed, 
Glassing its standards in the Hellespont, 
Triumphant; see the Apostate's navy load 



1886.] CONSTANTINE AT CONSTANTINOPLE. 307 

The Asian shore with wrecks. He too beheld it : 

Amazed he fled ; and all the East was mine. 

It was my Crispus ruled my fleet that hour! 

That victory I saw was his, not mine: 

His was the heroic strength that awes mankind, 

The grace that wins, the majesty that rules them : 

No vile competitor had he to fear. 

Had he but lived ! Well spake my dying sister, 

Wedded to that Licinius whom I slew, 

" God for thy sins will part from thee thy realm." 

I heard that whisper as my city's walls 

Ascended, daily. Night by night I heard 

The tread of Remus, by his brother slain, 

Circling the walls half-raised of Rome. 

'Tis past ! 

My Empire's dead : alone my city lives: 
My portion in that city is yon Church 
Named of the Apostles: there I built my tomb : 
In that alone my foresight stands approved : 
Around it rise twelve kingly cenotaphs 
In honor of the Twelve Apostles raised ; 
These are my guards against the Powers unblest: 
Within that circle I shall sleep secure. 
Thou Hermit of the Egyptian cave, be still ! 
Regret I then my life, my birth ? Not so ! 
To seek great ends is worthy of a man : 
To mourn that one more life has failed, unworthy. 
But be ye still, O mocking throngs far off! 
Be still, sweet song and adulating hymn! 
What scroll is that wind-curled ? Ha ! Persia's missive ! 

I ever scorned that Persia ! I reject 
Her mendicant hand, stretched from her bed of roses ; 
She that of Cyrus made of old her boast, 
That tamed the steed, and spake the truth ; even now 
The one sole possible rival of my Rome ; 
One from the Caspian to the Persian Gulf, 
The Tigris to the Ganges ; she that raised 
In part that Empire I designed but wrought not, 
An Empire throned o'er trampled idol bones, 
An Empire based on God and on his law, 
A mighty line of kings hereditary, 
Each " the Great King," sole lord of half the world, 



308 CONSTANTINE AT CONSTANTINOPLE. [Dec., 

And, raising, proved my work was feasible! 

This day she whines and fawns ; one day she dragged 

A Roman Emperor through her realm in chains, 

By name Valerian. Roman none forgives her ! 

Dotard at last, she wastes her crazy wits 

On mystic lore and Manichean dreams: 

I'll send no answer; yet I'll read her missive. 

" The Great King thus to Constantine of Rome : 
Galerius stole from Persia, while she slept, 
Five provinces Caucasian. Yield them back. 
If not, we launch our armies on thy coasts 
And drag thee chained o'er that rough road and long 
Trod by Valerian." Let me read once more : 
Writ by his hand, and by his sigil sealed ! 
So be it ! My boyhood's vision stands fulfilled ! 
Great Alexander's vow accomplished : Earth 
From Ganges' mouths to Calpe's Rock one realm ! 
Insolent boy ! Well knows he I am old : 
I was : I am not: youth is mine once more: 
To-morrow in my army's van I ride. 
Euphorbos ! Sleep'st thou ? Send me heralds forth ! 
Summon my captains! Bid these mummers cease! 
The error of my life lies plain before me, 
That fifteen years of peace. 

NOTE. The next day Constantine set out on his Persian expedition ; he fell sick at Hellen- 
opolis, a city erected by him in honor of his mother, the Empress Helena. He demanded Bap- 
tism, and died soon after he had received h. 



1 886.] Is THE NEGRO PROBLEM BECOMING LOCAL? 309 



IS THE NEGRO PROBLEM BECOMING LOCAL? 

AN affirmative answer is ventured upon. And the reasons for 
it will be given in this paper. Of course, in the eyes of the negro 
himself, the question of his race is not in any wise restricted. 
In his newspapers, books, and pamphlets, in the pulpit and the 
rostrum, before judges and magistrates, he struggles for many 
wants, real and imaginary. Seven millions in numbers, the ne- 
groes are determined to make their presence felt. The latest turn 
is a proposal to organize themselves into a National League. 
Like the great Irish scheme, it will have a different aim. As for 
the whites, however, a local question is the negro problem, 
chiefly affecting the South : not, indeed, all of the former slave 
States, but only the ones lying between the Potomac and the 
Gulf. 

The States in question are Virginia, North and South Caro- 
lina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Of 
all the blacks of the Union two-thirds live in these States ; man 
for man are they to-day with the whites. 

" Leaving out of consideration the population of the mountain regions 
the slopes of the Appalachian range we may safely say that in every 
house (including, of course, the curtilage) and on every plantation in eight 
States there is one colored person living side by side with each white per- 
son : master and servant, mistress and maid, child and nurse, employer 
and employee, in the shop, on the farm, wherever capital and labor or 
oversight and service meet. From the cradle to the grave the white life 
and the black touch each other every hour" (An Appeal to Ccesar, p. 116). 

From the census of 1880 two facts are plain. On the one 
hand the whites are gradually moving from, and on the other the 
negroes are as steadily and surely moving into, these same States, 
now known as the " Black Belt." Two great streams of domestic 
migration are continually carrying in their courses the white in- 
habitants of the Northern and Eastern States, as also those of the 
eight States under consideration. These streams are divergent 
one, going to the West, throws off a branch to the Southwest; 
while the other, starting from the " Black Belt," sends its main 
stream of whites to the Southwest and the branch to the West. 
Independently of these there is another, a black stream, whose 
waters are ever bearing the dark-hued children of the tropics 
southward where the hot sun makes life more attractive and 
where companionship is more genial. 



3io Is THE NEGRO PROBLEM BECOMING LOCAL? [Dec., 

Before the year 1900 within fifteen years, that is it is likely 
that there will be a chain of States, from the Potomac to the delta 
of the Mississippi, in every one of which the blacks will outnum- 
ber the whites, and in some will even double them. " Where 
are the boys that have finished school ?" lately asked a Southern 
bishop of the principal of his cathedral school. " Gone away," 
was the answer, terse and pointed. The lads could do better in 
the West and North, and left their homes, where the negro problem 
faced them, to put themselves in a more genial competition in the 
race of life. Like reasons will lead the blacks to change. In the 
other States the negro is in a hopeless minority : out of thirty-odd 
millions numbering not two millions, of which over three-fourths 
are living in the other six old slave States Maryland, Kentucky, 
Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, and Tennessee ; the remainder, about 
half a million, are scattered throughout the rest of the country. 
For a long time it was thought that trade and commerce and 
Northern capital would tend to act as a lever in the South for the 
balancing of the races ; but they have left the whites and the 
blacks decidedly unbalanced, and have proven a poor lever. Eu- 
ropean emigration was also going to the South, and would crowd 
the negro out. The wish was father to the thought; but, alas ! 
the sunny land threw back too dark a reflection for the emi- 
grants, who in seeking a colder climate found also fairer sur- 
roundings. In fact, since emancipation there has been a falling 
off of white immigrants. In 1880 there were 28,976 less foreign- 
born persons in these eight States than in 1860. And all compe- 
tent judges of the writer's acquaintance will bear this out. 

The colonization which is so strongly advocated by Professor 
Gilliam in both the Popular Science MontJily { 1883) and North Ameri- 
can Review (1884) seems to be underway. " For their common 
good let them be separated, and the African turn or be turned 
to Africa," are his concluding words to the second article. The 
African is turning, and is also being turned ; but the Africa is 
at home. He will not cross the Atlantic, whose western waves 
now wash the new Africa's coast. In the North, New Ireland 
is spoken of ; in the South, New Africa will be its rival. Henry 
Clay's scheme and, if we are not mistaken, Gen. Sherman's idea 
also will, after all, be realized, with the addition of citizenship 
and the franchise, with also a difference of locality. A handful 
of States, if the portents are true, are going to be swallowed up 
by the negroes ; and the rest of the country will mind its busi- 
ness. " This is a white man's country and a white man's govern- 
ment, and the white race will never allow a section of it to be 



1 886.] Is THE NEGRO PROBLEM BECOMING LOCAL? 311 

Africanized " (" The African Problem," North American Review, 
November, 1884). This simply provokes a smile. As long as the 
blacks behave themselves nobody will bother them. 

To day the whites are steadily making room for the dark- 
skinned ; to-morrow and. the next day the) 7 will do the same. 
Both races only seek more congenial fields. There need be no 
collision, and if fanatics do not sway the blacks there will be 
none. There is plenty of room in the North and West for the 
whites ; plentv in the South for the blacks. The natives will find 
it hard to give up their homes and leave their sunny land ; but 
other people have done so, leaving behind them as beautiful lands 
as the South. In bringing about these " black republics " cli- 
mate will have a big share: 

" The African, on climatic grounds, finds in the southern country a more 
congenial home. In many districts there, and these by far the most fertile, 
the white man is unable to take the field and have health. It is otherwise 
with the African, who, the child of the sun, gathers strength and multiplies 
in these lo'w, hot, feverish regions " (Popular Science Monthly, February 18, 
1883). 

Besides, the best cultivators of the great Southern staples are the 
colored race : 

" For the agricultural labor of the South it is impossible to provide any 
substitute for the African. It is his field ; he holds it far beyond all com- 
petition, and whosoever seeks to invade it must adopt not only his meth- 
ods but come down to his level also. The same is true in a less exclusive 
sense of mechanical laborers at the South. Little by little all of the plain 
mechanical labor of the South is centring in the hands of the colored people. 
Long before the abolition of slavery it was found profitable to teach cer- 
tain trades to slaves. Blacksmiths and carpenters, house-painters and, in 
some instances, wagon-makers, were to be found among the slaves. Al- 
most every plantation had its rude blacksmith-shop, and a slave presided 
at the forge and anvil. Some masters paid large sums to have their slaves 
taught the trade of the carpenter, so far as building could be taught with- 
out the knowledge of reading and writing and the laws of mechanics. 
These men have not been slow to seize upon their opportunities " (An Ap- 
peal to Ccesar, p. 163). 

Last year, in the building of St. Joseph's (colored) Church, 
Richmond, all of the laborers were colored ; of eight bricklayers, 
five were colored ; two of the three carpenters were of the sable 
race, and none but a black hand spread even a trowel of plaster. 

The negro question, then, territorially at least, is being nar- 
rowed down to small limits. As far as the problem's circumfer- 
ence goes, a few States monopolize it. Is this the state of the 
question in all its phases, political, educational, social ? A little 
reflection will show that it is. Questions like the labor question. 



312 /s THE NEGRO PROBLEM BECOMING LOCAL? [Dec., 

prohibition, and socialism agitate the whole country. If it were 
possible to transfer all the workmen, grog-shops, and socialists to 
any eight States grouped together, no agitation would disturb 
the others. Now, from one cause or other, the colored race are 
settling down in a well-defined locality. There also will they 
settle their problems. The work entitled An Appeal to Ccesar is 
simply a protest against ignoring this result. In his last chapter 
the author cries out in a wail of despair: 

" Will Caesar hear? Will the public the myriad-minded Caesar hear? 
Will anyone of influence the individual Caesar hear? The President, 
the Senate, a national political convention, and the press, one and all at 
different times this writer addressed in order to catch Caesar's ear. And 
Caesar heard not. Take up any book or pamphlet or article on this ques- 
tion ; it is all about the South and the negro, or vice versa : the North is 
invoked as a mighty Caesar, but the South is the Egypt where the new 
Antony must be met.'' * 

For us Catholics it has received, we may say, a final decision 
in the decree of the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore which 
left the negro's salvation and Christian education specially to the 
synods of the provinces in which the blacks for the most part 
live. There are but two such provinces Baltimore and New 
Orleans. A handful of sees with slim Catholic populations are 
affected. 

The question once localized, the next step is to understand it 
fully. A clear result of this localization will be negro rule; not, 
indeed, such as was seen some fifteen years ago, but one with 
growth and experience stamped upon it. To-day writers like Pro- 
fessor Gilliam (North American Review) and Mr. Grady, of Atlanta 
(Century), cry out : White men must rule ! They are simply giving 
the blacks a watchword : The negro must rule. What is sauce 
for the goose is sauce for the gander. A great deal of gerryman- 
dering is done now to keep the colored people out of positions 
which, numerically, they would hold. I speak not of their fitness, 
but of their numbers. Will the negroes, when their turn comes, 
forget this ? They may forget it, for, paradoxical as it may seem, 
it is the oppressed who forgives, not the oppressor. Man never 
forgives him whom he has wronged, although he will forgive his 
wrong-doer. Tne negro may forgive and forget. And he may 
not. It is now too late to speak of disenfranchising him. He is 
a citizen, and will stay one. 

With this outlook before the race the negro's warmest friends 
:see only evil and danger if he remain as now. The fears and 
forebodings of friend and foe alike are a dire arraignment and 



1 886.] Is THE NEGRO PROBLEM BECOMING LOCAL? 313 

condemnation of sectarianism, which is stronger and more life- 
like in the South than elsewhere in the United States. In seven 
of these "black republics" Protestantism has its happy hunting- 
grounds, while the Catholic Church has a bare foothold. For 
two and one-half centuries the Reformation has had the colored 
race under its thumb; and the result is that the very thought of 
its black proteges controlling a few States sends a nightmare of 
horror, not throughout the land, but in the South, among the 
very Protestants who made them, mentally and morally, what 
they are. 

The loudest among the prophets of evil thus writes : 

"One hesitates to address to anyone professing a belief in the doctrines 
of Christianity anything like a specific argument or appeal in favor of any 
measure the sole object and purpose of which is the general betterment of 
humanity. It would seem that one who claimed in any degree to be con- 
trolled by the command, ' Do good to all men,' must feel as if an injunction 
were laid upon him actively and earnestly to promote such a measure as we 
have discussed (national aid to education). . . . Taken in connection with 
that mysterious providence which made the greed of man the instrumen- 
tality for bringing the colored race to these shores, which appointed for the 
lot of the negro Christian stripes and tears and woe, but kept for ever green 
in his heart the faith in that ' year of jubilee' which should bring him de- 
liverance, it would seem that every believer must regard this measure as an 
opportunity to offer the sacrifice of good works in extenuation of the evil 
wrought before by those who bore the Christian name and with the sanc- 
tion of Christian churches" (An Appeal to Cczsar, p. 402). 

that is, Protestant churches. For the Roman Catholic always 
condemned the slave-trade, and never was strong in the South. 

A diagnosis of the outcome which the " black republics " will 
offer is beyond the writer's scope and, very likely, power. The 
popular magazines now and then furnish the views of men who 
make, or pretend to make, the negro a study. There is smatter- 
ing enough. It is very sad to notice in these effusions the ignor- 
ing of religious influence. Effects, good, bad, and indifferent, 
are given, and reasons are laid down for them ; but, barring some 
sentimental twang, the divine and eternal standpoint is ignored. 
" Leave them alone ; they are blind," the Master said of such 
teachers. 

Of the remedies education is held up as the chief. It is the 
Lux, Lex, Dux, Rex of An Appeal to Ccesar. Of course it is the 
popular or common-school education that is all this. The curse 
which this so-called education is bringing upon white children 
will be fourfold worse upon the colored, whose morality an Epis- 
copal bishop has called a shame. And particularly so in those 



Js THE NEGRO PROBLEM BECOMING LOCAL? [Dec., 

schools where both sexes attend. Two facts that have come 
under my notice will serve to illustrate this. At a public meet- 
ing held in the Academy of Music, Baltimore, some years ago, 
the president of one of these " mixed " places of study declared 
his conviction in the utter depravity of the negro. Fancy the 
tendency of such a man's care! When once visiting a mixed 
school of higher grade, I saw a young woman, one of the pupils, 
about twenty-five or so, with her head and shoulder on the breast 
of a young man, apparently older and a pupil also. There was 
one book between them, which the girl was holding open. Neither 
the woman teacher (colored), nor the large class of both sexes, 
nor the pair themselves gave any sign of feeling the impropriety 
of the mise-en-scene. And this was a State Normal School ; that 
pair will be teachers in the schools to establish and support 
which national aid is sought. This is laying the paint on with 
the trowel, we admit; qui potest caper e, capiat. 

Notwithstanding, it is pretty sure that some scheme of national 
education will be enacted before long. Sooner or later the " Blair 
Education Bill," or one like it, will be saddled upon the country. 
Then the mind will be enlightened in some sections; but the 
heart ? 

The principle underlying the demand that the whole country 
make itself responsible for the education of the negro has been 
recognized by the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore. In leav- 
ing the work of converting the blacks to the ecclesiastical pro- 
vinces the council localized the responsibility of management; 
but, by ordering a collection in every church of the land from the 
Atlantic to the Pacific, it determined the duty of support to be of 
the whole country. It orders a yearly collection, on the first 
Sunday of Lent, in every diocese of the United States. In those 
dioceses where the Association for the Propagation of the Faith 
exists the whole collection will go to the negro and Indian mis- 
sions; in the others, one-half only for those missions, and the 
other half to the Association. The sums for the home work will 
be given to a commission, composed of the Archbishop of Balti- 
more and two bishops of sees not affected by the negro problem 
or the Indian. Once more, the council draws the spiritual " Ma- 
son and Dixon's line." Rightly does the council re-echo the whole 
country's cry. From outside must come the sinews of war in 
order to educate the negro. He needs, not a partial education, 
but a Christian education, to receive which both teachers and 
schools are needed. 

Of all teachers the most vitally necessary are priests who will 



1 886.] Is THE NEGRO PROBLEM BECOMING LOCAL? 315 

" consecrate their thoughts, their time, and themselves wholly 
and entirely to the service of the colored people " (11. Cone. Bait.) 
It is simply impossible for the Southern clergy to do this work. 
The late Plenary Council, while gratefully expressing its thanks 
for what was done in the past, commands bishops interested to get 
priests " whose sole duty will be to preach God's Word to those 
members of Christ's flock, teach their children the principles of 
faith, and fulfil in their regard the work of apostles" (III. Cone. 
Bait, No. 238). 

A seminary is the first step towards a large body of priests. At 
present the few exclusively devoted to the negro mission come 
from England. True, all of them, save one or two, are of other 
races; still the work was conceived by an English mind and is 
executed under English direction. The great American church, 
said a bishop to the writer, ought to be able to do its own work. 
Moreover, Europeans anxious to be missionaries long for the East. 
No halo adorns the brow nor glory the path of him who turns 
his steps to the American blacks. It is not seldom for the negro 
missionary to find people looking askance at him. and now and 
then see the index-finger knowingly touch the forehead; but this 
narrow-mindedness is passing awav. 

For eight years has this seminary been talked of; it seemed 
two years ago that it would then be started. At that time the 
Sulpitian Fathers of St. Mary's Seminary, Baltimore, had, in the 
spirit of the saintly Olier, consented to the zealous desire of his 
Eminence Cardinal Gibbons, who wished the students of the pro- 
posed seminary to attend the lectures at St. Mary's. Just as is 
done in Rome, Louvain, and other places, the aspirants for the 
negro missions would go to the grand seminary at the lecture- 
hours, returning home for studies, special training for their work, 
and lodging. Besides the decided advantage of the thorough 
training, friendships would be formed which in the end would 
greatly help the black mustard-seed. At present the priests of 
this work are strangers ; in the proposed plan they would grow 
up with the other clergy. 

Next come the religious communities devoted to teaching. 
It is very much to be regretted that no brother of any teaching 
order is imparting even the rudiments to any black child. Indi- 
vidual brothers are anxious for the work ; and the writer has been 
told that, some years ago, a band of Christian Brothers asked 
their superiors to send them among the negroes. The complaint, 
so common nowadays, of the loss of boys after reaching the four- 
teenth or fifteenth year, is most sadly true of colored boys. God 



316 Is THE NEGRO PROBLEM BECOMING LOCAL? [Dec., 

help such boys ! Their future is blacker than the stain nature 
gave them. Three white sisterhoods, all Franciscans, are devoted 
to the colored work. Again, no matter to what races the sisters 
belong, the communities all hail from England. It is certainly 
enough to make us all bow down our heads in shame. Both the 
priests and the sisters on the negro missions have one very great 
claim on all the clergy : to keep them supplied with subjects. 
Other religious bodies of men and women serve the ordinary 
parishes and can get subjects; not so those in charge of the 
blacks: they must depend on the charity of the clergy, to whom 
the wretched state of the colored people appeals. 

There are quite a number of colored schools attached to the 
parochial schools, in charge of some seven or eight religious 
orders. The dioceses of Natchez, St. Augustine, and Savannah 
have a number of such schools. The system has the advantage 
of having both schools under the same management a great 
boon for the colored people, whose tender spot is thus left intact. 
Another advantage is the certainty of keeping up a good supply 
of teachers. The chief drawback is the danger that such schools 
will be always at a discount the fag-end of all work. May they 
grow larger and larger until separate communities are needed ! 

Lastly, there is no reason why, with the annual collection to 
help on the work, lay teachers cannot open schools in many 
places. The local clergy and the examiners of schools ordered 
by the last council may be able to look after these schools, or, if 
unable to do so, priests belonging to the negro missions would, I 
am sure, be placed at the disposal of the bishops for this purpose. 
After school-hours the parents and friends of the children could 
be gathered and taught the faith, just as the Protestants have 
done with the schools built by the " Freedmen's Bureau." Be- 
hold an almost unopened field! Over one million colored chil- 
dren go to no school ; and this number, instead of lessening, is 
going up at an alarming rate ,yearly. Hundreds of Catholic 
teachers should be thus employed. What sort of schools should 
we have? Every sort. The only rule is: Whatever Protestants 
do, Catholics must also do better. The church ought to lead. 



1 886.] THE COSMOGONY AND ITS CRITICS, 317 



THE COSMOGONY AND ITS CRITICS. 

" DID he talk a long string of learning," asks Mr. Flam- 
borough of Dr. Primrose when the latter has described his disas- 
trous deal with Ephraim Jenkinson, " about Greek and the cos- 
mogony of the world?" To this, says Goldsmith's immortal Vicar, 
" I replied with a groan " ; and it is quite possible that that groan 
may be re-echoed by more than one of our subscribers when they 
read the heading of the present article. There have been so 
many conflicting interpretations of the Scriptural account put 
forward, not indeed by Catholic writers, but by men conversant 
with the sacred text and confessing the inspiration of Holy 
Scripture; there have been so many theories first devised, then 
accepted, and ultimately rejected by the representatives of science 
as to the genesis of the material world ; there have been so 
many reconciliations between science and inspiration, so. many re- 
pudiations of the reconciliations, and so many refutations of those 
repudiations, that the only result of attempting to follow such a 
discussion is for the most part to superinduce a kind of vertigo, 
and to make the reader inclined to agree with the sentiment of 
the above-mentioned Mr. Ephraim Jenkinson, " that the world is 
in its dotage." Nevertheless, reluctant as one may be to enter 
upon a grave discussion of a topic with regard to which pro- 
bably nine-tenths of magazine-readers know little, yet these 
are not the days in which it is possible for any one safely 
to remain indifferent to that which affects the whole atmos- 
phere of society, or complacently to close his ears when an 
opportunity is afforded of knowing what objections are urged 
against our holy faith by those competent to expound them in a 
clear and intelligible fashion. When, therefore, the president of 
the Royal Society of England a man not only at the head of his 
special branch of knowledge, but practised in literary produc- 
tion, and especially in that most rare and difficult art of render- 
ing the depths of science clear to the unlearned reader comes 
forward in the pages of a popular magazine to enunciate the 
objections raised by the science of to-day to the account of the 
creation given by Moses more than three thousand years ago, to 
formulate, in fact, the non-credo of zoology and to give his rea- 
sons for considering the account of Genesis to be, as he frankly 
confesses, " a myth," it is well to take the opportunity of listen- 
ing to the master, that we may not hereafter be deceived or en- 



318 THE COSMOGONY AND ITS CRITICS. [Dec., 

snared through any false issues raised by less capable exponents. 
The original occasion which gave rise to the discussion was one 
of no slight importance, and itself marks another rise in the ever- 
advancing flood of revolutionary thought. 

Some months ago Dr. Reville, a distinguished member of the 
French Academy, took the first step towards the foundation of 
that experimental religion which, in the view of some theorists, 
is destined to succeed our exploded Christianity, by publishing a 
work intended as a preface to the history of religions, wherein 
he set forth his ideas with regard to the improbability of any 
divine revelation having been vouchsafed to primitive .man. 
In the course of this work he not only impugned the veracity 
of the statements relating to the cosmogony in Genesis, as might 
have been expected from such a source, but he went on to make 
remarks upon the probable solar origin of certain myths con- 
tained in Homer. Now, it happened, in the perpetual see-saw of 
British politics, that the publication of the book took place while 
Lord Salisbury was enjoying his present lease of power, and 
Mr. Gladstone, therefore, was left to the three great pursuits of 
his leisure hours yachting, Homer, and theology. Had Gene- 
sis alone been attacked it is possible that the attraction would 
not have been sufficient ; but when the domain of Homer was in- 
vaded also the well-worn axe leaped forth as fresh as ever, and 
Mr. Gladstone plied it vigorously in both directions. There- 
upon, as the hydra of old when bereft of one head immediately de- 
veloped two in its place, so here the president of the Royal Society 
in London and the ex- professor of Sanskrit at Oxford rose up 
to join issue with the ex-premier. Then Mr. Gladstone replied 
to Professor Huxley, and both the latter and Dr. Re*ville replied 
to Mr. Gladstone, while a fifth writer in a very able article chal- 
lenged generally the theories of Professor Max Miiller. 
ji } We shall not attempt in a few pages to lay down the law 
upon the exact meaning of the inspiration of Holy Scripture, nor 
the precise rendering of the Hebrew text, nor of the Septuagint, 
nor of the Vulgate, nor of the Benedictine translation, nor that of 
King James or of the Revisers, nor upon the proper method of 
exegesis, nor upon the accuracy of the theory of evolution, nor 
upon any one of the innumerable points arising out of the discus- 
sion, but shall confine ourselves to the humbler } T et not wholly 
useless task of recording the incidents of this grand tournament 
with the heroes of scientific lore, interposing every now and then 
a few criticisms of our own as to the fashion in which the com- 
batants conduct themselves. 



1 886.] THE COSMOGONY AND ITS CRITICS. 319 

One promise, at all events, may be made pretty safely : that 
is, that one who follows the discussion will not find it infected 
with the cardinal sin of dulness. Since the days when the men of 
Christchurch wrote, as Lord Macaulay expresses it, the best work 
that ever was written by any one upon the wrong side of a sub- 
ject of which he was profoundly ignorant, a livelier controversy 
never spoiled paper than that which has lately been raging in the 
English periodical press. In so rare a conjunction of intellects of 
the highest order as is furnished by the series of articles to which 
we allude, it is natural to expect not only that the characteristic 
view of each contributor to the discussion will be set out with 
special accuracy and distinctness, but also that a certain smooth- 
ness and literary ease will pervade every movement ; and this ex- 
pectation is by no means unfulfilled. Nothing can show more 
clearly the change which has come over the aspect of contro- 
versial discussion or at least of controversial discussion of this 
particular kind as conducted in England than the tone and ad- 
dress of the writers towards each other. There is a total and 
most happy absence of acrimony and of imputation ; and if one 
combatant insinuate that another is an ignoramus or fool of the 
first water, the language is so polished and delicate as to assume 
rather the form of compliment. Every one seems to be enjoying 
himself at a hearty game of football; and they trip each other 
up and knock each other down with perfect courtesy and good- 
will. Thus, when Mr. Gladstone observes that " the Mosaic 
writer," as he oddly calls Moses, had in view moral rather than 
physical instruction, and was consequently more attentive to the 
general summary than to particular details that, in short, his 
account was intended rather as a sermon than a lecture Mr. 
Huxley gaily retorts that evidently the differentia between a lec- 
ture and a sermon, in Mr. Gladstone's mind, is that the former 
must be accurate in its facts, while the latter need not be so ; 
and doubts whether the clergy will be complimented by the dis- 
tinction. Again, when Mr. Huxley has spent several pages in 
demolishing Mr. Gladstone's scientific averments, the latter 
thanks his opponent for his corrections with a smile, and wonders 
at the small amount he has found to correct. Equally if not 
more remarkable is the frankness with which Mr. Huxley con- 
fesses to the narrow limits of his ascertained domain and the 
constant revolutions that occur therein. He admits without dis- 
guise that the limits of certainty in his branch of knowledge are 
so narrow as to render the contents almost imperceptible, and 
quietly classes " the Ptolemaic astronomy and the cataclysmic 



320 THE COSMOGONY AND ITS CRITICS. [Dec., 

geology of his youth " under the head of science, without for a 
moment perceiving, apparently, that he thereby pays precisely 
the same left-handed compliment to its professors as he considers 
Mr. Gladstone to have paid to preachers of theology. Yet even 
he would seem scarcely to understand the universal applicability 
of his remark to all knowledge acquired by man ; for possibly 
because he has not adopted numbers as his particular study 
he makes mathematics an exception to the general rule that if 
only that of which we are absolutely certain is to be taken as 
knowledge, its limits are so narrow as almost to disappear. 
Mathematics, indeed! Mathematics quotha! Ask a modern 
mathematician to give up his quaternions or his infinitesimals, 
and see what he will say to you. As well might you expect a 
stock-broker to give up his telephone or an astronomer his spec- 
troscope. And yet what is the meaning of a quaternion? It is 
the symbol of an impossible process. What is the basis of infini- 
tesimal calculus? The expression of an inconceivable number. 
A notable exception to this general prevalence of fairness and 
courtesy is found in an article written by Mr. Laing in the Fort- 
niglitly Revieiv, commenting upon the discussion. According to 
the account given in Genesis, the earth, says Mr. Laing, was 
first formed out of chaos, light from darkness, the seas from 
the land, and the whole surrounded by a firmament or crys- 
tal vault solid enough to separate the waters above, which 
cause the rain, from the waters below, and to support the 
heavenly bodies which revolve around it every twenty-four 
hours. And then, after informing us that the Mosaic narrative 
states that the stars were added as things of minor importance 
probably as ornaments or to assist the moon in nights when the 
lunar orb is invisible he winds up this curious summary by ob- 
serving that this is the plain, simple, and obvious meaning which 
the narrative must have conveyed to every one to whom it was 
addressed at the time, as it did to every one who read it until 
quite recently. In this brief compass the ingenious writer has 
contrived to compress excellent specimens of every kind of error 
into which a transcriber can fall, beginning with the moderately 
incorrect, and passing through the wholly false to the palpably 
ridiculous. It is quite incorrect to represent the Mosaic narra- 
tive as stating that the earth was formed out of chaos ; it is 
wholly without foundation to say that there is a word about the 
firmament supporting the heavenly bodies, or about the heavenly 
bodies themselves revolving in twenty-four hours. It is totally 
false to speak of it as describing the stars to be of minor impor- 



1 8 86.] THE COSMOGONY AND ITS CRITICS. 321 

tance, or mentioning them as ornaments or assistants to the moon 
when that luminary is out of an evening. And it is a crowning 
absurdity to state that these wild misreadings have always been 
accepted, not by the ignorant or prejudiced or thoughtless alone, 
but by every one who has ever read the Scriptural account. 

In one respect, at least, and that of a most important char- 
acter, our acquiescence with Professor Huxley is complete. Un- 
doubtedly no one, whatever may be his creed and in whatever 
difficulties he may be thereby involved, is at liberty to reject a 
single fact once definitely and sufficiently proved, and that for 
this simple reason : that to doubt the compatibility of truth with 
truth is to deny the existence of truth altogether. " Above all 
things, we must take diligent care," says a celebrated Jesuit 
writer, " in treating of the Mosaic doctrine, to avoid positively 
and decidedly thinking or affirming anything which may be re- 
pugnant to clear experiments and true reasonings in philosophy 
or other studies. For since truth must be congruous with truth, 
the truth of the sacred writings cannot conflict with the true 
reasonings and experiments of human sciences." And what, then, 
it may be asked, is a believer in Holy Scripture to do when some 
fact is clearly ascertained to all appearance hopelessly irrecon- 
cilable with the facts related in the Pentateuch ? Under these 
circumstances the first thing necessary is to make sure that the 
difficulty arises from facts which are immutable, and not from 
theories which change every day ; but supposing this to be the 
case, then 

" Via prima salutis 
Quod minime reris Graia pandetur ab urbe." 

The very first place to turn is to Professor Huxley himself. In 
an eloquent peroration, not wholly untinged with a somewhat 
unaccountable passion, he tells us that his idea of morality is 
summed up in the saying of Micah : " And what hath the Lord 
required of thee, but to do justly, and love mercy, and walk hum- 
bly with thy God?" Now, to a plain man the way out of the 
difficulty would seem to be indicated with sufficient plainness, 
one would think, in the final clause of the verse just quoted ; but 
this not very recondite solution appears unaccountably to have 
escaped the observation of the president of the Royal Society. 
Still, it is something to find on such unexceptionable authority 
that there is one verse of Scripture which we may still consider 
as worthy of respect, and that humility is to be regarded as a 
scientific virtue. 

Coming now to the objections raised by Mr. Huxley to the 
VOL. XLIV. 21 



322 THE COSMOGONY AND ITS CKITICS. [Dec., 

Scriptural cosmogony, it is impossible to refrain from observ- 
ing that several of them appear to be surprisingly puerile and 
trivial. Who could have expected the president of the Royal 
Society to fall foul of the time-honored interpretation of period 
for day, and to speak as though the substitution had been ex- 
pressly devised to reconcile the cosmogony of Holy Writ with 
the discoveries of the last fifty years? Why, St. Augustine was 
familiar with it ; St. Peter was familiar with it ; King David was 
familiar with it. To say that it is more reverent to presume 
that if the Almighty had made any revelation to man he would 
have done so in language not inconsistent with the phenomena 
of nature as known to science, has a very pretty sound ; but what 
is there unreasonable or irreverent in conceiving that a revela- 
tion made to man should be made in terms which man could 
understand ? Would matters have been improved if the sacred 
writer had said " a cycle of darkness and a cycle of light, one 
aeon "? Or would the president of the Royal Society, the high- 
priest of the interpreters of nature, excommunicate from his fellow- 
ship any one who should venture to talk of the phenomena of sun- 
set, or of the egress or ingress of Venus in its transit, and declare 
that it was a mere evasion to say that any one using those terms 
could claim authority as a scientific teacher? As well might one 
say that whoever talks of right ascension and declination must 
seriously suppose the stars to climb and to fall off from the eclip- 
tic, or that when Sir John Herschel in a magnificent passage de- 
scribes the rocking and changing of the orbits of the planets and 
their ultimate return after countless ages to their original posi- 
tion, and ends his description with the striking words, " the great 
bell of eternity will then have tolled one," he was betraying his 
untrustworthiness as an authority upon astronomy, because all 
these transcendent operations cannot certainly be completed in 
the course of an hour. 

Moreover, there is another method by which we may easily 
conceive enormous intervals of time to have elapsed in the earlier 
periods, while yet only a single return of darkness and light took 
place in each period. For suppose that the rotation of the earth 
about its own axis, instead of being constant as at present, at- 
tained its present velocity by degrees of acceleration, just as a 
railway train does not start at full speed ; and suppose that the 
earth received during each " day," or period of creation, a force 
increasing its velocity ten times then on the second day the 
velocity of rotation would be ten times as great as on the first, 
and consequently the interval between darkness and the next 
succeeding darkness only one-tenth as long ; on the third day the 



1 886.] THE COSMOGONY AND ITS CRITICS. 323 

velocity \vould be ten times as great as on the second, and so 
forth. Conversely, therefore, the velocity of rotation ultimately 
attained on the seventh day would be ten times as great as on 
the sixth, and the sixth day itself would be ten times as long as 
the seventh, the fifth day ten times as long as the sixth and one 
hundred times as long as the seventh, the fourth day a thousand 
times, and the first day one million times, as long as the seventh 
that is, as the " day " with which we are familiar. In the same 
way we may observe that if we conceive the axis of rotation to 
have been originally inclined at a variable angle to the plane of 
the orbit, all kinds of cosmic phenomena will result which at 
present require immense intervals of time for their explanation. 
And this would correspond with the regularity of the seasons 
mentioned in Scripture as established after the Deluge. Not, in- 
deed, that these suggestions are offered as explanations of the 
Mosaic narrative, 'but simply as illustrations that the language of 
Genesis may be difficult to follow, not from its inaccuracy, but 
from the truth of its knowledge. 

In connection with this point it may be well to note the 
strictly astronomical manner in which that great primary con- 
dition of the exertion of human intelligence, the measurement 
of time, is here described. For what are the means by which 
that most difficult problem is effected ? By the sun and moon 
primarily, by the stars secondarily. And how are the sun and. 
moon here described ? As animals, as gods, as different species 
of creatures ? Not at all ; but as the greater and lesser of the 
principal lights of heaven relatively to the earth, the motion of 
which gives to us our measure of time; the stars, as secondary 
measures, being parenthetically mentioned also, and every part 
being the handiwork of God. And, again, in what manner are 
these movements utilized for dividing time to man ? The. re- 
volution of the earth gives the year, and the rotation of the 
earth the day, the inclination of its axis to the plane of its orbit 
the seasons, and the conjunction of the earth with the sun and 
moon and stars the signs or epochs from which the measure- 
ments are dated. The hour is an artificial division having no 
basis in celestial mechanism ; and if we now read the Mosaic 
account we shall find the hour to be omitted : " And God said, 
Let there be lights in the firmament of heaven to divide the 
day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons, 
and for days and for years." Could any astronomer have de- 
scribed to an unlettered audience the measurement of time more 
clearly or more justly, or could any human being except Profes- 
sor Huxley be content to class such a summary, along with the 



324 THE COSMOGONY AND ITS CRITICS. [Dec., 

Egyptian mythology that Hermes, playing at counters with 
the moon, won seventy of her lights and made five days out of 
them, kept as the birthdays of the gods: that on the first was 
born Osiris, and that a voice issued forth with him that " the 
Lord of all was entering into light " ; that on the second was 
born the elder Horus, on the third Typhon, breaking out of his 
own accord, on the fourth Isis in very wet places, and on the fifth 
Nephthys or Venus ? 

Another threadbare platitude of a similar kind, gravely pro- 
pounded by the " science proctor," is that the word rendered 
" firmament " by the loose though literary translators of the days 
of James, but " extentio " by the more accurate St. Thomas and 
" expanse " by the Revisers, must necessarily mean a solid body, 
because the waters are said to be divided thereby. If the writer 
of the Pentateuch did mean to imply that the firmament was solid, 
one would be glad to know what he intended to convey by stating 
that fowls fly about in it, unless, indeed, we consider the atmos- 
pheric envelope to be a solid, as, with all deference to Mr. Huxley, 
we are fully prepared to do. But, apart from this latter point, it is 
evident, first, that the sacred text does not say that the waters were 
divided by the firmament, but simply that Almighty God divided 
the waters that were above the firmament from the waters below 
it a very different statement ; and, secondly, even supposing such 
an expression had been used, that would in no way of neces- 
sity imply solidity. Has Mr. Huxley never heard nay, has he 
never used the description of the horizon as dividing the sea 
from the sky, or of the equator as the circle which divides the 
earth at equal distances from the poles ? Or has he not pro- 
gressed so far in elementary astronomy as to have come across 
the definition of the first point of Aries, as the point where the 
ecliptic cuts the plane of the equinoctial ? Or will he gravely 
tell us that navigation, geodesy, and astronomy are all to be re- 
garded as myths because they teach that the ecliptic, the equa- 
tor, and the horizon are necessarily solid ? 

Still more surprising is Mr. Huxley's complaint or lament 
over the impossibility of finding any definite point on which to 
challenge the believers in Holy Scripture to mortal combat. 
He seems to look on the race of reconcilers much as an old Eng- 
lish squire might regard a fox which skulks from earth to earth 
instead of breaking covert boldly and giving a good run and a 
hard death in the open. There must, he says, be some point 
which cannot be surrendered without giving up the whole. 
That is true enough, although one might think it no bad test of 
ithe truth of the Mosaic account and one which we should be 



1 886.] THE COSMOGONY AND ITS CRITICS. 325 

curious to apply to those Egyptian and Babylonian cosmogonies 
accounted by the professor as on the same rank with the Scrip- 
tural narrative that it should be capable of remaining uninjured, 
while the false interpretations introduced into its exegesis by the 
ignorance or carelessness of commentators are one by one elimi- 
nated ; but, however this may be, the point that must not be con- 
ceded ought surely to be expressed pretty clearly in the text. 
Now, the test devised by Mr. Huxley of a stantis vel cadentis 
histories namely, that no new species of any genus came into 
existence after the first creative act in regard to that genus is 
not only unsupported by any statement contained in the narra- 
tive, but it is absolutely opposed to certain expressions contain- 
ed in it. When, for instance, the sacred writer speaks of the 
herbs yielding seed after their kind, or rather " into their spe- 
cies," is it to be maintained that all the trees, herbs, and fruits 
suddenly not only grew up but yielded seed fora fresh crop? 
Surely no one can seriously maintain that that could have been 
the intention of the writer of the Pentateuch. Far more reason- 
able does it seem to say that such an expression gives color to 
the doctrine of evolution, and that the seed of the genus was 
differentiated into the subsequent variety, " produxerant in 
species suas," as the Vulgate has it; a translation which exactly 
gives the force of the Hebrew original, le-min. 

As to the central idea, which cannot be surrendered without 
giving up everything in its entirety, who but Professor Huxley 
ever doubted that the primary and central notion involved in the 
Mosaic account of the creation is the existence and operation of a 
Creator the doctrine that the entire material universe, sun, 
earth, and stars, light and darkness, seas, plants, animals, and man, 
were one and all the work of Almighty God ? This teaching it is, 
and not any imported theory as to the supposed limitation of the 
divine energy to instantaneous action, which supplies the point 
of resistance somewhat plaintively demanded by Mr. Huxley, 
which forms the citadel of Christian belief, that cannot be 
evacuated without total surrender. If zoology can show that 
matter can exist of itself or can create itself of its own mere im- 
pulse, it were idle indeed to reconcile one theory of creation or 
another. Nay, if inanimate matter could of its own mere voli- 
tion commence to move itself, the Mosaic record would be hard 
to understand ; but then we must give over at the same time the 
whole teaching of the science of mechanics, which has for its 
basis the law of inertia. What, then, is the latest reply given 
by its representative upon this momentous question ? It is 
silence, says the professor, for we have no evidence one way 



326 THE COSMOGONY AND ITS CRITICS. [Dec., 

or the other. If that be the case the problem remains un- 
touched. But before giving up the question let us seek an an- 
swer from an authority that Mr. Huxley cannot well repudi- 
ate. It happens that in the eighth volume of the Encyclopedia 
Britannica there are two articles on the subject of evolution. To 
the second of these, written by Professor Sully, wherein it is stated 
that that theory is directly contrary to the doctrine of creation, 
Mr. Huxley refers Mr. Gladstone for certain information. It 
is a pity that modesty should have prevented him from referring 
to the first one also ; for with such exquisite simplicity and lucid- 
ity is that deep and difficult subject there set out that to peruse it 
gives one a feeling like looking down into the blue depths of the 
Lake of Geneva, where the objects lying hundreds of feet below 
seem close beneath the surface, or as a child who looks into the 
heavens on a frosty night fancies that if he could but get to the top 
of a tree he could lay his hand upon the stars. Now, what does 
" T. H. H.'' (initials impossible not to identify with those of 
Thomas H. Huxley) say in this remarkable article? He tells us, 
first, that everything living may be considered not only as com- 
ing from a germ, but from a living germ or, in his own language, 
not only omne vivum ex ovo, but omne vivum ex vivo ; and it 
follows from this that if we admit the eternity of matter we 
must admit also the eternity of life, for either life must come 
from that which existed from eternity or it must be itself eternal. 
We arrive, then, at the admitting of necessity the existence of 
eternal life which may vivify matter but cannot be subject to it, 
for it is of itself eternal. Again, as animals grow and increase 
by the absorption of inanimate objects life must be thereby 
imparted to those inanimate objects (since the whole organism 
lives) ; and this, we conclude, must be effected by a force external 
to the matter, otherwise the matter would of itself produce life. 
And as life and matter are conceived to be eternal, this force also 
must be conceived to have acted from eternity. 

Further, he teaches that every living thing is derived from a 
particle of matter in which no trace exists of the distinctive char- 
acteristics of the adult structure, and that the formation of the 
creature takes place, not by simultaneous accretion of all rudi- 
ments nor by sudden metamorphosis of the formative substance, 
but by successful differentiation of a relatively homogeneous ele- 
ment into the parts and structures which are characteristic of the 
adult. Since, then, that which devises and creates new forms 
adapted for particular purposes must evidently be conscious in ac- 
tion and intelligent in purpose, it follows that the eternal force that 
gives rise to these differentiations must be both conscious and in- 



1 8 86.] THE COSMOGONY AND ITS CRITICS. 327 

telligent ; that is to say, admitting the hypothesis of evolution, we 
must admit also the existence of a conscious and intelligent 
agent acting from all eternity upon matter and producing the 
variety it assumes; but this agent, it is evident, cannot be the 
creature itself, for what animal, however highly organized, can 
adapt its own structure to its environment, or add one cubit to 
its stature, or develop one fresh organ to aid it in its struggle 
for existence? Assuming, then, the principles there adopted 
as the latest theory of science, we are bound to admit that a 
conscious and intelligent agent, living from all eternity outside of 
all creation, imparts life at every moment to every living crea- 
ture, and never ceases to mould the structure of each in accord- 
ance with the necessities of its existence. Now in what ma- 
terial respect, we would ask, does this scientific conception differ 
from the doctrine of the Catholic Church that the eternal God is 
the Lord and giver of life, and that every breath we draw is a 
direct gift from the Creator, the withdrawal of whose power for 
a single instant would reduce the whole universe to nothingness? 

Of a somewhat more substantial nature, at least at first sight, 
are the objections raised to the general order of creation, though 
even here they will be found to be directed rather against the 
commentator than the original text. For, unfortunately, Mr. 
Gladstone, with the proverbial light-heartedness of a new recruit, 
adopted in his first paper an entirely fresh nomenclature of his 
own, speaking of the air-population, the water-population, and 
the land-population, and being all the while in blissful ignorance 
that classification is one of the most dangerous pitfalls that the in- 
vestigator has to face. 

It is hard enough to obtain any definitions which shall not be 
either redundant or defective, or more probably exhibit both those 
deplorable qualities at once. It is harder still to find two ter- 
minologies which will exactly coincide, genus for genus and 
species for species. But when three methods of division the 
Scriptural, the scientific, and the Gladstonian are all to be 
compared together and every detail is to correspond, one need 
not be surprised if here and there certain lacunas not large, 
indeed, but not less lamentable should appear. Consequently 
it was not difficult for Mr. Huxley to demonstrate that the 
newly-invented definitions were inharmonious with the received 
classifications, and in his second article Mr. Gladstone wisely 
recurs to the ordinary terms of science. And he ultimately 
parallels the Mosaic narrative with the order given in Professor 
Phillips' Manual, as edited by Professor Etheridge, as follows: 
i. Azoic Period; 2. Plants; Invertebrates (omitted in Gene- 



328 THE COSMOGONY AND ITS CRITICS. [Dec , 

sis); 3. Fishes; Reptiles (also omitted); 4. Mammals; 5. Man; 
birds being afterwards inserted between reptiles and mam- 
mals. And also with that of Professor Prestwick : I. Plants; 
2. Fishes; 3. Birds; 4. Mammals; 5. Man. 

To this arrangement, however, Professor Huxley takes seve- 
ral exceptions, but he is by no means as clear in his arguments as 
in his exegesis, and a perusal of his article, repeated several 
times, still leaves one in doubt as to the exact points at which he 
means to strike. Thus when he says that bats must come in at 
stage number three, it is really difficult to understand whether he 
is directing his arguments against the Manual, against Mr. Glad- 
stone, or against the sacred text. 

Another objection raised to the Scriptural order is not a little 
hard to understand ; and Mr. Huxley appears to have anticipated 
that difficulty would be experienced, for he unkindly hints that 
it will be felt by those who know little of the subject in question. 
This suggestion is somewhat on the line of the famous clothes in 
Hans Andersen's well-known story, which were only perceptible 
to persons well suited for the office they held, and comes with 
little appropriateness from one claiming for the time to represent 
the average opinion of ordinary men. But, true or untrue, it does 
not mend matters. For the difficulty lies not so much in under- 
standing the particular passage of Scripture, nor at all in under- 
standing the zoological facts, but in following Mr. Huxley's de- 
ductions from them. There are, he says, two kinds of marine 
creatures mollusks, echinoderms, and such like creatures, and 
true fishes which are a much later development. Yet he recog- 
nizes as scientific the orders given by the Manuals above quoted, 
wherein the marine creatures appear but once, and he condemns 
as incorrect the account in Genesis where those creatures are 
mentioned in two distinct stages. Now, it is difficult to see how 
the most perfect attainment of all the knowledge in the world can 
suffice to render such a criticism intelligible. 

One more instance and we must conclude, partly because the 
shafts in Mr. Huxley's quiver are well-nigh spent, and partly be- 
cause it is time to finish. What possible meaning, we would ask, 
is to be attached to the extraordinary argument that he cannot 
accept the order of birds after fishes as a genuine interpreta- 
tion of the Pentateuchal narrative, because both of these spe- 
cies are mentioned as being created on the same day? Sup- 
pose they are so mentioned and nobody denies it what in the 
name of all that is reasonable is there to prevent him from un- 
derstanding it to mean that these creatures were created one 
after the other in the order indicated ? Is it absolutely necessary 



1 886.] THE COSMOGONY AND ITS CRITICS. 329 

that everything- that is reported to have happened on a particu- 
lar day must all have taken place precisely at the same moment? 
Does it follow that if a man says that So-and-so had breakfast 
on Tuesday and also had dinner on Tuesday he cannot be under- 
stood as meaning- that dinner was later than breakfast, because 
he records both as having taken place on the same day? Nor 
does the absurdity end here ; for if he cannot accept the state- 
ment that the birds were made after the fishes, so, for the same 
reason, neither can he accept the passage as stating that fishes 
were created after birds. Thus we are reduced to this amazing 
conclusion : that whenever two or more events are recorded as 
happening on the same day, they must have happened at the 
same instant ; and if we read in the paper that on a certain day 
the learned president of the Royal Society delivered a lecture in 
London before a large and delighted audience, and that on the 
same day he dined with the queen at Windsor, we cannot accept 
the interpretation that he delivered the lecture before he dined 
with the queen, or that he dined at Windsor before he lectured 
in London, but we are to take as the only possible meaning 
that he lectured while he dined, and dined while he lectured, 
and that he was talking in London while eating at Windsor. 
Had Professor Huxley been dealing with anything but an ar- 
gument in favor of Scripture, it is hardly probable that he would 
have been guilty of writing that for which all the deference 
due to his high station, his vast learning and singular powers 
of exposition cannot find any other name than irredeemable non- 
sense. Any stick, perhaps, will serve to beat a dog; but if our 
leaders fall into such ditches on the broad highway, how are we 
to trust them in the far and difficult passes of pre-historic time? 

Such is the indictment against the Mosaic account of the 
creation drawn up by Professor Huxley, acting, as no one is bet- 
ter qualified to act, in the capacity of "proctor " on the part of 
science; and the impression left upon the mind after careful con- 
sideration of the whole controversy is one of surprise and satis- 
faction at the paucity and comparative slightness of the charges 
preferred, although the latter sentiment is somewhat modified by 
the reflection that the more nearly the Scriptural account ap- 
proaches to the scientific teaching of to-day, the more, probably, 
will it differ from that of the succeeding generation. 

Still, premature as the discussion has been for it may be cen- 
turies yet before zoology can speak with reasonable certainty on 
the subject it has rendered the most important service to Scrip- 
ture by bringing out with great distinctness the most learned of 
its scientific opponents. 



330 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Dec., 



A FAIR EMIGRANT. 

CHAPTER XI. 
FURTHER MISLEADINGS. 

NEVER had there been more perfect weather for a journey, so 
far, but on the sixth day a gale met the good ship in the teeth. 
Bawn made this a pretext for staying in her cabin all day, and the 
Blue Cap weathered the storm on deck, feeling that he could not 
ask her to face it with him, and anathematizing the mischance 
that had lost him some of those hours which he had now begun 
to count as precious beyond price. Towards evening, when the 
wind was still howling and the steamer pitching, he could no 
longer control his desire to see her, and went down to look for 
her. 

" Ask the young lady with the golden hair if she will speak to 
me," he said to the stewardess. So strictly had he respected her 
intention of keeping her name unknown to him that he had taken 
no measures to discover it from any other than herself. He 
would learn it only from her own lips. 

She came to him at the foot of the stair, looking unusually 
pale, but quiet and unalarmed. 

" The worst of the storm is over," he said, looking at her with 
a glow of gladness in his dark eyes that made her heart beat 
faster. " You must be tired to death of that cabin by this time. 
Every one has been sick, I suppose, and everybody cross but 
yourself. Come up on deck, and I will take care of you while 
you get a little air." 

"Yes," she said readily. Why should she not go? Her 
thoughts had been troubled with him all day, and she found 
such thinking a very unwise occupation. Better go with him 
and brace herself, if not him, by disenchanting him a little more 
than she had yet done. There were now only two days of the 
voyage yet to come, and after they were past she should see him 
no longer. 

He drew her arm within his and piloted her to a spot where 
she could sit in safety by slipping her arms under some ropes, 
which kept her lashed to her place. 

"You have not been frightened? " he said, in a tone which 



1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 331 

made her suddenly repent of having exchanged the stifling cabin 
for the airs, however grateful, of heaven. 

" No; I am not easily frightened, I think, and I am not much 
afraid of death, perhaps because I can never realize it for myself. 
I am so young and strong that I swppose I hardly believe I have 
got to die. And just now life seems more alarming to me than 
death." 

"Why?" 

" I cannot tell you." 

" Is it because you fear the shops of Paris may disappoint 
you ?" 

"The shops?" 

" Have you forgotten the shops which contain your heaven? " 

" True. Oh ! yes, of course. There may be things, you see, 
in those shops which I may not be rich enough to buy." 

" Bawn " 

" Do not so call me, please." 

"Why?" 

"You said you would not unless I gave you leave." 

" And will you not give me leave? " 

"No." 

" I beseech you to allow me." 

" I cannot. It hurts my dignity too much." 

" Do you think I am a man who could bear to hurt your 
dignity ? " 

" I do not think you are ; but, at all events, I will not allow you 
to be. Do you think any nice woman would allow a mere fellow- 
traveller, the chance acquaintance of a week, to fall into a habit 
of calling her by her Christian name ? Because I believe you a 
gentleman I have, being alone and in peculiar circumstances, 
accepted your kindness " 

"I have shown you no kindness; I have simply loved you 
from the first moment I looked upon you." 

" You must not say so." 

" Why must not I say so ? I am free, independent, able to give 
a home, if not a very splendid one, to my wife. Till now I have 
not cared to marry because 1 never loved a woman before as I 
love you. I have told you no particulars about myself, neither 
my name, nor where is my place in the world, nor any other de- 
tail which a man lays before a woman whom he asks to share his 
lot. I have avoided doing this out of pique at your want of in- 
terest in the matter and your persistent silence about yourself." 

" That is a silence that must continue." 



332 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Dec., 

"Oh ! no. Give me at least a chance of winning your love in 
time. You do not positively dislike me ? " 

" No." 

"Nor distrust me?" 

"No." 

" Then why should you thrust me so terribly away out of 
your life ? " 

" Because I have to go my way alone, and I cannot allow any 
one to hinder me." 

"Those are hard words coming from so young a woman. Do 
you mean that you have pledged yourself never to marry ? " 

" I have not so pledged myself." 

" You are not engaged to any other man ? " 

" No." 

" You have no mother nor father to exercise control over 
your actions ? " 

" I am quite alone in the world, and as free as air." 

" Then let me tell you that you are in need of a protector and 
of such a love as I offer you. ^'l believe you are going to seek 
your fortune in Paris ; for I have made up my mind that you are 
not rich." 

" Why ? " 

" Do wealthy young ladies travel across the sea alone? Good, 
noble, and true ones may do so, but the wealthy bring keepers and 
care-takers in their train. Then, though your dress is neat as fit, 
and more charming and becoming than any other lady's garb that 
I see or have seen it is not the apparel of a woman of property." 

" I do not like seal-skin ; it makes me too hot. I am too 
healthy and vigorous to wear fur." 

" You will not admit that you are poor, but it is one of the 
things about you that I know without your telling." 

" I am not a woman to marry a man merely to get out of a 
difficulty." 

" God forbid ! I think I should not care for you if you were. 
You are, rather, a woman to reject what might be for your hap, 
piness from an exaggerated fear of being suspected by yourself 
or others of any but the purest motives for your actions." 

" I am capable of making up my mind and sticking to it. 
And I do not wish to marry." 

" Never?" 

" I will not say never. I think 1 hardly seem to believe in my 
own future. The present I mean the present of a couple of 
years or so is everything to me." 



1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 333 

" And your reasons for all this you absolutely will not tell 
me, not even if I were to swear to devote myself to assisting you 
in any enterprise you have got on hand ? " 

" I spoke of no enterprise." 

" No, but all you say implies that you have one. There is 
some difficulty before you, and it is your romantic fancy to meet 
it single-handed." 

"If that is your theory, what becomes of the salons and the 
shops? " 

" It may be a difficulty that lies among salons and shops. 
How can I imagine what it may not be? Can it be that you 
think yourself under obligation to enter some convent?" 

" No ; I fear I am not good enough for that." 

" Then what can it be, in which the services of a man might 
not be acceptable, if not useful? What reason ought there .to 
be why you and I should part as utter strangers part, and never 
see or hear of each other again ? " 

" Some of the reasons I cannot tell you, but one may be 
enough. You would want to persuade me to marry you ; and 
I do not want to marry you or anybody else." 

" You could continue to refuse me ; or time might change 
your mind." 

" It would be exceedingly inconvenient to me if I were to 
change my min-V' 

" You mean that you are afraid of that ? " 

" I am a little afraid of it." 

' Upon what grounds, if I may dare to ask ? Do you dis- 
trust your own "powers of endurance, and dread to be betrayed 
into marrying for a motive you consider unworthy, the weak de- 
sire to escape from a dilemma ? " 

"Not that." 

" Are you afraid you could learn to love me ? " 

" Yes." 

" My God ! And after such a confession you expect me to 
give you up ? " 

" You will have to give me up," said Bawn sadly. 

"O my love! do not speak so hardly. You have admitted 
too much." 

" I fear I have, and you ought not to have wrung it from me. 
You ought to have been satisfied with my earnest statej 
I am doing the only thing that I can do." 

" Bawn, you do not know what you are saying, 
that two people in the flush of youth and health wo| 




334 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Dec., 

fied in casting- themselves, hand-in-hand, into the sea to drown 
together. You would condemn us, with the love and happiness 
that are in us, to sudden death at the end of this journey which 
has been so fateful for us both. Do you really desire that we 
should never meet again in this world ? " 

" I do not desire it. But I know that it must be." 

"Never? Have you considered all that that word' never' 
means? It is not absence for a year or for twenty years ; it is en- 
tire blotting out for evermore." 

" It may be," said Bawn, "that in years to come we may hap- 
pen to meet again." 

"And your difficulty may then be cleared away ? " 

" It may be so, or, on the contrary, it may have deepened so 
terribly that I shall be glad to see that you have married and 
made yourself happy in the meantime." 

" You are a heartless woman." 

" Am I ? It may be well for me if I can prove to myself that 
I am." 

Silence fell between them. The gale had abated and the sky 
had cleared. He could see the expression of her face as she 
looked straight before her with a downcast, wistful gaze. There 
was such sorrow in her eyes those tender and brave gray 
eyes which had seemed to him from the first moment he 
had met their glance to be the sweetest in the world as 
made his heart ache to deliver her from the mysterious diffi- 
culty with which she was so sorely beset. That she had some 
great struggle before her he no longer doubted ; that she was in 
the hands of people whom she hated and was ashamed of he 
feared. He did not for a moment question her own individual 
goodness and nobility of purpose, but his very faith in her made 
him the more alarmed for her sake. What might not such a girl 
undertake if she could only get hold of a motive sufficiently lofty 
and unselfish ? 

That he should lose her out of his life through her fidelity to 
some worthless wretch or wretches, in some way bound up with 
her fate, drove him wild ; and yet, even as he gazed at her face, 
it seemed to grow paler and paler with determination, as, knitting 
her soft brows, she pushed away her regrets and strengthened 
her resolution to adhere to her own plans. 

T;H'QW, Bawn was asking herself, could she tell this man that 
daughter of one who had been branded and banished 
How could she persuade him to share her cer- 
tj/aUher father had been wrongfully accused ? And even 




1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 335 

were he to prove most improbably generous, and were to accept 
her faith and say to her, " Be you henceforth my wife, and 
nothing more," could she then forget her father and his life-long 
anguish, and utterly relinquish her endeavors to clear his name 
in the eyes of the little world that had accused him ? 

No, she could not bring herself to say, " I am the daughter 
of Arthur Desmond, who lived under a ban for having taken the 
life of his friend." And even if she could thus run the risk of 
being rejected as the child of a murderer, she would not give up 
her scheme for throwing the light of truth upon his memory. 

After all, what was this man to her, this acquaintance of less 
than a week, in comparison with the father who had for twenty 
long years been the only object of her worship? Let him take 
his ardent dark eyes, his winning voice r and the passionate ap- 
peals and reproaches elsewhere. She could not afford to yield 
up her heart to his persuasions. 



CHAPTER XII. 
LOVERS. 

BAWN got up the next morning fully determined that she 
would not allow herself to love this lover. Her heart might be 
shaken, but her will was firm. She was not going to give up the 
prospect for which she had sacrificed so much and struggled 
through so many obstacles, at. the bidding of a person who last 
week was unknown to her. His eyes might grow tender when 
gazing at her, bis hands be ready and kind in waiting on her, his 
companionship pleasant, and his voice like music in her ears, but 
she could not change the whole tenor of her life because those 
facts had been accidentally made known to her. She should cer- 
tainly miss his face at her side, and his strong presence surround- 
ing her like a Providence, but none the more was she willing 
to bestow on him suddenly the gift of her future. And there 
seemed to her no medium course between surrendering entire 
fate at once into the hands he was outstretching to her and put- 
ting him back into the shadows of the unknown from which he 
had so unexpectedly and awkwardly emerged to cross her path. 

And now she thought, as she finished dressing, there was only 
this one last day throughout which to keep true to her better 
judgment. To-morrow the captain expected to touch at Queens- 
town, and she must give her friend what she feared would be a 
painful surprise. She would bid him a short good-by and leave 



336 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Dec., 

him to finish his voyage as though such a person as herself did 
not exist in the world. 

" People who fall in love so easily," she thought, " can surely 
fall out of it again as quickly. By next week, perhaps, he will 
be able to complain of me to some sympathizing friend, and in 
a month I shall be forgotten as completely as if I never had ap- 
peared on his horizon." 

Such was Bawn's theory of loving. Love ought not to spring 
up like mushrooms in a night, but should have a gradual, reason- 
able, exquisitely imperceptible growth, striking deep roots before 
making itself obtrusively evident. Her father was the only per- 
son she had ever seriously loved, and her love for him had had 
neither beginning nor end. How could a mere stranger imagine 
that in the course of a week he. had learned absolutely to need 
her for the rest of his life ? 

In the meantime the man who called himself Somerled had 
passed a wakeful night. While Bawn in her berth summoned up 
all her resolution to resist for yet another day, and thus finally, 
the fascination which she unwillingly acknowledged he exercised 
over her, he lay and remembered but one saying of the woman 
who had suddenly risen up in his life and at once widened his 
heart and filled it with herself. She had admitted that she feared 
to learn to love him, and to his fancy the admission meant all that 
his soul desired. A girl who was afraid to cultivate his acquaint- 
ance, lest she should end by loving him, must already, he thought, 
almost love him ; and a girl with so soft and young though so 
determined a face, having made such an admission, must surely be 
capable of being won by perseverance. He feared that he had 
shocked her delicacy by speaking to her so suddenly, but he told 
himself that the urgency of the circumstances excused him. He 
chafed to see how his chances of success were lessened by the 
mysterious difficulties of her positio.n, and he set himself serious- 
ly to guess what that position and those difficulties might be. 
Looking at the case all round and recalling other words of hers 
besides those few which it made him so inexpressibly happy 
to dwell upon, he summed up all the evidence he could gather 
as to her circumstances, and before daylight broke over a foam- 
ing sea he thought he had made a tolerably good guess as to her 
purpose and the trials she felt herself bound to meet alone. For 
some reason which she believed to be compelling she was mak- 
ing her way to Paris to endeavor to earn money, not, as he con- 
ceived, for herself, but for the sake of some other person or per- 
sons. And he thought he had hit the truth when the idea flashed 



1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 337 

into his mind that it might be her intention to become a singer 
or an actress. 

The idea made him sick. An actress going through training 
on a Parisian stage ! He could not rest after the suggestion 
came to him, and got up and walked the deck, and was so walk- 
ing and chafing when Bawn appeared. 

He did not know it was the last morning on which he would 
see the trim, womanly figure, the fair, oval face under the round 
black hat, the little, strongly-shod feet coming to meet him steadi- 
ly and gallantly along the windy deck. No presentiment fore- 
warned him that by the same hour next day he should be labor- 
ing under the sorrow of having lost her out of his life for ever- 
more. 

At sight of her his mind became suddenly filled with the one 
exultant thought that here she was still safely within his reach, 
and not to be lost sight of, even at her own most earnest bidding, 
unless death should lay hold of her or him and frustrate all his 
hopes. He would throw over the urgent business that had 
brought him hurrying back across the ocean, and which was 
waiting for him in London, to be dealt with at a certain hour. 
He would throw anything, everything else to the winds, follow 
her to Paris, even (if it must be so) unknown to herself, be in- 
formed of her whereabouts and her circumstances, and after 
that leave the sequel of his wooing to the happier chances of the 
future. 

His face was flushed, his dark eyes shining with the force of 
his determination to compel happiness, as he came forward with 
his morning greetings. She accepted silently and meekly the 
support he offered her in her walk, feeling warmed and con- 
forted by his presence and protection, while thinking remorse- 
fully of the necessary treachery of the morrow. 

" Since daylight," he said, " I have been watching for you. 
I almost began to fear I had frightened you away, and that you 
were going to spend another day among the babies and the sick 
ladies." 

" I should have been -wiser had I done so," said Bawn. " I am 
not easily enough frightened." 

" You would not have been wiser. You are able to take care 
of yourself to hold your own against me. When you yield to 
my persuasion, to my counsel, you will do it with your eyes open 
with the sanction of your own judgment." 

"Shall I?" 

" I have been wanting to talk to you." 

VOL. XLIV. 22 



338 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Dec., 

" You talked so much yesterday that I do not imagine you 
can have anything left to say." 

" You have no idea of my talking capacity when you say so. 
I could talk for a week, if you would only listen to me. But if 
deaf and cruel miles were to come between me and your ears, 
then I feel that I could almost become dumb for the rest of my 
life." 

"Almost? That is, till some other young woman, like or un- 
like me, should be found willing to listen to you for yet another 
week perhaps for months and years." 

" Bawn, look at me ! " 

"Why should I look at you?" she answered gravely. "I 
know very well what you are like ; and I am greatly in earnest 
in saying I would rather you would talk of something else. 
After all I said last night you ought not to go on speaking to 
me like this." 

" And after all I said to you last night you suppose I can talk 
to you of nothing but the weather until the moment for parting 
with you arrives ? " 

"It would be better for yourself and kinder to me if you were 
to do so." 

" You think, then, that I am going to lose you so easily ? " 

" I know you will have to lose me. You had better make up 
your mind to it, and talk to me for the rest of the time only 
about Paris and the shops." 

"And the theatres?" 

" And the theatres, too, if you like. It would greatly amuse 
me to hear something about the theatres." 

" You would rather be amused than loved." 

" Anything is better than to encourage the continued offering 
of what one cannot accept." 

" Perhaps you cannot accept what is offered because you have 
;a preference for theatres." 

" I do not understand you." 

" An idea has occurred to me which seems to throw some light 
*upon your mystery. You are going to Paris, perhaps, to prepare 
yourself for the stage." 

Bawn blushed crimson, and her change of color did not escape 
lier companion's eye. It was caused by vexation that he should 
imagine her influenced in rejecting him by what seemed to her 
such an ignoble and insufficient reason, but he took it as a sign 
that he had hit upon the truth, to her sudden embarrassment and 
chagrin. 



1 886.] A FA IR EMIGRANT. 339 

" You are dreaming of going on the stage. This time I have 
guessed aright." 

" I will not tell you," said Bawn, now as pale as the foam- 
fleck that touched her cheek. Let him, she thought, follow this 
false scent if he would. It would lessen the likelihood of their 
meeting again. 

" Great heaven ! You upon the stage ! " 

" What do you find so shocking in the idea? Suppose I am 
what you have taken me to be, a poor young woman with her 
bread to earn in the world, why should I not go upon the stage? 
Have not good and noble women been actresses before now?" 

" I am not going to allow it for you." 

Her hand trembled on his arm, and she turned her head 
away that he might not see the expression of her eyes. She 
was unspeakably grateful to him for the words he had just 
spoken. Good women, greater women than herself, might 
spend their lives upon the stage, but such an existence would, 
she admitted, be intolerable to her. 

"Pray how do you intend to interfere to prevent me?" she 
said after a pause. 

" I do not know," he said, with something like a groan. " I 
cannot tell how I am going to find you and save you from such 
a fate ; but I warn you I will leave no stone unturned in trying 
to do it." 

Bawn withdrew her hand from his arm. 

" You mean that you will follow me persecute me ? " 

" Persecute you ? No ! Guard you from yourself perhaps 
yes." 

" Guard me ! " 

"Save you, may be, from the consequences of your own inno- 
cent rashness and romantic daring." 

Here he had hit home. The romantic daring was truly 
hers, and only Heaven could know what the consequences of it 
yet might be. As Dr. Ackroyd had warned her of trouble as 
the issue of her wilfulness, so now was this other man threaten- 
ing her with the dangers of that future to which she was ob- 
stinately consigning herself. Yet as she had resisted the lawful 
authority of the old friend, so much the more would she refuse 
to yield to the masked counsel of the new one. Her father and 
his good name and his fair memory were and should be more to 
her than the approval of either more than her own happiness, 
or her own liberty, or her own ease. 

But an overwhelming sense of the responsibility she had 



340 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Dec., 

taken upon herself pressed on her suddenly, and made her feel 
more ill in body and mind than she had ever felt since first set- 
ting out upon this path of her own seeking, which already she 
began to travel with so much pain. Why she should be so shaken 
at this moment she could not tell. Dr. Ackroyd was now more 
to her than any other person in the world, and yet his represen- 
tations had not moved her as the entreaties and reproaches of 
this audacious stranger were moving her. She drew her hand 
quickly away as he sought to replace it on his arm, and stood 
aloof by the side of the vessel, looking silently down to the flow- 
ing of the water. 

He saw that she suffered, and thought she was giving way 
before the urgency and honesty of his desires. She was acknow- 
ledging him in the right, and searching for a path by which she 
might allow him to approach her. He saw her firmly-closed 
hand relax and drop by her side, and that stern knitting of the 
soft, white brows, which at times gave her the look of an angel 
of justice rather than of tenderness, gradually smooth itself away. 
Tears gathered under her eyelids. 

He drew a step nearer to her. 

" What are you thinking of now, Bawn my Bawn?" 

" Not yours, nor any other's," she said, shaking her head sadly. 
" I belong, I can belong, to no one." 

" Not even in that far-off future which you hinted at once?" 

"I ought not to have spoken of any future of my own. My 
future is in bondage to another." 

He drew a long, hard breath. He felt impatient and sick at 
heart. 

" Then you have not always told me the truth." 

" Always." 

" You were engaged to no other man, you preferred no other 
man, you had no parents or relations who could control you have 
not these statements all been made by you ? Did you not tell me 
you were your own mistress, free as air, unfettered by any other 
will than your own ? " 

" I told you all that, and it was true." 

"And yet your future is in bondage to another?" 

" I cannot explain these things without telling you of matters 
of which I have bound myself not to speak." 

" You are a riddle and a mystery, and you have broken my 
heart ! " he cried with sudden passion. " I wish to Heaven I had 
never seen you ! " 

" That is what I have been wishing every day since you first 



1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 341 

spoke to me," said Bavvn in a low, trembling voice, while she 
threw back her head with dismay in her eyes and defiance in her 
gesture. " It is what from the first I have wished to make you 
feel." 

" Good Lord ! do you, then, hate me ?" 

" No ; I wish I did." 

" O my dear ! do you know what you imply by those 
words?" 

" I do not know, and I do not want to know." 

" I am going to tell you." 

" You must not ; you shall not, for I will not hear you ! " cried 
Bawn, and with a little wail of .pain she dropped her face upon her 
hands, leaning over the vessel's side. Then he turned away and 
left her, and walked about by himself at the other side of the 
ship, gloating over the admission which her words had again 
made to him. 

He remembered with satisfaction that he had yet some time 
before him in which to overcome her resolution to work upon 
that growing inclination towards himself which he thought he 
saw in her, and which she feared and strove against. Who could 
this person or those persons be to whom she was so bound, to 
whom the disloyalty that bought her own happiness could be a 
crime? It could not be a right or just bondage with so much 
mystery attached to it ; for he was now convinced of the exist- 
ence of some serious reasons for her silence as to all her circum- 
stances, future and past. He was sure that she trusted him 
enough to be willing to confide in him, if betrayal of others 
were not involved in her confidence. That she was going upon 
the stage he hardly doubted now. She had not denied it. Poor, 
and anxious to earn money, what so likely as that she, being 
young and beautiful, should hope to make a fortune by that ad- 
venture ? He was sure that she was clever, ready to believe 
she should be able to carry the world before her, and he chafed 
with impatience as he thought that the next time he saw her she 
might stand behind the footlights and under the eyes of a too 
critical or of a delighted crowd. 

The bell rang for breakfast, and when he looked up Bawn 
had disappeared. When he next saw her she was seated by the 
captain's side, as was usual at meal-times, and chatting to him 
pleasantly. But her face was unusually pale. 

" We are going to have a return of fine weather," said the 
captain. " We shall probably be in Queenstown in the morning." 

" Do many of your passengers land at Queenstown ? " asked 



342 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Dec., 

Somerled, reflecting with satisfaction that Bavvn was not one of 
the number. 

" A good many," said the captain, and Bawn held her breath, 
expecting he would say something polite to the effect that he 
was sorry that she was one of those to whom he should have to 
say adieu on the morrow. But some one addressed him on the 
moment, and the opportunity passed. 

After breakfast she asked herself if it would not be better 
were she to stay in the ladies' quarters for the whole of this long 
day, only going on deck for a few minutes in the evening to bid 
a final farewell to her friend. But no, she could not see that she 
was called upon to act so harshly, now that the very hours of 
their friendship were numbered. She would enjoy this one day 
of companionship. The future would be long enough for sepa- 
ration and silence. 

He met her as usual as soon as she appeared, and led her to a 
retired seat. 

" That young pair only met first when they came on board, 
and I am sure they are engaged," said a girl to her mother. 

" They seem to differ a good deal while they talk," said her 
sister, "and the man often looks disturbed, if not angry." 

" She plagues him a good deal, I fancy, though she looks so 
sweet and smooth," said the first girl. 

"She has some trouble, I think," said their mother. " I have 
seen tears in her eyes when she thought nobody was looking." 

" That must be very seldom, for the man is always looking." 

"He is a distinguished-looking fellow, and I hope he is not 
getting himself into any foolish entanglement," said another lady 
sitting by. 

" He is old enough to take care of himself. The girl may be 
in more danger," said the mother. 

" You need not be uneasy about her. She is a young lady 
who can carry her point, equal to the management of more than 
a flirtation, and able to carry it to a satisfactory conclusion." 

" Perhaps all the more to be pitied on that account. If a girl 
of that stamp takes her own affairs in her hands too early she 
sometimes makes a wreck of her life." 

" She seems to be quite her own mistress, at all events, travel- 
ling from America all alone. For my part, I am fond of girls who 
try to get under somebody's wing," said the other lady, who 
meant no unkindness, but who suffered from overmuch conscien- 
tiousness, and was accordingly inclined to be censorious. 

That Bawn at present felt her own wings strong enough to 



1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 343 

carry her there was no doubt, and it was for this reason that she 
had consented to spend her last day on board in company with 
the man who had declared her to be so necessary to his life, and 
yet whom she was quite resolved .never to see again. And in 
the meantime the man, resting on the admissions she had already 
made him, had begun to hope in earnest, and relied on the many 
hours that were yet before them to break down at last the bar- 
riers she had built up between their future lives. 

" Bawn," he said, " I want to say several things to you." He 
paused, and she did not check him for calling her by her Chris- 
tian name, though he gave her time to do so. He thought this 
a sign of relenting, but in reality she was only thinking that he 
might call her what he pleased to-day. The wind was carrying 
the sound away from her ears even as it was spoken, and would 
never return again bearing his voice. Once she was buried in 
the mountains, this man, who led a busy life out in the world, a 
dweller in London, a frequenter of Paris, would certainly never 
stumble upon the paths of her retirement. 

" I have been thinking deeply all night about the mystery that 
surrounds you." 

" How greatly you exaggerate ! Surely a little reticence need 
not be magnified into mystery." 

" I do not think I exaggerate. I believe your trust in me, 
which you have avowed, would have overcome your reticence 
before now if something more than mere personal reserve were 
not included in your silence." 

"What, then, do you think of me?" 

"That you are cruelly bound to some other person or persons, 
and that generosity to them, to him, or to her, whom you believe 
to have the prior claim upon you, is the cause of your reticence. 
I am sure that loyalty to some one has sealed your lips and 
fettered your movements." 

" Should I not be unworthy your regard did I forget such 
prior claims granted that they exist?" 

" Bawn, give up this lonely enterprise." 

She started visibly, and looked at him with wide-open eyes. 
The words struck her like a blow, and it was some moments be- 
fore she could reassure herself with the remembrance that he 
knew nothing of her intentions and alluded to a fancied scheme 
which had originated in his own brain. Her eyes fell, and she 
was silent. Neither did he speak, being occupied in adding this 
look which he had surprised from her to the other scraps of evi- 
dence he had gathered as to her lot. 



344 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Dec., 

" I cannot give it up," she said at last, feeling- a certain relief 
in talking of her own affairs, under cover of a misunderstanding, 
with this friend of to-day, who yesterday was not, and to-morrow 
would not be. " I am bound by loyalty, by love, by pity, by the 
energy and fidelity of my own character. My motive is strong 
enough and sound enough to bear me through what I have un- 
dertaken. It is an older acquaintance than you. God grant it 
may prove as good a friend ! " 

" Believe me, it will not," he urged, looking at her expectant- 
ly, as if he thought the longed-for confidence was coming at last. 
" Happiness is not to be looked for from it, comfort it will have 
none, difficulty and disappointment will follow persistently in its 
train." 

"Ah, you evil prophet! " she cried, with something between 
a laugh and a sob. " It may be that you are right," she added. 
" My enterprise is, however, my life ; and with it my life shall be 
overthrown." 

A red spot burnt on her cheek, and the look on her face smote 
him with remorse. 

" I would not forecast evil for you," he said, " even if you per- 
sist in putting me out of your future. No matter to what shadows 
you may have devoted yourself, there will still be an escape for 
you somewhere into the light." 

" I shall not be easily crushed, I can tell you. So long as the 
sun shines and the breeze blows there will always be a certain 
vigor and gladness in my veins," she answered, smiling one of 
her sunniest smiles upon him. 

" It is getting cold, I think," he said, as a chill from the heart 
ran through his stalwart frame. It was hardly easier to him to 
picture her in a future of sunshine which he could never share 
than to imagine her failing away from all the promises of her 
young life for need of the protection that he could give her. 

" I think it is turning cold," he said abruptly. " Have you 
any objection to walk a little ? " 

CHAPTER XIII. 
TREACHERY. 

DURING all the rest of that day Somerled exerted himself to 
amuse and entertain his companion. That sob in her voice, that 
flush under her eyes, when he had predicted evil for her, had 
frightened him, and he sought to banish unhappy recollections. 



1 886.] A FAIR EMIGRANT. 345 

He was a man who hitherto had not needed to make much effort 
in order to be beloved. Now that he was deliberately and ear- 
nestly trying to be lovable, he felt some hope that he might not 
ultimately fail. 

Assuming boldly that they were to meet again some day in 
Paris, he chatted pleasantly of the delightful hours they might 
spend together there. They would go to the old churches in the 
mornings and to the theatres in the evenings; in the day-time ex- 
plore the quaint old quarters so full of interest. How the bells 
on the horses' necks would ring, and how the animals' hoofs would 
click on the asphalt pavement ! What visits they would pay to the 
shops, the picture-galleries, the old museums and palaces! Bawn 
laughed and asked a hundred questions, and as the day went past 
it seemed as if they had been riding and driving, seeing sights 
and making purchases together, instead of walking up and down 
the deck of a steamer all the time or sitting upon two camp-stools 
facing each other. By evening it seemed to her as if she must 
have spent a week in Paris, and she could hardly persuade her- 
self she had never been there. This day seemed to have added a 
year to their acquaintance, so much pleasure, so many experiences 
had they shared between them. 

It was not until the dusk began to fall that Somerled ceased 
talking and allowed her to find herself again in the steamer, with 
the waves running beside them, and another day of their com- 
panionship fled, bringing them so much the nearer to their final 
separation. Of how near it had actually brought them he did not 
dream. 

It was an unusually clear, starry night, every one on deck and 
in the highest spirits. Our two friends sat in a quiet corner 
facing the breeze. Bawn's hat had fallen back on her shoulders, 
and her face looked pale and grave under a cloud of ruffled 
golden hair not the same eyes and mouth that had been laughing 
so gaily all day. She was asking herself whether the moment had 
come for telling him that they must part to-morrow morning. 

" You are looking now," he said, " like that statue of Diana in 
the Louvre. All this day you have had quite a different face. 
But now you laugh and dimple up, the likeness to the Diana is 
gone." 

" I have always been so very much alive I cannot imagine 
myself like a statue." 

" Bawn, at what door am I to knock when I go say a fort- 
night hence to look for you in Paris ? " 

" At no door," said Bawn, all the laughter and dimples gone. 



346 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Dec., 

" Then I am to give up my business and accompany you to 
Paris now ? " 

" Is that the alternative ? " 

" I think it is. Look at the matter as I will, I can come to no 
other conclusion." 

She shook her head. 

" It simply comes to this : I cannot make up my mind to lose 
you out of my life." 

" A week ago you had never heard of me. A fortnight hence 
your business will fill your mind and I shall be forgotten." 

" You do not think so. Your heart must tell you the reverse. 
A week has done for me what the rest of the years of my life 
cannot undo."- 

" What can I say to you that I have not already said ? " 

" Half a dozen words the number of a door, the name of a 
street, the name of a person, all of which you have kept carefully 
locked up behind your lips." 

Bawn turned pale. "If you knew all I could tell you, you 
would turn your back upon me at once and go your way. But 
I will not allow you so to reject me. It costs me a great deal to 
say this, and I had not meant to say it. I had, and have, good 
reasons and to spare to give you without this one ; but perhaps 
it will satisfy you more than all the rest." 

" It does not satisfy me, simply because I cannot accept what 
you have said as the truth. I must judge of your obstacle with 
my masculine brain before allowing it to stand. I can imagine 
no barrier between you and me except such as cannot possibly 
exist." 

" I assure you again that if you knew my story you would 
part with me willingly. I would spare you a great deal of pain. 
More I cannot say." 

" Then I repeat that I will not be frightened away by something 
of which I know not the form nor the meaning a nursery bogie 
mooing in a dark corner. I refuse to believe that an obstacle is 
insurmountable unless I have touched and examined it and mea- 
sured my strength with it. Bawn, listen to me once for all. I 
am a man who does not make up his mind on a subject without 
having thought it out. I have made up my mind about you. 
My judgment approved of you even before my heart desired 
you. You cannot shake my faith in yourself, and nothing that 
is not yourself, nothing that does not destroy my belief in you, 
can influence me to withdraw the claim that I have laid upon 
you. In addition to this I may say that I am a man who desires 



i886.J A FAIR EMIGRANT. 347 

only a few things in this world, but what I want I want quickly 
that is, I know very soon when an object has become necessary 
to my existence. Yours are the first eyes of woman that ever 
assured me their light was necessary to m.y life. Because I am 
threatened with some mysterious shadow behind your back shall 
I weakly consent to extinguish such a light 

He broke off abruptly, and Bawn was silent. 

" Unless," he went on, " you tell me that you hate me, that 
under no circumstances could you think of being my wife, I will 
exert every faculty I possess to make your future one with mine." 

She wrung her hands together, and still said nothing. 

" Bawn, you do not tell me that you hate me." 

" I cannot tell you that, for it would not be true." 

" Then you are going to tell me where we may meet? " 

" No." 

" I will not ask you to betray any one. I will not intrude on 
your privacy or seek to alter your plans. Only let me know 
where and at what time I may see or even hear from you. The 
moment may come when you will be glad to call on me for 
help." 

He took out his pocket-book. " My address is written here 
two addresses, in fact, one of which will find me at my club in 
London and the other at my home. I will give them to you 
in exchange for a couple of words from you a number and a 
street in Paris." 

Bawn suddenly felt all her resolution giving way, and a desire 
to have that leaf from his pocket-book take possession of her. 
But her will was not yet overcome. She clung on to her pre- 
conceived intention of keeping her own counsel, even while at the 
moment she could see the force of none of her reasons for so 
doing. 

" How do you know," she said lightly, " that I shall be in 
Paris at all ? It is as likely that I shall go to London or Vienna." 

Her words and tone jarred upon her own overwrought feel- 
ing as she spoke, and nervousness made them seem even more 
heartless than they were. They had the effect she intended them 
to have, that of startling her companion and breaking up the dan- 
gerous earnestness and persuasiveness of his mood. 

He flushed as if he had been struck. " Ah ! " he said, " I have 
misunderstood you, after all. You are a heartless coquette, and 
your reticence is a mere trick to torment me." 

" Why did you not perceive that before?" said she. " I have 
not tried to impress you with a high opinion of my character." 



348 A FAIR EMIGRANT. [Dec., 

" No, you have not tried, but you did it without trying. The 
fault was in myself. During the past few days I have forgotten 
that some time ago I found you an empty-headed and disappoint- 
ing woman. The idea returns to me " 

" Perhaps in time to save you." 

" As you say, perhaps in time to save me." 

" If so, I shall rejoice to have freed you from delusion. I shall 
have done you one good turn, at least, before we part," said Bawn, 
smiling, though with straitened lips. 

" Doubtless you know how to rejoice over the follies of men 
who are deceived by the beautiful mask that nature has given to 
your ungenerous soul ! " he cried angrily. " I " 

A little gasp from Bawn checked the rush of his words. A 
bolt had fallen suddenly on her heart, her head. She threw out 
her hands blindly and fell stiffly back in her seat. 

" Good God ! she has swooned," he exclaimed in amazement 
and dismay. He laid her flat upon the bench and flew for an old 
lady who had shown her some kindness before. 

" I thought she would be ill before all was over," said the old 
lady, bathing her forehead and chafing her hands. " Very few es- 
cape. It is nicer to be ill at first and enjoy yourself afterwards. 
There, she is better. She must get down-stairs at once." 

" Will you lean upon my arm ?" said Somerled penitently. 

" Yes," she said. And together they made their way below. 

She turned to him at the cabin-door and put her hand in his. 

" After this," she said, " you will promise to think no further 
ill of me?" 

He answered by silently raising her fingers to his lips.. 

" Never any more ? " 

" Never." 

" Thank you, my good friend. Good-night." 

As Bawn slipped into her berth and laid her head on her pil- 
low she told herself that the struggle was over, that this startling 
episode in her life was finally closed. But the man, who returned 
to the deck and paced there under the dark heavens till the small 
hours of the morning, told the wind and the stars jubilantly that 
this gold-haired, grave-eyed, sweet-mouthed woman was his own, 
that she loved him in spite of the shackles that bound her and 
through the cloud that hung around her, and that, with youth 
and love on his side, he would baffle the whole world to make 
her queen of his heart and of his home. 

The stars paled, the breeze grew colder, the dawn broke 
ancl showed the green coast of Ireland lying between sky and 



1 886.] IN THE SOUDAN. 349 

sea. The passengers were all asleep ; no one on deck was much 
excited by the sight of the gray and green, hazy shore except a 
home-sick sailor-lad who was hoping soon to feel his mother's 
arms about his sunburnt neck. The man Somerled had flung 
himself on his berth an hour before, and was sound asleep in the 
expectation of a happier morrow than had ever yet dawned for 
him. The stopping of the steamer did not wake him, neither did 
Bawn's light feet as she passed up the stairs and crossed the 
deck, selected her luggage from the pile that had been hoisted 
from the hold, and inquired at what hour the earliest train would 
leave Queenstown for Dublin. As she walked about, waiting for 
the necessary arrangements to be made before she could touch 
land, her eyes turned anxiously towards the stair, as she hoped 
or feared, she scarce knew which, to see the well-known dark 
head appear above the rail. Surely the noise, the tramping 
overhead, the shouting and hauling, would awake him and he 
would come on deck to see what was going on. If he were to 
come to her at this last moment what foolish thin^g might she not 
possibly say or do ? Never before had she found herself so near 
the undoing in a moment of all that her deliberate judgment had 
accomplished with so much forethought and pains. 

A few words of thanks to the captain and of good wishes from 
him, a vain effort to frame a kindly message of farewell to be de- 
livered by him to her friend, and then, with the unspoken words 
still choking her, Bawn was hurried along the gangway and into 
her cab. She arrived at the railway-station just in time to catch 
the earliest train, and was soon flying with the birds away across 
Irish pastures. 

TO BE CONTINUED. 



IN THE SOUDAN. 

WHAT news from the south from the great Dark Land, 

Lit but by flash of gun, 
Where tardy England came too late 

To save her noblest son ? 

Oh ! that bitter time is all forgot, 

And nothing remains but pride ; 
For English valor and English fame 

Burned bright when Gordon died. 



350 IN THE SOUDAN. [Dec., 

But what of the priests who are still fast bound 

'Mid the myriad heathen hordes ? 
Has their path to freedom yet been found, 

Cut out by Christian swords ? 

And what of the delicate women who went 

To teach God's little ones, 
With hearts as heroic as his who died 

Ere roared the rescue's guns ? 

They went not forth in the name of the queen, 

No nation's praise was theirs : 
Their silent lives were the gifts they gave, 

Their only weapons prayers. 



The veering fancy of the changeful time 

No longer throbs to that proud tale of glory ; 

Glad to forget a height we may not climb, 
To read on smoother ways a softer story. 

But God's great angels still keep watch and ward, 

And turn to joy the long captivity, 
When one by one the glory of the Lord 

Is theirs, as one by one the captives die. 

And on the hot, dead sand falls the dead seed, 
But not to dwell in death ; for it shall quicken, 

Till from the sowing of these lives that bleed 

Some time and soon shall the white harvest thicken. 

O ye who heard the Macedonian cry 

For faith and help, as in the dream of Paul, 

And with your life's whole service made reply, 
Unmarked of worldlings and unpraised of all : 

Great is the guerdon " To these little ones 
What ye have done, that have ye done to Me." 

Long was the toil and hard, but ye have won 
With those hard hours a blest Eternity ! 



1 886.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 351 

SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS.* 

SECOND SERIES. 
No. I. 

THE NEBULAR THEORY THE HYPOTHESIS OF LAPLACE RECTIFIED 
NEBULAR HYPOTHESIS OF M. FAYE NEBULAR THEORY IN ITS 
RELATION TO NATURAL THEOLOGY. 

ONE series of articles on certain important Scriptural ques- 
tions was published in THE CATHOLIC WORLD between the 
months of November, 1884, and February, 1885. The writer had 
no intention of continuing- the discussion of the topics treated in 
these articles any further when the fourth and last article was 
published. But, since that time, the perusal of the three works 
whose titles are given below has suggested the idea of the pre- 
sent series, with a view to supplement and complete, in respect 
to a few topics, the exposition partially made in the first series. 

The first of these works embraces in its scope the whole do- 
main of truth in respect to which the discussion concerning the 
several relations and claims of faith and science arises. Its title 
sufficiently shows what is the final object of its author. The 
work which is put in the third place treats of one special topic 
embraced in the general scope of the first, and its author aims at 
the same object at which the aim of the author of the first-named 
work is directed. Both these writers are ecclesiastics, and have 
in view the clearing away of the mist hanging over the topics of 
which they treat and obscuring the connection between that 
which is rationally concluded from scientific principles and that 
which is believed on the authority of revelation in regard to the 
same. 

The work mentioned in the second place is purely of a scien- 
tific and philosophical character, free from any such ulterior pur- 
pose as has just been indicated in respect to the two other works 
we have mentioned. M. de Saint-Projet refers to it, however, 
and cites from it, in terms of great praise, as a work which is 

* Apologie Scientifique de la Foi Chrftienne. Par Le Chanoine F. Duilhe de Saint-Projet, 
Laureat de P Academic Francaise, etc. Sec. Ed. Paris : V. Palme. 1885. 

Sur POrigine du Monde : Theories Cosmogoniques des Anciens et des Modernes. Par H. 
Faye, de PInstitut. Sec. Ed. Paris : Gauthier-Villars. 1885. 

Le Dfluge Biblique devant la Foi, PjScriturt et la Science. Par Al. Motais, Pretre de 
POratoire de Rennes, Prof. d'Ecr. S. et d'Hebreu au Chan. Hon. Paris : Berche' et Tralles. 
1885. 



352 SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. [Dec., 

available for his own purpose. He also mentions with approba- 
tion the work of M. Motais, who, in his turn, cites in the same 
manner passages from the Apologie Scientifique . There is, there- 
fore, a certain correspondence between these three works which 
justifies our placing them together as furnishing in common a 
basis for remarks bearing on the matter we have proposed for 
discussion. The reason of this will appear as we proceed further, 
beginning from the scientific theory of M. Faye on the origin of 
the world. 

M. Faye holds a place among the living astronomers of the 
first rank. His work, Sur V Origine du Monde, has excited much 
attention and received high commendation in Europe. It is not 
only exactly scientific in its method and substance, but also lite- 
rary and attractive in its style. The exposition of theories in 
cosmogony advanced by the Greek philosophers is clear, and, 
though succinct, sufficiently ample to give a correct view of the 
fanciful systems which preceded the one now universally re- 
ceived. The most interesting chapter of this portion of the book 
is the one which shows the heliocentric theory taught to a select 
coterie of disciples and handed down under a discipline of the se- 
cret, by Pythagoras; who anticipated in this marvellous species 
of scientific prophecy, by many centuries, the discoveries of Co- 
pernicus. About one-third part of the work is taken up with 
considering the theories of the ancients. The author next pro- 
ceeds to explain the ideas of modern philosophers respecting cos- 
mogony, and specially of Descartes, Newton, Kant, and Laplace, 
which brings him to about the middle of his volume. In the lat- 
ter half there is an exposition of the most recent astronomy. In 
this portion of his work the main thesis, to which all the fore- 
going is chiefly an introduction and the remainder an accompa- 
niment, is an original theory of M. Faye, which is a rectification 
of the nebular hypothesis, proposed by him as a substitute for 
Laplace's famous and, until recently, generally-received theory. 
The author begins the " Avertissement " at the head of his work 
by saying : 

" The celebrated cosmogonic hypothesis of Laplace is in complete con- 
tradiction with the actual state of science and the recent discoveries of 
astronomers. It needs to be replaced by another hypothesis." 

M. Faye made the exposition of his new hypothesis for the first 
time at the Sorbonne, March 15, 1884, a d published the first edi- 
tion of his Origine du Monde during the same year. We will first 
attempt a presentation of the theory in a purely scientific view, 



r886.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS, 353 

reserving the question of its relation to faith and the Scripture 
until this has been finished. 

The term " world " in this exposition is used to denote a 
single body, or a system of bodies united by a bond of mutual 
attraction, belonging to the entire collection of worlds visible by 
the eye alone or as aided by the telescope. The term " universe" 
denotes this entire collection. Our solar system is one of these 
worlds. The nebular theory embraces all the worlds of the uni- 
verse, but is particularly developed in respect to our world. 
This theory in general supposes an initial chaos of extremely 
rare nebulous matter diffused through space and finally becoming 
divided into a multitude of separate masses, the whole and all 
the parts being subject to the law of gravitation, and acted on by 
whatever other force or forces, scientifically undetermined or un- 
determinable, must be assumed as being necessary to impart a 
double simultaneous movement of translation and rotation. As 
the result of these movements the genesis of worlds is effected 
through successive condensations and concentrations of the pri- 
mordial nebulous matter. Atoms are grouped in different parts 
of immensity, each group a nucleus of further increase; the 
spherical form of these masses of condensing matters being a con- 
sequence of a well-known law, and their movements of rotation 
on their axes, and translation in space, being regulated by the 
laws of those initial forces which have stirred them out of inertia, 
into activity in respect to their directions and velocities. In 
this process rotating rings are formed, which break up into sepa- 
rate spherical bodies; and these, in the long lapse of time, be- 
come, in the instance of our system, a central sun with the 
planets, satellites, etc., which constitute our world. This is, in a 
general sense, the nebular theory, first suggested by Descartes, 
favored by Newton, more distinctly proposed by Kant, and de- 
veloped into a precise and scientifically-constructed hypothesis 
by Laplace, who is commonly referred to as its author, and who 
was confident that all future discoveries would confirm and finally 
establish its correctness. We have seen, however, that these 
subsequent discoveries have contradicted Laplace's expectation, 
that his theory has for some time been generally called in ques- 
tion, and that M. Faye has declared it to be altogether untenable. 
Some have gone so far as to assert that the nebular theory has 
been completely exploded. This is a hasty and ii 
ment. M. de Saint- Projet considers the nebular hypotj 
general sense as explained above, apart from the detai ^^exposi- 
tion of Laplace and others, to be one which, remains] 
VOL. XLIV. 23 




354 SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. [Dec., 

intact. He says : " This grand conception, we have said, be- 
comes continually more and more probable ; we might have said 
that it has been demonstrated, that it ought to be classed among 
scientific certitudes " (p. 142). 

Let us now examine more closely the special theory of La- 
place in comparison with the facts discovered since his time which 
run counter to it, and then look into the way in which M. Faye 
has reconstructed the nebular hypothesis with certain modifica- 
tions and rectifications. The fundamental idea and principle of 
genesis remain the same. The rectifications concern only the 
order and mode of formation of the stars composing our solar 
system. 

In Laplace's theory the sun was first formed by the concen- 
tration and condensation of the diffused nebulous matter, which 
in its central portion became a more dense rotating globe sur- 
rounded by a rarer vaporous atmosphere revolving around 
it in concentric rings, which were thrown off and abandoned 
successively by its increasing velocity of rotation, and which 
broke up into planets, some of these by the same process throw- 
ing off their satellites. Such a process, by which the planets 
were all derived from the sun, must necessarily produce rota- 
tions of planets and revolutions of satellites in the same direction, 
from one end to the other of the solar system. ' In reality these 
movements are direct in the first half of the solar system, i.e., 
from Mercury to Saturn inclusively, but a fact unknown to La- 
place retrograde from Uranus to Neptune. Those who are 
north of the equator look southward in turning toward the equa- 
tor, which places the west on the right hand and the east on the 
left. The revolution of the earth and other bodies from west to 
east is therefore regarded as a movement from right to left, and 
direct ; the opposite movement is from left to right, and retro- 
grade. Now, Kant and Laplace knew of no rotations of bodies 
on their axes, or revolutions in their orbits, within the solar sys- 
tem, except direct ones. The movements of the satellites of 
Uranus had not been calculated and were supposed to be direct. 
Neptune had not been discovered. The comets, which have 
such eccentric orbits some moving in them in a retrograde direc- 
tion were not supposed to belong to the solar system. It was 
inferred, therefore.Uhat all planets and satellites, as well those 
.which plight be newly discovered as those which were already 

wn, must have their rotations and revolutions in the same di- 
rection \vith the rotation of the sun i.e., direct, or from right to 
left/by reason of a law pervading the entire solar system. 



1 886.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 355 

But when it was discovered that the satellites of Uranus re- 
volve in orbits which deviate from this supposed law ; when 
Neptune was discovered with a satellite revolving in a retrograde 
direction ; when it was found that the comets in their most re- 
mote aphelia are still carried along by the sun in its rapid move- 
ment at the rate of four or five miles a second through space 
toward a star in the constellation Hercules, and therefore belong 
to his system the theory of Laplace was found to be deficient 
and to need rectification by means of a more complete induction 
from all the facts which are now known in astronomy. 

M. Faye's modification of the nebular theory is briefly this: 
The opposite directions of different bodies in the solar system 
contradict the hypothesis of their common derivation from the 
sun. The planets and satellites which move in the direction of 
the sun's rotation were formed before the sun, when the atoms of 
cosmical dust had a velocity proportioned to their distance from 
the centre of the nebulous sphere. Those which have a retrograde 
movement were formed after the sun, whose acquired increase of 
attractive power was then sufficient to invert the order of their 
linear velocities. This inversion was completely effected in the 
case of the world of Neptune, while that of Uranus marks the 
period of transition from the first to the second mode of forma- 
tion. Moreover, M. Faye considers that it is necessary to revert 
in a certain sense to Descartes' theory of vortices in order to ac- 
count for the inauguration of the process of cosmogony which 
has resulted in the formation of the solar system. The old no- 
tion of a primitive state of incandescence of the chaotic cosmical 
matter having become obsolete through the prevalence of the 
thermo-dynamic theory, it is by this last theory that M. Faye ex- 
plains the formation of hot bodies like our sun. 

This statement will not be understood by any reader who is 
not already well informed on the subject. But we hope to make 
it plain enough to be easily understood by some further expla- 
nation. 

Let us suppose that the sun was first formed, that it threw off 
rings, that these rings broke up into planets, and that these again 
threw off their satellites in a similar manner. Kant supposed 
that the sun, turning round on its axis with a direct rotation, must 
have imparted a movement both of rotation and of revolution to 
all the planets and satellites which was likewise direct. That is to 
say, that there was one cause and one law producing and regulat- 
ing both the movements of rotation and of revolution, and that 
these must all be in the direction of the sun's rotation. Faye 



356 SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. [Dec., 

points out a capital mistake in this supposition viz., a confusion of 
two orders of facts absolutely different, one of which is the direc- 
tion of the planetary movements around the sun, the other the re- 
volutions of the satellites around their planets. It is true that the 
planets must revolve around the sun in the direction of its rota- 
tion on its axis, and that the satellite must revolve around its 
planet in the direction of the planet's rotation on its own axis. 
But the rotation of the sun on its axis does not command a 
rotation of the planet in the same direction, and consequently 
not a revolution of the satellite in this direction around its planet. 
The interior movements of the secondary systems are not deter- 
mined k priori by the movements of the entire system, but by the 
nature of the interior forces, of which the direction of the move- 
ments of the entire system is independent. 

Laplace as well as Kant fell into the mistake of confounding 
these two orders of facts. But he did not, like Kant, overlook 
one great objection to his theory : viz., that according to his sys- 
tem all the planets ought to rotate, and all the satellites to revolve, 
from left to right i.e., in a retrograde direction. The reason of 
this is that, in order to produce a direct rotation, the velocities of 
the rings thrown off ought to increase from their inner to their 
outer border, whereas they actually decrease in proportion to the 
distance. Hence something must intervene which inverts the 
order by retarding the inner and accelerating the outer veloci- 
ties. Laplace sought for this reason of inversion partly in the 
friction of the molecules, and partly in the contraction of the ring 
by cooling. But Faye rejects this explanation, because it sup- 
poses the nebulous ring to be animated by a movement of rota- 
tion, whereas its movement is a planetary circulation. In the 
case of a rotating atmosphere, like that which surrounds our 
globe, the various layers press on each other by virtue of the 
predominance of gravitation over the centrifugal force. Let the 
rotation of the central globe become accelerated, the lower layers 
of atmosphere will receive by contact the same increase of velocity 
and communicate it by degrees to the others, until the uppermost 
layer will rotate at the same rate with the lowest, the whole 
moving together, as if it were a solid, around the central globe. 
Also, if the central mass contract by cooling, the layers approach 
each other on account of their pressing upon one another through 
the force of gravitation, which causes a reciprocal modification 
of their several velocities. 

Faye denies the parallelism between a cosmic ring with a 
planetary circulation and an atmosphere rotating with a globe. 



i886.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 357 

The concentric layers of a nebulous ring, he says, will not press 
upon one another, because the gravitation of each will be exactly 
compensated by the centrifugal force. The ring in its original 
state will never undergo that inversion of velocities of which La- 
place speaks. As a proof of this the ring of Saturn is referred 
to, which circulates now as it has done for millions of years. 
Faye concludes, therefore, that the sole fact that a planet rotates 
from right to left proves that it does not owe its origin to a ring 
derived from the sun. If Laplace's theory were correct, we 
would see the stars rise in the west and set in the east. 

Moreover, this theory excludes the comets from the solar 
system. 

Besides, it requires that any satellite, however near its planet, 
should take a longer time to revolve around it than the planet 
takes to rotate on its axis. But Phobos, one of the satellites of 
Mars, revolves around this planet three times while the planet 
makes one rotation. 

Let us see now how M. Faye makes an ideal construction of 
our world, in accordance with the present state of science, by a 
modified and rectified nebular theory. 

To begin with, we must have a vast nebula, of a spherical 
form, so far isolated in space as to be free and independent in its 
interior movements. This nebula must be animated by an initial 
and rapid movement of linear translation in space. It cannot be, 
like the great nebulosity of Orion, merely gaseous and there- 
fore incapable of being subject to stellar transformation, but must 
have a chemical constitution, composed of various elements, sus- 
ceptible of receiving the forms of solid substances. 

Next, the movements of the nebulous mass must be accounted 
for. The force of gravitation will not suffice. For this attrac- 
tion, of itself, would draw all the particles of the mass together 
into one condensed, motionless sphere. Our own particular 
nebula, together with the whole multitude of similar masses from 
which the other worlds have been formed all these are supposed 
to have made up originally one universal nebula, from which 
they have become separated. This universal nebula, if it had 
been without interior movements originally impressed upon it, 
and animated solely by the force of the attraction of gravitation, 
would have coalesced and become consolidated into one univer- 
sal globe, without rotation or linear translation in space. 

M. Faye develops quite at length his theory of vortices bor- 
rowed from Descartes gyratory movements in different parts of 
the mass, similar to those of whirlwinds in the air and whirlpools 



358 SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. [Dec., 

in the water. We find that want of space forbids anything more 
than the most succinct statement of this part of his theory. Briefly, 
our own nebulous mass must have brought with it at its begin- 
ning of separate existence interior impulses sufficient to produce 
rotation, circulation, translation in space, and to regulate these 
movements. 

If the sun had been first formed, as Laplace supposed, the ve- 
locity of linear movement in the rings would have diminished in 
proportion to their distance from the centre, producing retro- 
grade movements of rotation. The rings having been actually 
formed long before the complete condensation of the central star, 
they revolved with a velocity which increased in proportion to 
their distance from the centre, under the influence of the centri- 
fugal force. This is the cause of the direct rotation of the plan- 
ets nearest the sun and earliest formed viz., Mercury, Venus, 
Earth, Mars, Jupiter, the asteroids, and Saturn. Meanwhile the 
sun continued to increase, its attraction became more energetic 
and inverted the order of linear velocities in those rings which 
were the last to break up and from which the worlds of Uranus 
and Neptune were formed. This last planet with its satellite 
thus received a retrograde direction, while the world of Uranus, 
in which the satellites revolve in a direction nearly perpendicular 
to the plane of the planet's orbit, seems to mark a period of 
transition from one mode of formation to the other. 

We must reluctantly omit all mention of the formation of 
comets and give all our attention now to the sun. The general 
idea of M. Faye's theory is, as we have seen, that all the bodies 
in the solar system except the sun are derived from some special 
concentrations of parts of the common nebular mass, produced by 
particular vortices in which these portions were involved and by 
which they were controlled, the influence from the centre being 
at first feeble, but gradually increasing towards its final, domi- 
nating power, which at present gives stability to the whole sys- 
tem, radiating light and heat through all its bounds, keeping 
planets and comets alike to their orbits, and sweeping the entire 
cortege of its attendant spheres in its company with a rapid move- 
ment through space. 

The sun is supposed to have begun with some nucleus as the 
centre of the general gravitation of the nebulous mass around it. 
By its dominant attractive force it has drawn to itself and concen- 
trated into its vast globe all that material which we may call the 
loose cosmic dust of the system i.e., all which the planets and 



i886.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 359 

comets have not appropriated. This amounts, in fact, to fifths 
of the whole mass. 

The principal and most interesting point about the sun's con- 
stitution is the way in which it obtained, in which it keeps up, 
and in which it radiates its heat and light, especially so far as our 
planet is concerned. 

There are only three ways in which the heat of the sun has 
been supposed to be generated. One is that of chemical combus- 
tion. This supposition is inadmissible. For, under the most favor- 
able conditions which can be imagined, this great stove and lamp 
in one would consume all available fuel in two thousand years. 
The second supposition is that of the friction of a ceaseless rain 
of meteors upon the surface of the sun. This is liable to the 
objection, seemingly unanswerable, that the increase of the sun's 
mass by the falling into it of these foreign bodies would disturb 
the equilibrium of the solar system. There remains only the 
third hypothesis viz., that the sun is a vast thermo-dynamic ma- 
chine, a globe made intensely incandescent by the very process 
of its formation, by the concentration and condensation of the gas- 
eous nebula which rushed together from its remotest bounds and 
stored up dynamite enough in the body of the sun to last for mil- 
lions of years. Such a supply is not, however, unlimited. A 
sun, by radiating away its heat and light, is on the way to become 
cold and dark. Stars, at the maximum of heat and brightness, 
are white or bluish white. After a certain amount of radiation 
has taken place they become yellow, then red, and finally they 
become extinct as suns a catastrophe which seems to have befallen 
several of the fixed stars already. Our sun has already faded 
into the class of yellow stars, and astronomers think it probable 
that it has advanced considerably on the way towards ultimate 
extinction. Nevertheless there are no scientific data, from the 
human, historic period, which indicate any observable diminution 
in the heat and light radiated from the sun upon the earth. 

M. Faye regards the tertiary period of our earth as the epoch 
of the highest grade of incandescence in the sun, which began 
to relent and diminish at the beginning of the quaternary period. 
The length of the whole period of incandescence, according to 
his calculations, is 15,000,000 of years. Several it is impossible 
to say precisely how many of these millions of years have already 
passed. It would seem that the constant condensation and cool- 
ing of the sun ought to show itself in a diminished amount of heat 
and light radiated upon the earth, even during the few thousand 
years of human history. M. Faye has an ingenious hypothesis to 



360 SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. [Dec., 

account for the fact that the radiation keeps up to an unvarying 
standard. 

The contraction of the volume of the sun itself furnishes for a 
time a new supply of heat. But the constancy of radiation is 
chiefly accounted for by a double current of cooled matter from 
the surface to the centre, where it becomes reheated, and of 
intensely hot matter from the centre to the surface, so that the 
formation of a cool crust at the surface is hindered, equality of 
temperature in the whole mass of the sun is preserved, and, as it 
were, the whole burns with a more concentrated fierceness as it 
contracts in volume, and will continue to do so until the equili- 
brium is destroyed, the forces leading to extinction obtain the 
mastery, and at last incrustation takes place and the solar system 
becomes like a room from which light is shut out by the sudden 
closing of a shutter over its only window. 

The wonderful discoveries of the spectroscope have made 
known the similarity of construction which exists among all the 
stars of the universe, and all probabilities from all scientific data 
converge toward the conclusion of their common nebular origin. 
Several splendid pages of M. Faye's volume are devoted to the 
exposition of his nebular hypothesis as a universal theory. 

One interesting chapter is devoted to the topic of " Geological 
Concordances." The Treatise on Geology by M. A. de Lapparent, 
a work of high authority in Europe, gives as the most moderate 
probable estimate of the time required for the formation of that 
part of the terrestrial crust accessible to investigation, a period 
of 21,000,000 of years. As M. Faye professes to have proved that 
the quantity of heat annually expended by the sun multiplied by 
14,500,000 expresses the whole amount which the sun has been 
able to develop by its formation from the primitive chaos, he 
logically infers that the sun has not been dispensing its present 
annual amount of heat during 15,000,000 of years. On Laplace's 
theory that the planets issued successively from the mass of the 
sun, it is necessary to add all the heat which it expended during 
the formation of all these planets to the amount expended since 
the beginning of the primary epoch of our planet. This places 
the data of astronomy in a contradiction with those of geology, 
which appears to M. Faye insoluble except by his own theory. 

He says : 

" Unless we shut our eyes, and reject embarrassing data with the sole 
purpose of reducing the duration of the grand phenomena of the natural 
history of our globe, we must conclude that our globe is more ancient than 
the sun ; in other terms, the first rays of the nascent sun must have illumi- 



1 886.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 361 

nated an earth already consolidated, already manipulated by the waters 
under the influence of the earth's central heat alone " (p. 280). 

Before Laplace it was supposed that the conditions of per- 
petual stability were wanting in the mechanism of the solar 
system, which is, therefore, liable to become dislocated, or en- 
tirely englobed into the mass of its central sun. Laplace estab- 
lished the theorem of its mechanical stability. M. Faye proceeds 
to show, however, with a sombre eloquence, that the sun is rapid- 
ly proceeding toward its own extinction, as a stm, in the last sec- 
tion of his last chapter, entitled " The End of the Actual World." 
He says : 

"But the world, in order to endure, expends no energy, while the sun, 
in order to shine, expends an enormous quantity; and since its provision is 
limited and cannot be renewed, we must look forward to the death of the 
sun, as a sun, not indeed as near, but as inevitable. After having shone 
with an equal brilliancy for many thousands of years to come, it will finish 
by fading and becoming extinguished like a lamp whose oil is exhausted. 
Moreover, a considerable number of celestial phenomena give us warning 
of this event; these are the stars whose light vacillates, those which be- 
come periodically extinguished, at least for the naked eye as the star 
Omicron in the Whale and those which finally disappear.* . . . We must 
therefore renounce those brilliant fancies by which some seek to delude 
themselves into a view of the universe in which it is regarded as the im- 
mense theatre where a spontaneous development is progressing which 
will have no end. On the contrary, life must disappear from the earth, the 
grandest material works of the human race must be effaced by the action 
of the remaining physical forces which will outlive it for a time. Nothing 
will remain, not even ruins " (pp. 306-309). 

There are some celestial phenomena which seem lifce positive 
traces and evidences of the actual process of world-construc- 
tion in the universe, according to the ideal plan of the nebu- 
lar theory. It aids much to a distinct conception of the succes- 
sive stages of any constructive method in mechanical art if one 
can inspect specimens of the work in these various stages, from 
beginning to completion. The architect of the universe seems to 
have left some specimens of this kind to the inspection of scienti- 
fic observers. There are nebulosities in the universe which are 
purely gaseous, as specimens of the cosmic matter in the condi- 
tion of the most elementary composition of primary constitutive 
principles. There are others of a more complex constitution, 
apparently in the way of stellar formation. The ring of Saturn 
is a solitary remaining specimen in our world of the cosmic rings 
from which the planets were formed. The crowd of asteroids 

* Instances are, a star in Cygnus, one in Serpentarlus, and one in Corona Borealis. 



362 SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. [Dec., 

between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter may be regarded as the 
result of a failure in the process of planetary formation from a 
ring-, the ring having broken up in such a way that no part of 
it was large enough to attract the rest so as to form one large 
planet. Mitchell's remark that the ring of Saturn was left to 
show us how the world was made may be applied to all the 
phenomena we have enumerated under this head. 

Having now given a sufficient though not a complete analysis 
of the strictly scientific part of M. Faye's able and brilliant work, 
we may turn toward a consideration of the relation between his 
astronomical theory and the dictates of natural religion' or philo- 
sophical theism. Questions immediately concerning revealed 
truths and Holy Scripture will be postponed for future consi- 
deration. 

M. Faye has not avoided the theological side of cosmogony. 
His introduction is entitled " La Science et Tldee de Dieu." 
The following extract from it will show what M. Faye thinks of 
the relation of science to theology : 

" We contemplate, we know, at least in respect to its immediately appre- 
hensible form, this world, which itself knows nothing. Thus, there is 
something other than terrestrial objects, other than our own body, other 
than the splendid stars ; there is intelligence and thought. And since our 
intelligence has not made itself, there must exist in the world a superior 
intelligence from which our own is derived. Therefore, the greater the 
idea one forms of this supreme intelligence, the nearer will it approach to 
the truth. We run no risk of deception in regarding this intelligence as 
the author of all things, in referring to it those splendors of the heavens 
which have, awakened our thought, in believing that we are not alien or 
indifferent to him, and, in fine, we are altogether ready to accept under- 
standingly the traditional formula : God, the Father Almighty, Creator of 
Heaven and Earth. 

"As to denying God, this is as if one should let himself fall heavily from 
these heights upon the ground. These stars, these wonders of nature, that 
they should be the effect of chance ! That our intelligence should be from 
matter which set itself spontaneously to thinking ! Man would then be- 
come an animal like others; like them he would play for good or ill the 
ganie of this life without an object, and end like them after fulfilling the 
functions of nutrition and reproduction ! 

" It is false that science has ever by its own movement arrived at this 
negation. . . . 

"This is what I had to say of God, whose works it belongs to science 
to examine." 

Why should it be thought that there is any tendency in the 
nebular theory toward a denial of the providence, the creative act, 
or the existence of God ? A false report has been long and widely 



i886.] SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. 363 

circulated that Laplace said to Napoleon that his theory made it 
superfluous to resort to the hypothesis of divine power, as New- 
ton had been obliged to do by the exigencies of his deficient sys- 
tem. Faye successfully exculpates Laplace from this charge, and 
proves that the great astronomer merely asserted that he, by 
proving the mechanical stability of the solar system, had shown 
that there was no need of a direct divine interference to correct 
from time to time its aberrations (p. 130). 

This is something quite distinct from the nebular theory. But 
because some atheists have adopted this theory, and have fool- 
ishly attempted to trace the origin of the universe to a primitive 
nebulous chaos as the ultimate and sufficient reason of its exis- 
tence, a fear has beset some pious minds lest the theory itself 
should logically lead to atheism. 

This fear is groundless. For the putting back of the direct 
creative and formative actions of divine power in the cosmogony 
to a greater distance, so to speak, by interposing long ages of 
duration, and a long series of second causes, between the present 
time and the first instant of time at which the creation began ; 
the present condition of complex facts in the universe and the 
inchoate state which was next to the first cause, and in which 
second causes first began to act this process of recession, as one 
may call it, in no way affects the relation of effects and second 
causes to the first cause. 

M. Faye well and justly remarks that the demonstration of 
the existence of God from the wonders of the heavens does not 
depend on the exactness of our ideas respecting astronomy and 
cosmogony. " No one of the systems of cosmogony adds or sub- 
tracts an iota from the force of the argument " (p. 2). Cicero's 
superb argument in his De Naturd Deorum is not damaged by his 
incorrect astronomy. The argument is essentially the same, as 
presented by Newton and by Faye, with that of Plato and of 
Cicero. Newton supposed that the equilibrium of the solar sys- 
tem was unstable and required a divine intervention from time 
to time to rectify it. It has been proved to be stable through the 
operation of constant laws. The divine power is just as neces- 
sary to found a stable equilibrium as to regulate a system whose 
equilibrium is unstable. Newton supposed that the Almighty 
created our solar system, as it were, out of hand, as a maker of 
scientific instruments constructs an orrery. Then he gave it 
an impulse of centrifugal motion, and impressed the law of gravi- 
tation as a controlling force, so that it continues to execute regu- 
larly its rotations and revolutions. The nebular theory traces 



364 SCRIPTURAL QUESTIONS. [Dec., 

the reign of law under the controlling force of second causes 
back to an original constitution and to original forces in the uni- 
versal cosmic nebula. 

Now, as we have retraced the ideal process of cosmogony in 
M. Faye's theory back to the first elements of cosmic constitution 
and development, what have we found ? 

We have found, as the first and necessary conditions to the 
beginning of this process, an immense mass of primary matter 
and inconceivably powerful impulses of motive force. Every 
atom of this matter, in the words of an eminent scientist, bears 
the marks of a " manufactured article." This is true of the mi- 
nutest molecule of the simplest gaseous substance. What shall we 
say, then, of that variety of chemical composition necessary to a 
nebulous mass which is destined to condense into more or less 
solid spheres ? 

Then when we consider how powerful and how regulated 
must have been the forces which drove the. separated nebulous 
masses into vast distances from each other, when we consider 
how these forces developed in our world and in other worlds 
into interior forces, acting so variously and producing such va- 
rious results, what must we conclude ? 

Rational thinking must lead us up to the First Cause, the Su- 
preme Intelligence and Power, which has created and which gov- 
erns all for a wise and good end. The nebular theory is in per- 
fect accord with the dictates of natural, rational theology. What 
relation it may bear to revealed theology we hope to consider in 
another article. 



FAITH. 

THE fire, unfed, in ashes dies away ; 

The lamp, unfilled, begets no gentle ray ; 

So faith unproved in holy deeds must yield, 

While sin, triumphant, guards the much-sought field. 



1 886.] "HAS ROME JURISDICTION." 

"HAS ROME JURISDICTION?" 
II. 

THE residence, during seventy-odd years, of the Roman pon- 
tiffs at Avignon is certainly a very singular episode in the his- 
tory of the church. When Bertrand de Got, previously Arch- 
bishop of Bordeaux, was elected pope in 1305 under the title of 
Clement V., there appeared to be no valid reason for a change of 
residence nothing, that is, which could counterbalance the evils 
and inconveniences which must necessarily result to the church 
from the removal of the seat of the supreme ecclesiastical govern- 
ment from the Eternal City, where, securely imbedded in its 
own patrimony of St. Peter and surrounded with the prestige of 
centuries of sovereign independence, it could, as from some com- 
manding watch-tower elevated high above the mists and storms 
of conflicting nationalities, give laws to the churches and peoples 
and decide in matters of faith. For the change in this respect 
was no slight one. However sincere Clement might himself 
have been in his intention of preserving the dignity and inde- 
pendence of the Apostolic See, it could not be but that he, a 
Frenchman, living within the borders of France, should be more 
or less under French influences ; and even had he been a man of 
such firm and self-reliant character (which was scarcely the case*) 
as to be entirely innoxious to these influences, he could hardly, un- 
der the circumstances, avoid being the victim of suspicions which 
could not but be hurtful to his office and impede its full and free 
exercise. However, our duty is not at present to discuss either 
the utility or the morality of the course pursued by this pope and 
his five successors ; we have simply to deal with the legal aspect of 
the question arising from the position maintained by the Church 
Times, which brieflv amounts to this: that inasmuch as, according 
to the recognized principles of canon law, a bishop who does not 
reside in his diocese thereby vacates it, " the see of Rome was 
ipso facto void during the long residence of the popes at 
Avignon," to which the Church Quarterly adds the amazing 
statement that " when the popes went to Avignon they broke 

* " Philip," says Dr. Von Dollinger, " already knew what easy compliance he might expect 
from this man when, by his ambassadors who had gone to Perugia for this express purpose, by 
his gold, and by the influence of the Cardinal Peter Colonna, who had been deprived by Boni- 
face, he guided the voices in favor of Bertraiid " (Hist, of the Church, vol. iv. p. 98). 



366 "HAS ROME JURISDICTION" [Dec., 

up the Roman succession and established a new primacy at 
Avignon." * 

Now, it is perfectly true that the law of the Catholic Church, 
as it at present stands, strictly enjoins the residence of bishops 
in their droceses. Any prelate who absents himself without just 
cause for more than three months incurs, according to the Tri- 
dentine decree, the forfeiture of one-fourth part of one year's 
fruits, and if his absence be extended to six months the penalty is 
doubled. Beyond this it is further enacted that should this ab- 
sence be still more prolonged it becomes the duty of the metropoli- 
tan to denounce the offender to the Holy See, who in the last resort 
may remove him from his office. But in regard to this matter 
of the residence of bishops two things are to be noted. First, it 
ws not until the Council of Trent that these enactments came 
into force ; previous to that, as all historians bear witness, the 
discipline of the church had been exceedingly lax in this respect. 
And, secondly, the extreme penalties of deprivation, when they 
were determined, merely possessed force ex sententia ferenda 
that is to say, after the formal sentence of the pope, and by no 
means ipso facto by the commission of the offence itself. f But all. 
this is entirely irrelevant, as we shall now proceed to show that 
" upon the fundamental principles of canon law " the disciplinary 
enactments with their penalties relating to bishops have nothing 
whatever to do with the pope, who is above all ecclesiastical law, 
its source, and, when occasion serves, its abrogater. 

In proof of this fact we cite the following from the learned 
theologian Bouix, \ who, treating of the authority of the pope 
over the canons and the other prerogatives which he possesses 
by divine right, says : 

" The power of the Roman pontiff over the canons necessarily and evi- 
dently follows from his authority over an oecumenical council. It would 
have been sufficient to refer the reader to that portion of this work which 
treats upon that point. But having in view the fact that the negation of 
this prerogative constituted one of the four ill-fated Gallican Articles of 
1682, we shall, in order that the falsity of the Gallican tenets may the more 

* The weakness of Anglican logic is nowhere better illustrated than in this passage. It is 
sufficient for a bishop to desert his see and reside elsewhere to become bishop of his new home. 
Nusquam cleri eligentis vel posted consentientis aliqua mentio ! . 

t Cf. Pius IV. in constit. In suprema ; also Concil. Trident., sess. vi. De Reform, cap. i. 

J We ought, perhaps, to apologize for occupying so much space with excerpts from canon- 
ists and theologians ; but inasmuch as this is the very ground upon which the Church Timestias 
challenged us, these quotations constitute, not merely as regards the arguments and evidence 
contained in them, but as quotations in se, the reply needed. Original arguments would be of 
no avail here. 

Bouix, De Papa, vol. iii. part v. p. 309. 



1 886.] "HAS ROME JURISDICTION'" 367 

easily be exposed, proceed briefly to vindicate the pontifical authority over 
the canons." 

The first thesis which he lays down in this connection is as 
follows: Authority over the canons pertains to the Roman pontiff by 
divine right : 

" By the word canon is generally understood the decrees or laws both 
of the Roman pontiffs and also of general councils. When, however, this 
question is discussed among theologians no question arises regarding dog- 
matical canons or decrees, but merely concerning canons of discipline 
whether, to wit, the power of the pope over disciplinary regulations of this 
sort extends not only to the abrogation of, or dispensation from, his own 
canons and those of his predecessors, but also to those of general councils. 
Nor, indeed, do the Gallicans deny this power with reference to the decrees 
issued by the pope or his predecessors, but merely regarding those set forth 
by a general council or established by the universal practice of the 
church." 

The author then proceeds to show that it is of faith that the 
power given to St. Peter of feeding, ruling, and governing the 
universal church passes on in its entirety to his successors to the 
end of time. Therefore, he argues, each successive pontiff pos- 
sesses at any given time precisely the same power as his pre- 
decessors had. But he would not possess the same but an 
inferior authority if he could not change or abrogate a law 
enacted by one of his predecessors regarding disciplinary mat- 
ters in themselves mutable ; therefore, he maintains, there is no 
canon of discipline, mutable in itself, enacted by any pope, which 
cannot, should change of time and circumstances demand it, be 
changed and abrogated by his successors. This argument is in 
itself unanswerable, to all at least who accept the doctrine of the 
Petrine succession of the primacy, and does not need, as the 
author observes, further proof which could easily be given 
from the constant practice of the church. 

In the next place, the author maintains that the pope is superior 
to the canons enacted by a council independently of the pope. This 
again is in opposition to the Gallicans. As we are not at present 
engaged in proving the truth of the theory here set forth, but 
merely the fact that it is the recognized teaching of Catholic 
theologians, it is unnecessary to quote from the passages referred 
to by the author. 

The third proposition is that the pope is superior to canons 
enacted by the pope and council conjointly : 

" Fourthly, the pope is superior to canons confirmed by the general accept- 
ance and practice of the ecclesia dzspersa." " It is evident that the authority 



368 "HAS ROME JURISDICTION" [Dec., 

of the church at large is not superior to that of the church assembled in 
oecumenical council." 

" Lastly, the practice of the church establishes the fact that the pope is 
superior to the canons : 

" (i.) According to the ancient canons and common discipline of the 
church, the clergy were ordered to obtain dimissorial letters (litterce 
formatce) each from his own bishop, and the bishops from the metropolitan, 
whenever they wished to travel outside of their diocese. But Pope Zozi- 
mus made an alteration in this law as regards the church of Gaul, enacting 
as follows : // has pleased the Apostolic See that should any one from any part of 
Gattl, in whatever grade of the ministry, desire to visit us at Rome or to travel 
elsewhere, he shall in no case set out without having obtained dimissorial letters 
from the bishop of the metropolitan church of Aries (epistolaa R. P. editae a 
D. Coustant, t. i. col. 938). Pope Zozimus, therefore, was of opinion that 
authority had been transmitted to him even over conciliar canons. And it 
is noteworthy that this was a change of no small moment, which compelled 
the whole clergy of Gaul, including the archbishops and bishops, to obtain 
their letters from the Bishop of Aries (who was then constituted vicar of 
the Apostolic See for the whole of that country) as often as they wished to 
travel abroad. And the aforesaid pontiff so enacted, not because it seemed 
good to an oecumenical council, but because it so pleased the Apostolic See." 

" (ii.) Pope Symmachus, at the Sixth Council of Rome, A.D. 504 (Labbe, 
t. iv. col. 1371): We are necessitated by the government of the Apostolic See, 
and are constrained in order to the due disposition of ecclesiastical affairs, so to 
weigh the decrees contained in the canons of the Fathers, and to estimate the ordi- 
nances of our predecessors, as that, after all due consideration, we may regulate 
as far as may be, under divine assistance, those things which the exigencies of 
the times demand for the renovation of the churches." 

"(iii.) Towards the end of the fourth century the bishops of Africa be- 
sought Pope St. Anastasius to commute in their favor a certain decree 
enacted by a transmarine that is (as they themselves observe), a Roman 
council." (See their epistle apud Coustant, col. 3734.) 

The author mentions among other instances that in the begin- 
ning of the same century Pope St. Melchiades in like manner 
abrogated the primitive canon forbidding bishops who had lapsed 
into schism and who had subsequently returned to the unity of 
the church from retaining their previous dignity. St. Gregory 
the Great, too, dispensed with certain points in the fifth canon of 
Nicasa prescribing the convocation of provincial synods twice in 
each year. 

While, however, it is perfectly clear from the foregoing that 
the Roman pontiff possesses the power of changing, abrogating, 
or suspending the disciplinary laws of the church, there is never- 
theless, as our author distinctly states, a certain sense in which he 
is himself bound 1o their observance. He explains that an obli- 
gation of this kind may be understood in a twofold way : 

" Either because he is subject to the law and to the power which made 



1 886.] "HAS ROME JURISDICTION" 369 

it, or because, although he is not subject, he is nevertheless, for the sake 
of good example and of avoiding hurtful changes, bound to the observ- 
ance of the canons, when neither necessity nor utility prompts a different 
course." 

What we have already said is sufficient to establish the gene- 
ral fact that the Roman pontiffs are in no way bound in the 
former sense, whereas the latter proposition needs no proof. 
Hence the author remarks that the question regarding the 
Roman pontiff in relation to the canons is of the same nature 
as that concerning the temporal prince in his relation to the 
laws: 

" For inasmuch as the prince is the supreme authority, he can validly 
change his own decrees or those of his predecessors, nor is he bound by 
those laws as a subject. When, however, a change in the laws, effected with- 
out reasonable cause, is harmful, and the example of the prince in not ob- 
serving them equally so, the obligation constraining the prince to the ob- 
servance of the existing laws arises from a higher law, to wit, the natural 
or divine. He will therefore sin and be failing in his office of Supreme 
Pastor if he should abrogate canons relating to mutable discipline, except 
in cases of necessity or utility, or if he himself, who ought to be a model to the 
flock of Christ, should not observe them. But since he himself is not subject 
to them, nor is wanting in the power of abrogating, the abrogation will be 
valid." 

Space forbids us to continue our quotations from this learned 
and orthodox writer, who proceeds to disprove at considerable 
length the Gallican arguments, and subsequently to demonstrate 
in his eighth proposition that this doctrine of the supremacy of 
the pope over the canons is not merely certain but is of faith. 
For this, however, we must refer the reader to the treatise itself. 
We shall see in due course an application of this doctrine in re- 
gard to simoniacal appointments and ordinations, by no less au- 
thorities than Suarez and Ferraris, when we come to consider the 
case of Alexander VI. 

With regard, however, to the bearing of these principles upon 
the papal residence at Avignon, it will be perfectly clear that, 
however sinful the action of Clement V. may have been, how- 
ever he may have allowed the interests of country, family, and 
self to outweigh those of Christ and his church,* however cul- 
pably neglectful he may have been of those lofty considerations 
which should hold the first place in the mind of the Vicar of 

* " Personal feelings of revenge, anxiety for the aggrandizement of his relatives and for the 
interests of the French court, were the principal springs of the actions of this pontiff" (D61- 
linger, History of the Church, vol. iv. p. 99). 
VOL. XLIV. 24 



370 "HAS ROME JURISDICTION." [Dec., 

Christ, there can be no possible doubt as to the validity of his 
acts, whether in the creation of cardinals or in dispensing both 
them and himself from those duties of residence which, as bishops 
and priests, the canon law required in them. 

Were other evidence required we might call in that of Suarez, 
who asserts plainly that irregularity even in a case of homicide 
cannot touch the Sovereign Pontiff, " for although he is under 
obligation to his own laws as regards their directive force, he is 
not, however, as regards their coercive "/ * while the strange theory 
of the Church Quarterly Reviezv that " when the popes went to 
Avignon they broke up the Roman succession and created a 
new primacy at Avignon," is thus completely refuted by Fer- 
raris : 

"Whence Eugenius IV. at the Council of Florence in the letters of 
union clearly confirms our opinion: We define that the Holy Apostolic See 
and the Roman pontiff hold the primacy over all the world, and that full power 
of feeding, ruling, and guiding the universal church was confided to it by our 
Lord Jesus Christ in the person of St. Peter. Hence the Apostolic See cannot 
be removed from the city of Rome and transferred elsewhere : and so, not- 
withstanding that the city of Rome has been so many times laid in ruins, 
the Apostolic See has always remained fixed at Rome ; and although for 
many years several of the Roman pontiffs resided at Avignon, as Clement 
V., etc., nevertheless the Apostolic See always remained affixed to the 
Roman episcopate, and this title the Roman pontiffs used in their apos- 
tolical and pontifical rescripts, whence comes the common adage, Ubi Papa, 
ibi Roma." t 

This aphorism the Church Quarterly, strangely enough, inverts : 

"The popes living at Avignon could no more be considered bishops of 
Rome than St. Peter, living in Rome, could be considered as still Bishop of 
Antioch. And Pope Benedict XIV. says: ' No one who is not Bishop of 
Rome can be styled successor of Peter, and for that reason the words of 
our Lord, Feedmy sheep, can never be applied to him ' (De Synod. Dioeces., 
ii. i). Thus the Petrine principle is Ubi Roma, ibi Papa." 

These words give the clue to the Anglican position in this 
matter. Professing to argue upon the " principles of Roman 
canon law," they proceed, in open violation of those principles, 
to treat the Roman pontiff as an ordinary bishop. Accustomed 
.as the Ritualists are to be in everything a law to themselves, 
repudiating alike the decisions of the courts of the Established 
Church and the rulings of their own bishops whenever they do 

* Suarez, In tertiam partem D. TJtomce, De Irregularitate, disp. xl. sect. vii. No. 7. 
t Ferraris, vol. iii. sub titulo Ecclesia, art. ii. Nos. 18 and 19. 



1 886.] "HAS ROME JURISDICTION:' 371 

not accord with their own fads and predilections, it is not sur- 
prising that they should yield to the temptation of handling the 
jurisprudence of the Catholic Church in the same manner. Au- 
thority has no place in their code ; the recognized interpreters of 
legal tradition in the church must make way for their own ipse 
dixits. The pope is a bishop, therefore he is bound by the laws 
regulating bishops. We have shown that it is an axiom in canon 
law that the pope, of all men, alone is not so bound. If he were 
so, if there were any tribunal upon earth capable of judging him, 
any law ecclesiastical for failure in obedience to which he might 
be judged, how then would he be supreme ? Upon the prin- 
ciples of Anglicanism or of Gallicanism, of course, he is not su- 
preme ; but our contemporaries should remember that in the eyes 
of the Catholic Church, upon whose principles they profess to 
take their stand, Anglicanism is a monstrosity and Gallicanism an 
extinct and exploded error. 

And this brings us to the third argument adduced by the 
Church Times. We have just denied that there is any earthly 
tribunal which can judge the pope, or any law by which he can 
be judged by man. What, then, it may not unnaturally be asked, 
about the Council of Constance, by which two claimants to the 
Papacy were deposed and a new pontiff elected irregularly, the 
Church Times maintains in the person of Martin V.? Now, the 
difficulties connected with this miserable period of schism and its 
extraordinary termination are not new ; they have been treated 
over and over again in the pages of historical and controversial 
writers,* and to these we might well refer our readers, were it 
not that the Church Quarterly Review, still harping on its favorite 
idea that the jurisdiction of the Papacy has ceased to exist, de- 
clares that it is " impossible to decide which of the rival popes 
during this period had a rightful claim to his position, so that, on 
Bellarmine's principle that ' a doubtful pope is accounted as no 
pope,' the quasi-occupants of the Roman See during these many 
years must all be rejected, and the Papacy be regarded as void." 

We have already said enough to show that were we to admit 
everything which is stated in this passage that Bellarmine, for 
instance, ever had the intention of asserting that a doubtful pope 
is no pope in the sense that the see is vacant during his pontifi- 
cate, and, consequently, that throughout this whole period no 
true pontiff sat in the chair of Peter the idea that the succession 
of pontiffs thereby failed, and could never, under the present con- 
stitution of the church, be resuscitated, is an illusory one. There 

* Archbishop Spalding's Essays, for instance. 



372 "HAS ROME JURISDICTION." [Dec., 

is no reason why a general council like that of Constance should 
not elect a valid pontiff who should subsequently ratify its other 
acts and render it oecumenical. The absence of a head is mani- 
festly no bar to such an election, because the mere fact of a papal 
election presupposes this absence. If the local church of Rome, 
widowed of its bishop, has the inherent power to assemble and 
elect another, much more, surely, may the universal church of 
Christ, assembled in general synod, proceed to the election of a 
chief pastor necessary for the preservation of unity and the main- 
tenance of sound doctrine. Nor in this particular election does 
there appear, in spite of the Church Times, to have been anything 
irregular. The council was certainly a general council ; it repre- 
sented the entire church, for the cardinals, clergy, and people of 
both obediences (that of John XXIII. and of Gregory XII.) took 
part in the election, and the handful of fanatics who remained 
with Pedro de Luna at Pefiiscola were surely of no account. The 
possibility of this man being the true pope is of the slenderest 
kind ; there can be but little doubt that whether the election of 
Urban VI. was forced upon the cardinals in conclave by the 
threats of the Roman people or not (and these threats appear to 
have been of a very mild kind *), he was accepted as a true pon- 
tiff by the entire church, and the subsequent election of his rival, 
Clement VII., was undertaken in the face of the emphatic protest 
of the most renowned canonists in Christendom. f The chances 
of De Luna, who succeeded him, were rendered still more attenu- 
ated by the openly simoniacal practices of his predecessor ; he, 
too, in company with the other schismatical cardinals, took an 
oath previous to the election, whose conditions he subsequently 
ostentatiously refused to fulfil ; even the sainted Dominican, Vin- 
cent Ferrer, deserted him at last, declaring him to have been a 
perjurer. Against the third claimant John XXIII. the crime of 
simony was conclusively proved before the fathers at Constance;:}: 
and as there cannot in his case be even any pretence of subsequent 
universal acceptation by the church, the council acted fully within 
its powers in deposing him. It is of such men as these, doubtless, 
that Bellarmine asserts that as doubtful popes they were no popes 
at all, while he who was probably the successor of St. Peter, in 
whose line, in all probability, the succession had been kept up 
throughout all these trying times, the venerable Gregory XII., 

* " They speak only of prayers and entreaties, of the shouts that were heard in the streets, 
and of their fear that worse might follow " (Dollinger, Hist, of the Church, vol. iv. p. 133). 

t Ibidem, p. 132. \ Ibidem, p. 165. 

In the sense that a general council might set them aside for the well-being of the church. 
Neither of our contemporaries give any references. 



1 8 86.] ' *HA s ROME JURISDIC TION. " 373 

voluntarily resigned in the interests of the peace and unity of the 
church. Behold how the true shepherd gives his life for the 
sheep, while the hireling and impostor live but to ravage the 
flock. 

In dealing, however, with this matter of the great schism, the 
question may not unnaturally arise as to its bearing upon the rule 
or canon of St. Irenseus, with which we have dealt at length on 
a former occasion.* To what authority, throughout these forty- 
odd years, were the faithful to look for that keynote of Catholic 
doctrine which the saint establishes as existing in the teaching 
of the See of Peter ? We have said more than once that the 
church cannot be divided, because her centre of unity is consti- 
tuted in an individual. Break that up, set up a double popedom, 
or render doubtful for a long lapse of time which is the true pope, 
and has not the dreaded calamity actually befallen the church ? 
Has not the rule of faith broken down and left us in darkness 
blacker than that of the pagans of old by reason of its contrast 
with the seeming light which we had before possessed ? We are 
bold to say that during the period of history referred to nothing 
of the sort took place. It is quite conceivable, humanly speak- 
ing, that it might have done so. Pontiff after pontiff might have 
succeeded each other in double or triple line down to the present 
day ; had the church not been divine they very possibly would 
have done so, judging, at least, from the example of the Oriental 
schismatics. Each of these three lines might have favored some 
special school of theology or some pet doctrine say on the nature 
and efficacy of divine grace and its respective pontiffs might have 
elevated their favorite doctrines into dogmas of faith by ex cathe- 
dra definitions. It is manifest that in such a case as this the whole 
economy of the ecclesia docens would have been thrown into inex- 
tricable and irremediable confusion, the rule of faith would have 
been lost, Christ's promises to the church proved a delusion, and 
the Catholic religion itself would probably not have survived 
that revival of pagan ideas and that revolution in thought conse- 
quent upon what is termed the Renaissance. Nor is it even pro- 
bable that its outward shell would have long remained, as have 
the outward shells of Nestorianism, Eutychianism, and Photian- , 
ism in the conservative and changeless East. In Europe the 
old order was on the point of changing, giving place to new. 
The seeds of negligence and corruption on the part of the Catho- 
lic clergy were producing a plentiful crop of sceptics and scof- 
fers at all ecclesiastical authority ; and had the schism but con- 

* " St. Irerueus and the Roman See " (THE CATHOLIC WORLD, July, 1883). 



374 "HAS ROME JURISDICTION." [Dec., 

tinued till the time of Luther; had there existed, when his hand 
applied the torch, instead of one united church under the majestic 
Leo X., a body weakened alike in faith and capacity for action 
by schism and revolt, who could foretell the consequences? But 
nothing of the sort took place. Not a solitary one of these rival 
pontiffs meddled with the dogmas of religion in any way or 
shape ; such as they found them, such they left them ; and the 
faithful, consequently, could be in no doubt whatever as to what 
to believe for their souls' salvation. They may have been, in fact 
they were, in doubt as to who was the true pope, and so the dis- 
cipline of the church suffered terribly. But no shadow of doubt, 
having the schism as its cause, ever crossed their minds in mat- 
ters of faith and morals. Why was this so ? 

What was it that restrained these haughty, corrupt, and self- 
seeking men from thus defiling the fold of Christ and leading his 
flock astray ? What was it ? Christ's promise registered in the 
heavens and recorded there eternally : Thou art Peter, and upon 
this rock I will build -my church, and the gates of hell shall not pre- 
vail against it. Peter's successor might be obscured and hidden 
from view for a time, but Peter's see was there, and upon it as 
upon a rock the church rested secure. And when, after well- 
nigh forty years of storm and tempest, the boat of Peter emerg- 
ed from the mists of doubt and anxiety which had racked the 
minds and breasts of its most saintly sons and daughters, then 
indeed was it plainly and visibly seen that Christ, Peter's master, 
was himself at the helm ; then was men's faith strengthened and 
their hearts rejoiced ; then indeed could the church raise her can- 
ticle of praise to God and sing joyfully with the royal Psalmist : 
For though I should walk in the midst of the shadow of death, will I 
fear no evils, because Thou art with me. 

Afe^ the conclusion of its second article our contemporary, 
quoting from the Church Quarterly Review, returns to its first 
argument, declaring with absolute certainty that, even supposing 
the Roman Church to have weathered all preceding storms, she 
surely succumbed under the iniquities practised by Alexander 
VI. at the end of the fifteenth century : 

" There is not the smallest doubt that his election was simoniacal and 
that he was returned by means of purchased votes. It is equally certain 
that he systematically sold the cardinalate to the highest bidder. Thus 
not only was his own popedom void by reason of simony, but the cardinals 
whom he had nominated and he nominated a great many were no true 
cardinals for the same reason." 



i86.] "HAS ROME JURISDICTION.'" 375 

From these alleged facts the Church Quarterly draws the fol- 
lowing- conclusion : 

"The electoral body was thus utterly vitiated and disqualified by canon 
law at least as far back as 1513, and no conceivably valid election of a pope 
has taken place since that of Innocent VIII. in 1484, even if every defect 
prior to that date be condoned, and it be conceded that the breaches in the 
tenth, eleventh, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries were made good some- 
how. There has not been any retrospective action taken in regard to this 
final vitiation by simony, and to Alexander VI. belongs the responsibility 
of having made any assertion of unbroken and canonical devolution of a 
Petrine privilege in the line of Roman pontiffs impossible for any honest 
canonist or historian since his time." 

We have simply referred to this final attack in order to lay 
before our readers the true position of canon law in relation to 
simony. The absurd conclusion regarding vitiated electoral 
bodies and permanently usurping and illicit pontiffs of course 
needs no further refutation than has already been given. 

Nothing is more clearly laid down by the great doctors of 
canon law than the fact that in general, although simony renders 
all exercise of the functions pertaining to the office simoniacally 
obtained illicit, it does not render tJiem invalid. The first point is 
thus distinctly stated by Ferraris : 

" He who has been simoniacally ordained and is cognizant of the fact, 
in addition to the excommunication which he incurs ipso facto, is suspended 
from the exercise of all his orders, not only of those simoniacally received, 
but also of others, although the simony may have been effected secretly." * 

But that this suspension does not render the same acts invalid, if 
the suspended cleric has the temerity to perform them, is equally 
clear from the following: 

" It must, however, be understood that the exercise of orders and other 
acts prohibited by suspension are valid, with the exception of elections. 
Actions implying the exercise of jurisdiction are also to be excepted, and 
on this account one who has been absolutely suspended cannot validly 
absolve." t 

This is the law of the church regarding simoniacal clerics in 
general. It will be observed, however, that the exceptions laid 
down appear to play into the hands of our contemporaries, in- 
asmuch as the whole question turns upon the validity of elections 

* Ferraris, vol. vii. Simonia, art. iii. No. 12. 

t Ibidem sub titulo Suspensio, art. vii. No. 7. Cf. also Suarez, De Censuris, disp. xi. 
sect. ii. 2. 



"HAS ROME JURISDICTION" [Dec., 

and of the exercise of jurisdiction after election. And, indeed, 
their case from this point of view would be perfect were it not, 
as we have already said, that the Vicar of Christ stands in this 
respect upon an altogether different level from any one else, both 
as regards his own exemption from the operation of the canons 
and his power of dispensing others. His position in reference to 
simony is thus fully explained by Suarez : 

" Whether the pope selling a benefice may be regarded as dispensing the pur- 
chaser. This involves another question which is usually introduced at 
this point viz., whether the Roman pontiff, selling a benefice to any one 
and committing simony with him, may be regarded as dispensing him, at all 
events as regards the legal penalties. For some so deny this as to say 
that he remains excommunicate and incurs the remaining penalties. This 
opinion is advocated by Adrianus, etc. The contrary, however, is the com- 
mon opinion, and this appears to be the most agreeable to reason. For, 
first, as regards the penalty of nullity in such a collation, this is manifest 
from what has been said under the preceding heading. Secondly, as re- 
gards the penalty of excommunication, that man certainly cannot be called 
contumacious against the law of the pontiff who, in company with the 
pope himself, commits an act prohibited by law ; and without contumacy 
there is no excommunication. Moreover, it is highly improbable that a 
prince should wish to punish an action in whose performance he himself 
has shared, or which he has at least encouraged. Lastly, if simony were 
contrary only to positive law, the pope should be understood as dispensing 
as regards the sin also, and the subject himself should so regard it, since 
he ought not to suppose that the pope wishes to commit simony. Indeed, 
although simony should otherwise seem to be contrary to the divine law, 
if, however, it could be excused in the pope per mutationem matericz, the 
subject ought thus to presume and thus in good faith avoid all blame. 
When, however, the simony is of such a kind that the pontiff can by no 
means avoid incurring it, the subject is indeed involved with him in the sin, 
but together with him is excused from the penalty" 

We have now discussed the entire argument in its threefold 
ramification as served up by the ChurcJi Times for the instruc- 
tion and profit of its readers. That journal sets out with a 
mighty flourish of trumpets to announce the immediate demoli- 
tion of all claims to universal jurisdiction on the part of the 
actual occupant of the see of Peter by reason of failure in the 
succession, appealing in proof of its assertions to the fundamen- 
tal principles of Roman canon law ; and the second article con- 
cludes with these words : " As God has not taken care to protect 
the papal succession from illegitimacy and doubt, it is plain that 
he cannot have conferred any such charter upon the Roman 
Church as that which Roman Catholics allege." We have seen 



1 886.] "HAS ROME JURISDICTION" 377 

conclusively that, so far from the jurisprudence of the church 
supplying any foundation for this amazing theory, it is simply 
the ignorance of non-Catholic writers (and for this, indeed, they 
cannot be blamed) as to the real principles of canon law which 
has given rise to this singular delusion. And now, in taking 
leave of our two contemporaries, we would ask in all charity and 
Christian kindness, To what purpose is all this bombast? Do the 
conductors of the Church Quarterly Review, who are understood 
to be clergymen of name and standing, imagine that the reputa- 
tion of their periodical can possibly be enhanced in the eyes of 
impartial men of any creed by the use of arguments such as 
these, which can be accounted for only on the score of culpable 
ignorance or intentional dishonesty ? Of the latter we freely and 
frankly acquit these gentlemen. We do not for a moment sup- 
pose that the editors of either of these periodicals intended to 
misrepresent the principles of canon law. Having obtained a 
smattering of the laws relating to simony and irregularity from 
some source or other (probably some elementary text-book 
which would not contain the matter which we have extracted 
from larger works), they imagined that they had got hold of a 
good thing, and set themselves to work it for all that it was 
worth. But, alas ! 

"A little learning is a dangerous thing," 

and when men without any theological training and still less 
knowledge of ecclesiastical jurisprudence undertake so stupen- 
dous an operation as the destruction of the Papacy upon the 
principles of canon law, they and their admirers must not be sur- 
prised or disappointed if all that they effect is the making a mild 
exhibition of themselves, when the pregnant rumblings of the 
mountain of Protestantism, the birth-pangs of the Church Quar- 
terly, and the portentous parturition of the Church Times can 
only succeed in producing such a very ridiculous mouse. 



378 THE SHOONEEN. [Dec., 



THE SHOONEEN. 
i. 

ALEXANDER MACALLISTER, of Baremoor, in the County of 
Wexford in Ireland familiarly known in his district as " Sandy 
the Shooneen" was the impecunious proprietor of a broad, low- 
lying tract of sterile, marshy land. His tenants were a lot of 
half-starved, rack rented creatures, who toiled from morn till 
night to meet the half-yearly "gale-day." Of Ulster extraction, 
he was a rigid Presbyterian, a bitter hater of Catholicism, a vio- 
lent loyalist as the term goes and a prominent member of a 
Southern lodge. 

With his wife and daughter, the latter a beautiful young girl 
just budding into lovely womanhood, he resided in a big, ungainly 
structure called Baremoor House, which was situated on the 
only elevated and fertile portion of his property. This shabby- 
genteel residence was deprived of much of its bleak appearance 
by a profusion of wide-spreading shade-trees that enveloped it 
at ever}' side. From the porch fronting the hall-door a gravelled 
carriage-way led down to the main entrance through a lawn of 
vivid greensward, in spring and early summer profusely decked 
with yellow daffodils and silvery daisies. 

A large, leaden-colored, iron-barred gateway, a pair of white- 
washed piers surmounted with bluestone globes, a tenantless 
lodge-house, and several huge elm-trees, the home of a large 
colony of cawing rooks, were the main outward characteristics 
of this abode of struggling gentility as viewed from the public 
road. 

Major Brown, of the County Wexford militia, was a constant 
visitor at Baremoor House. Gossip said he was paying his at- 
tentions to the lovely Flora Macallister, but to the eye of an or- 
dinary observer the cold and unresponsive manner in which 
these attentions were received told plainly that his suit was not 
a successful one. 

The major, as a rule, met the family every Sunday at church, 
and then drove home with them to a meagre yet ceremonious 
dinner, after which his host and himself whiled away the evening 
over a couple of tumblers of weak whiskey-toddy, discussing the 
stirring political events of the day, which, he would remark with 



1 8 86.] THE S HO ONE EN. 379 

great pomposity, " were fast crushing out of existence all the 
landed gentry in the country." 

One Sunday evening, as the major and his host were engaged 
in this harmless method of entertainment, the latter picked up a 
copy of the local National newspaper, and, running his eye over 
the columns, stopped at one particular paragraph, to which he in- 
vited the attention of his guest. 

" Major," he inquired, " is there any truth in this story head- 
ed ' The Duncannon Warrior and the Jackass ' ? " 

" Not that I know of," replied the major, as his streaky, filmy 
eyeballs bulged out in anticipation of a suspected unpleasant reve- 
lation. " I don't know who the blackguards can mean by ' a 
Duncannon warrior.' Of course I have to attend drill at the 
fort whenever that rascally scum of papist rebels styled the 
Wexford militia are called out for their annual training." 

" Listen to this," said Macallister, adjusting his spectacles and 
beginning to read : " ' A few nights ago, as a well-known Dun- 
cannon major was returning home at a rather advanced hour 
after paying a visit to a sympathetic Shooneen, one of Shawn 
Foddher's male donkeys insisted upon entering into a practical 
discussion with this gallant son of Mars on the much-talked-of 
subject of physical force. After a few brilliant rounds in the 
dark the jawbone or the unshod heels of the jackass proved too 
much for his military opponent, and had not the brisk scuffle 
attracted the attention of Shawn Foddher, who came quickly on 
the scene, the consequences might have proved fatal. We un- 
derstand the owner of this bloodthirsty quadruped will be sum- 
moned to attend the next Petty Sessions at Enniscorthy for allow- 
ing his donkeys to wander, uncared for, on the public road.' " 

" Don't believe one word of it, sir ! " cried the major in a vio- 
lent burst of simulated indignation. " I can't guess who it is the 
rascals intend to lampoon ; but, at the same time, I think it only 
right that I should tell you I have lodged a complaint with my 
friend Captain Caldecott against that vile rebel Shawn Foddher 
for allowing those lazy, starved, wicked-looking brutes of his to 
wander at large on the public roads. There's one friend of ours," 
continued the major, "who wouldn't be sorry to see the rascal 
turned out on the roadside." 

"Who's that?" 

" Our new rector, the Reverend Silas Lawson." 

" Why, what did he do to him ? " 

"Oh ! nothing very much," replied the major, as he reached 
out the sugar-tongs and dropped a white lump into his tumbler 



380 THE SHOONEEN. [Dec., 

of toddy. " You know the rector's misguided but still well- 
meaning craze to bring the light of the Gospel into the hovels of 
these benighted, priest-ridden papists. Well, sir," continued the 
major, as he proceeded to crush the fast dissolving sugar-lump, 
" the rector had the misfortune to meet this lazy rascal Shawn 
Foddher on his rounds, and from his unkempt and forbidding ap- 
pearance it struck the innocent clergyman that he would be a 
good subject to make a commencement on for the spread of 
Evangelical Truth. He stopped the blackguard and inquired if 
he had any family dependent on him. ' I have, yer riverence,' said 
the low scoundrel in a whining, hypocritical tone. ' I have nine in 
family, sir ' although you and I, Sandy, know the rascal hasn't 
wife or chick or child save his infernal donkeys. ' Do they ever 
read the Bible, my good man ? ' inquired Mr. Lawson. 

" ' The divil ever ' ' 

" I beg your pardon, major," broke in the host. " Speak 
easy. That last word of yours, if it caught Mrs. Macallister's 
ears, might not be very pleasant. You know this is the Sabbath 
evening." 

" Excuse me, Sandy. I was, perhaps, carried a bit away at 
the thought of that low villain's cunning, and you know I was 
quoting the exact words of Mr. Lawson himself, who told me 
the story." 

" All right; go on." 

" Well, the rector asked him why his family never read the 
Bible. ' Bekase,' said the double-distilled ruffian, 'they can't 
read, yer riverence. They don't know B from a bull's fut.' So, 
to make a long story short, after further questions on the part of 
the misguided, unsuspecting rector, and further lying answers on 
the part of this knowing, deep-plotting villain, Mr. Lawson made 
an appointment to make a morning call at the rascal's cabin." 

" Rather foolish of the reverend gentleman, I should say," 
said Macallister. " He should have asked some of us about the 
fellow's character." 

" That's just what I said to him, Sandy my very words. But, 
as Mr. Lawson told me, the low impostor looked so simple as he 
scratched his scrubby, foxy poll and asked the reverend gentle- 
man if he knew of any chapter on industry or industhry, as he 
called it in the Bible, that the innocent clergyman was fairly 
taken in. As Mr. Lawson told me, quoting the impostor's own 
identical words, 'it would be a charity fur you, yer riverence, to 
read a chapter or two on industhry to these lazy allyawns o' 
mine, to try an' induce them to do a sthroke or two o' work ; for 



1 886.] THE SHOONEEN. 381 

they'll do nothin* for me,' says the low villain, ' but ait their males 
and rowl themse'fs in the dirt from mornin' till night.' ' 

"Well, major," interrupted the host, "your friend was 
caught in the trap. I presume he visited the cabin prepared to 
read the lecture ? " 

" Not only that, Sandy, but he actually did read a large por- 
tion of a suitable epistle from Paul ; and as his sight is naturally 
weak and the cabin was so dark, he would have probably gone 
on reading, I do not know how long, were it not that one of the 
donkeys indulged in a violent fit of braying." 

"You don't mean to say he actually read the Bible to the 
donkeys ? " 

" I regret to say that he did. They were inside a kind of low 
partition, over which their heads alone protruded ; and as it was 
very dark and Mr. Lawson was very anxious to get in some 
Scripture reading, he did not perceive the deception which had 
been practised on him until he heard the first roar of the 
jackass ! " 

" I am sorry for the reverend gentleman," said Macallister, 
scarcely able to refrain from smiling. " 1 presume he won't 
bother himself much further with fellows of this type ?" 

" You may bet your life he won't, Sandy. All the benighted 
papists in the district may go to well, they may go to Hong 
Kong, or any other place of worship, before Mr. Lawson will 
ever again make a single endeavor to effect their salvation. But 
here is Mrs. Macallister, I declare. Her coming is my signal. 
'Tis high time I should be moving for home." 

" You seem to have had a very interesting discussion, what- 
ever it may have been about," remarked the lady who had just 
entered the room. 

" Merely a little story I was telling, madame," answered the 
major, rising and moving towards the hall rack, from which he 
took his overcoat; "but an end must come to everything, you 
see. I'm off." 

" Good-night, major," responded the host, as he followed his 
guest out to the hall-door. "'Tis a dark night. Take care you 
don't knock up against Shawn Foddher on your way." 

" The low, dirty scoundrel' will keep clear of me, Sandy," re- 
plied the major with a hollow laugh, "as long as I carry this 
loaded stick in my hand. I will light my pipe now ; 'twill keep 
me company on the road." 

The major now struck a match, and, having ignited his pipe, 



382 THE SHOONEEN; [Dec., 

puffed it into a blaze, and then, buttoning his coat up to his chin, 
started out on his homeward journey. 



II. 

When Macallister heard his guest slamming the road-gate 
after him he retired within the house, and barred and bolted the 
outer door. Then he returned to the sitting-room he had just 
quitted, and, throwing himself into the easy-chair lately occupied 
by his friend, proceeded to brew himself another tumbler of 
whiskey-toddy. 

His wife sat moodily by the chimney-corner, gazing into the 
embers of the now smouldering fire, and occasionally heaving a 
kind of long-drawn sigh which caused her husband to turn his 
eyes slowly in her direction. 

" Heigho ! " she ejaculated, " what a weary, weary world this 
is when the pocket is not as full as the desires." 

" Do you want money, Susan ?" inquired her husband lan- 
guidly. 

" Do I want money ? Good gracious ! Sandy Macallister, 
do you see a pair of horns growing out over my ears ? Of course 
I want money. I always want money, and that is the very rea- 
son I wished to speak to you about getting further time to pay 
Malone's bill." 

" What can I do about it ? " replied her husband, as he drained 
down his glass of punch. " It is in the hands of that young fire- 
brand lawyer O'Donoghue. He would not do me a favor. You 
had better call on him yourself; he might not have the courage 
to refuse you." 

" I have been thinking over that very plan, Sandy ; but on re- 
flection I deem it safer to send him a note asking him to come out 
here to-morrow with his client and take an inventory of sufficient 
articles of furniture for a bill of sale to secure the amount until 
we can get in some of our outstanding rents. Florry knows him 
she was introduced to him at the last fancy fair held in Gorey 
and her presence will assist me in the endeavor." 

" Very good, Susan," replied Macallister thoughtfully. " I 
have no objection to your resorting to any means in your power 
to stave off the immediate payment of this debt, but I must 
object to Florry having anything to say to this young papist 
lawyer. Major Brown " 

" Major Fiddlesticks, Sandy ! " interrupted the lady. " Do 



1 886.] THE SHOONEEN. 383 

you think my daughter would throw herself away on him ? a 
regular sot, who is fully as old as you are ! No, no ; not if I can 
help it. Florry has already given him a decisive answer which 
has settled his aspirations in her regard. I only wish this young 
lawyer O'Donoghue was not a papist. He is rich, and the alli- 
ance would get us out of all our financial embarrassments." 

The following day the lawyer and his client drove out to 
Baremoor House in answer to the lady's invitation. 

Desmond O'Donoghue, attorney-at-law, was a handsome, 
well-built, intelligent young man. He was a prominent figure 
at all the National meetings in the county, an eloquent speaker, 
and a general favorite with every patriotically-disposed human 
being in the district. His client, Dan Malone, was a stout, vulgar- 
looking old man, whose life might be said to have been entirely 
spent behind his counter, and who, as he took his seat upon a 
handsome cushioned chair, seemed ill at ease at the comfort it 
afforded. After wriggling about uneasily for some time he 
sought relief in twirling his hat in his big, fat, speckled hands, and, 
after giving an owl-like gaze about the tastefully -furnished apart- 
ment, he turned his eyes in the direction of his legal adviser. 

" I wondher, Misther Desmond," he began, in a low, whisper- 
ing tone, as he inched his chair over towards the lawyer, " is the 
Shooneen raaly sick, or is id on'y a dodge he's tryin' on uz? 
You know I can't be hard, daalin' wid the wife." 

" 1 really can't tell you, Dan," replied O'Donoghue. " I take it 
they want more time, and your permission to withhold marking 
judgment against them to-morrow. It all rests with you, whether 
you will force the immediate payment of your account, and per- 
haps smash them up, or be lenient with them and take chance 
for your money." 

" What do you advise me to do, Misther Desmond ? " 

" Whatever you please," was the quiet reply. " I have already 
explained the situation to you." 

" Well, then, Misther Desmond," said Malone, " in the name 
o' God, I won't press him ; although I know the blaackguard 
would on'y be too delighted to ruin me or you, or any of our 
way o' thinkin'. But, thank God ! I can live iddout the money, 
even if I lose it." 

" I am glad you have come to that conclusion yourself. I 
could not well have suggested it to you. But stay, I hear a step. 
Here are the ladies." 

The door was now thrown open, and Mrs. Macallister, fol- 
lowed by her daughter, entered the room. Both visitors rose 



384 THE SHOONEEN. [Dec., 

from their seats, and the lady of the house advanced towards the 
lawyer with outstretched hand and smiling countenance, after 
which she bowed, in a most condescending manner, towards the 
burly creditor. Her daughter retired to the extreme end of the 
room, and, seating herself in an easy-chair with abashed and 
downcast gaze, seemed awaiting her mother's invitation to lend 
her aid in the unpleasant interview. 

" I am so much obliged to you, Mr. O'Donoghue," began the 
arch diplomatist, " for your kindness in calling here this evening. 
I regret very much that my husband's indisposition unables him 
to attend to this purely business matter. Of course I fully 
explained his proposition to you with regard to the bill of sale, 
and if you please we can now begin and make an inventory for 
the schedule. My daughter will assist me." 

" Well, Mrs. Macallister," began the lawyer, as he cast his 
gaze in the direction of the room wherein the young lady was 
seated, " my client, Mr. Malone, has been conferring with me on 
the matter since I read your offer of security to him, and has 
come to the conclusion that an unregistered bill of sale will give 
him no better security for his debt than that which he has at 
present; therefore " 

" He refuses to accede to our offer," interrupted the lady, as a 
hectic flush mantled her cheek, and she cast a sidelong look in 
the direction of her daughter. 

" Oh ! no, madame ; you mistake," replied the lawyer, slightly 
elevating his voice. " Mr. Malone does not intend to direct me 
to mark a judgment ; on the contrary, he is willing to give you 
all further reasonable time you may require to liquidate his 
demand." 

" This is really very kind of Mr. Malone very kind indeed." 
And here Mrs. Macallister turned and bowed towards the soft- 
hearted, awkward creditor, who twirled his hat between his 
hands and seemed anything but at his ease at the lady's courtly 
politeness. " The times have been so very bad of late, Mr. 
O'Donoghue," she continued, " owing to foreign competition in 
food-products and the unfortunate political disturbances, that my 
husband has not been able to collect his rents, and, therefore, our 
circumstances have been so strained that we really have not been 
able to keep our engagements." 

" That'll be all right, ma'am," broke in Malone, to the evident 
astonishment of his auditors, " whin we'll get Home Rule." 

" Oh ! really," replied Mrs. Macallister, turning quickly around 
and darting a sharp glance at her unsophisticated creditor, " it 



1 886.] THE SHOONEEN. 385 

may be so, sir; but we ladies do not presume to understand 
politics." 

" Av coorse not, ma'am. But how can the country be ever 
well off wid one class fightin' agin the other, the landlord 
squeezin' the poor tenant in the bad times, an' the Protestan' 
threatenin' to make war on his Catholic fellow-countryman? 
For my part, ma'am, although, av coorse, I have a private regard 
for my own an' who'd blame me ? I wouldn't object to help a 
Protestan', or even a Prosbytaarian, if I thought they stud in 
need of it." 

"Bravo! Dan," exclaimed the lawyer, with a jocular air, 
seeking by his simulated hilarity to cover the rude remarks of 
his client. " Your want of bigotry does honor to your head and 
heart. But we will be going now. Mrs. Macallister, my client, 
Mr. Malone, is a trifle outspoken in his manner, but I assure you 
it is the liberality of his big Irish heart which sets his tongue in 
motion. You need not further trouble yourself about that account 
of his, but whenever convenient I will be happy to hear from 
you. Come on, Dan." 

The client rose and, with a kind of half-apologetic bow, 
moved towards the door. The lawyer fixed his gaze upon a 
pretty little water-color sketch which adorned the room, and. 
the lady of the house, perceiving the action, moved up towards 
him, and, adjusting a pair of gold spectacles, proceeded in her 
turn to study the picture. 

" That is one of my daughter Flora's sketches," she said!. 
" She has a decided taste for art, and I regret here, in this coun^ 
try place, she cannot perfect herself in its study. Florry," stre 
called out, turning towards her daughter, " do you not know ftfr.. 
O'Donoghue ? I think you told me you had been introduced to 
him." 

" Oh! yes, madame," replied the blushing disciple of; Black- 
stone. " I have had that pleasure." 

The young lady now advanced, and, lifting her long, silken 
eyelashes, gave the lawyer a glance from the depth of her violet 
orbs which set his heart beating with increased tumult ; then 
she extended her hand, which he grasped with lover-like fervor, 
and said in a quiet, half-abashed tone: "I would have recognized 
Mr. O'Donoghue before this, mother, but that his visit here was 
a strictly professional one, and, unfortunately, one pai-di under 
very distressing circumstances." 

" I am sorry, Mr. O'Donoghue," said the elder lady, " that 
my husband's views on political and religious- matters are so 
VOL. XLIV. 25 



386 THE SHOONEEN. [Dec., 

widely different from your own. He is what you style an 
Orangeman and a loyalist, and you are a Roman Catholic and a 
Nationalist. What a pity there should be a necessity for such 
broad distinctions ! " 

" Still, madame," replied the lawyer, " mutual forbearance 
will do much to conciliate conflicting parties. Your co-reli- 
gionists need not fear the action of their Catholic brethren, even 
in the moment of our triumph." 

As the lawyer took his hat off the hall rack he turned towards 
the young lady, who stood silently at the parlor entrance. 

" Good-by, Miss Macallister," he said, stretching out his hand 
and grasping hers : " I am sorry my first visit to Baremoor was 
not made under more fortunate circumstances." Then in a sotto 
voce, meant evidently for her private ear : " I will be at the 
Long Lane to-morrow evening. Can you meet me? " 

" I will try," she whispered. 

"Au revoir, then," he replied in an equally faint tone, after 
which, with a polite bow, he passed quickly out through the hall- 
door to the gravelled path in front of the building, where he 
joined his burly client, who had been impatiently awaiting his 
arrival. 

III. 

The day after the lawyer's visit Mrs. Macallister announced 
her intention of driving into the neighboring market-town to 
make some dry-goods purchases. Her daughter Florry, how- 
ever, excused herself from accompanying her, and stole out as 
soon as she saw the jaunting-car upon which her mother was 
seated pass out through the front gate. Then she struck out 
quickly across the dewy fields for the Long Lane, the hawthorn- 
bound and primrose-fringed trysting-place wherein she had pro- 
mised to meet her lover. 

With two young and sympathetically-mated human beings 
who meet to tell each other the old, old story, time flies with 
wings of speed. It was not until the sun had cast the broad, flat 
land in cool gray shade, and fired the yellow, furze-crowned sum- 
mits of the distant uplands, that prudence suggested an immediate 
homeward journey. 

As the lovers emerged from the Long Lane upon the winding 
high-road the portly form of Father Tom Doyle, the jolly old 
parish priest, was seen advancing towards them. Although 
Pather Tom, as he was familiarly called, had his hat off and was 



1 8 86.] THE SHOONEEN. 387 

evidently reciting from his breviary, still, as all the parish knew, 
he had a quick eye for everything- passing round him. 

" By Jove ! Florry," exclaimed O'Donoghue, as he recogniz- 
ed the pastor, " what a misfortune ! My friend Father Tom, and 
no way of escape. We must only make a bold front of it, and I 
can say that I met you casually on the road, and was merely ac- 
companying you as far as your own gate." 

But Father Tom was too old a bird to be caught with chaff, 
and when he approached within a few paces of his young friend 
and parishioner, and noted the deep blush which suffused his 
cheeks, he began to suspect there was something in the wind. 

He knew, of course, the lawyer's companion, and were she of 
his own fold there was no one in the entire county he would 
have been better pleased to have met in the same situation ; but 
a Presbyterian, and the penniless daughter of " Sandy the Shoo- 
neen " ! Father Tom took a vigorous pinch of snuff and blew 
his nose with his big red handkerchief. 

What was to be done ? The characteristic smile of friendly 
recognition was beginning to broaden on Father Tom's big, 
honest face, and in another moment they were within speaking 
distance. 

" Father Tom," began O'Donoghue, with ill-concealed bash- 
fulness, " this is Miss Flora Macallister, of Baremoor." 

The pastor lifted his hat and bowed. 

" I was down by the bog," continued the amatory-disposed 
lawyer, " merely to see if the young ducks were flying, as I in- 
tend having an evening's shooting at them next week, when I 
met Miss Macallister on the road." 

Something seemed to interfere with the sight of one of Father 
Tom's eyes, as he closed it into wrinkled tightness, while the 
open one gleamed with a sort of funny knowingness at his young 
parishioner. 

" I think, Desmond," said he, as he pointed towards a path- 
way a short distance from him, " this passage leads straight up 
to Miss Macallister's house." 

" Yes, sir," replied the young lady in a meek, bashful tone. 
" I fear I have delayed already too long. Good-by, Mr. O'Dono- 
ghue. I am obliged for your kindness in accompanying me so 
far." 

Then she turned her eyes towards the priest, and, stretching 
out her hand to meet his, said : " Good-by, sir." 

" Good-by, Miss Macallister," said Father Tom. " I am very 
happy, I assure you, to have made your acquaintance." 



388 THE SHOONEEN. [Dec., 

At this moment Flora's attention was attracted by the sound 
of approaching footsteps, and, looking around in a frightened 
manner, to her horror she perceived Major Brown, who had evi- 
dently been a witness to her handshaking familiarity with the 
priest. She quickened her footsteps to avoid him, but the major, 
with rapid strides, came up near her and called out : 

" Miss Florry, you seem to be in a great hurry. I am going 
up to the house to see your father, and I will accompany you. 
You ought to be as well pleased to walk and talk with me as you 
were with that ignorant popish priest you have just left. I in- 
tend telling your father all about your doings." 

" You are a mean, low man to do so," retorted the girl, glar- 
ing fiercely at her companion. " An accident caused me to meet 
that gentleman whom you call a popish priest, and I did not ex- 
change ten words with him. As a lady I could not insult him 
when I found myself respectfully addressed. You know my 
father's fierce antipathy to priests, and the misery you may en- 
tail within our family by your officious, tell-tale interference. It 
is therefore that I am forced to stoop, nay, even beg of you not 
to make any allusion to this purely accidental occurrence." 

" The answer you gave me when I pressed my own suit, and 
the sight of the man whom I have just found in your company, 
and who has lost me your affection, preclude the possibility of 
such an infringement of my duty. You have had your moment 
of triumph, Miss Macallister; I now have mine. As an officer 
in her most gracious majesty's militia, and as a Protestant gentle- 
man, I cannot conscientiously refrain from acquainting your fa- 
ther of all I have seen this evening. These rebellious priests, 
with their communistic cries of Home Rule and abolition of the 
landed interests, are now our bitterest foes. Am I, then, to see 
the daughter of my friend and brother Mason degrade herself by 
t giving her hand to a vile political firebrand ? " 

Flora Macallister felt a choking sensation in her throat. It 
was useless to argue further with this inexorable bigot, this dis- 
carded suitor for her hand. So, without another word or com- 
ment, she proceeded on her way, and on arriving at the hall-door 
dashed hurriedly up-stairs to her own room. Meanwhile the 
major, with his own additions and innuendoes, was telling his 
story to his " brother Orangeman " ; and after a few moments 
Flora heard a terrible voice, which she dreaded, calling her at 
the foot of the stairs : 

" Florry, Florry, come here at once." 

With trembling and trepidation she crept down the stairs and 



1 8 86.] THE SHOONEEN. 389 

entered the parlor, wherein her father and Major Brown now sat 
together. 

" Florry," began the now excited head of the family, " what 
is this I hear about your conduct? Have you determined on 
disgracing me? " 

" I did not disgrace you, father; I could not do so." 

" You lie, girl ! You did. Has not Major Brown seen you 
hand-in-hand with a popish priest the arch-rascal who presides 
at all the unlawful meetings in the county ?" 

" I met him accidentally, father, and I could not avoid re- 
turning a bare salute when it was given to me in common cour- 
tesy." 

" And is it not a fact that that blackguard Home Rule attor- 
ney, O'Donoghue, introduced you to him?" 

" Yes, father, I was introduced to the priest by Mr. O'Dono- 
ghue. On his visit to this house yesterday you know he did not 
prove himself a blackguard ; and he is not one either, but a gen- 
tleman and a man of honor ! " 

All this while Major Brown was sniggering and shuffling un- 
easily in his chair, evidently delighted at the domestic storm 
which his revenge had been the means of arousing. He looked 
for a moment at the girl, who, without evincing boldness or de- 
fiance, still displayed no palpable demonstration of fear. 

" You should make her solemnly promise, Sandy," he chimed 
in, "that she will never speak to that papist lawyer again." 

" She shall do so," roared Macallister, as he reached up to 
the mantelpiece and grasped a large riding-whip. " I will see to 
it that my orders are obeyed. Do you promise, girl, that you 
will never again speak or exchange a word with this papist law- 
yer-fellow with whom you were found this evening?" 

" Father," cried the now terrified Flora, throwing herself 
upon her knees, and with tearful, imploring gaze looking into her 
parent's face, now wrinkled and distorted with passion, " for- 
give me if I seem to be disobedient, but at another time, when we 
are alone, I will give you satisfactory reasons." 

"I want none of your reasons, you young Jezabel ! Do you 
promise ? " 

With head bowed down the weeping girl murmured : " I 
cannot." 

" Then by the contents of this I will make you ! " And before 
his affrighted daughter had time to lift her hands on 
heavy whip descended with terrific force across he] 
neck, and with a wild cry of pain she fell upon the 




390 THE SHOONEEN. [Dec., 



IV. 

When Mrs. Macallister arrived home she found her husband 
and Major Brown seated in the front parlor. Their noticeable 
silence and moody attitudes instantly suggested to her the idea 
that something had gone wrong in her absence ; so, suspecting 
possibly the quarter from which the trouble might have arisen, 
she eagerly inquired for her daughter Florry. 

" I don't know where she is," replied her husband gruffly, 
without even lifting his eyes to look at his wife, " and, further- 
more, I don't care. Possibly she has some popish priest keeping 
her company.'' 

" Popish priest ! " exclaimed Mrs. Macallister. " Why, Sandy, 
what do you mean?" 

" I mean," replied her husband, rising from his chair, and ele- 
vating his voice so that he might be heard by all the inmates of 
the house " I mean that if any daughter of mine wishes to culti- 
vate the acquaintance of Romish Mass-singers or rebellious Home- 
Rulers she had better quit my house for ever." 

" This is a strange expression, Sandy. I cannot understand 
you. Tell me what has happened since I left here ! " 

" Go and ask her," retorted the husband with a sneer, as he 
pointed towards the staircase " your pet daughter. I have given 
her a lesson she won't forget for some time, and if I ever catch 
her again disobeying me I will turn her homeless on the road- 
side." 

" It is unfortunately too true, Mrs. Macallister," broke in 
Major Brown, rising from his chair and moving towards the 
door, as if to take his leave. " There is no doubt about the 
matter. I saw her myself shaking hands with that old fire-brand 
priest Doyle, and smiling at him as if she were one of his most 
intimate friends." 

"And you carried the pleasant news, did you? " inquired the 
lady, with a tone of voice and a scornful glance at the informant 
which did not bode well for his future welcome at the Sunday 
dinner-table at Baremoor. 

" I considered it my duty, madame," replied the major, with a 
profound bow. 

" Then allow me, sir, to offer you my thanks for your conde- 
scension." 

" How> madame ? I do not clearly understand." 

.".Perhaps not. Was it not a condescension that you should 

9 




1 8 86.] THE SHOONEEN. 391 

lower yourself from your high military position to become a little, 
tale-bearing family disturber ? " 

" Susan," interrupted the husband, " you must not speak in that 
manner to Major Brown. I think he deserves our best thanks for 
his friendly interference." 

" That is a matter of opinion, Sandy. It is fortunate for 
Major Brown I was not here when he told his troublesome story. 
I can mind my own daughter, and I have no need of military 
spies to track her every footstep." 

" Oh ! I beg your pardon, madame," rejoined the major, look- 
ing palpably discomfited at his unpleasant position. " I believed 
I was doing you and your husband a service with this intelli- 
gence." 

" It was one, sir, which was unsought, and which I hope will 
never be repeated." 

" Then, madame, I presume I had better say good-evening." 

" Good-evening, sir," was the disdainful reply. " You have 
given me unpleasant employment enough to incapacitate me from 
entertaining you any further." 

Major Brown bowed coweringly before the irate mistress of 
Baremoor, and quickly passed out of the room. 

After a few ineffectual inquiries to her husband Mrs. Macal- 
lister instantly quitted the parlor and proceeded towards the 
bedroom of her offending daughter. The door was bolted from 
the inside, and it was not without considerable knocking and 
calling that it was opened by the fair occupant herself, who pre- 
sented such a tristful and dishevelled appearance, after her terri- 
ble paroxysm of grief and tears, that her mother was terror- 
stricken at the sight. 

" My own dear, darling Florry ! " she cried, as she threw her 
arms around her daughter's neck and kissed her fervently on the 
forehead. " What, in Heaven's name, has happened since I left 
here this morning? Your father is wild with passion, and you, 
my dear you frighten me with the appearance you present. 
But stay, what is this ? My God ! you have been cut upon the 
cheek such a blow, too ! Tell me quickly how it all occurred." 

Through her sobs the girl told her the whole story of her 
affection for the young lawyer and his reciprocal feeling; of the 
appointment in the Long Lane, the walk home, the* accidental 
meeting with Father Doyle, and the unfortunate appear^ 
Major Brown. 

"O that contemptible little tell-tale! This is 
at your refusal of his suit. But, Florry my dear, wipe 




39 2 THE SHOONEEN. [Dec., 

and brush your hair, and come down with me to supper. You 
know it will be all right when I am at the table. Brown is gone. 
I gave him a piece of my mind ; and had I then known as much 
as I do now he would not have got off so easily." 

Yielding to the kind maternal invitation, Flora arranged the 
fringe upon her neck-gear so as to hide the dark-red welt which 
had arisen from the blow, and, with her mother's arm locked in 
hers, descended slowly down the stairway. The moment the 
pair entered the apartment there was a violent commotion. 
The father swung his chair around and then sprang to his feet> 
and, with outstretched arm and forefinger rigidly extended in the 
direction of his unhappy daughter, called out in stentorian tones : 

" This girl leaves the room, or I will leave it ! I cannot sit in 
company with one who plots designing falsehoods to disgrace 
my household by associating with the sworn enemies of my 
friends and party ! " 

" O Sandy, Sandy ! " broke in the wife, " what in the name 
of wonder is the matter with you ? Are you losing your senses, 
man ? Florry is deeply grieved that she has offended you, and 
she has explained the whole matter to me. 'Twas an accident 
she met 

"Another infernal lie of hers ! " roared the now excited man. 
" Was it by accident she met that spouting rebel O'Donoghue, 
or by accident they both met that popish priest on an unfre- 
quented roadway? Leave the room, leave my presence, girl, or 
I may rue the day I first called you daughter! " 

The poor penitent, thus savagely addressed, could not articu- 
late one syllable in reply ; even her garrulous mother was, for 
the moment, tongue-tied at the sight of her husband's fearful 
wrath, and releasing her hold of her daughter's arm, which she 
had grasped at the first moment of attack, she allowed her to re- 
cede a few paces, when she instantly rushed back to her room, 
which she had just quitted. 

The moment the young girl disappeared Alexander Macallis- 
ter arose from the chair into which he had thrown himself after 
his angry outburst, and, directing a piercing glance at his wife, 
said in a deep, sarcastic tone : 

"I suppose, Susan, you are going to take sides with that re- 
bellious daughter of yours. Don't you know what I am that I 
amjQrange of the Orange, if by that is meant one loyal to his 
Xmjfiett^and the integrity of the empire?" 

/' f "QhJ nonsense, Sandy," retorted his wife, with marked acer- 
i b$byvi l h*" hen tones. " I'm sick of all this talk about you Orange- 

V:\ ' 



1 886.] THE SHOONEEN. 393 

men. You can b.e as Orange as you like, but you mustn't strike 
my daughter with your whip. I'll see that this shall never 
occur again." 

v. 

The next morning Macallister arose in no good-humor with 
the world in general. His outbreak with his daughter had 
aroused his worst feelings; and then also debts pressed heavily 
on the "Shooneen." The rents which should be paid him were 
not forthcoming. A decrease in the value of all farm produce 
and a wet, unfruitful season had incapacitated his unfortunate 
tenants from giving him even an instalment of their payments, 
and in a blind spirit of revenge he determined to invoke the un- 
relenting aegis of the law to compass their eviction. 

One of the most notable defaulters on his property was Mick 
McGrath an honest, struggling, poor fellow whom inevitable 
circumstances had reduced almost to a starving condition. 
Against this man in particular Macallister had a grudge, and he 
therefore determined upon making him what he styled a fear- 
ful example of his power. 

It was a drizzly, cheerless October morning that the measur- 
ed tramp of marching feet attracted the attention of little Patsey 
McGrath, and when he had satisfied himself as to the destination 
of the military he instantly rushed into the house, crying out, 
as he clapped his hands in the excitement of his grief: "O 
mammy, mammy, he's de sogers ! " 

Mrs. McGrath was a delicate, attenuated woman, who for 
many years had been a victim to heart-disease, and the dreaded 
announcement, although daily expected, instantly threw her into 
a fever of excitement. Her husband, who was abroad in the 
fields working at the time, no sooner perceived the approach of 
the military than he rushed wildly towards his house, and on 
entering the door was horror-stricken to find his wife lying 
fainting on the floor. The strange pallor of the woman's pinch- 
ed-up features, her closed eyes and rigidity of body, at first 
glance led him to the belief that she had succumbed to the fell 
malady which had long threatened her life ; so in the wildness of 
his grief he cast himself on his knees beside her, while the young 
children, terror-stricken at the sight of their parents, crowded 
around the motionless form of their mother, uttering piteous in- 
fantine cries which might soften the most obdurate heart. 



394 THE SHOONEEN. [Dec., 

The scene was one of those fearful ones which can be wit- 
nessed in many parts of Ireland to-day, and which will continue 
to disgrace the land as long as London-made laws shall hold 
their power in the country. 

"Halt!" 

A loud military command, a cessation of the martial tread, 
and in a few minutes the light in McGrath's kitchen was almost 
extinguished by the forms of the Shooneen and the county sheriff 
standing in the narrow doorway. 

" McGrath," began the landlord, as he fixed his gaze on his 
tenant, " I have been compelled to bring the sheriff here to get 
possession of my place. You have not kept up to your pro- 
mise." 

" 'Twas the bad saison, yer honor," pleaded the poor man, 
" an' the fall in prices, an' the sickness, that kep' me back. You 
see my wife lyin' there; I'm afeared the shock ov bein' turned 
out is afther killin' her." 

" Oh ! nonsense," replied Macallister. " This is an old trick 
to gain compassion ; but it won't work this time. Out you 
must go." 

When the sheriff had fully taken in the situation of the misery 
of the poor people whom he was about to evict, he requested the 
landlord to accompany him outside, and sought to dissuade him 
from the proceeding. 

" I fear this will be a bad business, Mr. Macallister," said he. 
" I would strongly advise you to leave this man in his holding 
for the winter. This eviction will be the talk of the whole 
county." 

" I do not care whether it is or not," was the brusque reply. 
" The fellow owes me rent, the land is mine, and I am deter- 
mined I will have possession." 

"But, Mr. Macallister," said the sheriff, "can't you see you 
are about to run a very great risk? Should the woman die on 
your hands her death will be styled ' murder ' ; and even should 
she recover sufficiently to walk away from the place her husband 
may wreak his vengeance on you. My experience tells me it is 
not safe to trust men in McGrath's unhappy condition." 

" I have considered that point also, Mr. Sheriff, and here you 
see I have come thoroughly prepared." The Shooneen then 
threw open his overcoat and pointed to an inside pocket, from 
which the shining mounting of a pistol was distinctly visible. 
"A British bull-dog, Mr. Sheriff, the contents of which this rascal 
tenant of mine will get if he dares to attack me with violence." 



1 886.] THE SHOONEEN. 395 

" Very well, Mr. Macallister, you can do as you please. We 
will proceed at your risk." 

Both men now re-entered the house. Mrs. McGrath was 
standing upright, surrounded by her little children, whom she 
was caressing and encouraging to cease their tears, as she was 
all right. 

" We're goin' away, childher," she said, unable to repress the 
tears that glistened in her eyes, "an' God an' his Holy Mother 'ill 
take care of us. Don't cry, my launa " this to a handsome-faced 
little fellow who burst into a loud lamentation when the sheriff 
and the landlord approached his mother. " We're goin' to a fine 
big house, agragh, where ye'll all get yer food an' good dhry 
beds, an' where I can see ye now an' agen. God knows I never 
thought the poor house would see me in it at the end of my 
days." 

" Mrs. McGrath," said the landlord, " you will oblige us by 
walking outside, and bringing your children with you." 

" Oh ! yis, sir," said the mother, gathering her little family 
about her slender skirts as a hen does her chickens. " We're 
goin', yer honner ; you needn't say another word." 

As the group reached the door one of the children ran back 
and clutched its father by the leg as he was sweeping up some 
Indian meal out of a box and putting it in a bag preparatory to 
his departure. Macallister turned quickly round and stretched 
out his hand to stay the little urchin, when Mick McGrath turned 
upon him with frenzy blazing in his eyes and roared out: " Laave 
go that child, you black-hearted rascal ! He'll go out whin I'm 
goin'." 

" A trick, McGrath, to hold possession. It's not the first child 
was stowed away in a hidden place to evade the law. But out 
he must go, here ! " 

The child sent up a wild howl as the landlord grasped him, 
and the father with a bound clutched Macallister's arm as in a 
vise. The Shooneen, though an aged man, was yet a strong one, 
and with a desperate wrench he rid himself from his tenant's 
clutch, then quickly his hand disappeared into his inside pocket 
as he saw McGrath rush towards the smouldering embers of the 
turf fire on the hearth. The sheriff stood spellbound with terror, 
and the child managed to make another rush towards its father. 
McGrath had quickly grasped a rough, murderous-looking iron 
bar, and in the intensity of his passion caught the little boy up in 
his arms as he whirled the rude weapon aloft in a defensive atti 
tude. 



39 6 THE SHOONEEN. [Dec., 

The Shooneen's blood was up, and the protection which he 
believed was afforded him by the pistol impelled him to advance 
a step nearer the poor hunted tenant. The child gave another 
terrified yell as the men closed together, and before the sheriff or 
any outsider could interfere there was a loud report, a pistol-flash 
of fire and smoke, a terrible dull thud of the iron bar, and the 
Shooneen with a death-groan lay writhing on the floor ! 

Then the wild shriek of a woman was heard, and a rush was 
made from without. On the floor of the cabin lay the landlord, 
the dark blood oozing from his skull; near him lay a little white- 
faced child over whom his horror-stricken father bent. The 
bullet meant for the father had taken the life of his little child. 

Why proceed further with this terrible picture? It is, alas! 
the story of Ireland to-day Orange hate, landlord oppression, 
unjust enactments ; the impecunious landlord on the one hand, 
the over-weighted, helpless tenant-farmer on the other. Evic- 
tions are as rife to-day in Ireland, notwithstanding all the bene- 
ficial results which were to flow from the late Land Act, as they 
were twenty years ago ; and so they will continue, and tragedies 
like this will blur the page of Irish history, until a drastic remedy 
shall be applied to the numerous ills of that unhappy country, 
until her own people, on their own soil, shall meet and enact their 
own laws. 

j 

Twelvemonths after the death of " the Shooneen " Flora Mac- 
allister sat with her mother in the parlor of Baremoor House. 
The violent shock which the latter had sustained had completely 
silvered her hair. 

" It is all arranged, then, Florry my dear," went on Mrs. Mac- 
allister, resuming the thread of a conversation with her daughter, 
"and you will marry him?" 

" Yes, mother." 

" I am pleased with the intelligence. It will ease my mind to 
know that you are now safely established in life. Mr. O'Dono- 
ghue is rich and kind-hearted, and can afford to keep you above 
the little harassing wants which oppressed us in your poor 
father's lifetime. But, Florry, is it true that you are about to 
change your religion." 

" It is, mother." 

"And what have you found in Catholicism which was not 
within your own ? " 



1 886.] THE EIGHT-HOUR LAW. 397 

" I have found, mother, a peace which passeth all human un- 
derstanding." 

" God bless you, my child ! " said the old lady, as she leaned 
forward and imprinted a fervent kiss on the soft cheek of the fair 
convert. " May he send us all light in our ways, so that his 
Divine Truth may to each one be apparent ! " 



THE EIGHT-HOUR LAW. 

SOME years ago labor advocates succeeded in raising much 
enthusiasm among the politicians and other professional philan- 
thropists over their strong demand for a sweeping reduction in 
the hours of labor. Hitherto men, women, and children had 
worked as many hours as their employers asked or cupidity 
prompted. From twelve to fourteen hours daily were used by 
work-people in earning their bread. This was the average. 
Here and there a State legislature had limited the work-day to 
ten hours, but only on State works and in State institutions was 
the limit, with some exceptions, at all observed. Ten hours a 
day was an object for the great majority. It looked like the 
baseless fabric of a vision to most work-people, and has remained 
a vision up to the present moment. 

But, with the swiftness peculiar to crude revolutionary meth- 
ods, the labor advocates picked up the idea of an eight-hour limit 
and pushed it into the legislatures. The politicians were en- 
tranced, in New York State at least. The uprising of the labor- 
ers was come, and he who rode its topmost wave might glance 
without shame at the first office in the country. The law was 
passed that is, the letter of it. It can be seen on the statute- 
book in black and white. But the spirit, the vivifying spirit, not 
being at the beck of any legislature, has never entered into it. 
In vain has many a political aspirant Polyphemus- like pursued 
the principle that promised luck. The eight-hour law is dead as 
the door-nail whose deadness Dickens doubted. 

It has taken our law-makers long to understand that a law 
must be born of other stuff than their scheming brains and prin- 
ter's ink. Its necessity must be shown, the people whom it is to 
benefit aroused, the people whom it is to hurt annihilated, so to 
speak. Then there is a chance for the law to range outsj 
statute-book. The time came, of course, when political 



X s - 
Jtt+t- tC - 



398 THE EIGHT-HOUR LAW. [Dec., 

were glad the eight-hour law had no wider range. There was a 
necessity for the law, and the working-people were aroused, but 
so were their employers. Money was being made then in quan- 
tities, and money-makers could not get hours and men enough to 
pile up their treasures. They kicked with effect against dimin- 
ishing the hours of labor. Then the boom died away. The 
strikes began their work of demoralizing all parties. In the 
struggle to secure decent wages hour-limits have been for the 
moment forgotten. It is to be hoped they will remain so until a 
steady and well-managed movement to secure a fair limit can be 
organized, in behalf of which this article has been written. 

A good number of questions bristle around the eight-hour 
idea like quills upon a famous animal : What do work-people 
think about it ? what do employers say ? is it feasible? is it neces- 
sary ? will it disturb the national economy ? There has really 
been no discussion of a limit to hours of labor, at least none that 
has enlightened many on the subject. Men were agitating for a 
ten-hour limit before the public had learned that it was true 
economy to rest, recreate, and sleep a trifle between work- times. 
They jumped at the eight-hour bait before the ten-hour worm 
was nibbled at. So that from this haste a big sum of uncertainty 
and indistinctness has accumulated in kindly, interested minds 
and nobody seems to know anything about particulars of eight- 
hour and ten-hour ideas. 

The employers, as an interested party, have very precise and 
strong opinions about them. They are founded mostly upon the 
state of the market, the cost of raw material, the wages, general 
expenses, and the balance-sheet, and they amount to this : that if 
limiting the hours of labor will secure them as high or higher 
profits as they enjoy under the present system, they will not 
oppose an eight-hour law. The employer naturally regulates the 
entire world by the state of his exchequer, and once it is proved 
that he loses nothing by change you may transfer China to New 
England without a murmur of opposition from him. Capitalists 
are in the same state of mind as the general run of people. They 
know nothing about it except this: that if the laborer expects the 
same pay for eight hours as for ten, they are going to do their 
best to disappoint him. They are satisfied with present condi- 
tions, but if changes are to be made the party benefiting by the 
change must bear the expense. This, within limits, is logic and 
charity combined. 

As a rule employers oppose a reduction of the hours of labor, 
but more because of their present unstable relations with work- 



1 886.] THE EIGHT-HOUR LAW. 399 

people than from reasons of state ; as also, perhaps, from a well- 
founded idea that they will have to pay as much for eight hours 
of labor as for ten. This they do not intend to do, but the ex- 
pense of not doing it will be large. Many employers are neutral 
on this question, and are waiting, like the public, for further in- 
formation. In the April number of the Forum Mr. George Gun- 
ton supplied a reasonable amount of this, and, as far as figures go, 
made out a fair case for the economic feasibility of an eight-hour 
law. In fact, his case was chiefly an argument before a jury of 
capitalists to convince them that their profits would increase 
under such a limit, and that, far from disturbing the economies of 
America, the new system would materially strengthen them. To 
which article interested readers are respectfully referred, as in 
these pages no more can be done than to illustrate the proposed 
scheme from the standpoint of the working-man. 

To comprehend what his feelings are with regard to the eight- 
hour idea, a year or two in a coal-mine, a forest, a forge, a cotton- 
mill, or half that time on a freight-train, an ocean-steamer, or a 
railroad-section, would open up the understanding and the sym- 
pathies of any man. Saint-Simon thought it necessary, in order 
to formulate a new scheme for the salvation of men, that the 
scheme should embrace an experience of the heights of virtue and 
the depths of shame, the depression of pain and the exaltation of 
pleasure. His theory, in substance, is the highest tribute which 
socialism has paid to Christianity, whose Founder knew these 
mysteries as only God could know them. The working-people 
think and speak of the eight-hour law as Tennyson thought and 
spoke of "the golden time of good Haroun-al-Raschid." They 
are sceptical of ever attaining such a height of bliss. A system 
which would include a place for better things than the mere 
labor, sleep, eating, and drinking of which their poor lives are 
made up, has too close a resemblance to heaven to be at all prac- 
tical. To work from eight until twelve and from two to six, to 
have an hour for dinner, an hour for preparation and rest, a leis- 
urely evening, a full measure of sleep, and a breath of morning 
air, are luxuries which the rich, but not the poor, can afford. The 
working-people, therefore, talk of an eight-hour law as a good 
thing for the next world. They feel that it is their lot to work 
hard and live cheaply, thankful if they have health and fair wages 
to the last. And such Utopias as this they leave to the agita- 
tors, whose vocation it is to fight against the nature of things. 
They have seen the workings of the system under the government, 
where it is part of a species of fraud practised on taxpayers, and 



400 THE EIGHT-HOUR LAW. [Dec., 

they have come to suspect that the whole matter is of a fraudu- 
lent stamp whose rottenness will shortly be uncovered. They 
sometimes go so far as to think that it may even be a trap which 
opens into a deeper depth of poverty for them an impression 
strengthened by the employer, who carefully explains that if 
wages are close to starvation-mark now, these must fall below it 
after a change. So that, with the workingman as with the em- 
ployer, notions concerning the eight-hour system are hazy and 
incomplete. 

There are three questions which put themselves forward the 
moment the new system comes up for discussion : Is an eight- 
hour system necessary? can the workingman support himself un- 
der it? and can employers earn a reasonable profit over expenses? 
Figures and inferences say yes, decidedly. To the first question 
it seems to me an affirmative answer must be given. The eight- 
hour system is a necessity not pressing, but at least imperative. 
It may not need universal application, for greedy men will not 
adopt it, and may be allowed to kill themselves without danger 
to society ; but for certain large interests in our country it is 
the only measure which can secure to the poor the few rights 
they claim, to live comfortably and to live long. 

And now a word as to the wages which the workers may get 
for fewer hours of labor. There seems to be no way of stopping 
the descent of wages towards zero except through the violent 
convulsion of society known as the strike. It is now patent to 
all that the condition of labor becomes poorer with every year, 
and from causes which cannot be laid at any man's door. The 
few amass enormous fortunes, not alone from unjust practices, but 
also from ability to control big monopolies. The many grow 
poorer on wages which bear a fair proportion to the profits of 
employers. There is no more melancholy sight than this in the 
republic. Fathers of families, thousands of them, are forced to 
support eight persons on one dollar and ten cents a day. This is 
the limit. They do it in the country by leasing patches of land 
on which to grow potatoes and corn ; in the city by putting the 
women and children to work. From dawn to bed-time light 
and dark are boundaries which they cannot respect they sweat 
for a comfortable living, sweat not only to the extent of the Crea- 
tor's primal ordinance but their very blood. For these people 
there can be no lower condition permissible except beggary ; and 
beggary, for the American multitude, means riot and revolution. 
There can be no lower descent in the wages. The descent must 
stop at the limit of support. Now, this is the position. Having 



1 8 86.] THE EIGHT-HOUR LAW. 401 

come to the riot-mark in wages, and it being shown that eight 
hours' labor in a day is enough for all purposes, it is more profit- 
able for a poor man to take two-thirds of the day to himself than 
to exhaust his vitality in a wild struggle for pie as well as bread. 
He may leave it to the corporations to discover a method of get- 
ting more time out of him. It is all one to him how they suc- 
ceed. They cannot give him less wages without risking destruc- 
tion, and he will not give them more time. This deadlock will 
be wholly to his advantage, and that it is bound to come any 
two-eyed individual may see. It will not settle the labor difficul- 
ties, but it will leave contestants much leisure to think over the 
position. 

Is the eight- hour system a necessity? Yes. Why? Here 
are the facts. Every man born into this world has a right to a 
decent maintenance while he is in it. This is a crude statement, 
but so the work-people express it. The community to which he 
belongs should furnish him as payment for his steady labor with 
a house, food, raiment, and protection, should ask no more from 
him than he is able to accomplish, and only rarely should strain 
his abilities. Now, these are the things which society finds most 
difficult to do, and its incapacity becomes daily more apparent 
and alarming. Poor housing, poor food, poor raiment, and a 
grudging protection are the share of the multitude. And, worse 
than all, the strain put upon their physical and mental forces is 
heavier than nature can stand. Neither nature, art, nor religion 
can repair the irreparable damage done the poor laborer in many 
ways by the long hours of work. For this reason a diminution 
of the hours of labor is a necessity. And, not to mince matters, 
the new system must cost employers as heavily as twelve houss 
at present. That fact may as well be understood now as later.. 

The eight-hour system is a necessity because the majority of 
work-people cannot work longer hours and keep in good health. 
This sounds like rank heresy to men who were born fifty years 
ago and have remembered the primitive limits of a day's labor. 
But all things are changed since then. Machinery has nearly 
destroyed the individual laborer. It seizes him like the raw ma- 
terial upon which it feeds, saps muscle and life from him as long 
as he can supply them, and then tosses him aside like the refuse 
of a pulp-mill. The mechanic of a half-century back ran no risk 
of having his life jarred out of him. I repeat that the majority 
of work-people cannot work longer than eight hours a. da 
live. 

We have mines, forests, and factories, railroads, stea 

VOL. XLIV. 26 




402 THE EIGHT-HOUR LAW. [Dec, 

miscellaneous interests, where some millions of men, women, and 
children are employed. The mines, to begin with. We all have 
dim ideas of those infernal regions. The frightful catastrophes 
peculiar to them chill us, and the death-like life of their inhabi- 
tants fills us with dread. The gloom, the daily imprisonment, 
the danger impress us, but these are really less painful than the 
social condition of the miner. Once high wages made a com- 
pensation for risk and misery ; now there is no compensation 
whatever. For miserable wages the men and boys are buried in 
the earth twelve hours out of the twenty-four, in cramped atti- 
tudes, in poisonous atmospheres, in hourly dangers, in dampness, 
and in loneliness. The hours that should be given to sleep are 
the only social hours they may be said to know. The only re- 
creation they enjoy is a brief visit to the saloon and the quick 
excitement of bad whiskey and drugged beer. For education, 
for kome enjoyment, for the training of children, for a little of 
that leisure which the poorest ought to possess, there is no time. 
From childhood to the mine, and from the mine to the grave, is 
the history of the miner. 

The forest employs during the winter months the hardiest 
youth of the country. It is a health-giving employment. The 
hardships are great, the work severe, but the woodman is every- 
where distinguished for his magnificent physique, and also for his 
rheumatism. His working-hours are from twelve to fifteen a 
day. At four o'clock of a winter's morning he is at work. 
Rough food and rough quarters, intense cold, frequent and tho- 
rough wettings, are the inseparable companions of his existence, 
which has only one redeeming feature that his family do not 
share his miseries. Like the miner, he has time only for the bad 
whiskey of the log shanty ; unlike the miner, he may live like a 
civilized being for nearly one-fourth of the year in spite of the 
rheumatism. His only protection against sudden death is the 
strength of his constitution. Those precautions which give the 
body aid in recovering from exhaustion his scanty wages will 
not permit him to use, nor do his employers dream of supply- 
ing them. To work to the utmost, to rest the least, and to be 
recompensed with a trifle is the condition of the forester. 

The factory-people are in many places like an army on con- 
tinuous battle-fields. Every decade but a tenth remains of those 
who fought at the beginning. There are no veterans. Death, 
'"sickness, and the absolute necessity of change force the lines, in 
numerous instances, to form and form again. The new recruits 
-legion, eager to catch the same diseases and to suffer the 




1 886.] THE EIGHT-HOUR LAW. 403 

same fate as those who went before. One half their lives are 
spent in rooms with no ventilation, whose atmosphere is charged 
with various foul odors. For nearly twelve hours all are subject- 
ed to the jar of machinery. The spinners in cotton and woollen 
mills, men, women, and children, never sit the entire day except 
at meals, while the mule-spinners walk the entire twelve hours, 
until it would seem as if legs so long a-going could never stop. 
Weavers have intervals of rest, which saves considerable tissue. 
Children get no rest whatever. In winter over two hours of 
work is done by gaslight. The only recreation of these people 
is the accidental holiday, Sunday, and the space between supper 
and bed-time. The strain of factory-life proves too much for the 
majority ; they pass into other occupations or into the grave. In 
factory-towns, among factory-people, there is a painful scarcity 
of the white hair of age. 

Railroad men suffer in the same fashion as factory-people. 
For those who have the charge of trains the jar is constant and 
injurious. The passenger-train employees are fairly situated 
with regard to hours and wages, but the freight-train men and 
the section slaves are among the most poorly situated people of 
the country. Not to speak of the danger and the exposure of 
the first class, the long hours demanded of them are a standing 
disgrace to humanity. The economy practised by the railroads 
is the meanest because the most perfect known to civilized man. 
It is founded on an infallible system. Men may break, but the 
system never varies an inch from the rut. It is nothing to 
squeeze eighteen hours a day from employees who are only paid 
for ten ; nothing to call men from their rest two or three times in 
a night ; nothing to break up the meal-hour and the meagre hour 
of leisure ; nothing to make one man do the work of two in sea- 
sons of activity because the corporation has beforehand deter- 
mined to keep no extra men. The economical system will not 
allow it. The poor slaves who are employed in keeping the 
road-bed in repair, for the hardest of work receive one dollar a 
day. In summer ten cents, is added. They are exposed to all 
sorts of weather, and find the winters specially hard. Corpora- 
tions like the Central Vermont or the Delaware and Hudson 
railroad, whose territory suffers from stormy winters, need a 
particular and pressing invitation from the labor powers to treat 
their men with more humanity. Even in the country districts 
the lower grade of railroad men find it impossible to support a 
family on wages. Land must be leased and planted with pota- 
toes and other vegetables after the day's labor is ended. The 



404 THE EIGHT-HOUR LAW. [Dec., 

children must hoe it and weed it, gather in the harvest, and other- 
wise assist the parent as soon as their legs can carry them. 

The same thread of misery runs through the whole manufac- 
turing system of the time. The iron interests get in many dis- 
tricts twelve full hours from each man daily. The paper manu- 
facturers get the same from their machine-men. The obscure 
towns and the obscure factories squeeze their work-people as an 
orange might be squeezed flat. And, to add to the whole pic- 
ture the last touch of wretchedness, it must be remembered that 
not alone are strong, healthy men called on to endure these 
things, but women and children are subject to the same unneces- 
sary hardships. The most striking feature of our whole economy 
is the fact that women and children are rapidly supplanting men 
in every occupation where a feebler arm can be used. 

I might multiply illustrations they grow thicker than mul- 
berries but from these few one can make a reckoning. It is clear 
that our working-people are overworked. It matters little for 
our present argument that they are also underpaid. The case 
would stand if they were overpaid. This multitude of miners, 
foresters, railroaders, iron and cotton and woollen workers are 
wearing their bodies away in labor of which the world has no 
need. Here is the viciousness of it. They die to no purpose. 
They have no aged men among them, being fast friends of death. 
Behind them, and in the possession of their employers, they leave 
heaps of useless gold and surrender their priceless bodies to the 
dust. Twelve hours' continuous labor is a strain on the strong- 
est man. Under the aggravation of enclosure in bad atmos- 
pheres, etc., it is positive torture. Forced upon the young and 
the old, the weak and the strong alike, it is downright cruelty. 

Many who are acquainted with the facts which have been 
here set forth profess to believe that they shape an argument for 
shorter hours, but not especially an eight-hour system. True 
enough. But they do convince men that a diminution in the hours 
of labor is needed ; and when it comes to be asked to what extent 
are we to diminish, a careful inquiry will prove that no man can 
safely work more than ten hours daily, while the heavier trades 
should require no more than eight. 

At first sight the eight-hour system, by comparison with its 
neighbor, looks like child's play. One-third of the day spent in 
labor and two-thirds in sleep and recreation bears a striking resem- 
blance to the so-called lazy habits of the Italians, who, by the way, 
for all their habits, can work longer hours on bread and water 
than any American on meat and potatoes. The hygiene of the 
eight-hour system, however, and its social, moral, and religious 



i886.] THE EIGHT-HOUR LAW. 405 

aspects, change first impressions rapidly. Given the most per- 
fect physical constitution and ten hours' labor of the most favor- 
able kind farming, for instance and after it the physical consti- 
tution requires absolutely eight hours of sleep daily. Now, from 
this standard measure the conditions of the work-people describ- 
ed in this article. The miner, the sailor, the forester, the factory- 
hand, the train-man must either have more sleep or less work 
when in the best physical condition ; the women must have still 
more, the aged and the young most of all ; and as none of these 
have constitutions of the best, for all their endurance, the hours of 
recuperation must be lengthened. I consider this argument un- 
answerable. 

All this has been admitted man}* times by opponents of the 
eight or ten-hour system. They grant all that the argument 
demands nine and ten hours' sleep for the work-people, two 
hours for meals, Sunday for absolute rest, an occasional holiday. 
But they maintain that these things can be granted and the old 
system of eleven and twelve hours maintained at the same time. 
I do not see how, nor have they yet risen to explain their as- 
sertions. Twelve or thirteen hours of necessary sleep, refresh- 
ment, and recreation leave no room for any kind of leisure, and 
without that leisure I maintain no man can live his life out. 
Statistics prove it and reason supports it. Work-people have 
duties towards themselves, their neighbor, their children, and 
their God. What time is left to them for these factors of their 
earthly and heavenly destinies? From sleep must be snatched 
the time to attend to them. Fathers cannot look after their chil- 
dren except in the fashion of Congressional committees or State 
inspectors, once or twice a year. Brothers and sisters make the 
acquaintance of one another in the boarding-house style at 
meals. They were intimate in childhood, but have no chance to 
renew that intimacy except in sickness or after death. In order 
to vote a man must be excused from his labor. To attempt a reli- 
gious exercise on a week-day he must rise at four o clock and not retire 
before eleven. As for his neighbor in distress, he must assist him 
after dinner. To improve his mental, physical, or spiritual con- 
dition, to look after his own, to cultivate social relations, there is 
no time. In order to earn a scanty living he must sleep in haste, 
eat in haste, and, if he falls sick, get well in haste. Such a system 
is condemned in its utterance. 

Men's lives are not to be divided between the two occupations 
of wage-working and sleeping. Work which exhausts nature so 
completely that all spare time must be used in daily recuperation 
is no part of God's scheme in creation. The duties which de- 



406 THE EIGHT-HOUR LA w. [Dec., 

volve upon men as citizens, fathers, friends, superiors, and chil- 
dren of the Almighty require absolutely that time should be 
given to them outside the hours of labor for support and sleep. 
We blame the man who surrenders his whole time to money- 
getting, yet this is what the working-men are compelled to do. 
Ten hours in a coal-mine, a factory, a fancy-store, or even an 
editor's room, unfit the worker for any kind of activity, mental or 
physical. There is nothing to be done but rest and sleep after- 
wards, and it is with difficulty these intervals renew the man for 
the next day's labor. 

Hardship does not harden constitutions. It destroys them. 
Look for gray-haired men among our workers. They are rarer 
than diamonds. Their presence honors few firesides. Working- 
men are not sure of seeing their fiftieth year. What long hours 
of labor do not accomplish sickness and anxiety do, and the 
exhausted parent, originally blessed with a good constitution 
which he has not been able to transmit to his children, sees them 
die at the very moment when they might have been the support 
and honor of his age. What have such men left them but to die ? 
Death is far more merciful to the poor than any single individual 
I know of. 

I would have the eight-hour system applied to all the heavier 
trades, and to the occupations of women and children. Ten 
hours for sleep, two for meals, eight for labor, and four for abso- 
lute leisure, to be used in any way which circumstances demand, 
is the system which the facts set forth in this paper seem impera- 
tively to demand. We have our choice of this system, I think, 
or of another whose results are quite similar but strikingly 
tragic. Our work-people must enjoy either the leisure and the 
rest which common sense dictates, or the painful leisure of dis- 
ease. The average of twelve hours' daily labor for thirty years, 
ten years in rheumatic idleness or in a hospital, and ten years 
in the grave, is wonderfully less than fifty years at eight hours 
a day less by twelve thousand hours. Beside this gain of time 
put the magnificent results to be obtained in other directions, 
and you have a sum total that would convince the stingiest capi- 
talist in the country. 

The one difficulty with the eight-hour system, as Mr. Pow- 
derly points out, is that no one understands it. Moneyed men 
fear it, conservatives suspect it, and the work-people laugh at it. 
It seems too good to be true, but it isn't. Without being a 
panacea for labor troubles, it is, however, a key to hundreds of 
the difficulties that guard the labor problem. Once obtained the 
working-class can dispense with the strike and the boycott. 



1 886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 407 



A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 

THE Reminiscences of the Life of Abraham Lincoln, collected 
and edited by Mr. Allen Thorndike Rice, editor of the North 
American Review, is one of those symposia in which Mr. Rice de- 
lights a " choir invisible," each member of it singing at once 
and with more or less discord. Thirty-three gentlemen give 
their reminiscences and opinions in this large volume, all of these 
reminiscences and opinions being laudatory of President Lincoln, 
except that of Mr. Bonn Piatt. There is a marked difference 
as to Mr. Lincoln's literary attainments. Mr. Piatt says: 

" He had little taste for, and less knowledge of, literature ; and, while well 
up in what we call history, limited his acquaintance with fiction to that 
sombre poem known as ' Why should the Spirit of Mortal be Proud ? ' ' 

The Honorable William D. Kelley narrates an episode show- 
ing that Mr. Lincoln had an unusually nice appreciation- of the 
plays of Shakspere, and adds : 

" It must not be supposed that Mr. Lincoln's studies had been confined 
to his [Shakspere 's] plays. He interspersed his remarks with extracts 
striking from their similarity to, or contrast with, something of Shakspere's, 
from Byron, Rogers, Campbell, Moore, and other English poets." 

General Butler's article is one of the most interesting in the 
book, principally because he is a clear raconteur and he under- 
stands the art of letting people speak for themselves. General 
Butler tells us that President Lincoln looked with grave disquiet 
to the consequences of the emancipation of the slaves, as well as 
to the effects of the disbandment of the negro soldiers. Usually 
we are given to understand that he felt that the Emancipation 
Proclamation was the glorious consummation of the Civil War. 
General Butler shows us how he did feel before the sad event of 
his sudden taking off. During a conversation on the future of 
the colored race General Butler said : 

"' If I understand you, Mr. President, your theory is this: That the 
negro soldiers we have enlisted will not return to the peaceful pursuits of 
laboring men, but will become a class of guerillas and criminals. Now, 
while I do not see, under the Constitution, even with all the aid of Congress 
how you can export a class of people who are citizens against their will, 
yet the commander-in-chief can dispose of soldiers quite arbitrarily.'" 



408 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Dec., 

General Butler went on to prove that an army organization was 
the best for digging up the soil and making entrenchments, and 
that the negro soldiers might be sent into the United States of 
Colombia to open a ship-canal. Later the wives and children of 
these men might be sent to them and a colony be formed. Mr. 
Lincoln seemed pleased by the suggestion of a means for getting 
rid of the colored soldiers, and recommended General Butler to 
see Secretary Seward, that all foreign complications might be 
avoided. But the assassination of the President frustrated further 
consideration of the plan : 

" I soon discovered," Bonn Piatt writes, " that this strange and strangely 
gifted man, while not at all cynical, was a sceptic. His view of human nature 
was low but good-natured. I could not call it suspicious, but he believed 
only what he saw. This low estimate of humanity blinded him to the 
South. He could not understand that men would get up in their wrath 
and fight for an idea. He considered the movement South as a sort of po- 
litical game of bluff, gotten up by politicians and meant solely to frighten 
the North. He believed that, when the leaders saw their efforts in that 
direction were unavailing, the tumult would subside. 'They won't give up 
the offices,' he said ; ' were it believed that vacant places could be had at 
the North Pole, the road there would be lined with Virginians.'" 

Later President Lincoln found out his mistake, and even Mr. 
Piatt admits that he grew in strength as the strain on him in- 
creased. The Honorable Daniel W. Voorhees' paper shows Pre- 
sident Lincoln at his best in exercising that prerogative of mercy 
which so tried the patience of some of the military martinets. 
Mr. Voorhees' sincerity and entire sympathy with the good 
qualities of President Lincoln make a foil to Mr. Piatt's remi- 
niscence, which, if not sceptical, is cynical. The book has value 
for the future maker of history. It is a unique collection which 
can never be duplicated ; and from it one can form a truer idea 
of President Lincoln than all the rhetoric of a Macaulay could 
have conveyed. Mr. Charles A. Dana relates an anecdote of a 
trait of character which led to those sudden lapses from tragedy 
to comedy that amazed and grieved his friends. Mr. Dana was 
at the White House on the night of election day. Every effort 
had been made by Mr. Lincoln's friends to secure his re-election. 
The returns were coming in, and the suspense very great : 

" ' Dana,' said he, ' have you ever read any of the writings of Petroleum 
V. Nasby?' 'No, sir,' I said; 'I have only looked at them, and they 
seemed to me quite funny.' ' Well,' said he, 'let me read you a specimen.' 
And, pulling out a thin, yellow-covered pamphlet from his breastpocket, 
he began to read aloud. Mr. Stanton viewed this proceeding with great 
Impatience, as I could see, but Mr. Lincoln paid no attention to that. He 



1 886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 409 

would read a page or a story, pause to con a new election telegram, and 
then open the book again and go ahead with a new passage. Finally Mr. 
Chase came in, and presently Mr. Whitelaw Reid, and then the reading was 
interrupted. Mr. Stanton went to the door and beckoned me into the next 
room. I shall never forget the fire of his indignation at what seemed to 
him to be mere nonsense. The idea that when the safety of the republic 
was thus at issue, when the control of an empire was to be determined by a 
few figures brought in by the telegraph, the leader, the man most deeply 
concerned, not merely for himself but for his country, could turn aside to 
read such balderdash and to laugh at such frivolous jests, was to his mind 
something most repugnant and damnable. He could not understand, ap- 
parently, that it was by the relief which these jests afforded to the strain 
of mind under which Lincoln had so long been living, and to the natural 
gloom of a desponding and melancholy temperament this was Mr. Lin- 
coln's prevailing characteristic that the safety and sanity of his intelli- 
gence was maintained and preserved." 

Japan and the Japanese are becoming more and more fashion- 
able in literature. It is more than a passing fancy. Buddhism 
a new caprice of the " cultured " being no longer the estab- 
lished religion of Japan, the Japanese of the better classes are 
dropping even the vague and colorless Shinto worship, which, 
divested of gross superstitions, is simply Western Agnosticism. 
The government, with true Japanese subtlety, has come to the 
conclusion that Western civilization is the result of Christianity, 
and it now aids rather than retards the efforts of missionaries. 
A Bridget of Letters from Japan, by Arthur Collins Maclay, A.M., 
LL.B., formerly instructor of English in the Ko-Gukko-Rio, 
Tokio, Japan (New York : A. C. Armstrong & Son), confirms the 
impressions that recent correspondents have given of the par- 
tiality of the government and press to Christianity as a source 
of material progress. Mr. Maclay, who has adopted a needless 
now, de plume and created a useless friend to whom to address his 
letters, is a more serious writer than the author of Outside of Pa- 
radise a frivolous but well-written book on Japan lately noticed 
here. Mr. Maclay is an American who went to Japan to teach 
English. He seems to have had a comfortable berth, and to have 
enjoyed himself moderately whenever there was no rumor of the 
approach of a Catholic priest. He had less fear of a samurai run- 
ning amuck than of the dreaded Jesuit. On page 112 he tells us 
that the Jesuits and their converts plunged the country into a 
frightful civil war, and "how, before the obstinate sect could be 
extirpated, it became necessary to swell the royal ranks to a hun- 
dred and fifty thousand warriors, and forty thousand lives had to 
be sacrificed." 



4io A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Dec., 

Mr. Maclay insists that, though employed by the Japanese 
government, his work was a missionary one, and he admits that 
he spent much of his scholastic time in defending Protestantism 
against the attacks of the clever Japanese. And yet his indigna- 
tion is tremendous when he hears that a Jesuit has entered Hiro- 
saki as a teacher of science and European languages. After the 
shameless defence of the persecutors of the Jesuits we have 
quoted, Mr. Maclay writes of this same " sect " in whose extirpa- 
tion he rejoices : 

"Again, it is urged, the native Christians are not really and truly con- 
verted ; they are insincere ; they will not stand fast should persecution 
arise. Facts prove the contrary. Let the cliffs of Pappenberg and the 
crucifixions and tortures of Shimambara testify." 

Nevertheless, the places consecrated by the martyrdom of the 
Japanese Christians cause Mr. Maclay to shudder at the horrors 
wrought by Romanism ! It is no wonder that he found himself 
puzzled by the subtle objections made to his presentation of the 
doctrines of evangelical Christianity. He made them understand 
that he was a Christian, but not a " sectarian," and then he pro- 
ceeded to calumniate the " Church of Rome" in the most bitter 
and "sectarian " manner. When he referred to the Bible as the 
groundwork of his faith we can easily understand why the keen- 
minded young Japanese Agnostics sneered. Who could vouch 
to them that the Bible was not a forgery, since it had been in 
the keeping of the atrocious Church of Rome for so many cen- 
turies? Mr. Maclay's encounters with the Buddhists he gives 
only his side of the argument in the book are weakly sustained 
on his part. If the intellectual among the Japanese could meet 
only such evangelical exponents of Christianity there would be 
little hope of their conversion. 

Mr. Maclay's book has the charm which the fresh impression 
of a new people on a young man must always have, particularly 
if the young man is observant and sympathetic. He sketches 
the every-day life of the Japanese deftly and accurately ; for, as 
an admiring reader of Mr. Greey's translations from the Japanese, 
we are enabled to judge of the truth of Mr. Maclay's descrip- 
tions. He points out the causes that led to the downfall of the 
feudal system, the deprivation of the daimios of their power and 
the dispersal of their retainers, the sumarai, and does not hesi- 
tate to touch on the evils caused by the immorality which is un- 
checked by Buddhism or the various sects of Japan. Most 
modern writers seem to want to give the impression that Japan- 



i886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 411 

ese innocence would be hurt by the introduction of Christianity. 
And even Mr. Greey, in his Captive of Love, smoothes, in the inte- 
rest of public morality, the coarseness, and even obscenity, of 
certain passages in that romance. Mr. Maclay is sufficiently 
frank, but not too much so. It is evident that the guilelessness 
of the Japanese is often a cloak for sins and vices which, since 
the spread of Christianity in Western nations, have ceased to be 
recognized as necessary and even commendable parts of the social 
system. When Mr. Maclay attempts to explain the abstract ten- 
ets of Buddhism authoritatively to the Buddhists themselves, he 
puts himself in the absurd position occupied by so many Pro- 
testants when they undertake to teach "Romanists" what they 
really believe. If the ordinary missionary sent out by the Pro- 
testant denominations is at once so ignorant of philosophy and 
theology, so prejudiced and so illogical, the ill-success of Pro- 
testant preachers in Japan is easily explained. 

Miss Florence Marryat, daughter of Captain Marryat, whose 
sea-novels Carlyle devoured in order to plunge himself into a 
flood of inanity, sends out Tom Tiddlers Ground (London : Swan, 
Sonnenschein, Lowry & Co.) Miss Marryat's volume is the re- 
sult of a rapid "skim" through the United States. She has, no 
doubt, seen some Americans at a distance, and viewed them with 
the curiosity of a superior being. She concludes that, as she has 
never seen American women drink brandy-and-soda in public 
restaurants, they must drink that compound in their rooms. She 
makes it plain that life to her seems unendurable without brandy- 
and-soda. She was amazed at the impudence of a New England 
manager Miss Marryat is an actress as well as an author who 
protested against the low cut of her gown. "I am an Eng- 
lishwoman," she retorted, " who has been used to move in the 
best society. I know exactly what is the proper thing to wear. 
But I have come over here to teach the people how to sing and 
recite. I have not come to teach them how to dress. When I 
do they will be at liberty to criticise my wardrobe." It is too 
bad that England should generally be represented in America 
by men and women whose coarseness and vulgar " provincial- 
ism " are taken as traits of the national character. Miss Marryat 
is no doubt regarded in her own country with the same good- 
humored tolerance that induces Americans to pardon her imper- 
tinences. 

Mr. Anstey's Fallen Idol (Philadelphia : Lippincott & Co.) is 
cleverer than A Tinted Venus and The Giant's Robe, and it ap- 
proaches the inimitable Vice Versa. It is a very funny burlesque 



412 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Dec., 

on the craze for Buddhism lately developed in the society of 
the cultured. It is of the same class as Mr. Frank Stockton's 
delightful extravaganza, The Casting Away of Mrs. Leeks and 
Mrs. Ales/tine (The Century Co.) It is difficult to characterize 
the quality of humor which Mr. Stockton diffuses through this 
story of two good housewives wrecked in company with a young 
man whom they take under their protection. Mr. Frank Stock- 
ton is more of an artist than Mr. Anstey, and has more " staying 
power." The strict honesty and " capability " of the two women 
from the Middle States, who in the most extravagant situations 
are entirely true to life, are drawn by a humorist who has all the 
delicacy of Mr. Howells and the brilliancy, without the vulgarity 
and cynicism, of M. Edmond About. Mr. Stockton's humor is 
a great advance on that of Orpheus C. Kerr and Petroleum V. 
Nasby. It is indicative of the improved taste of the American 
people. 

Miss Alcott's Jo's Boys (Boston: Roberts Bros.) is the last of 
the series of young-folk books beginning with Little Women. 
And the older folk, too, will take leave of them with regret. 
Lingering over the pleasant pages, we too are mo'ved with re- 
gret that no Catholic writer has yet given us a book or series of 
books for young people that will compare in attractiveness of 
manner and knowledge of human nature with Miss Alcott's 
books. Why should the best of our children's books not be 
founded on a deeper and truer philosophy than that of Emer- 
son ? Why should not the beauty of Catholic life be shown 
through the most powerful of all mediums the stories loved of 
the young? We are young during the greater part of our lives, 
and we return again to our childhood when we grow old. 

Old Boniface : A Novel (New York : White, Stokes & Allen) 
is by Mr. George H. Picard, author of A Mission Flower, which 
was a remarkable American novel. Old Boniface is an " interna- 
tional " story. It has no merit whatever, except an easy style. 

Mr. Thomas Wharton, author of A Latter-Day Saint, has 
written Hannibal of New York (Henry Holt & Co.) It is a hard, 
coarse caricature of life. The personages are newly rich mil- 
lionaires, so vulgar and heartless that nobody can be benefited 
by making their acquaintance. They are not even amusing. 
There is some force in the picture of the wife of the millionaire 
deprived of every dollar as a punishment, but her sufferings are 
not edifying. One of the strongest pleas for idealism in modern 
literature is the existence of would-be realistic books like Hanni- 
bal of New York. 



1 886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 413 

Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney's Bonnyborough (Houghton, Mifflin & 
Co.) is a worthy successor to The Wide, Wide World and other 
" talky " books, in which the characters made muffins, invented 
new readings of Bible texts injected into New England slang, and 
were generally harmless idiots with a mania. " Peace Polly " is 
the name of the heroine of Bonnyborough. A vein of pleasantry is 
introduced into the commonplace life of this young person by the 
twisting of her name into "pease porridge." This bit of humor 
vivifies a good many dreary pages of the four hundred which 
make up Bonnyborough. Mrs. Whitney loses no opportunity to 
hit those city people who are supposed to astound country peo- 
ple in the summer by their superior savoir faire. She tells with 
gusto of a picnic to which the " country boarders" were not in- 
vited : " The ladies with country toilets carefully suggestive of 
metropolitan art and resource, and the young men with the 
water-cart whiskers and successful British intonations, took their 
turn at standing about or sitting on piazzas, to see the equipment 
and start of the simple, and to stare, as the simple had been sup- 
posed to have stared only they never did at themselves." But 
-in spite of the queer theology of the book, the twisted applica- 
tions of Scripture that sometimes seem irreverent, there are signs 
of a desire to get nearer to the truth and of the conviction that 
without God and his grace the earth is " earthy." 

Miss Sarah Orne Jewett is another New-Englander of the 
"Quietist" school. She has something of the tone of the charm- 
ing Miss Mitford, whose Our Village and Belford Regis are clas- 
sics. Her latest book is The White Heron, and Other Stories 
(Houghton, Mifflin & Co.) " Marsh Rosemary " is the most care- 
fully written of the sketches that make up the book. It is on the 
same line as Tennyson's " Enoch Arden." An old maid marries 
a young and lazy man. After a time he disappears; she mourns 
in silence, forgetting his bad qualities and glorifying his good 
ones. Suddenly, after a lapse of time, Mrs. Elton, a village 
gossip, brings news of the man whom Ann Floyd had believed to 
be dead : 

"Ann was stitching busily upon the deacon's new coat, and looked up 
with a friendly smile as her guest came in, in spite of an instinctive shrug 
as she. had seen her coming up the yard. The dislike of the poor souls for 
each other was deeper than their philosophy could reach." 

It is remarkable that in most of these New England stories in 
which the life of the people is depicted with fidelity, 
assumes a hard and repellant aspect. The deacons, the 




414 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Dec., 

the seamstresses who seem to answer in social position to Miss 
Mitford's poor English gentlewomen and even the minister, are 
in their professionally religious capacity unforgiving and obsti- 
nate. Ann, in " Marsh Rosemary," in her trouble is all the more 
pathetic because religion has no consolations for her. She finds 
that her husband has " married " another woman. She comes 
suddenly, unobserved, upon a domestic scene made up of the 
faithless Jerry, his wife, and the baby. She is pleased to hear 
that Jerry, who, the neighbors predicted, could come to no good, 
is thrifty and industrious ; but then the sense of her woe and his 
treachery enters her heart : 

"The other woman stood there looking at them, full of pride and love. 
She was young and trig and neat. She looked a brisk, efficient little crea- 
ture. Perhaps Jerry would make something of himself now; he always had 
it in him. The tears were running down Ann's cheeks; the rain, too, had 
begun to fall. She stood there watching the little household sit down to 
supper, and noticed with eager envy how well cooked the food was and 
how hungrily the master of the house ate what was put before him. All 
thoughts of ending the new wife's sin and folly vanished away. She could 
not enter in and break another heart; hers was broken already, and it 
would not matter.'' 

Now, Ann or Nancy, as Miss Jewett prefers to call her was 
a religious woman, according to her Congregational lights ; but 
in this crisis, when it was a question of solving a social problem 
which she had no right to solve in a sentimental way, her religion 
offered her neither consolation nor direction. Jerry, evidently a 
bad and heartless man, was left to his sin, and his innocent part- 
ner to the consequence of it. He might desert his new wife as 
he had deserted his old one. But Nancy, who paid out of her 
scanty earnings her portion of the minister's salary and never 
missed meeting, takes no thought of her responsibility as acces- 
sory to her husband's crime. Miss Jewett's sketches are slight 
but artistic, and so true to life that, like Mrs. Terry Cook's 
Sphynx s Children, they have worth as material for the study of 
New England life. Gogol and Tolstoi, and others of the Rus- 
sian novelists now so greatly in vogue, have this merit of fidel- 
ity. And in St. Johns Eve, by Gogol (New York : Crowell & 
Co.), we find a clue to the present position of Russia among 
novels. In fact, novels are to-day doing what we formerly ex- 
pected history to do telling us the truth ; we gain more know- 
ledge of the character of the Russian people from the Russian 
ealists than from all the cumbrous historical essays on the Cos- 
and Peter the Great yet written. 




i886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 415 

Mr. Philip Gilbert Hamerton's books, ThougJits about Art, The 
Intellectual Life, and A Painter's Camp in the Highlands, are de- 
servedly appreciated. It is no reflection on the supremely good 
taste he has always shown that he married a Frenchwoman. 
Madame Eugenie Hamerton is the author of Golden Mediocrity 
(Boston : Roberts Brothers), a novel which must have a healthy 
effect. It is subdued in tone, but in admirable taste. The in- 
terest is gentle but well kept up. Madame Hamerton paints a 
French interior not the kind of an interior which we usually see 
in French feuilletons, but the inside of a home. Madame Ham- 
erton contrasts the frugal elegance of French housekeeping with 
the extravagance of the English and also the American meth- 
ods. The French understand that elegance and " mediocrity " 
of income are not incompatible. In the case of the Marquis de 
Civray she has an example of the horrible results of the constant 
intermarriages in noble families. She treats it, not as a moralist, 
but as a sympathetic observer, and her narrative has the more 
force. The experience of the young French people when they 
feel for the first time the shock of English cookery is amusing. 
Helene ventures unsuspiciously to eat horse-radish, while her 
brother tries the Worcester sauce. " Immediately her temples and 
forehead were pearled with tiny drops of perspiration, which soon 
covered all her face to the roots of her hair, and, with a trembling, 
moist hand, she helped herself to a full tumbler of water, which 
she swallowed hurriedly." " It's one of the numerous sly devices 
of the English to astonish the foreigners/'^said Jean ; " they choose 
our mouths as the proper place to explode their fireworks in." 

The astonishment of Helene's English friends on discovering 
that a marquis may be on terms of equality in France with a 
"simple college master and his daughter" is graphically depicted. 
The Marquis de Civray acknowledges the status of intellect and 
goodness, while the amiable English of the upper middle class 
can think of nothing but the condescension of rank. 

But Madame Hamerton does not force her points ; she writes 
with keen perception of lights and shades, but with none of that 
detestable "smartness" of style which we have already noticed 
in Miss Marryat's vulgar book on America. Madame Hamer- 
ton's hero marries an English girl, who, however, is, like him, a 
Catholic. We have to thank Madame Hamerton we under- 
stand that she does not like to be called " Mrs." for a pure and 
interesting story, which will do much to dissipate American pre- 
judice against the French people and to teach American 




416 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Dec., 

that riches and extravagance are not necessary to elegant and 
contented lives. 

Joan Wentworth (Harper & Bros.), by Katharine Macquoid, 
is a pleasant story of French school-life and Breton manners. It 
is probably an early work of Mrs. Macquoid. 

A new novel from the pen of Mr. W. H, Mallock is sure to 
make a literary sensation and to be read eagerly by people who 
know the flavor of that author's previous books. The Old Order 
Changeth is less a novel than a series of dialogues, managed with 
inimitable grace and exquisite knowledge of those minor traits 
of social human nature which make the highest comedy. Mr. 
Mallock's usual tendency to pruriency is not so evident in this 
work as in his preceding ones. There is, to be sure, a certain 
divorced Madame de St. Valery, who has an interest for the 
hero, Carew, and an American girl who " would have gone to 
her ruin with the same look in her eyes that most girls would 
have in going to their confirmation," yet much is not made of 
them. The conflict between Carew's passions, the object being 
this Miss Violet Capel, and his principles, which tend towards 
Miss Consuelo Burton, is sufficiently accentuated without any of 
that over sensuous coloring which is as vulgar as the modern 
sculptor's habit of chiselling the temptress who appears to St. 
Anthony with all possible power, and leaving out the expression 
of that will and grace which made the saint victorious. Some of 
Mr. Mallock's personages find Thackeray vulgar, and, from the 
unanimity of their opinion, it seems as if Mr. Mallock agrees with 
them. But Mr. .Mallock, whose eye is very keen for marks of 
vulgarity, should avoid the trick of pretending to take portraits 
of living persons of celebrity and putting these weak sketches 
into his books. What, for instance, can be more vulgar than the 
use of "Mr. Herbert Spender" for Mr. Herbert Spencer? Mr. 
Mallock's creations are vivid and vital enough not to need the 
cheap arts of that most vulgar and meretricious of novelists, Lord 
Beaconsfield. 

Consuelo Burton and her two aunts are Catholics of a very 
high English caste. The aunts are exceedingly devout; Con- 
suelo, a great beauty and of a firm character, believes all the 
church teaches, but she has doubts whether the church can reach 
the poor in this century or not. Carew is reverently in search 
of truth, and also more or less in love with Consuelo. She thus 
expresses her feelings to him : 

**" : ',~~^^ 

"The world is changing and the church stands apart from the change. 



i886.] A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 417 

. . . And what," she went on, with a sound like a stifled sob "what has 
the Mass got to do with this? It might have so much, but at present it 
has nothing. It distracts us from our duty ; it does not nerve us to follow 
it. What right have I to be listening to angels, when outside the chancel- 
wall are the groans of the crowded alley? Often, often, often, when I have 
heard the organ playing, ' Hang the organ ! ' I have thought ; ' let me listen 
to the crying of the children.' " 

Of one of her aunts Miss Consuelo says : 

" When I watch her trotting off to Mass in the morning, looking as if 
she were doing the whole duty of woman, I feel as if, myself, I should never 
be religious again." 

Nevertheless she is religious, and Carew, seeing her at her 
devotions, is astonished by the strange, unearthly brightness of her 
face. She listens to a dialogue between Mr. Stanley, a priest, 
and Foreman, a Socialist. The priest shows how absurd are pre- 
tensions to the improvement of the human race founded on the 
theory that all men are capable of the highest sacrifices. And, 
hearing the priest's presentment of the Christian answer to anti- 
religious Socialism, she ceases to doubt. Miss Consuelo Burton 
is an interesting character, but Mr. Mallock has not rightly in- 
terpreted what a well instructed Catholic girl of high mind would 
say if she had a momentary fear that modern infidelity had made 
a gap between religion and the poor which the church would not 
bridge. Surely no thoughtful assistant at the unbloody Sacrifice 
could feel that appeals to the Lamb of God for mercy and peace 
are not as applicable to the poor as the Sacrifice itself is to the 
whole human race. Miss Consuelo Burton might have been 
afraid that the children of the church had failed to grasp her 
meaning, and to act towards the poor, stimulated by that mean- 
ing ; but she would not except in Mr. Mallock's book talk 
about the church or the Mass " distracting us from our duty.." 
The most sublime Sacrifice could not make those who understood 
it selfish or self-centred. The truth is that, in causing hi* 
heroine to talk this way, Mr. Mallock has thought too much of 
the gorgeous vestments and the music, and too little of the 
divine Fact of which they are only accessories. It is the way 
even of the most sympathetic non-Catholics.. 

The conversation between Mr. Stanley, the priest, and Mr. 
Foreman, the Agnostic Socialist, which converts Miss Consuelo, is 
very spirited Mr. Mallock having recovered the art of talking in 
books, which seemed lost when Walter Savage Landor died : 

" If we were all equally clever and equally industrious, your theory 
would be perfect. The state would be socialistic to-morrow. There is 
VOL. XLIV. 27 



418 A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Dec., 

only one other supposition on which the same result would be possible 
if the average race of men were all of them to rise to heights of zeal and 
self-sacrifice to which saints and heroes at present find it very hard to 
attain. Will Mr. Foreman allow me to ask one question more? The kind 
of life you contemplate in your Socialist state is one of enjoyment, comfort, 
cheerfulness, is it not ? It does not, at all events, approach the gloom and 
the hard discipline of monastic orders? Exactly. I thought so. I have 
known other men of views similar to yours, and they have all declared that 
the asceticism of the Christian church is little less than a blasphemy 
against our healthy human nature." 

Mr. Foreman agrees to this. 

"You are doubtless aware," continues Mr. Stanley, "that this discipline 
in its severest form is. regarded by the Catholic Church as fitted only for a 
small fraction of mankind. What I want to say to you is, that the severest 
discipline ever devised for any handful of monks does far less violence to 
our average human nature than the change in it which your system would 
require to be universal. It would be easier, far easier, to make men Trap- 
pists than Socialists." 

The Old Order Changeth has the brilliancy, the wit, the delight- 
ful play of humor witness the encounters, so entirely well-bred, 
between the Tory Protestant, Lady Mangotsfield, and the Ca- 
tholic, Lady Chiselhurst and the soundness of reasoning, up to a 
certain point, that make the appearance of each of Mr. Mallock's 
books a striking feature in modern literature. We say a great 
deal when we say that it has all the best qualities of The New 
Republic, with only one defect a plot" which, while it does not 
make the dialogues and by-play more brilliant, gives a needless 
vagueness and weakness to the work. Mr. Mallock need not 
write a story in order to interest his readers ; he possesses in a 
high degree the gift of enchaining attention by his charming style. 
Mr. Stanley preaches on the necessity of the church's taking hu- 
manity more into consideration and her power of doing it. But 
it is no new thing for a priest of God's church to teach that the 
church holds within her what is good in all creeds even in So- 
cialism, and, above all, in what is called the religion of Humanity. 
Mr. Mallock, unlike Mr. Harrison, Miss Vernon Lee, and the 
others who prattle so complacently of " the choir invisible," rea- 
sons. The saddest thing in all the modern worship of the God- 
-dess of Reason is the unreason of her worshippers. 



1 8 86.] A SUMMER IN RHENISH PRUSSIA. 419 



A SUMMER IN RHENISH PRUSSIA. 

A SUMMER afternoon in a little, old-fashioned German town. 
The sun pours down on the streets paved with cobble-stones, and 
glistens on the paint of the two-headed imperial eagle over the 
" Kaiserliches Post-Amt" the government post-office, and wilt- 
ing the trees planted on each side of the dusty highroad leading out 
into the country. Not a picturesque country, Rhenish Prussia, 
by any manner of means, lying, as it does, in the level plain of 
the northwest Rhineland, extending, roughly speaking, from 
Cologne to Diisseldorf. It is mostly flat, with here and there 
low, rounded hills, covered generally by clumps of beech-trees, 
which seem to flourish here, and broken now and then by the 
long, narrow valley of some sluggish stream. It is in such a val- 
ley that Odenkirchen lies. The Nier, a very insignificant little 
stream, runs by the side of the town, and is useful chiefly for 
turning the numerous flour-mills and for supplying water to the 
large dye-works just outside the town. It is not at all a pretty 
place : it is small, ill-paved, not over-well drained, and the Nier 
in drought-time is not odoriferous ; it is very hot in summer and 
bitterly cold in winter ; but it is very quaint. The houses, with 
their steep roofs and queer wood- work, remind one of some of the 
old streets in Chester or Heidelberg ; the customs seem to carry 
one back to the middle ages, and to the true, " good old times " 
before Protestantism was heard of for most of the people are 
Catholic in Rhenish Prussia, the " Evangelisch " being few and, 
for the most 'part, rationalists. Just now the setting sun, tinge- 
ing the beech-woods over there on the Berg, or hill par excellence, 
throws a fading splendor on what shows that Rhenish Prussia in 
general, and Odenkirchen in particular, is Catholic in very deed. 
It is a huge stone crucifix, standing where the three streets meet, 
right in the very centre of the Platz. The carving is perfect as 
all German carving is and the golden radiance of the setting sun, 
gleaming on the still water of the distant river and lighting up 
the thorn-crowned Face of Divine Agony, seems like a celestial 
"glory," and tells us that in this little town the grand old faith 
still reigns supreme in the hearts of its people. As we shall sec 
later, the customs of the people are all Catholic ; and so much 
has the true faith leavened the false that even the Lutheran 
churches ring their bells three times a day morning, noon, and 



420 A SUMMER IN RHENISH PRUSSIA. [Dec., 

night little thinking, or little caring, perhaps, that they are 
ringing the threefold "Angelas." 

The three principal buildings in a German town are the 
church, the Stadthaus, and the post-office. The church in Oden- 
kirchen is well worth a visit ; though in this out-of-the-way cor- 
ner of the world visitors are few indeed. The summer spent in 
Rhenish Prussia was spent chiefly in the cool, sacred shadows of 
dusky aisles, in the " dim religious lights " of windows painted, 
many of them, while glass was almost unknown in English coun- 
try churches, for Munich was famous even then ; and to Catho- 
lic readers it will, doubtless, be of interest to have some pen-and- 
ink sketches of a few of these, with the Old- World customs of 
the worshippers who frequent them. 

The Church " des Heiligen Petrus"(of St. Peter) in Oden- 
kirchen is said to be seven hundred years old. The architecture, 
as may be imagined, is neither very strict nor very correct in a 
small provincial town, but it is evidently early Gothic in general 
design, with pointed, narrow windows and doors. The arches 
are also pointed and very plain, the church being cruciform, with 
apse, nave, north and south transepts, and two side-aisles. Across 
the entrance to the sanctuary is a carved screen of oak, black with 
age and highly polished, the open work formed of the traditional 
fleur-de-lis of Our Blessed Lady and the cross-keys of St. Peter. 
It is perhaps a fortunate thing that the modern Goth has not 
found his way to Odenkirchen, for the oak carvings of this rood- 
screen would be worth their weight in gold. 

At the back of the high altar is a reredos of carved oak, also 
black with age, but touched up here and there with a gold edg- 
ing representing the Ascension. The church is full of banners 
belonging to different sodalities, and has many votive altars. 
There is a fine statue of the patron saint, very much like that in 
St. Peter's at Rome, at the south corner pillar of the sanctuary, 
just outside the rood-screen. Outside and inside the church is 
of dark-brown stone. The tower is high and narrow, with a nar- 
row spire, which has a small window high up, from which on 
saints' days the huge banner of the church waves triumphantly. 
In the south aisle there is a crusader's tomb, so old that even 
legend has forgotten the name of its occupant, and over it on 
the wall two or three rust-eaten fragments of old armor. On 
saints' days and Sundays all through the year the first Mass is 
at six o'clock, and in the bright summer morning it is wonderful 
and touching to see the crowds of townsfolk, mostly poor and 
almost all in wooden shoes, pouring in through the high western 



1 886.] A SUMMER IN RHENISH PRUSSIA. 421 

door. As we are in Germany, it is needless to say that the music 
is exquisite and the devotion most exemplary. The priest at 
Odenkirchen is a young man, born and bred in the place and 
educated in the seminary out on the hill yonder, and his life is 
full of labor and of good works. During Mass the congregation 
sing old German chorals in harmony, and after the Elevation a 
boy's voice breaks the stillness with the " O Salutaris." Low 
Mass without any music would be incomprehensible to the music- 
loving Germans. High Mass or solemn Vespers must be heard 
in Germany to be appreciated fully. We were present at High 
Mass on the feast of Corpus Christi, when the music was 
Mozart's Twelfth Mass very barbarous and " tuney," no doubt, 
but sung by the choir of St. Peter's, Odenkirchen, most heart- 
stirring and beautiful. 

Among the quaint old customs in Rhenish Prussia is one 
which is very striking to a visitor and which carries the mind back 
to Scriptural times. When any one meets a funeral he uncovers, 
his head, and turns and walks a few yards in the procession. This 
is a sure test of a man's faith, and shows him at once to be a 
Catholic in this part of the country at least. Another most un- 
mistakable evidence is a man's behavior in passing a wayside Cal- 
vary : if he lifts his hat he is a Catholic ; if not, he is a Protestant. 
On days of great processions, such as Corpus Christi or the As- 
sumption, one can generally tell which houses are inhabited by 
Catholics from the candles burning in the window, often very 
numerous, and with a crucifix or a statue of Our Lady among 
them. On Corpus Christi, when we were in Odenkirchen, the 
whole town was decorated with flags, triumphal arches, and 
flowers, the procession was very numerously attended, and the 
crowds that lined the streets all knelt most reverently. 

Small pilgrimages from one local shrine to another are very 
common, and seem like echoes of the "ages of faith." We were 
walking over the Berg one day when suddenly, at a turn of the 
road, we met a party of these pilgrims. A man walked in front 
carrying a large crucifix, and men, women, and children were 
singing an old choral. Every little cluster of cottages has its 
Calvary among them, and at every mile or two along the road we 
found a clump of trees, and there in the shadow, amid the smiling 
fields of grain, was the Image of Divine Agony. It was most 
beautiful, and spoke of the one true faith, under whose holy wings 
the whole land seems to rest in utter peace a peace which can be 
felt after all the toil and turmoil and dreary unfaith of the busy, 
steam-driven nineteenth century. 



422 A SUMMER IN RHENISH PRUSSIA. [Dec., 

There are many places of interest within easy distance of 
Odenkirchen. Rheydt, another small town about three miles 
east, has a very fine church, and some unusually beautiful win- 
dows in the sanctuary. The church itself, which is dedicated to 
Our Blessed Lady, is very much like that of Odenkirchen in style, 
except that there is no rood-screen. It is supposed to have be- 
longed to the Augustinian Canons in earlier times a supposition 
founded, in great measure, on the exquisitely-carved stalls in the 
sanctuary, which resemble those at Wimborne Minster in Dorset- 
shire (England) having the " misericorde " or little half-seat to sup- 
port the form while standing. There is a life-size crucifix over 
the altar of great beauty, the Figure being of wax, which is capable 
of marvellous accuracy of representation. The long painted win- 
dows in the sanctuary represent passages in the life of Our Lady 
and of the saints, and are very beautiful. The choir of this church 
is famous in the whole neighborhood. We were present at Ves- 
.pers one Sunday evening when one of the Psalms happened to be 
the " In Exitu Israel," and the " Tonus Peregrinus," as chanted 
by a choir of over a hundred voices and the whole congregation, 
was worthy of Solomon's temple " in all its glory." 

There is a little church a few miles from Odenkirchen which is 
a perfect little gem of art. It was built by a private family about 
thirty years ago, and is almost circular. From floor to ceiling 
it is covered with most exquisite frescoes, and is full of votive 
altars and statues. The most curious of the frescoes is one of the 
Crucifixion, where the cross, instead of being straight, as usually 
represented, is simply a tree with two branches extending up- 
wards, and a lopped head. Our Lord's arms are nailed to the 
branches, and his head rests on the limb. It is difficult to give an 
accurate conception of this curious painting without a sketch, but 
the cross resembles exactly that on the old Gothic chasuble, from 
which it was probably copied. Correct or not, the effect is most 
realistic, and seems borne out not only by the cross on the vest- 
ment, for which no valid reason has been assigned, but also by 
the legend of the aspen-tree. A German priest, to whom I spoke 
of it, said that it was very doubtful that the Roman soldiers 
would, on such short notice, prepare an elaborate cross, but that 
they probably lopped the first tree that seemed suitable. Of course 
centuries of traditional art have fixed unalterably the shape of the 
cross, but a picture such as this by its very strangeness seems to 
startle one into a keener realization of what the Crucifixion means. 

Among the many beautiful statues in this church the most 
beautiful of all is a " Mater Dolorosa " in Munich statuary, with 



1 886.] A SUMMER IN RHENISH PRUSSIA. 423 

the dead Christ on her knees. The expression of unutterable 
agony on the face of Our Blessed Lady is wonderfully life-like, 
and is a justification, if any were needed, of the violation of 
the canons of Greek art by colored statuary. The dead body of 
our Lord is startling and almost painful in its accuracy of color- 
ing and detail. There is a lamp kept continually burning, filled 
with perfumed oil, the sweet odor of which mingles with that of 
incense which pervades the whole church for German Catholics 
use incense lavishly. On the pedestal of the " Mater Dolorosa" 
are some lines in gold letters, selected from that most touching 
poem, Marguerite's prayer to the Mater Dolorosa in Faust. A 
strange selection, truly, some may say, but perhaps none could 
have been chosen which would have been more appropriate. 

German people are proverbially fond of mottoes. There is 
one over the priest's house, next door to this same church, which 
is worth copying : 

" GAVDEAT ingrediens, laetetur et aede recedens, 
His, qui praetereunt, det dona cuncta Deus." 

Passing on from Lindenkirchen, as this little village is called, 
we went to what is said to be one of the greatest curiosities of the 
whole province namely, Schloss Dyck, an old Flemish castle be- 
longing to one of the most ancient Catholic families in western 
Germany. The castle itself stands in the very centre of a grove 
of limes, firs, and beeches, the home of thrushes, blackbirds, and 
nightingales, which made the whole air musical on the day we 
spent there. In front of the castle, which consists of an outer 
fort, two court-yards, and the house itself, is a broad moat full of 
water and covered with water-lilies, the home of some rare 
breeds of swans, white European, and black from Australia. At 
the back of the castle are the grounds, beautifully laid out, and 
. open to visitors five days a week, where the moat widens into a 
small lake full of gold and silver fish. Inside the first and larger 
court-} ard are the stables and other offices; inside the second, 
round which the house is built, are the windows of the dining- 
hall and family chapel. The latter was undergoing repairs, so 
we were not allowed to see it ; but the dining-hall was magnifi- 
cent, in the true Flemish style, oak panelled and ceiled, with the 
coats-of-arms of the numerous heads of the house quartered and 
blazoned on walls, ceiling, and windows. In the side next the 
court-yard is a large door, said to have been made to allow 
Charles the Great, from whom the family claim descent, to 
ride in in lull armor; but this we concluded must be an anach- 



424 A SUMMER IN- RHENISH PRUSSIA. [Dec., 

ronism, though we were careful not to say so. In the portrait- 
gallery we were shown a long line of ancestors, from Charles 
the Great to the present owner's father, some of them probably 
as mythical as the famous portraits of the Scottish kings in 
Holy rood Palace. At all events, whether mythical or authentic, 
there is a strong family likeness in them all. The line is said 
to have been direct, from father to son, until the present owner, 
who is childless. A curious coincidence was pointed out to us 
on the walls of the gallery : there was only one vacant space 
left, where the picture of this last of the direct line is to be put. 
The property at his death reverts to a distant and, unfortunately, 
a Protestant cousin. The Fiirst, or prince for that is his title 
does not often visit his Rhenish estate, but when last here, a few 
years ago, he entertained the emperor more like an independent 
sovereign than a subject. We were shown in the gallery that 
dearly-prized treasure of German (and other) hearts a family 
tree. By this it seems that the family can trace their descent to 
the year 19 B.C., and number among their ancestors the hero Her- 
mann, or Arminius, who defeated Varus. 

In the Schloss Dyck property, but some miles from the castle 
itself, is a little village on a hill, known as Bergkirchen. We 
walked to it along the highroad, which in Rhenish Prussia, as in 
France, is bordered with trees, and paved where it passes through 
the villages or towns. The presence of the Iron Chancellor's 
power is visible everywhere : every few miles of country are 
marked off into a " Kreis " or " Circle," every village and town 
numbered according to its inhabitants, and assessed for so many 
" Landvvehr," or militia, and forced to support so many regular 
soldiers. On entering a village you see on the wall of the first 
house a white placard headed thus : " Village Bergkirchen, 
Circle (district) of Gladbach (a large iron-working town), Regi- 
ment of cavalry No. 5, so many men ; Regiment of Infantry No. 
loo, so many men ; Landwehr, so many." In Bergkirchen, just 
outside the village, there is a ruined tower, supposed to have 
been a border fortress in the disturbed times of the middle ages, 
" when barons held their sway." On the wall of the church 
there is a very ancient Calvary, the figures and coloring of which 
are most rude and quaint, and inside the church an altar-tomb of 
a mitred abbot, said to have been killed in an affray by a maraud- 
ing baron, for which the family had to do perpetual penance. 

Our whole summer in Rhenish Prussia was quiet and unevent- 
ful. Living, as we were, amid primitive people, our only occu- 
pation was to drive or walk to some neighboring village and 



1 8 86.] A FEW MORE WORDS WITH CONTRIBUTORS. 425 

inspect the church. The most remarkable of these have been 
sketched ; it would be wearisome and monotonous to enter into 
endless details. The churches all have some point of interest ; 
the customs, among- which was one which we did not see namely, 
the lighting of lamps and candles on the graves of the dead on 
All Souls' day are most beautiful, simple, and Catholic. Rhen- 
ish Prussia is not a country likely to be visited by tourists. 
Many of their customs the Germans bring with them to this 
country, but their wayside and churchyard Calvaries, their pil- 
grimages, their processions and funeral customs, are almost un- 
known except to those who have lived, as we did, in a quiet little 
country town in an out-of-the-way corner of the Fatherland. 



A FEW MORE WORDS WITH CONTRIBUTORS. 

" And these few precepts in thy memory 
Look thou character." 

SOMETHING over a year ago, in the May number (1885) of this 
magazine, the editor indulged in quite a long talk with his con- 
tributors. He set forth his woes, and, in our estimation, gave 
some excellent advice. Now, this advice has either never been 
read or has been calmly ignored by many contributors. To all 
intents and purposes they remain as oblivious to it as did the fa- 
mous fishes in the legend to the sermon said to have been 
preached to them by St. Anthony : 

"The sermon now ended, 
Each turned and descended ; 
The pikes went on stealing, 
The eels went on eeling. 
Much delighted were they, 
But preferred their old way." 

Now, many contributors undoubtedly prefer their own way, 
but to assure their contributions a cordial welcome it would be 
wiser to prefer the magazine's way. At the end of the last " Talk " 
the editor summed up the magazine's way under four points. 
They are important enough to be repeated, and were given as 
follows (the first point is altered slightly, so as to allow a little 
more latitude in the length of articles 6,000 words, however, 
should be the very maximum) : 



426 A FEW MORE WORDS WITH CONTRIBUTORS. [Dec., 

FOUR POINTS RESPECTFULLY RECOMMENDED TO THE ATTENTION 
OF CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS MAGAZINE. 

1. Never let your article exceed 6,000 -words. Only the fiction 
in a magazine is privileged to exceed this amount of words. 
Keep the article under 5,000 words, if you can. If it did not run 
beyond 3,000 or 4,000 words, and were otherwise acceptable, it 
would be sure of almost immediate insertion. 

2. Never allude to a "series." If you cannot treat a subject in 
a single article, devote your article to one aspect of the subject. 
Let that be a complete article which can stand by itself without 
dependence on any other. By and by, if you like, send in an- 
other article, equally complete and independent, dealing with an- 
other aspect. 

3. Never send in an article which is not as perfect as you can make 
it. Count on no revisions or verifications. 

4. Prepare your manuscript neatly. Let it all be written on the 
same kind of paper. Let the handwriting be as clear as print. 
A clean, legible manuscript gives an article a great advantage 
with an editor whose eyes are not of brass, and who has a heart 
to feel for his compositors and proof-readers. 

If contributors would contrive to keep these four points 
which should be to them what the four points of the compass are 
to the mariner in their " memories locked," the lot of the editor 
would become a comparatively happy one. To receive, for in- 
stance, neat and legible MSS. would be an inestimable boon, and 
would inspire him with hopes of being able to preserve his temper 
and his eyesight. Contributors say to the editor: "Oh! but you 
ought to be able to read anything ; I should think that you would 
be used to it." He may be " used to it," but the mere fact that 
he repeatedly pores over assorted varieties of hieroglyphics does 
not furnish him with a key to their meaning. The editor is per- 
suaded that when some contributors find themselves unable to 
express a thought clearly they write as illegibly as possible, and 
with many erasures, in the hope that a light will break in upon 
the editor's brain which will enable him to divine the idea they 
have been unable to express other than by blots of ink and illegi- 
ble scratches. But the editor will refrain from again recount- 
ing his woes; he could, of course, a tale unfold, etc., but he will 
generously spare the contributors the infliction, merely referring 
them, after the manner of circulars, to May number (1885) "for 
further particulars." 

He wishes to call the attention of the contributors to one more 



1 886.] NEW PUBLICATIONS. 427 

point. On the inside of the cover of each number a hand points 
to this unvarying inscription : " The editor cannot undertake to 
return rejected articles unless stamps are enclosed to prepay post- 
age. Letter-postage is required on returned MSS." 

And yet MSS. are continually sent without any enclosure of 
stamps. If they are rejected, contributors wonder that the arti- 
cles do not return, and sometimes get angry and write murmur- 
ing letters. There is no publication in the world that we know of 
which returns rejected MSS. at its own expense. This magazine 
has neither the inclination nor the superfluous wealth to wish to 
shine as the solitary exception to a universal rule. Let there be 
enclosed with each MS. at least one stamp. This will be suffi- 
cient to start it upon its homeward journey if rejected ; if ac- 
cepted, the stamp will be utilized in bearing the news to the sen- 
der. Foreign postage-stamps are of no possible service in this 
country ; United States stamps alone should be sent (this is for 
the especial benefit of foreign contributors). Sometimes MSS. 
arrive which have not been properly stamped, and upon which 
postage is due. Such gross carelessness should never occur. 

And now, having said his brief say, the editor hopes that it 
will sink kindly into the memories of contributors, many of whom 
he has to thank for bearing in mind and acting upon the former 
"Talk." 



NEW PUBLICATIONS. 

FIVE-MINUTE SERMONS FOR Low MASSES ON ALL SUNDAYS OF THE YEAR. 
By Priests of the Congregation of St. Paul. Volume II. New York : 
The Catholic Publication Society Co.; London : Burns & Gates. 

It is with great pleasure that we notice this second volume of Five- 
Minute Sermons by the Paulist Fathers. The well-deserved popularity of 
the first issue and the constant demand for a second leave little doubt as 
to the reception this book will receive from the clergy and the laity. 

That there is need of books of this description is very evident. There 
has been among the clergy a growing custom of delivering short discourses 
at the earlier Masses on Sundays, and the Third Plenary Council of Balti- 
more urged the doing of this upon all priests having the care of souls, so 
that now, if time allow of it, it is matter of obligation. 

A book, therefore, of this kind is of no small value to the priest whose 
other duties are so engrossing as to leave him no opportunity for elaborat- 
ing these little weekly sermons for his congregation. For, although such 
discourses are short, they require care in their preparation indeed, even 
greater care than if they were longer. They should be the kernel of the 
divine word. They should be to the point and give a practical lesson. 
They should be perfect in their way. 



428 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Dec., 

It may seem that we are attaching too much importance to such little 
things as five-minute sermons, but when we consider their end carefully we 
think it becomes more evident that they are not only of importance, but of 
the highest importance. 

Many of those who generally listen to five-minute sermons in the 
church form a class who rarely hear any other preaching. They are people 
who either will not or cannot attend the High Mass, who do not care for 
long services nor for long sermons, and who not unfrequently are sadly in 
want of practical piety. The word of God and the word of God presented 
in a clear, concise manner is all the more necessary for them because of 
this. They need the truth brought home to them ; they need arousing and 
urging to the practice of virtue. 

And let it not be imagined that the number of those habitually absent 
from the regular sermon is small. The contrary is rather the case. The 
attendants at the High Mass would in many places scarcely be a sixth part 
of the congregation, and so five out of six of our Catholic people seldom 
hear any sermon except the short discourses at the early Masses. 

This being the case, it is not surprising that the late. Council should 
have declared its wish that the Gospel of the day be read in the vernacular 
every Sunday and solemn feast-day, at all the Masses, and that, if time 
permitted, the people be instructed in the law of God for at least five 
minutes. 

These little sermons also serve as suggestions for the regular ser- 
mons. Although they are not written with a view to this, still we know in 
the past that they have served in many cases as skeletons of more preten- 
tious discourses. Brief as they are, they contain thoughts which will suffer 
development, and the structure of a good sermon. 

For the laity, too, they are of value because they put in the hands of 
people living far away from a church, and unable to assist at Mass except 
on rare occasions, something with which they may nourish their souls. 
Although they are prevented from hearing sermons, still they have an op- 
portunity of reading them, and 'so they are not entirely cut off from the 
ministry of the word. 

NATURE AND THE BIBLE: Lectures on the Mosaic History of Creation in 
its Relation to Natural Science. By Dr. Fr. H. Reusch, Professor of 
Catholic Theology in the University of Bonn. Revised and corrected 
by the author. Translated from the fourth edition by Kathleen Lyt- 
tleton. 2 vols. Edinburgh : T. & T. Clark. 1886. (For sale by the Ca- 
tholic Publication Society Co.) 

Dr. Reusch belongs to the heretical sect of the so-called " Old Catholics." 
This circumstance may create a suspicion of the orthodoxy of a work pro- 
ceeding from his pen. His work must, however, be judged on its own objec- 
tive merits ; and, in point of fact, it does not deserve, so far as we have per- 
ceived, any censure on the score of orthodoxy. The author wrote it while 
he was a Catholic in high esteem, and we do not see that his corrections and 
additions have made it any less worthy of praise than it was before, when 
it received high commendation and won a place among the best works of 
its kind. It is written with German erudition and thoroughness. We do 
not know of any similar work in English which equals it in these respects. 
The style of the translation and the whole manner of the publication are 



1 886.] NEW PUBLICATIONS. 429 

excellent. Now that special attention to this class of subjects in semina- 
ries has been recommended and prescribed by ecclesiastical authority, a work 
of this kind must be very useful to teachers who have to lecture on this 
branch of study. It is a matter of regret that a man of Dr. Reusch's learn- 
ing and ability should have fallen from his allegiance to the church into a 
pitiful schism. We trust that those who profit by his labors in the cause 
of sound doctrine and science will pray that he may have the grace to re- 
turn to the bosom of the true Mother Church. 

MISSIONARY LABORS OF FATHERS MARQUETTE, MENARD, AND ALLOUEZ 
IN THE LAKE SUPERIOR REGION. By Rev. Chrysostom Verwyst, O.S.F., 
of Bayfield, Wis. Milwaukee and Chicago: Hoffman Bros. 1886. 

This unpretending-looking pamphlet is a piece of the most authentic and 
interesting history. Father Verwyst has the true historical spirit and 
method, in marked contrast with "the superficial romancing style of his- 
torical writing'' which he condemns so severely. He tells the story of the 
labors, sufferings, heroic fortitude and devotion of men worthy to be classed 
with saints and apostles a story which would seem almost incredible were 
it not most certainly proved to be true. It makes one living amid all the 
comforts of civilization feel almost ashamed to call himself a Christian 
when he compares his easy condition with the hard lot of these Indian mis- 
sionaries. If the author makes any money by his little book he will give it 
all to the missions among the Indians. We hope he will make a great deal. 

THE ILLUSTRATED CATHOLIC FAMILY ANNUAL for 1887 (nineteenth year). 
New York : The Catholic Publication Society Co. ; London : Burns & 
Gates. 

The Annual this year presents a most attractive appearance, not only 
because it is beautifully printed and illustrated, but also because of its in- 
teresting and varied table of contents. 

The literary portion opens with a historical ballad " A Ballad of Iscan- 
der-Beg," by Mr. Maurice F. Egan, written in this author's charming and 
finished style, and interspersed with lovely thoughts like these : 

" For childish thoughts are life-time's dreams 

Within us unto death ; 
They come upon us when pain seems 
To stop our very breath. 

" Oh ! thoughts of childhood do not die 

Like thoughts of man and youth ; 
They change not like an April day, 

They live in lies or truth ; 
And be they false or be they true, 

They work us good or ruth." 

Following the ballad come some clearly written and brief sketches of 
several of the archbishops of Baltimore, each of which contains an excellent 
likeness of the subject. One sees so many caricatures which pretend to be 
good likenesses of prominent people in cheap publications generally that it 
is refreshing to find really good portraits in a book that is sold at a low figure. 
Indeed, the illustrations throughout the Annual are worthy o 
mendation, as is also the fact that they have evidently beej 
the articles. It is often the case with cheap publications t\ 
bought up and reproduced, and hack articles written to fit 




430 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Dec., 

suits in a very unsatisfactory book. Of course illustrations should be made 
for the articles, not the articles for the illustrations. 

There are so many interesting sketches and articles in the present An- 
nuafthat we'Jcannot enumerate them in a brief review; though among the 
sketches of eminent religious and of noted Catholic laymen we might spe- 
cially mention those dealing with the Rev. Augustine J. Thebaud, S.J., Car- 
dinals Taschereau and Guibert, Dr. Richard Robert Madden, Right Rev. 
Thomas Francis Hendricken, D.D., Mary Aloysia Hardey, Murillo, Dryden, 
Chateaubriand, Gabriel Franchere ; these are sufficient to give an idea of the 
scope of the work. " The Jesuits in China " contains sketches and portraits 
of Fathers Ricci, Schall, and Verbiest. We note interesting historical 
sketches : "The Templars," " The Old Mission of San Xavier del Bac," and 
others. Altogether The Catholic Family Annual for 1887 is a work upon 
which the publisher may justly plume himself. .When its excellence is 
contrasted with its very low price it is hard to see how any Catholic family 
can afford to be without it. 

HISTORY OF CHEVALIER BAYARD. Translated from the French. London : 
Chapman & Hall. (For sale by the Catholic Publication Society Co., 
New York.) 

In these days of manufactured heroes it is a grateful thing to have our 
attention called to a real hero ; for whatever doubt there may be as to the 
sentiment of chivalry, there can be none as to the heroic character of its 
truest representatives, among whom the Chevalier Bayard is the most con- 
spicuous. 

This is a history of his exploits in arms, told in the quaint style of the 
mediaeval chronicler. The author the " Loyal Serviteur," as he calls him- 
self is rather garrulous and not over-reliable, and we question whether the 
true greatness of the " Chevalier sans peur et sans reproche" does not suf- 
fer in his hands. Nevertheless, he glories in his hero, and presents him to 
us in what he considers his grandest aspect. The translation is very imper- 
fect. It is so fearfully literal that it gives not only the French idioms, but 
often even the French words slightly modified. The book is profusely 
illustrated. 

EIGHTY-FIVE YEARS OF IRISH HISTORY: 1800-1885. B 7 William Joseph 
O'Neil Daunt. In two volumes. London : Ward & Downey. 1886. 

These two volumes of Mr. Daunt are a valuable addition, we think, to 
the literature already extant bearing upon the question of the government 
of Ireland. The author is himself an earnest advocate of an Irish Parlia- 
ment, and his books are written to show that Ireland has a perfect right to 
have a Parliament. 

" The desire of the Irish people," says Mr. Daunt, " to recover their right of domestic legis- 
lation is as natural as a sick man's desire for restoration to health. Ireland's vital need is self- 
government, the exclusive control and development of her own resources. ' The powers of 
independent existence seemed to be marked in her structure in such bold characters by nature 
that it required the unceasing efforts of an active and malignant policy to defeat the obvious 
purposes of creation.' 

" That active and malignant policy was never more perniciously exercised than in its effort 
firgtfto corrupt , and then to suppress the Irish legislature. To emancipate our country from 
jts d^adly'ltrfluence is the purpose which has never been absent from the Irish mind for eighty- 
'fiv^ years. It i$ a purpose consistent with the most devoted loyalty to the crown. Its achieve- 
m*ntr\vuld give strength and stability to Irish constitutional loyalty by removing that fruitful 
source of discontent the denial to Ireland of her indefeasible right of self-government." 

' 



1 886.] NEW PUBLICATIONS. 431 

To the intrinsic value of information afforded by these two volumes 
there is added the charm of a very pleasing style. The author knows how 
to entertain his readers as well as how to instruct them. Pleasanter histori- 
cal reading than Eighty-five Years of Irish History can hardty be desired. 
It reminds us forcibly of Justin McCarthy's History of Our Own Times, 
which had for us almost the attractions of a brilliant novel, and made us 
as eager for the succeeding chapter as if we were in the midst of the plot 
of a story and anxious to know the issue. 

THOMAS GRANT, FIRST BISHOP OF SOUTHWARK. By Kathleen O'Meara. 

Second edition. London : W. H. Allen & Co. 1886. 

The great ability and saintly character of Bishop Grant are well known 
and generally recognized. Miss O'Meara's reputation as a writer, especially 
of biography, has long since been established. A second edition of her life 
of the distinguished English prelate, prefaced by a very warm eulogium 
and commendation from Bishop Ullathorne, is opportune and welcome. 
The work itself has already been appreciated at its true and high value by 
the Catholic public. 

CHRISTIAN PATIENCE THE STRENGTH AND DISCIPLINE OF THE SOUL. A 
Course of Lectures. By Bishop Ullathorne. London: Burns & Gates ; 
New York : The Catholic Publication Society Co. 1886. 

The aged and illustrious author of this book gives it to us as his last 
work, with a beautiful dedication to Cardinal Newman. Every reader who 
knows the character of Bishop Ullathorne and his works will expect to find 
this .treatise admirable. He will not be disappointed, but will find his ex- 
pectation amply fulfilled. 

THE WATCH ON CALVARY. Meditations on the Seven Last Words of our 

Dying Redeemer. By the Right Rev. Monsignor T. S. Preston, V.G., 

LL.D. New York : R. Coddington. 1886. 

These Meditations for Lent are published in a form of remarkable 
beauty, and the interior contents correspond well with their attractive ex- 
terior form. 


SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS OF NOTED PERSONS. Compiled by Justin S. Morrill. 

Boston : Ticknor & Co. 1887. 

The book is a compilation of the opinions which various noted persons 
have entertained of themselves. Of course a great deal of egotism is re- 
corded, and some instances of unbounded conceit. Voltaire's preposterous 
and ridiculous saying is perhaps the sublimest piece of conceit given : " I 
am tired of hearing it repeated that twelve men were sufficient to found 
Christianity : I will show the world that one is sufficient to destroy it." It 
is needless to add that Voltaire is dead and that Christianity lives. From 
Whitman, never much given to modesty in any sense of the word, this gem 
of egotism is selected : 

" I conned old times, 

I sat studying at the feet of the great masters ; 
Now, if eligible, oh that the great masters might return and study me ! " 

Of Nelson it is said : " It may not be generally known that Nelson's last 
signal was not ' England,' but ' Nelson expects every man to do his duty.' " 
It has been asserted that the officer to whom the order was given affected 
to have misunderstood the egotistical direction, and substituted the sound- 



432 NEW PUBLICATIONS. [Dec., 1886. 

ing rhetoric which was then, and has been ever since, received with so 
much enthusiasm by Englishmen." 

Looking through the book at random, one is forced to confess that hu- 
mility among noted persons is a very rare virtue, and that, as Young has it, 

' ' The love of praise, howe'er concealed by art, 
Reigns more or less, and glows in every heart." 

It would perhaps have been better had the " noted persons " been arranged 
in the book with some regard to their chronological order. It is somewhat 
startling to fino Alexander the Great and Benjamin Franklin almost hand- 
in-hand, and Jean Froissart succeeding to James A. Garfield. 

RELIGIOUS UNITY AS PRESCRIBED BY OUR LORD ; or, Grounds of Faith 
and Morals. By I. Van Luytelaar, C.SS.R. St. Louis : B. Herder. 1886. 

This is a compendium of the doctrine of Christian unity. The subject 
is treated with learning, and especially with a view to furnish a statement 
of the grounds of the unity of the church which shall be complete. It is a 
useful hand book both for study and reference. 



OTHER BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS RECEIVED. 

MURAL PAINTING. By Frederic Crowninshield. Boston : Ticknor & Co. 1887. 

A LECTURE ON CATHOLIC IRELAND. By the Rev. J. P. Prendergast. Dublin : M. H. Gill & 
Son. 1886. 

THE SORROWS OF WERTHER, from the German of Goethe. THE DIARY OF SAMUEL PEPYS, 
1660-1661. VOYAGES IN SEARCH OF THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE. LIVES OF THE ENGLISH 
POETS, by Samuel Johnson. Cassell's National Library. New York : Cassell & Co. 

SKETCH OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN THE CITY OF NATCHEZ, Miss., on the occasion of 
the consecration of its cathedral, September 19, 1886. 

QUARTERLY REPORT OF THE CHIEF OF THE BUREAU OF STATISTICS, Treasury Depart- 
ment, for the Three Months ending June 30, 1886. Washington : Government Printing- 
office. 

THE DESTRUCTION OF THE WORLD, and other Poems. By John J. McGirr. Boston : Alfred 
Mudge & Son. 1886. 

WILLIAM PENN UNMASKED ; or, His Enmity towards the Catholic Religion clearly shown 
from his own writings. By Rev. William P. Treacy. 

THE ROSARY OF THE SACRED HEART. By Mrs. Frances Blundell. Dublin : M. H. Gill & 
Son. 1886. 

MAXIMS AND COUNSELS OF ST. IGNATIUS LOYOLA. Translated from the French by Alice 
Wilmot Chetwode. Dublin : M. H. Gill & Son. 1886. 

TO-DAY'S GEM FOR THE CASKET OF MARY. Compiled from various sources by a member of 
the Ursuline Community. Dublin : M. H. Gill & Son. 1886. 

SHORT MEDITATIONS ON THE HOLY ROSARY. Translated from the French by a member of 
the Order of St. Dominic. Dublin : M. H. Gill & Son. 1886. 

THOUGHTS OF ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI. Translated from the French by Miss Margaret A. 
Colton. New York, Cincinnati, and St. Louis : Benziger Bros. 1886. 

INSTRUCTIO SPONSORUM LINGUA ANGLIA CONSCRIPTA AD USUM PAROCHORUM. Auctore 
Sacerdote Missionario. St. Louis, Mo.: B. Herder. 1885. 

A MEDITATION UPON WHISKEY. By Rev. B. Lpison. Translated from the German by Rev. 
J. B. Maus, of Allentown, Pa. Philadelphia : The Catholic Total Abstinence Archdio- 
cesan Union. 1886. 

SISTER SAINT-PETER AND THE WORK OF REPARATION. Historical Notice by M. L'Abbe 
Janvier. Translated by K. A. C. Dublin : M. H. Gill & Son. 1886. 

NEW AND OLD SERMONS. Edited (in conjunction with many other Clergymen) by Rev. Au- 
gustine Wirth, O.S.B., Elizabeth, N. J. 

HUNTING AND FISHING-GROUNDS, AND FACILITIES FOR HEALTHFUL SPORT. 

How TO STRENGTHEN THE MEMORY. By M. L. Holbrook, M.D. New York : M. L. Hoi- 
brook & Co. 

MICROBES, FERMENTS AND MOULDS. By E. L . Trouessart. New York : D. Appleton & Co. 
1886. 

THE HISTORY OF THE SOCIETY OF JESUS. By A. Wilmot, F.R.G.S. London : Burns & 
Gates; New York : The Catholic Publication Society Co. 



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