Full text of "The Catholic world"

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THE

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CATHOLIC WORLD.

MONTHLY MAGAZINE

GENJR|L LITERATURE AND SCIENCE.

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VOL,. I.V.

APRIL, 1892, TO SEPTEMBER, 1892.

NEW YORK : .

THE OFFICE OF THE CATHOLIC WORLD,

120-122 WEST SIXTIETH STREET.

1892.

THE COLUMBUS PRESS, 120-122 WEST 60fH ST. NEW YORK.

CONTENTS.

American Catholics and the Roman
Question. Very Rev. Augustine
F. Hewit, 425

Ancient City of Dublin, The. Katha-
rine Tynan, ..... 93

Are We Worthy of Our Inheritance ?

Josephine Lewis, . . . . 700

At the Pension Roguet. Lelia Hardin

Bugg, 546

By the Roanoke. F. C. Farinholt, . 232

Canterbury Tale, A. Charles E. Hod-
son, 260 .

Catholic Church and the Indians, The.

Rev. D. Man ley, .... 473

Catholic Educational Exhibit in the Co-
lumbian Exposition, The. Right
Rev.J.L. Spalding, D.D., . . 580

Catholic School System of Great Bri-
tain. Rev. Thomas McMillan, . 794

Catholic View of Shakspere, A.. John

Malone, 716

Catholic Summer School, The. John

A. Mooney, A.M, .... 532

Christian Anthropology. Rev. E. B.

Brady, 541

Closing Scene, The. Rev. Alfred

Young, . . . ' . . .329

Columbian Reading Union, The, 145, 305,
461, 612, 773, 923

Columbus and La Rabida. Rev. Char-
les Warren Currier, . . . 639

Columbus in Portugal. Rev. L. A.

Dutto, 44

Columbus in Spain. Rev. L. A. Dutto, 210

Conversion of the American People,

The. Rev. F. G. Lentz, . . 884

Diverging Streams. Marie Louise San-

drock, 349

" Doubtful," The, or Pseudo-Shakspe-

rean Plays. Appleton Morgan, 203, 397

Expulsion of the Jews from Spain.

Manuel Perez Villamil, . .851

Financial Relations of the French Clergy

to the State. L. B. Binsse, . 897

George von Franckenstein. Joseph Al-
exander, ..... 32

Home Rule and the General Election.

George Me Dermot, . . . 225

Home Rule or Egotism ? George Mc-

Dermot, 785

House of Shadows, The. Rev. Wil-
liam Barry, D.D., ... 15

Human Certitude and Divine Faith.

Right Rev. F. S. Chatard, D.D., 84

Is There a Companion World to Our

Own. Rev. George M. Searle, . 860

Jews in Spain During the Middle Ages,

The. Manuel Perez Villamil, . 649

Johannes Janssen. Joseph Alexander, 572

Latest Word of Science on Venomous

Snakes. William Seton, . . 695

Longing for God and Its Fulfilment.

Rev. Walter Elliott, . . .338

Maid of Orleans, The. Rev. Thomas

O'Gorman, D.D. .... 802

Martyr to Truth-Telling, K. Wtl/rid

Wilberforce, 879

Matchbox-Makers of East London,

The. Henry Abraham, . . 812

Methodist Book Concern, The. Prof.

W. C. Robinson, . . . .159

Miss Lanier. M '. C. Williams, . . 722

Mistress Mary. Cranfurd Nicholls, 64, 188

Mother's Sacrifice, A. A. M. Clarke, 410,

509

Old World Seen from the New, 115, 273,
437, 588, 750 902

On the Upper Lakes Forty Years Ago.

Gen. E. Parker Scammon, . . 246

Polly's True Boy. Edith Brower, . 817

Reminiscences of Edgar P. Wadhams,
First Bishop of Ogdensburg. Rev.
C. A. Walworth, . 317, 482, 662, 826

Satanke, the Kiowah ; A Reminiscence. 4
Henry C. King. . . . . 101

Shea, John Gilmary. Marc F. Vallette,

Ph.D 55

Shepherdess of Domremy, The. Rev.

T homas'O' Gorman, D.D. . . 629

Some Personal Recollections of Cardi-
nal Manning. Katharine Tynan, 180

Some Thoughts Upon Irish Minstrels

and Minstrelsy. Daniel Spillane, 496

Story of a Diamond Ornament, The.

Edith Stamforth, .... 677

Suggestions for the Coming Total Ab-
stinence Convention. Rev. Mor-
gan M. Sheedy, .... 562

Talk About New Books, 129, 285, 445, 597,

760, 909

Third Archbishop of Westminster, The.

Henry Charles Kent, . . . 385

Third Congress of Colored Catholics,

The. Rev. Thomas M. O'Keefe, 109

Toluca. Charles E. Hodson, . . 845

What Fills Our Jails. J.A.J. McKenna, 172

What Nature Says of Its Creator. Rev.

John S. Vaughan, i

Why I Became a Catholic. Frank

Johnston, 375

With the Publisher, 154,311,468,621, 782,

930

Wrath of Mother Nature, The. M. T.

Elder, 707

CONTENTS.

POETRY.

All in White. Henry Edward

O'Keeffe, 793

At Easter Time. Maurice Francis

At the Church' Door. Mary Elizabeth

Blake 49

Death of Bjorn, The. Geraldine

O'Neill, 8 49

Forgiven. Alice Van Cleve, . . . 34
For Wild Flowers. Rev, Alfred Young, 579
Even-Song for Easter . Katharine

Tynan, "4

Glendalough. Right Rev. J. L. Spald-

ing, D.D 66*

Haec Hora. Lucy Agnts Hayes, . . 83
Heroes of Holy Church. George F. X.

Griffith, 63

Home. Patrick J. Coleman, . . - 539

I am the Way." Rev. Alfred Young, 231
Legends of the Cid. Aubrey de Vere,

741, 888

Leo XIII. Francis Lavelle, . . . 384
Mystical Rose, The. Marie Loyola

LeBaron, 693

Sursum Corda. T. W. Parsons, . . 495
Sweet Chastity, Right Rev. J. L. Spald-

ing, D. D., 54

Vade Mecum. Kate P. Lathrop, . . 179

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

Across the Plains, 289

American Catholics and the Roman

Question, 29?

Angular Stone, The . . . .136
Autobiography of Archbishop Ulla-

thorne, The, 143

Blessed Virgin in the Catacombs, The, 456
Blue Pavilions, The, . . . .132

Cssar Cascabel 600

Calmire, 760

Christian Education in America, . . 767

Columbus and Beatrix 449

Conscience, 293

Daughter of the South, A., . . 450

Dictionary of Hymnology, A., . . 607

Discovery of America, .... 458

Document, A Human, ... * 291

Don Braulio, 602

Dreams and Days, 448

Di^hess of Angouleme and the Two Re-
storations, 294

Kdinburg Eleven, An, . . . 917

Evolution of Christianity, The, . . 769
Experiences of a Lady Help, . . .765

Faith, 910

Fates, The Three, 285

Fifty-two Short Instructions, . . 921

Flower de Hundred, . 766

Felix Lanzberg's Expiation, . . . 602

France, The Literature of, . . . 138

Freville Chase, 913

Gertrude Mannering, .... 916

Glories of Divine Grace, The, . . 295

Grania : The Story of an Island, . . 130

Guide for Catholic Young Women, . 609

Heir of Liscarragh, The, . . . 916

Hertha : A Romance, .... 766

Himalayan Lake, By a., ... 294

Hints for Language Lessons, . . 610
Ireland and St. Patrick, . . . .141
I Saw Three Ships, and Other Winter

Tales, 292

It Happened Yesterday, . .133

Lady of Ravens Combe, The, . . 913

Leslie, Mrs., and Lennox, Mrs., . . 133

Leaders, American Religious, . . 139

Life of General de Sonis, . . . 144

Love Letters of a Worldly Woman, . 452

Lumen, 290

la and the Educational System of

the Jesuits, 299

Madeline's Destiny, .... 916

Madden, Memoirs of Dr., . . . 143

Magi King, 9 l6

Man and Money, 293

Martyr of Our Own Times, A., . 457

Mary, Queen of May, . . . . 34
Mate of the Vancouver, The, . .766
Meditations on the Principal Truths of

Religion, 3 2

Meditations for the use of the Secular

Clergy 9*9

New York Family, A, . . . -599
One Good Guest, The, .... 602

On the Rack, 452

Pactolus Prime, 606

Peter Ibbetson, 129

Phases of Thought and Criticism, . 920

Poetical Works, 916

Potiphar's Wife, and other Verses, . 134
Pot of Gold, The, and Other Stories, . 135
Principles of Political Economy, . . 298
Question of Taste, A, .... 45

Renee and Colette 13?

Renee's Marriage, 294

Reasonableness of the Ceremonies and

Practices of the Catholic Church, . 772

Res Judicatze, 603

Realm of Nature, The . . . .142
Reflections of a Married Man, The, . 598

Roger Hunt, 131

Roweny in Boston, . . . .130

San Salvador, 286

Scapegoat, The, 135

Sinner's Comedy, The, . . . 451

Sealed Packet, The . . 449

Story of Francis Cludde, The . . 606
Story of a Penitent Soul, The . . 762
Story of Philip Methuen, . . 445

Tent and Bungalow, In, . . 139

Theologia Moralis per Modum Confer-

entiarum, ... . 142

Tess of the D'Ubervilles, . . 453

Thoughts and Teachings of Lacordaire, 460
Transplanted Rose, A, . . . . 765
Trial of Margaret Brereton, The, . . 610
Travels Amongst the Great Andes of

the Equator, 303

Miss Wilton, 290

Wings of Icarus, The, .... 597

Wrecker, The, 918

Younger Sister, A, .... 600

THE

CATHOLIC WORLD,

VOL. LV. APRIL, 1892. No. 325.

WHAT NATURE SAYS OF ITS CREATOR.

IF we consult the oldest record extant, and study the pages
of the Holy Scriptures, we shall find it recorded by the inspired
writers that the vast and immeasurable universe, in the midst of
which our little earth floats like a tiny mote, was formed during
the course of six days. " In six days God made heaven and
earth, and the sea, and all things that are in them " (Exo-
dus xx. n). But we must bear well in mind that the Hebrew word
" ydm"* which has been translated "day" does not, strictly speak-
ing, signify " day " at all, but rather an indefinite term or period.f
Hence, as all competent Hebrew scholars assure us, the more ac-
curate rendering of the original text would be : " In six periods
God made heaven and earth," etc.

Now, the interesting question arises, What was the length
of those periods ? For many centuries it was commonly thought

* " If we are seriously to study the value and Scriptural acceptation of Scriptural words
and phrases, I presume that our first business will be to collate the use of these words in one
part of Scripture with their use in other parts holding the same spiritual relations. The
creation, for instance, does not belong to the earthly or merely historical records, but to the
spiritual records of the Bible ; to the same category, therefore, as the prophetic sections of
the Bible. Now, in those, and in the Psalms, how do we understand trie word day? Is any
man so little versed in Biblical language as not to know that (except in the merely historical
parts of the Jewish records) every section of time has a secret and separate acceptation in the
Scriptures ? Does an ceon, though a Grecian word, bear Scripturally (either in Daniel or in
St. John) any sense known to Grecian ears ? Do the seventy weeks of the prophet mean
weeks in the sense of human calendars ? . . . Who of the innumerable interpreters under-
stands the twelve hundred and sixty days in Daniel, or his two thousand and odd days, to
mean, by possibility, periods of twenty-four hours ? Surely the theme of Moses was as mys-
tical, and as much entitled to the benefit of mystical language, as that of the prophets." De
Quincey's Works, vol. iii. pp. 204-5.

tSee, e.g., among others, Origine du Monde, etc., by M. 1'Abbe Motais ; Manual Bib-
lique, by M. Vigouroux ; Geology and Revelation, by Rev. G. Molloy ; La Religion en Face
de la Science, by Arduin.

2 WHA T NA TURE SA YS OF ITS CREA TOR. [April,

that they were six periods of exactly four-and-twenty hours
each. Geology and the other natural sciences were then almost
or entirely unknown ; there was, consequently, no solid basis on
which to form an accurate opinion ; so, in the absence of any
reliable indication as to their real duration, an ordinary day was
considered the most natural and satisfactory interpretation. As,
however, time wore on and men began to devote more attention
to the study of the earth and to the structure of its crust ; and
as science advanced and extended its boundaries, this opinion
grew less universal, and little by little lost its hold altogether up-
on the minds of men. Geologists learnt by slow degrees how
to read the history of the earth in the rocks, as in a book. Na-
ture itself was persuaded to discourse to man so soon 'as he had
made himself capable, by hard application, of understanding its
strange language. The earth told him much of its own wondrous
birth and infancy ; and delivered up to him secret after secret
of its grad.ual development and growth. So that just as we may
ascertain the age of a tree by the number of concentric rings
forming its trunk, or the age of a deer by the number of bran-
ches or shoots on its antlers, so in a similar manner we may
form a tolerably correct idea of the stages through which the
earth has passed, and the duration of its existence, by certain
well-known indications in its strata. The result of these investi-
gations has been to convince men that the " days " or periods
of creation were not terms of twenty-four hours, but long periods
of hundreds of thousands, or even of millions, of years. There is,
of course, nothing contrary to Scripture in this view, since the
Scriptures leave the duration of the creative day quite vague and
undefined.

According to the more generally accepted theory of science,
the earth we inhabit began as a vast circular ball of fiery vapor,
revolving around a central point. All the existing material ele-
ments which go to make up the earth, such as the rocks, the
metals, the crystals; as well as the carbon, hydrogen, and oxy-
gen, and other substances of which the animals and plants now
living on its surface are formed, were then existing certainly, but
in a condition of such intense heat that they were all maintained
in a gaseous form. " It is plain," writes the learned Father Har-
per, S.J., in his Metaphysics of the Schools, vol. ii., "that accord-
ing to the teaching of St. Thomas and of the Fathers of the
Church, the primordial elements alone were created in the strict
sense of the term, and that the rest of nature was developed out

1892.] WHAT NATURE SAYS OF ITS CREATOR. 3

of these according to a fixed order of natural operation, under
the supreme guidance of the Divine administration." *

In the course of slowly unfolding ages the fiery vaporous
earth began to part with its heat by radiation into space, and to
cool little by little. As it cooled, like all cooling bodies, it con-
tracted and became more compact. At last, after many ages,
amounting, some say, to millions of years, the temperature be-
came so far reduced that a hard film or crust began to be formed
on its outer surface, constantly gaining in thickness and solidity,
till at last it surrounded it as the rind surrounds an orange.
The heavier substances, and those which solidify at a higher
temperature, were by this time precipitated and formed a por-
tion of the hardening nucleus of the earth. The seas and oceans,
however, were still held suspended in the form of steam or va-
por high up in the regions of the air. As centuries elapsed and
the temperature sunk lower and lower, these aqueous vapors con-
densed and fell upon the earth in the form of heavy and almost
continuous rains. As it fell upon the earth's surface little run-
nels were formed in all directions. These gathered into torrents,
streams, and great roaring cataracts and rivers, which, flowing
together, filled the hollows and more depressed regions, and so
gave birth to the original lakes and seas and wide-stretching
oceans, where storms and hurricanes and furious winds kept high
revel, and so churned and troubled the turbulent waters that,
compared with the tempests of that period, the wildest tempest
of our day is little better than a storm in a tea-cup.

At this stage of the world's history another notable change
comes over the scene. The warm, steamy atmosphere of the still
heated earth begins to stimulate the energies and vital principles
lying dormant in the virginal soil. The green grass slowly forces
its way up through the yielding soil and spreads like a carpet far
and wide. Herbs, and shrubs, and trees of all kinds spring up
and propagate themselves in all directions, increasing in number
and stature year by year, till the earth shows at last like a vast
tropical garden. Thus things progressed and progressed, so that
by the time the carboniferous period had fairly set in the whole
land was covered with the most luxurious and gorgeous vegeta-
tion. On all sides vast forests of gigantic trees sprang into life,
stretching their colossal limbs high into the air, while innumer-

* The professor of theology at the University of Breslau, Father Schultz, makes a similar
observation : " Erhielt sich die Ansicht, dass Alles zugleich und ohne zeit geschaffen sei,
auch im Mittelalter. Sie findet sich noch bei Thomas Aquinas (Sum. i. 19) und, nach Peta-
vius (De Theo. Dogm. Hi. cap. v.), auch bei Cajetan u. A." (p. 328, Die Schopfungsgt-
schichte).

VOL. LV. I

4 WHA T NA TURE SA YS OF ITS CREA TOR. [April,

able creepers and trailing plants, with soft, succulent, and spongy
stems and large, broad leaves, covered almost the whole of the
hot, soppy, and swampy soil. Their number and luxuriance may
be gathered by the great coal measures, often many yards in
thickness, which they have deposited in the course of their de-
cay. " In the early time there was no aerial animal life on the
earth, and so late as the carboniferous period there were only
reptiles, myriapods, spiders, insects, and pulmonate molluscs"

(Dana, p. 353)-

But a little later great monsters began to move in the deep,
and wondrous forms of birds and beasts, long since extinct,
might have been heard crashing through the underwood in the
sombre glades of the forests, or splashing and gamboling on the
shore of lake or inland sea. The remains of these great un-
wieldy creatures are still occasionally met with imbedded in the
rocks. In the palaeontological department of the British Museum
various most interesting specimens may be seen and examined :
such as the skeleton of the American mastodon, an animal close-
ly allied to the elephant ; and the skull of the Elephas ganesa, re-
markable for the immense length of its tusks. There is also a
model of an entire skeleton of the Dinoceras mirabile, one of the
most remarkable of the many wonderful forms of animal life
lately discovered in the tertiary beds of the western portion of
the United States of America. This animal combines in some
respects the characters of a rhinoceros with those of an elephant,
and has others altogether special to itself. The group to which
it belonged became extinct in the miocene period (see General
Guide, p. 48). In addition to these the interested visitor may
feast his eyes on the remains of the famous lizard-tailed bird
(Archaeopteryx) of the Solenhofen beds of Bavaria; and a series
of skeletons of the "Moa" or Dinornis of New Zealand, a bird
in which no trace of a wing has been discovered. There is al-
so a fine assemblage of reptilian remains, such as the great sea-
lizards and sea-dragons (Plesiosauria and IchtJiyosaurid) and the
gigantic Dinosauria, by far the most enormous of all land-animals,
while at the eastern end of the gallery are the Pterosauria, or
flying reptiles* (p. 50).

The relics of these and other extinct monsters are occasion-
ally discovered in the various strata of the mesozoic period, which
includes the cretaceous, Jurassic, and triassic layers. Owing to the

*The ureat interest in visiting these remains arises from the fact that it brings us actually
face to face with the representatives of a period in the earth's history far anterior to the ex-
istence of man, and wholly unlike anything of which we have any experience.

1 8

1892.] WHAT NATURE SAYS OF ITS CREATOR. 5

similarity of the general plan upon which each distinct class of
living creatures is built up, it is often possible to form a very
fair notion of an antediluvian or prehistoric beast or reptile from
very scanty data. On the principle of " Ex pede Herculem" or
what would, perhaps, be more appropriate in the present connec-
tion, ex ungue leonem a foot or a claw, or even a single pet-
rified bone the tibia or fibula of the hind leg, for instance, or
the sacrum or one of the vertebrae is enough to enable an ex-
pert to reconstruct the whole skeleton ; nay, a mere foot-print
on the soft clay, hardened by time and preserved in the deep
alantosaurus or permian beds, is sometimes enough to reveal to
the wondering eye of x the discoverer the gigantic form of the
mammoth or the megatherium, the mastodon or the ichthyosau-
rus, which ten thousand ages before man was made lived and
sported and produced their young amid scenes of unwonted love-
liness, and surrounded by a grandeur of vegetation and a mag-
nificence of growth never contemplated by human eye, and the
bare existence of which is only certified by the record stored up
and preserved in the rocks and other deposits.

For thousand of years, possibly for tens or hundreds of
thousands of years, this world was made over as the home and
dwelling place of unconscious and unreasoning creatures.

Faith as well as science informs us that irrational animals
were made before man. All the great geologists teach that man
is the last in the series of living creatures to enter upon the
stage of this world. It was only at long last when the fulness
of time was come, and the world had developed into a habita-
tion fit and suitable for a more highly gifted being, that God
resolved, in the exercise of his omnipotence, to fashion a crea-
ture who should not only enjoy life, and feeling, and the power
of growth and development like the beasts and birds, but far
other and greater capacities as well. An entirely new class of
animal an animal, indeed, but a rational animal ; the fore-
runner of a race of beings who should be able to take an ap-
preciative interest in the works of his hands, and to love and
admire. He made Adam, and gave him a companion, Eve,
formed and endowed like himself with the priceless gifts of
knowledge, and understanding, and free will, and with the
power both of forming and expressing his thoughts, and the faculty
of communicating to others his feelings and sentiments. They and
their descendants were to rule over the earth by virtue of their
superior knowledge, and to subdue it, and " to have dominion over
the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and the beasts,

6 WffA T NA TURE SA YS OF ITS CREA TOR. [April,

and the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth
upon the earth " (Gen. i. 26). Every creature was to acknowl-
edge their authority and obey their will.

We must pause here for a moment to rem.ark that, so far as
the fact of man's arrival on the earth is concerned (and setting
aside all questions concerning the means by which he was intro-
duced), science and faith are in the most complete accord.
Geology, no less than Scripture, points to a time when there was
no life of any kind whatsoever upon the earth ; and the most
advanced scientists, no less than the most unyielding theologians,
declare with equal emphasis that among living beings man was
the last to appear. Almost all the remains of human beings have
been found in the quaternary strata, and none below the terti-
ary.* The fact that a vast number of fossils of extinct animals
and living creatures have been discovered in the various strata
below those in which the relics of man are found tends to show,
beyond all reasonable doubt, and altogether apart from revela-
tion, that irrational animals of various kinds and species lived
before any human footsteps trod the virginal earth. Every scien-
tific man, every learned geologist, be he Atheist, Agnostic, or
Christian, is constrained by the very science he professes to be-
lieve that there was once a period, however remote, when no
man breathed throughout the realms of earth. He must also
admit not alone on religious grounds, please to observe, but on
strictly scientific grounds that further back still a more remote
period must be admitted in which no life of any kind, whether
of bird or of beast, of reptile or fish, existed on earth a period,
in fact, in which the earth could not have supported life for one
instant. I refer especially to the period preceding the forma-
tion of the lowest solid rocks, when, as Professor C. H. Hitch-
cock f affirms, "the whole globe was in a state of igneous
fusion." It is perfectly clear that no life could have existed
on the earth when its temperature throughout was very much
higher than, say, molten iron or brass.

How then, we may ask, did life commence? What produced
What gave origin to grass and trees and endowed them
with power of growth and expansion ? What gave origin to
animals and endowed them with the power of feeling, instinct,
and locomotion? What power first introduced man into this
world, where once he was not, and bestowed upon him the fa-
culties of reason, conscience, and free-will ? We reply God. We

There are no certain traces of man in the tertiary strata. EDITOR
t Elementary Geology, p. 104.

1892.] WHAT NATURE SAYS OF ITS CREATOR. 7

make answer that God alone gave, and that God alone could
give. The scientific Agnostic, on the contrary, questions his
sciences ; and all they can reply is, " We don't know." That
man once had no existence on earth, they acknowledge to be
certain. That he now has existence on earth, is equally certain;
but how he was first introduced into this terrestrial world, they
cannot say.

Scientific men make the most valiant attempts to interpret
and unravel each successive step in the formation of the earth ;
but here, at least, they are bound to acknowledge themselves
baffled. Without pausing to refer to minor difficulties, we may
remark that there are four great transitions, four deep yawning
chasms which, with all their cleverness and ingenuity, scientists
cannot bridge over.

The first is the passage from nothing to something. Yet
this passage must be bridged over; for, though we may transport
ourselves in thought to a time when the earth was but a ball
of vapor, or even the finest and most subtile gas-cloud,
yet we have still to ask, How and whence came the vapor, and
what gave origin to the gas-cloud ? The mystery still remains
insoluble, unless a Creator and Supreme Fashioner be admitted.
But, passing by this initial difficulty a stumbling-block to athe-
istical science we come to three other impassable gulfs :

The gulf between the inorganic and the organic ;

The gulf between the organic and the sensitive ;

The gulf between the organic and the sensitive, on the one side,
and the intellectual and the reasonable, on the other.

Even setting aside for the moment all questions of religion
and revelation, we have no choice but to acknowledge the fact
that geology itself testifies that the inorganic preceded the organic ;
that the organic preceded the sensitive, and the sensitive pre-
ceded the rational the rational coming last in the series. In
other words, science itself compels us to admit that there was,
after the bulk of the earth had been formed, a FIRST plant, a
FIRST animal, and a FIRST man. But how came the first plant ?
Every experiment, and innumerable have been made, tends to
make it more and more incontestibly certain that, in the order
of nature, a plant or tree cannot come except from the seed or
germ or bud of a pre-existing plant. This is quite regarded now
as a demonstrated fact. An immense number of most careful ex-
periments have been made, even in recent years, with a view of
testing this truth. Again and again men have labored to pro-
duce life from non-life ; but no success has ever crowned their

8 WHA T NA TURE SA YS OF ITS CREA TOR. [April,

efforts. Nay, they have been forced to accept as an axiomatic
truth the old and time-honored dictum, " Omne vivum ab ovo."
Science is incompetent to deal with the difficulty. But one an-
swer remains, and that answer stands inscribed on a page written
three or four thousands of years ago, viz. : " God said : Let the
earth bring forth the green herb, and such as may seed, and the
fruit-tree yielding fruit after its kind," etc. (Gen. i. 11).

So again, in the ascent from the vegetative to the animal
world, a similar difficulty meets us. Of course, we have evidence
in abundance all around us in support of the fact that one ani-
mal may be produced by another of its own kind. We see that
a bird will produce a bird, and an insect an insect. But no one
can explain scientifically, nor even so much as imagine, how the
first bird or the first insect came into being. " Ce nest qui le
premier pas que cotite"

Science informs us that the earth was once a ball of fire. It
then goes on to say, that after it had cooled a process extend-
ing, if we may trust Helmholtz, over one hundred and fifty mil-
lions of years it was covered with a luxurious vegetation,
though it is very careful to give us no clue as to how this vege-
tation was produced.* Science further tells us that there were
no animals until after the hills and valleys had become green
with plants and herbs. And that is certainly reasonable enough,
for in the absence of all seeds and of all green food neither
bird nor beast could have survived a week.

Hence, science and common sense, as well as faith, represent
to us an earth beauteous with the number and variety of its
grasses, plants, and shrubs, but at one period without a bird or
a beast, a butterfly or a bee. We might (had we been living
at so remote a period) have wandered through the forests and
lost ourselves in the dense jungles ; but we should never have
encountered the life and motion to which we are now so accus-
tomed. No birds sang among the tangled branches ; no mischiev-
ous squirrels gnawed the clustering nuts; no bees hummed and
buzzed amid the wild ferns and creeping lycopods ; no gorgeously

* Take, for instance, the carboniferous period. According to the reading of the records,
it was a time of great forests and jungles, and of magnificent foliage, but of few or incon-
spicuous flowers ; of acrogens and gymnosperms, such as tree-ferns, club-mosses, coniferas, and
taxace.-v, with no angiosperms ; of marsh-loving insects, myriapods, and scorpions, as well as
crustaceans and worms, representatives of all the classes of articulates, but not the higher in-
sects that live among the flowers ; of the last of the trilobites, and the passing climax of the
brachiopods and crinoids ; of ganoids and sharks ; but no teliosts or osseous fishes, the kinds
lhat make up the greater part of the modern tribes ; of amphibians and some inferior species
of true reptiles, but no birds or mammals ; and therefore there was no music in the groves,
save that of insect life and the croaking batrachian. (See Dana's Manual.}

1892.] WHAT NATURE SAYS OF ITS CREATOR. 9

painted butterfly opened its mealy wings to the subdued sun-
light ; no shard-borne beetle, with its drowsy hum, rung out
night's yawning peal. No ; only the shadows flitted to and fro,
only the rain-drops pattered. There was a time when on the
land there was no life but plant-life, and when no sentient be-
ing existed in wood or fell.

So says science. But later, science goes on to inform us,
animal life appeared. Yes, " appeared " ! What are we to under-
stand by that ambiguous expression, " appeared " ? Who intro-
duced animal life where previously there was none ? Whence
came the lion and the leopard, the dog and the deer, the mole
and the mouse, and all the myriad of other animals. Whence?
Science, in its irreligious votaries, is puzzled ; science is troubled ;
science hangs down its head and cannot offer any answer that
will satisfy a reasonable man ; it cannot even suggest an explana-
tion which is anything better than a subterfuge. The Agnostic
dare not confess that God made the beasts, and all that lives
and moves in sea and earth and air, because that would oblige
him to acknowledge the existence of a Supreme and Infinite Be-
ing who rules over all things, and he would rather believe any
nonsense than confess God.

What, then, do such men say ? They would have us accept
any absurd and grotesque hypothesis rather than allow the exis-
tence of God. They will assure us that little by little animals
were brought forth by a slow process of development ; and that,
after many convulsions and changes of fortune, the various beasts
were evolved from well, since nothing but earth and vegetation
then existed say from a rock or a tree. We thus see to what
shifts even the most learned are reduced, and to what absurdi-
ties they are driven, so soon as they deny and denounce the
doctrine of an all-wise and an all-powerful Creator.

Yet these, alas ! are the men who speak scornfully and with
curled lip about our credulity and superstition. That life ap-
peared where previously there was no life, and that animals ex-
isted where previously there were none, are hard-and-fast facts
which do not admit of any serious controversy. Yet sooner
than admit that beasts were created by the omnipotent hand of
God, they will try and persuade us that they were developed
from plants or vegetables ; which, in their turn, were evolved
from mud or protoplasm, and I know not what besides. Who
can bring his reason to accept such an astounding statement ?
As well persuade us that the prehistoric trees produced legs of
roast mutton and hot-buttered French rolls.

io WHAT NATURE SAYS OF ITS CREATOR. [April,

No, the more we inquire into the ways and teaching of
science, and the better acquainted we become with the earth and
its history, the more the conviction is forced upon our minds
that there is above nature, a Force ruling nature ; and above the
life begun in time, a Life which had no beginning ; and above
finite intellect and will, an infinite and uncreated Intellect and
Will. An Intellect, indeed, which made all things, maintains all
things, and rules, controls, and moulds all things according to its
own supreme pleasure. In other words, that there is a God, all-
mighty and all-wise, who reigns over the universe, poises the
earth on three fingers, and holds the oceans in the hollow of
his hands ; to whom be honor and glory and empire for ever
and ever !

Even without revelation, even apart from the teaching of
the church, we are thus constrained to acknowledge the existence
of God. If we deny the existence of God, we must deny the
existence of the very earth, and even our own existence. Every
object in the great world around us, every creature in the planet
on which we dwell, proclaims his sovereignty and announces
his presence. It is to this great fact that the Scriptures refer
when they remind us that " by the greatness of the beauty of
the creature the Creator of them may be seen so as to be
known thereby " (Wisd. xiii. 5) ; " Praestans est opus, igitur prae-
stantior ipse opifex " (Chrysostom). And it is for this reason
that the heathens who deny God are, as St. Paul teaches, " in-
excusable," since " by the visible things that surround us may
clearly be seen the invisible things " (Rom. i. 20) ; and because
God manifests himself in the works of his hands.* " The won-
derful harmony of all things," exclaims the renowned St. Chry-
sostom, " speaks louder on this subject than the loudest trumpet."
If, therefore, men refuse to recognize God in his works, and fail
to trace his power and glory in the heavens, it is not because it
is not clearly manifested, but too often because they wilfully
close their eyes and do not wish to see because " they love
darkness better than light."

In sooth, as the royal Psalmist reminds us in words of in-
spired wisdom, "the heavens show forth the glory of God, and
the firmament declareth the work of his hands. Day to day
uttereth speech, and night to night showeth knowledge " (Psalm
xviii. i and 2). Indeed, there is not the smallest insect that
creeps along the ground, nor the meanest floweret that blows,

"Sicut enimars manifestatur per artificis opera, ita et Dei sapientia manifestatur per
creaturas" (St. Thomas Aquinas).

1892.] WHAT NATURE SAYS OF ITS CREATOR. u

nor the slenderest rootlet or sucker that draws its nutriment
from the soil, but speaks with irresistible eloquence of the wis-
dom and power of God. Take the most insignificant little weed.
Consider it well. We undertake to say, that the more carefully
and thoroughly you study its marvellous construction and forma-
tion the more will your wonder and admiration grow. The ex-
treme delicacy of its graceful form ; the exquisite beauty of its
coloring ; the fine, thread-like tracery of its leaves ; the astound-
ing finish and perfection of its minutest detail ; its method of
growth and expansion ; its almost human activity in drawing from
the earth the moisture and nourishment it needs ; its wondrous
dexterity in clinging and twisting its slender roots to the stones
and rocks for support ; and, more wondrous than all, its power to
produce others like to itself, and to propagate and multiply
almost indefinitely all this, and much more which it would be
tedious to mention, tell us of a wisdom, and a power, and an
adaptation of means to ends, which exceed the power of words
to express and almost of mind to conceive.

How certainly must this thought have been present in the
mind of the poet laureate when he penned those oft-repeated
lines, addressed to a tiny flower growing out of the masonry

" ... in the crannied wall.
I pluck you out of the crannies ;
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower : but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is."

Can we conceive a watch, or a music-box, or a steam-engine, or
a man-of-war, or any other complicated piece of mechanism
existing without an intelligent workman or designer to plan it,
and construct it, and fit the various parts together? Evidently
not, and yet such things are simple in the extreme compared
with the myriad objects existing in the vegetable and animal
kingdoms. If such a thing as a hundred-guinea chronometer
cannot begin to be without an intelligent artificer, how much
less can the world, and all the wonders that fill the world, begin
to be without an intelligent Artificer. Take one of the most in-
significant among the myriads of moving objects say, for in-
stance, a butterfly. A butterfly, even of the commonest species,
e. g. y the large white cabbage butterfly (Pontia brassica], is im-
measurably more wonderful and complicated an object than a
steam-engine, or a man-of-war, or a weaving-machine.

12 WHAT NATURE SAYS OF ITS CREATOR. [April,

Call to mind the history of a butterfly from the egg to the
perfectly formed insect. Consider the changes involved in passing
from the condition of the fecundated ovum to that of a crawl-
ing, growing, devouring caterpillar ; and from the caterpillar state
to that of the wholly unlike chrysalis ; and from the chrysalis again
to the gay, giddy, gorgeously painted butterfly, completely
equipped with eyes, wings, antennae, proboscis, muscles, and limbs,
and digestive organs; and power of sensation and locomotion.
The caterpillar feeds upon hard substances, while the butterfly
lives upon vegetable juices, but whether as larva or as fully
developed insect, it feeds; and to feed means to digest and to
assimilate ; and to digest and to assimilate means to possess and
to use organs and properties immeasurably more marvellous and
beautiful than any to be found in any machine or contrivance
made by man.

Consider that every vital act in any creature is performed at
the expense of the structure by which the act is produced.
Whenever a muscle contracts as when a wing is moved or a
leg is stretched a portion of its substance is destroyed. And
this holds good of every tissue and of every function. Hence
the constant loss of substance caused by the exercise of vital
acts must be constantly repaired, if the organism is to maintain
its integrity. This can be effected only by the formation of
fresh tissue to take the place of that which has been destroyed.
" Every tissue possesses the power of replacing the particles de-
stroyed by its functional activity, by manufacturing, so to speak,
particles equal in number and similar in character to those which
have died " (Elements of Biology, pp. 85-6). Hence, if we may
so express it, a bird, a beast, or an insect not merely uses mar-
vellous organs, and fulfils complicated functions, but it maintains
itself and its organs in repair.

When we look at a hundred-guinea chronometer and examine
its works, and see how beautifully all its parts fit into one an-
other, and how accurately and easily it goes, etc., we are forced
to the conclusion that an intelligent person made it. But if (ex
hypothesi) we were to make the further discovery that the said
watch could repair itself ; and that when a wheel got worn, or a
rivet got loose, or a spring became rusty, it could of itself
remedy the defect and repair the injury, we would feel even
yet more persuaded of the gigantic and almost superhuman wis-
dom and power that had contrived it and arranged it. Yet this
is just what happens in the living objects around. If on pursu-
ing our examination still further we were to make the discovery

1892.] WHAT NATURE SAYS OF ITS CREATOR. 13

that, in addition to the power of repairing itself, it had also the
still more remarkable power of reproduction in other words, the
power of making, without any human aid, other watches like to
itself our surprise and admiration at the wisdom of the artificer
would know no bounds. Imagine what would be your surprise,
on opening your watch to wind it some fine day, if you were to
discover a row of ten or twelve tiny watches within the cover,
arranged like peas in a pod, each a little miniature of its parent
and on the point of being hatched ! Yet this power of produc-
ing other beings like to itself is just what we find in birds, and
beasts, and fishes, and insects. They not only move, see, digest,
repair the wear and tear and loss of their tissues, but they form
others exactly like to themselves, complete and perfect internally
and externally. If the sight of a watch, or a phonograph, or a
sewing-machine at once impresses us with an unmistakable sense
of mind and intelligence in the inventor and manufacturer, how
infinitely more impressed we should be at the sight of a fly buz-
zing on the window-pane or a cricket chirping on the hearth.
If watches and clocks, sewing-machines and music-boxes,
steam-engines and spinning-mills are not made by accident, but
by design, and do not start into existence without an inventor
and an artificer ; if they suppose an intelligence to conceive them
in the first instance, and an artist or rational craftsman to put
the conception into operation in the second place ; surely rea-
son and common sense require that similar requisites are infinitely
more needed for the vastly more intricate and beautiful machi-
nery of the living body, whether it be of bird or of beast, of
the most perfect man or the most rudimentary animalcule !

JOHN S. VAUGHAN.

London.

AT EASTER TIME. [April,

AT EASTER TIME.

THE sunset, like a flaming sword,
Between our sight and Paradise
Offers its red fire to our eyes

A symbol of earth's Lord.

The crocus shows above the ground
Its glowing lamp of yellow flame,
It seems a letter of the Name

Which choirs of angels sound.

An altar all this fair earth is,

The Christian mind the priest,
The greatest thinker or the least

Is acolyte of His.

For nature gives us what we bring,

Not more, nor any less ;

The meaning of her varied dress
Must in our minds first spring.

Thus Easter gilds the opening year,

Because Christ is our joy ;

The sunset brave, the crocus coy,
Reflect Him bright and clear.

Nature's a sphynx to those who know

Not Resurrection time !

We read her well ; in every clime
Faith makes her meaning glow.

MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN.

1892.] THE HOUSE OF SHADOWS. 15

THE HOUSE OF SHADOWS.

THE story, which I am going to tell exactly as it happened,
is this :

I, Henry Maiden, now an old priest, and much given al-
ways to reading and solitude, was sent down into an out-of-the-
way part of England, to take charge of a country mission. The
neighborhood was very lonesome. A few hamlets scattered
about, none of them close together ; farm-houses nestling in the
hollows where tall trees grew thickly; rivulets piercing their way
through underwoods ; and wide tracts of heathery common. I
had only a handful of people ; and I knew nothing of those who
did not attend my little church on the hill-side. Where I dwelt
bore the name of Monks' End. But what monks had lived there,
or how they disappeared, or when, I could never learn.

You must think of me as a dull, prosy person, satisfied with
routine and my own company, passing my days in a kind of in-
nocent dream ; like one who sees the world's brilliant motley
painted in ' dim and faded colors, on a canvas brown with age
a far-off confusion, the sound of which cannot come to him.
One week resembled another. Seldom did anything in the shape
of man knock at my door. Having no trouble of my own, I
fell, perhaps, into a careless oblivion of the stage I had long ago
quitted ; and the griefs of human kind became less to me than
was wholesome or just. If on that score I was ever to blame,
my penance was awaiting me. But how could I have foreseen
the manner after which it would be inflicted ?

Be that as it may, on a fine winter's morning, when the clear
sunshine lay across the snow, and was beginning to thaw the
icicles that hung in glittering strings from the trees upon my
lawn, I heard a carriage driving up to the gate ; and laying down
the book I was reading for I spent most of my time in my
little study I waited for the unexpected visitor. My servant
brought me a card, and said that the gentleman wished to see
me. I glanced at his name. It was quite unknown to me I
had never met Mr. Richard Affane, or any one with whom I
could connect him in my memory. " Show him in," I said, giv-
ing the fire a poke to make it burn up brighter, and then turn-

!6 THE HOUSE OF SHADOWS. [April,

ing on the hearth-rug to see the face of the man as he entered.
Certainly he was a grand figure ; tall and soldierly in his bearing,
with keen gray eyes, bronzed features, and a -grizzled moustache
and whiskers. I judged that he must be over sixty. He wore a
shooting-jacket and gaiters, and carried a stick in his hand.
Bowing courteously, he took the seat I offered him, and began, in
deep but agreeable tones, to explain what had brought him.

"You have never heard of me, Father Maiden," he said, "but
as I once lived in this part of the country, and am coming back
here to spend my old days, I felt it a duty to call upon you. I
was not always a Catholic " he paused, and seemed to be lost
in thought for a moment. " However," he went on, " I am one
now, thank God ; and you are my pastor."

I made some civil reply. "Shall you be living near Monks'
End?" I asked.

" No," he said, " at Araglin. Do you know the house ? It is
nearly seven miles from here."

" I have driven by it. A large and rather secluded place,
isn't it, hidden among trees ? "

" Secluded enough," he answered, with a short and, I had
almost said, a violent laugh, which gave his features an odd ex-
pression. " But I am an old soldier, tired of knocking about the
world. I shall not be sorry to sit still and smoke the pipe of
peace. My tastes are those of a bachelor. You will not be
troubled to keep the consciences of any womankind at Araglin,
father."

" It is doubting the charm of your acquaintance," I answered,
in the same tone. "Have you always been of that opinion?"

" Not quite," he said hastily ; " I lost my wife many years
ago." He walked to the window and looked out. " What a
pretty lawn ! " he remarked ; " your church makes an impressive
background. It was not built when I lived in these parts. One
ought to be happy in so quiet a nook."

" I never found the place make much difference," said I,
joining him. " The world every one lives in is made of his
thoughts and memories rather than his surroundings. Don't you
agree?"

" I hardly know," replied Mr. Affane, absently. " By the
way, Father Maiden," he went on, taking up a volume from the
table at which we were standing, " are you fond of science ? I
see this is a treatise of biology, and a pretty stiff one too. I
knew Professor Ranklin, who wrote it a fine head, but too
prosaic for his business."

1892.] THE HOUSE OF SHADOWS. 17

"Yes," I said, in answer to his question, but turning over in
my mind his last remark, which struck me as uncommon "yes,
what I can get in the way of science. But I am only a looker-on ;
I don't pretend to know anything."

" Ah ! who does ? At least, if you consider what there is to
be known. But now, will you come' and see me ? " said Mr.
Affane, as he turned to go. " I can send for you if you don't
care about walking, or wish to spare your nag."

Naturally I accepted his invitation. In my place I had no
alternative. But I liked his frank, hearty ways. And there was
a charm in his smile, though the remembrance of that short ex-
plosion of laughter grated on one. But then few men laugh
agreeably. It is a barbarous accomplishment, at the best.

II.

I was to dine and sleep at Araglin, arid Mr. Affane's carriage
took me there on a terribly cold night, when the roads were like
glass, and everything one touched " burnt frore," as the poet
speaks. Much would I have preferred to stay in my own den.
The winter was lasting long that year. Great storms of rain
had swollen the rivers, flooding field and meadow ; then the
frost had fallen like sudden enchantment, fixing the water in icy
sheets, upon which came tumbling and whirling snow-drifts from
a gray and steadfast heaven. The villages were more lonely
than ever. Hardly any one came to church. I had seen Mr.
Affane two or three times on Sunday, but only for a moment
after Mass. We had held no further conversation ; and he did
not write until his man brought me a note, in brief though very
civil terms, asking me to stay the night in his new abode. Now,
though living on the outskirts of a country village, I had always
contrived to keep its gossip at a distance. No talk, therefore,
concerning my latest parishioner came to my ears. All I knew
of him was what he had told me.

When I reached Araglin it was dark, but I could see lights
peering through the trees ; and as the carriage drew up to the
house, I was surprised to observe that in every room there
seemed to be a blaze of light. Mr. Affane evidently shared my
own taste for a cheerful place about him. As he came out on
the steps to receive me, which he did with great cordiality, I
remarked to him on the pleasantness of seeing such a warm
glow in the midst of the white and icy landscape.

"I can't bear the dark," he said, leading the way in. "These
lights burn from sundown to sunrise. They make up to me, as

1 8 THE HOUSE OF SHADOWS. [April,

well as they can, for the sky of India, which I never thought
I should miss with such intense longing. I doubt, however, that
I shall get much comfort from them."

It was an opening for conversation, and while we were din-
ing I asked him about his travels. He seemed by no means
reticent. His stories were some of them curious ; I thought them
bordering on the incredible. But he told them all with the
same air of frank simplicity. Perhaps he was only amusing him-
self, or trying how far he could go with me. That he certainly
did not learn ; for, while he went on talking, I could not help
looking around, and was astonished at the magnificence with
which he had fitted up the room in which we were sitting, as
well as his study, or smoke-room, of which we had a glimpse
behind half-drawn curtains. The walls were colored in subdued
tints, with here and there an immense piece of tapestry from
Persian looms hanging upon them, showing quaint arabesques of
which the designs were chiefly fantastic birds and beasts among
foliage. The furniture, of which there was little, corresponded
with the decoration of the walls, and was likewise Oriental. On
every side lights shone with a soft and luminous glow. The
meal itself which we were discussing was delicate and choice,
with strange aromatic wines on the table to accompany it. I
felt that I had somehow escaped from the atmosphere of the
Western life. My senses yielded to the delightful charm, which
was so quiet and unobtrusive, yet so powerful. But something
within me revolted. I said to myself that a brave and manly
temper would melt under these luxurious influences to I knew
not what to effeminacy, cowardice, mere love of the pleasant.

" I see how your thoughts run," said Mr. AfTane with a slight
smile, when we were sitting, after dinner, in the study beyond
the curtains he smoking a rare tobacco of which I enjoyed the
fragrance more than I should have liked the taste, and I drinking
coffee out of gorgeous Japanese ware in red and gold, the name of
which I do not recollect. "You are marvelling that a man who
lives by himself, and a soldier, should care about these things" and
he pointed negligently to the woven pictures on the walls "but
I could not be at the trouble of changing my habits merely be-
cause I happened to be settling down in England. I have lived
in this way for many years; it is only putting the East for the
West. And then," he continued somewhat eagerly, " I am not
sure that I agree with your idea of one's surroundings being
indifferent. Don't you believe in the influence of matter on
spirit ?"

1892.] THE HOUSE OF SHADOWS. 19

i4 Put it the other way," I said, " of spirit on matter, you
mean." "Ah, well," he replied, "again I say, who knows? They
act and react. Anyhow you believe in their communicating im-
pressions to each other. Of course you do," he concluded im-
patiently, throwing the end of his cigarette in the fire.

" Tell me how it strikes you," was my rejoinder. It is a
priest's duty to have his eyes about him ; and I felt convinced
that Mr. Richard Affane was not talking at random. He had
something on his mind, light or heavy, but something. The ques-
tion was, Would he reveal it ?

After a few moments' silence, my host, who had lit another
cigarette and was sitting with his head thrown back in his chair,
and his eyes shut, like a man in profound meditation, took up
the thread of our talk again. "You know," he remarked, biting
his lower lip in a way that seemed habitual to him, " if I were
discussing with a mere man of science, like my friend Professor
Ranklin, or with a layman, I should not care to make a fool of
myself by putting forward extravagant theories. But with you
it is different."

"You think I don't mind extravagances," I broke in, laugh-
ing. He put out his hand deprecatingly.

" No, no ; that is not what I mean. But, as a priest, you al-
low of great and. unknown powers not only the phenomena we
call magnetism, electricity, and so on, but faculties of an order
quite beyond these an unseen life, as well as an invisible dy-
namic force."

"Well," I said, "draw your conclusion. Suppose I do admit
that there is a world of living agencies more than human ;
what then ? "

" This," he returned, leaning forward eagerly and laying his
hand on my chair ; " since matter, as we call it, can affect mind,
why should not spirit affect spirit ? What is to hinder that
which is in the flesh from communicating with that which has
gone out of it which is behind the veil ?" His voice had sunk,
and the eyes of the man kindled.

I have an extreme dislike, amounting to horror, of the abnor-
mal and the eccentric, so I answered, half-angrily, " What is to
hinder ? Why the Veil itself, I think. Does it exist for no
purpose ?"

He drew back a little, as if rebuked ; and said in a tone of
disappointment, " But some have looked through it, have pierced
into it, and yet have lived."

" Not by the methods of science or of faith," was my reply.
VOL. LV. 2

20 THE HOUSE OF SHADOWS. [April,

" As a Christian I must believe in the supernatural, and I do.
Yet the same law teaches me not to hanker after the abnormal.
Let the dead bury their dead."

" Ah, yes," he answered, " if there were any dead." It was an
uncomfortable answer, and to me a dreary subject. I rose, plead-
ing fatigue, and was wishing Mr. Affane good-night, when he said,
retaining my hand : "All I meant but I am little used to explaining
my thoughts to another was, that behind the forces of the physical
order, high or low, there must be spirit-forces and spirit-life.
Everything goes to prove that in the two worlds, of the seen
and the unseen, a perfect harmony or parallelism has always ex-
isted and exists now. The past is in the present, and the pre-
sent in the past. Where scientific men get off the track is in
supposing that anything but life can discover life. Their instru-
ments are blind and dumb until the spirit gazes through them
and interprets the message they bring. You grant so much ?"
he insisted. " How, being a Catholic and a priest, could you
deny it, indeed ?"

" But, my dear Mr. Affane," said I, with a little impatience,
" you are only repeating in other words what I granted in the
dining-room : that spirit acts on matter, and not vice versa. You
seem to infer the lawfulness of attempting to establish an inter-
course with those who have passed away. I am convinced that
we shall do so at our peril. The Almighty has made death the
boundary and shore of time, even as the waves fall back from
the beach, and come no farther than they are suffered. Why
should we violate the Divine ordinance ? It is good for us that
the other world is hidden. We could not see it face to face and
fulfil our daily tasks ; we should be intoxicated with eternity "

" Then you think the illusion of a solid world of matter ought
to be kept up," he said at length, turning away.

" I did not say so. What I hold is that the lust of knowl-
edge, like every other lust, ought to be under control ; that there
is a curiosity which leads to ruin, which disorders the brain,
which unsteadies the nerves, and which hardens the heart. Be-
lieve me, our fragile being holds together simply on condition of
temperance and the modest use of whatever faculties we possess.
To run after strange and wandering lights is to court destruc-
tion."

With these words, I went up to my room. Late as it was, I
could not sleep soundly, but fell into a half-doze from which I
was continually awaking. The great house, in which as I knew
lights were burning through the night, became intensely still.

1892.] THE HOUSE OF SHADOWS. 21

But from time to time I heard, as it seemed to me, a footfall
in the chamber underneath my own, where Mr. Affane slept.
Was he pacing to and fro, holding talk with his uncanny mind,
or seeking, perhaps, that chink in the dark veil through which
he might peer into the worlds beyond ? I had a keen sense of
his danger, and was tempted to go down to him again. But in-
terference might do more harm than good. When next the
thought came into my head, I was wide awake in the broad
daylight, and a servant was tapping at my door.

III.

I had engaged to stay at Araglin until the afternoon ; and as
the morning air was crisp and the snow hard, crackling under
one's feet as one walked, Mr. Affane proposed that we should
go round his shrubbery and plantations. They were very exten-
sive. I found much to admire, especially a winding walk under
Scotch firs, that took us a great distance from the mansion, and
opened upon bosky dells and nooks, now full of brown leaves
which the snow had not quite covered up. My host did not
continue last night's conversation ; and we were turning at the
extremity of a path when my attention was drawn to an upright
slab among the grass in a sequestered and even gloomy spot,
overshadowed with the growth of yew and ivy. On looking
again, I saw that there were several other slabs, and the shape
of the enclosure, which had a quickset hedge on three sides, re-
vealed to me that I was standing in a kind of cemetery. Mr.
Affane said nothing ; but when I moved forward, he remained in
the path, and left me to read the epitaphs, which were scarcely
decipherable on the moss-grown tombstones. I could, indeed,
make out only a word here and there. The slab, however, which
had first caught my eye, seemed to have been recently cleansed
of its dark growth, and I read the inscription. It consisted of a
single name at the top ; while, some way beneath, there was a
second. The first was " Eva." Nothing more, neither a date
nor a family name appeared on the stone. With some difficulty
I made out the other. It was an odd name which I had never
seen elsewhere, " Enzian."

" How extraordinary !" I said to Mr. Affane as I rejoined
him. " Who could have made a graveyard in such a place ? Can
you tell me how it comes to be here, in the grounds of a coun-
try-house ?"

" Yes," he answered, " of course I can. Did I never men-
tion that Araglin has belonged to my family for many hundreds

22 THE HOUSE OF SHADOWS. [April,

of years ? There was formerly a chapel on the spot where we
now stand ; the graveyard was close to it ; and my people have
been buried here for generations."

"I ought to have known," I said in some confusion; "any
one else would have read his county-history ; but antiquities are
not my line. May I ask whose tomb is that with the two names
upon it ?"

A strong spasm shot across his face. " My dear Father Mai-
den," he said with an effort, " I brought you this way that you
might be told, for I want your help. But " he hesitated, and
1 thought would have fallen, he had become suddenly so weak
" I cannot, I cannot, tell you here what, some time or other, you
must know. That tomb holds the remains of my wife and my only
child. It is all I have left of them in the world. Long ago I
turned my face from it ; but the strong attraction, which was
always pulling at my heart, has led me home again ; over seas
and deserts, from the wildest regions of Hindostan, from adven-
tures and chances in which death was on every side of me, and
I could not die. Think what it is to have your heart in the
grave to be lying between your dead wife and child, even while
you are hurried into the thick of intrigue and battle. Can you
imagine it ? I was absolute ruler in a native Indian state more
than king, for I could act as I pleased and was answerable only
to my own right hand. But all that was a waking dream. My
life, my life," he repeated energetically, " was still here, haunting
this spot. I came back, at last. And the slab you were reading di-
vides me from those who were my very self, my other soul.
What can I do for them, father ?" he asked with a wild and
haggard expression.

" You can pray for them," I said, leading him away by the
arm. " Do you not believe in the Communion of Saints ?"

" Believe ?" he answered, calming down, though still inwardly
agitated " believe ? It was the preaching of that doctrine which
made me a Catholic."

I thought I understood our last night's talk now. But to in-
quire into the story of his irretrievable loss was more. than I
dared. Nor did he invite my confidence further. We returned
in silence to the house ; and the same afternoon I was driven
back, over the frosty roads, to Monks' End.

IV.

Nearly six months went by, and my fitful and unsatisfactory
intercourse with Mr. Affane had not advanced our friendship.

1892.] THE HOUSE OF SHADOWS. 23

When I called at Araglin he seemed glad of my company. I
dined there once in a way ; and we exchanged views on many
subjects. But the steadfast abhorrence with which I regarded
the more shadowy and doubtful aspects, whether of science or
of life, on which he loved to dwell was too manifest ; and though
he would sometimes approach the question of intercourse with
the unseen, I gave him no encouragement to pursue it. Perhaps
I was over-timid ; yet my conscience assures me that I acted
for the best.

When the long days came, I had my own occupations. I
was particularly absorbed in a line of historical reading which
demanded close attention ; so that, little as I heard about the
master of Araglin, I did not think it necessary to pay him a
visit for some time. He had always been uncertain in his atten-
dance at Monks' End Church, partly because of his health,
which was precarious, and also, as I gathered, on account of
his frequent absences in London. We had never arrived at the
stage of close correspondence ; and, on the whole, I daresay we
found our English reserve an advantage on both sides. Could I
have done him any service ? Was not the course of events traced
out from the beginning, and, when he first came to see me, in-
evitable ? Others may pass judgment ; it is my business merely
to narrate.

On a cloudy and sweltering afternoon in July, when I was
engaged among the flower-beds in my garden, making haste to
have done because of the thunder in the air, I saw Mr. Affane's
groom driving furiously down the road and scattering the groups
of children by which his horse flew. He caught sight of me
over the wall, and without dismounting, begged me, with a trem-
bling voice, to come at once to Araglin ; there was no time to
be lost. I did not trouble him with questions, for he looked
somewhat scared, except to ask whether his master was ill to
which he answered vacantly, " 111 or out of his mind, I don't
know which, sir." I went into the church ; made all preparations
as usual when attending a sick-call ; and was soon by the driver's
side on my way to the strange house in which I had never felt
comfortable.

His intelligence was sad and perplexing. Mn Affane, after
an absence of about five weeks, had returned on Saturday it
was now Wednesday afternoon and shut himself up in the large
book-room which served him as a sort of laboratory. For he
was constantly engaged, so his man said, in making scientific ex-
periments perhaps in relation to magnetism, but this Lamborne

24 THE HOUSE OF SHADOWS. [April,

could not, of course, know. On Sunday evening, as he did not
appear all day, his valet knocked at the door, and inquired
whether he might bring him some food. Mr. Affane replied in
his ordinary voice, from within, that he wanted nothing and was
not to be disturbed. But that night the servants (all of whom
he had brought from the East and who were greatly attached to
him) heard a loud sobbing in the room, the sound of several
voices, as they thought, and at times a wild and disordered rush
of feet across it, which here was the most extraordinary and in-
credible point seemed to pass over the threshold, ascend the
stairs to an upper chamber, and there die away. Since then the
sounds had been repeated incessantly, and were still going on.

When I looked at Lamborne in amaze, and told him he must
have been dreaming, the man assured me that every one in the
house the five servants who made up Mr. Affane's indoor es-
tablishment had heard the sound of unknown voices, the rush-
ing of feet, and the disorder on the staircase. Not one of them
had dared to go into the upper corridor since ; they had slept
where they could in the kitchen and the servants' hall. Their
master was still invisible, though certainly alive, as they could
tell by his moving about. He had eaten nothing, to their know-
ledge, since his return, and they were full of dread lest the next
step in this awful business should be suicide. More than this
they neither knew nor could guess.

I do not pretend to be of a venturesome temper. I have the
courage of my calling, a sense that duty is duty and must be
done, but no delight in facing unknown perils. Had I not felt
that I owed my services to this apparently brain-stricken man, I
might have turned back on hearing the account, so much beyond
the bounds of credibility, which Lamborne had given of the
state of things at Araglin. Happily I could not palter with my
obligation. We arrived towards eight o'clock. The hall-door
was immediately opened, and I entered the house. No sooner
had I done so, than I became aware of the sound of feet and
voices in the library upstairs, where, as Lamborne said, his mas-
ter had shut himself in. It was a dreadful moment. My heart
stopped beating. I thought I should have fainted. But I was
resolved to gb on. " Will any of you come with me ? " I asked
the servants, who were huddled at the foot of the staircase, listen-
ing, with blanched faces, their eyes strangely watchful and large,
to the clamor above. They shrank back when I addressed them,
but none made answer. "Come," I said, "what is there, in the
name of God, to be afraid of ? " It was all in vain. I nerved

1892.] THE HOUSE OF SHADOWS. p 25

myself, accordingly, to go upstairs alone, having That with me,
as I felt, which would be my protection whatever might come to
pass. The preternatural din never ceased. There seemed to be
a growing tumult inside as I approached the locked and formid-
able door. Scarcely, however, were my fingers on the handle,
when I thought that the door itself was flung violently open, and
something rushed by me which I could not see. It fell with a
heavy weight and a groan against the staircase leading to the
next corridor, and then went moaning and stumbling the whole
way up, until it reached some room over my head.

I was almost sick with terror. But, to my amazement, the
door which I had thought open remained shut as before. In
spite of my overwhelming sensation to the contrary, it never had
been open. I could perceive nothing whatever of the interior
of the room, where lugubrious silence followed upon the clash
and confusion of which I had so lately been sensible.

" Mr. Affane," I called out in as loud a voice as I could sum-
mon but it was only a stifled whisper " will you let me in ?
Let me in, for God's sake."

" Who is there ? " asked a voice which I did not at once re-
cognize. " Go away until I send for you."

" Mr. Affane, I am the priest Father Maiden. May I not
see you for an instant ? "

There was no answer, but the door suddenly opened ; and
now I could see into the room. Its great windows, looking west-
ward, seemed to be hung with flaming clouds, which dazzled me
somewhat. On one side, in a deep arm-chair, was sitting, with
his head leaning on his elbow, the man of whom I was in quest,
his eyes staring at me, his hair dishevelled, and good Heavens,
it had become as white as snow ! He wore a kind of loose
dressing-gown, crimson with slashes of purple across it, unfastened
at the neck. In Mr. Affane's appearance there was the wildest
disorder. My eyes searched the room fearfully ; but I could dis-
cern no vestige of the tumult I had heard coming up the stairs.
Books and instruments were in their places ; all had an air of
undisturbed repose. It was wonderful after the hurly-burly that
had reigned there but a few minutes before. Mr. Affane, whether
exhausted or unobservant, did not speak, and I went up to take
his hand. As I did so, the door closed of itself.

It was the most eerie circumstance that had ever befallen
me. I did not know in what words to begin. My cowardly in-

26 THE HOUSE OF SHADOWS. [April,

stinct warned me to return and open the door ; yet I felt con-
vinced that if I did, my only chance of helping Richard Affane
would have vanished. I held his hand ; it was cold and clammy.
But speak I could not ; only, in my distress, I murmured some
half-inarticulate prayer. My eyes, which were fastened on his,
appeared at length to draw him back, as it were, out of the un-
fathomable depths into which he had sunk. He returned my
pressure, sat up, and looked at me earnestly. " You should have
come before," he said in a low voice.

"Why did you not send to me?" I replied. He shook his
head. " There was no sending in my case/' he answered, almost
under his breath, and the words made my hair stand up; " they
would not let me." He looked round, as if in expectation
of something following on what he had spoken ; but all was
still.

" You heard it ? " he inquired passionately ; " it is no halluci-
nation ; has not the whole house heard it day and night since it
began ? Tell the truth, father."

What could I say ? My expression was enough. " Yes, it is
outside of me, not in my "brain," he cried, " there have been de-
lusions which were nothing else ; but this, this is a reality ! "

I whispered to him, not knowing when the next horror might
break out of the silence, " Can you say how it arose ? Who
caused it ? "

" I caused it ! " he exclaimed fiercely ; and his loud tones
made me shudder. Would not the unseen Thing he was defying
answer him with some fresh portent ? But no, he was suffered
to go on. My thought, all the while he spoke, was like a sick-
ening sensation as of a third person, or object (by what name
shall I describe it ? ) hovering near a presence, at once loath-
some and irresistible, in the room around us.

" Come," he said, grasping my hand, " I will tell you all. But
it is not a confession. Long ago, when I came into the Church,
I confessed. Let me speak as to a friend a human creature
in the flesh, similar to myself.

" It is the story of my wife I wish to tell you. Her grave
you have seen, but neither you nor any one else knows how she
came to die at twenty-three. Father, " he exclaimed with terri-
ble earnestness, " I killed her !"

" God forbid," I answered with a cry, drawing back from the
man ; " you cannot mean what you are saying."

" I killed her," reiterated Mr. Affane, looking straight at me,
" not with these hands, but as surely as if I had stabbed her to the

1892.] THE HOUSE OF SHADOWS. 27

heart. Do not think I am raving. She was a proud, sensitive
woman, was Eva Norland. I married her against her father's
inclination, for he said, with good reason, that the Affanes had
always been fierce and unmanageable, and I had inherited the
worst of their temper. Yes, I had, and I knew it. Still, we
loved one another ; all the more, perhaps, that I was not easy to
control. We spent three years of happy wedded life, my irrita-
ble temper getting the upper hand of me at times, but Eva
patient and forgiving. Our child was born as beautiful as an
angel, whom his old Tyrolese nurse called Enzian because of
his great blue eyes, like the Alpine gentian. You saw the name
on his tomb. Then we made the acquaintance of Gerald Mengs,
an artist, half Italian, half German. And that broke the spell of
our happiness."

Though Affane was a strong man, I heard the sound of tears
in his voice while he was speaking. I listened distractedly. My
terror was lest the noise in the air should begin again. I begged
him to finish quickly, the suspense was overpowering.

" Mengs had all sorts of accomplishments. In those days I
could only hunt and shoot. He was a musician. Eva liked him ;
so did I at the beginning. Then he came down and stayed here.
They were always together ; but why wasn't I with them ? Oh,
I was about the farm and a thousand other things. Jealous ?
I was wild with jealousy at times, though I said to myself it
was all nonsense and I was a fool. Eva noticed the change in
me. Naturally, she was disdainful, and, instead of telling Mengs
to go, she insisted on his staying for some concert or other. He
was to play there, and they must practise, morning after morn-
ing. You can see the thing. I knew she was only provoking
me ; but I could not stand it. Why didn't she let him go ?

" It was a hard frost and the hunting had been given up.
That morning I had nothing to do but lounge in and out of the
house. I heard their infernal music going on, in this very room.
The piano was here, in front of us. How long I had been
wandering about, with certain thoughts getting warm in my
heart, is more than I can tell. But at last, as I was coming
upstairs by that door it was wide open I saw, as it seemed
to me, Gerald Mengs turning towards Eva with an expression
in his eyes which I didn't like. They were just finishing a duet
they had been singing. The rest I can't describe ; it was all one
flash. I know that when I looked up again, sensible, Mengs was
on the ground, and my fingers were round his throat. It was
brutal, ungentlemanly, you say. So it was. But the brute had

28 THE HOUSE OF SHADOWS. [April,

sprung out of his lair; there was no gentleman just then in
Richard Affane. I should have choked the life out of Mengs,
but, as I looked up, there was my lovely boy Enzian, whom I
had not noticed before, standing on the threshold, his eyes di-
lated with horror and his lips a dead white. He was fascinated
by the face on the ground. Well he might be. Mengs had the
awful look of a soul in mortal agony. I was flinging him away
when Eva, recovering as from a trance, snatched up the boy in
her arms, and ran out shrieking. The next I heard was a heavy
fall, a child's voice in terrible pain, and the sound of flying foot-
steps on the stairs."

"Yes," I cried at that instant, I, Philip Maiden, cried out al-
most beside myself, " and you hear them now, don't you now,
Mr. Affane ? Good God, they are on the stairs. What shall I
do."

It was no delusion. The whole drama which my companion had
been rehearsing suddenly enacted itself in the room and outside
a hurrying tumult, a panic of the invisible, addressed not to the
sight but to the hearing, and all the more stupendous that it
was not seen. I put my hands to my ears. It made no differ-
ence ; the sounds increased, and were prolonged, and died away
in the region overhead, only to re-commence on the threshold of
the library. I was quivering with fear, to which any other feel-
ing, how dreadful soever, would have seemed light and tolerable.
The deeps of existence had yawned ; the veil was rent between
the living and the dead.

"That is what I have been listening to since Sunday," ob-
served Affane; "the imagination of it, which I had driven down
beneath the surface in my Eastern adventures, has taken its re-
venge. But it is my own fault. You warned me not to med-
dle with the supernatural."

" And have you ?" I asked timidly, when the quiet was re-
stored. He nodded significantly.

" My wife," he went on, " fell with the boy against the stairs,
and his head struck on the balustrade. He was hurt beyond all
cure, being a delicate child, and already weakened by his fit of
terror. He died in her arms within the week. She followed him
soon. It was impossible that she should live with a broken
heart. She never forgave me. I was not even suffered to en-
ter the room where she died."

"What became of Mengs?"

" Oh ! we met," repeated Affane coldly, " he behaved as a gen-
tleman, and gave me satisfaction. He had himself to thank.

1892.] THE HOUSE OF SHADOWS. 29

That every one allowed. I have never felt troubled on the score
of his death. But he swore to me with his dying lips that I
misjudged Eva. I did, because I was a passionate young fool.

" Then I shut up the house, went to India, lived among the
natives, and learned from them practices in which you don't
believe. I pass over all that. Something withheld me from
mixing up the names of my dead wife and child in these devil-
tries. You are quite right ; they come from that quarter and no-
where else. I was made a Catholic, as I told you, by seeing
how your people pray for their dead ; and I tried to pray for
mine. But just consider the difference. I couldn't ; it brought
up the whole scene, and I was not forgiven. I said to myself
last year, * Why not go and live at Araglin ? You'll be near them,
and it is your home as well as theirs.' I came back ; and the
longing to see the face of my dead wife grew upon me like a
passion. I turned for amusement to scientific problems ; but
they threw me on the old question of calling up you know
what looking around as he spoke. " I didn't see why it
should be forbidden. Still, I resisted, went up to Town, found
I had no acquaintance there worth cultivating, was wretchedly
miserable, and, last Saturday, rushed down here again, deter-
mined to put in practice what my Easterns had shown me
oh! I knew it would work; I had seen the thing. But I couldn't
say beforehand how. When it began, I thought I was crazed.
But you heard it ; every one heard it ; there's no mistake about
the matter now."

" There is crime and sin, however," 1 said when he paused.

VI.

But we were struck dumb, both of us, by what happened
next. I cannot expect to be believed ; yet, with my own eyes,
I saw, from out of the mid-vacancy of the room, emerge, as in
a glass, three several figures a young man, in the velvet
jacket which artists wear, lying on the ground, his face inex-
pressibly distorted, and above him the very features of Richard
Affane, bloodshot with rage and murder ; while at a little dis-
tance stood, as though carved in stone, the most beautiful dark-
eyed woman with uplifted hands, and gasping, half-opened mouth.
Nothing I ever witnessed could be more distinct or vivid. And
the figures did not float away, did not pass. The fiery sunset,
which now flooded the library, made a glowing atmosphere about
them ; yet they neither melted into it like shadows nor lost one
touch of their solidity. Appalling was the likeness, the contrast,

30 THE HOUSE OF SHADOWS. [April,

between the living man, with snow-white hair and ashen looks, at
my side, and his wraith, or spectre, so full of vindictive passion,
blazing in the heyday of violent youth, and strangling his
enemy on the floor. How long the vision lasted I know not.
Affane saw it as well as I. For when his ghastly double turned,
as though to glance towards Eva (it was surely the accused
wife!), Richard sprang up wildly and ran to clasp her in his
arms. I beheld his vain attempt to embrace the shadow. It
slipped from him, and the whole scene disappeared. Then Af-
fane collapsed in a heap, as though smitten with apoplexy, and
a white foam gathered on his lips.

Let me not dwell on the misery of that night. At first I
could get no one to help me. By and by Lamborne crept into
the room, and we made up a bed for his master where he had
fallen. To remove him was out of our power; his pleading eyes
forbade the attempt.

Hour after hour I sat by him reciting the prayers in my
Breviary, and watching when reason might return. I asked hum-
bly for light and guidance from above ; and in the depth of the
midnight stillness it was given to me. I took my resolution.
When morning broke I sent Lamborne with a hasty but expli-
cit letter to the friend at Monks' End who had the care of my
altar and vestments. He came speedily, bringing, as I had di-
rected, all things requisite for saying Mass. An altar was fitted
up in the library ; I proceeded to vest, and John Whitlock
served me. The patient, who had been sunk in lethargy, roused
himself when I began, and followed me wonderingly with his
eyes, not being altogether conscious of what was going forward.
I offered the Holy Sacrifice that he might be set free from
malign influences and unhallowed thoughts ; that time might be
allowed him for repentance, and, if God pleased, that he might
recover. The sounds and sights of yesterday had now wholly
ceased. I fancied there was an unwonted freshness in the air.
That immense weight which oppressed me like a nightmare was
gone.

When the last Gospel was over, and I was kneeling in
thanksgiving on the altar-step, Richard Affane called to me.
" You have done well," he said in a calm voice ; " I feel bet-
ti.-r now." "Yes," I told him, "you look tired, but the evil
thing has been taken from your heart. Will you not make your
confession ?" He did so with the unaffected sorrow of a child.
What passed between us, of course, is sacred. Nor shall I
venture to hint, although I had his leave in case it seemed expe-

1892.] THE HOUSE OF SHADOWS. 31

dient, on the means which had been taken to evoke from its
tomb the awful past. Whether the dead came back, or powers
of darkness flung their illusions about the unhappy man who
dared to meddle with them how much was due to the conta-
gion of fear and fancy, or could not be explained in that easy
way I shall not undertake to determine ; Neque in mirabilibus
super me, all that is no concern of mine. One thing I know ;
that Richard Affane's reason had tottered on its throne and his
very moral being was assailed by the unhallowed attempt to
which he had committed himself. In breaking through the flaming
walls which girt us round, he had come nigh destruction ; and only
that faith was left, and the supernatural yet most compassionate
power of Christ was still at hand to save him, the searcher into
the secrets of death must have perished.

But he rose from his bed of illness ; and, though white and
feeble, tasted the quietness of recovered peace during the years
that remained to him. They were not many. He was now to
be seen in the little church of Monks' End every Sunday, and
did much to comfort the poor and the sorrowful round Araglin.
At the last he had the consolation of hearing Mass daily in the
library which had been fitted up as a chapel. And there, one
morning after Communion, drawing a long, deep sigh, he died,
without more agony of body or spirit. The house was sold and
came into the possession of strangers. For years I have not
been within its walls. But I never heard of any disturbance
troubling the inmates. Its dark shadows, if they linger about
the place, are unseen. Linger they surely do. Every roof under
which men and women have dwelt with their passionate desires
and foiled hopes, is a house of shadows. But few have the gift
of discerning them, or of turning back the pages of the Book of
Years and reading what is therein written. And well that it
should be so ! For when conscience becomes a living present,
and " the books are opened," who shall abide it ? Richard Af-
fane has passed into a world which, lightsome as it is within, to
us remains a terror and a mystery, the burden of which only
faith can endure. My own penance has been, to dream for
months together of the figures emerging from the vacant air, the
rush of hurrying feet, and the heart-shattering tumult, which, like
an earthquake, lifted the solid ground beneath me, and made it
rock to and fro. And I have thanked God, on waking in an
agony of terror, that I could return to my commonplace duties,
and walk the dusty road of life again with my fellow-men.

WILLIAM BARRY.

32 GEORGE VON FRANCKENSTEIN. [April,

GEORGE VON FRANCKENSTEIN.

AT the death of Windthorst the press was flooded with obitu-
aries, anecdotes, and whole biographies. The little man from
Meppen seems to have thrown into the shade all his fellow-labor-
ers in the great struggle that ended in the overthrow of Bis-
marck's anti-Catholic policy. On this side of the Atlantic, at
least, but scant notice has been taken of the other members of
the Centre party. Still they are worth knowing, and none more
so than Baron George Arbogast von Franckenstein.

He was born on July 2, 1825, at Wuerzburg, and came of a
noble stock. A room in the castle of Ullstadt the place where
most of his life was spent contains a collection of miniature
portraits. " I have to tell you," he once said to a visitor, jest-
ingly, " that these are my people, lest you might never realize it,
so little do I look like them." As a matter of fact, there was a
striking difference, the late baron being blonde, eyes blue, and
hair reddish, while the long series of ancestors showed almost in-
variably dark hair and eyes. " It was my grandmother," he
would say, " that changed our traditional looks ; she was so very,
very blonde." He seemed almost to regret it. At the same
time, no one who knew him closely doubted the genuineness of
his Franckenstein blood. There were in his family prince-bishops,
statesmen, valiant knights, humble monks, nay, even a saint
Blessed Paulus von Franckenstein, of the Dominicans but some-
thing hardly definable seemed to unite and make alike all these
men, a certain air of unstrained dignity, betraying a mind at
once stern and strong. And in Baron George's eyes beamed the
same steady light. Americans often loudly rejoice in the absence
in their country of a nobility, of privileged classes, and they are
entitled so to rejoice, considering how nowadays privileged peo-
ple generally run in Europe. But where nobility is felt by the
owner to enjoin the unavoidable obligation of emulating great
ancestors gone before, where privileges are considered a source
of enjoyment only because they enable their possessor to work
with wider liberty for the welfare of his fellow-men, there nobili-
ty has a high and admirable reason for its existence. Nowhere
is this more the case than among the old Catholic houses of

1892.] GEORGE VON FRANCKENSTEIN. 33

Germany, though far less in the German part of Austria than in
Bavaria and Westphalia.

After having made his college course, Franckenstein studied
philosophy and law at the University of Munich, which at that
time was not yet wholly devoid of Catholic spirit. The old
baron, Charles Frederick, died in 1845, leaving George, as the
eldest of three sons, manager of the large Franckenstein estates
besides Ullstadt they comprise Ockstadt and Buenzburg. More-
over, the young man succeeded his father in the hereditary dig-
nity as member of the Bavarian Reichsrath (senate), of which, in
1 88 1, King Louis made him the president, a position he held up
to his death.

The dowager Baroness Franckenstein, born Countess Leopold-
ine Apponyi, survived her husband for about a quarter of a
century, and for her and her memory George ever cherished a
love bordering on worship. Probably it was from her he inher-
ited that mildness, that sweet, kind smile, which to his dying day
graced the stalwart knight and made him all but irresistible even
to political and religious adversaries. On the main altar of the
church built by him at Ullstadt his filial love is perpetuated in
the statue of St. Leopold.

From the outset Franckenstein's parliamentary labors were
stamped with those characteristics in which he himself wanted to
sum up his life's work : " True and faithful " being the motto he
had written on his coat-of-arms. A courtier he never was.
Abiding in him was that feeling of personal independence and
dignity so characteristic of the best German nobility, and so es-
sentially different from the cringing subjection of a French mar-
quis under the fourteenth or fifteenth Louis. A man of the
Franckenstein type is devoted, never slavish. King Louis, rather
against his own inclination, had been compelled to propose at
Versailles the erection of the German Empire with a Hohenzollern
to wear the crown. When the draft of Germany's new constitu-
tion was submitted for ratification to the Bavarian senate, Franck-
enstein had the courage openly to speak and vote against it. As
warm a friend as any of Germany's unity, he, like many others,
could not at once sympathize with the way it was brought about.
To many an eminent German scholar and ardent patriot of the
old school Gervinus is an instance it appeared as if Prussia's
military hegemony would crush out the multifarious phases in
which the German national spirit had been hitherto free to ex-
hibit itself ; that, in short, uniformity was far too high a price
for unity.

34 GEORGE VON FRANCKENSTEIN. [April,

At any rate, once the German Empire had become an estab-
lished fact, Franckenstein was of far too sober and practical a
nature to go on grumbling and cavilling. With him activity was
indispensable; mere fault-finding he despised. In 1872 he was
elected to the German Diet, keeping his seat to his death. He
at once joined fortunes with the men that were championing the
freedom of Catholic Germany, and who were, as an unavoidable
consequence, subjected to every kind of indignity, even the
most outrageous and exasperating. It may be necessary to em-
phasize that I am not in the least exaggerating. A poor crazed
individual Kullmann fired at Bismarck and missed him. In his
pocket was found a Catholic paper, or he had been seen reading
one I forget which and consequently upon this was based a
charge of some kind of Catholic complicity in the attempted
crime. Of course, no tittle of evidence was ever brought forth
in support of this charge. But in the German Diet the chan-
cellor hurled this charge at the Centrists : " You would fain dis-
claim any connection with the murderer ; he clings to your coat-
tails !" An assassin clinging to the coat-tails of Ludwig Windt-
horst and George von Franckenstein !

We all now know that these are things of the past. The
Centre party has long since lived down its maligners and justi-
fied its policy, as is frequently admitted even by non-Catholics.
Said an anonymous but well-informed writer in the Fortnightly
Review for August, 1890:

" We have no special predilection for the Roman Church, but
it is impossible not to recognize the signal service which the
German Catholics rendered to their country by their quiet but
unflinching resistance to the May laws. If they had yielded Ger-
many would have been reduced to a state of political serfdom
hardly to be found except in Russia."

II.

Franckenstein soon rose into repute within his party. Windt-
horst, as great a master in judging character as in parliamen-
tary tactics, at once recognized his high ability, and resolved with-
out jealousy or reserve to give him an energetic support. As
early as in 1875, at the decease of Herr von Savigny, he caused
Franckenstein to be elected his successor as president of the Cen-
tre party. Henceforward the two men were inseparable. Side-
by-side they were seated in the Diet, arm-in-arm they might
be seen walking up and down Unter den Linden, the famous ave-
nue of Berlin. The gigantic Bavarian and the diminutive Hano-

1892.] GEORGE VON FRANCKENSTEIN. 35

verian presented an odd sight, and it was no wonder the
comic papers seized on them and made them the subjects of
countless cartoons.

Franckenstein was not an orator in the accepted sense of the
term, yet as a speaker he proved impressive. His speeches were
brief, honest, to the point, and always, even when directed
against adversaries, utterly void of bitterness. If he was not
possessed of the ready wit, the cutting sarcasm, of other parlia-
mentarians, he in return never wounded anybody, never sneered
at his opponents. He was not a diplomat inasmuch as he
was totally incapable not only of any double-dealings, but even
of those stratagems indispensable, it would seem, in policy, and
not necessarily involving any falsehood on the part of those who
practise them. Somehow this aversion to what is generally un-
derstood by diplomacy arose from his deeply optimistic turn of
mind. He was unable to see why others should not, like himself,
be ever ready to be convinced on having the truth plainly stated
to them. Outspoken honesty, united with a unique unselfishness,
were his dominant features as a politician. Hence it happened
not rarely that he changed his first opinion on a new bill, hav-
ing during the discussion become better informed as to its im-
port and issue. This might occur in public sessions of the house
as well as in private meetings of the committees of which he
was a member. And when thus convinced of having been in
the wrong, he would never hesitate to say it with perfect frank-
ness.

It may not be amiss here to dwell somewhat at length on
an incident in Franckenstein's political life which has been the
subject of widespread comment, and is still to be found oddly
misrepresented in alleged historical works.

It was in 1887. For some time the German government had
wanted a large increase of grants to the army, but this the op-
position had not been willing to give. As far, however, as the
larger part of the opposition the Centre party was concerned,
its antagonism was not to be construed as definitive, the Centre
not being unwilling generally to increase the military budget ;
only it wanted to take its time in order to sift the matter, and
not to grant without due consideration everything Bismarck de-
manded. Then the Papal nuncio in Munich, Monsignor di Pie-
tro, wrote to Franckenstein, telling him that Cardinal Jacobini,
the Pope's secretary of state, had 'just sent him a note making
known the opinion of his Holiness. Leo XIII., so the nuncio
stated, would like the Centre party to yield somewhat in a mat-
VOL. LV. 3

36 GEORGE VON FRANCKENSTEIN. [April,

ter in which the government showed such extraordinary concern ;
by doing so the Pope was persuaded the Catholics would gain
rapid and considerable concessions for their persecuted church.

As soon as Franckenstein received this intimation he took
every trouble to secure the co-operation of Windthorst and the
other leaders for the end pointed out by the nuncio. The gov-
ernment wanted the demanded expense voted for seven years ;
the Centre, holding their mandates from the electors for only
three years, agreed to vote it for that time, and so much the
more had they reason to expect the government to be satisfied
with this, as Moltke himself declared in the Diet that the period
for which the money was to be voted was irrelevant. In the
happiest mood Franckenstein wrote home that he had achieved
everything the Pope wanted. But he had reckoned without his
host. Bismarck needed a more pliable Diet, not only for his
military projects but still more to support his financial policy
the Diet then sitting having thrown out his bills for the tobacco
and brandy monopoly. Accordingly, as soon as the Centre had
resolved to vote the military expense for three years, the gov-
ernment declared that nothing would satisfy them but a seven
years' vote ; and when at the second reading the period of three
years was carried by a narrow majority, Bismarck did not wait
for the third reading, but forthwith dissolved the Diet. About
the same time the authentic text of Cardinal Jacobini's letter to
the nuncio suddenly appeared in the governmental papers ; no
one ever knew how it got there. But to the Catholic statesmen,
and above all to Franckenstein, it was a severe blow, because, as
a matter of fact, the letter showed that what the Pope wanted
the Catholics to vote was the very septennate, unabridged. This
Franckenstein had never suspected; but of course his adversaries
instantly seized on this rare opportunity to vilify him, and
through him his party, alleging, it must be understood, that
Franckenstein and the other leaders had been all along fully ac-
quainted with the Pope's letter, but had been withholding its
contents from their party. Bismarck, in the Diet, censured with
hugely amusing severity those unruly Catholic parliamentarians
who made light of the Pontiff's injunctions, and newspapers in
which everything pertaining to the Papacy used to be ipso facto
a subject of ridicule and scorn suddenly assumed the tone of
holy indignation, turning their scandalized eyes toward the
heaven where, according to their tenets, no God ever resided.

The stroke told with Franckenstein more than with any one
else. At once he wrote out a full account of his conduct to the

1892.] GEORGE VON FRANCKENSTEIN. 37

Papal nuncio. And he added that it had always been under-
stood by him and his colleagues that the Pope left them free
play in all matters purely political. At the same time, if his
Holiness was of opinion that the Catholic interests in Germany
could be managed more effectively through the sole means of
diplomatic transactions, and that consequently the services of the
Centre party were needed no longer, a word from the Holy See
would suffice to dissolve the party, Franckenstein and most of
his friends being ready to retire from the Diet, into which they
had sought admission only in order to defend the church.

The cardinal's answer was to the effect that the Curia had
been led to believe the septennate was, not a purely political
question. The secretary did not with one word even try to sus-
tain this supposition ; and, moreover, he most decidedly exhorted
the Centre to pursue its activity, which was as much as to say
that it gave the highest satisfaction. Accordingly the Catholic
politicians retained their seats ; the new elections witnessed no
loss of strength within their ranks, and in the ensuing session
most of the Centrists voted against the septennate, which, how-
ever, was passed by help of a coalition between the other fac-
tions.

Franckenstein has been praised on all hands for his unwearied
industry while in Parliament. Outside of his labor for the church's
peace, most of his time in the Diet was devoted to the cause
of the working classes. In 1881 he was elected president of a
committee appointed to examine an accident-insurance bill, and
he subsequently held a corresponding position on all similar com-
mittees.

Whatever he undertook he brought to his work always the
same clear intellect, the same honest purpose. Nor by any
means was the appreciation of his prominent qualities confined
to the members of his own party. From 1879 to l &$7 ne held,
by unanimous consent, the office of first vice-president of the
German Diet, and it was not until political and religious
passion ran high, not so much against his person as against his
cause, that he had to yield. Hence most striking is the testimo-
ny given at his death by the president of the very faction which
forced him out :

" A genuine German, firm and faithful, true and fearless, un-
selfish, plain, and without guile. A man of few words, but of
high practical ability and wide views. An authority wherever
duty summoned him."

38 GEORGE VON FRANCKENSTEIN. [April,

III.

Despite, or maybe rather because of his independence, Franck-
enstein was always a favorite with his kings. Louis II. asked
him twice to form a ministry, but Franckenstein's Catholic ideas
of what a government should be proved too uncompromising ; so
the honor had to be declined. It is, however, a highly touching
and significant fact that Franckenstein was the only man to whom
King Louis thought of turning for succor when, during the last
days of his reign, the thickening clouds had driven away from
his throne the crowd that used to bask in the royal sunshine.
On the nth of June, 1886, a despatch from the king reached
Franckenstein at Marienbad. He hastened to Munich, there to
learn that the king was a raving maniac and could be seen by
no one. Already on the I3th the royal prisoner put an end to
his wretched life ; so all further efforts in his behalf would have
been in vain.

Besides parliamentary life Franckenstein enjoyed still another
field for public action. As early as in 1847 ne was received in-
to the royal Bavarian order of the Knights of St. George, and
from 1877 he was its great chancellor. Here as elsewhere he
was a man of work, not words. That nursing of the sick was
made one of the aims of the order was mainly due to his efforts,
as was also the erection of two hospitals one at Nymphenburg,
another at Brueckenau both dedicated to the order's and his own
patron, St. George. % Up to his death all the claret needed in the
two hospitals was furnished from his private wine-cellar. But he
paid his debts to suffering manhood in a still nobler way. He
partook in person in the nursing of the diseased and wounded,
assisted at amputations, became quite an expert in the dressing
of wounds. In 1870 he performed this kind of work so persis-
tently that, as he afterwards said, the smell of corrupted sores
stayed with him for a long while. At the little town of Markt-
bibart, near Ullstadt, a temporary hospital was set up during the
Franco-Prussian war for such severely wounded soldiers as were
deemed unable to stand the transportation to Nuremberg. Beds
and mangled soldiers were plentiful ; but who was to pay the
cost of it all? Again the Baron of Ullstadt stepped in. And
not only did he pay the expenses and see that the sick were
supplied with every possible comfort, but he made himself useful
in various ways by his kind address and manifestly sincere sym-
pathy, cheering and consoling the sufferers, so that, as one of
them a plain Bavarian peasant afterwards put it, " He was like
a father and a mother to us, both at once."

1892.] GEORGE VON FRANCKENSTEIN. 39

IV.

The mainspring of this magnificent character was its profound
and unflinching Catholicity. His was a faith of a kind too rare-
ly seen in our days, as unswerving and as solidly grounded as
one of those Gothic piles which adorn his country. It never oc-
curred to him to cavil at the action of Holy Church, to find
fault with this or that Papal decree, or the like. That even
prominent ecclesiastics might experience any difficulty in submit-
ting to the decisions of a council as, for instance, the Vatican
of 1870 was to him simply passing comprehension. " God leads
us through Pope and bishops, and that settles it " such was
his plain, unalterable logic.

His respect for ecclesiastical authority was profound, but per-
fect clearness as to their stand-point was with him a demand
never to be dispensed with. A model of toleration towards Pro-
testants and infidels, he brooked no double-tongued practice in
those whose very office called for outspoken orthodoxy. Prob^-
bly it is little known that (according to the Rev. J. Faeh, S.J.*)
it was Franckenstein that brought about Doellinger's suspension.
The attitude of this prelate towards the Vatican decrees was
notorious, yet his superiors for a while held back from acting.
But as a great celebration of the Knights of St. George was
coming on, and Doellinger as provost was to conduct the religious
services, Franckenstein went directly to the archbishop and de-
manded an open explanation. He must needs know, so he said,
whether or no Doellinger was still a Catholic priest. The an-
swer was Doellinger's suspension.

To a friend of the present writer, who asked Franckenstein his
opinion of Doellinger, he said : " He has simply read too much
and prayed too little" ( Er hat einfach zu viel gelesen und zu
wenig gebetet). After a pause he added: " Or rather no: he
might have read all he pleased as long as he prayed ; it all came
about for lack of humble praying."

From the outset the Catholic conventions commanded his warm-
est interest. More than once he was their president. In fact,
all sorts of Catholic clubs, unions, and societies were sure of his
self-sacrificing support, provided, of course, they were conducted
on sound principles.

His piety was as unaffected and unostentatious as it was
deeply rooted. A certain kind of modern devotional books, full
of verbose and over-sweet effusions, were^ by him held in horror.

* To whose charming sketch of the late baron, in the Stimmen aus Maria Laach for
1891, the present writer is indebted for valuable information.

40 GEORGE VON FRANCKENSTEIN. [April,

One of his children once reading the morning prayers from a
book of this description, Franckenstein said nothing, but the
next morning it came from him in his deep, commanding voice :
"To-day it is I that pray." And he began: "In the name of
the Father, etc. . . . Our Father. . . . Hail Mary. . . .
I believe in God the Father. ... I am done ; now go on
with your own trash ! "

Every day he heard Mass, and when possible assisted at the
evening devotions in the chapel at home. To the Blessed Vir-
gin he always cherished a special devotion. For years he said
the beads daily ; like O'Connell, carrying them with him wherever
he went, in the parliament and in the audience chambers of
kings. The Memorare was his favorite prayer, and his first words
to his children, when they poured into his ears their complaints
and sorrows, would almost always be : " Have you said the Mem-
orare ? " One day a man, who has himself told me the incident,
came across the baron just as he was deeply engaged in conver-
sation with a little peasant girl. The man passed by, not want-
ing to interrupt ; he was, however, soon overtaken by the baron,
who in an artless manner explained that he had just been trying
to teach the child the Memorare.

In 1857 the baron married Maria, Princess of Oettingen-
Wallerstein. When, about a year after her husband's death, she
passed away, one of her nieces, herself for years motherless, wrote
to a friend : " In her we all lose a mother." Indeed, not only her
own children and her nearest relations, but all those around her,
even those who had the remotest claim upon her, be their ways
of life ever so lowly, when in need they got to feel that in the
baroness they had a mother with all a mother's soothing love
and painstaking care. Those who want to understand what a
patriarchal form of life really means might have learned it no-
where better than at Ullstadt. As a matter of fact all that were
in any way connected with the household ipso facto were of the
family. When in want of anything, all they needed was to ap-
ply to the baron or his wife; they were sure to get it. Was
any one taken ill, he or she would always be attended to ; no day
passed by but that some members or others of the family called ;
in cases of long-enduring illness a Sister of Chanty was sent
for.

And now a word touching the more intimate life of the fam-
ily. Whosoever has seen Baron Franckenstein amid his children

1892.] GEORGE VON FRANCKENSTEIN. 41

has seen the model father. His delight was to train his sons
and daughters in his own habits, imbue them with his own taste
for art and literature. His efforts were rewarded ; all the young
Franckensteins possess exquisite literary and artistic taste. But
best pleased was the father when he succeeded in interesting
them in some high political or charitable undertaking of his. He
would often ask them their opinion on a speech he was compos-
ing or on some project of improvement of his estates, and he
was for ever trying to awaken their own judgment and elicit an
independent opinion from them. " Don't go away," he would
often say when they were about leaving his study ; " stay a little
longer. I do like so much to have you with me."

And with all his seriousness he knew how to be as jolly as
the youngest member of his household by taking part in their
sports. During meals reserve was thrown to the winds, and no-
thing would please him better than being able to say : " What
a racket we raised at the table to-day ! " " Das war heute wieder
ein Spektakel bei Tisch ! "

A photograph taken, if I mistake not, in 1882, shows him
surrounded by his household. His tall figure, crowned with
the striking head, would of itself call for attention, even without
one's knowing who the man was. It is pre-eminently the head
of a man of high moral courage and great kindness of heart.
Behind him, with the baron's eldest son leaning upon his arm,
stands a young-looking man in clerical garb the young people's
tutor. There is, or so it appears to me, something highly s,ug-
gestive in the way the baron and the priest stand out among
the numerous figures on the picture, the representative of pri-
vate and civic virtue and the representative of God's church.

VI.

It seems that in 1877, while in Rome, Franckenstein caught
cold during a visit to the Catacombs. Fever and cough set in,
and, although for the time checked, left behind them an affection
of the heart. During the ensuing years, from time to time, re-
lapses would occur ; howbeit, in the often long intervals between
these relapses the baron seemed as sturdy as ever, and his ap-
pearance was but little or not at all affected by the insidious
disease. But on the I4th of January, 1890, he was compelled
to go to bed, feeling extremely weak. A thorough diagnosis
was made, and it was found that both his lungs were severely
affected. He then knew what was impending, and his first

42 GEORGE VON FRANCKENSTEIN. [April,

thought was of his duty toward God. " I will make a general
confession of my whole life," he said, and, the confession over,
he asked for and received the last Sacraments, devoutly praying
with the priest while they were administered.

Thus his soul was set at peace with God, and yet his de-
parture could not but give rise to moments of stinging pain.
His wife, his constant companion of thirty-three years ; his chil-
dren, always his joy and his pride ; his friends, who could so
badly spare him they were all to be parted from and would
soon vanish from his sight. The dying man's couch witnessed
scenes never to be forgotten. Unable as he was to keep his.
eyes open, he would now and then raise the heavy eyelids, look-
ing for one or other of his dear ones ; he mentioned their
names, drew them close to his bedside, embraced and blessed
them. Or he called out, " All ! all ! " .and looked at them as if
trying to stamp ineffaceably upon his soul their likeness. To his
friends, who succeeded one another at his bedside, he spoke
words brief but of deep meaning. And then again to the
children : " Remain always united. Love one another and your
mother."

As the days glided by he grew more and more feeble. Still
his voice was audible when giving the responses to the prayers
of the Rosary ; from the movements of his lips those around him
could tell when he was saying the Memorare.

Throughout the Fatherland prayers were said for his re-
covery. Perhaps the oldest of all his friends was Archdeacon
Moufang, justly celebrated for his share in the Kulturkampf and
for having been among the first to try and rally the working-
classes under the banner of the church. He used to spend part
of every fall at Ullstadt, but of late had been confined to his
room with illness. On hearing of Franckenstein's sad state he
had himself brought to a convent to offer up, with streaming
tears, prayers for his dying friend. And when, on the 22d of
January, the tidings reached him that a little before noontime
Franckenstein had passed away, it was to him as if he, too,
could tarry no longer. Within a few weeks he followed his
friend into a better world.

Franckenstein was buried at Ullstadt, close to the wall of the
church he had himself raised to God's honor. Here he lies,
vested in the dress of a Knight of St. George, waiting for the
angel's summons.

1892.] ' GEORGE VON FRANCKENSTEIN. 43

VII.

A knight he was, as truly as any that ever bore that glorious
title. Testimonies to the esteem he was held in even by men of
widely different convictions poured forth at the news of his
death from the emperor, who in various ways manifested his
sincere sympathy ; from the national-liberal party, who placed a
gorgeous wreath on the bier; from liberal Italian papers, like
Opinione and Tribuna, in which respectful obituaries appeared.
Needless it were to dwell upon the grief of his political friends
and of the German Catholics ; doubly needless would be the at-
tempt here to map out the exact dimensions of his and his
friends' work : whence it started, how it grew, and whither its
drift. Nor should it be forgotten that the renascence of Ger-
man Catholicity during the last two decades was not exclusively
the work of statesmen. Some of the most striking manifesta-
tions of this reawakening life had for some time past been si-
lently ripening ; a work, for instance, like Johannes Janssen's
great history, the import of which as a fortifying element with
German, nay European, Catholics can scarce be overrated, was
begun twenty-five years before the first volume appeared ; and
Father Kolping's Gesellen- Vereine (working-men's associations) had
been a power for good among the masses long before the blaze
of the Kulturkampf reddened the horizon.

Nevertheless, the chief honor for what has been achieved be-
longs to the leaders of the Centrists. They rallied broken regi-
ments, stationed as it were batteries just in the proper places,
encouraged the lines, and finally gained a series of decisive vic-
tories. Already some of the greatest of these captains have
gone to their reward : Mallinckrodt, Windthorst, and Francken-
stein are no more. The Bavarian nobleman deserves the abid-
ing gratitude of Catholics as fully as any of them ; and in con-
cluding I beg to remark that if the picture here drawn seems all
light, the reason is simply that from whatever side you approach
the subject it casts over you a glamour to which you are fain to
submit as long as you want to remain near enough for its study
and reproduction.

Jos. ALEXANDER.

44 COLUMBUS IN PORTUGAL. [April,

COLUMBUS IN PORTUGAL.

OF Columbus between the age of fourteen and thirty-eight
nothing certain is known in detail, if we except a few items he
gives us himself in his correspondence, such as his expedition to
Tunis, noted in a former article. Several heroic deeds nar-
rated by Ferdinand cannot be accepted as historical. As this
writer, I have no doubt, intentionally wrapped the origin and
parentage of his father in mystery, so, in his desire to rescue
him from the obscurity of his early life, connected him with fa-
mous admirals of a name similar to his, and made him share
with them many daring and adventurous enterprises.

According to Ferdinand, Columbus landed in Portugal after
a desperate battle with the Venetians, during which his ship was
burned and he saved himself by swimming ashore. The tale is
now admitted by all to be an invention. The battle in which
Ferdinand makes his father a participant was fought on the 2ist
of August, 1485, when Columbus is known to have been already
in Spain. Las Casas rehearses the story, but evidently on the
authority of Ferdinand alone, as he gives no other source of in-
formation. Unless documents now unknown to the world be
discovered, the history of Columbus between the age of fourteen
and thirty-eight will remain almost a blank. What was his occu-
pation during the intervening twenty-three years ? It may be
gathered from his writings. He took to sea, he tells us himself,
when very young say, at fourteen. From a letter of his we
know that he travelled on the sea " for twenty-three years with-
out any interruption worth mentioning." Now, from the year
1474 to the end of his life the movements of Columbus are fairly
well known. From the end of 1474 to the end of 1484 he lived
in Portugal, travelling at times north and south, but engaged,
he tells us, in endeavoring to obtain ships for his transoceanic
voyage from the king. From the end of 1484 to 1492 he lived
in Spain, seldom, if ever, putting to sea. The twenty-three years
of uninterrupted travels must, therefore, have ended before the
year 1474, because from this date to that of his death he could
not have said with truth that there had been no interruption in
his travels worth mentioning. Nor can plausible reason be as.
signed why, in his letter to the king, he should have falsified
the facts.

1892.] COLUMBUS IN PORTUGAL. 45

As we find him at Savona at his father's place of residence
on three different occasions, on the 2Oth of March, and on the
26th of August, 1472, and on the 7th of August, 1473, we must
conclude that the twenty-three years of travel must have ended
before the year 1472. Deducting twenty-three from 1472 carries
us back to 1449, when Columbus was fourteen years old, at
which age, he tell us, he took to sea. I will say here, retrospec-
tively and parenthetically, that this forms another absolute de-
monstration that Columbus was born in A.D. 1435, or in the
beginning of 1436. Thus the different dates given by Columbus,
far from being contradictory, prove and support each other. But
how shall we reconcile or explain the following fragment of a
letter of his in which, addressing King Ferdinand, he says :

" Our Lord sent me here miraculously that I might serve
your highness ; I say miraculously, because I had landed in
Portugal, whose king was more interested in discoveries than any
one else ; he [the Lord] closed his eyes and his ears and all the
senses, so that in fourteen years I did not succeed in making
him understand what I was telling him."

It will be proved that Columbus, in reckoning any given pe-
riod of time, always counted both the year in which it began
and the one during which it ended inclusive. According to the
letter just quoted, interpreted in the light of this rule, Columbus
made his first proposal of a transoceanic voyage to the King
of Portugal in 1471, for we know that he left Portugal
to return no more, at least to stay, in 1484. From 1471
to 1484, both dates counted inclusive, there are fourteen
years. It is quite evident, therefore, from the writings of Colum-
bus, that he was born about 1435, that he entered on his nauti-
cal life when fourteen years old, and continued in it to the
thirty-eighth year of his life, that is, to A.D. 1472.

However, before the expiration of the full term of twenty-
three years' navigation, having matured his convictions and formed
his plan to visit the land of spices by a transatlantic voyage, he
proposed it to the king of his adopted country about the year
1471. Whatever may have been the grounds on which he based
it, his was a firm conviction, admitting of no doubt, that he
would meet with success in his perilous undertaking. " He had
conceived in his heart," says Las Casas, " as firm a conviction
that he would find what he expected as if he had it already
locked up in his chest." And of all men he was the one best fitted
"to break asunder the locks which the ocean had held fast since

46 COLUMBUS IN PORTUGAL. [April,

the time of the Deluge, and to discover another world." Guided
by an all-ruling Providence, he had prepared himself for the
mighty task by twenty-three years of seafaring life, that gave
him as perfect and exact knowledge of navigation as could be
attained in the fifteenth century, and made him the foremost
mariner of his age.

It was during those twenty-three years' experience that he ac-
quired an extensive and practical knowledge of cosmography and
kindred sciences, and learned how to determine longitudes by
dint of practical application, although, as he tells us himself (Las
Casas, lib. i. cap. Hi.), he had never studied astronomy. In his
intercourse with " learned men of all nationalities, Christians,
Jews, and Moors, lay and clerical," by the reading of modern
and ancient philosophers, poets, and scientists, he had learned all
that was known of geography. " We believe," says Las Casas,
"that Christopher Columbus in the art of navigation excelled
beyond a doubt ev-ery one else of his time in the world."

To follow him during his twenty-three years' peregrination is not
possible, as we have no reliable sources of information ; but much
light can be obtained from contemporary historians and chroni-
clers. Antonio Gallo, an unimpeachable authority, tells us that
Christopher and Bartolomeo Columbus, having spent their boy-
hood at school, when they reached the age of puberty took to
the sea, as was customary with their countrymen. Gallo goes
on to say that Bartolomeo went to Portugal and ultimately set-
tled in Lisbon, and there made a living by drawing mariners'
charts. According to Gallo, he went to Portugal because many
Genoese seamen found there at that time employment and lu-
crative positions, and, in my opinion, because his noble relative,
possibly a brother of his grandmother, Bartolomeo Perestrello,
was governor of the Portuguese Island of Porto Santo, and there
they could expect to be received, not as the sons of the Genoese
weaver, but as the cousin or grandnephew of an influential
grandee.

As Bartolomeo lived in Portugal, Christopher naturally may
be supposed to have made that country the starting point of his
frequent journeys, whence, as his manhood matured, startling dis-
coveries of new lands on the coast of Africa were of frequent
occurrence. Year after year expeditions started from Lisbon,
pushing further and further the exploration of the African coast.
The goal in mind was the land of spices, to be reached by cir-
cumnavigating Africa ; and the prize to be won, the lucrative
commerce between Asia and Europe, which, finding its way

1892.] COLUMBUS IN PORTUGAL. 47

through the Red Sea and the Nile to Egypt, had enriched for
centuries Venice, the queen of the sea, and the rest of the Italian
peninsula. That commerce the kings of Portugal and their peo-
ple desired to gain possession of.

The reigns of Alfonso V. and John II. form a period in
Portuguese history remarkable for a feverish activity in naval en-
terprises. " An incredible enthusiasm," says the Jesuit Riccardo
Cappa in his Colon y los Espafwles, " for maritime discoveries had
seized the, Portuguese nation." That enthusiasm and a desire of
fame and discovery were soon shared by the gifted and intrepid
young Genoese, who, seeing that all attempts to reach India by
an Eastern route had failed, conceived the idea of travelling to
it by the way of the West. Can all this be proved ? We have
seen that Columbus had endeavored for fourteen years to induce
the King of Portugal to give him ships, etc. We have seen, also,
that about January I, 1485, he had already arrived in Spain. It
must, then, have been about 1471 that his first application to the
King of Portugal was made. Now, Las Casas expressly says that
it was on account of his having established his domicile in Portu-
gal, and because he had become a subject of Portugal, that he
made the first proposal to that king. As Columbus was in Sa-
vona and Genoa during 1472, and in August, 1473, and as it is ad-
mitted on all sides that the first proposal to the King of Portugal
was made not later than 1474, and as he could not have become
a subject by reason of his domicile in the space of a very few
months at most, it follows that said proposal must have been
made before 1472. Oviedo tells us that Columbus had become
a subject of Portugal by reason of his marriage. If so, he must
have been married before 1474, and even before 1472 Portugal
must have been his home.

Fernam Martins, or Martinez, was a canon of the cathedral of
Lisbon, and perhaps a relative of that Margarita Martins who
had been the first wife of Bartolomeo Perestrello, the father-in-
law of Columbus. Pedro Noronha, a nephew of the same Pere-
strello, was archbishop of Lisbon. These coincidences are easily
explained by the nepotism common everywhere in the church
during the fifteenth century. They explain in turn how easy it
must have been for Columbus to have access to the king. The
canon, Fernam Martins, was in correspondence with Paulo Tos-
canelli, a learned man of Florence. The king of Portugal di-
rected the canon to write to Toscanelli asking him to explain
how the land of spices could be reached by a journey west on
the Atlantic. Martins wrote, and received an answer dated the

48 COLUMBUS IN PORTUGAL. [April,

25th of June, 1474. Why should it have entered the mind of
the king, who, later on, came to the conclusion that the idea of
Columbus was but an empty dream, to ask such information,
were it not that the latter's proposals had already been made
and were being considered ? It is true that on some previous
occasion Toscanelli had spoken to Martins of the possibility of
reaching the East by way of the West, as may be gathered
from Toscanelli's letters ; and it is true that the information
might have been communicated by Martins to the king. But all
contemporary historians, Portuguese and Spanish, agree in at-
tributing to Columbus the initiative in the undertaking ; and this
point has never been controverted. Had it been otherwise, said
historians would not have failed to make a note of it, anxious
as some of them showed themselves to be to belittle the merits
of the Genoese. If so, we must again conclude the offer of
Columbus to the Portuguese king was made before 1472. For
the correspondence of Martins with Toscanelli presupposes an
investigation of Columbus's plans by the king. We know that
Columbus was in Savona from the 2Oth of March, 1472, to at
least the 7th of August, 1473. Even supposing that he left
Genoa immediately after the 7th of August, 1473, and that he
went to Portugal at once, it is not credible that, if he was a
stranger in that country, within the period of at most a few
months he could have gained influence enough at the court of
Portugal to engage its serious attention to what must have ap-
peared his wild scheme an attention serious enough not only
to interest the learned men of Portugal, but to induce them to
look abroad for information.

How shall we explain the presence of Columbus in Savona in
1472 and 1473 if he had laid his plans before the king prior to
these dates? During 1471 Alfonso V. was engaged in a for-
midable war against the Moors on African soil, which prevented
him from giving the Genoese a favorable answer. He either de-
ferred an answer or answered negatively. Thereupon Columbus,
who, as a loyal subject, had made the first offer to his adopted
country, seeing that, for the time being at least, nothing could
be accomplished there, betook himself to his native Genoa and
offered to the authorities of the republic to undertake the voyage
of discovery and reach the East by way of the West. No offi-
cial document concerning his negotiations with the Genoese gov-
ernment is extant. But that the offer was made by Columbus
at one time or another there can be no doubt. After, having dis-
covered America, Columbus wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella :

1892.] COLUMBUS IN PORTUGAL. 49

" In order to serve your highnesses, I refused to come to any
agreement with France or England or Portugal ; the letters of
the princes of those countries your highnesses have seen in the
hands of Doctor Villalano." From this we learn that he had ap-
plied for ships to Portugal, France, and England. Another let-
ter of Columbus, lately discovered by Cesare Cantu, acquaints us
with the fact that he had made the same request to Venice. It
is not reasonable to suppose that the republic of Genoa, his na-
tive country, which was second to none of the European powers
in maritime enterprise, should have been singled out as the only
one to which he would not afford an opportunity of acquiring the
marvellous unknown regions which he felt sure were about to be
discovered. There is no evidence that Columbus visited Genoa
after 1473. If an offer was ever made it must have been made
in 1472 and 1473. That it was made is attested by Ramusio,
who, as early as 1534, published at Venice his Compendium of the
General History of the West Indies from the writings of Peter
Martyr ; by Benzoni in his History of the New World, published
in 1565 ; and by the Spanish historian Herreras. The memorial
Columbus addressed to the republic of Venice is now lost ; but,
as late as the end of the last century, it was to be seen in the
archives of that city. If one trait of character more than an-
other is to be admired in the great mariner, it is his persever-
ance and tenacity of purpose. It' is not, therefore, to be sup-
posed that, after receiving a refusal from Genoa, he lost all
hopes from that quarter.

In 1480 Dominic Columbus gave power of attorney to his
son Bartolomeo to transact business in Genoa. The document
was dated the i6th of June, 1480. While Christopher was en-
gaged, between 1484 and 1492, in Spain in the endeavor to ob-
tain a grant of ships from their Catholic majesties, Bartolomeo
was visiting the courts of England and France for the same
purpose. This visit to Genoa in 1480 was, I believe, for the
purpose of making a last effort in that quarter. That Christo-
pher remained in Genoa during the years 1472 and 1473, en-
gaged in soliciting ships for his intended voyage, may be gather-
ed also from a clause in his last will and testament. The admi-
ral, during the twenty years of struggle, poverty, and privation
intervening between 1471 and 1492, contracted numerous debts,
which remained unpaid to the end of his life. To clear his
conscience he directed in his will that the different sums he
owed should be paid by his heirs in such a way as not to let
the creditors know whence the money came. Among such be-

50 COLUMBUS IN PORTUGAL. [April,

quests, first on the list, is the following : " To the heirs of Ge-
ronimo del Puerto, the father of Benito del Puerto, Chancellor
of Genoa, twenty ducats or their equivalent." The office of
chancellor of the republic was that of a solicitor-general, sharing
the duties of our secretary of state and attorney-general. Beni-
to del Puerto was an influential nobleman ranking high in the
state councils of the republic; and it was evidently as a fee for
presenting his petition, or for some similar service, that Colum-
bus had bound himself to pay him the twenty ducats, a con-
siderable sum for those days. It is also worthy of notice that,
while Christopher's father was in good circumstances at the end
of 1469, as we have seen, all the documents of 1472, 1473, and
those of subsequent years indicate that he was always in straits
for money. Five of them concern different sales of real estate,
and five others are promissory notes for goods bought on cre-
dit. Once only during this time did he buy real estate, but en-
tirely on credit, and he never succeeded in paying for it. It is
but just, therefore, to surmise that the Columbus family, father
and sons, impoverished themselves in trying to obtain the means
necessary to discover America; and that not only the name of
Christopher, but those also of his father Dominic, of his brothers
Bartolomeo, James, and John Pellegrino, should be dear to every
American. Their old home by the gate of St. Andrea in Genoa
was sold, I believe, to enable Christopher to accomplish the one
great object of his life.

Henry Harrisse, having misunderstood the Savonese docu-
ments and hence adopted a false chronology, arrives at a con-
clusion diametrically opposed to mine. According to him, Chris-
topher Columbus learned the trade of journeyman weaver and
continued to exercise it until 1473. But he admits that, owing
to his decided taste for a seaman's life, he may have pursued
during his youth, contemporaneously with his wool-carding and
cloth-weaving, certain nautical studies and undertaken some jour-
neys on the Mediterranean. "All his assertions to the contrary
notwithstanding," says Harrisse, " everything tends to prove that
the principal occupation of Columbus, his true profession even
after having become of age (at twenty-five), was to card wool
and weave cloth. . . His age then, in 1472, was between
twenty-five and twenty-six. . . . The following year, on the
27th of August, he is yet found in Savona, acting in the capaci-
ty of witness to a will wherein he is designated as lanerius"
These quotations are found at pages 247 and 248 of the first
volume of Harrisse's Christophe Colomb.

1892.] COLUMBUS IN PORTUGAL. 51

It is truly painful to see this erudite and painstaking critic
misled into spoiling his life-work by the single Latin word lane-
rms, which he takes to mean in French tisserand, or weaver in
English. I submit that, if he be right, Columbus in his early
manhood, in 1474, at twenty-seven years of age, was an even
more wonderful man than when eighteen years after, in 1492,
he discovered America. Harrisse would have us believe that
this son of a " poor weaver," " a weaver himself," whose educa-
tion was then " very elementary," and who had never seen other
seas than the Mediterranean, while carding wool and weaving
cloth conceived the idea of braving the Atlantic and travelling
to the antipodes to discover new lands! He would have us be-
lieve that this Genoese weaver at twenty-seven left of a sudden
his wool, his shuttle, his cloth, and went to ask of the King of
Portugal ships to go to the island of Cipango to visit the grand
khan ! He would have us believe that as soon as he set foot in
Portugal he entered not only into intimate relations with the
gentry and the learned men of that kingdom, but with the
Florentine savant Toscanelli, to whom he sent a terrestrial globe
designed by himself and geometrically fashioned by his own
handicraft, " with seas, ports, shores, bays, islands, etc., each in
its proper place." It all looks a la Jules Verne. We have seen
how Harrisse, having taken it for granted that lanerius is synony-
mous with textor pannorum lance, was beguiled into believing
that the father of Columbus had all his life exercised the trade
of weaver. He reached this conclusion by reasoning, on false
premises, that Columbus was born not earlier than 1446, and see-
ing him designated as lanerius in 1472 he reasoned thus : Colum-
bus was a weaver. He must have begun his apprenticeship
when fourteen years of age, i. e. y in 1460, and continued it the
usual period of five or six years to 1465 or 1466. As in 1472
and 1473 he is yet found working at his father's trade, the con-
clusion quoted above is reached. But Harrisse is evidently
wrong. Columbus was a gifted but not an impossible man.

This seems to be the proper place to give the reason why
Columbus, in one of the documents which proved his presence
in Savona in 1472 and 1473, is designated as lanerius. When
between 1484 and 1492 Columbus was patiently waiting on the
court of Spain, he at times, Las Casas tells us, made a living
by drawing and selling mariners' charts, and, we are informed by
the cura de los palacios, by selling printed books. So, when at
Genoa, being so poor as to be compelled to contract debts, he
VOL. LV. 4

52 COLUMBUS IN PORTUGAL. [April,

naturally associated himself with his father in the wool-trade,
and thus was properly designated by the notary as lanerius, or
wool-dealer. He had, however, no fixed residence in Savona ; for
while his father is constantly designated as habitator Savona,
Columbus is described as lanerius de Genua. A suitor to a
republican government's favor, then as now, needed to reside at
the capital. This did not prevent him from frequently visiting
his father in Savona, twenty-five miles distant from Genoa
by a convenient two or three hours' sail, or even from spend-
ing weeks or months with the family.

I may conclude that every circumstance, and every legitimate
historical induction, confirms the implied assertion of Colum-
bus, that he proposed his scheme to Portugal about the year
1470.

Columbus in 1492, accompanied by a motley crew of sailors
of different nationalities, crossed the Atlantic and discovered
America. Hence the glory of that event, second only in impor-
tance to the Incarnation of Christ, is attributed very generally
solely to him. As reflex lights of that glory, history mentions
the names of Queen Isabella, of the Pinzon brothers, the friar
Juan Perez. There is another name that should be placed at
head of the list. That is, Bartolomeo Columbus, the brother of
Christopher. From the beginning there existed a partnership
between the two in the mighty undertaking ; the effect of a com-
mon conviction that the land of spices, Cipango and Cathay,
the East, could be reached by travelling West. Both of them
spent the best years of their life in privation, hardship, and
poverty, at times the laughing-stock of the courts of Europe, in
humbly begging from monarchies and republics the ships neces-
sary to undertake their voyage. While Christopher patiently
waited in the antechambers of the Catholic monarchs of Spain,
Bartolomeo, map in hand, explained to Henry VII. of England
the rotundity of the earth and the feasibility of travelling to the
antipodes. Having failed in his mission to the English king, he
passed to France to ask of her what had been refused by Por-
tugal, Spain, Venice, England, and Genoa. While he was there
Columbus, who had no means of communicating with him, sailed
from Palos. Had there been, as now, a system of international
mails, Bartolomeo would now share with his brother the title of
Discoverer of America. Las Casas represents him as little infe-
rior to Christopher in the art of navigation, and as a writer and
in things pertaining to cartography as his superior. Gallo, the

1892.] COLUMBUS IN PORTUGAL. 53

earliest biographer of Columbus, and writing during his lifetime,
has told us that Bartolomeo settled in Lisbon, and there made a
living by drawing mariners' charts. Giustiniani, another country-
man of Columbus, says in his polyglot Psalter, published in 1537,
that Christopher learned cartography from his brother Bartolomeo,
who had learned it himself in Lisbon. But what may appear
more surprising is the plain statement of Gallo that Bartolomeo
was the first to conceive the idea of reaching the East by way
of the West, by a transatlantic voyage, and that he communicat-
ed it to his brother, who was more experienced than himself in
nautical affairs.

It would be interesting to know the exact places of Colum-
bus's residence in Portugal. But it is now impossible to point
them out further than to say that for a time he lived in Lisbon,
and for a time on one of the Canary or Azores Islands. From
Lisbon he wrote to Toscanelli, in Lisbon he contracted numer-
ous debts with Genoese merchants, and in Lisbon he resided for
a time, as Oviedo testifies. It is also certain that the home of
Columbus was at one time the Island of Porto Santo, on the
coast of Africa. That he married the daughter of Perestrello,
the governor of that island, is attested by all the early Portu-
guese and Spanish historians, who mentioned the subject without
a dissenting voice. Perestrello died in Porto Santo ; there was
his family estate, and there lived his son-in-law, Pedro Correa,
who succeeded his wife's father as governor of the island. What
more natural than that Columbus should have settled there too ?
Las Casas, in the fourth chapter of the first book of his Historia
de las Indias, says : " He lived for some time in the Island of Porto
Santo, where his father-in-law had left an estate." He adds that
Diego, a son of Columbils, was born there. Gaspar Tructoroso,
the historian of the island, who wrote in the latter part of the
sixteenth century, and who gives us the pedigree of Perestrello's
descendants, tells us plainly that " Columbus came from his
country to Madeira, married there and made a living by draw-
ing charts."

Harrisse, who makes Columbus weave cloth in Savona up to
the year 1473, finds no time in his chronology for a residence at
Porto Santo, and discredits the testimony of the above-quoted
Spanish and Portuguese historians. He says, at page 294 of his
first volume : " There has not yet been found in Portugal or on
the islands a single document, a single contemporary act of the
fifteenth or sixteenth century mentioning the presence of Chris-

54 SWEET CHASTITY. [April,

topher Columbus at Madeira or on the Azores." The which
is contradicted by a fragment of a letter of Columbus himself,
quoted by Las Casas in the third chapter of the first book of
his History of the Indies, which says : " I went to take two ships,
and left one of them in Porto Santo.'*

Towards the end of 1484, weary of waiting for an answer to
his petition, and threatened with prosecution, possibly on ac-
count of debts which he was unable to pay, Columbus passed
from Portugal into Spain.

L. A. DUTTO.

Jackson^ Miss.

SWEET CHASTITY.

How fearful is sweet Chastity,
Which from its very thought will flee,
And if a shadow fall its way
Will, not a moment longer stay.

A tender bud, it wraps its heart,
And at the whispering wind will start,
Nor suffer e'en the blameless air
To touch the treasure hidden there.

An inner sense it seems to own

Which warns of danger, though unknown :

A sort of blissful ignorance,

That suffers not sin's shameless glance.

J. L. SPALDING.

1892.] JOHN GILMARY SHEA. 55

JOHN GILMARY SHEA.

JOHN GILMARY SHEA was a man of remarkable and varied
ability, and the mysterious dispensations of Providence appointed
him to duties requiring the alternate exercise of all his talents.
He was born a historian, and he entered upon his life-work with
a modesty that was eminently his own, and with a zeal and un-
tiring energy that would have done honor to the greatest heroes
the world has ever produced. The first object of history is
truth ; the second, that it should accord the due meed of praise
or glory to its heroes. These objects were ever uppermost in
the mind of the hero of this sketch, and they shall, through re-
spect for his memory, govern every word that shall be said of
him here. He lived well, he spoke well, and he died well. He
performed the part in all its humility, and in all its greatness,
which Providence imposes on every mortal, of thinking justly,
leading an honest life, and dying with hope.

Born of parents possessed of education, refined tastes, and
loyalty to the faith of their fathers, the future historian inherited
many of the qualities that have contributed to single him out
from among many as a man of extraordinary worth. But it was
his own fidelity of mind and heart that merited for him his in-
spiration with high resolves and great designs ; that endowed him
with vigor, fortitude, and perseverance to execute them ; and that
favored him with manifest signs of divine protection in the
signal success of his undertakings.

John Gilmary Shea was born, in the city of New York, on the
22d"day of July, 1824. From the character of the man we may
judge the principles his parents instilled into the soul of the
child. His frail body and almost girlish gentleness brought upon
him the nickname of " Mary. " Far from shrinking from it, as
most children would have done, no sooner did he realize the
imputation than, like St. Paul, who, when derided for his adherence
to the Cross, the emblem of shame, cried out exultingly, " The
Cross, the Cross ! I glory in the Cross ! " so young Shea gloried
in. the name of Mary, and in his natural humility added the
Irish prefix " Gil," a servant ; and to the end of his life con-
tinued to be a faithful servant of Mary.

At an early age he entered the grammar-school attached to
Columbia College, from which he graduated in his thirteenth year

56 JOHN GILMARY SHEA. [April,

with a diploma that would have admitted him to the college.
He preferred, however, to enter upon a business life, and soon
found employment in the commercial house of a Spanish gentle-
man. And right here we notice one of those evidences of the
sovereign and transparent interposition of Divine Providence in
shaping the destinies of men. To human eyes this interposition
seems to leave man free in action and will, to follow good or
evil, to incur punishments or merit rewards, but the grand gen-
eral results of the acts of individuals or of peoples belong to
God, and to him alone. Shea's life-work was to be entered
upon only after due and proper preparation. He was to be an
historian ; to the historian a knowledge of languages is indispen-
sable. His general field was to be American history; what lan-
guage more useful for careful research in that direction than the
language of Spain? His special field was to be Catholic history,
and we see the bent of the boy's mind turned to the reading of
works of a Catholic spirit in the language he was learning.
What fourteen-year-old boy of to-day would spend his time in
reading and studying up the history of Alfonso XL of Spain ?
And yet Shea was only fourteen years of age when he had so
mastered Spanish history that his first literary venture, published
in the Young People's Catholic Magazine, was an account of the
heroic services of the soldier-cardinal, Gil Alvarez Carrillo de
Albornez, to his country and to his church. The valiant Bishop
Hughes, himself a hero in his way, was attracted by the young
author's style and research, and commended his work in the
Freeman s Journal, of which he was the editor.

The historian must be skilled in law ; not only must he know
the laws of his own country, be conversant with the terms used
in legal writings and forms, and the system by which trade and
commerce are regulated, but he must also know the code regu-
lating the mutual intercourse of nations and states. This knowl-
edge can best be attained by legal training under competent
and practical teaching, and thus we see young Shea (guided by
Providence, unconsciously perhaps), after due preparation, enter-
ing upon the practice of law in his native city, in 1846.

But a knowledge of civil law did not satisfy his needs. The
historian who is to deal with the religious aspects of history
must know something more. He requires a knowledge of the
rules of conduct which the Creator has prescribed to man as a
dependent and social being ; he must understand such laws as
are enacted by ecclesiastical councils, and confirmed by sover-
eigns ; decisions of matters in religion, or regulations of policy

1892.] JOHN GILMARY SHEA. 57

and discipline by general or provincial council ; he must under-
stand the language and traditions of the church. It is evident
that Providence designed young Shea for a thorough historian,
and in 1848 we find him advanced another step on the ladder of
his destiny, and acquiring his knowledge of canon and ecclesias-
tical law at Fordham College, under the habit of the humble
scholastic of the Society of Jesus. He was to tell of the heroic
deeds and sufferings of a Brebeuf, a Lalemant, a Jogues, and
in order to describe the self-abnegation of those devoted souls
he must himself taste of the discipline and imbibe the spirit of a
Loyola and a Francis Xavier.

Six years of systematic training in the novitiate revealed the
fact that, though the most industrious and most indefatigable of
students, the gentlest, most submissive, and most pious of novices,
he was not destined to serve humanity at the altar. His sphere
was in the world ; he was to serve the church as a layman and
not as a priest ; but the knowledge of the priest was necessary
to the fulfilment of his mission.

Mr. Shea returned to the world, and to the practice of law ;
but there was still a void in his life. He had laid up stores of
knowledge ; his learning had become extensive, critical, and pro-
found, and the time had now arrived when his years of study
were to begin to bear fruit. The New York Historical Society
attracted his attention, its rich and varied library opened vast
fields for his yearning soul to explore, and the study of the
early Indian missions in America opened the door to the voca-
tion for which Providence had designed him. It was not long
before the result of his researches became known through the
pages of the United States Catholic Magazine, published in Balti-
more. His writings were printed side by side with those of Dr.
Martin John Spalding, Bishop of Louisville ; Rev. Dr. Charles I.
White, of Washington, and other well-known writers.

There is no river in our country that has attracted greater
attention, perhaps, than the great Mississippi, the " Father of
Waters." Poet and novelist have peopled it with their heroes
Chateaubriand delighted in picturing it with all the vividness of
his flowery imagination, but it was reserved for John Gilmary
Shea, when scarcely twenty-six years of age, to tell the true story
of its discovery ; to describe the inhabitants that dwelt on either
bank ; to record the adventures of the explorer, greedy for the
wealth supposed to be 'hidden in this region of milk and honey,
and the toils and sufferings of those who considered they had
found untold wealth in the gaining of a single soul to God. The

58 JOHN GILMARY SHEA. [April,

Discovery and Exploration of the Mississippi appeared in 1851.
It was dedicated to Dr. Jared Sparks, LL.D., president of Har-
vard University, as a mark of the personal regard of the author
and as a grateful recognition of the encouragement the learned doc-
tor had given to the young historian. No wonder the Westmin-
ster Review thought it "a most valuable and interesting vol-
ume," and the London Athenaum justly remarked that the au-
thor wrote " clearly, graphically, and with considerable elo-
quence." His description of the last moments of Father Mar-
quette is well worth reproducing here :

" A week before his death he [Father Marquette] had the pre-
caution to bless some holy water, to serve him during the rest
of his illness, in his agony and at his burial, and he instructed
his companions how to use it. The eve of his death, which was
a Friday, he told them, all radiant with joy, that it would take place
on the morrow. During the whole day he conversed with them
about his burial, the way in which he should be laid out and the
place to be selected for his interment, and directed them to raise
a cross over his grave. . . . They carried him ashore, kindled
a fire, and raised for him a wretched bark cabin, where they
laid him, as little uncomfortable as they could. . . . The
father being thus stretched on the shore, like St. Francis Xavier,
as he had always so ardently desired, and left alone amid those
forests for his companions were engaged in unloading had
leisure to repeat all the acts in which he had employed himself
during the preceding days. When his companions came back
to him he embraced them for the last time, while they melted
in tears at his feet. He then asked for the holy water and his
reliquary, and taking off his crucifix, which he wore around his
neck, he placed it in the hands of one, asking him to hold it
constantly before him ; then, feeling that he had but a short time
to live, he made a last effort, clasped his hands, and with his
eyes fixed sweetly on the crucifix, he pronounced aloud his pro-
fession of faith, and thanked the Divine Majesty for the im-
mense grace he did him in allowing him to die in the Society
of Jesus; to die in it as a missionary of Jesus Christ ; and above
all to die in it as he had always asked, in a wretched cabin, des-
titute of all human aid. From time to time during the silence
that followed such words escaped his lips as, ' Sustinuit anima
mea in verba ejus,' or 'Mater Dei, memento mei] the last words
he uttered before entering upon his agony, which was very calm
and gentle. When no longer able to speak one of his compan-
ions cried aloud, 'Jesus, Maria ! ' which he several times repeated
distinctly, and then, as if at those sacred names something had ap-
peared to him, he suddenly raised his eyes above the crucifix,
fixing them apparently on some object which he seemed to re-
gard with pleasure, and thus, with a countenance all radiant
with smiles, he expired without a struggle, as gently as if he
had sunk into a quiet sleep."

1892.] JOHN GILMARY SHEA... 59

We cannot, in an article like this, dwell at any length upon the
various narratives of courage, of heroism, of devotion described
in these pages. It is to be regretted that the Discovery and Explo-
ration of the Mississippi is now out of print, for it is a work that
would hold the attention of the reader not only on account of
the matter of which it treats but because of the charming style
in which it is written.

In 1854 Mr. Shea had so far progressed in his researches
into the history of the North American Indians, and the efforts
made by Catholic missionaries to win them over to Christianity,
that he was able to make them public in his History of the Catho-
lic Missions among the Indian Tribes of the United States, 1529-
1854. This work he dedicated " To his Holiness Pope Pius IX.,
Supreme Head of the Catholic Church," as a " history of a portion
of his fold." It was undertaken at the suggestion of Jared
Sparks, LL.D., and the author brought out the remarkable fact
that " the Indian tribes evangelized by the French and Spaniards
subsist to this day, except where brought in contact with the
colonists of England and their allies or descendants ; while it is
notorious that the tribes in the territories colonized by England
have, in many cases, entirely disappeared, and perished without
ever having had the Gospel preached to them. The Abenakis,
Caughnawagas, Kaskaskias, Miamis, Ottawas, Chippeways, Arkan-
sas, and the New Mexican tribes remain, and number faithful
Christians; but where are the Pequods, Narragansetts, the Mo-
hegans, the Mattowax, the Lenape, the Powhatans? They live
only in name in the rivers and mountains of our land." For ten
years Mr. Shea labored in collecting material for this work. He
consulted volumes published in France, Spain, and Mexico, and
spent much money in securing copies of manuscripts from Rome,
Madrid, Mexico, Havana, Quebec, and elsewhere. He had com-
plained of inaccuracy in others and he did not propose to trust
to conjectures when authenticated facts were available. The de-
scriptions of the sufferings and martyrdom of the Jesuits, Fran-
ciscans, Dominicans, etc., are graphic and full of pathos. The
author seems to have thrown his whole heart into his work.

Mr. Shea's love for his church was one of his most prominent
characteristics. Everything connected with it interested him,
commanded his attention, excited his energies. Knowing how
little interest was taken in the Catholic history of our country,
he sought to collect and save from oblivion every book or pam-
phlet that would be of use to the future historian. He edited
and republished a large number of pamphlets touching upon the

6o JOHN GILMARY SHEA. [April,

voyages of early explorers. His Carmoisy series, consisting of
twenty-six little volumes which he printed for gratuitous circula-
tion among his friends, is highly prized. His Bibliography of all
the editions of the Catholic Bibles published in this country ap-
peared in 1859. He pointed out the errors and misprints in the
various editions, prevailed upon publishers to print new, corrected
and uniform editions, and finally, with the approbation of the
Most Eminent Cardinal McCloskey, after carefully comparing the
texts with the Latin Vulgate, he reprinted the original edition
of Dr. Challoner's Bible of 1740.

Dr. Shea was a great linguist ; not only was he acquainted
with most European languages, but his deep interest in Catholic
Indians led him to devote a great deal of time to the study
of their languages. This resulted in the publication, in 1860, of
his Library of American Linguistics, a series of fifteen volumes
of grammars and dictionaries of Indian languages. The articles
in the Encyclopedia Britannica and in the American Encyclopedia
on Indian affairs are much admired for their accuracy and the
vast field they cover. The late Thomas W. Field, superinten-
dent of public schools in Brooklyn, himself a recognized authority
on this subject, pronounced Dr. Shea the best informed man in
America on everything pertaining to the aborigines.

Dr. Shea's pen was never idle after it had once been set in
motion. In 1862 he published a Life of Pius IX., which was
soon followed by a history of the Catholic Churches in New York
City, whilst his Hierarchy of the Catholic Church in the United
States has been a mine to hundreds of writers who have written
lives of American bishops from " sources hitherto unpublished."
His numerous translations and adaptations ; his contributions to
historical works, such as Winsor's Narrative and Critical History ;
to magazines, like the American Catholic Quarterly, THE CATHO-
LIC WORLD, and the United States Catholic Historical Magazine,
which he founded and which he edited almost to the day of his
death, never failed to command the attention of scholars.

His crowning work, The Catholic Church in the United States
(5 vols., 670 pp.), three volumes of which have already appeared
(the fourth is now in press and the fifth planned out), was un-
dertaken at the earnest solicitation of some of the most promi-
nent members of the American Episcopate. The volumes that
have appeared thus far show an amount of research that must
have necessitated many years of patient labor. The task the au-
thor had set for himself was a herculean one, and one that " cost
him more labor and anxiety than any book he ever wrote." It

1892.] JOHN GILMARY SHEA. 61

is almost a pity that he began it so late in life, for he says
himself that he has more than once had reason to regret that he
had undertaken a task of so much magnitude. It covers a period
in American history from the first attempted colonization to the
present time the four hundred years of American existence ;
and yet, in all this great work, it is clearly evident that he
" never substituted a conjecture for a fact." Every page bears
the impress of his great genius, his abiding faith in the religion
of his fathers, and his patriotic affection for the land of his
birth. The writer was evidently enamored of his subject. It
filled his heart, and he knew that he was serving the cause of
truth. His last work will be the standard history of the Catho-
lic Church in America, and it will be the monument that will
perpetuate his memory in time to come.

Dr. Shea was a profound scholar ; the fathers of the church
and the great men of science and letters in every age were his
familiar friends. Amid the engrossing occupations of his ever-
active life he always found time to commune with them and to
enjoy the refreshing influences of contact with great minds. If
he was ignorant on any one point, it was the selfishness of man-
kind, the vanity so common to men in his position, and that
narrowness of mind that blights so many lives that would other-
wise be great.

In manners Dr. Shea was always the accomplished gentle-
man, ready to anticipate the wishes of those around him, and to
serve them when opportunity offered in the most unostentatious
manner. In social life he was courteous, and, with those who
knew him best, warm-hearted and whole-souled. In the eyes of
many not acquainted with him there seemed to be a modest re-
serve, which was often mistaken for an aversion to social inter-
course. It has even been said, on one hand, that he felt that
his merits and great work had never been recognized, and, on
the other, that he was so like a sensitive plant, so averse to con-
tact with others, that he drew himself up within himself. This
was a great mistake, for a more genial, generous, and friendly
nature would be hard to find. He never failed to charm those
who came in contact with him by his fund of anecdotes about
men in every walk of life, and this made him the most welcome
of guests and the most e-ntertaining of hosts.

That Dr. Shea was honored by men in the church and out of
it is beyond question. At the great Catholic Congress held in
Baltimore some two years ago Dr. Shea was accorded the front
rank, and his appearance on the stage was greeted with the

62 JOHN GILMARY SHEA. [April,

most heartfelt applause, by the most prominent Catholics in the
country. Historical societies were proud to have him on their
roll of membership. The Wisconsin Historical Society made him
an honorary member; the Massachusetts and Maryland historical
societies claimed him as a corresponding member; the New Eng-
land Historic and Geological Society felt honored in having him
for one of its vice-presidents, while the United States Catholic
Historical Society was proud to own him as its founder and
president. Conservative Spain, in recognition of his invaluable
services in the field of history, made him an honorary member of
the Real Academia Historica de Madrid, a distinction never be-
fore conferred on an American.

Nor were colleges behindhand in lavishing their honors upon
so worthy a subject. The College of St. Francis Xavier con-
ferred upon him the degree of Doctor of Laws in 1862, and in
1879 St. John's College, Fordham, conferred the same degree
upon him. The University of Notre Dame honored him with
the " Laetare " medal, the first time that medal was ever conferred
upon a layman ; whilst his old friends, the Jesuits of George-
town, at the celebration of their centenary, in recognition of the
services he had rendered to the college in his history of the
Life and Times of Archbishop Carroll, besides honoring him with
the degree of doctor of laws, presented him with a handsome
gold medal, containing the bust in profile of the recipient, ac-
companied by an appropriate inscription, enclosed within half-
wreaths of laurel.

In summing up the life of Dr. Shea, we can only add that
his memory will long hold a place in the hearts and minds of
those who knew him. And, whether we regard his abilities
and fearlessness as an editor ; his industry and fidelity to truth as
an historian ; his shining example as a practical Catholic gentle-
man, we cannot fail to realize the fact that in his death history
and general literature have lost a most accomplished, talented,
and conscientious student and author, the Catholic press a most
valuable contributor, and the Catholic Church one of its bright-
est ornaments among the laity. Others may have made her more
renowned ; none have labored to make her more beloved. His
body lies in the cemetery at Newark ; his grave is as yet un-
marked. Will the Catholics of the United States raise a monu-
ment over the great historian ?

MARC F. VALETTE.

1891.] HEROES OF HOLY CHURCH. 63

HEROES OF HOLY CHURCH.
I.

WESTMINSTER.

THOUGH these be sluggish times, yet have we men
And sons of God. England, thy storied roll
Of saints and scholars bears no braver soul

Than his, upon whose utterance, again

And once again, the nations paused ; whose pen,
More than thy sword, his country can control
What time black clouds shadow thy sacred mole

Big with such wretchedness as passeth ken.

Dark grows the watery waste, stars die away,
The thunders moan amain ! Oh ! let thy Voice

Of Hope and Faith and fearless Chanty
Tell us the heavenly message till 'tis day,
Till Peace divine maketh His own rejoice,
E'en as they did on storm-tossed Galilee.

II.

ALGERIA.

Prince, Patriot, Apostle ! thy three-fold

Fame is humanity's. Let Church and State

Honor thy triple cross we'll not await
Royal decrees to claim thee, noble, bold,
And godly Priest. Bring we our yellow gold,

Bright deeds, warm hearts, high speech, and guerdons
great

To stay thy strength, driving without the gate
Those fiends within whose shambles men are sold.

Then tell us of our duty. Not for Gaul,
Nor Africa alone, but for the world

Thy words for statesmen, citizens, for all
Now slaves to Sin ; and, as the Saviour hurled
The hucksters from God's house, do thou appall,
Scatter and scathe the fiends that hold us thrall.

GEORGE F. X. GRIFFITH.

y 1891.

64 MISTRESS MARY. [April,

MISTRESS MARY. * v >

^''IMU ;
/4 STORY OF THE SALEM PLANTATIONS.

SALEM PLANTATION, )
IN THE COLONY or MASSACHUSETTS BAY, \
February the third, 1653. )

MUCH wilt thou marvel, sweet sister, when thou seest this
letter, if by good hap it fares so far forth as to reach thee. A
name harsh and strange to thine eyes at the head of it, and yet
writ by thine only brother's hand, him whom, I doubt not, thou
hast wept for as dead, and for whom Masses have been said in
thy quiet convent in France, when no tidings came after that
day of ruin and defeat at Worcester. No need is there to tell
the story of the battle we lost, nor of all the wrangling and con-
fusion that forewent it. The very soldiers in the camp had their
songs of dissension, praising each one his own general, so that
the night before I heard the Ross-shire men shouting :

" Leslie for the kirk

And Middleton for the king;

But de'il a one can give a knock,

Save Ross and Angustine."

The orders of one countervailed not the wish of the other ; the
pass of the river beyond the town and very key of the defence
where Massey set his foot was left so unguarded the next day
that the Parliament troops were not known to be on the hither
side of the river till they were even ready to charge. If I think
again of that day I shall lose heart to tell thee of all that has since
befallen. In very truth we who charged with Duke Hamilton
thought the battle was won when the shot struck me down that
left me senseless for more hours than I knew of. Nor will I sadden
thee by telling how we were driven like cattle to London, nor
how many perished for want of food and of all diseases ; being
enclosed in little room till they were sold to the plantations for
slaves. I being told that I was bound for the Bermudas, be-
wailed my bitter fate in silence, sore at heart for them who fol-
lowed me from Loch Erroch many slain in battle, others re-
proachfully hanged, as the news came to me. Suddenly a stir
was heard, and there entered into the prison a little party, grave

1892.] MISTRESS MARY. 65

and sober as they of the Parliament affect to be, and asked di-
vers questions a*s. .to those who had shown themselves strong and
steadfast in battle, Pn.e whom later I knew to be one Stephen
Winthrop, of the * Massachusetts Colony, a Parliament officer of
good report, had some converse with me, and then told me I was
to go to the Salem Plantation, where they are in need of young
men to aid if perchance the savages, though quiet now, should
again harry them. And at once I was quickly transported to
another vessel, which that same evening set sail for the New
World.

And of the voyage little can I tell thee, for I was mightily
sick and the fever of my wound came back, so that when one
dark evening we drew into shore whereof I saw little but a few
lights amid a great bulk of trees methinks he would have been
but a sorry savage that was frighted of me. The weakness, and
the motion of the ship still prevailing with me, the earth itself
seemed to be still going up and down like the waves of the sea,
and I was standing as one bewildered when the word came.
The most worshipful governor, Master Endicott, desired a young
man for his secretary, if any fit for such there be in this cargo.
Then said the captain : " Here is one Alan Graeme, a very pesti-
lent rebel" for so are we called by them who spared not t!o
slay their king "sore hurt at Worcester, who would be but a
poor aid to them that want work, but able to write both French
and English." Now, I think the captain, albeit surly-seeming,
had compassion on me in thus speaking, that with the governor
I might fare somewhat better than they who might have harder
work with a less kind master. Howbeit, after some parley, I
was led away through the darkness to the house of the governor ;
who being absent, an aged woman showed me a fair room beneath
the eaves where I could sleep. Well pleased was I to stand
upright beneath a roof once more, though the floor seemed still
to rise and fall like the ship's deck, and when I laid down my
head I seemed still to hear the wash of the waves and the
creaking of cordage and mast until at last I slept.

LETTER II.

The next morning very early, and before the coming of light
in these short days of winter, the house was all astir by candle-
light, and dressing myself speedily I went to the hall, where
shortly all were assembled. The governor, whom I now saw for
the first time, read that chapter of the Old Testament which
tells how the king of the Amalekites was hewn in pieces before

66 MISTRESS MARY. [April,

the Lord in Gilgal, and made a long prayer whereof I was
somewhat weaned.

Then went we into a meal, plentiful though plain, of strange
dishes made from the Indian grain like our porridge in Scotland,
and what the savages call succotash. None spoke, save that the
governor prayed a long blessing before we eat. That finished,
Master Endicott spoke with me, asking of my schooling and
nourriture, and then, marking my white looks, saying that until
after the Sabbath it being then Wednesday he would require
no work of me ; after which I was to attend him in the morn-
ings in his study.

After asking me my name and station, he saith, " Doubtless,
being Scot, you are of the Kirk ?"

" Ay," said I, " of the only true Kirk, the Holy Roman Catho-
lic Church." He bent his brows, and I could see that he much mis-
liked my answer ; but he said only : " Stephen Winthrop hath done
amiss in sending me a Papist hither; but being come the tares
and wheat must even grow together till the time of the har-
vest " ; and so departed abruptly.

The woman who mindeth his household sat spinning in the
hall, and when I spoke for my faith to the governor I saw her
turn as one terrified, her foot stopped on the treadle and her
hand in air. When he was departed out of hearing, " You have
a bold tongue, young man," said she, " to proclaim yourself a
Papist to the governor's very face. Look behind and see what
hangs on the wall." Turning, I saw a great flag in folds, pull-
ing which aside I saw that the great cross of England was clean
cut out.

" I would scarce believe that any Englishman should so
serve the English flag," I cried hotly, " had I not known them
to kill their king."

" Nay," said she, " but Governor Winthrop says the Pope
gave the red cross as a sign of victory to the first -king, and that
'tis but a superstitious thing and a relic of Antichrist."

I could have laughed but that I was so angered.
. " Antichrist, indeed ! 'Tis a perverse generation that could
make the figure of the cross, on which the most blessed Saviour
did overcome death and the devil, into the sign of his enemy."

" But the Papists have it for their own sign the one by which
you can tell them in all places, it matters not of what country
or tongue they be," saith she ; " wherefore the godly do spit up-
on it and abhor it. In this very house, which was quickly built
for Master Endicott, I saw him soundly rate the workmen who,

1892.] MISTRESS MARY. 67

thinking to fashion the doors with special fairness, had carved in
them panels with cross-pieces. He bade them all be taken
away, saying he would have no emblems of Popery beneath his
roof. But I spend over-much time talking " ; and she returned
to her spinning, nor would speak further with me.

Nevertheless, I could have laughed to think that, in his own
despite, Governor Endicott hath still a Popish emblem under his
roof, for in all the chances of battle and prison and sickness and
seafaring I keep still the chaplet our- mother gave me, with its
fair gold crucifix, and fail not each night to say one decade for
the souls of our parents, one for King Charles's soul and for
them that have died for him, and one that his son may come to
his own again.

LETTER III.

Were it not that all about me is so strange, it would seem
stranger that I, who always much misliked my books and would
sooner stand hip-high in the burn all a rainy day than bide
within four walls, should be set to work here in New England
as a clerk. Prisoner though I be and sold a slave to these
plantations, I have near as much freedom as them that call
themselves freemen here ; for together are we all shut in by the
trackless forest, with the sea in front. All the day do they
work, none harder than the governor, who is cumbered with
many cares for the governance and well-being of the plantation ;
with letters to the managers in England, with wrangles and dis-
putes touching their borders with the newer plantations, and
with treaties and alarums of Indians, though, for the most part,
the land hath had rest from them for some years ; for the
savages are not many hereabouts, their nations having been
wasted by a great pestilence a little before the first landing of
the English in these coasts.

The most worshipful governor, as is his style for they that
pride themselves in giving no titles to men of blood yet do hold
greatly to those of an office themselves have appointed is a
man of noble and firm aspect. Albeit he possesses all the seri-
ous and grave bearing of the Puritan, his manner is as of one
who has known the world and found himself not amiss even in
the king's presence. I have never seen an Englishman of so
dark a countenance ; so that the gravity from which he seldom
departs is liker the dignity of the Spanish hidalgos I have seen
in France than his fellow-Puritans. He is seldom moved to
anger, yet is sometimes strongly stirred to wrath, as only this
winter he struck one Dexter, a saucy knave, for which the court
VOL. LV. 5

68 MISTRESS MARY. [April,

fined him forty shillings, governor though he be. I could have
smiled to myself when the next day copying fair the letter he
bade me write to John Winthrop :

" I desired the rather to have been at court, because I hear I
am much complained on by Goodman Dexter for striking him.
I acknowledge I was too rash in striking him, understanding
since that it is not lawful for a justice of peace to strike. But
if you had seen the manner of his carriage, with such daring of
me with his arms on kembow, etc. it would have provoked
a very patient man. But I will write no more of it, but leave
it till we speak before you face to face. Only thus far further,
that he hath given out if I had a purse he would make me empty
it ; and if he cannot have justice here, he will do wonders in
England ; and if he cannot prevail there, he will try it out with
me here at blows. Sir, I desire that you will take all into con-
sideration. If it were lawful to try it at blows, and he a fit
man for me to deal with, you should not hear me complain ;
but I hope the Lord hath brought me off from that course."

LETTER IV.

Sunday.

Dost thou not wonder that I spare time to write these long
letters I, who would hardly send thee ten lines at once ? Here
in Massachusetts Bay it is thought a grievous thing to work or
play or even converse, one with the other, on the Sabbath.
Naught do they but walk twice a day to the meeting-house and
waste many weary hours listening, as they say, to the word of
God. Rather seems it to me the word of man, for they read
but a small portion of the holy Scriptures, and, setting out from
that, make long and strange discourses ; for they insist always
on what they call exposition, and call the bare reading scofrmg-
ly dumb reading, as if His words needed help from them or had
to be sorted and sifted into subtleties. Fain would I hear again
the Epistles and Gospels which we were forced to learn by heart
each Sunday and saint's day at St. Omer's, and the Psalms for
Vespers; but them they rarely choose. Rather take they harsh
chapters from the Old Testament, of battles and struggles and
triumph, and war with Jebusites and Hittites and Amorites and
Amalekites, till I oft fall asleep from sheer weariness. And al-
ways they speak of themselves as the chosen people; and in-
deed the Lord himself said of the very Jews that they were a
stubborn and stiff-necked generation, who worshipped him with
their lips while their hearts were far from him. The law com-
pelleth every man to go to their meeting whither the governor
goes attended by four sergeants with their halberds and re-

1892.] MISTRESS MARY. 69

turned home, each one seeketh his own chamber to read and
meditate. Now, as thou rememberest, I have little love for
reading, and I think I should go mad with meditation ; so I
write thee these many pages, which the governor hath pro-
mised shall go to England when the ships sail in the spring.
I shall crave the captain to give them to the hands of our good
friend in London, who, I doubt not, will make shift to send
them to France ; so that at long last thou wilt learn that thy
brother is not dead, and how he fares in this New World.
Without writing I know not how I should win through the long
Sabbath. They walk not abroad, save to the meeting ; they play
no games ; they enter not each other's houses nor speak much in
their own, where also they have but cold cheer ; for they cook
no food, eating that which was prepared the day before. I
could groan aloud to think of the Sundays in Scotland and
in France, which were aye the merriest and happiest of all the
week. The games after Mass, and the merry evenings when all,
both high and low, had no thought but to be glad and blithe,
and the gathering of friends and neighbors that never failed.
Betimes this long, long winter is like to a Sabbath which I think
will never pass. The snow lieth still on the ground as when
first I came, and all the trees, save only the great pines, are
bare of leaves, and at times the wind from the sea pierceth
and chilleth to the very bone and marrow. My room is high
up beneath the eaves, and the trees stretch their arms over-
thwart it, so that sometimes waking in the night I hear the
cones falling on the roof as they wont to do at home ; and,
in the bewilderment of first starting from sleep, I know not
where I am. Do you mind Nurse Alison telling us ballads
at night, after we were happed in bed, and how I ever cried
after young Branxholm ?

" The pine-cones fall by Branxholm wall

As the night wind stirs the tree ;
And it shall not be mine to die by the pine
I loved in infancy."

And kow I would fain play I was young Branxholm bound
to choose a tree to die on ? I thought of it all last night when
I woke at the sound of the wind and the falling cones, but when
I got me to the casement, I looked on a strange world where
there was naught but a pale glimmer of snow and all around
the dark forest where the wolves howled. This long winter
and hunger have made them so bold, and they come so near the

70 MISTRESS MARY. [April,

cattle and sheep, that a reward is given for every wolf's head,
whereof I have killed several. And in place of the burn singing
down the glen I heard the sad sea moaning as the tide went
out.

Even Christmas, when 'tis said the very dumb beasts rejoice
at the good tidings of the Saviour's birth, was gloomier than any
other day of the winter. We worked all the short, dark day
over books and papers, and when I looked for good cheer, be-
hold, being Saturday, naught was for dinner but salted dunfish
and cod. There is great store of fish in these waters,, and al-
ways Saturdays they are for our meal ; but on Fridays there is
always meat, that they may not fast like the Papists. Goodwife
Charnock mindeth me somewhat of Nurse Alison, and scoldeth me
in her fashion and saith I have a wheedling tongue ; and when
she told me of this rule of theirs I answered her that many ,
Papists of the stricter sort fast always on Saturday in honor of
our Lady, so that after all she did but as they did. She hath
a kind heart for all her shrewish tongue, and made me warm
possets when I was ill of a cold. But, O Esm, the weary win-
ter ! Whiles I think it is never any different, and then fain would
I have died in battle with my clansmen, sword in hand, for my
king. And yet life is sweet, and I am young. And I have
naught to urge against them, for in no way are they easier than
I. If I am a prisoner, so they are, for alike are we shut up
within the bounds of this plantation ; and though Master Endicott
speaketh bravely of their boundaries, saying that they run west-
ward even to the South Seas, there is little profit or pleasure in
owning a land wherein one may not venture. Whiles when the
governor hath matter wherewith he wisheth me not to have
knowledge, I have gone to the edge of the land, and, looking over
the far waters, wearied for news from England. Our ship was
the last that came, and we know naught that has passed since
then whether the king be fallen into the hands of them that
slew his father, or if he have put down the rebels and struck off
their arrogant heads. Methinks they in power here have doubt-
ings also, though they speak not before me.

LETTER V.

It is many weeks since I wrote thee, dearest Esm6, and the
packet being sent one morning in haste, I fear thy tender heart
hath been much saddened, thinking of me in the gloom and cold
and weariness of the winter. Quickly did it pass when once the
spring opened, and now one would wish not for a fresher and

1892.] MISTRESS MARY. 71

more pleasant country. One afternoon I was walking alone for
the governor was with some of the council concerning I know
not what matter of state and under the pines I threw myself
down in the soft, fallen leaves and looked at the sky, which
was everywhere of a wonderful deep blue, save that at times a
soft, white cloud floated across before the south wind. A bird
sang with as sweet a note as ever I heard in Scotland, and the
trees in among the pines that had been bare all winter began
to clothe themselves anew with tender leaves of a faint and deli-
cate green, so that never did anything seem so beautiful in
Scotland, though I doubt not that there, being happy, I marked
not much the changes of the world. I have lost the count of
Easter, though the whole winter was like a long, starved Lent ;
but methought it must be near the time when the church keeps
the memory of our Lord's resurrection, and even here in the
wilderness the whole world seemed to tell of it. So I thanked
God heartily who had brought me through danger and the
shadow of death, and filled my soul with peace ; for of a truth
the pleasant air and soft sky and the sight of the young little
leaves filled me with happiness. Lying there I was aware of an
exquisite fine perfume, so delicate that I had never known its
like, mingling with the spicy breath of the pines. Looking about
curiously nowhere could I see any flowers, but the air was filled
with that fair fragrance. Suddenly, as I stirred the fallen
needles and cones idly with my hands, I uncovered many fair
and exquisite flowers, some all waxen white, some of a pink
sweeter than any rose, so that I marvelled how they grew hidden
under those dead leaves and on so hard a soil. Brushing away
still more of the needles I found the rocky earth well r nigh cov-
ered with these sweetest and most delightful blooms, whereof I
pulled some to take home to Dame Charnock. As I drew near
the house I saw a horse I had not before seen carrying a young
man and a lady on a pillion. He called loudly : " Diggory Char-
nock, bring hither a chair that Mistress Mary Endicott may
alight, for we have ridden far."

None answered his call, so, going forward quickly, I proffered
my aid and dropped on one knee beside the horse that the lady
might set down her foot. She hesitated and looked to her
brother, who said, " Thanks, friend. Methinks you must be Alan
Graeme, of whom my uncle hath written." I was still looking at
the maiden, who, for her part, still kept her eyes on her brother
as craving to know his pleasure, and methought those two faces
together were the fairest ever I saw, for they were alike in every

72 MISTRESS MARY. [April,

line of brow and chin, and yet most unlike the one black-beard-
ed and black-browed as the governor's self, the other fair as the
flowers I held Within my hand. The brother had the look Sir
Anthony gives to the eyes of many of his portraits, which people
say signifies one doomed to early death or to bring sorrow on
those that love him, so soft and melancholy is their gaze ; but
his sister's blue eyes are blithe and bright as a sunny sky, and
the fair little curls that waved across her forehead looked as if
they danced with delight. Though I am so long in the telling,
'twas but a second that I looked up into their two faces ere she
rested on my knee her foot in its stout little shoe, laced with a
black ribbon, and so, taking the hand I offered, stepped
lightly to the ground. She said a word of thanks and then
cried out : " O Henry ! he has found the first Mayflower, and I
have sought it everywhere."

Now, to see her so fair and blithe and lightsome one would
have attended that she should speak with a high albeit sweet
voice ; whereas her voice is of a deep, low music which is like
a rich bell touched softly in the solemn parts of the Mass.

" Will you not grace the flowers by accepting them ? " I
asked. The sweet rose reddened in her cheek and her eyes
drooped ; she answered naught, but yet took the flowers, and at
once the governor and Diggory and Dame Charnock were
around her, and going into the house they left me alone ; for
her brother had ridden away to stable his horse, and I feared
that she may have deemed me overbold in proffering the flow-
ers, seeing I am to her but a slave sold to these plantations.
And by now the light had faded from the west and the night
grew chill ; for with the sun-setting the cold fog came in from
the sea, and all was dark and cheerless.

LETTER VI.

I marvel that the people of this plantation relax not some-
what of their rigor, which fitted well with the stern winter of
ice and cold, now that the whole world wears so soft an aspect.
While I waited for Governor Endicott one morning I began to
sing, hardly thinking of the words, that little French song of our
Cousin Alain's:

" L'eau dans les grands lacs bleues

Endormie,

Est le miroir des cieux ;
Mais j'aime mieux les yeux,

De ma mie.

1892.] MISTRESS MARY. 73

" On change tour a tour

De folie.

Moi, jusq'au dernier jour
Je m'en tiens a 1'amour

De ma mie."

I knew not that he had entered and heard me till he spoke
presently, saying :

" Methinks Isaiah might have furnished a wiser and godlier
similitude when he saith, 'The righteousness of the Lord is as
the waves of the sea.' "

I answered light-heartedly, for at times I forget the fashion
of silence towards the elders which governs here : " But I think
there can be nothing better than that your lady's eyes should
make you think of heaven," and then marvelled at my own
boldness, which yet displeased him not, for he spoke no word of
rebuke, but went on with his papers, and I with copying out letters
he had appointed to be written to Boston. Presently we were
aware of a stir at the door, and one asking, in good but some-
what strange-sounding English, for the governor, and with a voice
unlike those of this town, which are for the most part harsh and
worsened by the high drawl they affect in their prayers and
speech. Diggory Charnock came in with a much-distracted
appearance, at which I wondered not when I saw who followed,
for in a black cassock, drawn up through the belt not to hinder
walking, and a crucifix thrust in like a dagger and indeed it is
the weapon with which they set out on the conquest of .this and
the next world I saw a Jesuit priest. You must know that
while secretary to the governor I have learned many of their laws,
and was instantly mindful of that harsh and barbarous one which
commands that on his first coming any Catholic priest should be
beaten and banished forth of the plantation, and upon his
second coming for that cause alone put to death.

My fear was quickly over when the governor greeted him
with a stately courtesy and in good French, asking if he were
not the envoy from the governor of New France, of whose com-
ing he had been apprised. It seems that D'Ailleboust hath sent
this embassy in the hope that as Christian nations we two may
make some league against the Iroquois, who threaten both alike,
and who follow with the most eminent fierceness and barbarity
the Huron nation, which has become Christian. The Iroquois are
a great leaguer of many nations with strange and uncouth names,
and none are bolder nor wiser in warfare, as Father Gabriel
telleth, and have even fought to the walls of Quebec. Also there

74 MISTRESS MARY. [April,

are questions of commerce, and traffic, and trade in skins which
concern New France and New England alike, and which the
French governor thought might well be settled in amity and by
composition. These things have I learned at divers times as Father
Gabriel talketh of them after the evening meal, for he is lodged
at the governor's; and in the twilight we listen to his stories of
his perils among the Indians, for he hath been many years a
missionary among the Abenaquis, who are now all Christians and
therefor much threatened by the Mohawks. He is tall and spare,
but most active, his hair around the tonsure as white as silver,
and his eyes of a most keen and piercing blue. So long hath
he lived among the Indians that methinks he hath grown to look
like them, for three winters hath he spent in their tents
learning their language, sharing their labors and their food, or
rather their famine. Nursing them and giving them medicines,
he won them to listen, while with his crucifix he strove to make
them know of their salvation, and got their good-will to baptize
their children, whereof many died of cold and want. The gover-
nor is much moved by his simple tales, though he speaks little, and
it is a fair sight -to see Mistress Mary's face as she listens, while
the scarlet yarn drops from her fingers and her knitting-pins stay
idle. But he himself is humble as a little child, thinking he hath
done nothing, since he hath not given his life for his flock, he
saith, as many of the order have already done, and all hope for.
Then he telleth us stories of Father Jogues running the gaunt-
let, which they call " the narrow road to Paradise," and of the
tortures practised upon other fathers by the Iroquois, till we
were all frightened at a wolf's howl in the night, thinking it the
war-whoop. The women in New France, by him, are as forward
as the men in zeal for the spread of the faith and the salvation
of the savages, and he told of many high-born maidens and
widows that have transported themselves across the dangerous
seas ; and of the nuns of whom always night and day one
kneels before the grand altar at Montreal praying for the con-
version of Canada. He saith he hath met with much kindness
in these plantations, and two fingers of his hand being shot
away, the governor gave leave that I should help him write at
length part of his notes. I could scarce forbear laughing at the
outlandish spelling of the English words, for Cape Ann he had
written Kepane, and our governor he called ' Sieur Indicott, and
Roxbury Rogsbray. He says all have shown him much affection,
and in Boston Major-General Gibbons gave him the key of a
room in his house where he might freely pray and have the

1892.] MISTRESS MARY. 75

services of his religion. The governor seems well disposed
towards the treaty, or failing that, that they may have liberty to
take up volunteers in the English jurisdiction, and at least have
liberty to pass through the colonies by water and land, if need
should be. I think Henry Endicott would fain go as volunteer
if the commissioners would permit ; and once again I have a
hope to be no longer a slave, for it may be that the governor
will give me leave to go also. He hath been strangely mild, and
considereth the thought and desire of others, though he saith
little ; so that I marvelled not when on the Friday following
Father Gabriel's coming our dinner was all of fish for his con-
veniency.

While he abides with us many of the neighborhood have re-
sorted to us ; and even them that favor not the alliance with
New France like well to listen to him. None seem to hold him
in higher thought than Master Eliot, whom he wrote Maistre
Heliot, of Roxbury, whom the governor favors greatly as a godly
man, calling him the Apostle of the Indians, among whom he
labors much, and he is ever working that he may put the Holy
Scriptures into their own tongue. He is never weary of hearing
how Father Gabriel and the other Jesuits have wrought among
them, and one night he pleaded earnestly with him that the
priest should abide with him a year, that they two together
might finish this work. But albeit well-disposed to him and
sure of kindness and comfort in his house, Father Gabriel would
not consent to it. "Nay," said he, "it is not by the mere
changing of the Word of God into their own. tongue that the
poor heathen are to be snatched from Satan. Our blessed Lord
said, ' Go and teach all nations,' and we who call ourselves by
the title of his company send not book nor message, but go our
own selves unto these lost sheep of the wilderness, leaving father
and mother and house and country, as he bid his disciples. It
is in vain to bring in one, or twenty, or ten times twenty, who
going back to their tribes fall soon again into savagery, and
sometimes become even worse than their fellows, both by the
greater knowledge they have gained, and to show that they are
in nowise changed by the white men, and show themselves bold
and barbarous beyond all others. We bring them not to us,
which in others is but a cruel kindness, but take our lives to
them, making ourselves like to them if haply we may win them
to Christ. Then can they better believe the message we bring
them and the Word which we, too, try to obey, taking up the
cross to follow him ; and the very sight of the crucifix, when

76 MISTRESS MARY. [April,

once they have learned what it signifies, oft-times preacheth bet-
ter than speech or book. Already," he went on with a strangely
sweet smile, " I think it very long that I am away from my
children of the wilderness, and when the commissioners' answer
is given and I have delivered it in New France I shall make
haste to go to the Abenaquis, for I know they want me both in
body and soul, and if the plantations join not against the Iro-
quois I doubt not they will fall upon us, and it may be give
the crown of martyrdom to me, albeit so unworthy of it."

Many such talks they had, for Master Eliot was instant with
him that he should stay, but ' he prevailed not at all, and they
parted with many terms of affection and commending of each to
the other's prayers. Indeed, all who held conversation with Father
Gabriel felt the same warmth of affection, and had it been in
respect of him only would gladly have made the alliance which
now seems doubtful, albeit our governor is well-disposed thereto.

I made my confession the night before the father's going
for he is now departed to lay the matter before the other plan-
tations, if he may prevail with them and asking him as to the
Easter-tide he told me that the day whereof I wrote thee, when
Mistress Mary returned from Boston, was in truth Easter Eve,
when the whole church begins to rejoice, and the bells which
were silent ring once more, and the organ that was muffled
sounds the Gloria in Excelsis, and all the voices that were
hushed praise the Lord.

LETTER VII.

In the morning yesterday I waited for Master Endicott, who
was at a meeting of the council, while Mistress Mary sorted the
papers on her uncle's desk, which were in a great disarray. Tak-
ing up one newly come from the Providence Plantation, she
asked me what meant the motto of the great seal of Rhode
Island upon it a sheaf of arrows bound up and in the liess
these words indented : Amor Vincit Omnia. As I was expound-
ing it in English as signifying that love doth vanquish all
things in cometh the governor, wearing a somewhat disturbed
countenance, whether from what befell at the council or at my
words I know not for indeed they mislike the name of love
even as the thing itself, and account all mention or consideration
thereof as a vanity and a snare to the unwary. However, he
addressed himself not to me, but somewhat sharply to his ward,
asking her what made she with his papers. When she answered
that she did but inquire the significance of the seal he saith : " I

1892.] MISTRESS MARY. 77

marvel they found no better words for it than those of a heathen
poet ; it would have better beseemed godly men to bring to
their minds the thought of the Lord and of his work in planting
the word in the wilderness than so vain a saying as this " ; and
he rapped the seal scornfully with his forefinger. " I like not
the temper of that plantation in many ways, and they write now
of establishing a new port upon the island Aquidneck, for that
it hath a soft and pleasing air a fair reason, forsooth. If now
at the start they consult but their own conveniency and soft
living, what think they the place will come to be when the spur
of the present necessity pricks no longer. Verily, I think with
such beginnings it will end in a mere place of pleasure, given
over wholly to the lust of the eye, and the lust of the flesh, and
the pride of life.*

In like manner he proceeded somewhat sharply for a little
time, Mistress Mary standing meekly beside him the while, with
her sweet eyes cast down and a marvellous pink color in her
cheeks, like a child that is being chidden for she knows not what
fault, for in truth she had no part in the choosing of the new
colony nor the seal of the new plantation. Presently he goes on
with his work with me, and Mistress Mary to her own household
cares with Dame Charnock ; but he seemed more impatient than
is his wont, and found many faults with the letters (many I can
vouch of his own dictation), and a heavy fall of snow bedimming
the light of the afternoon, it passed but drearily and dismally ;
neither saw I Mistress Mary again that 'day, for at supper the
dame said that her head ached from the cold and that she
craved her uncle's permission to hold to her own room.

I have learned since in converse with divers persons that
aught relating to the subject of the Providence Plantations the
governor much mislikes. Of them most forward in its settle-
ment one is a man banished from Massachusetts Bay, one Roger
Williams, formerly a dear and close friend whom he long main-
lined as minister of the church at Salem, in despite of the
:her churches and the council, who charged him with various

leresies and wrong teachings. Some speak of him as a man
lovely in his carriage, and hope that the Lord may yet recall

iim, but of violent and tumultuous carnage against the patent,
id of so great a spirit of controversy, albeit of much sweetness

md constancy of benevolence, that at the end he was banished
out of the colony. At the first he resorted to the neighboring

* Governor Endicott's forebodings are strangely justified by the observations of the last
English authority, Professor Bryce, who uses the same words in describing Newport.

7 g MISTRESS MARY. [April,

Indians of the Pokanoket, to whom he was much endeared, and
abode with them the long winter ; and the following spring being
joined by some from Salem he proceeded to Seekonk, where he
pitched and began to build and plant. But the governor of
Plymouth wrote him that since he was fallen into the edge of
their bounds and they were loath to displease them of the Bay,
he advised him to remove but to the other side of the water,
where he would have the country before him and might be as
free as themselves, and they would be loving neighbors together.
So Williams and five who followed him set out in their canoes
and finally set themselves up in the Narragansett country, and
founded the Providence Plantations. Many have since resorted
to him who agreed not with the harshness of rule in the other
colonies or who were banished therefrom. Notable among them
was one Mistress Hutchinson, who, as I hear, was a woman of
a ready wit and bold spirit, who hesitated not to speak out in
the presence of all men, and who taught strange and new doctrines,
not to be tolerated by the council and governor. After many
trials and public controversies, and admonishments and being im-
prisoned, she, and they that held by her, were at the end ban-
ished, and after many wanderings made settlement, by the advice
of Roger Williams, on Aquetnet Island, near to his plantation.
But in the sequel, and this is a thing bitter and grievous to the
governor and those of benevolent mind, they having further dis-
cord among themselves, Mistress Hutchinson once more removed
her family into the Dutch country, where presently, in an inroad
of the Indians near a place called Hell Gate, she and all her
household were cruelly and horribly murdered, except one daugh-
ter, a child of eight years old.

Her they led into captivity in the wilderness, and all of the
colony being moved with pity for so grievous a fate, and it may
be a little with remorse for their own harshness in the first ban-
ishment for the mere holding a different opinion, the General
Court of Massachusetts has made many efforts to recover the
child from the savages, which as. yet have availed not.

LETTER VIII.

Father Druillettes hath told us of a marvellous fall of water
to the westward of the country of the Iroquois, the like whereof
is nowhere to be seen in this world, for a mighty river flowing
from out of the Great Lakes plunges downward over a granite
wall in a vastness of water not to be imagined. He hath not
himself seen it ; but those of his Indians whom he most trusteth

1892.] MISTRESS MARY. 79

have told him of it at divers times, all agreeing as to its size
and bulk of water, so that it is the sight he most craves to see
in this new world. By their relation the river is of more than
a mile's width, and, being divided by a large island, gathers its
waters together with an incredible force and plunges downward
from a great height in two great falls, the one straight and'
sheer facing to the west, but the other and most beautiful in a
great curve like a horse-shoe, on which the light plays in a
marvellous beauty of sheen and smoothness. His Indians tell
him that, standing on the lesser islands beyond the great one to
which at times a falling tree not yet dislodged from its roots
gives them access, the air and the solid earth tremble and
quiver with the rush of the waters against the jutting rocks,
which yet slacken not the speed of their going, but only churn
them into snowy foam and glassy curves. And the sound of
the falls themselves is of so awful and majestic a power, ceasing
not by day or by night, that they liken to the voice of the
Great Spirit. And they say no man sees where the waters
reach the lower river for the wild whirl of foam and spray
which for ever hides their base ; but always from that mad tur-
moil rises a veil of soft and delicate mist frailer than one can
imagine, wavering only to the wind, which he likens to the pure
prayer which goes up heavenward from out of the confusion of
sin and sorrow. And for another sign from heaven, at certain
times when the moon is in a fitting stage and shines upon the
mist and spray, men may see a bow so fair and frail in form
and color that it seems but as the spirit of that one which
shineth after rain. As he told us of it methought I too would
like much to gaze upon it ; but the governor believeth not what
the Indians have told him as to its size and body of water, and
argued long with the father that so great a fall of such wide
water could not be in nature, for the weight of the water would
crumble away the most solid rock, and quoted the Latin pro-
verb, Gutta cavat lapidem (" A drop will wear away a stone ") ;
how much more such a mass of water as the Indians would fain
have him believe ! Neither doth he believe at all in the sight
of the bow, for he says men have never yet seen one in the
night-time, nor without rain ; and indeed it would be against
the promise of the Scripture, which set the rainbow as a cove-
nant after rain. He grants that there may be a fall of water
somewhat large, but yet nothing like what the Indians fable,
and jested much with Father Druillettes for his too easy faith
of foolish stories, and lays it laughingly to his religion, which he

So MISTRESS MARY. [April,

says has made him prone to give ready belief to miracles and
marvels. But Mistress Mary sat as one charmed and who could
see with the eye of her pure fancy this Niagara, as the Indians
name it ; and I gazing at her thought within myself how happy
a fate would be his who could look upon so fair a sight beside
one so lovely ! While we were still talking of this marvel a mes-
senger came in haste for the governor, and when he returned
he wore a much troubled countenance, whereof next day I heard
the cause. It seems that for many months past there have been
veiled and whispered complaints and hintings of 1 the bewitching
of various persons, by divers grievous and sudden afflictions and
diseases. After careful searching into which matters the witch
was shrewdly suspected to be a certain Goodwife Powell, an aged
woman living a little aloof from any neighbors and chiefly alone,
her two sons' business leading them frequently from home. One
neighbor swore that on her husband's going forth Goodwife
Powell did say for a trifle she knew he should not come again,
and though in truth he did come home well from that voyage
he died of a chill the next winter/ Goodwife Ordway said that
her child being long ill, the wife coming in and looking at it,
pitying of it did fear it would die, which shortly afterward hap-
pened. And many other like grievous and afflictive things were
sworn against her. The governor and council are much moved
in mind to think that Satan has so soon found footing in this
plantation, and, after hearing much evidence from the afflicted
persons and neighbors, they decided to seize her for trial, though
well knowing that in face of such an adversary it behooved them
to walk warily. The arrest was to be made the next day,
when it appeared she had got word of it to her sons being
doubtless apprised by her familiar who returning suddenly in
the night did carry her off to the woods of Cape Ann, where it
is said they have builded a house so secretly that none can find
it, and where they mean to keep her safe hidden. At least so
says the governor, though some among the more ignorant
people shun not to affirm that her master (whom they call the
Black Man) did himself carry her off to his own place in the
midst of a fearful storm which befell the same night. Howbeit,
I am glad she is away from this plantation, and hope that it
may be long ere another such visitation is visited upon us.

LETTER IX.

We were not long returned to our accustomed life after Father
Druillettes left us Henry Endicott riding with him as far as

1892.] MISTRESS MARY. 81

Roxbury, where he was to see the Lieutenant-Governor, Dudley,
an old soldier who had fought under Henry Quatre in France
when coming home from a walk one evening I saw the four
sergeants with their halberds who go before the governor to
church and council, and between them a stranger whom presently
they left at the hall door. His looks had a familiarity the rea-
son whereof I discerned not, until coming in to supper the gover-
nor named him as Major-General Winthrop, through whom I was
transported to these plantations, who is now newly arrived from
England and heartily welcomed by Governor Endicott, who
holds him in great esteem. He is of the Parliament troops, and
from what has passed in conversation a little misliked and dis-
trusted of Cromwell, whom, for his part, he finds somewhat too
bold against the Parliament, and so is well pleased to withdraw
himself a little into this country, where are his father and family.
We are never tired of hearing him tell of all that has passed in
England, albeit each listeneth with divers feelings. And yet
though I was rejoiced to hear of the king's escape and miracu-
lous deliverance, which bore the impression of the immediate
hand of God, I think the governor was not ill-pleased, for,
though of austere appearance and bearing, yet is he, I well be-
lieve, of a benevolent disposition, and I doubt not many of his
party would have been sore perplexed had they taken the king,
for many think it not wisely done to have murdered his father.
Mistress Mary listened as to a fairy tale, while General Winthrop
recited how the king lay hid in an oak-tree with a gentleman
of Staffordshire, who, being of the church, knew others of the
Catholic faith, who in many perils had learned safe hiding-places
and so had opportunity of concealing him. He went from one
poor house to^another till a Benedictine monk, Father Huddle-
ston, conveyed him to Mr. Lane's house, where he saw the pro-
clamation of a thousand pounds promised to any who would de-
liver him up or discover the person of Charles Stuart, and de-
claring traitors all who durst harbor or conceal him, which
greatly moved him at the thought of the many that so freely
risked a traitor's death in his behalf. From there, for later the
knowledge of all this came to the Parliament, he rode as a
neighbor's son behind Mistress Lane, a lady of a very good wit
and discretion, Colonel Lane following at a little distance with a
hawk upon his fist and two or three spaniels following, as if he
were hawking, till they were within a day's journey of a house
in Bristol, where the Lord Wilmot, who had no other disguise,
took the hawk and continued the journey in the same exercise.

8 2 MISTRESS MARY. [April,

Then Winthrop related how nearly he was discovered in Lyme,
whither he went to take ship for France and lay in an inn to
which the cavaliers often resorted. Some who lodged there sent
for a smith, it being a hard frost, and he looking at the feet of
their horses to find more work, going abroad told the neighbors
that one of those horses had travelled far and in much haste,
for that his four shoes had been made in four several counties.
That reminded me of the game we children used to play on the
terrace at Monsecours :

" Marshal, ferres-tu bien ? "

Aussi bien que toi :
" Mais je ne ferre qu'un cheval,

Le cheval du Roi."
" Mets-donc un fer a celui-ci,

C'est le cheval du Roi."

The house was searched, but the two whom they sought had
ridden away and could not be overtaken, though in fleeing from
one danger, 'tis said, they must have passed through a regiment
of Desborough's horse, with Desborough himself in their midst.
Howbeit the king was got safe to the house of a widow lady,
whom they trusted with the knowledge of her guest, and who
concealed him in a little room made since the beginning of the
troubles for delinquents whence he took boat for Normandy
from Brighthelmstone. The governor remarked on the strange
chance which entrusted Charles Stuart's life to the loyalty of
Roman Catholics, against whom were such penalties, and to the
bravery of women. But General Winthrop says it is told he hath
promised Father Huddleston, to whom he holds himself chiefly
beholden, that the order of St. Benedict should have his special
favor if ever he be restored. And also a rumor goes that the
priest hath foretold to him that once more before he dies he
shall render him a still greater service. " And as for the women,"
he went on, " I think they be all rebels at heart. I remember
the first day of Charles Stuart's trial, at the calling of the judges'
names no answer was made when they called the General Lord
Fairfax, and at the second time of calling a voice cried out ' He
has more wit than to be here.' And presently when, at the read-
ing of the impeachment, it was said, ' All the good people of
England,' the same voice cried, only louder, ' No, nor the hun-
dredth part of them.' And when one of the officers bid the sol-
diers give fire into the box whence the presumptuous words came
it was quickly discerned that it was the general's wife, the Lady
Fairfax, who had uttered both these sharp sayings."

1892.]

HORA.

" She comes of a fearless family," said Governor Endicott,
" and the daughter of Lord Vere would never scruple to say out
her mind in any presence ; and here is Mary, I warrant, as glad
that Charles Stuart has gotten safely to France as any loyalist
of them all." It was pretty to see the pink color come into
Mistress Mary's cheeks, as we all looked at her, though she
spake never a word. General Winthrop muttered something in
his grizzled beard about her gentle heart, at which I wondered,
as coming from him, and still more to see his weather-beaten
and unchanging face show a dull reflection of her blushes ; at
which she blushed the more. The governor marked it also, for
I saw a sort of smile kindle in his dark eyes, and presently
Winthrop took his departure, still in some confusion.

(TO BE CONTINUED.)

H^EC HORA.

LET me but live this hour!" a sinner cries.
Alas ! his hours are over, and he dies.
A miser thrusts his gleaming gold aside :
Take all, but let me one short hour abide
In prayer !" Too late ; the prayer remains unsaid
Ah, cruel shines his gold around the dead !
With happy smile a stranger drops his spade ;
My loved at last thank God !" was all he said.

Father, this hour we would our duty see.
Now holding forth weak, trembling hands to Thee ;
No more in our own selves to trust or pride
Let us this hour in peace with Thee abide !

LUCY AGNES HAYES.

VOL. LV. 6

84 HUMAN CERTITUDE AND DIVINE FAITH. [April,

HUMAN CERTITUDE AND DIVINE FAITH.

IT may not be amiss, in this period of widespread doubt and
uncertainty in matters of religion, to direct our thoughts to the
question of belief ; to ask ourselves, What is belief ? and how far
is it to extend what is its domain? To be able to respond we
must first be able to give a satisfactory answer to a fundamental
question, to wit : is there such a thing as certainty ? For belief
and certainty may be said to be correlative terms in religious
matters ; the one implies the other. To give heed to some of
the most prominent men of the day, there is no such thing as
certainty. If so, there can be no such thing as belief. Yet Rev. Dr.
Patton is reported as having said there is no such thing as meta-
physical certainty. If this be so, we may bid good-by to certain-
ty of any kind, and accept the system of universal doubt, and
adopt probability as the practical principle of action.

How destructive this system is of all real knowledge it is not
difficult to understand. Had the learned gentleman referred to
confined himself to saying that certainty could not be demon-
strated, he would not have been wide of the mark ; for demon-
stration means the showing of a truth from prior and better
known truth. But there can be nothing prior to certainty or bet-
ter known than it is, and therefore it cannot be demonstrated.
On the other hand, every science demands a first truth to which
nothing is prior, for it is the cause of what follows, which is the
effect ; science being systematized knowledge, it must have a
solid foundation of primal truth to rest upon. Certainty is an
intellectual intuition of a truth, and that truth is, that I exist
and know I am not deceived in my ability to apprehend with-
out danger of error some facts. It is a postulate of our intel-
lectual nature, of reason. It goes before anything else, and
therefore cannot be demonstrated unless we choose to look upon
the application of the principle of contradiction as a species of
demonstration, that the same thing cannot be and not be at the
same time. But we must be certain of this before we apply it ;
and this interferes with the demonstration. It is, therefore,
necessary to regard certainty as an intuition and call it the sight
of the soul, as much needed for it as sight is for the body.
And just as a man sees a thing, and asks no one to prove it to
him, so the soul sees the truth which is connatural to it at a

1892.] HUMAN- CERTITUDE AND DIVINE FAITH. 85

glance ; and the first truth it does see is that it can and does
know what is. To say this does not belong to metaphysics, when
it is the very first truth that science demands, seems to us, at
least, strange ; for it is usual to speak of knowledge of being
and of its attributes as metaphysics, though they are in reality
physical realities thought out systematically by the mind.

There is besides this the moral persuasion of the human race
that there is such a thing as certainty, and the whole of our
social economy rests on that basis. It may be said this is a pos-
teriori and in reality begs the question. But it is a fact that
shows beyond doubt the existence of the fact of certainty. The
universal testimony of the human mind cannot be gainsaid
without assailing its Author, and bidding adieu to reason.

If certainty is a necessity in the order of natural truth, still
more is it necessary in the order of that which is above nature,
the region or domain of revealed truth. Catholics understand
this ; the introduction of private judgment as the ultimate tribu-
nal of religious truth has had the effect of blunting the sensitive-
ness of those outside the church with regard to this necessity ;
with the result of causing them to be unable, it would seem, to
understand it. Recently the Evening Post of New York (Aug. 30,
1891) published the answer of three foremost preachers the
Rev. Lyman Abbott, the Rev. B. H. Conwell, and the Rev,
(or Professor) David Swing, of Chicago to the questions : " Do
you believe absolutely that the miracles recorded in the Bible
were actually performed, or do you think the people of those
times only believed they witnessed miracles ?" And, " If we re-
ject any part of the Scriptures as literal truth, must we not reject
all?"

To say these were crucial questions for the reverend gentle-
men, and that they evaded answering directly, is only what was
to have been expected. Dr. Abbott does not even touch the
miracles with a tongs, but deftly glides off to speak of the foun-
dation of belief as afforded by Christ himself. Yet Christ says :
" If you do not believe me, believe the works I do. They give
testimony of me " (St. John v. 36).

Rev. Mr. Conwell falls back at once on his lines of defence
good sense and the beauty of the Bible.

Professor Swing lets the miracles go. That nut is too hard for
him to crack. And then he falls back on his line, and says :
" There is nothing essential except a devotion to the Divine
Founder of our religion" a very vague utterance, each one un-
derstanding it in his own way. He goes still farther in his hazy

86 HUMAN CERTITUDE AND DIVINE FAITH. [April,

system, and subjoins, " An ethical religion is gradually displacing
the religion of simple belief " which is simply a fact outside the
Catholic Church. So we see what it has all come to : uncertain-
ty in everything, certainty about nothing. This is the ultimate
word of Protestantism.

This result and the nature of the case itself lead us to see
clearly that unless we bid adieu to reason there must be and is
such a thing as certainty, and that we can have certainty in the
order in which we are. Philosophers usually class certainty ac-
cording to the manner in which it is acquired ; they speak of
metaphysical, physical, and moral certainty. With metaphysical
certainty and physical we need not occupy ourselves in this con-
nection. Moral certainty, which is based on the laws which
govern man's free will, is that which is the ground of natural
belief. These laws lead us to accept truth on the authority of
others, historic truth, and the events of every day of which we
have not been witnesses. It is akin to the certainty which leads
us to accept religious truth. Such truth is pre-eminently received
on the authority of another. " Faith," says St. Paul, " cometh by
hearing." Religious beliefs, or faith, may be defined to be the ac-
ceptance of the truths of revelation through the divinely appoint-
ed teacher, the church God has established on earth ; a church he
instituted through his prophets, and, lastly, through his Divine
Son, who came on earth to found it, and by means of miracles
convinced men of his right to teach in the name of God, and
led them to accept what he taught. The church of Christ, then,
is the teacher. Once we are sure of that our duty is clear ; we
are to believe all the truths she believes and teaches because
God has revealed them, and because she teaches by the authori-
ty of God, and by his assistance : " Go, teach all nations "; " I
am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world."
The motive of faith is, therefore, much superior to that of
human belief; this gives certainty, that a certainty more intense,
as God its source is so far above nature, on the laws of which,
as we have said, human certainty is based.

There are certain results and consequences of this system
of Christianity which it is well for us to consider.

If it is God who speaks to us through the church, then we
must accept what the church authoritatively teaches; otherwise
we are "as the heathen and the publican." While all Catholics
are agreed on this point, there comes up the question, What rule
is to be followed in matters in which there is no official declar-
ation, or dogmatic decision on the part of the church ; where

1892.] HUMAN CERTITUDE AND DIYINE FAITH. 87

councils have not spoken nor Supreme Pontiffs given ex cathedra
decrees ? This is a very important matter, especially in its in-
fluence on Catholic life, and for this reason we wish to dwell on
it at some length.

Outside of the dogmatic decrees of councils and of the ex
cathedra decisions of popes, there is the mass of Catholic tradi-
tion, which has come down to us from the beginning, and of
which also God is the author. This is the truth which perme-
ates ^Catholic life and makes the members of the church think
alike, no matter where they may be. This atmosphere of truth
is the medium in which the church lives. Through it she is
active ; where, on the contrary, it is clouded, where this truth is
obscured, there is languor, decay, death. Just as a living body
has instincts which make it act spontaneously with regard to
what is necessary for it, as air, food, drink, and self-preservation,
so there is an instinct in the believer to accept all revealed truth,
and to think, speak, and act, in what vitally affects his belief,
this disposition having been formed in him by the environment
of faith, its atmosphere, its teachings, its language, its common
habit of thought, akin to the training of the ear, which, without
trouble and unerringly, detects the discordant note of music.
Just as one who would show himself indisposed as regards what
is necessary for the maintenance of his natural life would give
good ground to doubt of his healthy condition, so one who
would be careless with reference to propositions that affect un-
favorably the faith would justify the conclusion that he was not
sound in it. Therefore it is that we find in all, as a gift from
the Holy Spirit, a spiritual instinct which leads us to believe ; to
regard the church as an ever-active teacher aided by the Holy
Ghost, and directing our minds to accept with the utmost docil-
ity what she says, without waiting to critically examine the man-
ner in which she speaks, or to look for unanimity. This pious
disposition to believe has been dwelt on by theologians and
councils, and by them it is spoken of as a gift of God.

The second Council of Orange, held A.D. 529, in its fifth
chapter, thus speaks: "If any one says that as the increase of
faith so also the beginning of it, the very pious disposition to
believe ipsum credulitatis affectum by which we believe in Him
who justifies the impious, and come to the generation of sacred
baptism, is in us, not by the gift of grace, that is, by the inspi-
ration of the Holy Spirit correcting our will from infidelity to
faith, from impiety to piety, but is in us naturally, he is proven
to be an adversary of the apostolic dogmas." In this most im-

88 HUMAN CERTITUDE AND DIVINE FAITH. [April,

portant decree of this council, received in the church with all
the authority of a dogmatic decree, we call attention to this
phrase credulitatis affectus a pious disposition to believe, which
is declared to be a gift of grace, an inspiration of the Holy
Ghost. The Holy Ghost, like nature, is never wanting in what
is necessary ; and, therefore, this most necessary tendency to
believe he implants in every one to whom the gift of faith is
vouchsafed. Where, then, this gift is vigorous, sound, healthy,
there its first manifestation is to be seen in the docility to the
teaching power, the pious disposition to believe. Where it is not
vigorous, nor sound, nor healthy, there such a disposition will
not show itself ; but, on the contrary, a restless, resisting, critical
spirit will be seen. Therefore, too, where we see such indisposi-
tion, where we see one on his guard against the church's voice,
and jealous of his independence, we are not uncharitable in
drawing the conclusion that the faith has become weak.

It may be said that this is going too far; that as there are
superstitious people, who accept as of faith what is not, there
may be those who may not be ready to take everything without
first ascertaining by approved ways what is to be held. The former
may be called waximizers ; the latter, wishing to preserve their
liberty, accept the least, but in doing so, in the trust they put in
their own lights, are apt to reject what is essential, and are known
as minimizers. A good while ago Cardinal Newman made the re-
mark : "A people's religion is a corrupt religion " meaning
thereby that individuals without instruction are apt to be too
credulous and take up what there is no authority to uphold.
This certainly may be ; but there will be a mark about this ex-
cess which will make it easy to recognize it as spurious, it will
be wanting in universality; and, depending on individual weak-
ness, will follow its phases. Studying the whole people, though,
the theologian will see the work of the Holy Spirit pervading
them, making them dwell together of one mind, unius moris in
dovw. It would have been well with the minimizers of some
years back had they made that study more profoundly. It is
not characteristic of the minimizer that he does this. His is a
work of thought evolved from his own mind, weighing the doc-
trines by his own standard, an individual one, determined largely
by the influences that surround him, education and habit of
thought. We do not mean to say that he is not learned ; on
the contrary, very often he is most learned. It seems to us that
the trust in his own equipment very often breeds this spirit of
judgment ; while the simplicity of the less learned leads them to

1892.] HUMAN CERTITUDE AND DIVINE FAITH. 89

put their trust in the great body of the faithful, in whom pre-
eminently the Holy Spirit dwells, and to look up instinctively to
the teaching authority which that same Spirit has given the
church and through which he directs it ; and, lastly, to the tradi-
tion of the church, of which the fathers are the witnesses. We
may illustrate by a fact which appears to present this phase
of the mind of one who does not minimize. Whenever the car-
dinal-vicar of Rome publishes one of his Inviti Sacri, or brief
pastorals, the Roman theologians are on the lookout to know
how the people receive it, and what comments they make.
And this not for the purpose of judging whether it is acceptable,
but because they appreciate the instinct of faith in the people,
which would make them detect at once any word not in keep-
ing with the faith ; and, on the contrary, appreciate expressions
which adequately convey to them the teaching of their belief.

As we write, there comes to us on the wings of electricity
the news that a great light has gone out in Israel ; that one
who has been a bright example in the church is no more ; that
the great Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, Henry Edward
Manning, has been called from the scene of his earthly labors.
No longer will that voice, with its strong yet gentle note, be
heard ; that tongue, musical in its beauty of language and charm
of expression, is stilled. A hush comes over the audience he
held spell-bound, as widely-spread as are the regions of the
earth; for the sound of his words went from pole to pole, and
from the rising of the sun to its setting. All who felt the genial
influence of his teachings of charity, and of his example, sing
his praise, pay their tribute of respectful admiration, and offer
for him, in a grateful spirit, their prayers to God. But though
he is no longer with us in the flesh, his teachings abide, teach-
ings that re-echo the spirit of his Master, who said : Misereor
super turbam " \ have pity upon the people " ; teachings that
breathe the spirit of his Master, who said : " It is my food to do
the will of my Father " ; teachings and examples that fulfil the
command of his Master, who bade all hear the church : " He who
hears you hears me "; " He who will not hear the church let him
be to thee as the heathen and the publican." Had we sought
for one whose words and life were an illustration of the docility
to the authority of the church of which we are treating, no one
more excelling in this regard could we have found than Cardinal
Manning. Now that he is no more, we can speak freely of him
and of his career. It was our good fortune and privilege to
have known him for nearly thirty years, and to have been an

9O HUMAN CERTITUDE AND DIVINE FAITH. [April,

admirer of the man, and a grateful recipient of spiritual aid from
his life and words. During the eventful period of the Vatican
Council, the days that preceded it, the time of its duration, and
the days that followed it, we were living in the city of Rome,
and in relation sometimes with him personally, and with those of
his own nation through whom we could always have correct in-
formation. His discourses, too, and his writings were in our
hands as soon as they came from the press, read with an appre-
ciation that came of a mutual interest in the triumph of the
truth. In England before the Vatican Council there had existed
the controversy regarding the decisions of the Roman congrega-
tions ; and those who were contending against a well-meant but
undue valuation of them as sharing the infallibility of the Roman
Pontiff, and who, carried away by a spirit of opposition, inci-
dentally in other matters fell short of what would be expected
of a genuine Catholic, were named by Mr. Ward, of the Dublin
Review, minimizers. Without going to the opposite extreme, Cardi-
nal Manning contended always for a docility of spirit towards
the teaching authority of the church. He advocated the view
that our feelings even should be with the church, and in this he
was most commendable and deserving well of Catholics every-
where. What, in fact, is more unfilial than that a son should be
continually on his guard against the authority of his father, re-
quiring to be fully persuaded of the right before he obeys. All
will censure such a spirit. But it is worse for a Catholic to have
such a disposition in regard to the Sovereign Pontiff and the
church ; for it argues weakness of faith, an ignoring of the fact
that Christ her founder, and the Holy Ghost her spouse, are ever
with the church, and giving her prudence from above. Remotely
it savors of the spirit of the world, of an anti-Christian spirit. Of
this anti-Christian spirit, Cardinal Manning wrote, in his lectures
on the Four Great Evils of the Day (lect. iv. 5) :

"There is one person upon whom this anti-Christian spirit
concentrates itself, as the lightning upon the conductor. There is
one person upon earth who is the pinnacle of the temple, which
is always the first to be struck. It is the Vicar of Jesus Christ;
and that for the most obvious of reasons. There is no man on
earth so near to Jesus Christ as his own Vicar. Two hundred
and fifty-seven links, and we arrive at the Person of the Son of
God. Two hundred and fifty-seven Pontiffs, and we are in the
presence of the Master whom his Vicar represents. That chain
runs through the ages of Christian history, and connects us with
the day, when, on the coasts of Decapolis, Jesus said to Peter :
' Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church,

1892.] HUMAN CERTITUDE AND DIVINE FAITH. 91

and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.' . . . To
Peter were given the two great prerogatives which constitute
the plenitude of his master's office. To him first and to him
alone, before all others, though in the presence of the others,
was given the power of the keys. To him, and to him alone,
and in the presence of the others, was given also the charge of
the universal flock : ' Feed my sheep.' To him, and to him
alone exclusively, were spoken the words : ' Simon, Simon, be-
hold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he might sift you
as wheat (that is, all the Apostles) ; but I have prayed for
thee' (in the singular number ; for thee, Peter) ' that thy
faith fail not ; and thou being once converted, confirm thy
brethren' (St. Luke xxii. 31, 32); and therefore the plenitude
of jurisdiction, and the plenitude of truth, with the promise of
the divine assistance to preserve him in that truth, was given to
Peter, and in Peter to his successors."

Further on the cardinal uses these beautiful words :

" Poor Ireland ! What preserved it three hundred years ago
and during three hundred years of persecution ? Fidelity to the
Vicar of Jesus Christ, fidelity to Rome, fidelity to the change-
less See of Peter. The arch of the faith is kept fast by that
keystone, which the world would fain strike out if it could, but
never has prevailed to do so, and Ireland has been sustained
by it ; and to this day among the nations of the Christian world
there is not to be found a people so instinct with faith, and so
governed by Christian morality, as the people of Ireland."

But the following passage from lect. i. of this series is more
to the purpose for which we write. Page 26 (edition 1871) he
says :

" Before the Vatican Council there was growing up in the
minds of some men a disposition which, I am happy to say, is
nearly cast out again, to diminish and to explain away, to
understate and reduce to a minimum that which Catholics ought
to believe and practise. This spirit began in Germany. It says :
' I believe everything which the church has defined. I believe
all dogmas ; everything which has been defined by a general
council.' This sounds a large and generous profession of faith ;
but they forget that whatsoever was revealed on the day of
Pentecost to the Apostles, and by the Apostles preached to the
nations of the world, and has descended in the full stream of
universal belief and constant tradition, though it has never been
defined, is still matter of Divine faith. Thus, there are truths of
faith which have never been defined ; and they have never
been defined because they have never been contradicted. They
have not been defined because they have not been denied. The
definition of the truth is the fortification of the church against the
assaults of unbelief. Some of the greatest truths of revelation

92 HUMAN CERTITUDE AND DIVINE FAITH. [April,

are to this day undefined. The infallibility of the church has
never been defined. The infallibility of the head of the church
was only defined the other day. But the infallibility of the
church, for which every Catholic would lay down his life, has
never been defined until now ; the infallibility of the church is
at this moment where the infallibility of the Pope was this time
last year : an undefined point of Christian revelation, believed by
the Christian world, but not yet put in the form of a definition.
When, therefore, men said they would only believe dogmas and
definitions by general councils, they implied, without knowing
it, that they would not believe in the infallibility of the church.
But the whole tradition of Christianity comes down to us on
the universal testimony and the infallibility of the church of
God, which, whether defined or not, is a matter of Divine faith."

In all the actions of this illustrious prince of the church, not
even excepting his remarkable influence over the London strikes
at the docks, which surprised the English and led them captive
of all his actions nothing impresses us so strongly as the do-
cility of spirit he manifested in believing and in conforming to
the teaching and thought of the church. It was^like unto the
spirit of a saint who in early childhood drank in the faith at
his mother's breast. It argues a great gift of faith that is the
especial and generous work of the Holy Ghost in his soul, and
for this reason it demands our admiration and calls for our
imitation. When God vouchsafes to bestow a gift above na-
ture on a man this requires of him most respectful gratitude
and faithful co-operation. This gift of faith we have received,
and it calls upon us to foster it and make it bear the fruit of
good works. It is the talent which is given that we may labor
till the Giver comes. It is certain that he will demand an ac-
count of the use we shall have made of it. What a misfortune
if any one shall have " wrapped it up in a napkin" and put it
aside ! And this those do who, ashamed of their birthright, are
on their guard against accepting too much and remain in a
state of inactivity. Of such one hardly errs in saying, with St.
James : " Faith without works is dead." Not so did the saints,
for their prayer has ever been what the Apostles offered up to
their Divine Master: "Lord, increase our faith."

FRANCIS SILAS CHATARD.

Indianapolis, Ind.

1892.] THE ANCIENT CITY OF DUBLIN. 93

THE ANCIENT CITY OF DUBLIN.

DUBLIN, a city by the sea, whose salt breezes in a time of east
wind come up into the city streets, sweet and penetrating ; a
city ringed about with mountains which one sees far off from
upper windows, lovely in a gray-blue haze ; a city of wide and
empty throughfares ; of stately buildings, put to scant use ; a
sleeping city with the dust of centuries upon her hair and robe.
Coming from busier worlds, one notices first the depression of
the streets before one has realized other things, the velvety air
for example, which blows on one's face exquisitely pure and
grateful. The superannuated cabs which crawl through our
thoroughfares are supplemented by the thin stream of people on
the sidewalks, while the well-horsed outside cars, to which the
stranger may be seen painfully clinging, only give a look of
spasmodic .dare-deviltry to the scene. There is a new street in
Dublin, in line with and following the great main thoroughfare of
Dame Street, and it has been opened three years, and only one
shop has been built there ; the street is two straight lines of
desolate building-plots. Decay could not speak more eloquently.
Yet the city is full of memories of the grandeur that was in the
eighteenth century. The great Custom-house, James Candor's
masterpiece, has miles of disused rooms and passages, despite
that half-a-dozen boards of one kind or another burrow there
for we are overrun with bureaucracy. The Exchange and the Linen
Hall have been diverted from their original purpose. The magni-
ficent houses of the nobility have fallen upon evil days : Charlemont
House shelters the registrar-general and his staff ; Tyrone House,
the Board of National Education ; Moira House, the Mendicity In-
stitution ; Aldborough House, the Commissariat ; Leinster House, the
t National Library, and Museum, and Picture-gallery, and so on. We
>ve the memory of that glittering old nobility, we Irish, being
onservative in all our instincts despite the temporary bouleverse-
lent of the land revolution. Probably as a class they were as
ppressive as their brothers of France, whose curled heads fell
nder the guillotine, despite such glorious exceptions as the Earl of
Charlemont and Lord Edward Fitzgerald ; but we have forgotten
all that, as their retainers did when they barricaded the castle
rackrents against the forces of the law, and fought tooth and
nail to save their masters from the inconvenient consequences of
their mad unthrift.

94 THE ANCIENT CITY OF DUBLIN. [April,

Dublin is the only city in northern Europe possessing two
cathedrals. To see really picturesque Dublin one must fare
away from the more prosperous parts from the temple-like
front of the Bank of Ireland, once the houses of Parliament,
and the long, unlovely line of Trinity College, westward up
Dame Street to Christ Church, the smaller of the two cathedrals.
This beautiful Gothic cathedral, the ancient priory of the Holy
Trinity, has many memories about it ; there Lambert Simnel was
crowned in 1486, with the crown of the statue of the Blessed
Virgin in St. Mary's Abbey over the water, for which act of
treason the Archbishop of Dublin of those days had later to do
public penance. Here was kept the great relic, "the Staff of
Jesus," with which St. Patrick performed many miracles, and
which was burnt by a too-zealous reforming bishop in the time
of Henry VIII. The saint came by it in a strange fashion. He
was warned in a dream to go seek it, in an isle of the Mediterra-
nean, coming to which he found it populated by people young
and of celestial beauty, and people old and withered. And to
his surprise he learned that the ancients were the children, the
sons and daughters of those beautiful young folk. And then
they told him how in the practice of hospitality they had given
shelter one night to an unknown traveller, whose presence among
them was even as might be the presence of that One who
journeyed unknown with two fellow-travellers to Emmaus. For
the night he abode with them the hostel seemed bathed in a
fair light, and all their hearts were full of raptures and songs.
And in the morning the cell where he slept was empty, none
having seen him depart ; but his staff, of exceeding richness and
beauty, he had left behind. They called it the Staff of Jesus, un-
derstanding that he had deigned to visit his people. And all
who looked on him were gifted from that hour with undying
youth and beauty. But the hermit, who was their chief man,
having been warned in a vision, delivered up this precious staff
to St. Patrick, who returned with it to Ireland, and worked by
its aid many miracles, and afterwards, in its shrine in Christ
Church, it remained an object of great veneration till the coming
of this iconoclastic bishop of unlovely memory.

From Christ Church, and the hill on which it stands, as one
goes westward from the city, many quaint and corkscrewy streets
twist their tortuous way down to the river, some of them, such
as Wormwood Gate, impossibly crazy and headlong as any
wynd in Edinburgh Old Town. Wormwood Gate commemorates
one of the old gates of the fortified town, which stood at the

1892.] THE ANCIENT CITY OF DUBLIN. 95

foot of those narrow streets on the banks of the river, an admira-
ble natural position of defence one would think. As late as
1610 all the north of the river was sand and sea marshes, save
only for the great pile of the Abbey of St. Mary's to the north-
west, which had gathered around itself an appanage of streets
and dwelling-houses as a university might in our day ; on the
old maps it looks like a little town in itself.

At the foot of Parliament Street once stood Izod's tower,
named from that Iseult of Ireland whose story has such power
to charm that three great poets of our day have set it in their
poetry. One imagines her looking from some narrow tower-
window over the sandy marshes and through the east-wind
sea-fogs, with her destiny as yet a sealed book and no messen-
ger from Mark upon the water-way, her fate in his hand. One
could make a picture of her thus, before her love and her sor-
row ; a Burne-Jones or a Rossetti picture it must be, for passion
and prevision are so wrought into one's thoughts of her. Her
tower is gone, and only the memory of it remains ; but there is
Chapelizod, a sunk village between swelling hills and by the
Liffey banks, out beyond Phcenix Park. There, after all her
sin and suffering, her father erected a chapel for her soul's
sake, and the name of the village commemorates this. It is a
" Sleepy Hollow " where even the fiery heart of an Iseult might
drowse, if her resting-place had been there.

At the other side of Christ Church and its hill there is an-
other descent to the low-lying streets marking the ancient bed
of the Poddle, a mysterious subterranean stream which, leaving
its parent Dodder at a lovely green place behind Harold's
Cross, slips away from the sunlight and goes sluggishly under
houses and streets and becomes a common sewer, till it spills
into the Liffey through a side gate in the quay-walls. A dread-
ful stream it has always seemed to me since I read long ago of
a woman falling into it through a trap-door which she had lifted
in her little house-yard in order to draw up water. Imagine
the helpless creature swirling away into that living grave!
Imagine her dead, floating on and on through the labyrinth in
the dark! I have never forgotten the horror of it. There is
something ghastly about a subterranean river. The water-rats
used to come from this river swarming into St. Patrick's, the
other cathedral, by night, till Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness, the
munificent father of more munificent sons, restored it, and the
old flooring was replaced by concrete and tiles. There is a
story of an officer who was shut in here by accident at night

96 THE ANCIENT CITY OF DUBLIN. [April,

having been eaten by rats, a story which I have always hoped
was untrue.

If one wanted to make a brilliant impressionist picture one
could scarcely do better than to come to Patrick Street, the
direct route from one cathedral to the other, and the most
picturesque street in Dublin, if also the dirtiest. He should
catch it on a frosty winter afternoon, with the sunset reddening
all over the sky and the haze of frost in the air. The street
goes down steeply ; there is the pointed dark tower of Pa-
trick's sheer up in the luminous sky, and the long expanse of
the cathedral with its great buttresses solemn in the growing
shadows. But at its feet there is this street of booths, stocked
with the most miscellaneous merchandise for the very poor
tin kettles and flaming cheap prints, coarse crockery and tawdry
second-hand clothing, cradles and cabbages, looking-glasses and
sheeps' heads. The saleswomen, with their argumentative voices
and bold, bright eyes, their touzled heads and scarlet woollen
neckerchiefs, their weatherbeaten faces, and the stout apron, or
praskeen, tied round their comfortable waists, are on the hap-
piest terms with the other ladies, similarly clad, who have fish-
stalls by the curb-stone, and sit in sight of the world all day
industriously cleaning their fish. There is always much conver-
sation going on in Patrick Street, not always of the belligerent
kind an uninitiated person might fancy from voices and attitude.
As it grows dark flaming gas-jets spring up in the open fronts
of the booths. An old woman, with the inevitable red shawl,
knits at her door-post, a velvety black cat rubbing himself up
against her ; a golden-haired child in a print frock and dirty
pinafore looks on sedately ; a stray cur or two is sniffing the
garbage for some delicate morsel. Patrick's Close, by the ca-
thedral side, is another such collection of crazy booths and
bright bits of color. How different from the cathedral closes
one remembers, those green places with the singing of birds,
and the murmur of the wind in great branches, and the hum-
ming of bees in the heart of a rose or the cup of a lily !

I am not sure that the cathedral does not gain from its
strange surroundings. Impressive it is to gloom, with its state-
liness, its loneliness, its overmastering memories of Swift, one of
the saddest figures in all the world's history. It lies very low ;
after all the descent one has to go down steps into it. It is
an eerie place of an evening, with the ragged banners of the
Knights of St. Patrick fluttering in the gloom over the dark
oak stalls, and the shadows heavy in the long side-aisles. The

1892.] THE ANCIENT CITY OF DUBLIN. 97

gloom of stained glass has a richness and holiness about it ;
but here, where the white glare of the clerestory windows was
darkened over by the coming night, there was a cold gloom
like death. The verger was very old and very tired of sight-
seers; there were no worshippers only some one went tiptoe
down the far aisle ; there was a far-away glimmer of light at the
organ, where the organist was droning upon his instrument ; and
overhead was the bust of Swift, with the strange, terrible in-
scription, " Here where fierce indignation can no more lacerate
his heart." What one feels here Professor Dowden has express-
ed so beautifully that I transcribe from him :

" While we stand beneath Roubiliac's bust and read that terri-
ble inscription, we think, before all else, of the mournful night
when, by the flare of torches under the high roof, the faithful
heart of Esther Johnson was laid in the dust, and the torch-
lights gleamed across to the old deanery windows, where Swift,
ill in body and tortured in mind, sat in gloom. ' This is the
night of the funeral,' he wrote ' the funeral which my sickness
will not suffer me to attend. It is now nine at night, and I am
removed into another apartment that I may not see the light in
the church, which is just over against the window of my bed-
chamber.' And then, fingering perhaps that precious relic, ' only
a woman's hair,' he went on to write of the softness of her tem-
per and heroic personal courage, her modesty, her learning, her
gentle voice, her wit and judgment, her vivacity of heart and
brain. * Night, dearest little M. D.,' he had so often added as
the farewell word of his diary to Stella : now with her it was
night and a cloudier night with him."

They lie together under a modest, lozenge-shaped brass near
the entrance. Walter Scott, visiting here, said : " One thinks of
nothing but Swift : the whole cathedral is merely his tomb " ;
and this is so. One leaves it gladly as one would a mausoleum ;
yet I would rather see it so, ghost-haunted, than in its hours of
service, or on those gala nights when an oratorio is given here.
There is a tomb in the cathedral to the memory of Alexander
Magee, " the faithful servant of Dean Swift." Is this " the Dane's
man "? the invariable second person the Irish peasant brings in-
to every story of the saturnine dead man, who is remembered
so only by his jests his jests which were nearly always such
terrible earnest !

In Marsh's Library close at hand, the gift of Archbishop
Marsh to the citizens of Dublin, where none reads and none
penetrates except the librarian, I have heard that a ghost walks
of nights, flinging about disdainfully the worm-eaten folios.
Swift might well haunt this place, yet he of all ghosts ought not
to " walk " ; after his unrestful life he should sleep well.

98 THE ANCIENT CITY OF DUBLIN. [April,

Close by it is the Coomles, the highway of the Liberties of
Dublin, where after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes great
numbers of French silk-weavers came and settled, and introduced
the poplin-making industry. Their " weavers' hall " is still in
existence, though turned to other purposes. The descendants of
some of them prospered well, and now French names belong to
some of our most considered people. We have so many Hugue-
nots yet amongst us as to necessitate a special graveyard for
their use, a walled place between houses in Merion Row, which
not one out of every fifty passers-by knows to be a graveyard.

Returning once more citywards, one passes many haunts of
the fine gentlemen of the last century, the Mohocks, the duellists
and swashbucklers, for whom noblesse oblige bore strange mean-
ing. On Cork Hill was Luca's coffee-house, their famous resort,
where they met and emulated their London brethren in the
wildest excesses. They were individual, indeed, in their love of
duelling. On the crest of one of the mild and gracious hills
which ring Dublin about stand, naked and forlorn, the ruins of
the Hell-Fire club-house, whereto the choice spirits who com-
posed the club were wont to resort from time to time. Strange
stories are told about this place. Paces were measured for many
a pair of fine gentlemen here ; the constant killing-off of the
members saved the club from congestion, no doubt. But the
great duelling-ground was the Fifteen Acres out in Phoenix Park,
that lovely wildwood, with its green glades and winding roads,
its pleasant pastures, and thorn-bushes all white in spring.

Coming back to College Green, one may see, if one will, the
House of Lords, which the governors of the Bank of Ireland
have kept intact. The House of Commons, with its memories of
Grattan, is the cash-office of the bank, and all the rest, the
speaker's robing-room and other chambers devoted of old to the
legislators, are now the various offices of the bank. The House
of Lords is a stately chamber, panelled all in oak and with oak
pillars, and arched sedilia at either end, and finely carved man-
tel-pieces. The walls are hung with gigantic tapestries in fine
preservation, representing the battle of the Boyne and the siege
of Derry. Down the centre of the room goes a long, polished
table, whereat my lords were wont to sit deliberating, on those
solid and massive chairs which now are only used by the gov-
ernors of the bank at their half-yearly meetings. An obliging
porter will point out all this to you, elucidating dark points. Of
course, the Commons' chamber is altogether despoiled of its be-
longings. In St. Andrew's Church, at the head of Suffolk Street,
is the great chandelier which lighted it ; at Leinster House, in

1892.] THE ANCIENT CITY OF DUBLIN. 99

the board-room of the Royal Dublin Society, stands the speaker's
chair ; Lord Massareene and Ferrard, the grandson of John Fos-
ter, the last speaker of the Irish House of Commons, holds in
trust the speaker's mace, which his grandfather refused to surren-
der to any body save that which had entrusted it to his keeping.
Sir Joshua Barrington gives one a coup d'oeil of the famous and
less famous personages who thronged those long corridors, and
lounged on the benches of this chamber, now consecrated to the
money-changers. He has a delightful chapter on the lesser par-
liamentary lights. What brilliant days those were ! The shadows
of '98 had not yet gathered, and the United Irish Society was
in just so much favor that the ladies dancing at the balls in
the Rotunda wore their sacques of white brocade, powdered
with silver shamrocks, or of tabinet of silver with the green
worked in. The Rotunda was the Irish Ranelagh, and the fine
folks promenaded here in the morning and danced here at night.
Dublin City was very splendid during the viceroyalty of the
Duke of Rutland. His beautiful duchess, Isabella, " as beautiful
as any woman in Ireland, and more beautiful than any other in
Christendom " (says a pro-Irish chronicler of the day), led all the
mad gaiety. Sir Joshua Reynolds painted her in her great
hat and powdered curls, her sacque and petticoat, and dainty,
tigh-heeled shoes. Some such dress she wore at a Rotunda ball :
pink silk with a stomacher and sleeve-knots of diamonds ; a
irge brown velvet hat, with knots of pink ribbon, and a great
>rofusion of diamonds so some Belle Assembled of the time tells
is. Once she went clattering down in her grand equipage to
mean Francis Street, to see a Mrs. Dillon, the wife of a woollen-
draper, whom rumor had declared to be a more beautiful woman
than herself. The frank duchess was delighted with her rival's
dignity and sweetness, and taking her by the two hands and
kissing her white forehead, "My dear," she says, "you are the
lost beautiful woman in the three kingdoms."

In the twenty years following the Volunteer movement and
receding the Union Dublin throve incredibly. In Rutland
[uare lived ten earls, to say nothing of other peers spiritual
id temporal, with a host of honorables and right honorables.

Sackville Street, a shady boulevard then with overhanging
lime-trees, held the town residences of four earls, six viscounts,
two barons, and fifteen members of Parliament. Gardiner's Row,
Great Denmark Street, North Great George's Street, and Marl-
borough Street also had their full quota, and this northern part
of the city had its birth in those prosperous years. Now it is
VOL. LV. 7

ioo THE ANCIENT CITY OF DUBLIN. [April,

decaying, or decayed, most of it, to tenement houses, except
Rutland Square and Sackville Street.

The old houses of Dublin would take a long article all to
themselves, with their memories and their dreams. Here in Ire-
land we have not yet sold our old lamps for new. One delights
to furbish it all up again ; to hang Leinster House once more
with white damask and gold, and people it again with the semi-
royal Geraldines ; to bring back the Beresfords to Tyrone
House ; to fill Charlemont House 6nce again with such figures
as Mr. Grattan, in his modest suit of brown laced with gold ; the
Bishop of Derry and Earl of Bristol, in purple velvet, with diamond
clasps at the knee, and diamond shoe-buckles ; my Lord Gormans-
ton, in pale blue and silver ; Lord Taafe, in dove-colored silk ;
the Earl of Belmont, in white silk, with scarlet heels to his white
shoes. And amid all that brilliant group should move Lord
Charlemont himself, the friend of Goldsmith and Dr. Johnson
and Sir Joshua Reynolds, gentle and grave and dignified, the
Maecenas of artists and poets, he whose rare beauty of character
and face and demeanor had made him a loved and honored
guest at every court in Europe.

Moira House is now, perhaps, the saddest of all ; half workhouse
and half jail, it looks docked of its upper story, and stained gray-
black with the north wind and the rain. Where is now the
splendor that John Wesley saw in 1775? the octagon room sheeted
in mother-of-pearl, where Charles James Fox and Henry Grattan
met, whither came Flood and Wolfe Tone, and many another.
"Alas!" said the great Dissenter, who loved his noble friends,
the Earl and Countess of Moira, well " alas ! that all this splen-
dor should pass away like a dream."

Dublin is a city of the past, and we hope a city of the future.
Nay, certainly it is a city of the future, as our country with all
her sealed wealth of minerals, her undeveloped richness of natu-
ral resources, awaits her futur* when the richer lands of to-day
shall come seeking what they themselves have exhausted. And
her people, with their great and wide-spread talent, all fallow for
want of education, with their cleaving to the old lamps of faith
and religion which less fortunate lands have bartered for worth-
less will-o'-the-wisps shall not her people have their future ?
Surely ; and, keeping still to the allegory of the Eastern tale, it
may be that by the magic of their unbartered lamps they shall work
marvels, and reap riches, before which the Sultan's orchard, with
its fruit-trees bearing rubies for apples, and diamonds for dew-
drops, and emeralds as large as a man's hand for leafage, shall
pale its uneffectual fires. KATHARINE TYNAN.

1892.] SATANKE, THE KIOWAH : A REMINISCENCE. 101

SATANKE, THE KIOWAH: A REMINISCENCE.

THERE was a lull in Indian troubles on the plains in 1856.
Early in the fall, however, several massacres of whites followed
each other in quick succession on the lower routes to Utah
and California. This unpleasant news was brought to me near
Pike's Peak one September evening by an express-rider who,
dismounting at ^the camp-fire with legs stiffened pothook-shape
by hard riding, handed me a crumpled letter from William Bent
of Bent's fort, one hundred and fifty miles below. Briefly stating
the facts, Bent urged me to hasten down to the fort, adding
that he was just starting for Kansas City with his wagon-train
on his annual fall trip.

My objects were sport and health ; my party consisting of one

younger hunting companion, .L ; a cook ; a wagon-driver; two

Mexican hostlers, and a guide, Charley Aut'Bees, the last named
a mountaineer and Indian fighter of long experience. And we
were in a veritable hunter's paradise a thing much talked of
but seldom found, embracing in this instance the Fontaine qui
Bouille, the " Divide," and the South Park, primeval haunts fit
to have been the hunting grounds of Diana ; neutral Indian
ground, trodden only by passing war-parties, big game " after
their kinds" idled undisturbed on the rich gramma plains and
mountain slopes, and in the deep forest arcades of the pine and
spruce-covered Divide. But it would have been folly to disre-
gard Bent's warning, and it being near the time set for our
return to the States, the camp under the balsam pines was
struck, and in no pleasant mood toward the redskins we turned
our backs on the mountains where for some months we had
enjoyed noble sport to our hearts' content. One after another
the rugged ranges sank behind us, last of all Pike's Peak, fading
into the western sky like a slow-vanishing cloud, and in due
time travelling down the Arkansas valley, we had arrived near
the fort, congratulating ourselves that we had seen no Indians,
only a broad lodge-pole trail, quite fresh, leading south across
the river, a circumstance upon which we felicitated ourselves as
indicating that the hostiles had quit the scene of their deviltries
for fear of a reckoning with the troops. The sun was within an
hour of setting when we ascended the bank of an arroyo whence
we had the first view of the fort, still three miles below. There

102 SATANKE, THE KIOWAH: A REMINISCENCE. [April,

it was, and right glad we were to see its friendly gray walls
rising sharp and clear above the yellowish green and purple of
the frost-touched cottonwoods opposite; the lonely pile, the
broad sweeping valley flanked by its massive brown hills, and
the eastward stretch of turbid river that flashed like liquid
metal under the oblique sun, all looking as calm and peaceful
as a Sunday evening within the sound of church bells. All this
I had but glanced at as we halted a moment, when Aut'Bees
exclaimed, " Look at the lodges ! "

Following his gaze I could see the faint outlines of a hun-
dred white cones on the north side of the fort. Indian lodges
I at once knew they most likely were, but it was just possible
they might be the conical Sibley tents of the United States
troops, though I had not heard of an expeditionary force having
been ordered to the plains that year. I suggested the Sibley-
tent theory to Aut'Bees. "'No, sir!" said he, "I've seen too
many lodges. That's Injuns Cheyennes, I reckon and they've
taken the fort, or, maybe, are starvin' it out." Then, turning to

me and L , he added : " Gentlemen, I've brought you right into

the wolf's mouth. It's my fault. I ought to have been ahead,
keepin' my eyes skinned for this." A closer look satisfied me
that the objects were really Indian lodges. Our congratulations
had been premature. What was to be done? Two courses
were open : one to turn and try to get away, the other to put
on a bold face and take the chances of fighting our way into
the fort, supposing it to be still held by Bent's people.

As to the first, we felt sure we had already been seen by
the Indians, and our animals being leg-weary from a long, rapid
march forty miles that day we would be overtaken before
sunset by our pursuers on their fresh ponies. And besides,
there was nowhere to go ; behind us only the wide, bare valley
down which we had come, and on every side for hundreds of
miles a wilderness Fort Laramie on the north, Council Grove
on the east, Salt Lake City on the west, and Taos on the south,
being the nearest civilized habitations, and about as available to
us as if situated in the moon.

The second alternative offered little better hope. None of
my men, except Aut'Bees, knew the use of firearms. The fight-
ing, if it came to that, would have to be done by myself, L ,

and Aut'Bees. But this course was resolved upon without many
words. The extra arms and ammunition were placed forward
in the wagon, and, recapping our rifles and tightening our six-
shooter belts, the march was resumed, Aut'Bees and L riding

1892.] SATANKE, THE KIOWAH : A REMINISCENCE. 103

abreast with me, the two Mexicans and the express-rider behind
us, and the wagon, drawn by four mules, following close. We
had not gone far before a single Indian was seen on the hills to
the north riding at full speed towards the fort, and as we ad-
vanced others appeared silhoueted against the sky-line, all hurry-
ing towards the same point. Presently large herds of horses
were rushed in from the plains from several directions, mounted
herders dashing furiously after them, while they tossed their long
manes and scampered along pell-mell, leaving trailing lines of
mist-like dust in the still air, all converging towards a common
centre at the fort. Evidently our small party excited a great
commotion, and Aut'Bees shook his head in silence with an ex-
pression of distress very unusual on his grave, weather-beaten
face. When within a mile of the fort a body of mounted war-
riors, about a hundred strong, moved out and halted on the hill
in front of the lodges facing us.

" There they come ! " said Aut'Bees. The next moment he
put his horse into a canter till he placed himself a hundred
yards ahead, humming an old Canadian French song as he came
to a walk again. I had to call peremptorily to him before he
would fall back. He meant to be the first to meet the danger
for which he considered himself to blame. A little further on
we surprised an old squaw washing a garment at a water-hole.
She was terribly frightened, and evidently expected to be shot
own on the spot. When she recovered her breath, being ques-
oned by Aut'Bees (who, besides English, French, and Spanish,
oke a number of Indian languages), she said the Indians at the
rt were Kiowahs. " Worse and worse ! " exclaimed he ; " the
eanest, bloodiest devils of 'em all ! " Meanwhile the horsemen
on the hill remained stationary where they had halted. At every
forward step of our horses we were watching for the moment
when they would get in motion for the swoop down upon us.

" Mighty strange ! " muttered Aut'Bees, as he kept his eyes
fastened on their compact ranks, for we were now within rifle-
ot. And so on up the slope, almost brushing their line in or-
r to pass between them and the north wall of the fort, and
king into their eyes as we rode by at a walk. Each Indian
had a rifle across his saddle, a bow and quiver slung over his
shoulder, while many also wore revolvers. But they sat motion-
less on their horses, and, except that their eyes followed us with
a scowl of keen scrutiny, they might have been so many eques-
trian bronzes so far as any outward signs of life went. There
was a mystery somewhere, but we thought they were now wait-

fasl

ViQr

io4 SATANKE, THE KIOWAH: A REMINISCENCE. [April,

ing till we passed them, and Aut'Bees declared afterwards that,
expecting to feel an arrow between the ribs, his muscles bunched
and hardened till he felt as if a half-ounce ball would have
glanced from his back. Turning down the east wall the double
gates were thrown open from the inside and closed as soon as
we entered. In the courtyard we were warmly welcomed by Mr.
Mills, the clerk, who had been left in charge with three or four
employees during Bent's absence. He quickly explained that
the Kiowahs, under their most hostile chief, Satanke, had en-
camped there soon after Bent left, and had demanded of him
every day to open the gates ; but he had so far kept them off
by telling them that U. S. troops were on the march towards
the fort, by which ruse he was hoping against hope to gain time
till help from some unknown source might turn up.

" They think," said he, " that you two are army officers riding
ahead with a mess-wagon, and that the troops are behind." The
light now began to dawn on us. Our opportune appearance
confirmed Mills's story in the minds of the Indians. Hence the
excitement in camp and their strange behavior in allowing us to
pass into the fort. For, though killing white men, they were
not yet quite at open war with the government. In fact, the
latter was by no means always or necessarily a consequence of
the former. At that early day some years before the discovery
of silver and gold in what is now the flourishing State of Colo-
rado besides the traders, all of whom were well known to the
Indians, but two classes of travellers were seen on the plains,
viz., emigrants for the Pacific coast and Utah and the troops of
the United States. My animals and equipments were not of the
kind generally used by emigrant parties, and the Kiowahs, seeing
the apparent confidence with which we approached, fell readily
into the mistake, a very lucky mistake as it proved for us. I
say " apparent confidence." It was, in fact, only apparent and
not by any means real.

Confident we were that we were in a bad scrape, each one
feeling as he glanced back at the setting sun that it was his last
look at the glorious king of day, and only those having felt the
strain of a situation admitting no reasonable hope of escape
could appreciate the rebound of exhilaration on finding ourselves
inside the fort with our scalps on, safe at least for the moment.
Within the walls we had a possible fighting chance, though the
gates might be broken in or the walls scaled if the Indians
should make a determined effort to do either. In a few minutes
a knocking at the gates announced Satanke, who, accompanied

1892.] SATANKE, THE KIOWAH: A REMINISCENCE. 105

by Pawnee and two other sub-chiefs, asked to see el capitan,
meaning myself, and they were admitted to the council-room,

where, in company with L , Aut'Bees, and Mills, I held a

talk with them in Spanish, a language generally spoken by the
Kiowahs and Comanches. I did not feel called upon to explain
to them that I was not an officer, but only a plain civilian. The
only hope for us was in the deception, and I took the role with-
out any ethical scruples. The room was rather small, elliptical in
shape, and bare of furniture except stone benches built around
the sides. The chiefs declined to be seated, Satanke taking his
place standing before me. He was of medium size but strongly
built, with dainty hands and feet and delicate features. But big,
bloodshot, cloudy eyes looked out from this handsome face with
a mixture of cunning, boldness, and ferocity, and deadly hate of
the white man ; a sneering smile played about his clean-cut, thin
upper lip, on which grew a few black moustache hairs, and his
voice grated like the low growl of a mastiff. His face, under
the excitement of the "talk" that followed, and which was sub-
stantially as given below, would have been the envy of any stage
Mephistopheles. Without any of the usual formalities of the
pipe he said to me :

" The Great Father at Washington has broken his promises
to the Kiowahs. He has a forked tongue," suiting the action
to the word by the Indian gesture of shooting, as it were, the
opened fore and middle fingers from the mouth.

I replied : " It is the Kiowahs who have forked tongues ; you
have violated your treaty with the Great Father and have been
killing white men and robbing trains. What have you got to say
to this?"

"The Kiowahs are on the war-path," said he, his eyes grow-
ing fiery, "and take scalps of whites who scare off the buffalo,
et the Great Father give us more annuities and stop sending
Idiers into the Kiowah country."

" The Great Father is very patient," I replied ; " but if any
more white men are killed he will send out plenty of soldiers
and wipe out the Kiowahs." He glared a moment and toyed
ternately with the handles of his sixshooter and butcher-knife

if he would like uncommonly well to take my scalp then and
ere, but contented himself with asking abruptly :

" How many soldiers have you coming down the road ? " To
hich I answered, "You can count them when you see them."
"When will they be here?" asked he. "That," said I, "you
will know, too, when they come."

io6 SATAN KE, THE KIOWAH : A REMINISCENCE. [April,

These answers evidently disappointed him and seemed to ex-
asperate him almost beyond his self-control, but finding himself
baffled he made a short harangue denouncing the white man,
extolling the prowess of the Kiowahs, and intimating that he had
half a mind to capture the fort and string our scalps to his sad-
dle-horn before the troops arrived, the other chiefs grunting " A
how ! A how ! " Knowing the necessity of a bold face in deal-
ing with Indians, and assuming a calmness which, it may be
imagined, I did not entirely feel, I told him if we had been
afraid of the Kiowahs we would not have ridden ahead to the
fort, that my party was small, but we had good guns and knew
how to use them. It was a relief when this powwow was over.
More than once it seemed about to end in violence; but Satan-
ke, though in a rage, was too astute a chief to risk a doubtful
move just then. His object was information. So, growling a
curt " Adios," he strode out, followed by the others, and the
gates were barred after them. About 9 o'clock in the evening
there was another knocking and another request to see el capitan.
Stepping outside I was .met by a tall, elderly warrior muffled in
his robe, who saluted me gravely, and after a pause asked how
many troops were coming. I gave him about the same answer
as that given Satanke, telling him it was probable he would see
for himself when the time came. This seemed to give him mat-
ter for reflection, for he paused a full minute again, then asked
when they would arrive. To this I replied that it would depend
on their horses. Another pause, another grave bend of the head,
and he took his leave, and the gates were again closed. Our
little party took turns standing guard, mine falling at midnight.
The half moon was sinking in the west, and while its pale light
lasted the lodges, which were within arrow-shot of the fort, were
plainly visible from the walls. All was tranquil and silent there
as a churchyard. The Kiowahs seemed to be good sleepers.
There was not even the whine of a hungry cur or the snort of
a restless horse.

A wolf's tremulous howl floated up now and then from the
far southern hills, a wild, wailing cry as of some unhappy spirit
wanderer. But no other sounds broke upon the deep, all-pervad-
ing silence that lends to night on the great plains a solemnity
and impressiveness unknown elsewhere. The weirdness of the
scene carried me into the past of this strange, wild region, when
this fort was built, and to the earlier years of the century, when
the other, the original Bent's fort, stood thirty miles above at
the mouth of the Purgatoire " Pickettware," as known to Amer-

1892.] SATANKE, THE KIOWAH : A REMINISCENCE. 107

ican trappers and traders. The former or new fort, a large hol-
low square of massive stone masonry, was built by William Bent
after the Mexican war, and was resorted to by the Comanches,
Kiowahs, Cheyennes, and Arapahoes for the disposal of their
peltries, aggregating an annual trade of many thousands of dol-
lars. Old Bent's fort was destroyed by fire about the year 1848,
leaving rather imposing ruins which afforded shelter long after
to passing hunters. It was also a trading-post, but a yet more
extensive and elaborate structure, built after military models,
with turrets, bastions, and portholes, its architecture somewhat
ornate, and from its highest tower the " Stars and Stripes "
always floated on the breeze, a well-known signal of hospitable
welcome and security to the traveller who braved the perils of
the wilderness. Here lived the Bent brothers, the eldest of
whom, Charles, was the first military governor of New Mexico ;
men of nerve and enterprise, full of the spirit of bold adventure,
and sportsmen of the first water. Here, too, was the courtly St.
Vrain, while Kit Carson, John Hatcher, Tim Goodell, and many
another pioneer of the Far West found a common rendezvous
and good cheer within the baronial walls. Around these two
forts cluster the history and traditions of the upper Arkansas
prior to 1861.

But the moon has set an hour since. Even the violet after-
glow suffusing sky and cloud above the western horizon has van-
ished with the night queen's descending train. The lodges are no
longer visible in the darkness. But from the unbroken silence
over there doubtless bucks, squaws, and papooses are all still
wrapped in a common slumber, and the dusky Kiowah maiden
is dreaming in her mother's lodge of her warrior lover. Calling
the next guard I turned in, and had slept but a few minutes, as
it seemed to me though in fact it was some hours when Mills,
in a state of great excitement, roused me and told me to follow
him. Not doubting it was an attack, I caught up my rifle and
pistol and hurried out. It was just at daybreak, and, to my sur-
prise, the big gates were standing wide open. Mills was outside,
and, pointing to the site of the lodges with a smile, said : " Look
there ! " However, nothing was to be seen but the bare plateau
and the shadowy outline of the northern hills looming up beyond
in the gray dawn. Not a vestige of the Kiowahs or of their camp
was left. Between moondown and morning they had struck their
lodges and gone in silence ; and so silently did they steal away
that, though within speaking distance of the fort, not a sound
of preparation was heard by our guards, not a voice or a foot-

io8 SATANKE, THE KIOWAH: A REMINISCENCE. [April,

fall, while several hundred Indians took themselves off with their
lodges and all their effects, and some thousands of horses. With
equal truth and aptness, if less of poetic fancy, might Longfellow
have substituted " Indians " for " Arabs " in his oft-quoted lines.
My evasive answers to Satanke and the elderly warrior as to the
numbers of my supposed troops' and the time of their arrival
were doubtless construed unfavorably, probably as indicating an
intention to call the Kiowahs to account for their late atrocities,
and, having their women and children and live stock at the camp,
the chief thought it prudent to get out of the way.

Whither they went I never knew, but they left the road clear,
and the next day we continued our long ride of eight hundred
miles to Kansas City. At the fort, however, we parted with
Aut'Bees, who with the two Mexicans returned to his winter
quarters in New Mexico, taking the same road by which we had
come. I may mention that when two days out he was attacked
by forty Ute Indians, whom he fought from his wagon for several
hours, killing and wounding a number and finally whipping them
off, though he was shot through the right arm early in the fight.
With a commanding figure that might have stood for an Apollo,
simple-hearted, brave and true, a dead shot, a wonderful rider
and a keen hunter, Charley Aut'Bees was a fine specimen of the
Rocky Mountain pioneer, whose daily life of adventure and peril
was more like high-wrought romance than reality.

A word more as to the chief of the dramatis persons of this
reminiscence. Early in the seventies the press of the country
published the horrifying details of the torture and butchery by
Indians of the teamsters of a large wagon-train in northern
Texas. Shortly afterwards three Kiowah chiefs, Satanke, Satanta,
and Big Tree, were arrested at Fort Sill by the military, they
having boasted openly that they had killed the teamsters. It
was said that these chiefs had planned the capture of General
Sherman, then en route through Texas from San Antonio to
Fort Sill, and failing in this had wreaked their thirst for blood
on the luckless trainmen. Whether there was any foundation
for this rumor or not, the three were turned over to the civil
authorities of Texas, were tried before the State District Court
having jurisdiction of the offence, and, being duly convicted of
the murder of the teamsters, were sentenced to the penitentiary
for life. It was in a border country without railroads, and they
were placed, handcuffed and shackled, in a wagon and started
for Huntsville under an armed guard, who rode with them in the
wagon. While on the road one of the Indians suddenly snatched

1892.] THE THIRD CONGRESS OF COLORED CATHOLICS. 109

a knife from the belt of the driver of the wagon, and with it
stabbed to death and wounded several of the guards before he
was shot down. This was Satanke. Unnoticed by the guards,
with his teeth he had bitten and torn the flesh from that small
hand of his until he could slip it out of the handcuff. Rather
than go in chains to prison he chose to die, his hands wet with
the white man's blood, and the war-whoop of exultant vengeance
on his lips.

HENRY C. KING.

San Antonio, Texas.

THE THIRD CONGRESS OF COLORED CATHOLICS.

ON January 5, 1892, the Third Congress of Colored Catholics
convened in the city of Philadelphia. There were present about
fifty delegates from different parts of the United States : east
as far as Boston, west as far as St. Paul, Minn., and south as
far as Galveston, Texas. It is a trite saying that every Ameri-
can is by birth a public speaker ; every man at the Colored
Congress proved his Americanism. From the old gentleman
who made the speech of welcome on the part of Philadelphia,
and whose utter indifference to all the rules of grammar and of
rhetoric amused the congress, up to the scholarly gentleman
from Boston, who replied to the speech of welcome, every man
proved his right, judged by this standard, to rank as an Ameri-
can of Americans. There was talk at the congress, plenty of it,
but there were ideas behind it ; and the result of the talk is
work already accomplished and work planned for the future.

These congresses are answers, indirect yet complete, to the
queries, " What are the colored people doing ? " " What progress
are they making towards the church ? " Let any one who is de-
sirous of information on these points go to the next congress of
colored Catholics ; let him see there men from different parts of
the Union, representing all the peculiarities of their localities and
past careers, and let him judge for himself what the colored people
have been doing in the past, what they are doing in the present.
He will perceive the effects of education, generously given in many

i io THE THIRD CONGRESS OF COLORED CATHOLICS. [April,

cases by the state or by private individuals ; he will discover
what the church has done and what she has left undone ; and he
will behold in mental vision a picture of the glorious harvest
which is ripening for the church in this particular field, if there
can be found laborers enough to do the reaping.

On the morning of January 5 Rev. Augustus Tolton, of Chi-
cago, celebrated the High Mass in St. Peter Claver's Church,
which was occupied by the delegates and a large congregation
of white and colored people, many of the latter being Protestants.
Archbishop Ryan, of Philadelphia, and Bishop Curtis, of Wilming-
ton, assisted in the sanctuary. Immediately after the Mass the
congress went into session, and continued its sittings, with the
necessary interruptions, until the evening of January 7. There
were differences of opinion on many matters, and these were
ventilated in some instances pretty extensively ; nevertheless, a
most edifying brotherly spirit was ever maintained. So the
work of the general assembly and of the various committees
went along smoothly, and this without any supervision by the
priests who attended, for it was a laymen's congress, and, in-
deed, a colored laymen's congress.

A permanent organization was effected, committees were
formed to take in charge different branches of work, many papers
of interest to both Catholics and non-Catholics were read, and
finally to many heretofore ignorant not through malice, but mis-
fortune was brought a true idea, though a vastly incomplete
one, of the Catholic Church and her teachings.

The former congresses were experiments, and served two
ends : First, to discover where colored Catholics were ; and second-
ly, to find what their will was towards the holding of congresses.
The information obtained in some cases was startling. Catholics
were found where no one suspected they existed, and, again, it
was discovered that in some parts of the Union the Catholic
Church was known only as a name to conjure up visions of the
most degrading superstitions and of returning slavery. With
much joy colored Catholics almost everywhere hailed the holding
of the First Congress two years ago. It united them all over the
country into a body of over one hundred and fifty thousand by
means of their delegates in convention assembled. " Why, down
my way I was the only Catholic," said one delegate; " so I went
to the congress for company. When I got home again I found
myself famous and no longer alone. There were Catholics in my
county, but they were afraid to stand up and be counted. The

1892.] THE THIRD CONGRESS OF COLORED CATHOLICS. in

congress gave them courage. And so we got together and num-
bered about fifty, and since then a score or two have come to
us by means of conversion."

The Third Congress, then, marks the establishment of a per-
manent organization. In the future a meeting will be held per-
haps yearly, every time in a different city. So there will be the
preparing for the congress in different parts of the country: in
some, where the Catholics are numerous and therefore respected ;
in others, where they are few and therefore need sympathy and
moral support. There will be the holding of the congress now
in this city and again in that, and there will be the after-think-
ing following every meeting and so the knowledge of the true
church will be diffused far and wide ; and the ignorant will have
the light forced to their notice, and the seekers after truth will
have the chance of finding, and the weak-kneed who require
bracing up will see that after all it is a respectable thing, even
in the eyes of the world, to be a Catholic.

Several committees other than the regular ones necessary to
every convention were formed, not only to gather information and
report at the next congress, but also to undertake work in the in-
terim in various parts of the country. One of these is the com-
mittee on parish schools. It shall be its duty to inquire into the
policy of our Catholic parochial schools towards colored children,
and likewise the conduct of colored Catholics towards the parish
schools. The colored children pre-eminently stand in need of
the Catholic day-schools, and in many cases it is but a slight
misunderstanding on one side or the other which prevents the ex-
tending or the accepting of the benefits of these schools. Should
the committee understand the importance of its trust, and ener-
getically get to work, what a task is in store for it ; and corre-
spondingly what an inestimable good it will do its own race, and
the church in America ! Another committee we might call a
building association. It shall be its duty to assist in raising
funds for Catholic churches and schools for colored people, where
they already exist, and undertake to encourage their establish-
ment in new localities. Again a committee with a sacred duty
and a heavy burden. Should this committee do its work faithfully
and successfully, what a help it will be in the future to missions
now struggling almost hopelessly with heavy debts ! Its scope is
well-nigh limitless, the means at hand are insignificant, and so the
delegates who compose it have steeled themselves against despair,
knowing it is God's work and in time will prosper, even if they

ii2 THE THIRD CONGRESS OF COLORED CATHOLICS. [April,

are but planting the seed and may never live to tend the plant,
much less gather the harvest.

The papers read at the Congress were of an interesting and
instructive character. Let us take notice of but two : the paper
on separate churches and that on the policy of the church
towards slavery. In the first was shown the necessity of sepa-
rate churches from the present state of things separate churches
in this sense : that colored Catholics are free to attend any Catho-
lic church they please, but should have one in which they may
feel some personal interest ; and then the benefit of these sepa-
rate churches as seen from those already in existence. They
have done a great deal of good previously neglected and have
hindered no other good by their special work. The other paper
showed the policy of the Catholic Church towards slavery
from the very beginning, and that the church, wherever she was
free and strong enough to do it, always and absolutely abolished
slavery. It showed that the church is superior to her children ;
and that if these ever draw the color line, they do so in direct
opposition to the teaching and the policy of their Holy Church.
These two papers, not to speak of the others equally as good,
will give much information even to the delegates present at the
congress ; they will be remembered and spoken of in many
places, and so they will go far to instruct ignorance and remove
prejudice.

One point which is brought prominently forward at every
congress, and thus given time and time again to the notice of
new observers, was that there is one place where black may
meet white and fear no color line, and that sacred place is the
altar of the Catholic Church. When a black priest celebrates
Mass, assisted by several brother priests of the white skin, and
when an archbishop, great by reason of his personal virtues and
of the magnificent diocese over which he presides, humbly kneels
in adoration of the Sacred Host raised in that black priest's
hands, there is presented to the colored race of America the
assurance of a sanctuary from the wide-spread unchristian perse-
cution it .suffers on account of color of skin. In this country
the curse of the color line follows every child of the race from
the cradle to the grave, and sometimes finds a place even at
the grave-side. But it must stop at the altar-rail of the Catho-
lic Church. It is an unholy thing and dare not stand in the
sanctuary. This point was strongly presented by the scene
in St. Peter Claver's Church on January 5 ; was spoken of by

1892.] THE THIRD CONGRESS OF COLORED CATHOLICS. 113

many Protestants present at the Mass ; will be treasured in the
memory ; and, under God's providence, will in time have an
effect in many conversions.

The personnel of the Congress was most interesting. There
was the old man, who had seen the days of slavery and suffered
in them, a Catholic before the war, a Catholic since, supported
in time of trouble by his holy faith, guided by it now in times
of peace, secure in the hope of eternity, in his charity striving
to forget and forgive the past. There was the returned Catholic :
a Catholic before the war, afterwards thrown among Protestants
and joining their ways, till the faith of his youth sought him
out and brought him back ; now rejoicing in his two-fold liberty.
Then there was the young Catholic born since the war, knowing
nothing of slavery save through tradition, seeing -in himself no
difference from his white brothers but the difference of skin,
wondering why this and this alone should bless the one and
curse the other, and railing hotly at the indignities heaped up-
on his race even in our days ; and finally the young converts
young men of superior education, ready speakers, good debat-
ers, possessing much school-learning and of course, as in every
intellectual convert, of intense and aggressive Catholicity.
These last furnish the church with much hope and consolation,
for they show that wherever among the colored people educa-
tion has been most enjoyed, there the church finds material
for useful and consoling converts.

THOMAS M. O'KEEFE.

Church of St. Benedict the Moor, New York City.

114 EVEN-SONG FOR EASTER. [April,

EVEN-SONG FOR EASTER.

THE road winds on to where, against the gold,
The placid hills are dreaming, great and old ;

Gray-green as glassy seas

Where shoaling water is ;
The mists are curling in the valleys cold.

Sweet is the time. The little lambs are strong,
The birds sing many leafless boughs among ;

The bare trees lift their crest

Plumy against the west ;
The sap stirs in their branches ; they are young.

Thou clothest the clouds with silver, and with green
The hedge-rows and the sheeny fields between.

About the time Thy Son

Slew sin and death in one,
The resurrections of the world begin.

Thou callest the night that cometh from the sea,
As smoke along the mountains bloweth she ;

And in the gold lies prone

Leviathan o'erthrown :
The white mists from the lowlands answer Thee.

Father of all, if we should see but once
The splendor of Thy planets and Thy suns,

'Twere heaven ; but we are dull,

And often seeing, full
Ungrateful as the veriest boor and dunce.

Yet still of Thy sweet Will most heavenly things
Thou mak'st, not asking human thanksgivings,

True to Thy hand and Thought,

Patient where Thou hast wrought:
Surely some day Thy worms shall find their wings !

KATHARINE TYNAN.

1892.] THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. 115

THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW.

THE newspapers have been filled for the last few weeks with
sensational telegrams about a universal strike of miners in Eng- (
land. To say the least, these reports have been misleading, for
there has been no strike, properly so called, and the cessation of
work has been far from universal. The truth of the matter is
that, in order to prevent an impending diminution of wages, the
Miners' Federation recommended that work should be suspend-
ed for a time, that stocks might be run down and prices kept
up. This plan, initiated by the men, Was not opposed by many
of the employers, so that no conflict between the two parties
has taken place. Nor has the cessation of work been universal,
for of the 600,000 miners in the three kingdoms the Miners'
Federation influences only 175,000, and not even the whole of
these have fallen in with the suggestion. The Durham miners,
it is true, have also ceased work ; but this is an independent
movement. In fact, the latter is in reality a strike against a pro-
posed reduction of wages, and it is only so far as regards
them that a strike exists. We have thought it worth while to
make this explanation, for we do not wish our readers to lose
the hope to which we referred last month, that a strong feeling
against strikes is taking root among working-men in general,
and that the repugnance to this method of settling disputes to
which we referred in our last has not ceased to gain ground.

The so-called strike is, therefore, an effort initiated by the
miners to prevent, by curtailing the supply, a fall in prices a
fall which is recognized by employers and employed alike as
otherwise inevitable. The question is, whether such a course can
succeed ? The fall of prices is due, it would seem, to causes
which cannot be controlled by the parties interested in coal-
mines alone chiefly to the diminution in the demand from South
America upon the rail-mills, the engine-works, and manufactories
of Great Britain a diminution due itself to the great Baring
panic of 1890, from which the world of commercial enterprise
has not yet recovered. The want of those orders has affected the
freight market and the railways. The American tariff has crippled
the textile manufactures. How can the non-production of some
VOL. LV. 8

u6 THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. [April,

5,000,000 of tons out of a total annual production of 182,000,000 of
tons prevent a fall in price which is due to causes of so wide-spread
a character ? Besides, there is the probability that the large pur-
chasers of coal will be able by economies to diminish consump-
tion, and so, even were the other causes inoperative, to prevent
the main object of the movement ; while on the poor, who buy
by the hundred-weight, the main burden will be thrown. It
would seem, therefore, that the movement is ill-advised, the more
so as the employers will save some ^500,000 by the non-pay-
ment of the wages which the men will lose a loss which
would almost equal the reduction of wages by five per cent., to
avert which the plan was adopted. This in advance appears to
be the probable result. We shall have to wait for a short time
to see whether these anticipations will be realized.

Although the year 1890 and the strikes which took place dur-
ing its course may seem to belong to a remote past, yet, if an
account which can be relied upon as accurate and complete is to
be given, time must be allowed for its compilation. According-
ly, the report of the labor correspondent of the Board of Trade
of the strikes of that year will be valued by every student of
labor questions. This report contains 362 pages, and gives a
large number of curious and interesting facts, to which, of
course, we cannot in the space which is at our disposal give but
the briefest reference. Of the strikes which took place in 1890
62 per cent, were for an increase of wages, or for maintaining
wages at their former rate. In 60 per cent, of these strikes to
prevent a diminution the men were successful. For the reduction
of the hours of labor only 23 strikes were undertaken, and of
those 43.5 per cent, were Successful, and 26.0 per cent, partly
successful. The strikes for the defence of trade-union principles
were unusually numerous, but they were attended by an unusual-
ly high proportion of failures, the percentage of victories for the
masters being 57.6 per cent., while in the " sympathetic " strikes
the percentage was as high as 63.1. But on the whole the re-
sult of the strikes was favorable to the men. This will readily
be seen from the following figures : In the completely success-
ful strikes 213,000 persons took part, in the partially suc-
cessful 60,000 persons, while in the strikes which wholly failed
only 101,000 were engaged. If we consider the pecuniary aspect
of the struggle the details are not sufficient for a very complete
account. The report analyzes only 232 strikes but of the total
for the year of 1,028. Before these 232 strikes the estimated

1892.] THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. 117

weekly wages were 244,000; after the strikes, 261,000. Seven
were unsuccessful and caused a loss of ,1,000, so that there was
a profit of .16,900 in weekly wages. To gain this advantage
the workers forfeited .578,000, and had to expend in strike-pay
sums which brought the total up to 675,000. At the new rate
of wages, it would take forty weeks of uninterrupted work to
enable the men to recover the losses involved in these success-
ful strikes.

The elections for the London Council, besides their political
aspect, with which we are not concerned, have an important
bearing upon many social, economical, and industrial problems
of the present time. The vast size of the county, which has a
population of nearly five millions living within an area of 120
square miles, cannot but render social experiments on so large a
scale influential, either for good or for evil, upon the rest of the
country perhaps even upon the rest of the world. The battle
which has just been fought, and which has resulted in a decisive
victory for the Progressives, had as the point at issue the ques-
tion whether private enterprise or municipal and public were to
be predominant. The Progressives wished to acquire for the
council, and for the council to carry on, the water companies, the
gas and electric-light companies, the docks and the tramways,
businesses worth nearly five hundred millions of dollars, giving
employment to at least 40,000 men, and involving a patronage
of fifteen millions per annum in wages and salaries. In the
Progressive programme was also included a defined policy with
respect to the employment of the working-men. In all contracts it
was to be required of the contractors that the trade-union rate
of wages was to be paid, while for all those directly employed by
the council the eight hours' day and trade-union wages would be
the rule. Moreover, the policy of direct employment by the
council was to be adopted whenever possible. For all under-
takings aiming at obtaining Parliamentary authorization for
works in London the council was to endeavor to make such au-
thorization conditional upon their adopting the 'maximum eight
hours' day.

The question of the incidence of taxation has long formed
an important point with regard to which the Progressives have
aimed at reform. In fact, they have deliberately abstained from
carrying out much-needed improvements in London because they
were of opinion that the fair share of the expense of such im-

ii8 THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. [April,

provements would not be borne by the ground-landlords under
the present system of assessment. Their programme in this con-
test included the special assessment of "betterment" on property
improved at the public cost, and the revision of local taxation
so as to divide the rates between owner and occupier; special
taxation of land values, and the absorption of the unearned in-
crement by a municipal death-duty on real estat^. For the
benefit of the working-classes the council itself was to build and
maintain artisans' dwellings and common lodging-houses, and all
hospitals, asylums, and dispensaries were to be under municipal
control, and, beyond present endowments, to be supported by the
rates. Such are the proposals of the authorized programme. There
is, however, an unauthorized programme which represents the views
of an even more advanced school, the principal advocate of which
has been elected to the council. These would have some four
hundred thousand rooms erected in the suburbs of London, and
for the working-men who are to occupy these rooms free trains
morning and evening are to be provided for taking them to
their work and for bringing them back. The council was to pro-
vide mains to carry water up to the top stones of London tene-
ments, and not only cold water but hot as well. Such are the
lines on which the recent battle has been fought, and that the
Progressives have won an overwhelming victory shows that
ideas which many will denounce as socialistic have been widely
adopted in the British metropolis. Strange to say, the candi-
dates who came forward as avowed socialists obtained an insig-
nificant number of votes. An important result of the election is
the fact that a small but well-organized band of representatives
of labor pure and simple has been returned. Catholics have at
least two representatives in the council, but as they are in
opposite camps, the Duke of Norfolk in the moderate, and Mr.
Costelloe in the Progressive, their influence will be neutralized.

The year 1891 has been pronounced by the United Kingdom
Alliance the brightest and most noteworthy in the records of
the Temperance movement. This must be taken as true rather
in view of the future than of the past. Undoubtedly many
events which happened in 1891 have given good grounds for
the expectation that the legislative projects of the Alliance will
at no distant date be realized and become legislative acts. Nor
will any one deny that there is a great work to be done. The
annual drink bill for the year has just been published. From
this it appears that although the trade of the country, while not

1892.] THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. 119

actually depressed, has been tending towards depression, the
amount expended upon drink has increased. In 1890 one hun-
dred and thirty-nine and a half million of pounds sterling were
spent in spirits, wine, and beer. In 1891 one million and three-
quarters were added to this vast sum, making the total expen-
diture for the year one hundred and forty-one millions of pounds.
This increase is too great for the increase of the population to
explain, and gives to each man, woman, and child in Great
Britain an expenditure amounting to ^3 155. each. Some of
the tax-payers grumble at the large sums spent upon the army
and the navy ; yet the sum paid for beer alone by the inhabi-
tants of England would support two armies and two navies in
addition to the civil service. If funded for nine years, it would
pay the whole of the national debt and deliver the country from
this the largest item in the annual budget. The only consolatory
feature revealed by these figures is that, although there has been
an increase, this increase was not so great as that of 1890 com-
pared with 1889.

An illustration of the practical effects of this expenditure
upon drink is found in the - evidence of one of the witnesses
before the Royal Commission on Labor. The managing owner
of tramp and cargo vessels of Glasgow stated that it was the
rarest possible thing for one of his vessels to go to sea with her
crew all sober. In nine cases out of ten there were a number
of men simply unfit to do any work, and it was, consequently,
the custom for vessels leaving Glasgow to anchor at Greenock
in order to allow the men to get sober. His firm employed
thirteen captains, who all preferred foreign sailors not because
they were cheaper, but because they were more sober, more
cleanly, and more ready to submit to discipline. Such are the
effects of drink upon its consumers and purchasers. An occur-
rence at the East End of London will show its effects upon the
sellers ; that it either so blinds them as to render them unable
to see the evils of the trade, or and this is the more likely
fills them with such effrontery as to make them unwilling to
brook any opposition. The vicar of an East End parish has, it
appears, organized a vigilance committee for the purpose of watch-
ing the public houses and seeing that they keep the law. (This,
by the way, would be a useful plan to adopt in our own large
cities.) This excited (by its success, we hope) the ire of the pub-
licans, and so they called an indignation meeting to protest
against the conduct of the vicar, and to declare that his pro-

120 THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. [April,

ceedings were (mark the words !) immoral, un-English, and a totally
unnecessary interference with a respectable class of tradesmen,
who were licensed by the state and who contributed largely to
imperial and local taxation. The vicar was also declared to be
guilty of intolerance and bigotry because he would not allow
the son of a liquor-dealer to sing as a chorister. The meeting,
however, was not so great a success as its promoters wished, for
the vicar and his friends came in good numbers ; but the friends
of the trade manifested their own tolerance and charity by not
allowing their opponents a hearing.

A decision of the Queen's Bench Division of the High Court
in Ireland has made it clear that the law for the regulation of
the liquor-traffic in that country is far less satisfactory than it
is in Great Britain. It will, perhaps, be remembered that by the
celebrated case "Sharp v. Wakefield " it. was decided that the
discretion of the magistrates as to renewing a license was abso-
lute, providing they exercised it judiciously, and that they had a
right to refuse a renewal in case it appeared to them that
there were too many houses in a locality. But this does not
apply to Ireland. The Jaw, as decided by the highest court,
takes from the magistrates the power to refuse a renewal or a
transfer of an existing license on this ground, and gives to the
publican a vested right in the license. We have not heard that
any effort has been made to obtain an alteration of the law,
and fear that there are among the Irish members too many
friends of the publican to render such an effort probable.

The government has introduced into Parliament the Educa-
tion bill for Ireland, which want of time last year rendered
it necessary to defer. The sum of ,200,000, which fell to Ire-
land's share in the apportionment of the funds made in the
grant for freeing education, is applied by this bill to giving an
addition to class salaries of the teachers ; to increasing the remun-
eration of the assistant teachers ; to improving the position of
the smallest schools ; to the making of a capitation grant, and to
the freeing from the payment of school-pence of a considerable
proportion of the schools. But this is far from being the most
important feature of the bill. Since 1876 elementary education
in England, Scotland, and Wales has been compulsory. This,
however, was not then extended to Ireland. By the present bill
compulsion, to a certain extent, becomes law ; that is to say, in
the municipal corporations and all towns under commissioners

1892.] THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. 121

constituting about one-fourth of Ireland this law will compel
parents to send their children between the ages of six and four-
teen to school ; it will render it illegal to employ children at all
under the age of eleven, or to employ them without a certifi-
cate of proficiency between eleven and fourteen. As to the rest
of Ireland, it will be left for the local authorities to be consti-
tuted under the new Local Government bill to decide whether
these provisions shall apply to their respective districts. The
justification for adopting compulsion is found in the fact that,
while in England 12.9 per cent, of the population is in average
attendance at the schools, and in Scotland 13 per cent., in Ire-
land the average attendance amounts to only 10 per cent. ; so
that there are from 110,000 to 120,000 children who ought to be
under instruction if the due proportion of children were sent to
school. These statistics do not take into account the children
who attend the schools of the Irish Christian Brothers. These
receive no assistance from the state on account of their unwill-
ingness to conform to the rules of the Board of Education. It
is, therefore, rash to conclude that the real percentage of attend-
ance at elementary schools is represented by the statistics of the
state-aided schools.

A very interesting and important point with reference to edu-
cation in Ireland is the position of the schools with reference to
religious education. By law the state insists, as a condition of
the grant, upon religious education being excluded during the
school hours, in order that the schools may be both secular and
mixed. Practically, however, as the chief secretary stated on in-
troducing the bill, a system of denominational schools has been
established, and without breaking the law. This is due to the
efforts chiefly of Catholics, but also of Protestants where, they
are found. Both send their children by deliberate choice to
schools in which the teachers are of the parents' religion. The
result is that to a large extent the secularizing efforts of the
state have been defeated by the religious feeling and zeal of the
people. This would seem to show the way in which a similar
work might be accomplished here, and in an equally legal man-
ner. Let zeal for religion be enkindled, and then the present
system may be gradually changed before the laws are altered.
This is a method more in accordance with the spirit of the
times, and also with the theory of our government. Public
opinion and sentiment, and the voice of the people, are the ruling
powers, not state-made laws ; at all events, the latter have no

122 THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. [April,

force unless they accord with the former. It must be our busi-
ness so to form and mould opinion that whether the laws
favor religious education or not, the people will, as they have
done in Ireland, secure it for themselves.

The international movement for the suppression of the slave-
trade, the beginning of which was due to the efforts of Cardinal
Lavigerie, seems to be slowly, indeed, but surely attaining suc-
cess. The objections of the French Assembly to the provisions
of the Brussels General Act have been obviated by a modifica-
tion of the measure ; and although France has not actually rati-
fied the treaty, nor yet Portugal, it is generally understood that
such ratification is sure soon to be accorded. Moreover, every
power except Great Britain has taken practical steps in execu-
tion of the agreement ; and at last Great Britain is following in
the wake. For many years, indeed, she has kept cruisers off the
east coast of Africa, and has spent some ,100,000 per annum
in the suppression of the sea-traffic in slaves. But these efforts
leave untouched a large internal traffic of the most cruel charac-
ter. All porterage of ivory and other goods from the interior
to the coast is by means of slaves, no animals being able to
live in the districts where the tsetse-fly abounds. The Brussels
Act, therefore, recommended either the establishment of stations
of armed troops or the opening of railways as a means of sup-
pressing this internal traffic. The British East Africa Company
has adopted the latter plan, but being unable itself to find the
money, it has appealed to the government for help to build
a railway from Mombasa to the Victoria Nyanza. This appeal
has been so far successful that a grant has been made of
^20,000 for the purposes of the preliminary survey, and this is
accordingly being proceeded with. Whether the railway itself
will eventually be built will depend, of course, upon the character
of the report. Should it be favorable, there seems little doubt
that it will be constructed whatever government may be in
power; for the sentiment against the slave-trade is very strong,
so strong as to be able to overcome the most deeply-seated
doctrinaire scruples.

The incidents connected with the proposal to erect a statue
to Cardinal Newman at Oxford are full of interest. Nor are
they without importance as indications of the strength of the
various currents of religious feeling in Great Britain. The pro-
posal originated with the non-Catholic members of the Memorial

1892.] THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. 123

Committee, the preference having been given to London as the
more appropriate site by the Catholic members. The latter were,
however, overruled, and in the name of the committee the Duke
of Norfolk applied to the council of the city of Oxford the
body which has the control of public thoroughfares for the
grant of the site opposite to Trinity, Dr. Newman's first and
last college. As indicating the influence exerted by Dr. New-
man over the most divergent schools of religious thought, it
may be mentioned that the subscribers to the statue, although all
did not approve of the proposed site at Oxford, included, in
addition to the Catholics, several dignitaries of the Church of
England, the heads of seven colleges at Oxford, two greatly re-
spected Congregational ministers, the president of the Unitarian
Theological College, members of the Presbyterian Church of
Scotland, and, as a representative of modern thought of the
most unfettered type, Mr. W. H. E. Lecky. On the receipt of
the Duke of Norfolk's application, the council referred it to
one of its committees, and this committee, without the least
hesitation, at once granted the site.

So far all had gone well ; but now opposition was roused.
The regius professor of divinity, who is so little known to fame
that. we cannot say whether he is High, Low, or Broad church,
felt that by putting up the statue on this spot a wound would
be inflicted on his religious susceptibilities. As it happens the
site in question is within one hundred yards of the place where
Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer suffered death ; and that Newman's
statue should be placed so near and should overlook and domi-
nate the situation ; that the man who, to quote the profes-
sor, " had caused the defection of a larger number of cultivated
Protestants from their Protestant faith than any other writer or
preacher since the Reformation," the man whose own secession
" had dealt a deadly blow on the Church of England," should
thus honored, was more than could be borne ; it would be
ie manifest triumph of ultramontanism over the pure gospel
for which the worthy Cranmer reconciled himself in the end to
lie. Moved chiefly by these considerations, although other
grounds of opposition were not wanting, a strong movement
irose against the erection of the statue upon the desired site,
>r, indeed, upon any site in Oxford. A crowded public meet-
ing held in the city protested ; a memorial signed by thirteen
heads of colleges and thirty-two other resident members of the
university, and a petition of nearly two thousand members of

124 THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. [April,

the university residing in various parts of the country, were pre-
sented to the City Council. For some two or three weeks the
whole country was agitated by the question. In the end the
efforts of the intolerant met directly with only a partial success.
As one of the city councillors said : " John Henry Newman was
not upon his trial before the Town Council of Oxford, but the
city of Oxford was upon its trial." Nor did it stand the test
badly ; for the offer of the statue was accepted, although upon
the understanding that the Broad Street site should be aban-
doned. But indirectly the opponents gained a complete victory ;
for it was felt by the friends of Dr. Newman and by the pro-
moters of the movement that it would expose the cardinal's
memory to dishonor to persevere in a plan to which so strong
an opposition had been offered, and they have accordingly relin-
quished the project. It is worthy of note that it was chiefly
from members of the university that the opposition arose, while
the admirers of the cardinal were found in a larger measure
among the representatives of the comparatively uneducated peo-
ple ; and that these gained a victory over the cultivated for-
ces of religious rancor and intolerance. We hope that this may
be taken as an indication that the heart of the people is being
turned towards he faith of their fathers.

The funerals of Cardinal Manning and of Mr. Spurgeon have
called forth demonstrations of such wide-spread respect and sym-
pathy on the part of vast numbers of people of every rank and
class as to be deserving of special note. Just as it is pleasing
to a certain number of idle and somewhat vacuous-minded peo-
ple to call themselves society, and to ignore all who are outside
of their own circle, so it is the fashion of a still smaller num-
ber of bookish and in their own eyes superior people who
have tied themselves to the* coat-tails of a few writers who are,
for the time being, in vogue to treat religion as a thing of the
past, and to look upon themselves and their followers as constitut-
ing the sole world of thought and intelligence. And as audacity
is a great element of success, their pretensions often cause annoy-
ance and even distress to a wider public. Now, the demonstra-
tions called forth by these funerals show how small and insig-
nificant an impression has so far been made upon the mass of
the people. More than this, the cry is often raised by a certain
class of weak-minded defenders of religion that the days of dog-
matic religion are over; that if religion is to survive at all, it
must be under the form of sweetly pretty pietism and sentiment.

1892.] THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. 125

But if any two men in the United Kingdom were types of dog-
matism, Manning and Spurgeon were those men. No one who
knows anything about either the church or the Baptist denomi-
nation will question the dogmatic character of these bodies, and
to many of their members the tone of mind and the utter-
ances of the^e particular teachers seemed at times to border
upon exaggeration. And so these popular demonstrations bring
home the fact that there is a wide-spread feeling of sympathy
for not only religion but also for those who emphasize and bring
out the aspect of religion which is most repugnant to the
self-advertised class of literary and scientific minds. Our readers
will, of course, understand that however much we may in some
respects admire Mr. Spurgeon, as we undoubtedly do, we do not
intend to place him upon a level with the cardinal. The lat-
ter received in its fulness the whole and complete revelation of
God as vouched for and interpreted by the " pillar and ground
of the truth," and made that revelation the rule of his belief and
of his life ; he gave up all he had and lived and died a poor
man. Mr. Spurgeon was his own church, his own pope, and
had no rule but what commended itself to his own private
judgment, and, to use the expression of an American reporter,
lived " in magnificence and elegance." But they both had great
power and influence because they both had a definite message
to the world and knew how to deliver that message.

The power and influence of definite dogmatic teaching is being
manifested also by the wonderful reception accorded to the head
of the Salvation Army. On his recent return to England from
his visit to Africa, Australia, and India so large was the number
>f people who went to welcome him that the service of trains
>etween London and Southampton was thrown into confusion,
ind on his entry into London the street-traffic was for a long
rime entirely blocked. It is, of course, to the work which has
;en undertaken by the general for the bettering of the lot of
te poorest of the poor that the chief interest of our readers is
ittached. As we have already mentioned, one Farm Colony has
>een commenced and is in fair working order. The principal
)bject of the journey of the general was to secure a suitable
>lace for the " Colony over the Sea." As a result of inspection
ind inquiry South Africa has been chosen for this purpose, and
*fore long practical steps will be taken to realize this the final
>art of the Darkest England scheme. In London itself so full

126 THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. [April,

a provision has been made that the general claims that now no
man, woman, or child need pass the night without food or shel-
ter. All that is wanted in order to secure this is that the police
should co-operate and send to the " shelters " all the homeless
whom they find in the streets. If this is true, it indicates that
the success of the scheme has already surpassed ^he most san-
guine anticipations.

After ten days spent in unsuccessful efforts, a new ministry
the twenty-seventh since the establishment of the Republic has
been formed in France. The larger number of this new cabinet
were members of the one just defeated. There is, however, a
new premier, a somewhat obscure and, as French politicians go,
respectable and moderate man. Ostensibly the former cabinet fell
upon the question as to the relations between church and state ;
those, however, who are or who claim to be behind the scenes
say that the whole proceeding was an ignoble personal intrigue.
M. de Freycinet, as is well known, aspires to succeed M. Carnot
as President of the Republic. His success as head of the War
Department has been so pronounced as to make him very popu-
lar with all classes ; whereas his position as premier almost neces-
sarily involved the making of enemies and opponents. There-
fore he wished to retire to the War Office and to give up the
premiership. In M. Constans, moreover, he had a strong rival
to his claims, for to him is due the complete defeat of the Bou-
langist movement, and consequently whatever gratitude a republic
is capable of. Consequently the benevolent and magnanimous
project was formed of driving M. Constans from the office which
had brought him so much honor. In both M. de Freycinet has
been successful ; he remains at the War Office. M. Loubet is

premier, and M. Constans has vanished from the scene.

The policy of the new cabinet, as declared in the declaration
of the ministers, is to maintain the existing relations between
church and state, and to resist all efforts on the part of the
Radicals to bring about the abolition of the Concordat. On the
other hand, the attitude of conciliation and of frank acceptance
of the established form of government by the bishops and clergy,
and by Catholics generally, has been strengthened and confirmed
by the letter addressed by the Pope to the French bishops, in
which he reminds them that any form of government is good,
whether imperial, monarchical, or republican, and that one form

1892.] THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. 127

may be good at one time and another at another time. No
form, however, is good except so long as it makes for the com-
mon well-being. And as the principle of authority is compatible
with various forms, it becomes the duty of Catholics, his Holi-
ness declares, to accept a new form when established. This let-
ter is understood to be the definite acceptance of the Republic
by the Holy See, and the as definite renunciation of every alliance
with Orleanists, Bonapartists, or the various other claimants of
the supreme power. In the programme of the new- ministry a
long list of measures for the benefit of working-men is included,
and, what is new for France, a law for the regulation of the
liquor-traffic. Two other items of news will be of interest. The
first of these is that a league for the promotion of rest on Sun-
day has been formed, and is meeting with a large measure of
success. The second is that the governor of Paris has directed
that the duties of soldiers should be so arranged that they may
be able to attend religious services.

In Germany there are tokens of the existence of wide-spread
uneasiness and even discontent ; nor without reason. When in a
country constitutionally governed the sovereign descends into
the arena of party politics, and himself takes sides in these con-
tests, especially when this is done in the manner adopted by the
emperor, it is not to be wondered that there should be anxiety.
And although with many of his measures we cannot but feel
sympathy, we are forced to remember that there are bad ways
of doing good things, and that the Catholics in Great Britain
and Ireland have for many years suffered on account of the im-
politic course adopted by King James II. Moreover, among the
working-classes there is undoubtedly a great deal of suffering,
due to want of employment a want of employment which is
caused to a large extent by the politicians of our own country
who passed the McKinley bill. The riots in Berlin found their
occasion in this want. It is not fair to lay these proceedings at
the door of the Social-Democrats. It was the roughs of Berlin
who took part in them, and the Social-Democrats openly disavow
all sympathy or participation in them. It is not in Germany
only that insufficiency of employment exists ; in Vienna, in Buda-
Pesth and other parts of Hungary, the working-classes are under-
going a similar misfortune.

Portugal is not the only one of the smaller European king-

128 THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. [April,

doms which is on the verge of bankruptcy. The financial straits
of Greece are so great that the king has had summarily to dis-
miss the ministry, which has at its back a majority in the
Chambers, because it proved itself unable to extricate the coun-
try from its embarrassments. The fact is that the ambitious
ideas of the present Greeks, based on a too intimate acquaintance
with the history of ancient Greece, and a too fond identification
of themselves with their predecessors, have led them to form the
project of forming a new Hellenic Empire by appropriating
territories still under Turkish rule territories which are claimed
by Servia and Bulgaria as well. For this purpose the Greeks have
been spending large sums upon the maintenance of an army,
and they now find themselves in the somewhat ignominious posi-
tion of not being able to pay their bills or even to borrow
money. It must be confessed that those little Christian king-
doms in the Balkan peninsula offer no very edifying spectacle to
the world. They are consumed with fierce jealousy and hatred
for one another ; and it is only the fear of the great powers
of Europe that keeps them from flying at each . other's
throats. For Bulgaria, however, notwithstanding the somewhat
arbitrary proceedings of M. Stambouloff, a certain amount of
sympathy can be felt on account of her gallant struggle with the
tyrannous force of Russia, and the calm good sense of her peo-
ple. The assassination of Dr. Vulkovitch, her agent at Constan-
tinople, is the last token of the enmity felt towards her and of
the unscrupulous methods adopted to gratify this enmity.

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 129

TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS.

FANTASTIC was the word chosen by Mr. Crawford to de-
scribe his last tale, " The Witch of Prague," and the choice
seemed to justify itself to the majority of his readers. It would
apply with even greater justice to Mr. George Du Maurier's
peculiar novel, Peter Ibbetson* This, we believe, is its author's
first venture into literature, though as an illustrator his fame has
long been well established. He is evidently capable of making
his mark in " black and white," whether in art or letters. Noth-
ing could well be more charming than the earlier portion of the
present story ; the home at Passy, la belle Madame Pasquier, la
divine Madame Seraskier, the musical father, the French version
of Colonel Newcome who told endless fairy tales ; Gogo and
Mimsey, with their invisible attendants, the Fairy Tarapatapoum
and Prince Charming, are all fresh, original, and delightful acquain-
tances. Excellent, too, and in much the same vein of excellence,
are the dream explorations into the France of Peter's ancestors,
which occur early in " Part Sixth " of the novel. One under-
stands so easily the cogency of the reason given for not explor-
ing the English side of the joint ancestry of himself and " the
Duchess of Towers " :

" The farther we got back into France, the more fascinating
it became, and the easier and the more difficult to leave."

As for the dream business, the " sacramental attitude " for
dreaming true (on one's back, with the hands clasped under the
head, and one's right foot crossed over the left), and all the
rest, it seems a great pity to have spoilt so pretty and unique a
scheme by hitching it fast to Darwinism, and giving no leeway
to the imagination except into the " dark backward and abysm of
time." It is not the past but the future one wants to gild with
hope not the mammoth, the mastodon, the arboreal ape, and
the bit of animated protoplasm that one seeks for comforting
knowledge, not merely if one is built on the type introduced in-
to this world now nineteen centuries ago, but if he still lies
prone in mere human nature. "We look to the grave for joy,"

* Peter Ibbetson. Edited and illustrated by George Du Maurier. New York : Harper &
Bros.

130 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [April,

as a great preacher said once in an Easter-day sermon. The future,
as Du Maurier looks at it, is not more Christian than the past,
but, if it be anything at all, merely an endless unfolding, at
some point in which what men have " always been taught to
worship as a Father " may turn out to be an " as yet unborn,
barely conceived, and scarce begotten Child." Now, one of the
great beauties of Christianity lies in the combination of those
two ideas. The evolutionary scheme hobbles on one painful foot,
seeking to grasp but one of them. To grant it even so much is
to be too generous, since it is not half so sure of the coming
Child as it is preposterously cocksure of the non-existence of
the conscious Father.

Roiveny in Boston* is a clever bit of realism from the good
woman's point of view a point, one may say, in order to make
one's self clearer, which is not unlike that taken by Mr. Howells
when considering the New England youth of both sexes. Roweny
is a bright girl with an artistic turn, who is " sot on goin' to
Borston " to study art, and who accomplishes her desire, as every
reader will be glad to learn who agrees witn "Allestres" that
" elsewhere they talk about art ; in Boston they love it." A
good many of us have visited regions where such a sentiment
would be regarded as heretical. Roweny has a variety of ex-
periences in several scales of Boston life, ranging from the vul-
gar boarding-house and the Spiritualist " se-ants" to the Brown-
ing class, and the dabblers in theosophy and Christian science.
In addition, she has a very modest and prudently conducted love
affair, and a streak of good fortune which lands her at last in
Paris, and, probably, in one of M. Jullien's studios. Her adven-
tures are told in a crisp, brightly alert fashion which should
commend the book to many readers.

Grania\ is a painfully pathetic story of Irish peasant life,
told without much artistic skill, and yet effective. The scene is
not laid in Ireland proper, but in one of the three Islands of
Aran, Inishmaan, in Galway Bay. A map of these islands serves
as frontispiece to the volume. It is not specially helpful as an
aid to the geography of the tale, but possibly it accents more
sharply its quality of actuality. The tale is like a boulder out
of the live rock on which its slow, uneventful, but tragically in-
tense action passes as bleak and scantly hospitable to any life
less hard and more exacting that that of Grania and her sister

* Roweny in Boston. A novel. By Maria Louise Poole. New York : Harper & Bros.
f Grania : The Stary of an Island. By the Hon. Emily Lawless. New York and Lon-
don : Macmillan & Co.

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 131

Honor. The girls are half-sisters, and Honor much the elder.
Such softening as the bitter realities of a life like theirs admits
of is supplied, and well-supplied, to our thinking, by the au-
thor's conception of Honor. She is a nun in all but external
consecration a lover, that is, of the Ideal Good, God Himself,
to a degree that transforms and glorifies what are, to hearts less
pure, the unmixed hardships of actual life. Grania is different ;
a born rebel, who " couldn't bear to be bid or driven by any-
body," and hungering with all her heart for natural happiness.
Her pains, not purifying ones either, come from her love for a
worthless scamp, an idler and drunkard, whose faults she sees
with perfect clearness, although among them must be reckoned
the nature of his attachment to her, which has no ground ex-
cept his appreciation of her comparative wealth and his certainty
that she will always work for two. The sordid tragedy of it all
comes out in a clear-cut way not easy to forget. Honor is
touched in with an extreme delicacy and sympathy which seem
unusual in a writer who apparently knows Catholic faith only as
an outsider. The final scene, where Grania is drowned in her
attempt to row through a mighty fog in order to fetch a
priest from the larger island to give Honor the last sacraments,
comes as a relief. Better the salt sea for a heart like Grania's,
than life unblessed with a faith like Honor's, and with no better
comfort in view than a Murdough Blake could bring her. The
book is deficient in artistic finish and proportion. The chapters
lag on idly, one after another, through half its length, without
forwarding the action of the tale or adding to one's knowledge
of its actors. But, as mere accessories, as bits of landscape, as
vigorous sketches of other islanders, they help to complete a
vivid impression of what life may be under such grim conditions
as those by which the author has chosen to be bound.

Miss Woolley's new novel * is a clever study, from the wo-
man's point of view, of a thoroughly selfish man, entirely un-
hampered by religious belief, and impervious to the stings of a
criticism which he regards as purely conventional. Such men
-exist, as most of us know from more or less wide experience,
and Miss Woolley has pinned one of her specimens to the wall.
Not, we suppose, to serve as a direct warning or lesson to their
equals. No one would be more likely than Miss Woolley to ad-
mit that to the Roger Hunts of our day such novels as hers
would afford but slender entertainment. It is a readable novel,

* Roger Hunt. By Celia Parker Woolley. Boston and New York : Houghton, Mifflin
& Co.

VOL. LV. 9

132

TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [April,

none the less, though its lesson, taken at its very best, is not
lofty. Roger, when one makes his acquaintance, is a married
man with a six-year-old boy, and a wife in an inebriate asylum,
a hopeless drunkard. The first chapter reveals him in the act of
inducing a not very young girl, who perfectly understands his
position, but is deeply in love with him, to elope with him to
Europe. Nothing in the religious belief of either prevents his
seeking an easily obtainable divorce and putting a legal sanction
on this step. The only obstacle to so doing, but an impassable
one, lies in the man's "scorn of conventions." He would not seek
a remedy at the hands of the law, he would defy it. He could
and would be as faithful to his word of honor without as with it.
Eleanor is overcome by his invincible will and her own weak-
ness, and they depart. The story of their life together follows,
with its waning love on his side, its remorse and grief but ever
growing love on hers. At the end of three or four years
Roger's wife dies, and the pair are married in fact, and a child
is born to them. The history of one of the man's " Platonic
attachments" is given at some length, as a sample of many that
have preceded it. Eleanor, worn out by the cold indifference of
her husband and the pangs of a remorse that apparently measures
itself against no standard more absolute than that of the opinion of
the people among whom she lives and has lived, dies just after
her daughter, now grown up, has learned the truth about her
false step in youth. Miss Woolley seems to have had no aim
beyond that of showing the far-reaching character of selfishness
on its purely human side. She preaches that, even here, no
man liveth to himself and no man dieth to himself. In so far,
what she has done is well done. But the book is singularly de-
ficient in uplifting qualities. Not a character in it is really sym-
pathetic, nor is the religious motive, which after all is the only
one that can ever be counted on to resist the assaults of self-
love and pride, or to punish their momentary triumph, brought
into any prominence whatever. Moreover, love like Eleanor's is
a sentiment one finds it difficult to believe in.

A thoroughly wholesome story, and an extremely entertaining
one into the bargain, is The Blue Pavilions* It is a mixture
of history and imagination. The time is that of William of
Orange, when England was still averse to " Dutchmen." William
himself and the shifty Earl of Marlborough make their pictur-
esque appearance more than once. Nevertheless, they are, as
they should be, but solid and suggestive accessories to the real

* The Blue Pavilions. By " Q." New York : Cassell Publishing Co.

1892.] TALK ABOUT N'Ew BOOKS. 133

business of story-telling at which " Q." has proved himself so
capable. Captain John and Captain Jemmy, and Meg's boy
Tristram, carry off all the honors. The book is delightfully old-
fashioned in plot and motive, but has a modern lightness of
touch, and a cleanliness of execution which ought to give it
long life. Much poorer books have already attained a century
or two of praise and remembrance. Perhaps they are lauded
more frequently and more assiduously than they are read.

A distressingly bad novel, worse in purpose than in execu-
tion, is called Mrs. Leslie and Mrs. Lennox* It is not merely
unmoral but immoral as bad in its more circumspect way as the
French novels which it imitates. The scenes are laid in New
York and Washington, and the virtuous and admirable heroine
for whom sympathy is sought is a wife who confides her love
for another man than her husband, not merely to him, but to
others of her male friends. She is a model mother, and techni-
cally proper, inside of the limits just defined. This is " Mrs. Les-
lie," who, on one occasion, to " get back " the man she loves
from her rival, " Mrs. Lennox," is on the point of sacrificing her
virtue to " Mrs. Lennox's " ex-husband, a man whom she detests,
and is saved from so doing by the merest accident. " Mrs. Len-
nox " is worse still. As the book lies on all the stands, it is
well to warn all those who have any oversight over our young

I people's reading to protest against it as distinctly bad, and with
no redeeming quality in its badness.
// Happened Yesterday \ is a more than usually clever story,
although it begins in a hackneyed and feeble fashion which is
far from promising. The narrator gathers strength as he goes
on, and holds his reader's attention to the end of a tale quite
out of the common run. Its motive is a psychological one the
thing indifferently called will-influence, suggestion, magnetism,
etc. The chief characters are one Madame Jelle, the rich widow
of a French manufacturer ; a German girl, Frieda von Rothen-
fels, in whom all the national tendencies toward idealism are
raised to their highest potency, and whose patriotism is almost
an insanity ; Jules Jelle, nephew to Madame, who is as madly
French as Frieda is German ; and a Russian, Yaransk, a sort of
mesmerist, between whom and Jules Jelle exists an ancient
league, binding them to 'hate Germans and Germany to their
latest breath. Frieda is at first Madame Jelle's companion, af-
terwards her most beloved friend. The Frenchwoman has

* Mrs. Leslie and Mrs. Lennox. A Novel. New York : Cassell Publishing Co.
Mt Happened Yesterday. By Frederick Marshall. New York : D. Appleton & Co.

I34 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [April,

sought her, on account of what she has heard from Yaransk of
the possibility of transferring qualities from one person to an-
other through the influence and will of the stronger of the two.
She is herself too prosaic, too practical to enjoy to the full all
that seems to her worth enjoying. Frieda has been recommend-
ed to her by the bishop of her diocese, to whom her existence,
her character, and her need of protection have been made known
by her life-long friend and adviser, Canon Miiller, a Bavarian
priest. The canon has a keen eye for character, and so singu-
lar a power of conveying his impressions of it that his letter to
the bishop, transferred by the latter to Madame Jelle, inspires
in her the hope that as Frieda is overfull of the qualities she
lacks, all that is necessary to put them into equilibrium will be
an exercise of will on the part of the young girl. This part of
the experiment comes to naught. Madame and Mademoiselle
each remain what they are by nature. But the two young peo-
ple are brought together, and the difference between the Ger-
man and French types, each in extremes, is handled in an un-
usually effective way. Jules succumbs to Frieda's inexplicable
charm, but exerts none over her. She falls, instead, under the
deliberately exerted dominion of Yaransk, which is put forth at
first as an experiment, but afterward continued in order to de-
prive Jules of every hope of winning her, and thus hold him
true to their plighted hatred of Germany. A curious feature of
the novel is that it often reads like a translation, although ap-
parently written originally in English perhaps by a hand equal-
ly accustomed to both French and English.

Sir Edwin Arnold's newly published book * of verses is some-
thing of a disappointment to those who remember well some of
the lovely things in With Sadi in the Garden. Nothing at all
comparable 'to even the least good poems in a volume which
contained nothing that was poor, is to be found in the present
collection. Good verses it is perhaps impossible for their author
not to make when he makes any, but for this once he has made
none likely to cling to fastidious memories. Theme goes for a
great deal with him perhaps, too, he is more dependent for his
sentiment than one had been willing to believe on the authors
whom he has so often imitated or translated. In this volume he
is mainly himself translating, however, in a few instances, from
an original so little worth translating as the Queen of Roumania.

Good as Miss Wilkins's tales of New England life were, there

*PotiphaSs Wife, and other Verses. By Sir Edwin Arnold. New York : Charles Scrib-
ner's Sons.

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 135

are qualities in her new volume of children's stories which we
find as unexpected as they are delightful. They show a quaint-
ness of humor, a bubbling, effervescent fun, an airy fancy, for
which her previous work haql not prepared us. In saying this
we speak chiefly of the first ten stories of the present collection,*
where she makes a pretence, so to say, of letting herself loose
on a breeze flowing from fairyland, while in reality she has
taken care to tie the string of her kite fast to the substantial
gatepost of a New England farm. The first story in the book
seems to us the least good of all, and hence undeserving of the
prominence given it by its position and general sponsorship for
what follows. But that once passed we confess to having laid
the book aside for a space after reading it, and too hastily con-
cluding that Miss Wilkins was wading in waters too shallow for
her size the reader finds the rest full of quaint material for un-
expected and innocent laughter. The inventions are so odd, as
in "The Christmas Monks," for example, or "The Christmas
Masquerade " and " Princess Rosetta and the Pop-corn Man."
Better than either, perhaps though it is hard to choose among
them is "The Patchwork School." The details match the con-
ception so neatly that each story stands out in an atmosphere
wholly its own. After the semi-fairy tales come half a dozen or
so in which Miss Wilkins returns frankly to familiar New Eng-
land ground, though here too she is writing of and for children.
The young ones should be grateful to her if they are at all ap-
preciative. Though they are not so felicitously odd and imagin-
ative as the tales that precede them, the history of Ann Gin-
nins the " Bound Girl," the " Squire's Sixpence," and poor little
Willy's " Plain Case " have excellent qualities of their own. The
illustrations, by W. L. Taylor, Childe Hassam, Barnes, Bridgman,
and other artists, are particularly good, being for the most part
real aids to the imagination.

The idea underlying Mr. Hall Caine's new novel f is not unlike
that of his first one, " The Deemster." In each of them there is
a victim of expiation, suffering a strange and terrible doom, laid
upon him in chastisement for his own faults or sins. The scenes
of the present tale lie in Morocco, and the hero is a Jew, Israel
ben Olliel, who has incurred the wrath of God and the hatred
of his own nation by becoming assessor of tributes to the Mos-
lem governor of Tetuan, and so the visible executor of his un-
just exactions. As a matter of fact, he prevents more oppres-

* The Pol of Gold, and other Stories. By Mary E. Wilkins. Boston : D. Lothrop
Company.

t The Scapegoat. By Hall Caine. New York : United States Book Company.

I3 6 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [April,

sions than he causes; but to his fellow-Jews, who hate him on
other counts, he seems to be egging on a master who but for
him would be a less merciless tyrant. They curse him, and God
seems to justify their curse, at firstly withholding children from
him, and at last, when his prayers and those of his wife, the
only creature who loves him, have moved Him, by sending a
daughter born deaf, blind, and dumb. She is gifted with won-
derful beauty, however, and is the heroine of the novel. The
story of her childhood, irradiated by a certain interior light and
joy, though shut out from every avenue leading to the external
world save that of touch, is told with a good deal of poetic
power. One by one, as Israel undergoes the penitential afflictions
imposed upon him by an awakened conscience, though the
hatred of men seems their efficient cause, the stones laid at
the doors of her senses are rolled away in a strange and mi-
raculous fashion. As usual with this author, the prosaic and
commonplace does not enter into his imaginative scheme. He
is brutal enough in places, but he is never what is called a
" realist." He delights in the romantic and the picturesque, even
to the extent of incurring the criticism of being weakly fond of
them. Vengeance, doom, righteous retribution, and then unex-
pected Divine mercy, are his favorite themes. He is not so much
a novelist as a romancer. The commonplace hampers him, and
his imagination will not work in its traces. His style matches
his other qualities, and aids in giving his productions a niche by
themselves in contemporary fiction.

Emilia Pardo Bazan is plainly an industrious woman. She
not merely conducts a monthly periodical, but she does so on the
plan adopted by Dr. Brownson in the earlier issues of his
famous Review, when he was the author of every article they
contained. Sefiora Bazan is said to furnish a tale, an essay, a
criticism of some book or books, and of contemporary art, in
every number of her magazine. The quality of her work proba-
bly varies. Those of her novels we have read certainly differ much
in point of excellence, though none has attained it to any high de-
gree. The latest of the numerous translations made from them
by Mrs. Serrano is called The Angular Stone* an enigmatical
title of which one may give any rendering that occurs to him,
none being suggested by the tale itself. As usual, a motive
underlies it ; in this instance it is a protest against capital pun-
ishment offered in a somewhat oblique fashion. The hero is a
wretched headsman, despised and put almost beyond the pale of

* The Angular Stone. By Emilia Pardo Bazdn. New York : Cassell Publishing Co.

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 137

humanity, even by the humane physician who occupies an equally
prominent position in the story. Such point as Rojo's history
possesses is gained by sharpening the daily facts of his existence
against the respect and deference obtained by the lawyers and
judges of whose decrees he is the necessary executant. He feels
this so deeply himself that, in the end, it drives him to suicide.
The question of capital punishment comes up more than once
for discussion between certain lawyers and other professional
men who meet in a cafe, described with that superabundance of
local details unpleasantly characteristic of this author's work.
One of them, a young advocate filled with the modern spirit,
thinks that the idea of punishment should be abolished, and that
of curative treatment substituted, so that the "grotesque horror
called the scaffold " may be removed from the civilization of the
age, together with "that social enigma called the executioner."
He says :

" One of the few mediaeval sentiments which have survived to
our times, and one which even gains strength every day, is the
hatred of the executioner. The executioner is more a pariah to-
day than he was in the middle ages. The conviction, vague but
strong, exists that he is no more than a murderer hired by society.
And, speaking logically, what is the difference between saying
'We decide that the prisoner deserves death and we condemn
him to death,' and turning a crank ? But the magistrate is re-
garded with respect, the executioner with hatred. Observe that
in some of the most advanced nations, the United States for in-
stance, they attempt to abolish the executioner while retaining
the death penalty. Either they lynch which shows an anarchi-
cal but frank and youthful state of society, in which all judge
and execute or they kill by electricity, in which method the
executioner does not exist. At any rate, a real executioner
scarcely inspires me with more horror than such props of the
scaffold as Cafiamo."

Cafiamo is a judge famous for inflicting death penalties.
There seems a certain confusion in the mind of a person who finds
that executions by electricity require no executioner.

Rene'e and Colette* is a badly translated and unimportant story,
dealing with the life-history of two sisters by half blood, the
elder of whom is illegitimate, but has been adopted by the
lawful wife, with her husband's permission, and brought up on
equal terms with their daughter. This is Colette, and she pos-
sesses all the virtues, some only of which, and those negative
ones, have fallen to the share of the younger sister. Their

* Renee and Colette. By Debut Laforest. Translated by Mrs. B. Lewis. New York :
Cassell Publishing Company.

I3 8 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [April,

story, their love affairs, the long-suffering patience of Colette,
and the mean vanity and headstrong obstinacy of Renee, end-
ing at last in Colette's triumph and Renee's late repentance,
might not have made a bad groundwork for a thoroughly ac-
ceptable tale in the manner of E. Werner. But here they are
managed badly and one fancies that the translator is perhaps
as much to blame for it as the author. She describes it herself
as an "adaptation," and prefaces it with a Latin quotation and
a letter "To My Readers," in which she assures them the tale is
a true one. But her meaning seems to be that it conforms to a
general truth of life, and not to a particular case of experience.
One cannot help thinking that a more particular knowledge of
both English and French would have made her avoid such a
collocation of words as "whispering incontinent phrases," mean-
ing confused and broken speech, or such a passage as the follow-
ing, concerning the presence of a curd and two Sisters of Charity
at the bed of a would-be suicide, whither they had accompanied
a doctor :

" Though our ideas may be inclined to philosophize, in regard
to quixotism, and our observations for good and evil between
the sorrows and uselessness of human existence, be vague, still
our duty is to venerate and respect those who consecrate their
lives to the alleviation of human ills."

One feels inclined to wager that if any passage resembling
this occurred in the original, the resemblance was a singularly
remote one. But this, after all, is the small beer of criticism.

Speaking of French, a most excellent aid towards studying
the literature of that language is to be found in one of the
University Extension Manuals, now in course of publication
by the Scribners. Professor Keene shows himself a competent,
fair, and enlightening critic and historian of that great literature,
from its infancy down to a period which includes all notable
names except those of living writers, who are seldom alluded to
except by implication What he thinks of a certain class of these
can be inferred without difficulty from what he has to say on Real-
ism in more places than one, and notably in a fine passage on
Nature and Man, p. 133, which occurs in a notice of Lamartine
and his English leader and example, Lord Byron. The spirit of
Mr. Keene's work* seems to us as admirable as its execution,
and that is giving it high praise. It is not easy to recommend
it too highly as a hand-book for students.

* The Literature of France. By H. G. Keene, Hon. M.A. Oxon. New York : Charles
Scribner's Sons.

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 139

The latest issue of the " Unknown " Library is a reproduction
of the sketches called In Tent and Bungalow* the author of
which is understood to be a woman. They deal with subjects
very like those illustrated by Mr. Kipling in " Plain Tales from
the Hills," and in their own way are not badly written. But
that way, for a woman, seems to us a bad enough one. The
" bow-wow " system of the English residents in India, which, be-
ing interpreted, is the system that allows married women to
flirt openly and undisturbed with a single recognized attendant,
without compromising their social position, forms the most
ordinary piece de resistance in the frothy and unsubstantial meal
of tittle-tattle afforded by the sketches. Some of them are bet-
ter " Too Clever by Half," for instance, " Any Port in a Dust-
Storm, " and " The Face in the Fountain." But too often they
illustrate the well-known fact that, when a woman chooses to
use the weapon of light satire in dealing with social immor-
alities, she is in very great danger of suggesting to her readers
that the hilt of that sword, in such hands, is at least as sharp
as the blade.

i. CARTER'S BIOGRAPHY OF MARK HOPKiNs.f
President Carter's biography of his predecessor in the presi-
dency of Williams College is written in a very pleasing and
readable style, and is pervaded by such a calm, candid, and
gentle spirit that no one, whatever his beliefs or opinion may be,
can take offence at any part of its contents. As a piece of
character-painting, and a description of the private and public
career of its subject, it is an excellent specimen of the biographi-
cal art.

Dr. Hopkins was one of the greatest and most estimable
men of the New England professorial body in this century. He
was a very able and successful president and professor during
the greater part of his long life, in a respectable college ; a
leader of great influence in the Congregational denomination ;
and an author of merit and reputation. Revered and loved by
his pupils, esteemed by his compeers and by all with whom he
came in contact, for his intellectual and moral worth and his
amiable character, he has left a name deserving to be held in
honor and preserved in the list of distinguished American educa-
tors and philosophers.

* In Tent and Bungalow. By an Idle Exile. New York : Cassell Publishing Company.
f American Religious Leaders : Mark Hopkins. By Franklin Carter, President of Wil-
liams College. Boston and New York : Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

140

TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [April,

The philosophy and ethics of Dr. Hopkins are intimately and
inseparably connected with his theology. He is a religious philo-
sopher, in the sense that in his system both the data of natural
religion, and also those of revealed religion, are dominant. In a
word, he aimed at teaching a distinctively Christian philosophy
and ethics. As to his precise and specific conception of what
the doctrine of the Christian Revelation truly is, it was, of
course, derived from his Puritan origin and education. Yet it
was greatly modified from the original Puritanism of his eccle-
siastical ancestors, as, for instance, the theology of the chief
among them, President Edwards ; its rugged features were soft-
ened and refined, its most obnoxious and uncatholic tenets, we
may even say, were eliminated. It is in great measure due to
men like Dr. Hopkins, who have filled the chairs of instruction
in the New England colleges, and in similar institutions through-
out the country, that the noxious tendencies to a fundamentally
false and anti-Christian philosophy have been held in check, and
the majority of the studious youth whom they have taught
have retained a belief in God and the divine origin of the Chris-
tian religion.

Who can dispute that they have thus rendered an important
service to the state, as well as to the cause of religion and
morals? Heretofore the common sentiment has been held and
acted on, that for such services they have deserved the counte-
nance and aid of the state in sustaining the colleges by subven-
tions. Williams College received from the legislature of Massa-
chusetts a grant of $75,000. Now there is a cry raised that
giving money to institutions under denominational and ecclesiastical
control is contrary to American principles. It is said that it is
a direct support by the state of some particular form of religion,
and therefore unlawful. This is manifestly false. It is the
American principle not to discriminate in favor of any form of
religion against any other forms which have nothing in them
contrary to those principles of natural religion and ethics upon
which our laws and customs are founded. It is not contrary to
this principle to give countenance and support to an institution
of learning or charity, controlled by a particular denomination,
unless these are refused to others which have an equal claim.
To refuse them to all alike is to discriminate in favor of an ag-
nostic, irreligious sect. This is contrary to American principles.
J making a national profession of a system of anti-Christian
philosophy as a sort of established religion of infidelity.

It is no wonder that those who make open war upon Chris-

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 141

tianity should adopt such a perfidious policy. But it is strange
that any professing Christians should be drawn into its support.
It is very plain that only dislike and fear of the Catholic re-
ligion is the motive. But it is to be hoped that the great body
of the American people will be willing to acquiesce in the full
enjoyment by Catholics of those equal rights which are guaran-
teed to us by our constitutions and laws. It is to be hoped
that they will remain true to the wise maxim of Washington, that
religion is the basis of public and private morals. It is an imme-
diate inference from this principle, that education ought to be
religious, and consequently that the state ought not to act on a
plan of public education which discriminates against schools
where religion is taught in favor of those from which it is ex-
cluded.

2. FATHER MORRIS ON IRISH HISTORICAL QUESTIONS.*

In this book Father Morris gives us what may be called a
sequel to his Life of St. Patrick, a work which has, in the esti-
mation of many good critics, taken the first place among' the
biographies of the Apostle of Ireland. The author's learning
seems to embrace the entire literature of his subject, and his
discrimination has kept pace with his learning. Nor need this
be gainsaid by the evident fact that his heart is in his work,
and that in taking sides on disputed questions he has shown
warmth and zeal of advocacy ; zeal need not be partisan, and is
a trait of sincerity. What the author says in his introduction is
in point : " Although the following essays have been written at
long intervals, the moral is the same throughout ; and just be-
cause there is a moral and a line of argument, a certain ex parte
tone is inevitable, and this, I fear, will prejudice some readers
against the conclusions. In the writings of Catholics about the
saints this is unavoidable, for we believe that they are the accredited
intermediaries between heaven and earth the greatest because
the only absolute and unquestionable benefactors of mankind."

Many readers will follow Father Morris with loving interest in
the chapters which so learnedly treat of St. Patrick's relation with
the great St. Martin, and his tracings of the saint's spirit in the
present religious condition of the Irish race, or, as we might better
term that world-wide people, the Irish races. But to the historical
student and the general public the utter and final exploding of

* Ireland and St. Patrick. By William Bullen Morris, of the Oratory of St. Philip Neri.
London and New York : Burns & Gates.

I4 2 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [April,

the myth of Pope Adrian's bull of the gift of Ireland to Henry
II. will be the most interesting chapter in the work, one as
patiently wrought out and developed as its materials were skil-
fully explored and intelligently possessed in the preliminary in-
vestigations.

The publisher and printer have given us a well manufactured
book.

3. THE REALM OF NATURE.*

This is an admirable summary of the general results of science,
and the methods by which these results have been obtained.
It is, in fact, a complete survey of the vast field of nature, and
conveys the most reliable and varied information on scientific
subjects. The general reader will be apt to find it rather con-
densed, and the student for whose use it is more particularly
compiled will often feel the need of his teacher's explanations to
fully master its contents. It is well supplied with maps and ex-
cellent illustrations of the text, and, all things considered, it is
probably the best summary of the kind that has yet appeared in
our language.

4. MORAL THEOLOGY.f

Two marked excellences of Elbel will make this new edition
of his Moral Theology welcome to all students. The first of
these is the extreme clearness and lucidity of his style, the sec-
ond is the method of exposition which he has adopted. This
consists in the division of his matter into Conferences. Of these
Conferences the substantial part is formed by " cases of con-
science." To the cases are prefixed the preliminary notions
necessary for the solution of the practical questions raised, and
the corollaries to be deduced from both the one and the other
are appended. This method secures the clear and practical ap-
prehension by young students of principles which they often fail to
grasp when put in the more abstract and scientific method which
is commonly adopted. The new edition is an almost exact re-
print of the one which appeared in 1751. A few answers which
are not in accordance with more recent decisions of the Holy

*The Realm of Nature. By Hugh Robert Mill, Dr. Sc. Edinburgh. University Exten-
sion Manuals. New York : Charles Scribner's Sons.

t Theologia Moralis per modum Confer entiar urn. Auctore P. Benjamin Elbel, O.S.F.,
novis curis edidit P. F. Irenaeus Bierbaum, O.S.F. Paderborn* : Ex Typographia Boni-
faciana (J. W. Schroeder) ; New York : Benziger Brothers.

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 143

See have been changed, although not without an indication be-
ing made of such change. The new edition cannot but prove
very useful to those, and they must be many, who have hitherto
been unable to procure the works of this classical author.

5. ARCHBISHOP ULLATHORNE'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.*

Archbishop Ullathorne took a most important part in the
" Second Spring " of the Catholic Church in England. Indeed,
it was chiefly due to his zeal and labors that the hierarchy was
established again in 1851 after its long suppression. But it is not
so much with this great work of his that the present volume
deals. A large part of Dr. Ullathorne's life was spent in Aus-
tralia, and more than a proportional part of his autobiography
recounts his experiences there. It is consequently, to a large
extent, the record of missionary struggles and of the planting of
the church in those distant regions. Those were the days of
the penal settlements, and of primitive arrangements both in
church and state. For example, Dr. Ullathorne says that he al-
ways carried the Blessed Sacrament in a pyx in the breast-pocket,
even though he had often to pass the night in taverns. This he
did in order to be always ready to give Communion to the
sick and dying. We need not say to any one who is in the
least acquainted with Dr. Ullathorne's solid character that this
work is full of valuable instruction ; and as it was not written
for the public use it reveals the secret springs of the life of one
who did so great a work for the church.

6. MADDEN'S MEMOiRS.f

The memoirs in this compact and neatly printed volume are
chiefly autobiographical. During his long life (1798-1886) Dr.
Richard R. Madden published forty volumes. His Lives and
Times of the United Irishmen and History of the Penal Laws
against Catholics are standard historical books worthy of a place
in every library. It is said of him that few men of his day had
seen so much of the world. He made three voyages to America.
In 1835 h e called on General Jackson at the White House, and
was surprised to find no sentinels at the entrance, no state ser-

* The Autobiography of Archbishop Ullathorne. With a selection from his Letters.
London : Burns, Gates & Co. (limited) ; New York : The Catholic Publication Society Co.

\Memoirs of Dr. Madden. By Thomas More Madden, M.D., F.R.C.S.E. New
York : The Catholic Publication Society Co.

144 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [April,

vants in grand liveries. He was still more astonished when a
gentleman sitting on the veranda, in plain attire, smoking a
short meerschaum pipe, replied to his inquiries in these words :
" I am General Jackson. At all times I am glad to receive visi-
tors from the old country, and most happy to see gentlemen
from Ireland, the land which gave birth to my fathers."

Dr. Madden published a work in 1863 on Galileo and the
Inquisition, in which he proved from authentic original sources
that upwards of a century before the birth of Galileo, in 1562,
the motion of the earth and the heliocentric system were theo-
ries that found acceptance among eminent Roman ecclesiastics.

Not the least part of the excellent work accomplished by the
author of this book is that which relates how the anti-slavery
question was discussed by prominent men on both sides of the
Atlantic.

7. A CHRISTIAN HERO.*

Several military men requested Lady Herbert to translate for
the English-speaking public this beautiful life of a true Christian
hero. He gave to the army of France devoted service for forty
years, and an example worthy of the noble knights of old. The
story of his heroic life shows clearly that the highest military vir-
tues may be combined with a genuine earnest 'piety. In a vigor-
ous crusade against fanatical Mahometans pledged to extermi-
nate Christians in Africa he declared that it was his duty " to
preserve the good by terrifying the bad." To all who are
striving to lead a Christian life in the army or navy this book
is full of encouragement. Lady Herbert's work as a translator
deserves the highest praise.

*Li/e of General de Sonis. By Monsignor Baunard. Translated by Lady Herbert:
London : Art and Book Company ; New York : Benziger Brothers.

1892.] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 145

THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION.

ALL COMMUNICATIONS RELATING TO READING CIRCLES, LISTS OF BOOKS,
ETC., SHOULD BE ADDRESSED TO THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION,
415 WEST FIFTY-NINTH STREET, NEW YORK CITY.

THE school that gives exclusive attention to progress in arith-
metic a study unduly magnified by recent educators usually
makes scanty provision for the reading matter supplied to its
scholars. Practical teachers are compelled to act against their
own better judgment in following regulations imposed by incom-
petent school officials. No opportunity is allowed in many
places for teachers to express their convictions on the relative
value of arithmetic to other studies equally important. Their
work is judged by a narrow standard on one subject, which is
intended to secure accuracy in business. Hence it is that gener-
ous efforts for the intellectual and moral elevation of children by
the aid of interesting studies in literature seldom bring to the
teacher any advancement in the line of promotion, though de-
serving of the highest official sanction. An investigation of the
educational influences most valuable in this age has convinced
eminent thinkers that the reading habit is second to none. From
books studiously read in early life some of the greatest men
have derived their lofty ideas and plans for the work to which
they were devoted. In the careers of those who had limited op-
portunities for attending school, we see how much they gained
by judicious reading. With truth it has been said that their fund
of information was gathered from the great books of the world.
These books did more than the teachers to make them masters
of the wisdom of other times, and other places. What they
gathered from the printed records of thinkers on various sub-
jects inspired them with a laudable ambition to work upward to
the noble ends they sought. Their minds were not mere calcu-
lating machines. A taste for reading was the most valuable ele-
ment of their education.

* * *

Richard H. Clarke, LL.D., president of the New York Cath-
olic Protectory, in a statement of the work of that excellent in-
stitution, admits the difficulty of keeping the boys from getting
cheap sensational newspapers and books which vitiate the mind.

I4 6 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [April,

Some of the most worthless productions of the press find their
way by unknown channels into select boarding colleges and
academies where young ladies are vigilantly protected. Among
young folks everywhere, at home and in school, there is the in-
cessant appetite for reading which must be taken into account
by all whose duty it is to supply their reasonable demands. On
this subject we heartily agree with Principal George E. Hardy,
of New York City. In a pamphlet kindly sent by him to the
Columbian Reading Union we find this undeniable statement of
fact : " As modern civilization in its contemporary literature offers
to those who read abundant opportunities for mental and moral
degradation, the conclusion is inevitable that in teaching a child
simply how to read, without attempting to develop in him a
taste for good reading, the work of the school has been fatally
incomplete." Professor Stanley Hall is quoted as authority for
the opinion that the school has no right to teach how to read
without doing more than it now does to direct the taste and
confirm the habit of reading what is good rather than what is
bad. It is no exaggeration to say that the school which sends
forth into the world scholars without literary taste, and the
power of discriminating between good and bad reading, contri-
butes but little to mental culture. As the public schools are now
constituted, it is only in the ethical teaching of literature that
any opportunity is given to take hold of the spiritual side of
the child's life, and this opportunity is rarely utilized.

The Educational Review published an article not long ago,
written by Principal Hardy, from which the following passages
are taken :

" I am not one of those who claim that in the reading and
study of literature will be found the restoration of man's moral
excellence, and the future regeneration of the world ; yet, with Pro-
fessor Laurie, I believe that in the proper reading of literature
by children we have the means not only of cultivating their
taste and uplifting their imagination, but, what is vastly more
important, of inculcating in them the precepts of morality, and
of disposing their minds toward a higher and more spiritual life.
This I conceive to be, to-day, the true function of literature in
our elementary schools.

"It has been amply demonstrated that the cultivation of the
reading habit and the development of a correct literary taste in
children may be commenced at a much earlier age than most
teachers are prepared to admit, and that the foundation of such
work can be profitably begun in the lower classes of our schools.

1892.] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 147

Fortunately neither the commencement nor the promotion of
this important work will entail any radical change in existing
methods, nor need it burden the already over-laden- backs of our
teachers with more than they are carrying at present. The
essence of the change consists simply in following the Biblical
injunction of giving the child bread instead of a stone ; in sub-
stituting for the inane and commonplace contents of the ordi-
nary reader the healthy, bracing reading-matter which the judg-
ment of time has declared classic.

" The first years of a child's school experience are devoted
to initiating him into the mysteries of the alphabet and the
primer. Having mastered their difficulties he passes onward to
a graded series of readers, which as a rule consists of five books
the five inanities, they have been called. The average reader is
a purely haphazard collection of prose and poetical extracts of
varying degrees of literary merit. In the lower numbers the
contents are of such a vacuous and insipid character, and appeal
so lightly to the interest or to the imagination of the child, that
one is unavoidably forced to conclude that the selections have
been made to order for grading purposes only. The third and
fourth readers are less trivial, perhaps, but even more common-
place. Where the selections have not been taken outright from
standard works, they are generally feeble and their literary
value is nil, whether we examine them from the point of view
of their thought-content, the language in which they are written,
or the form in which they are cast. The literary value of the
higher numbers is generally greater, inasmuch as the lessons are
made up almost entirely of extracts from standard authors. Al-
though the selections are not wisely or even happily made, yet
these readers present to children their only opportunity of com-
ing in contact with real literature during their school courses.

" Nor does a closer inspection of our school readers disclose
in them any hidden excellence that might have escaped a hur-
ried examination. Even in those readers which are made up
of extracts from classic writings it is not always apparent that
the selections have been made with the view of cultivating the
taste of the youthful scholar, or of developing in him the habit
of critical reading. Degraded, as the average reader has been,
to the position of an educational maid-of-all-work, one finds
scattered throughout it scraps of geography, bits of history,
chunks of science, and an olla podrida of whatever may be the
prevailing pedagogic fad of the day, but scans its pages in vain
for those writings described by Plato as finding their gracious
way into the secret places of the soul, exalting the minds of
those who read them."

The New York State Teachers' Association*jhas~organized a
standing committee on literature, of which Principal jjHardy is
chairman. The plan of this committee is to 'increase in every
way the child's opportunities for reading the best books, by

VOL. LV.- -10

I4 8 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [April,

" the preparation of leaflets on reading for the young ; the for-
mation and proper use of school libraries; the reviewing and
classifying of recent juvenile works ; the preparation of lists of
suitable books books of fiction, history, travel, biography, and
popular science so classified that the busy teacher will be en-
abled to select at a glance choice reading matter for each of the
school grades.

"To complete the programme thus outlined is a work too
ambitious for the committee to attempt at present. As an ini-
tial step the committee proposes to issue, in time for the next
convention, a little pamphlet in which an effort will be made to
classify some of the works of literature, according to the stan-
dards of grading now in current use in the schools, and thus
furnish to teachers a list of literary masterpieces which can either
serve as reading matter for their classes, or be used as alternates
with the regular reading books of the grade. Such a list of
books has already been prepared, and it is now deemed advisa-
ble to subject this list to an extended comparison with other
lists for the purpose of perfecting it, and also of including in it
as many additional books as may be practicable. The method
of grading adopted in this list is that followed in the ordinary
series of school readers, and books will be classified as alternates
for the First, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Readers."

The Columbian Reading Union's list of books for the young,
selected from the catalogue of Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons,
has been favorably received. Over two thousand copies are now
distributed. Every Catholic parish school in New York State
has been supplied with a copy gratis, as well as those whose
names are recorded on our books. Members of the Union may
obtain extra copies of this list for their friends without addition-
al expense. We urge them to take advantage of this offer
promptly. Through the aid of kind friends, who agree to de-
fray the expense of postage, we hope to extend to all the Catho-
lic children of the United States the advantages secured by our
list of books for the young. The total number of Catholic par-
ish schools, obtained by adding together the figures in the re-
port from each diocese in the United States for the year 1892,
15 3>334> attended by over 700,000 scholars. It is our sincere
desire to assist the teachers of this vast army of children in
making efforts for the purpose of diffusing good literature. We
shall be pleased to have them send letters on the subject to the
Columbian Reading Union. Some one who is not a stern in-
structor of facts and figures, one having some knowledge of the
laws of juvenile thought and sympathy for young folks who
dearly love a story, should be requested to give personal atten-

1892.] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 149

tion to the study of ways and means of getting for every school
at least a small collection of the best books for children.

The Catholic boy who wrote his opinions of books for one
of the Paulist Fathers is a pioneer in an uncultivated region.
His opinions have a foundation in fact, which is more than can
be said of fanciful professional criticisms. We are very much
pleased to know that such competent judges as Brother Azarias
and Principal Hardy have acknowledged that our pioneer boy is
a curiosity in literature, and that the plan of fostering among
young folks a desire to talk and write about the books they read
may develop surprising results. A writer in The Critic admits
that it is a " novel thing " to see an invitation extended by the
Columbian Reading Union to the young to write and send in
notices of the books they read. The specimen notices from the
pen of a boy of fourteen were found by the reviewer in The
Critic " by no means unintelligent. The youngster's sense of
humor is shown by his reference to Mr. Stockton's Jolly Fellow-
ship as a story that is told in such a dry way that you would
have to laugh at it if you had lost a five-dollar bill. Another
author beloved of this boy is Noah Brooks, and a book that
delights his soul is Hans Brinker"

A volume on Writers and Books has lately appeared from
the press of Putnam, consisting of lectures delivered before the
Teachers' University Association of Oxford, by George Bir-
beck Hill, D.C.L. of Pembroke College. He takes strong ground
against teachers who make grammatical exercises out of fine
passages of poetry. He says : " The man who would use a great
poet to beat grammar into a boy, who would parse * Hamlet '
and analyze * Paradise Lost,' would botanize upon his mother's
grave. If you must teach grammatical analysis get it out of
Tupper." In another paragraph he thus alludes to the ideal plan
of reading for children : " Happy is the child who has the run
of a good library, and who for a certain part of each day is
allowed to read at random ; who is turned loose in the rich
pastures of English literature to" browse where he pleases. It
would be a wise practice in every school, with as much regu-
larity as the morning prayer comes round, to read aloud some
fine passage from a book to be left accessible to him who wished
to read more."

* * # y

One of the first active workers in the Reading Circle move-

1 5 o THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [April,

ment sends the good news that the little seed planted by the
assistance of THE CATHOLIC WORLD in December, 1888, has
flourished, and the interest in the work has not abated :

"To the non-parochial Catholic Reading Circle established
March 10, 1889, and the local parish Newman Circle March 17,
1889, was added last winter another, the non-parochial Catholic
Literary Society, which was the first to try and successfully-
mixed membership. Now we are about to form a central board
of members from these -three circles, for occasional interchange
of talent, and for any general business that may come up in the
interest of Catholic literature. In this union I intend to work
for the establishment of a library where all Catholic books may
be obtained free. Accept my congratulations on the result of
the recent Convention of the Apostolate of the Press. I read
every item of reference to it in the secular and religious papers
that come to us. Of particular interest to me is the Church
Calendar. I knew not of its existence until I read a brief notice
of Rev. John Hughes's paper. E. G."

One of our regular correspondents has made the discovery
that there is "a great deal in the history of the church which
seems, from perverse views, to condemn her, but when looked
into carefully only point out her strength and beauty all the
more forcibly. There are some among us who have studied his-
tory in school under the guidance of bigoted teachers, and from
very narrow-minded authors, and to such persons any scheme
that opens up a line of thought in the right direction is certainly
great encouragement."

ft * *

With pleasure we have examined a list of stories, poems, and
books for children and young people between the ages of seven
and seventeen prepared by Mrs. M. S. Mooney, of the State
Normal College at Albany, N. Y. The one hundred and forty
books named in this collection include the fables, myths, and
folk-lore of the ancient classics, which modern writers make use
of to illustrate and enrich their works. They also introduce
young readers to some of the -great epochs of history in an in-
direct way. Such reading, placed within easy reach of children
at home or in school, will aid very much in forming a standard
of taste to lessen the desire for foolish sensational stories.

We are willing to receive many members at large like the
writer of the following letter :

1892.] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 151

" Please enter my name on your list as a member of the
Columbian Reading Union, for which purpose I enclose one dol-
lar. There is something of a Reading Circle already organized
here. This is a beginning. There will doubtless be others. In
the meantime I would like to be considered ' a member at large,'
if I may so express it, of your association. I have always felt
that the Paulist Fathers were the ones of all others to direct
young American Catholics in the safe paths of sound literature.
I have often said as much, and have come to the conclusion
that I could say it with a better grace .after taking the step of
joining the Union myself."

In answer to a request for criticisms of books by juvenile
readers an esteemed correspondent writes:

" I will try to interest my friend, the director in the public
library, in it, as well as some who have charge of Sunday-school
libraries. I would rather have the direction of people's reading
than any other power over them. I know from experience the
great good that can be accomplished in elevating the taste for
literature if the librarian knows what to do and does it."

A distinguished president of a St. Vincent de Paul Society
in Canada sends this letter :

"Will you kindly send me a list of good Catholic books that
will be attractive as well as good reading for young persons.

" I find it difficult to secure reading matter sufficiently inter-
esting to enchain the attention of young boys and girls, not yet
old enough to appreciate merely the good. A spice of adven-
ture or exciting incident of some kind seems necessary now, as
ever, to make books palatable to beginners at least. You will
also confer a great favor by giving me the names of some good
selections for evening readings, recitations, and light plays for
young and old.

" If you will send a catalogue of books for a Catholic library,
with directions as to prices and as to where they can be got
most reasonably, I will feel greatly obliged. - B. L. D."

Rome is proverbially slow in deciding important matters,
but it leads the way in the celebration of the fourth centennial of
Christopher Columbus. On February 14 a polyglot academy
was held in his honor at the palace of the Apostolic Chancery
under the supervision of Monsignor Tripepi, secretary of the com-
mission for historic studies. The correspondent of the New York
Catholic News informs us that papers were read in different lan-
guages bearing on the life and work of the great navigator.

Monsignor Caprara spoke in Latin, showing the service ren-
dered to the Catholic religion by Columbus ; Marquis Crisp

I52 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [April,

Colti dwelt, in Italian, on the genius of Columbus; Mon-
signor Benavides treated, in Spanish, of the important part
taken by the Catholic clergy in the discovery of America;
Professor Seeboeck spoke, in German, in praise of the immortal
Genoese navigator; Professor Poletto recited a poetical tribute
on Columbus at the appearance of the New World; the
learned Abb Serpoulet made an eloquent synthesis upon the
eminently religious character of Christopher Columbus, describ-
ing his piety and virtues ; whilst the crowning discourse of the
meeting was that pronounced, in English, by the vice-rector of
the English College, Rev. Dr. John Pryor, who proved conclu-
sively that the enterprise of Columbus was a fruit of the Catho-
lic faith. The Cardinal-Vicar of Rome, who was to have deliv-
ered the closing essay, was impeded by sickness from taking part
in the proceedings, but expressed, through Monsignor Caprara,
his regrets for enforced absence and his warm approval of Colum-
bus as a true son of the church. The renowned Jesuit, Father
Angelini, contributed an elegant Latin inscription for the occa-
sion. The venerable Cardinal Mertel, Vice-Chancellor of the Holy
Roman Church, occupied the post of honor, surrounded by nu-
merous prelates amid them Archbishop Ireland, of St. Paul, Min-
nesota by many ecclesiastics, members of the Roman Patriciate ;
religious and seminarians, of every nationality.

In Genoa Signor Quarene, of Novello, North Italy, has been
authorized to construct, in the Italo-American Exposition of Gen-
oa, a kiosk, to bear the form of an egg broken at the lower
end ; in which building he proposes to install a cafe"-restaurant,
which he is persuaded will be largely patronized during the fes-
tivals in honor of the fourth centennial of the discovery of
America. This egg will be twenty-five metres in height, dimen-
sions somewhat calculated to put to shame the original egg used
by Columbus.

Reliable historians all declare that Christopher Columbus was
distinctively a Catholic, renowned for dauntless courage as an
explorer and conspicuous for his mental gifts. He undertook
and carried to success his great achievements with a view to
the spiritual and intellectual advancement of the human race.
His example is commended to all the members of this Reading
Union which bears his name. Hostile critics have already begun
to belittle his claim to be ranked among the immortals. Loyalty
to the Catholic Church was the chief barrier to his greatness ac-
cording to the standard of criticism which prevails among Amer-
ican bigots.

1892.] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 153

A writer in the Catholic News, of Preston, England, was favor-
ably impressed with the account of the work accomplished by
the Catholic Reading Circles of Boston. It is praised as a phase
of Catholic life in the United States which might profitably be
imitated elsewhere. This English advocate of our movement
sees no reason why every Catholic church should not have a
society of the kind, because the members require no special
degree of culture to begin with, no elaborate machinery of or-
ganization is needed, nor yet any strength of numbers. " It
may be said we have literary societies which do the same work.
So we have a few, but very few. The Reading Circles, however,
as being far less ambitious and more easily practicable, might
well be taken up where literary societies would have little chance
of succeeding. They might, for instance, be very well added
wherever the admirable church library system sanctioned by the
Bishop of Salford is carried on. The success of the system
would be entirely a matter of the energy with which it might
be taken up ; and no efforts in such a direction, even though of
a merely transient nature, would be entirely wasted."

We hope that our appreciative friend in England will con-
tinue to write on this question. Some new evidence from over
the water may awaken signs of zeal for the diffusion of good
Catholic literature, which is our main object in many parishes of
America where as yet nothing has been attempted. The move-
ment needs no further endorsement from the clergy, as it is found-
ed on safe lines and directed chiefly in view of the intellectual
demands of the age. Intelligent representatives of the laity have
it in their power to begin at once the formation of Reading
Circles, especially devoted to the study of the great thoughts
embodied in the works of Catholic authors.

M. C. M.

WlTH THE PUBLISHER. [April,

WITH THE PUBLISHER.

THE Publisher again calls attention to the fact that the Re-
port of the Convention of the Apostolate of the Press is not
stereotyped, and that the edition is a limited one. There are
now but few copies left, and these can only be obtained by ap-
plying directly to the office of the Columbus Press. Please send
in your orders at once, for the Report cannot go into a second
edition, and the value of the book is being so widely recognized
that orders are pouring in every day, and we will soon be with-
out the books to fill them ; we therefore urge all to whom this
Report can be of service to no longer delay sending in their
orders, and to this office directly. The edition is so small and
the demand so great that we are obliged to make this rule, and
in the interest of individual readers and workers in the cause we

cannot depart from it.

And who is there who has zeal and courage and intelligence
that cannot and ought not labor in this cause? Where is there
a Catholic worthy of the name who cannot see, and is not
moved to use in one way or another, the opportunities of the
printed truth in behalf of those about him ? Is there a man
who is blind to these opportunities or deaf to the call that zeal
should make on his ears? Then, this Report is the book he
needs to make his duty plain to him ; to show him ways and
means, no matter what his natural gifts are, no matter what his
environment. This Report is the hand-book for zeal ; and there is
no possible field for its exercise that it does not touch, there is no
appeal it does not make, no objection it does not meet. There
can be no man who will not be the better for reading the stir-
ring pages of this Report, and learning how much has been done
and how much can be done, how readily, how easily for the cause
of revealed truth. It is a book to make a man think, and think
in a way at once practical and profitable. So, be alive to the
chance of securing a copy, and urge your friends to follow your
example. For your own sake and for the sake of the good it
will help you to do, attend to this matter without any delay. It
is only a small matter of twenty-five cents, but the investment
will pay you as nothing in this world can.

1892.] WITH THE PUBLISHER. 155

Brother Azarias, notwithstanding his many duties in the class-
room, is an indefatigable laborer in the cause of higher Catholic
literature. The Report of the Proceedings of the New York
Teachers' Association at their meeting last year contains in full
his admirable paper on Church Schools. The Report can . be ob-
tained by addressing the secretary, Mr. Welland Hendrick, Sara-
toga Springs, N. Y. The learned Brother will issue at an early
date, through the press of Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Phases of
Thought and Criticism. The latter part of the volume " is oc-
cupied with an analysis of three of the world's masterpieces
. . . De Imitation e Christi, the Divina Commedia, and In Me-
moriam."

It is announced that Mr. K. W. Barry, who succeeded Mr.
Lawrence Kehoe as manager of the Catholic Publication Society
Company, will resign his position on May I.

Our readers will be pleased to hear that Mr. Griffith's trans-
lation of the Abbe Fouard's Life of Jesus, a notice of which
appeared a few months ago in THE CATHOLIC WORLD, has been
so successful that the translator has been encouraged to under-
take another volume of the same author's series on the Origins
of the Church. The book is in the printer's hands and will be
published by Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co. almost imme-
diately.

Mr. John Hodges, to whose enterprise we are indebted for
the publication of Father Gasquet's Henry VIII. and the Eng-
lish Monasteries and Edward VI. and the Book of Common Prayer,
as also Dr. Pastor's History of the Popes, Father O'Reilly's Essays on
the Relations of the Church to Society, and other valuable works,
and of whom Messrs. Benziger Brothers are, we believe, the agents
for this country, announces a series of biographies to be called
" Heroes of the Cross." The first volumes of this series, to be
issued immediately, are the Life of St. Gregory the Great, by
the Right Rev. I. B. Snow, O.S.B., and Christopher Columbus,
His Life, Labors, and Discoveries, by Mariana Monteiro. Other vol-
umes are: the Life of Hugh of Avalon, by Canon Perry, and a
new edition of the Life of St. Stephen Harding, which originally
appeared in Cardinal Newman's series of Lives of the English
Saints.

Another important work announced by Mr. Hodges is a
translation of the Benedictine Calendar, a work first published in
1677. This work is to be issued in twelve monthly parts, with
fine copies of the original engravings reproduced by the Meisen-
bach process.

I5 6 WITH THE PUBLISHER. [April,

The Catholic Publication Society Co. has just published :
Aquinas Ethicus ; or, The Moral Teaching of St. Thomas.

A translation of the principal portions of the second part

of 'the Summa Theologica, with notes. By Rev. Joseph

Rickaby, SJ. Two vols.
The Wisdom and Wit of Blessed Thomas More. Edited,

with Introduction, by Rev. T. E. Bridgett, C.SS.R.,

etc.
The Passage of Our Lord to the Father. Conclusion of

" Life of Our Life." By Rev. H. J. Coleridge, SJ. New

volume, Quarterly Series.

The same company announces :

A new ' edition of Rev. H. F. Fairbanks's Visit to Europe
and the Holy Land.

The Spirit of St. Ignatius, Founder of the Society of Je,sus.
Translated from the French of Rev. Fr. Xavier de Fran-
ciosi, of the same Society.

My Zouave. By Mrs. Bartle Teeling, author of " Roman Vio-
lets," etc.

The Hail Mary ; or, Popular Instructions and Considera-
tions on the Angelical Salutation. By J. P. Val d'Eremao,
D.D., author of "The Serpent of Eden," "Keys of
Peter," etc.

This house has in preparation a new edition of the popular
series of Young Catholic s Readers, from new plates and with new
and artistic illustrations by Mr. James Kelly, who has won fame
both with the pencil and the chisel. In the matter of illustra-
tion alone this series will be without a peer among readers.

Benziger Brothers' new publications are :

Christian Anthropology. By Rev. John Thein. With an
Introduction by Prof. Charles G. Herbermann, Ph.D.,
LL.D. This is the only book on the subject in English,
we believe, written from a Catholic stand-point.

A Manual of Political Economy. By Charles S. Devas,
M.A., Examiner in Political Economy in the Royal Uni-
versity of Ireland. This is the last number of the Eng-
lish Manuals of Catholic Philosophy.

Thirty-two Instructions for the Month of May and the Feasts
of the Blessed Virgin. Translated from the French by
Rev. Thomas F. Ward.

1892.] BOOKS RECEIVED. 157

The Reasonableness of the Practices of the Catholic Church.
By Rev. J. J. Burke, Chebanse, 111.

A Martyr of Our Own Times. From the French of the
Right Rev. Monsignor D'Hulst, Rector of the Catholic
Institute, Paris. Edited by Very Rev. J. R. Slattery,
Rector of St. Joseph's Seminary, Baltimore. With a letter
of approbation from his Eminence Cardinal Gibbons.

Education for the Indian. By Rev. L. B. Palladino, S.J.

They have in press and in preparation :

Legends of the Middle Ages. By Henry Wilson.
Americans and the Roman Question. By Monsignor Joseph

Schroeder, of the Catholic University, Washington, D. C.
The Sacramentals of the Holy Catholic Church. By Rev.

A. A. Lambing.

Four new story-books for the young :

Olive, and The Little Cakes. From the French.
Gertrude's Experience. From the French by Mrs. Mary C.

Monroe.

The Bric-a-Brac Dealer. From the French.
Her Father's Right Hand. From the French.

BOOKS RECEIVED.

TRAVELS AMONGST THE GREAT ANDES OF THE EQUATOR. By Edward

Whymper. With Maps and Illustrations. New York : Charles Scribner's

Sons.
RECOLLECTIONS AND LETTERS OF ERNEST RENAN. Translated by Isabel

F. Hapgood. New York : Cassell Publishing Company.
HUMANITY IN ITS ORIGIN AND EARLY GROWTH. By E. Colbert, M.A.

Chicago : The Open Court Publishing Company.
THE ELEMENTS OF ETHICS : An Introduction to Moral Philosophy. By J. H.

Muirhead, M.A., Lecturer in mental and moral science, Royal Holloway

College, Egham. New York :* Charles Scribner's Sons.
PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY. By Father Matteo Liberatore, S.J.

Translated by Edward Heneage Bering, author of " Freville Chase," etc.

London : Art and Book Company (and Leamington) ; New York : Benzi-

ger Bros., agents.
THE LIFE OF BLESSED PETER ALOYSIUS MARY CHANEL, MARIST, First

Martyr of Oceania and Apostle of Futuna. From the French. Edited

by Basil Tozer. London : Art and Book Company ; New York : Benziger

Bros.
THE HEIR OF LISCARRAGH. By Victor O'D. Power. London : Art and Book

Company ; New York : Benziger Brothers.
ESSAYS, CHIEFLY ON POETRY. By Aubrey de Vere, LL.D. In two volumes :

Vol. I. Criticisms on Certain Poets. London and New York : Macmillan

&Co.

I5 8 BOOKS RECEIVED. [April, 1892.

GERMANIC ORIGINS : A STUDY IN PRIMITIVE CULTURE. By Francis B. Gum-
mere, Ph.D., Professor of English in Haverford College. New York :
Charles Scribner's Sons.

NOT ON CALVARY : A Layman's Plea for Meditation on the Temptation in the
Wilderness. New York : Charles T. Dillingharn & Co.

THE JOURNEY OF THE MAGI KINGS. From the Life of the Blessed Virgin,
after the Meditations of Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich. Translated
from the French by George Richardson. London : Art and Book Com-
pany; New York: Benziger Bros.

THE TRIAL OF MARGARET BRERETON. By Pleydell North. New York, Cin-
cinnati, and Chicago : Benziger Bros.

SACERDOS MAXIMUS OMNES CHRISTI JESU MINISTROS VIAM ET VERITATEM
DOCENS. Auctore Bernadino Aquilante. Romae : Soc. S. Joannis
Evangelistae. New York : Benziger Bros.

A PILGRIMAGE TO THE HOLY COAT OF TREVES (with an account of its his-
tory and authenticity). By Richard F. Clarke, SJ. London : Longmans,
Green & Co.; New York : 15 East Sixteenth Street.

CATECHISM OF SCRIPTURAL AND ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY. For the use of
schools: Dublin : Browne & Nolan.

THE RELATIONS OF THE CHURCH TO SOCIETY. Theological Essays by Ed-
mund J. O'Reilly, SJ. (sometime Professor of Theology in Maynooth Col-
lege, at St. Beuno's in North Wales^ and in the Catholic University of
Ireland). Edited, with a biographical notice, by Matthew Russell, SJ.
London ; John Hodges. New York : Benziger Bros., agents.

PAMPHLETS RECEIVED.

THE OFFICE AND WORK OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. A paper read before the

Milwaukee Convocation, at Elkhorn, December 3, 1891. By Edward G.

Richardson.
BISHOP VESEY, of Sutton Coldfield and Exeter. By J. R. Willington, M.A.

London : Art and Book Company ; New York : Benziger Bros.
TRADITIONS. By Joseph Pope. Pamphlet No. 2. The Catholic Truth Society

of Ottawa.

THE DUTY OF THE STATE TO EDUCATE ITS CITIZENS. By Rev. W. B.

Williams. Boston : Beacon Press.
VOICE OF THE HIERARCHY. Letters of Approval from Cardinal, Archbishops,

and Bishops of the United States. St Paul: Catholic Truth Society of

America.

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE OF A PHYSICIAN. With an appeal to the medical

and clerical professions. By John Ellis, M.D. Philadelphia: Hahne-

mann Publishing House.
CLAIMS OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN IHE MAKING OF THE REPUBLIC.

By his Eminence James Cardinal Gibbons, D.D. Pamphlet No. 16. St.

Paul : Catholic Truth Society of America.
How CHRIST FOUNDED THE CHURCH. By Rev. James L. Meagher, author

of " Teaching Truth," The Seven Gates of Heaven," etc. Pamphlet No.

1 5. St. Paul : Catholic Truth Society of America.
CAPITAL PUNISHMENT : Additional Report of the Commissioners of the State

of New York. Albany : James B. Lyon.
THE PARENT FIRST : An Answer to Dr. Bouquillon's Query, " Education : To

Whom does it Belong ?" By Rev. R. I. Holaind, SJ. Second edition.

New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago : Benziger Bros.

THE

CATHOLIC WORLD

VOL. LV. MAY, 1892. No. 326.

THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN.

AN OBJECT-LESSON.

FORTY or more years ago, while reading in the public library
of my native town in eastern Conn; "ticut, I noticed on a shelf
before me a book entitled Science and Revealed Religion.
The name attracted my attention. I had just entered on the
study of physical science, and had become especially interested
in geology, whose seeming contradiction of the then current in-
terpretation of the Mosaic cosmogony had already disturbed my
conscience, and led me to look anxiously for some fact or hy-
pothesis by which they might be reconciled. Eagerly, therefore,
I opened the book, but on turning to the title-page found, to
my dismay and disappointment, that it was written by a Catho-
lic priest. Could any good come out of Nazareth ? Could
truthfulness of statement, or honesty of reasoning, be looked for
from the pen of one who had surrendered his own intellect to
the deceits of Roman error, and now appeared as the avowed emis-
sary of the Apocalyptic Antichrist ? Sadly I closed the volume,
but as I did so my eye fell upon the fly-leaf, where, in the pen-
cilled handwriting of a distinguished scholar of the neighbor-
hood, I read, "Fas est et ab hoste doceri" At once the tenor
of my feelings changed. Taking the book to my home I exam-
ined it with care and satisfaction. It shed the light I needed
on the problems which perplexed me ; but, more than that, it
introduced me into the vast treasure-house of Catholic literature
which, to minds prejudiced as my own up to that time had been,
is still unfortunately an " unknown land."

The lesson taught me by that pencilled proverb and its im-
mediate results has never been forgotten ; and in many walks of
life the investigation, which has proved to me more fruitful in

!6o THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN. [May,

practical advantage than any other, has been into the causes of
the success or failure of my adversaries. Hence is it that with
no reluctant hand, in this awakening of the Catholic mind to
the importance of the press as a missionary agency in the con-
version of mankind, I unfold the records of that remarkable or-
ganization which during the past hundred years has been the
mainstay of the Methodist Church in this country, and has done
more than any other means could do to extend, consolidate, and
establish Methodist principles and discipline among the people
of the Anglo-Saxon world.

Yet it is not without much hesitation that I speak of Metho-
dists as adversaries. It is true that among them prevail the
strangest misconceptions of Catholic truth, and that these are
not confined to the unlearned, but are shared equally by their
most prominent theologians and teachers.* It is also true that,
more than any other denomination of Protestants in the present
century, they have pursi. an aggressive policy toward the
Catholic Church, and in numerous books, racts, and sermons
have grievously misrepresented her doctrines, purposes, and ac-
tions\f But these expressions of hostility have been personal
rather than denominational, and do not afford a correct idea of
the spirit of Methodism itself. Methodism, as a religious move-
ment gradually developing into an ecclesiastical organism, was
the reaction of certain Catholic principles against the formal
morality of Anglicanism on one hand, and the oppressive limita-
tions of Calvinism on the other. Its founder attributed his
earliest definite impulses toward that interior spiritual life, on
which he and his followers afterward insisted as the only test
of Christian character, to his study of the Imitation of Christ ; %
his methods of practical missionary work were largely copied
from those of the great preaching orders of the church. The

* See Methodist Review, January-February, 1892, p. ii., article by Professor W. F. Steele :
"The Romanist's Doctrine of Mary's Immaculate Conception by Her Mother.' 1 ' 1

An anonymous letter, recently received by the author, signed " A Follower of the Lord,"
and evidently written by a person of literary pretensions and an occasional reader of THE
CATHOLIC WORLD, exhibits the inability of the Protestant mind, without immediate Catho-
lic aid, to understand the plainest utterances of the Council of Trent, and the facts of
Catholic history.

t See the current catalogue of the Book Concern.

I Mr. Wesley thus writes of himself: "In the year 1726 I met with Kempis's Christian
Pattern. The nature and extent of inward religion, the religion of the heart, now appeared
to me in a stronger light than ever it had done before. I saw that giving even all my life to
God (supposing it possible to do this and go no farther) would profit me nothing unless I
gave my heart, yea, all my heart, to him."

In 1748 Mr. Wesley was preaching on Dublin Green near the barrack. A man cried
out : " Aye, he is a Jesuit, that's plain!" To which a Popish priest, who happened to be near,
replied : "No, he is not. I would to God he was."

1892.] THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN. 161

rule of life which he prescribed for his disciples was formed out
of those precepts by which ascetic writers had for ages guided
Catholic souls along the way of holiness. The organization of
its scattered congregations in this country into a church followed
a plan so similar to that of the Roman hierarchy that one of
its noted and eccentric preachers arraigned it, in an indictment of
twenty articles, as an imitation of the Pap.al power.* The task
which it has undertaken and accomplished in the conversion of
sinners, and the promotion of Christian faith and morals, has
been mainly in the line of Catholic effort, especially in its offer
of a free salvation to every one who will receive it, in its in-
sistence on a complete submission of the human will to the di-
vine as an indispensable condition for obtaining sanctifying grace,
and in its constant endeavor to establish a conscious personal
union between the regenerate soul and its living, present
Saviour. The influence which it has exercised outside its own
borders has been of the same character. It has inoculated
Anglicanism with a Catholic energy and flexibility hitherto un-
known to its traditions. It has melted down the iron barriers of
Calvinism, and driven from its pulpits and confessions the notion
of a Creator who could foreordain the eternal damnation of
his creatures. It has kept alive among a race from whom the
Catholic Church was by a barbarous penal code, and by intense
hereditary prejudices, excluded a spirit of religious fervor and a
sense of religious responsibility which, more than any other
quality, prepares the way for the perception and acceptance of
Catholic truth, and has secured the graces of the sacrament of
baptism to millions who otherwise, as far as human vision can
discern, would have lived and died without God and without
hope in the world.

Far be it, then, from any Catholic to speak of Methodism, in
this higher and universal sense, as of an enemy. What English
and American Christianity would have been without it if they
had continued until this time in their ancient channels, so far
as that state of things can be conjectured, best serves to show
its value as a leader to the generations which are gone, and as
a forerunner of the Catholic Church in its return to the domain
from which it was expelled with fire and sword three centuries
ago.

The grasp of the early Methodists upon the situation of the
godless multitude around them nowhere appears more evident
than in the means which they employed for its illumination.

* Works of Rev. Lorenzo Dow, p. 375.
VOL. LV.- -I I

!6 2 THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN. [May,

They recognized the fact, so frequently forgotten, that in the
restoration of the human soul to God the light of knowledge
must precede the adhesion of the will, and in the communica-
tion of that knowledge have uniformly treated the pulpit and
the press as co-ordinate branches of the teaching power. Mr.
Wesley was himself a distinguished scholar, and obtained and
held his leadership rather by his writing than his preaching.
Although it is said that during his fifty years of active missionary
work he delivered more than forty thousand sermons, he also
wrote and published thirty volumes, and translated and edited
one hundred and twenty more. Tracts fell from his pen "like
autumn leaves wherever he went." Upon his itinerant associates
he imposed the duty of circulating religious books and pamphlets ;
the importance of this duty not yielding in his estimation to that
of preaching itself, since printed matter "holds the attention of
the people for six days of the week, while preaching is almost
entirely limited to the Sabbath." * In the extension of their
labors to this country the same double agency was employed.
During the first twenty years they imported most of their books
and tracts from England, although a few had been printed in
New York and elsewhere. But the expensiveness and insuffici-
ency of this method were inconsistent with their practical wis-
dom, and shortly after the close of the Revolution, and the or-
ganization of their members into a distinct denomination, they
determined to establish a publishing house of their own for the
preparation and distribution of religious literature. This deter-
mination they carried into effect in 1789. At this time their
preachers numbered about two hundred, and their entire mem-
bership was less than fifty thousand, scattered throughout the
United States and Canada, nearly one-half of whom resided in
Virginia and Maryland. Most of these were, individually, in
humble circumstances, while the denomination had no foreign
source to which to look for missionary aid. Materials and trans-
portation were very costly, and the probable returns for capi-
tal expended exceedingly slow. But all these obstacles tended
rather to intensify than weaken the purpose and courage of the
Methodist leaders, and with daring, if not with worldly prudence,
they launched the enterprise which has successfully stood the
test of a hundred years' experience, and has so fully met their
needs and realized their highest expectations.

That in our own emergency we may take heart and perhaps

11 Newly-awakened people should, if it were possible, be plentifully supplied with books.
Hereby the awakening is both continued and increased " (Letter of Mr. Wesley to
Bishop Asbury).

1892.] THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN. 163

guidance from this experiment of an apparent adversary, I in-
vite my associates of the Apostolate of the Press, and other in-
terested Catholics, to an examination of the purposes, history,
government, methods, and achievements, both literary and finan-
cial, of the Methodist Book Concern, and to the response which
its efforts have received.

I. The purpose of the Methodist Church in establishing the
Book Concern was to educate its own members, and to dissemi-
nate its religious principles among mankind at large. It accept-
ed as self-evident the propositions that a church must provide
the literature for its people as well as for all others who seek to
understand its teachings; that it must do this officially and au-
thoritatively, and that it must exercise a direct and intimate con-
trol over the agencies through which the work is carried on. It
realized that the books and papers needed for such uses, what-
ever their intrinsic merit, could rarely be of a commercial value
sufficient to induce individual publishers to issue them or the
ordinary book-trade to undertake their sale. It saw the neces-
sity, therefore, of itself entering into the business of manufac-
turing and distributing the literature which it required, and of
conducting that business in such a manner that not only should
all proper reading matter be supplied under the sanction of the
church, but that all publications emanating from other sources
should stand without ecclesiastical endorsement, and rest upon
the sole responsibility of their respective writers. By this
method it expected to become a teaching church through its
press as truly and as thoroughly as through its pulpit ; the or-
thodoxy, the unity, and the persistency of the one being reflect-

l, extended, and perpetuated by the other. To these consider-
tions that of pecuniary profit was to be subordinate. Profit
:o some amount would become necessary in order to repair

sses and increase the capital to meet the growing needs,
ind this it was intended to secure as a direct result of the en-
:erprise itself, thus rendering it independent of assistance from
dthout. Such was the problem which confronted the founders
of the Methodist Book Concern when they planned its constitu-
tion and mode of operations. How far their plan was suited to
their purposes the following pages will disclose.

II. The history of the Methodist Book Concern commenced
at Philadelphia in 1789. Its beginnings were of the most hum-
ble character. In that year the Rev. John Dickins was officially
appointed the business agent of the church to inaugurate the
work. He borrowed a capital of six hundred dollars, hired a

!6 4 THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN. [May,

room, and arranged for the printing and binding of such volumes
as were then most urgently demanded. Against many difficul-
ties, arising from the smallness of his capital, the scarcity of
means of transportation, and the slowness of returns, he strug-
gled valiantly for the nine remaining years of his life, and
though in this period he had published and put in circulation
many valuable books, at his death he left the Concern heavily in
debt. His successor was the Rev. Ezekiel Cooper, under whose
administration the debt was lifted, a capital accumulated ade-
quate to existing demands, the business transferred from Phila-
delphia to New York, and the manufacture and distribution of
its publications largely increased. From 1804 to 1821 operations
were carried on in one or two hired rooms which served for the
editing, selling, and shipping of the volumes. In 1821 a bindery
was opened, and in 1824 a printing-office also. In 1825 a build-
ing was purchased on Crosby Street, where the business was
conducted until 1833, when a lot was obtained and a manufac-
tory erected and occupied on Mulberry Street. Three years
later this structure was destroyed by fire, involving a tremendous
loss, mainly from the failure of insurance companies, but with
the help of friends it was in a few months replaced by a
more suitable establishment in which the various departments of
labor have until recently been pursued. In 1889 a massive build-
ing of brick and stone, eight stories in height, was completed on
the corner of Fifth Avenue and Twentieth Street, destined to
afford facilities for carrying on the entire business of the Con-
cern, and costing, including land, about one million dollars.
Here, for the present at least, the institution which a hundred
years before was accommodated in a single small room in Phila-
delphia, finds its workshop and its home.

Thus far I have sketched the history of the Eastern Branch
of the Concern. In 1820 a Western Branch was opened in Cin-
cinnati, to avoid the difficulties of transportation from New
York and to meet the condition of the currency in the West.
Before this time all books were sent to Western purchasers from
New York by wagons over the Alleghany Mountains to Pitts-
burgh, and thence down the Ohio River. An agent, the Rev.
Martin Ruter, was therefore appointed by the General Confer-
ence of 1820 to open a salesroom in Cincinnati, where a stock
of books was deposited, and he entered on the varied duties of
manager, buyer, salesman, bookkeeper, and shipper. Though it
was not then intended to establish a publishing house in the
West, yet the business grew so rapidly, and the demand for

1892.] THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN. 165

Methodist literature so far exceeded the ability of any mere
salesmen to supply that in 1836 the General Conference accord-
ed them permission to manufacture books, and in 1839 they
were formally chartered as the Western Methodist Book Con-
cern. This rendered them independent of the New York pub-
lication house, and with the growth of population in the West,
and the increase in the membership of the Methodist Church,
the business of the Western Branch already rivals that of the
Eastern. From the hired apartment, tenanted in 1820 by a sin-
gle agent, it has come to be the owner and occupant of a sub-
stantial seven-storied structure, where its manufacturing and dis-
tributing operations are conducted.

Besides these central institutions to which the printing and
publishing of books have been confined, other establishments have
been located in various cities for the more economical and ex-
peditious distribution of these publications. These are known as
Depositories. In connection with the Eastern Branch such
houses have been opened in Boston, Pittsburgh, and San Fran-
cisco, and, in connection with the Western Branch, at Chicago
and St. Louis. Auxiliary to these, though not owned by the
Book Concern, stores are maintained in many of our large
towns, by the authority of the local conferences, for the sale of
its publications, and are to be regarded as among the means
which it has accumulated for the performance of its labors.

III. The government of the Methodist Book Concern is
>dged primarily in the General Conference, which is the su-
)reme ecclesiastical authority of the church. By this conference
its managers are appointed, the location of its business houses
letermined, and the privileges conferred on each duly defined,
lot merely by general legislation, but by such specific decrees as
:he exigency of affairs demands. The managers hold office during
the four years intervening between one meeting of the confer-
ence and another, have usually been two in number in each
branch of the Concern, are eligible to reappointment, and have
ordinarily been so selected that with every new member one
having had the preceding four years' practical experience
should be associated. The advantage of this method of combin-
ing the vigor of a fresh laborer with the knowledge of one
already familiar with the details of the work is too great to pass
unnoticed. To these managers are entrusted the conduct of the
various departments of the business of the Concern, whether lit-
erary or financial their power being sufficient for any emergency
that may arise. Prior to 1848 the managers were under the

T 66 THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN. [May,

supervision of committees designated by the local conferences,
but in that year the General Conference substituted for these a
general Book Committee, composed of clergymen and laymen
chosen from all portions of the church. Since 1872 local com-
mittees of these laymen have been selected from among the
members of the general committee to oversee the business in
New York and Cincinnati, to whose gratuitous and effective
service the prosperity of the Concern is largely due. The
annual reports of the managers are made to the general Book
Committee, and the quadrennial report of this committee to the
General Conference, by whom the work of the preceding four
years is approved or criticised, and the managers superseded or
continued as it deems expedient. By this arrangement the
church, in its highest official body, comes into immediate rela-
tion with every detail of the enterprise, exercising over it not
simply an advisory or prohibitory, but a directive control, and giv-
ing it the benefit of the soundest wisdom and the largest
experience which the church itself possesses, together with
the moral and intellectual endorsement which such control
affords.

IV. The methods pursued by the Book Concern in carrying
on its work are of two classes, those of production and those of
distribution. In the production of printed books and papers for
distribution the mode adopted until 1821 confined the labor of
the managers and their employees to the preparation of the
matter to be published and the handling of the finished product,
the printing and binding being done by private parties under
contract. Even with this method the institution prospered and
its capital rapidly increased. But the manifest benefit to be de-
rived from the union of all the departments of its business un-
der one administration, and particularly from securing to the
Concern the profit of the printing and binding then accruing to
other manufacturers, impelled the managers in 1821 to open a
bindery and in 1824 a printing-office. The success of these ex-
periments led to the erection of the larger manufactory in Mul-
berry Street, where for over fifty years the entire process, from
the preparation of the manuscript to the shipping of the finished
volumes, was conducted. As a result of the change thus made
in the mode of production the assets now invested in buildings
and machinery, amounting to more than one and a half millions
of dollars, have been acquired and paid for, the whole of which
would under the former system have gone to other manufac-
turers.

1892.] THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN. 167

In the distribution of the products of the Book Concern re-
liance has been placed, first and above all, upon the clergy.
Methodist preachers have always been instructed that the supply
of their people with proper reading matter constituted an essen-
tial part of their missionary work. In rural districts where book-
stores were inaccessible, and in more populous regions where
suitable religious literature could not be found, both necessity
and conscience rendered them colporteurs as well as teachers.
Before highways were opened for carriage transportation these
earnest men journeyed on horseback, their saddle-bags laden with
books and tracts for distribution. The energy and tact which
they displayed in stimulating the thirst for knowledge, and in
placing within reach of their hearers the means of satisfying it,
has contributed more than any other cause to the success of
the whole undertaking. The experience of the Book Concern in
this particular has forced upon it the conclusion "that any sys-
tem for the sale of books and papers that proposes to dispense
with the agency of the preachers will prove a failure." And
though modern facilities have, in the settled districts of the coun-.
try, allowed the clergy to retire from active colportage, yet it is
still affirmed that " if we take the whole history of the church
together three-fourths of the products of the Methodist Book
Concern have reached their destination, directly or indirectly,
through the agency of Methodist preachers. The people still look
to them for their reading matter as well as for their Sabbath in-
struction, and the preachers still feel the need of the press as
their most potent ally in their work." With the development
of the country and the spread of Methodism larger means have
become necessary to bring the publications of the church within
the reach of its people, and to this end warehouses, or " deposi-
tories," were opened at the great centres of trade. These are
the property of the Book Concern and under its management,
although for many business purposes they are treated as distinct
establishments. To them the products of the Concern are
shipped in immense quantities, and are thence distributed to the
preachers, Sunday-schools, and neighboring booksellers. The
profits realized by the depositories upon the prices at which the
mblications are charged to them by the Concern are expected
to render them self-supporting. Full stocks of books are also
kept in many other cities, in stores not under the control of the
Concern, but selling on commission or otherwise as the state of
trade may warrant.

V. The literary achievements of the Methodist Book Concern

!68 THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN. [May,

have been such as might be expected from its history and
methods. The catalogue issued by Mr. Dickins in 1795 contains
the titles of twenty-eight bound volumes, published during the
preceding six years. The catalogue of 1889 includes two thou-
sand, seven hundred and fifty-three bound volumes and two thou-
sand, eight hundred and seventy-two tracts and pamphlets. In
the interval between these dates many other books have been
published which are no longer in print or have passed out of
the hands of the Concern, and hence are not found in its cata-
logues. The books enumerated in the later catalogues are of the
most varied character, embracing formidable treatises on philoso-
phy, dogmatic theology, and ecclesiastical law, as well as less
pretentious works of history, biography, physical and moral science,
and fiction, suited to all readers of whatever age or degree of
learning. The impression made by a perusal of their titles is
that the Methodist Church has, through its Book Concern, at-
tempted to create and furnish for its people a literature of its
own, dispensing with the necessity for referring to other publi-
.cations for information on any subject, human or divine.

Still more remarkable than this has been the rise and spread
of its periodical religious literature. At the date of the founda-
tion of the Book Concern this form of publication was practically
unknown. But its advantages were too apparent to permit it to
remain unemployed after proper facilities for its distribution had
been provided, and in 1818 the Methodist Review was started
(though under a different name), and ever since has held a lead-
ing place among religious periodicals, its circulation now amount-
ing to about seven thousand copies. In 1824 the Christian Ad-
vocate, a weekly newspaper, made its appearance from the
presses of the Eastern Branch, and was followed by the Northern
Christian Advocate and the Southeastern Christian Advocate, the
weekly issue of the three together during the year 1891 being
aboui; sixty-five thousand copies. In the Western Branch, the
Western Christian Advocate was commenced in 1834, the Christian
Apologist (German) in 1839, tne Northwestern Christian Advocate
in 1853, the Central Christian Advocate 9 in 1856, the Epworth
Herald in 1890, and others of less note in English or German.
The weekly circulation of these journals in 1891 was over one
hundred and fifty thousand. Thus the Concern furnishes to the
two million members of the Methodist Church one bi-monthly
review and eight weekly newspapers, averaging about one copy
to ten persons, which on the usual basis of computation would
indicate that nearly two-thirds of the Methodist population were

1892.] THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN. 169

readers of the periodicals issued by their Book Concern. That
all are not so is doubtless due to the fact that other Methodist
newspapers, not controlled by the Concern, enjoy extensive
patronage.

But even these figures must in turn give place to those
which show the magnitude of the supply of Sunday-school mate-
rial that the Concern provides. The Sunday-school has always
been the strong arm of established Methodism, and the efficiency
with which their schools have been conducted goes far to ex-
plain the willingness of many prominent Methodists to see our
public schools made permanently secular. The child who spends
his first ten years of Sabbath education under their discipline has
little left to learn that any Protestant parochial school could
teach him. This statement will be readily accepted, since the re-
ports of 1891 disclose that in addition to all other modes of in-
struction, by catechism, by Bible study, and by oral exposition,
the Book Concern supplies to the two million Sunday-school chil-
dren of the Methodist Church weekly, monthly, and semi-monthly
papers and leaflets whose aggregate circulation is three and a
half millions, or nearly two for every pupil in their schools.
Here the investigation of statistics may well stop, but it will
leave unreckoned the multitudinous variety of church and Sun-
day-school appliances, the nature and use of much of which would
require more explanation than the writer has the time or space
to give.

VI. The financial results of this literary venture are, however,
the best tests of its practicability and value. An institution sup-
ported by endowments or external charity may furnish unlimited
missionary work in preaching and in publications, and the gift,
though accepted, may fall fruitless and wasted from the hand of
the receiver. But when people are willing to pay for what they
obtain, and a price at that which affords not only compensation
but a profit to the supplier, the inference is a fair one that the
book or service is appreciated and turned to some good use by
the purchaser or hearer. In this point of view the pecuniary
success of this self-supporting institution vindicates not only the
practical wisdom of its founders as men of business, but their
sagacity and zeal as Christian teachers. The Methodist Book
Concern commenced its operations in 1789, as we have seen, with
a borrowed capital of six hundred dollars. At the death of Mr.
Dickins, in 1798, there was a deficit of four thousand five hun-
dred dollars. By 1804 this debt had been cleared away and a
working capital had been accumulated from the profits. After

i;o THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN. [May,

the fire in 1836 the capital remaining in the Eastern Branch
was nearly two hundred thousand dollars, which was then in-
creased by an outside subscription of about ninety thousand
dollars, the only occasion on which the enterprise has ever re-
ceived external pecuniary aid. In 1891 the net capital of the
Eastern and Western Branches together was reported at upwards
of three million dollars. In addition to this sum, which is re-
tained in the business, an amount nearly or quite equal to it
has been paid out of the profits to the general and local confer-
ences for church purposes and the support of superannuated
preachers. The sales during the four years ending with 1888
were about seven million dollars, and for the year 1891 exceeded
two millions. And this at prices as low as those of other lead-
ing houses, and in many cases lower, and with liberal discounts
to Sunday-schools, the clergy, and the trade. The Book Concern
itself within the year has shown its appreciation of such patron-
age by scaling all the prices of its books an average of twenty
per cent., thus rendering its publications materially cheaper than
any similar productions in the market.

VII. The response of the Methodist people to these efforts
of their denominational publishing house is evident from the
foregoing facts. Without their hearty support the enterprise
must have failed, and from the beginning this support has been
given even by those from whom it might naturally have been
least expected. Among the early Methodists were not many
who were rich or learned, but under the perpetual stimulus of
the travelling preacher the mechanic, laborer, and farmer became
readers and sought their books where they had found their de-
sire for knowledge. Within their humble homes little libraries
grew up volume by volume, as the visits of the preacher were
repeated, bound in substantial leather and meant for use, and
have descended to their grandchildren and great-grandchildren,
well worn by many readings but prized as sacred relics of an
unforgotten past. Readers make readers ; and as the member-
ship of the church extended the demand for books more than
kept pace with the increasing population. Statistics on this
point are not attainable, but the following comparison will mani-
fest the fact : In 1848 the average outlay of each member for
publications of the Book Concern was twenty-five cents; in 1891
it was one dollar ; the ratio of patronage developing four times
as fast as that of membership. This practical sympathy of the
people has not been suffered to diminish for want of encourage-
ment on the part of the church authorities. Appended to the

1892.] THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN. 171

catalogue of Mr. Dickins in 1795 was an admonition to all
Methodists not to purchase any of the books contained therein
except from the Concern or its agents. In 1889 the General
Conference recommended that the year be observed throughout
the church as a centennial of thanksgiving for the prosperity of
the Book Concern, that sermons be preached by every pastor
setting forth its history and the importance of its work, and ex-
horting the people everywhere to commemorate the event by
purchasing from it every needed supply of books and periodi-
cals. It is this unceasing co-operation between the clergy and
the laymen of the Methodist Church which has not only given
the Book Concern its wonderful success, but has made Method-
ism itself one of the remarkable phenomena of the nineteenth
century.

Such is the object. What are its lessons? Are they not
these ?

1. That a publication house under clerical management and
control is not only practicable, but can attain the highest degree
of literary and financial prosperity.

2. That the success of such an enterprise is not dependent
upon present capital or immediate patronage, but upon the ' zeal
and methods of its founders.

3. That to induce a people to accept and use a church lit-
erature the supply must be undertaken and conducted by the
church itself ; thus removing the work from the plane of business
competition and pecuniary interest, and making it a part of its
missionary or pastoral labors.

4. That the work thus undertaken and conducted has an edu-
cative force of immeasurable influence, able in a few generations
to convert a race of meagre information and sluggish mental
operations into one of high intelligence and far-extended know-
ledge.

5. That in an age like ours, when power resides in know-
ledge, not in wealth or numbers, an organization which would
keep abreast of its associates must concentrate its energies on
the development of the intellectual faculties and acquisitions of
its members, and that the Press surpasses any and every other
means to that result.

Finally, that the question whether we shall have a Catholic
Book Concern is not a question whether or not we can, but
whether or not we will.

W. C. ROBINSON.

Yale University.

WHAT FILLS OUR JAILS. [May,

WHAT FILLS OUR JAILS.*

CRIME, its cause and its cure, is a subject so engrossing that
the bulky volume which the government of Ontario has issued,
containing the report of the commission appointed to inquire
thereinto and to collect information respecting prisons, reforma-
tories, and the like, is worthy of more extended notice than is
usually given to official publications. It gives a succinct sketch
of English penal legislation, dips into the history of the treat-
ment of destitute children, recounts the advances made in the
treatment of criminals, and sets forth a striking symposium of
views on the causes of crime.

The " melancholy tendency of crime youthward " so impressed
the commissioners that they placed prominently on their list of
crime causes " want of proper parental control, lack of good
home treatment, and the baneful influence of bad homes." They
knew of no antidote, " unless some outer influence for good
could be employed " ; and they recommend, in the way of pre-
vention, compulsory school attendance, the setting apart of pub-
lic playgrounds with gymnasiums in every city and town, the
rigid supervision of the importation of destitute children, and
the enactment of municipal laws to prevent the running at large
of boys and girls in the streets after dark. But, strange to say,
they omitted to suggest the employment of one of the most po-
tent outer influences for good the teaching of religion in the
schools. The Catholics of Ontario, of course, enjoy the blessed
privilege of state-supported separate schools. But they are
pitied for it by many good people, who would like in the in-
terest of Catholics, of course to have such schools abolished.
The unsectarian school idea dominates the educational depart-
ments of all the provinces except Quebec ; and it is as slavishly
worshipped by the generality of Protestants in Ontario as it is
by their fellow-believers across the line. This may, in some
measure, account for the omission. The commissioners received
many forcible reminders that there was something radically
wrong in the training of children, and that education in merely
secular subjects did not make men and women law-abiding. The
" want of proper education, moral and otherwise," was given as

* Report of the Commissioners appointed to Inquire into the Prison and Reformatory Sys-
tem of Ontario. 1891. Printed by Order of the Legislative Assembly.

1892.] WHAT FILLS OUR JAILS. 173

one of the causes of crime by Dr. Clarke, the Medical Superin-
tendent of the Toronto Asylum for the Insane ; and others iter-
ated his opinion. But the Rev. Mr. Bogart, leading Episcopal
clergyman of Ottawa, spoke more plainly.

" What do you think are the chief causes of crime ? " asked
the chairman.

" I attribute," answered Mr. Bogart " I attribute a great deal
to a thing our people are inclined to boast of very much, and
that is our system of education. The instruction which the chil-
dren receive in the common schools ought to be such as would
deter them from crime. I have gone into the schools in Ottawa
I took the trouble a few years ago to visit as many as I could
to find out how many pupils knew the Lord's Prayer and the
Ten Commandments. I made out a little schedule of the result
of my inquiry, and the result in these schools was simply appall-
ing. I don't believe that twenty-five per cent, of our children of
the age of ten or twelve know these. They have an idea of
right and wrong, but there are a great many things that they
meet with in the ordinary course of life that they do not know
to be wrong. I do not see what you can expect from the Sun-
day-school system alone when the teaching of Christian morality
and doctrine are entirely neglected in our day-schools."

" What percentage could repeat the Lord's Prayer and the
Ten Commandments ?" inquired a member of the commission.

" About twenty per cent.," replied Mr. Bogart.

" Could all repeat the Lord's Prayer ?" asked another com-
missioner.

" No," answered Mr. Bogart. And then he went on to tell
of a test he had made in a public school in a country parish,
where, in a room containing twenty-six pupils, he found only
three who knew the Ten Commandments. " I think," he added,
" it is a deplorable thing that Christian doctrine and morals
should not be taught in our day-schools."

" You consider, then," said the chairman, " that the absence
of religious instruction in the schools is one of the causes of
crime ? "

" I do," was the emphatic answer.

A gentleman who represented the interests of labor on the
commission, and who gave the measure of his fitness for such a
post by remarking that he was " not one that is very particular
about matters of this kind" to wit, the doctrines of the Chris-
tian religion waxed wrothy at the evidence which the reverend
gentleman felt himself compelled to give after taking an oath on
the Holy Gospels that he would speak the whole truth. This
representative of the working-men proceeded to read the divine
a lecture, and in a very unjudicial tone he demanded if he did

, 74 WHAT FILLS OUR JAILS. [May,

not know ''that in England the tendency is toward secular edu-
cation."

" I do not think so," replied Mr. Bogart ; " I know that there
is a struggle at the present time between Christianity and unbelief,
but I have not seen that the church has suffered by it."

What a pity it is that so many Christians fail to perceive
that the fight against religion in the schools is the fight of un-
belief against Christianity!

When it came to suggesting means of reform, the commis-
sioners unstintingly recommended as a cure what they failed to
suggest should be employed as a preventive. They urge that
the erecting of industrial schools, with accommodation for as
many children as it may be found necessary to place in such
institutions, be immediately undertaken, and "that the literary
and the moral and religious instruction of the boys and girls
detained therein be carefully attended to," as well as their techno-
logical training. The erection of such schools, they suggest, should
be made compulsory on municipalities, "unless within a reason-
able time a corporate association under the terms of the existing
act, and with the assistance of a legislative grant and private
aid," should undertake the work. The commissioners had evi-
dently much faith in voluntary as opposed to exclusively state
action in such matters ; and they advise that " the most cordial
encouragement and assistance " be given by the civil authorities
to all organizations interested in the saving of children. None
of the commissioners appear to have visited any Catholic insti-
tution in their wanderings among prisons, reformatories, and the
like. But they were impressed by what they heard of the suc-
cess of the Montreal Reformatory, conducted under government
supervision by the Brothers of Charity.

The exceptional good results produced by this institution
are largely attributed, the commissioners tell us, " to the skill and
devotion of the Brothers, and to their system of constantly
mingling with the boys, whose admiration is evoked by such un-
selfish devotedness."

The example of Wichern, the founder of the Rauhe Haus at
Horn, near Hamburg, was not lost on the commissioners ; and
note is made in their report of the fact that he was forced, in
order to better provide a substitute for the influence of family
life, to establish "a sort of religious brotherhood, who, devoting
their lives chiefly to the work, exercised, it is said, a most bene-
ficial influence on the boys with whom they continually lived
and worked." Wichern's Brotherhood has been invited to take

1892.] WHAT FILLS OUR JAILS. 175

charge of prisons and reformatories in Prussia and elsewhere.
Apropos of Mr. Round's reformatory, known, I think, as the
Burnham Industrial Farm, the secretary of the commission has
this to say :

" The especial characteristic of the institution is that, while it is
strictly Protestant, it is managed by a body of religious who call
themselves Brothers of St. Christopher. They did not wish at
first to take the name of any saint lest they might be suspected
of leaning to Catholicity. The applications for admission to this
order are said to be more numerous than can be entertained.
When an applicant is admitted he signs a paper pledging him-
self to do any duty that may be assigned to him without pay
for six months and to observe all the rules. At the end of six
months he signs a similar agreement for three years, if he so
wishes and he is approved of. He may renew the agreement
at the end of three years. He receives only food and clothing,
and, of course, he is lodged. Mr. Round appears to have been
led to the establishment of this order by having observed the
great success of the New York Catholic Protectory. Very few
of the boys who pass through that protectory afterward fall into
the hands of the police, and this Mr. Round attributes to their
being cared for by men who devote their lives to the training
of those boys from religious motives, and who do not work for
pay. He believes that his brothers have much more influence
over the boys in his institution than any paid teachers could
have."

Their dip into history must have brought prominently before
ie minds of the commissioners the fact that much of the evil
h they had to deplore resulted from a departure from Catho-
lic ideals. Down through the ages of faith they found in Mer-
rie England the religious houses, which we have been so often
:old were corrupt incubuses on the commonwealth, actively en-
jaged in effectually carrying on many of the works of mercy in-
to which the commissioners were charged to inquire. But, as
they so gently remark, a " great change took place in Great
Britain in the time of the Tudors. For many generations desti-
tute children had only such care as the Poor Law provided, and
juvenile offenders were treated as criminals. A few of the old
:haritable institutions for the care of children escaped destruc-
tion, but these were devoted to the education of the children of
respectable families. For the poor there remained only the poor-
house and the prison." And centuries elapsed before anything
worthy of notice was done to remedy the evils thus wrought by
the so-called Reformation. When will history be read aright by
the people ? Perhaps this very guarded remark of the commis-

I7 6 WHAT FILLS OUR JAILS. [May,

sioners may be a straw on the surface which shows that men
are coming to understand that the religious revolt of the six-
teenth century was even socially a backward movement, and
that by it the masses, not the classes, suffered most.

After stating in his evidence that in the reformatories of Eng-
land there was complete separation between Catholics and Pro-
testants, Mr. Warden Massie, of the Ontario Central Prison, a
rigid Presbyterian and a practical penologist, was asked if he
would recommend the adoption of that system in Canada.

" Oh, yes ! for the boys and girls," he answered. " Of course,"
he added, " you will understand that I am influenced by what I
saw and what I learned in England and Scotland ; I would
strongly recommend this. I am strongly in favor of the separa-
tion of the two religious classes. Each class should be under
the training of their co-religionists ; much better work would be
accomplished. Supposing you had a board of commissioners to
supervise these institutions, such a board could speak with far more
frankness and firmness with the heads of these institutions, and
they could expect them to deal far more effectively with them
if each were managed directly by a head who was in thorough
sympathy in matters of religion with the inmates. My own ex-
perience teaches me that there should be separation in these es-
tablishments ; indeed I do not know but it would be better in
the prisons."

Care, of course, has always been taken in Canada to place
Catholics and Protestants on an equal footing as regards religious
instruction in penal and reformatory institutions. In large insti-
tutions, in which chaplains are employed by the government, there
are both Catholic and Protestant appointees. The view of Dr.
Wines as to the necessity for the employment of " religion in
all its freedom and power," in all schemes of reform, has been
adhered to. I do not think Canadians would long endure an in-
stitution conducted as to religion in the manner in which that
on Randall's Island is conducted, which institution, by the way,
is not referred to in the commissioners' report, although much
space is given to the excellent Industrial School at Rochester.

Heredity receives due prominence as a cause of crime, but
the evidence makes more strongly in favor of the view that
crime is to be more largely attributed to evil environment. Dis-
like for work, ignorance, and the inordinate eagerness to acquire
wealth, or to get money sufficient to satisfy the desires of the
extravagant or the profligate, which so prevails in this age, are
extensively commented on as producers of crime. But among
all the influences which drag men down intemperance is given

1892.] WHAT FILLS OUR JAILS. 177

the first place. Even the neglect of the young, who form such
an appalling proportion of the prison population, is, the com-
missioners say, largely due to "the evil effects of intemperance."
Indeed the burden of the replies to the question, "What do
you consider the chief cause of crime ? " was " drunkenness."
And very few of those who are regarded as temperance fanatics
and moral fadists appeared before the commission to give evi-
dence. The witnesses were mainly - hard-headed jailers, jail sur-
geons, and chiefs of police, whose opinions were formed by expe-
rience. " The chief cause pre-eminently the chief cause is
intemperance," said Dr. Rosebrugh, the surgeon of Hamilton
jail.

" Drunkenness is, beyond all question, the source of more
crime than any other vice," answered Lieutenant-Colonel Gras-
sett, the chief of the Toronto police ; and in support of his
statement he instanced the small number of arrests on Sundays
in Toronto, where Sunday-closing is pretty rigidly enforced.
Staff-Inspector Archibald was of the same opinion ; and he
pointed to the fact that on election days, when in Canada liquor-
shops of all kinds are closed by law, the number of arrests was,
as on Sundays, much smaller than on other days. Indeed, the
experience of the commissioners was very similar to that of the
eminent penologist, Dr. E. C. Wines, who found that the replies
h he received to the circular addressed by him to prison-
gardens might be summed up in this trenchant answer of Mr.
'ollard, of Vermont : " My opinion is that if intoxicants were
)tally eradicated, the Vermont state-prison would be large
jnough to hold all the criminals in the United States."

The oft-told tale had evidently become monotonous, for one
)f the commissioners attempted to side-track " intemperance " by
sking Sheriff Smith, " Does not destitution lead to drunken-
less?" The reply was: "It may do so; but I would say that
itemperance more generally leads to destitution than destitution
to intemperance."

" I have heard some gentlemen say," remarked Jailer Kelly,
)f London, Ontario, " that idleness is the chief cause of crime,
but I think drunkenness is; it produces all kinds of crime, with
the exception of burglaries and such like." In this Mr. Kelly
was borne out by the opinions of many who had evidently probed
the question deeply. Several who took exception to the promi-
nence given to intemperance as a crime-producer did so because
expert criminals the leaders, so to speak, in the profession
are generally sober men sober, indeed, by necessity, for their

VOL. LV. 12

I7 8 WHAT FILLS OUR JAILS. [May,

work requires a cool head, a clear vision, and a steady hand.
But most of the offences against the person, and the bulk of
the lesser crimes and misdemeanors, have intemperance for their
parent. Page after page might be cited from the evidence
given before this commission ; but it would be the same sad
story repeated over and over again of the baneful effects of in-
temperance. The best beaten and most easily trodden of all
the roads which lead to prison is that which has its beginning
in the saloon. Theorize as we may upon the per se goodness
of all the gifts of nature, no man can go unmoved through the
evidence which has been merely touched upon here; no Chris-
tian can con it without feeling that one of the greatest impedi-
ments to the coming of God's kingdom, for which we daily
pray, is the liquor-traffic ; no social reformer can peruse it
and not be forced to conclude that the first and most feasible
step towards the betterment of the condition of the masses
must be taken in the direction of lessening their consumption
of alcohol.

In summing up the commissioners declare that " intemper-
ance directly and indirectly is unquestionably one of the most
fruitful causes of crime, and its effects are wholly evil." They
recommend the committal to inebriate reformatories, which they
would have established in all centres of population, of persons
convicted of drunkenness more than three times in two years.
But in morals, as in medicine, prevention is better than cure.

J. A. J. McKENNA.

Ottawa^ Ont.

1892.] VADE ME CUM. 179

VADE MECUM.

PRECIOUS prayer-book, old and fingered,
Shabby grown from use and years,

Turned-down pages, faded writing ;
Each defect the more endears.

It has been not only spokesman

When my heart was dumb and cold,

But a messenger from Heaven
Bearing blessings manifold.

In my doubtings often counsellor,
Prompting better thought and deed,

Nourishing a famished child-soul
With sweet prayer instead of creed.

Twixt its leaves my tears have fallen,

None else knew they ever fell ;
It has hid the tell-tale blushes;

Caught the smiles that spoke a spell.

First /to hear my childish lispings,
Then my whispered marriage vow;

In my hands, when dead, I'll clasp it,
Sharing dust as secrets now.

KATE P. LATHROP.

Baltimore^ Maryland. .

i So PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF CARDINAL MANNING. [May,

SOME PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF CARDINAL

MANNING.

NEVER has a great man passed to his rest amid such praise
and love as " The Cardinal," the name by which he will still be
known affectionately amongst us. If any other great man were
to die there would be a conflict of feeling; if mourned passion-
ately by some, his memory would be indifferent to, or derided
of, many others. But the cardinal oh ! the cardinal has written
himself upon this age in England in letters that have sunk into
people's hearts. All manner of people, unbelieving, wicked,
careless from these even he has to-day faith, sorrow, care. Up
the stone steps of his bleak palace at Westminster what burdens
were carried ! His doors were as open as the doors of Simon's
house where his Master sat at table, and the woman coming in
broke the pot of precious ointment upon his feet. He wel-
comed every one the latest Socialist with the latest fad for re-
generating the human race ; the latest poet with his folio of
songs of the people ; members of Parliament and East End
workmen ; poor Irish priests and old friends of his of the Estab-
lishment ; Sisters of Nazareth and working members of the Sal-
vation Army all passed up his stairs to his little warm study,
where, when the weather was not of the warmest, he sat in a
big chair spreading his transparent hands to the blaze. Most
bitterly orphaned of all he has left are the women whom, per-
haps, no one else would set about helping. I know myself of
some he received into the church who had crawled to his feet
out of abysses of sin. He was not satisfied, as another might be,
with making penitents of them ; he tried to rehabilitate them
even in this world, and devoted all his influence to such an
end, usually succeeding as only he could. There was no differ-
ence to him in the sinner being a woman or a man ; to him
there was as much hope of restoration to good fame and honor
for one as for the other. I have heard he could be very stern
when it was a question of paltering with right or wrong, but his
exquisite tenderness to sinners was one of the most heavenly
things in his nature.

How he has brought the church he adopted into touch with
the half-pagan world of London is extraordinary. People are
comparing him and Cardinal Newman nowadays, but there is

1892.] PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF CARDINAL MANNING. 181

no comparison. Cardinal Newman set his mark upon the intel-
lectual life of the world ; our dead cardinal on the work-a-day
and human life of it. Cardinal Newman even in the great days
of '45 scarcely, I think, affected more than the intellectual
classes. Lord Beaconsfield said Newman's secession gave the
Church of England a shock from which many years after it still
reeled. No doubt it did, but only among the more highly cul-
tivated and intellectual classes. Newman was an Oxford man
through and through. He was an Oxford don by profession
and inclination, till in 1843 ne resigned his living of St. Mary's
and went to Littlemore. His sermons at St. Mary the Virgin's,
his Tracts for the Times, deeply affected the upper strata of hu-
manity in England. He lived among the exquisite things of
Oxford, wherein one gathered as in a treasury the precious
gleanings of a very old and slow-growing prosperity. His place
was in old, gold-fretted libraries, with stained windows, and over-
looking ancient quadrangles, where the feet of saints and scholars
had trodden while yet the Plantagenets were young. The world
was beyond the green peace of quadrangles and cloisters, beyond
the high towers where the swallows wheeled, quite afar from his
arched windows in the frames of greenery. He could never
have been a democratic cardinal. Oxford had marked him for
her own, and when he left her, passionately mourning, to strip
himself of ancient privileges and join himself to the church of
the poor, he carried with him that spirit of refined love of study
and seclusion which an Oxford don might enjoy in the spirit of
a mediaeval monk. So far as quietness and apartness from the
world went, Edgbaston might have been Littlemore.

Manning, on the contrary, had worked down more through
the lives of the people. He was a very famous preacher, and his
books of sermons were read and treasured by many a devout
soul to whom the Gorham controversy and the Oxford move-
ment would be indeed caviare. Then he was in the front of
men's eyes. Archdeacon of Chichester at thirty-two, the next
step would be a bishopric ; and he was looked upon as the
great champion of the liberties of the English Establishment.
Bishop Philpotts, of Exeter, used to say that there were three
men England had to look to for her future Manning in the
church, Gladstone in the state, and Hope in the law. When
Manning and Hope-Scott both left the Establishment, Gladstone
said he felt as if he had lost his two eyes.

We in the nineties scarcely realize the position of the church
as she was in the forties, when those devoted men saw her,

1 82 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF CARDINAL MANNING. [May,

through her poverty, the very Bride of Christ. The old families
of English Catholics were and are for the most part extraordi-
narily conservative. Many convulsions have passed over the
world and never reached them within their park walls. They
have a placid belief in their divine right, and to some of them
we fear that the sovereign people is as much in a state of serf-
dom as though King John reigned. The prelates of the church
were either Italians or men with strong Italian traditions, and so
bitterly distasteful to the mass of the English. The poor of the
church were mainly the very poor Irish, and as Irish certainly
not sisters and brothers to the haughty English Catholics. It
was when the church was at this low ebb that God recuperated
her miraculously by the Oxford movement. This poor and de-
spised church suddenly drew into her, as some one wrote, a
third part of the stars of Heaven. Men could no more despise
or believe calumny of her when for her sake such men as New-
man and Manning had given up all things. They were English-
men that was the great thing for the English multitude and
their lives, Manning's especially, lived openly in the sight of all
men. To Cardinal Manning, however, more than all others is
due the credit of demolishing by his mere life the whole stupid
fabric that hatred and ignorance had been building since the
days of Martin Luther. In latter days even men who hated
his faith bent the knee to him, feeling that which Leo XIII.
sweetly said to the arrogant young German sovereign : " You
will be none the worse for an old man's blessing."

Even in Cardinal Newman's life it was Cardinal Manning was
called "the cardinal." The older and greater man, perhaps,
could no more have conceived of addressing a temperance meet-
ing from an upturned tub in Hyde Park than he could have
fraternized with General Booth. Yet if there was one thing pre-
eminent in Cardinal Manning's great qualities it was his dignity.
He was most truly a prince, and though he had taken all the
world to his great heart, I do not think he ever forgot for a
moment his dignity as prince of the church ; and I have heard
of his resenting a stupid brusquerie with very marked dis-
pleasure.

He took to the people and the ugly world of London with
extraordinary ease. It must have been all such a change from
Lavingdon rectory. Sussex is a county of England especially
rich in the beauties of an old civilization. It is full of lovely
park lands, of noble trees, of hidden sheets of water, pure and
lonely in the heart of silent woods, where the only living thing

1892.] PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF CARDINAL MANNING. 183

is a white swan, calmly gazing on his image in the mere. An
American once told me how exquisite the order and neatness of
old European countries were to one accustomed to great spaces
and untrained nature. Sussex is not too rich and velvety-pas-
tured, as are some of the home counties. It has that chain of
woods and meres running through it ; and coming from deforest-
ed Ireland, where woods are few, lovely are Sussex woods, car-
peted heavily with bracken and starred by all manner of wild-
flowers. In June, when I was there, leaning from a window
curtained with roses, one might hear the nightingale singing in
those dark woods. I have never seen Lavingdon rectory, but I
can place it easily in the lovely Sussex landscape.

There is no doubt that Manning's short married life made a
deep impression on all his after-career. Perhaps it put him
even more in touch with human joys and sorrows. His wife
was very beautiful. She was the daughter of his predecessor at
Lavingdon, one of the four lovely Miss Sargeants, of whom the
others married, one Bishop Wilberforce, another Henry Wilber-
force, his brother, and the remaining one became Mrs. Dudley
Ryder, and was to be the mother of three Catholic priests. Henry
Wilberforce's family also joined the church. There are many
stories of the cardinal's marriage. Many people believe, for ex-
ample, that there were two daughters of his somewhere in the
world or the convent. As a matter of fact he buried his young
wife and her one baby at the end of three years of married life,
and shut down so heavy a curtain upon his grief that no one
seems ever to have sought to lift it. A friend of mine who en-
joyed a special intimacy with the cardinal of late years, and re-
vered and loved him passionately, writes that he once mentioned
in conversation that he had been to Lavingdon. " Did you go to
the graveyard?" said the cardinal. As my friend answered in
the affirmative, he says that a look passed between them which
seemed like the lifting of a little corner of the curtain. He
mentions also that the cardinal's advice to those who came to
him to be comforted in bereavement, "You must bury the
trouble and put a stone on it," always seemed to him like a
reference to his own early sorrow.

My own knowledge of the cardinal came through this friend,
who is a distinguished Catholic journalist. I was calling at his
house at Kensington, in the May of 1884, when the cardinal's
little brougham drove up to the door, and he came in, in his
warm overcoat with quilted lapels in front. I kept in the back-
ground while he chatted with my friend, and while he gave a few

1 84 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF CARDINAL MANNING. [May,

words of blessing to my friend's invalid wife. Then he said
quite suddenly: "And this young lady?" "An Irishwoman,
and a young poet of Merry England, your eminence," replied
my friend. " And a Catholic ? " he asked with delightful friendli-
ness, for dearly he loved an Irish face and an Irish voice. "Yes,
your eminence." " Well, my child, I'll give you a blessing/' he
said ; which he did and may some of his blessing's fruit cling
to me during life ! I remember that I was sorely discomfited
afterwards because, in my awkwardness and confusion, I did not
kneel to kiss his ring; but he was the last person to misunder-
stand.

Then when my first little book, Louise de la Valliere, ap-
peared in the following year I sent it to him. I shall never
forget that he acknowledged it by return of post. His letter is
now before me in his clear handwriting, and though it says such
kind things of myself, I transcribe it reverently as it is written :

"ARCHBISHOP'S HOUSE, WESTMINSTER, S. W.,

May 29, 1885.

" DEAR Miss TYNAN : Your volume of poems reached me
last night, and I at once read many of them with very great in-
terest and pleasure. The least excellence in them is their very
pure diction. I am no critic, but I am very quick to feel words
without meaning or color or fitness. I have seldom read so
much, and met with so few words I did not think well chosen.
The next excellence seems to me the beauty of conception both
natural and moral. But the last and highest is the sacredness
of the subjects, and the piety of their treatment. It is not,
therefore, so much as poems but as sacred strains of which the
Person of our Lord is the centre that I value them. I hope if
you come again to London I may see you. I cannot with cer-
tainty remember when, as you say, I gave you a blessing, but I
hope that all blessings may be with you."

I was in London a year later, but did not venture to visit
the cardinal alone, the dear friend to whom I owe, in a way, the
cardinal's kindness being out of health at the time. However,
I always had it before me to see and talk with him ; but I had
more letter-writing first, for he acknowledged my Shamrocks, pub-
lished in 1887, with a letter even kinder and sweeter than the
first. It is as follows:

" MY DEAR CHILD : I have read much of the book you have
kindly sent me with great pleasure, especially ' Cor Dulce ' and
the ' Good Shepherd.' I find the same perception of the beauty of
all created things which is a gift of the Holy Ghost. It is a
part of the Donum Scientice which sees God in all things, and

1892.] PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF CARDINAL MANNING. 185

all things in God. This ought to be a part of the education of
children, and the world wauld be happier and better. I have
read also * Diarmid and Grainne,' which has more force and is
here and there rugged, but a beautiful whole. Keep firmly to
the beauty of the natural and the supernatural, as Fra An-
gelico did in painting. I send you a little book, in which you
will find the ' Donum Scientiae.' May every blessing be with
you.

" Faithfully yours in Jesus Christ,

" HENRY E. CARDINAL ARCHBISHOP."

The book was The Internal Mission of the Holy Ghost, and
it is a very treasured volume now.

I did not see him again till September, 1889. It was in the
very thick of the dockers' strike, and I had been seeing a good
deal of it, visiting the docks, all silent and empty save for a few
shamefaced " blacklegs " hanging forlornly about. The ware-
houses of ivory and spice and sandal-wood and cinnamon had no
footfall on their echoing. At Tilbury, too, I had seen, in a day
of dancing water and brilliant sky, the silent docks and the
stern pickets who guarded the dock-gates against possible
" blacklegs." And in Hyde Park I had stood on a platform
with John Burns and Cunningham-Graham, by chance, not by
design, and had gained immense kudos among the dockers, as a
well-dressed woman who sympathized with them. The cardinal
was immensely busy in those days, driving hither and thither in
his little brougham, preaching patience to the men and tolerance
to the dock directors, having long conferences with the labor
leaders, doing more than any one else in the world could to
avert a revolution. For there was talk of a gas-strike, and more
than talk, and London once in darkness, the creatures that lurk
in its dark and infested corners would be down like a swarm of
rats upon the immense wealth in the shops and warehouses past
which the dockers every day made their patient five miles'
trudge to the West End.

It was a wet morning, I remember, when we turned out of
Vauxhall Bridge Road into Carlisle Place, a quiet street of
somewhat gloomy mansions, flanked at either end by the
archbishop's house and the convent of the Sisters of Chanty.
The cardinal's man, Newman, opened the door for us, the same
faithful old servant whose attendance on the cardinal once, in
Paris, caused a glib French journalist to inform the Parisian
world that Cardinal Newman and Cardinal Manning were stay-
ing at the same hotel in its midst. We went up the stone
stairs, along a balustraded gallery, and entered the big room

1 86 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF CARDINAL MANNING. [May,

which was not the cardinal's snuggery. It had a long, stately
table down its length, and stately ctiairs in ormolu and red silk
were round it. On the walls were a picture of the Vatican
Council, a portrait of Blessed John Fisher, a picture of Our
Lady of Good Counsel, some family portraits ; under a glass
shade was Cardinal Wiseman's biretta ; close by a Mater Dolo-
rosa in Italian marble.

The cardinal came in quite briskly for all his eighty years, an
old man tall and thin to attenuation, dressed in a long cassock
trimmed with the red of his cardinalate, and a scarlet skull-cap
on his silver head. He did not strike me that day as he did
when I saw him later, and the strain was removed, as a very
old man. He did look very old, but such an old face, such a
saint's face, so purified, so ascetic, so removed from all of earth
except only human kindness ! It was a very beautiful face, apart
from its spiritual significance even. His features were classical
and perfect, except perhaps that the mouth, straight and thin,
was a little too rigid. Ah, well, that rigidity was for himself
only! His blue eyes smiled at one for the stern mouth. It
struck me what different types of old age were his and Cardi-
nal Newman's. Millar's picture of Cardinal Newman, that tri-
umph of scarlet robe and silver hair and delicate aging flesh-
tints, is extraordinarily pathetic ; the face looks directly at you,
the fine curves of it softening away into infinite tiredness. Car-
dinal Manning, on the contrary, seemed to be a type of tense,
braced-up old age that day ; his figure was so unrelaxed, his
features so firm.

When I saw him again he looked older, for the strike was
just settled, and he was tired and the impetus to strength gone.
He was in a little inner room, littered with books and papers,
sitting by the fire in a great arm-chair and a little shivery,
though it was a lovely mild September morning. He drew a
chair at his right hand for me, and so for an hour I sat in close
converse with a saint. He treated me with the most affectionate
kindness. We discussed many things the strike; Mr. Arthur
Symonds' Nights and Days, a newly published volume of poems ;
Mrs. Hamilton King's Garibaldian Poems, which characteristically
he praised with generous warmth. He talked of the Irish
people with great love, of their domestic virtues, of the things
they needed, of his faith in their ultimate destiny. That morn-
ing, as we came along from Victoria station, the news-boys were
crying the intelligence of another Whitechapel murder, one of
the appalling series of crimes which have made the name that no

1892.] PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF CARDINAL MANNING. 187

doubt was derived from some stately chapelry of White Friars
horrible in the thoughts of the civilized world. When my com-
panion told the cardinal his {ace became, if possible, paler. He
lay back with his eyes closed, and a blanched look that told
how horribly he felt the world's burden of sin and misery. He
looked very old then ; and it was a pathetic indication of his
age that later, wishing to inscribe his name in his little book,
Towards Evening, which was my second, most precious gift from
him, he could not remember it ; when I repeated it he said to
himself, " Of course, of course," with a little impatient sigh.

The papers and magazines have teemed with reminiscences
of him. Already many people's experiences of him in the news-
papers would reach from here to New Yprk if the lines were set
on end. Every one has something sweet to tell, from the old
men who were young fellows with him at Oxford to " John
Law," the philanthropic young lady who is a toiler in the East
End and closely allied with the Salvation Army. " I would like
to become a Catholic," she wrote lately, " for the sake of
pleasing Cardinal Manning." His letter to " Dear General
Booth " " You alone have gone down into the depths to rescue
souls ransomed by the Precious Blood " brought down up-
on him many remonstrances from English aristocratic Catho-
lics. So very probably did his published desire to honor John
Wesley as a faithful servant of his Master. But the cardinal, of
all princes that ever lived, knew how to put an insolent meddler
in his place. His heart was as wide as the heart of the church,
so often misunderstood by even those of her own community.
The world is very lonely without him to one who saw him but
seldom. What his loss is to those to whom he was father, friend,
comforter, and guide God only knows. Even the great world
will miss him, for none of them have failed to appreciate the
rarely great soul, and the venerable and beautiful personality.
But the poor Irish in London will miss him terribly : his League
of the Cross, all his schools and orphanages, and his poor
dockers, who followed him on foot for the last time in bleak
mid-January weather. There was a time people used to call
him ascetic and cold. Every one knows better now. A more
universal love was never given to any of God's creatures, and
assuredly he was

" to those men that loved him, sweet as summer."

KATHARINE TYNAN.

MISTRESS MARY. [May,

MISTRESS MARY.
A STORY OF THE SALEM PLANTATIONS.

LETTER X.

ALAS ! Esme, for the heavy tidings I heard but yesterday ?
You never knew him, and yet you know well how I loved
George Lisle. Since I wrote last General Winthrop hath come
to us very oft, and telleth always stories of the troubles at
home, which his shrewdness shows him greatly interest Mistress
Mary, little thinking with what eagerness I also listen. One
time I made bold to inquire of him if he knew aught of Sir
George Lisle, of whom I heard nothing since Colchester yielded
to Fairfax and Ireton. At the first he seemed somewhat loath to
make answer, and then spoke shortly, saying that after so long
and obstinate a defence it was needful, for the example of others,
and the peace of the kingdom, that some military justice should
be done, and that the council therefore determined that he with
two others should be shot to death ; which was presently done.
Grief for his death and anger at the manner of it made me for-
get my condition both as a prisoner (for so I hold myself to be)
and a younger man, so that I cried out it was a barbarous deed
and without example in England, and that they had murdered
a man better than themselves, gallant to look upon and to fol-
low in a day of battle, so that his men never forsook him nor
left anything undone which he led them upon ; and yet to his
fierceness of courage he had the softest and most gentle nature,
loved all and beloved of all, and without a capacity to have an
enemy. Winthrop seemed angry at my thus speaking, whether
because at heart he was ashamed of so barbarous a deed, or be-
cause unwilling that his party should be shown to be of such an
unmerciful and bloody nature before Mistress Mary, I know not ;
for he answered quickly: "Ireton told me of him as one of a
light and frivolous carriage, and that died with a jest on his lips ;
for when Sir Charles Lucas, who was their first work, fell dead
he ran to him and then kissed him, and then standing up spake
to them who were to execute him to come nearer. One of the
soldiers saying, ' I'll warrant you, sir, we'll hit you,' he an-
swered, smiling, ' Friends, I have been nearer you when you
have missed me.' Thereupon they all fired, and did their work

1892.] MISTRESS MARY. 189

home, so that he fell dead, in an ungodly manner, with neither
word of prayer nor of repentance of his sins."

"Nay," said I brokenly, for I could hardly speak for sorrow,
" meseems it was most godly to harbor so little hatred of his
murderers as to jest with them, and better than many words,
and I doubt not his death, even though he met it smiling, was
received in mercy by our blessed Saviour "; and with that I left
the company, and saw as I departed Mistress Mary's sweet eyes
full of tears, and Winthrop looking stern and ill-pleased. Pray
for his soul, dearest Esme, though I believe he stands not in
need of prayers, dying a martyr's death ; and yet I would not
that he should feel himself forgotten.

LETTER XI.

Since my last writing I have held myself aloof from the
society when Winthrop made part of it, and so noted with more
particularity the frequency of his coming, by which means also
a whole week was nearly over before I had any word with Mis-
tress Mary save at meals, and then few enough. It befell, how-
ever, one evening the governor bade me accompany him as he
walked abroad, wishing to tell me the substance of letters he
desired written the next day touching the alliance with New
France, which is still undetermined. Before we were very long
gone from home we were overtaken by Winthrop and Mistress
Mary, she quick-breathed from rapid walking, and he methought
somewhat shamefaced and not well pleased. " I have brought
General Winthrop to you, uncle, for he came soon after you left,

ind I knew not rightly how to direct him to overtake you,"
id she. The governor greeted him courteously and Winthrop
could do no less than join him, leaving Mistress Mary and me
:o walk together, and she being fatigued, we loitered a little be-

lind them and out of ear-shot, until we came to the graveyard,
where I prevailed upon her to repose herself a while sitting on
the low stone wall that is builded around it. It is a bare and
lonely place with only grass growing above the quiet graves, but
the sky to the west was fair, with a clear, pale light above the
dark pines, and against the wall were pink wild-roses, which, -to
fancy, looked lovelier by the rough gray stones than any

lowers in the French parterres. Her dress was as gray as the
stones, for the maidens here are ever clothed in sober hues, and
coming hastily, the evening being warm, she wore no hood, so
that the low sunlight lay lovingly upon her fair hair, and after

I gathered some of the roses, which she graced by putting them

I9 o MISTRESS MARY. [May,

in her girdle, I thought nowhere else could the sun see so beauti-
ful a sight. I read the names on some of the nearest headstones,
and she showed me one marked with the names of the Lady
Arbella and Isaac Johnson, her husband, and the dates showing
he had lived but a few weeks beyond her. Then she told me
how the Lady Arbella was the daughter of the Earl Lincoln,
who, as Dudley wrote home, "coming from a paradise of plenty
and pleasure which she enjoyed in the family of a noble earl-
dom into a wilderness of wants, lived there only one month, and
her husband died of grief a few weeks after." After did she tell
me other stories of the first settlement ; how two hundred of the
first emigration died before the end of the autumn, and yet the
hearts of those that lived were in nowise disquieted, and none
the less did they hold to their first purpose. She said that al-
ways from a child she had come to the Lady Arbella's grave ;
and think of the strange fate and the force of her love, which
had brought her from England to die in this strange land.
" And I doubt not," said I, " that many flowers have you placed
on her grave." " Oh, no ! " she answered, " that would be un-
seemly"; and then told me of the austere fashion of their bury-
ing, where no clergyman ever says a word of prayer. Then I
told her how in France, besides praying for the souls of them
that have departed this life, each year those that love them visit
their graves and lay on them flowers and wreaths, so that the
bond of love is nowise broken even when the spirit passes from
the flesh, and that as we pray for one another living, so also we
continue in prayer after the death, which can separate bodies
but not souls, and so keep the Communion of Saints as the
Apostles taught. Her hands being full of pink roses she placed
a few very tenderly on the soft grass, and as she turned away I
saw that the thorns had pricked her white hand so that it bled,
and drawing forth my handkerchief that I might stanch the
blood, I pulled out with it my Rosary. While I bound up her
finger unskilfully, and with trembling hands, she looked curiously
at my Rosary, which seeing, I offered it in her hands. She
took it as though half-afraid, touching the beads one after an-
other, and suddenly cried out : " Why, it is strung like my
mother's necklace. See ! " And she took from around her neck,
but hidden in her gown, no necklace indeed, but a Rosary of
fair amethysts strung on gold, only with the cross broken away.
"No necklace was ever strung like this, Mistress Mary," I said,
and showed her the beads were in tens, like my chaplet, with a
greater bead between for the Gloria and the Pater Noster,

1892.] MISTRESS MARY. 191

and the three smaller beads that follow the cross. She seemed
as one sorely perplexed, and said : " It is very like ; and yet
how should I have a Rosary belonging to my mother?" Then
I asked her of her mother, of whom she says she has the re-
membrance only of a gentle lady with dark eyes like her brother,
and that she does not even know her name ; for that none have
ever spoken of her, she thinks by some command of her uncle,
for that once when she inquired of him he told her briefly that,
though her parents were so long dead, the grief to him was so
great that he wished never to speak on so sad a theme. Only
some jewels in a casket he had given her, rings and bracelets
and such like, which the Puritans permit not their maidens to
adorn themselves with she, indeed, needs not their adorning
and that finding the string of amethysts among them, she wore
it always hidden as something that had been the unknown
mother's, her tender heart craving that remembrance of her in
their harsh custom's despite. While she was still speaking Gov-
ernor Endicott and General Winthrop approached, and methought
both looked as if our speaking together misliked them, and it
being now twilight, and the falling of the dew, we all went
homewards, I marvelling greatly how Mistress Mary came by
her amethyst Rosary, unless indeed her dead mother were of.
the church, which might well be deemed, by the governor, a
grief and a grievous thing, the knowledge whereof he would fain
keep from his fair niece.

LETTER XII.

O Esm6 ! I have been told a thing that is grievous to hear,
and wherein I avail naught to help or hinder, though hinder it
I would at the price of my heart's blood. Since the evening
whereof I wrote last I have had no word with Mistress Mary,
and hardly a look from her eyes ; for whether her uncle hath
chidden her for that occasion's converse, or for'some other cause,
she holds her eyes downcast whenever I see her, and hath a
grave look that sorts her not and yet makes her lovelier than
before. Yesterday I was talking with Dame Charnock about the
hour that Mistress Mary setteth her household affairs in order,
and Winthrop passing, she muttered, as if to herself, saying:
" Weighty matters indeed that bring him every day to see the
most worshipful governor "; with so great an air of meaning
more than she spoke that I spared not until she had told me
all that she meant, the hearing whereof was heavy enough. She
saith that he desires to marry Mistress Mary, and that the gov-

I9 2 MISTRESS MARY. [May,

ernor is well pleased that it should be so, there being already
a marriage between the two families, and General Winthrop
standing high in the thoughts of all men for his courage and
character. When I cried out that he, worn and grizzled, was no
match for one so young and fair, she answered sharply that he
was a most sober, godly man, and so most pleasing to the gov-
ernor, and therefore pleasing to a dutiful maiden. Being passion-
ately moved against the thought of this so unequal match for.
though I had long seen how his eyes rested upon Mistress
Mary, I thought not that any would dare to think of giving
her to him I spoke with great heat, which was suddenly chilled
when from an inner closet came Mistress Mary, so pale and with
so sad traces of tears that I dared say nothing as she passed,
for the governor was calling her, and I think Winthrop waited.
Now truly I know the reason of her silence and sadness, and
gladly would I die to ease her sorrow ; but what am I, a broken
man and a prisoner in the house of her uncle.

How shall I tell thee of the joy that has followed my de-
spair for she loves me! I had said no word of love to her,
and yet she knew it ; and when a happy fortune gave me leave
to speak with her alone, it was as if we had always loved each
other.

True it is that they would marry her with Winthrop, but,
albeit we see no way out of the coil, she hath told me that she
will never consent, and she is as strong beneath all her soft
sweetness as the granite rocks that underlie the mayflowers, as
sweet as she.

LETTER XIII.

Father Druillettes has returned, and to him I told all my
love and our sore perplexity. He heard me with much kindness,
and yet thought *of no means whereby he might help us, but
says that he will pray for light in this cloud of unknowingness,
and still bids us be patient. Patience ! when on any suspicion
by the governor or jealousy of Winthrop and his love may
well make him sharp-eyed I may be sent far from here, leaving
them to work their will by preaching or persuasion upon my
best beloved ! I have had private speech again of her, and won
her consent to one thing, for which I had to plead long. She
hath promised to marry me now if Father Druillettes will con-
sent, and he I doubt not will be well willing. I opened the
subject to him, and lo ! he was very loath, and said it liked him

1892.] MISTRESS MARY. 193

not to make such a requital of the governor's kindness to him.
Whereupon I said, Mary is of age and free from her obedience
to her uncle, and that it were better to marry her in secret to
one whom she loved than leave her to be wed unwilling to one
she loved not. Then said he : " It were better for her to marry
in her own religion and by her own minister." " Nay," said I,
" they do have no blessing of their own church at their mar-
riage, for it is a magistrate and no minister who performs the
rite" ; and at that he crossed himself in horror.

" But," said he further, " I would not willingly marry thee,
Alan, to a heretic; nor, indeed, would I have the power, failing
a dispensation from my superior." To that at first I knew not
what to urge, for well I knew I could not move him from his
obedience, and so I was sorely perplexed. Suddenly the sight
of his beads reminded me, and I cried out as if a sudden light
from heaven had fallen upon my eyes. " Father, and what if she
be no heretic, but a child of the church stolen from the fold ?"
And then recited to him what I knew of her mother's Rosary.

" That might indeed be, though it seems little possible," said
he ; " and if she were a true Catholic she would have failed not
to have her child baptized in the faith, even if in secret. Has
she no memory of any prayers taught her in infancy?"

" I know not," I answered ; " but, father, wilt thou not see
her and question her? Thou hast skill and long knowledge."

And so he promised that after supper he would await us in
the woods beyond the town, if I could get word to Mistress
[ary to repair thither. And oh ! if he sees her and has even
>rief speech of her he cannot refuse her aught that she would
ive.

LETTER XIV.

Whether it befell by prayer or luck I know not, but that
ime evening Governor Endicott and Harry went to see Gov-
ernor Winthrop, and the note I slipped beneath the lintel of
[ary's door told her of my plan, so that in the twilight, when
the house was all still, she came down the broad stairs and met
me where I waited, cold and hot with fear and love. In the
shadow of the trees I took her hand and led her where the
priest waited. She was in a dark gown as when I first saw her,
and with her travelling hood around her face ; pale now but
sweeter and lovelier than ever, and brave as became her brave
heart.

" Daughter," said the priest, after she had showed him her
VOL. LV. 13

I9 4 MISTRESS MARY. [May,

beads, for there was little time to waste in words, " rememberest
thou any prayers taught thee by thy mother?"

" None," she made answer ; and my heart sank within me.
" Think again," he said very gently. " Didst thou never, a little
child, kneel beside her while she held thy folded hands and said
certain words for thee to repeat after her?" Her brows knitted
as if she half-remembered.

" I do not know " she hesitated ; " I almost think I remem-
ber or I dreamed something like what you say."

" Father," I cried, standing by in a passion of hope and fear,
" say the Our Father, and perchance she may remember." For
my own heart beat so fast that I could say no word of it.

" Nay," he answered, " that prayer is common to all Christians,
and it would prove nothing ; but if her mother were in very
truth a Catholic she would not fail to teach her own child the
prayer all Catholics say to the mother of our Lord. See if thou
dost remember the response."

And very slowly, still holding her hand, he said the first part
of the Ave Maria. But she looked up in his face in silence, but
piteously like a child trying to read a lesson she knows not.

" Many do pray in Latin," he said. " It may be she will
remember it so"; and this time he said the prayer again in
Latin. Still she answered it not ; but her face changed like a
lake when a little wind stirreth its waters, and slowly she repeat-
ed one word, " Maria," and as if trying to say something whereof
she was not sure.

" Father," I exclaimed, and the tears were in my eyes, " say
it in French ! " And I caught her hand as if mine could carry
the words to her very heart.

He waited a short space while his lips moved in silent
prayer. For me I could say and think of no words, but every
breath of my body and every beat of my heart was a passion-
ate prayer that methought might move mountains. Then, still
slowly and clearly, he began :

" Je vous salue, Marie, Mere de Dieu, le Seigneur est avec
vous "

When he stopped at the word Jesus my heart stopped beat-
ing ? And then O God be praised ! slowly and like a child
repeating a half-forgotten lesson, I heard her sweet voice say :

"Sainte Marie, Mere de Dieu, priez pour nous, pauvres pe-
cheurs, maintenant et a 1'heure de notre mort."

I think no shame to my manhood that I was sobbing aloud
before she finished.

1892.] MISTRESS MARY. 195

Father Druillettes raised his biretta and said :

" Praise be to God, who in this vast wilderness hath brought

this lamb back to the fold ! Verily out of the mouth of babes

and sucklings shall his truth be made manifest.

" Son, I will vouch that no mother so careful to teach her

child these holy words would let her lack the baptism of the

water of life, and I will wed thee to her whenever the time

seems fit."

LETTER XV.

Much has befallen since the evening I wrote of, when that
fair and sweet Puritan maiden, in her own unconsciousness,
showed herself a child of the church. It needed not much fur-
ther argument to win Father Druillettes to agree to- marry us
when the time was fit, and the only scruple he made was that
while a guest of the governor he would not marry his ward
and niece in secret. So it was settled that after his further
visit to Dudley the last of his attempts for the treaty he would
return on a fixed day with an Indian guide and wait us by a
certain great pine-tree on the forest's skirt, whither Mary would
go as soon as the twilight would give her chance to depart the
house unseen. How long that day was in coming, and how
much longer in wearing to twilight, I could never tell thee. In
the morning Henry Endicott suddenly arrived, whose coming
icarly shook his sister's resolution, for there hath always been a
singular love between them, and her heart being tender with
tew feeling, did but feel the old affection more keenly, so that I
iw her sweet eyes fill with tears whenever they rested upon
dm. Indeed I feared greatly that she would discover our secret
all that looked upon her by the tenderness and self-reproach-
ilness with which she moved among them, and but that her
>rother himself seemed strangely occupied with I know not
hat weighty concern he must have marked her trouble. Still
feared not she would fail at the tryst, and as the night grew
lear the greater danger was that I would be let from keeping
it, for Henry Endicott joined me when I started and would walk
with me through the town until I could have believed he pur-
posed to prevent my going. But at last, after I had entered
the forest by another way from the one we had appointed for
Mary to go, he bade me good night, saying I must be fond of
lonely and darksome walks, and turned away. I marked, with-
out considering the reason, that he turned not back to Salem
but further into the forest, little thinking how weighty would be

196 MISTRESS MARY. [May,

to me the direction of his footsteps, nor all the trouble that
should follow noting only that he went away from where we
were to meet.

And then in a little while I was at the tree where stood the
Indian guide and Father Druillettes, with Mary holding his hand,
wearing the travelling cloak in which I first saw her, and the
hood falling back from her fair head, so that the faint light of
the crescent moon fell on her brave face and sweet, deep eyes.
The holy words were soon said I repeating mine knowing
nothing but that I held her cold little hand and that thus far
forward she was mine mine for ever, for not death itself should
part me from my love. And then we knelt, and the holy
father put his hands upon our heads, blessing us, prayed earn-
estly, and 'then was gone.

Never had the heir of Castle Graeme so strange a bridal no
witness but a dumb savage, no revelry or mirth to attend, nor
altar lights nor pealing organ ; only the light of the distant stars,
and the sound of the sad night wind that stirred the sombre
pines, and far off the deep moan of the sea.

LETTER XVI.

Many a time and in a petulant and unthankful mood have I
called myself a prisoner in this new world, dearest Esme, which
now, looking back upon from my present condition, much abash-
es me, for truly then I had as much freedom as any of my
fellows, whose bounds are the pathless ocean in front and a
strange and pathless world around them, filled with such enemies
that would fright the bravest soldiers of the old countries by
their horrid and unseemly manner of fighting. But now am I of
a verity a captive locked in one gloomy chamber, with access
to none save only the jailer who is charged with my living, ac-
cused of a crime most horrible and undreamed-of, and for which
few would more deeply grieve than I, the innocent yet suspected
murderer. I write, not knowing whether the words will ever
win their way to thee, or what will be the outcome of this dark
and mysterious tangle, for I need not say to thee, to whom
all my thoughts since I came to this land are well known, that
not the holy sisters in thy convent are more innocent of the
foul crime than I. It befell that my last package of letters,
through a rare chance of good fortune, went in the ship that
sailed the day after my last writing, and have, I trust, imparted
to thee all that had befallen me. As is the wont here, we
watched the ship that sailed homeward the last that is to go

1892.] MISTRESS MARY. 197

before next spring till it could no more be seen in the far-
thest distance, and afterwards I walked long in the pleasant coun-
try, for the evening was of marvellous softness, like as if the
summer returned for a brief space, and a mild and pleasing haze
hung over the earth like a veil of thinnest smoke. It is that
season which they call here the Indian summer, for the first set-
tlers, deceived by the appearance as of smoke all through the
warm air, were at the first alarmed, taking it for the camp-fires
of the savages gathering to the attack; but later finding their
error, and that each year after the first fall of snow come these
heavenly sweet days, they still name them in memory of that
first fear, scorning, I doubt not, to hallow them as the people
do in France, by the name of the great Saint Martin. I walked
long, for my thoughts kept me sweet company, and returning
home in the moonlight I was aware of an unwonted crowd
around the governor's house, the whole town seeming astir.
Hardly had I issued from the shadow of the trees when I was
seized with much vehemence by many men at once, and with
shouts of triumph and groans of horror and execration was led
into the house, the hall whereof was filled with people, among
whom I saw the deputy, the assistants, and many of the
more considerable townfolk, but none of the household. Not
knowing the meaning of all this stir, I was silent until Gover-
nor Winthrop, the brother of the general for this year Endi-
cott is deputy said sternly : " Alan Graeme, when saw you
Henry Endicott last ? "

In much relief at so simple a question I answered instantly,
" On the Wednesday just passed " ; for I remembered well what
day it was.

"And at what hour?"

" Somewhat late in the evening," I replied; but not without
hesitation that escaped not the keen attention of the listen-
ers, for many cried out :

" Fain would he deny, but dare not, knowing that they were
ien of many of us going together toward the forest."

My heart turned to ice in sudden dread that I had been
followed and my secret discovered, with what sequence of sepa-
ration for us or harm to another I dared not think, but I made
shift to keep a calm and careless bearing, so that from me they
should learn nothing.

When the governor had commanded silence, he said very
solemnly :

" Alan Graeme, where is Henry Endicott now ? "

I9 8 MISTRESS MARY. [May,

I answered : " Nay, I know not, unless he has returned again
to Boston, for since the evening I have told you of I have
not seen him."

" Nor no man else," said Winthrop ; and there were many
mutterings among the crowd, the cause whereof I little guessed
until he went on : " Wherefore, as the last person seen with him,
and the only one here who could bear enmity against him, being
of different creed and party, and an alien and prisoner in this
plantation, you are accused of his murder."

"Murder!" I repeated, and laughed aloud, in part for the
relief of knowing whereof I was suspected and in part at the
pure foolishness of any supposing I could have wrought evil to
Henry Endicott. But the groans and exclamations of the crowd,
no less than the white anger in Winthrop's face, quickly brought
me to a soberer mind. Then, to my much surprise and despite
my most solemn oaths of innocence and good will, I was carried
to the jail, long empty of any prisoner, and never, I am bold to
say, harboring one so guiltless in act or wish of the crime laid
to his account.

LETTER XVII.

At last, at last, dear Esme", I am free and blessed with a
happiness so great and so unhoped-for that methinks I could
gladly go back to prison again for the sake of so fair an ending
of my captivity. Not now shall I weary thee with the long
weeks and months that passed in that loneliness and suspense,
nor the many times of summoning before the council and the
oft-repeated questionings concerning Henry Endicott, to which
I could give but one unshaken answer, as knowing no more and
marvelling as much as any at his disappearance. Nor need I
now dwell upon that greater sorrow and anxiety as to what
had befallen his sister, bereft now of her brother and with no
tidings direct from me ; for none were allowed to see me save
only the officers and council. I was forbid all communication
or writing or receipt of letters, so that of what was passing
without I knew naught. One thing only I knew, which was my
chiefest comfort in those dark days, that how great soever her
grief for her brother, and whatsoever they might charge against
me, they should never change her faith in me, for, by the bond
of the love between us I was full well assured that she could
no more have doubt of me than I of her. And of this I had
an assurance that filled me with thankfulness, for, falling sick
through anxiety and dark doubt, I could not eat of the plain

1892.] MISTRESS MARY. 199

prison fare, so that Governor Endicott himself sent me food from
his table.

As the jailer sorted the dishes one forenoon I saw a jar of
jam wrapped in a sheet of paper on which was a superscription.
Ere I could seize it he caught it, and, looking at both sides,
threw it away carelessly, saying, " Dame Charnock hath been
burning old papers of the governor's " ; and looking, I saw an old
impression of the seal of Rhode Island, with the sheaf of arrows
in the liess and the words Amor Vincit Omnia. Then I knew
well whose hand had chosen the paper in the hope that it might
bring me a message of love and hope. Little knew they who
framed the design what meaning it should one day bear for us
two ! And the thought of her message lightened the long days
of which each one then seemed endless, and now, looking back-
ward, seem but as one short season, separated only by the
change from cold to the mildness of the early spring, and by
the stated questionings and examinations, whereof none brought
further trace of Henry Endicott since the evening we parted at
the skirt of the woods.

At long last, one evening as I watched the red sun sinking,
striped with black by the iron bars of my window, I heard a
great noise, the like of which had not been since the time of
my capture, and was aware of many men moving towards the
prison, but too far for me to distinguish the meaning of their
words. My first thought was of an attack by the savages, and a
great dread seized me, locked weaponless in the prison, at the
thought that my wife was in imminent danger and I not by her
to save or perish with her, so that in my fury I seized the iron
bars and would fain, in my passion, have wrenched them
asunder to win to her side. But all my force was as nothing to
their cold strength, and presently as the crowd came nearer I
saw many women among them, which somewhat quieted my fear,
knowing that if an Indian attack was toward, the women and
children would first be set safely in the blockhouse, which was
in an opposite direction. Also I perceived that the men carried
to weapons, and I was aware that they were approaching the
>rison whereof I was the only prisoner. Presently my door
>pened, and there entered to me Stephen Winthrop and Endi-
:ott, the one moved beyond what I had ever seen in him and
Endicott looking glad and happy, and over their shoulders I could
;ee many crowding as when I was first accused, but with no
>uch dark and ominous carnages. Endicott held an open letter,
md coming quickly he grasped my hand, saying : "Alan Graeme,

200 MISTRESS MARY. [May,

you have suffered wrongful imprisonment and false suspicion
through the foolish and unthinking undertaking of my nephew,
which yet it hath pleased God to bless beyond the wise and
careful dealings of sober and godly men. Forgive him, for he
reckoned not that evil should come to any because of his mys-
terious disappearance. He is now safe returned from a perilous
and secret journey, the particulars whereof are in this paper,
and is even now on his homeward way, bringing with him the
child of Mistress Hutchinson, whom he was in search of among
the Indians beyond Fort Orange, where she has abode since her
mother and all others of her family were massacred. Come home
with me now, and learn at ease the history of his journeyings,
and forgive them that in great strait of doubt and distress turned
an unjust and unworthy suspicion upon an innocent man."

" And beyond all others," said Winthrop, " let me crave for-
giveness who first directed prejudice in your direction I blush
now to confess with what slight reason, and how much of a
base prejudice and unworthy imaginings ; and yet I protest I did
also think there was good cause "

But he made no end to his confused sentences, upr did I
answer save by clasping his hand, and the many others thrust
out from the crowd, to which I gave but little heed as with the
governor I passed out from among them once more a free man
free not only in the body, but what was far more to my mind,
free from blame or wrong in their thoughts. Yet freedom it-
self, dearly as the long months had taught me to hold it, was
but little compared with the thought that in brief space I should
again see Mary. And again which once I would scarce have
credited mixed with the thought of close-coming happiness, was
a less glad feeling as of disloyalty for the secret we harbored
from the governor.

But when once more I stood in the hall where passed the
sorest moment of my whole life I forgot all else, for she was
standing there, and I knew only that her eyes met mine full
of steadfast love and unwavering faith. She took no heed of
her uncle, but held both her hands to me, saying only " Alan ! "
And then I took her in my arms, and for the first time kissed
my six months wife.

Then said I : " Mary, my faithful and well-loved wife, we two
will have no further secrets from thy good and noble uncle."
And still holding her hand, I told him in few words how all had
chanced as to our marrying.

1892.] MISTRESS MARY. 201

LETTER XVIII.

At last, dearest Esme", after many plans and much converse,
our future is well-nigh fixed upon, and in it I hope thou shalt
have a happy portion. After the first shock of the tidings of
his niece's love for me, and when fully assured of the truth, the
governor showed a more kindly and forgiving spirit than I could
have ventured to hope for. Truly I begin to think that the
same human heart beats in all men's bosoms, though the stiff-
ness of these Puritan manners would fain make one doubt, for
he has acted with great justice and generosity? I think he is
also partly moved with some pity at the thought of my long
and most innocent captivity; partly, it may be, from gratitude
that one of the family of Mrs. Hutchinson has been saved from
so horrid a life among the savages as seemed to be her fate. I
have never known so just a man, and though in dealing so
harshly with that unfortunate woman as a seditious heretic he
but obeyed the law and was, moreover, in no ways accountable
for her further removal after her banishment to the Providence
Plantations, yet I know full well, from my own observation and
what Mary hath told me, that the thought of her fate and her
innocent children was often heavy upon his thoughts, though he
is of a temper too haughty and habit too silent to make avowal
of it to any. Also, upon Henry Endicott's return, as of one
come back from the dead, he, upon hearing of all our history,
stood manfully for our cause and spoke hotly to his uncle in
>ur behalf. But in truth I believe that of most weight with
lim was the earnest endeavor of General Winthrop, who, being
mce persuaded that Mary would have none of him as a lover,
icame the truest of friends to her, and for her sake to me.
[e it was who, when the governor was at last won to consent
recognize, with good grace and friendliness, the marriage
rhich indeed he could not deny, told us of the fair island next
lat one bought by his nephew John of the savages in the
reat sound to the southward, where the neighbor-tribes have
always been firm friends of the whites, whither he proposed
to remove and establish his home. And through his offices
of friendship was it bought for our home of the Indians, and
a house is to be builded for us by them that go from this
plantation with John Winthrop. The governor hath made a
strict reckoning as to Mary's fortune, which it seems is consid-
erable ; for our guesses were true, and her mother was a French
Catholic lady who gave up country and creed for her English

202 MISTRESS MARY. [May,

lover, and so, being cut off from her family, died in England of
pure grief soon after her husband, and left her two infants to his
brother's care. Also he has been obstinate in giving me what
would be fair pay for a secretary for the time I served him,
as well as for the time I passed in prison, as he says, through
his fault.

We stay with him till such time as our house is built, when
we will make our home upon our own land, and where Mary
says you are to come also and be her sister, and forget all the
troubles of Scotland and France in this new world. And this is
no vain imagining, for Stephen Winthrop, who sails soon, hath
been forward to say that he will take these letters straight to
thy convent, and has also offered, what I had not asked, to
bring thee to us when the ships come again next spring. The
convent in France was a blessed refuge for thee whiles thy
brother was a soldier and a prisoner, and our home in Scotland
given to fire and pillage, but across the wide ocean God hath
builded here a new world where men from all countries may
come and find safety and peace. And I, coming hither a sick
and hopeless prisoner and a broken man, have found more, aye,
much more finding my joy, my help, and my happiness in find-
ing Mistress Mary.

CRANFURD NICHOLLS.

THE PSEUDO-SHAKESPEAREAN PLA vs.

203

THE " DOUBTFUL," OR PSEUDO-SHAKESPEAREAN

PLAYS.

THE English Plays which, dating from circa 1600, have been
at sundry times or periods attributed to Shakespeare, are, I be-
lieve, the following:

The Troublesome Raigne of
John, King of England.

The Famous Victories of Hen-
ry the Fifth.

The Contention between the
Famous Houses of York and
Lancaster.

The True Tragedy of Richard,
Duke of York.

The Arraignment of Paris.

The Merry Devil of Edmon-
ton.

The London Prodigal.

The Puritan; or, The Widow
of Watling Street.

The History of King Stephan.

The Life and Death of the Lord
Cromwell.

The Two Noble Kinsmen.

The Birth of Merlin.

The History of Cardenio.

The Double Falsehood.

The Second Maid's Tragedy.

A Warning for Fair Women.

Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cob-
ham.

Fair Em, the Miller's Daughter.

Duke Humphrey.

Locrine.

Arden of Feversham.

Mucedorus.

King Edward the Third.

A Yorkshire Tragedy.

Eurialus and Lucretia.

George a Greene.

Iphis and lanthe.

Henry the First and Henry
the Second.

Lorrino.

Oldrastes.

The very utmost that can be said in favor of the above list-
ed Plays, is that a very few of them, three or four at most ac-
cording to the varying judgment of readers, and these not
always the same ones contain single passages or scenes which
remind or smack of Shakespeare. Some of them have been se-
lected by the German critics who (as Grant White used to say)
dive deeper, stay down longer, and come up muddier than any
other critics in the world as Shakespeare's. Others were delibe-
rately labelled with Shakespeare's name for commercial purposes
(and to this cause probably the larger number owe it that they
ever passed for a moment as his), while three of them, as will
presently appear, were called Shakespeare's on the authority of

204 THE PSEUDO-SHAKESPEAREAN PLA vs. [May,

an unknown bookbinder ; who stamped, upon the back of a lot
of plays sent to him for binding, the name from which it has
taken long and careful research, extending over a century or
two, to divest them ! As to one or two others, there is some
small circumstantial evidence to warrant for them a Shake-
spearean collaboration with some other dramatist, whose name is
also found attached to that particular play. And, finally, our
list is inclusive of four plays to which Shakespeare himself gave
a quasi-acknowledgment by selecting them as worthy enough or
popular enough to be rewritten by his own hand ; and, in their
rewritten state, to be admitted to the canon of his acknowledged
works. These classes I propose in this paper to examine separ-
ately. But the fact that any piece of literary work was ever,
however erroneously, at any time and for any reason, attributed
to the great dramatist, appears to make that piece interesting,
as at least indicative of shades of opinion, passing states of
criticism or taste, not to mention other matters or points of
view which might supply working hypotheses for circumstantial,
even if not of critical, research and investigation.

I should not advise anybody to actually attempt to read the
thirty above-mentioned plays, or indeed any of them. They
are all of them, except in spots few and far between, wooden,
monotonous, and lifeless. In fact, one may say that, from any
popular stand-point, or any stand-point except a severely critical
one, these plays are not " doubtful " in the least. No consensus
of opinion among casual readers of them would ever assign
them indeed no " casual reader " has ever assigned them to
Shakespeare. It is only by that microscopic study and that
appetite for discovery which subdued like the dyer's hand to
what it works in becomes in time so terribly over-apt to dis-
cover whatever it searches for, and so altogether quite as unre-
liable a guide as the most unassisted ear or eye could be, that
they have ever been so assigned. In no field of research is the
individual we may call " the generous specialist " so rare a bird
as in the field of Shakespearean research and hermeneutics.

In any consideration of the subject before us, the first four
of the above-mentioned plays must command our largest atten-
tion, since they were rewritten and remodelled by Shakespeare
himself, and re-entitled by him respectively "The Life and Death
of King John," "The Life of Henry the Fifth" (and I am in-
clined to think, also, that the suggestion for the inimitable Fal-
staff parts of the two parts of " Henry IV." as well came from this
old source), " The Second Part of Henry the Sixth, with the

1892.] THE PSEUDO-SHAKESPEAREAN PLAYS. 205

Death of the Good Duke Humphrey," and " The Third Part of
King Henry the Sixth, with the Death of the Duke of York."
These last two revisions were done with some apparent haste,
and with much less than the care which Shakespeare was wont
to give to his final work. So hastily and so carelessly, indeed,
as to have given rise to endless theories and controversies as to
whether he had any hand or partnership at all in the composi-
tion of any one of the three parts of his play of Henry VI.
Into the vicinity of that controversy it is not the purpose of
this paper to enter. But I will remark in passing that, care-
lessly as Shakespeare performed his revision, the master's hand
is still visible ; his touch, however light or casual, was yet such
as none other could give, and his characteristic was still apparent,
most of all in that quick capture, so to speak, of the salient
point in the bringing up of the text to the place where, from
improvement of conditions or lapse of time, it should meet and
fill the sense and appreciation of the audience.

For example: in "The Contention of York and Lancaster,"
a nobleman, Lord Suffolk, is represented as being taken prisoner
by a captor whom he recognizes as a former servant of his own,
and says to him :

" Hast thou not waited at my trencher
When I was feasting with Queen Margaret ? "

So the text in 1594. But when Shakespeare rewrote the play
there had been a long step ahead in table etiquette. It had come
to be only the oaf and the yokel who fed from a "trencher."
Trenchers at that date were not found on noblemen's tables ; so,
in the revision Shakespeare made this passage read, in the " II.

Henry VI. " :

" How often hast thou waited at my cup,
Fed from my trencher ? "

It would be, I think, rather difficult to conceive how by a sim-
ple change of a single word, to depict an actual change in so-
cial conditions, or to over-admire the skilful hand which, by
a stroke of the pen, brought old conditions down to current
dates !

But when Shakespeare undertook to rewrite " The Trouble-
some Raigne " into "King John," and "The Famous Victories"
into " Henry the Fifth," he did work that challenges our enthu-
siasm as well as admiration, not only for the summit of
dramatic genius in the artist, but for the laborious nicety of the
technical touch, and the prophetic as well as contemporary know-

206 THE PSEUDO-SHAKESPEAREAN PLA vs. [May,

ledge of stage effect and of practical acting requirements. The
two plays, as they stood, were drivel, mere rubbishy and ran-
dom dialogue (such as we might well infer actors without prepa-
ration, but simply talking to a given synopsis of action, might
speak on the spur of the moment) a lot of dialogue without
form, beginning, middle, or end ; a mere sequence of incidents
and situations with no coherence or interdependence, or anything
to attract or retain the attention, still less the interest, of an au-
dience. Out of this Shakespeare brought two perfect models of
acting plays, each with a concentrated dramatic action and a
splendor of mise en scene that no modern stage has ever yet
been able to more than adequately treat, besides creating out
of the baldest suggestions of the old text characters that will
live as long as English literature endures in the memory or men-
tion of mankind. Let us look a moment at this transformation
in the case of " The Troublesome Raigne."

The old play opens with some fifty or sixty lines of rambling
talk, the purport of which is that the King of France desires
some sort of " dicker " or conference with King John relative
to the eternal claims or pretensions which the respective crowns
of France and England were constantly obtruding to those re-
spective territories, based on fine points of intermarriage, Sa-
lique law and what not, of which the Shakespeare plays have
always so much to say. Shakespeare at once drew his pen
through all this and opened the drama abruptly with the single

sentence :

" Now say, Chantillon, what would France with us ? "

a splendid and imperious utterance, which at once presents the
spectator with the situation namely, that France, not England,
seeks the interview; and that the English king is determined
in advance to treat the demands of France, easily enough anti-
cipated, with contumely and contempt. Would it be possible
to give a finer example of the art dramatic? the art (which,
the more I study Shakespeare, the more I come to believe
that he created certainly there were no models in English
before him) not only of telling a story to eye, ear, and intelli-
gence at once, but of infering to the same eye, ear, and intelli-
gence the probable direction of the narrative to follow, and
the nature of the result. This wonderful art it is whose intri-
cate and delicate adjustments make success so precarious in the
attempt, and so splendid in the achievement, that the highest
form of any literature must always and invariably be the dra-
matic form. And Sheridan, because he understood it so well

1892.] THE PSEUDO-SHAKESPEAREAN PLAYS. 207

himself, could afford to joke about it (as he joked about almost
every other actor's trick or stage device in his admirable " The
Critic," when he made Mr. Puff say : " I open with a clock
striking to beget an awful attention in the audience ; it also
marks the time, which is four in the morning, and saves a de-
scription of the rising sun and a great deal about gilding the
Eastern Hemisphere ").

But something else is wanting besides narrative, situation, and
action, to a perfect drama. There must be a central character
for a hero, a strong individuality around whom the sympathies
of each spectator in the audience must cling, whose fortunes
each and all must love to follow, with whose ultimate success
the triumph of the principle of the piece is to be inseparably a
part, in which the spectator himself is to feel himself rewarded.
There was no such personage in "The Troublesome Raigne."
There was, however, a character, Faulconbridge, who, after a
rambling sort of fashion, met and surmounted obstacles, and
was a not uninteresting agent in one or two incidents in
the recognizable motive such as it was in the piece. This
personage, therefore, Shakespeare seized upon, and around him
proceeded to group his action, making the personal success of
this character the triumph of the motive of the play itself. But
something more was still needed : The perfect drama, written
not for the closet but for the spectator and the stage, must not
only avoid obscurity, and allot certain situations to be developed
in the dialogue, certain other by the stage effect, and certain
other by the opposition or coincidence of both of these ; but
it must so contrive to unify all these that no situation shall
present itself except as the result of a preceding, or the
exciting cause of a subsequent, situation. No matter how
pathetic, eloquent, or comic a scene may be, if it be dragged in
by the heels, as Dromio, in the "Return from Parnassus" of
1594, dragged in a clown by a rope, it will kill the piece by
begetting the impatience of the spectators (a truth well enough
understood to-day, but emphasized in Shakespeare's day by an
unpleasant habit of the audience of breaking upon the stage
and tossing the actors in blankets, if a performance did not hap-
pen to please .them). Now let us watch how Shakespeare, in
adapting the old material, worked strictly in accordance with
these rules. In the old play there is a scene meant to display
young Arthur's death in an attempt to escape from prison
by leaping from his cell-window, which, since it is very short,
I transcribe (modernizing the spelling only) entire :

2o8 THE PSEUDO-SHAKESPEAREAN PLAYS. [May,

Enter young Arthttr on the walls.
" Now help good hap to further mine intent,
Cross not my youth with any more extremes ;
I venture life to gain my liberty :
And if I die, world's troubles have an end.
Fear 'gins dissuade the strength of my resolve :
My hold will fail, and then, alas, I fall ;
And if I fall, no question Death is next.
Better desist, and live in prison still :
Prison, said I ? Nay, rather Death than so !
Comfort and courage come again to me :
I'll venture sure : 'tis but a leap for life !

He leaps, and, bruising his bones, after he was from his trance, speaks thus:
11 Ho, who is nigh ? Somebody take me up :
Where is my mother ? Let me speak with her !
Who hurts me thus ? Speak, ho, where are you gone ?
Ah, me, poor Arthur, I am here alone !
Why called I mother ? How did I forget
My fall, my fall, hath killed my mother's son ?
How will she weep at tidings of my death
My death, indeed ! O God, my bones are burst ;
Sweet lesu, save my soul ; forgive my rash attempt ;
Comfort my mother, shield her from despair,
When she shall hear my tragic overthrow.
My heart controls the office of my tongue,
My vital powers forsake my bruised trunk :
I die, I die ! Heaven take my fleeting soul,
And, Lady Mother, all good hap to thee ! "

He dies.

Now, however important the fact of Arthur's death might
have been to the story of the old play, it would be hard to im-
agine anything less dramatic than the above scene as it stood.
Nothing had led up to it, and nothing followed it except
the fact of the news of the death being later brought
to the king. But the fact of Arthur's death, if necessary,
could have, and would have been introduced, to fill out
the narrative, quite as well by this announcement of the
death to the king, as by the scene we have quoted ; and,
moreover, would thus have met the old classical rule laid
down by Horace, that no death scene should be acted, but
should be always left to the vivid narration of one of the
characters in the presentation. Shakespeare cared as little for
old Horace's rules as he did for the "three unities," but
he saw an opportunity in the incident, and was quick to seize
upon it. It is actually out of these few lines of soliloquy of
young Arthur that he found his only warrant and suggestion for

1892.] THE PSEUDO-SHAKESPEAREAN PLAYS. 209

the two episodes which have made " King John " the splendid
play it is, and the episodes themselves synonymous for con-
summate pathos and deepest fervor of dramatic sympathy wher-
ever the literature of the English stage lias penetrated. These
two episodes are, the scene where Hubert enters the prince's
cell and explains to him that he comes to blind him with
hot irons, and the touching entreaties of the lad to Hubert to
spare his sight, and the poignancy of Queen Constance's grief
over the death of her son.

As to the first, there is no need of dilation here. The con-
temporary drama which killed, hewed, quartered, and slaugh-
tered until seventeen murders in a single play was a fair average
surely showed no suggestion of this Shakespearean art of de-
lineating the agony of physical pain in a single human organ.
And we may well pause to notice the lines interpolated by
Shakespeare :

" The iron of itself, though heat red hot,

Approaching near these eyes, would drink my tears

And quench his fiery indignation."

One of those allusions to a scientific fact (viz., that the heat of
molten metal, by converting moisture into vapor, might by its
approach under certain circumstances neutralize itself*) which
Shakespeare was constantly running into the speeches in his
plays.

Queen Constance's mourning for her dead son, in the second
instance, indeed, is so eloquent in woe that it has not only
challenged the tears of Christendom but induced certain com-
mentators (like the exotic Mr. Dowden,f for example) to
actually write a chronology for Shakespeare himself out of it,
arguing that such poignancy of grief must have been written
when Shakespeare was grieving for his only son, Hamnet, the
date of which death being known, fixed the date of the compo-
sition of " King John " ! a- process of extracting hard facts from
tender emotions rather exceeding in delicacy that of evoluting,
if not sunbeams from cucumbers, let us say of cucumbers from
sunbeams !

* Jules Verne, in his Michael Strogqfr, makes Michael, who is about to be blinded by
having a white-hot sword passed before his eyes, see his mother looking on, when, bursting
into tears, the blinding process becomes abortive.

f See THE CATHOLIC WORLD of November, 1884: "William Shakespeare and His Es-
thetic Critics."

APPLETON MORGAN.

(TO BE CONTINUED.)
VOL. LV. 14

210 COLUMBUS IN SPAIN. [May,

COLUMBUS IN SPAIN.

THE period of Columbus's residence in Spain, beginning with
his arrival in that country and to the year 1492, has been, and
is yet, a subject of disagreement among his biographers. Bossi,
Irving, Prescott, Roselly de Lorgues, Harrisse, Riccardo Cappa
all differ as to his peregrinations, chronology of important events,
and especially as to his treatment at court. Irving and Prescott
deprecate the ignorance and bigotry of the Spanish courtiers,
among whom, according to them, Columbus had scarcely a friend
or a supporter ; while Harrisse and Riccardo Cappa, on the con-
trary, are rather surprised at rinding most of the influential ad-
visers of the Spanish monarchs, and the monarchs themselves,
willing listeners and easy converts to the startling theories of the
Genoese mariner. The unreliability of Ferdinand Columbus's
biography of his father, which, before the publication of Hur-
risse's valuable criticism of it, no writer dared gainsay, and
which, as late as 1884, was called by the latest American histo-
rian, Justin Winsor, "the corner-stone of American liberty," is
responsible for much of this confusion and chaos. Apparent con-
tradictions in the writings of Columbus also led his biographers
to widely diverging opinions. The frai'.mentary nature of most
of the original sources of information contributed its share of
mist and uncertainty. In what I shall say of Columbus between
the years 1484 and 1492 I will be as untrammelled by the as-
sertions of his son as if he had never written about his father.

At the beginning of 1484 Columbus was yet in Portugal, as
is shown by the following entry in his Diary : " I remember
that, being in Portugal in the year 1484, there came from the
island of Madeira a man asking of the king a caravel to visit a
certain land which he swore he saw every year." And, in fact,
the archives of the chancery of Portugal have preserved the de-
, dated June 30, 1484, granting one Fernam Dominguez a
ship and the governorship of an island which proved never to
have existed. That Columbus passed into Spain that same year
is proved by the following quotations from his writings. In a
letter uritten about 1 Keeinber, l$OO, he says : "Since I came
to serve these princes, it is now seventeen years; eight of which
aloiu; in dispute, and ended with my project being
turned into ridicule." From 1484 to 1500, counting both dates

1892.] COLUMBUS IN STAIN. 211

inclusive, there are seventeen years, and between 1484 and 1491
inclusive there arc- the eight years ol disputes. As I have said
in a former article, it was the custom of Columbus to count in-
clusive both the year by which a given period of time began
and the one with which it ended. And I think that the student
of Columbian literature will find it impossible to reconcile the
apparent chronological contradictions contained in his writii
unless he abide by this rule. In a letter dated July 7, 1503, he
says again : " Twenty years of service, through so many trials
and dangers, have profited me little." Between 1484 and 1503,
both dates inclusive, there are twenty years of service. Can
there be a doubt that Columbus arrived in Spain in 1484?

The biographers of Columbus, misguided by his son Ferdi-
nand, make him leave Portugal accompanied by his son Diego,
who, they say, had lost his mother some time before. This is a
mistake. Columbus left behind him in Portugal wife and chil-
dren. An autograph letter of Columbus written A.D. 1500 is pre-
served, in which he says to his correspondent : " I beg of you
that, like good ( !hrist ians in whom his highness has so much con-
fidence, you examine all my writings and consider how I came
so far to serve these princes, leaving behind wife and children,
whom, on that account, I saw nevermore."

Columbus left Portugal secretly and hurriedly to avoid prose-
cution, as is shown by the following extract from a letter written
him March 20, 1488, by the King of Portugal: "And as per
lance you may have some fear of our justice, because of legal
roceedings which may be pending against you, we, by these
>rcsents, guarantee you a safe conduct for your coming, stay-
ig, and returning, and that you will not be arrested, retained,
;cnsed, cited, or sued in any prosecution, civil or criminal,
whatsoever." This letter was an answer to one written by Co-
imbus to the king. In fact, the king's letter begins thus: "We
ive seen the letter which you wrote us." Justly or unjustly, very
>robably on account of debts which he could not pay, Columbus
id left Portugal an outlaw. If so, can it be believed that he
onld have taken along with him, and away from his mother,
to a foreign country his son Diego, who in 1484 was but six
years old ? Ferdinand Columbus, to shield his father from the
imputation of outlawry, manufactured a different version of his
going from Portugal to Spain, and thus misguided future biogra-
phers, Irving among them. Neither is it true that on his arri-
val in Spain he visited the convent of La Rabida and there met
the famous friar, Juan Perez. Columbus never saw La Rabida

212 COLUMBUS IN SPAIN. [May,

or Juan Perez before the year 1491. Here are the proofs point-
ed out by Navarrete. In 1513 Diego, the son of Columbus, was
prosecuting a lawsuit in order to be placed in possession of the
viceroyalty of a portion of the mainland of America discovered
by his father in his third voyage. Witnesses were called from
Spain and America to give testimony. One of them was Garcia
Hernandez, a physician residing in the neighborhood of La Rabi-
da. The minutes of the court, with accompanying depositions,
have been preserved. The following is a portion of the deposi-
tion of Hernandez :

" Witness knows that the Admiral Don Christopher Columbus,
having arrived on foot with his son Diego, who is now admiral,
came to La Rabida, a convent of friars in the city of Palos, and
asked at the convent door for some bread and water for his lit-
tle son ; and that while witness was in the neighborhood a friar,
Father Juan Perez by name, who is now dead, happened to
speak to Christopher Columbus, and perceiving from his demean-
or and speech that he was a foreigner, asked him who he was
and whence he came : and that Christopher Columbus answered
him, that he was coming from the court of his highness, and
gave him an account of his embassy there, and how he had come
to go to the king. And said Christopher Columbus told said Juan
Perez how he had treated with his highness about a proposed
discovery ; and that he bound himself to make over to his high-
ness such lands as he might find, provided his highness furnished
him with the necessary vessels and things requisite for such a
voyage as he intended. And Columbus further told the friar that
many of the cavaliers and other persons who were present at
the conference ridiculed his way of reasoning ; and that finally
the king rejected his suit, saying that more than once before
ships had been sent to discover unknown lands without success.
His highness further said that the scheme of Columbus was but
a bubble, and that there was nothing in it. Said Christopher
Columbus seeing that what he promised to do and to accom-
plish was so little understood, left the court and was travelling
directly from Palos to the city of Huelva, to see a brother-in-
law of his, married to a sister of his wife, who lived there and
who was named Muliarte. And the friar having heard the ac-
count of Columbus, sent for witness with whom he frequently
conversed familiarly because he was somewhat versed in astron-
omy, in order that he might speak with Christopher Columbus
and look into his projected discovery. Witness came at once,
and all three talked it over together, and, there and then,
selected a man to carry to the Queen Dofia Isabel a letter from
Juan Perez, who was the confessor of her highness."

This quotation is long enough for my purpose.

The man who carried the letter to the court at Santa F was

1892.] COLUMBUS IN SPAIN. 213

Sebastian Rodriguez of Lepe, who fourteen days afterwards re-
turned with an answer from the queen to Perez, instructing him
to come to see her. Garcia Hernandez also testified that not a
soul in Palos knew Columbus.

" Juan Rodriguez Cabezado (another witness), from the neigh-
borhood of Palos, testified that about twenty-two years ago he
saw the old admiral in the city of Moguer, a suburban town
near Palos, negotiating about the intended discovery of the In-
dies with a Franciscan friar who was in the company of the said
admiral ; and that witness was asked by the said admiral the
loan of a mule on which said friar was to travel to and carry
on negotiations at the court ; and that the mule was granted.
. . . On his departure, the admiral left his son Diego in
the charge of witness and of a priest named Martin Sanchez."

The fact that Garcia Hernandez swore that no one in Palos
knew Columbus, and the questions asked by Perez as to who he
was and whence he came, prove that the latter had never before
seen Columbus or his son Diego, and that that was the first
visit of the admiral to La Rabida. That this visit was made
not earlier than 1491 is proved by the postman Sebastian Rod-
riguez travelling to Santa F, near Granada, to deliver the letter
to the queen, whither Perez went fourteen days after to confer
with her. On the arrival of Perez and, later on, of Columbus at
Santa Fe, the conference was held, after which Isabella decided
to grant ships to Columbus. All historians admit that this con-
ference took place in 1491. In fact, Columbus says, in the in-
troduction to his Diary, that he was present when the Moors
surrendered Granada, on the 2d of January, 1492 ; and that the
order for the armament of the three caravels granted 'him was
given in that same month of January. The camp, which in
July, 1492, became the city of Santa Fe, only dated from the
25th of February, 1492.

Columbus did not go to La Rabida on his arrival in Spain,
icither did he at once go to the royal court. In a letter given
>y Navarrete (page 263 of his second volume) Columbus says :
" I spent here in his royal court seven years disputing." From
1486 to 1492, both dates inclusive, there are seven years. In the
lescription of his fourth voyage he says again : " I spent seven years
the royal court." And in a letter given by Las Casas, in the thir-
r-second chapter of his first book, Columbus again gives testimony:
" Your highness knows already that I spent seven years in your
court importuning you." In the following quotation from % Colum-
bus's diary is given the exact date of his arrival at court : " On

2I 4 COLUMBUS IN SPAIN. [May,

the 20th of this month of January it will be just seven years
since I came to serve their highnesses." This entry was made
on the 1 4th of January, 1493. Here the intention of Columbus
was evidently to give not only the number of years and parts
of years, as in the foregoing quotations, but the number of
months and days. Thus it will be seen that the much-written-
about contradictions of Columbus have no foundation in fact.
His dates need only to be understood and harmonized to become
a safe guide in establishing the chronology of the different
events in his life. If on the 2Oth of January, 1493, it was just
seven years since he had come to serve their highnesses, it fol-
lows that that service must have begun on the 2Oth of January,
[486. "It is evidently on this extract," properly remarks Har-
risse, "that the Bishop of Chiapas (Las Casas), by an erroneous
calculation, has laid the foundation of his assertion that Colum-
bus, having arrived at court on the 2Oth of January, 14.85, began
a terrible conflict," etc. On the authority of Las Casas, many of
the biographers of Columbus have taken it for granted that he
arrived at the court of their Catholic majesties on the 2Oth of
January, 1485, and thus have rendered unintelligible Columbus's
several assertions.

Knowing that he arrived in Spain in 1484, and that he entered
the service of the court on the 2Oth of January, 1486, we will
now endeavor to trace his whereabouts during the intervening
period of nearly two years. Las Casas tells us that, " before be-
ing sheltered by the hospitality of the Duke of Medina-Celi, in
his house at Puerta de Santa Maria, Columbus had visited the
Duke of Medina-Sidonia in Seville." And we also know from
Las Casas that the Duke of Medina-Sidonia refused to embark
in the enterprise of Columbus. The following letter in part ex-
plains itself :

To the Most Reverend Senor the Cardinal of Spain, Archbishop
of Toledo, etc.

" MOST REVEREND SENOR : I do not know if your lordship is
aware of the fact that I kept in my house for a long time Christo-
pher Columbus, who was travelling from Portugal on his way to
France with the intention of asking the favor and assistance of
the king of that country in his endeavor to discover the Indies.
I myself had fitted out for him the three caravels which he
asked of me ; but as I saw that such an enterprise would be
more properly undertaken by our lady the queen, I wrote to her
highness from Rota, and she answered me that I should send
Columbus to her. I did so at once, praying that, inasmuch as I
had not undertaken it myself, and had directed Columbus to her

1892.] COLUMBUS IN SPAIN. 215

service, she would deign allow me a share in the venture ; and
that the fitting out and return of the expedition take place at
the port of Santa Maria. Her highness received him and placed
the affair in the hands of Alonso de Quintanilla, who wrote me
that he did not consider the enterprise very promising, but that,
if it should be undertaken, her highness would permit me to
have an interest in it. After having carefully examined into the
project of Columbus, she concluded to send him to discover the
Indies. It is perhaps eight months since he started, and now he
has returned by way of Lisbon, having found, and very com-
pletely, all that he expected to find. All this I have learned
but just now, and to convey such good news to her majesty I
write you by Xuarez, and send to ask that she graciously allow
me to send out every year some caravels. I beg of your lord-
ship that you help me in this affair, inasmuch as it is due to my
having detained Columbus and entertained him for two years in
my house that so great a discovery has been made. Xuarez will
explain things more in detail ; and I beg you to believe him.
May our Lord grant you all the protection that you desire.

" We kiss the hand of your lordship.

" Dated from the city of Cogolludo the iQth of March.

"THE DUKE."

Columbus arrived in Palos, on his return from the first voy-
age to America, on the I5th of March, 1493, and on the I9th
the Duke of Medina-Celi wrote the foregoing letter to Cardinal
Mendoza, who was a kind of prime minister to Ferdinand and
Isabella. Most of the biographers of Columbus, on the suppo-
sition that he was received at court as early as January, 1485,
are puzzled in assigning a time for the two years* residence with
the Duke of Medina-Celi mentioned in this letter. My under-
standing of Columbus's dates not only reconcile them one to
another, but, I think, with all other contemporary documents.
Thus, the expressions " was travelling from Portugal," " had di-
rected him to her service," " my having detained him for two
years in my house," contained in the letter, all indicate that
shortly after having arrived in Spain Columbus had become the
guest of the duke. In fact, we know his movements between
. January, 1486, and his departure for the Indies, sufficiently well
to see that at no time during that period could he have resided
two years at Puerta Santa Maria. The obvious meaning of the
words " had directed him to her service," is that the writer,
the duke, had introduced him at court, and that Columbus was
a stranger to Isabella when she received the letter from the
duke.

The court of Spain, owing to the continuous wars against
the Moors, was erratic, scarcely ever remaining one year at a

216 COLUMBUS IN SPAIN. [May,

time in the same place. Thus, we find it on the 2Oth and the
2$d of January, 1486, in Madrid, and during the winter of 1486
and 1487 in Salamanca. The ^ordinary place of residence of
Isabella from 1485 to 1490 was Cordova, and here it was that,
according to the testimony of all historians, Columbus first pre-
sented his petition to the sovereigns. A commission or junta
of learned men was appointed to examine the project, presided
over, according to Las Casas, by Fernando de Talavera, prior of
the convent of Santa Maria del Prado, a Jeronimite friar and
confessor to the queen. Talavera is known to have received the
papal bulls appointing him Bishop of Avila not later than the 8th
of March,. 1486, and to have been consecrated and personally to
have taken possession of his episcopal see soon after. Knowing
this, we are obliged to conclude that the first of the many meet-
ings of the junta must have taken place in the spring of 1486,
because Las Casas denominated Talavera simply as el prior del
Prado. Rodrigo Maldonado, who was a member of the junta,
deposed in 1513: "Witness and el prior del Prado, and other
learned men, litterateurs and mariners, conferred with the ad-
miral." Had Talavera, when he presided over the junta, been a
bishop, Las Casas and Maldonado would have called him not el
prior del Prado, but el obispo de Avila, as he is called in many
documents of a subsequent date.

Talavera had no faith in Columbus's projected discoveries.
But happily, while he was visiting his diocese, another friar of
the Dominican order, Diego de Deza, who was then Bishop
of Zamora, afterwards known as the Bishop of Palencia, and
preceptor to the heir apparent to the throne, became the
leading spirit of the junta. In the autumn of 1486 the
court moved to Salamanca, and there the meetings were re-
sumed. The result was that, if the project of Columbus did
not meet with the approval of the junta as a whole, it was
upheld by many of its influential members, especially by Diego
de Deza, Cardinal Mendoza, and a learned Franciscan astronomer
named Antonio de la Marchena. Hence Las Casas says : " In a
letter penned by himself, I saw that Columbus said that the
Archbishop of Seville (when the letter was written Deza had
been promoted to the archbishopric of that city), Don Diego de
Deza, and the chamberlain, Juan Cabrero, had been the cause of
their majesties being possessed of the Indies." During the year
1486 and the early months of 1487 Columbus was the guest of
Alonso de Quintanilla, the royal treasurer, the very man into
whose hands, the Duke of Medina-Celi says in his letter, the

1892.] COLUMBUS IN SPAIN. 217

queen " had placed the affair, and who at first thought it not
very promising."

Let us hear Oviedo : " Columbus arrived at court and pre-
sented himself at the house of Alonso de Quintanilla, the trea-
surer of their Catholic majesties, who, touched by his poverty,
caused food and whatever else he stood in need of to be given
him." This passage shows that the duke had not been very
liberal in his hospitality to Columbus. While willing to patron-
ize him, he had probably done little more than give him a
shelter while the intended expedition was being fitted out. It is
evident that he sent Columbus to the court penniless. It must
have been during his stay with the duke that Columbus made a
living by selling books in Andalusia, as Bernaldez tells us.
Alonso de Quintanilla's generous hospitality must likewise have
been of short duration, for Las Casas says that " while at court
Columbus was reduced to such poverty as to be obliged to live
by his wits and the work of his hands ; drawing mariners' charts,
which he sold to sailors." Perhaps Columbus preferred inde-
pendent poverty to the patronage of courtiers. It is interesting
to follow the different steps which led him at last into the pre-
sence of the king. The last lines of the thirtieth chapter of Las
Casas' Historia tells us how he made the acquaintance of one
Romero, the major-domo of the Duke of Medina-Celi, who in-
troduced him to his master. The duke recommended him by
letter to the queen, who gave orders that he should be looked
after by Alonso de Quintanilla. By Quintanilla he was intro-
duced to Cardinal Pedro Gonzalez de Mendoza, the prime
minister, through whose influence he obtained audience of the
queen. The historian Gomara says : " Through Alonso de Quin-
tanilla Columbus had access to, and was heard by, Pedro Gon-
zalez de Mendoza, and through Mendoza their highnesses gave
audience to Columbus, and read his memorials."

Modern Spaniards have repeatedly endeavored to prove that
the committee sitting at Salamanca, called by them La Junta de
Salamanca, approved the propositions of Columbus. But the fact
that the pretended favorable decision was not acted upon, even
after the siege of Malaga, when ships were easily obtainable ;
the assurances given by Columbus in his writings that, with few
exceptions, his ideas were ridiculed by all ; and the fact that,
according to Las Casas, Columbus spent much time at court be-
fore obtaining an answer, which was only when the monarchs
were busily engaged in the wars of Granada, prove that there
must have been much difference of opinion among the members

218 COLUMBUS IN SPAIN. [May,

of the junta, and that no definite conclusion was reached. It is
my belief that Columbus was put off by being told to wait.
That his proposals were not definitely rejected is certain. For
immediately after the sitting of the junta at Salamanca, and on
the return of the king and queen to Cordova, in the spring of
1487, his name was placed on the pay-roll as a servitor of the
court. The royal treasurer's books of that time were found at
the beginning of this century, and contain the following entries :

" May 5, 1487. Paid to Christopher Columbus, a foreigner,
who is doing certain things in the service of their highnesses : 3,000
maravedis."

"August 27, 1487. Paid to Christopher Columbus 4,000 ma-
ravedis, to enable him to come to court. By order of their high-
nesses."

On the 3d of July he had received a similar sum, and still
another on the I5th of October of that same year, always
through the intervention of his good friend, Diego de Deza. He
went according to orders received, we may suppose, to meet the
king and queen at Malaga, which had surrendered on the i8th
of August, 1487: But no time was then found by the monarchs
to give serious attention to the projected undertaking of Colum-
bus, and he soon returned to Cordova, where in the fall of that
year he contracted an alliance or mesalliance with Beatriz Enri-
quez de Arana, by whom he became the father of his son
Ferdinand the I5th of August, 1488.

From May 5, 1487, to June 16, 1488, Columbus received
out of the royal treasury 17,000 maravedis. The winds had
probably never before been so favorable to the manner from
Genoa. He was drawing a handsome salary, and consorting
with courtiers, bishops, cardinals, and kings, with fair prospects of
soon seeing realized the cherished dream of his life. Still, in the
early part of that year 1488, he wrote to the King of Portugal
offering him his services. This we know from the answer he re-
ceived, which I have already quoted, and from which I make
another extract :

"Avis, 20th of March, 1488.

" To Christopher Columbus from the King:

"We, Don John, by the grace of God King of Portugal,
Sefior of Guinea, etc., salute you. We have seen the letter
which you wrote to us, and the good-will and desire which you
show of being in our service."

Columbus had not forgotten the fourteen years spent near

1892.] COLUMBUS IN SPAIN. 219

the court of Portugal in vain solicitations, or the duplicity of
that same King John, who, after having pumped out of him all
the information he thought necessary, had secretly dispatched
an expedition to discover Cipango and the Indies. Columbus,
who did not lack worldly cunning, but on the contrary united
the simplicity of the dove with the wisdom of the serpent, must
have chuckled to himself on the receipt of this letter at the
prospect of paying the Portuguese monarch in his own coin, by
practising on him a harmless deception. He had no thought of
again entering the service of Portugal, but he saw the risk of
being arrested if he entered that country without a safe-conduct
from its king. His wits served him well, for he obtained that
which he desired. From the testament of Diego Columbus we
know that the wife of the great discoverer had died in Lisbon,
and was there buried in the monastery del Carmen, leaving be-
hind her only surviving son Diego. Columbus desired to make
a trip to Lisbon, settle his family affairs, and fetch his son to
Spain. He went, but soon returned ; for on the I2th of May,
1489, the following order, which has been preserved in the city
of Seville, was issued by the king and queen from Cordova :

" Christopher Columbus has to come to this our court, and to
other parts and places of these our kingdoms. . . . Hence
we command you that, when he shall happen to pass through
said cities, towns, and places, you lodge him well, and give him
good apartments in which he and his may lodge without pay."

From this document it appears that Columbus had to pass
through Seville on his way to Cordova, which makes it extreme-
ly probable that he was on his way from one of the numerous
ports of Andalusia Palos, for example, near where his brother-in-
law lived, or Santa Maria near Cadiz, in the domain of his old friend
the Duke of Medina-Celi. It cannot be supposed that the lar-
gesses of Ferdinand and Isabella were then so magnificent as to
enable Columbus to travel in state and with paid attendants.
The royal command, therefore, that he and his should be lodged
without charge to him, leads me to the conclusion that Columbus
was then returning from Portugal with his son Diego and with
perhaps some other connection whom we have seen he left be-
hind with his mother, when he first left that country for Spain.
These considerations, taken in connection with the letter of King
John, in the absence of any indication of his whereabouts in
Spain between the i6th of June, 1488, and the I2th of May,
1489, fairly establish the fact that Columbus, between those two

22O

COLUMBUS IN SPAIN. [May,

dates, made the trip to Portugal for the purpose indicated
above.

At the beginning of 1488 Ferdinand and Isabella were absent
in Aragon, and the fact that they were so occupied as not to be
able to give him a hearing at that moment may have influenced
Columbus to use the time, that would otherwise have been
spent in idle waiting, in visiting Portugal. During 1488 Cor-
dova was afflicted with an epidemic and with inundations which
brought on a famine. This explains why no attention was then
paid to the intended discoveries. When Columbus returned
from Portugal the court was at Jaen, and Ferdinand, actively
engaged in the siege of the city of Baza, very probably never
thought of Columbus, who, there is little reason to doubt, fol-
lowed Isabella to the besieging camp, where she had arrived on
the /th of November. Baza fell on the 4th of December, 1489,
and the Spanish army had scarcely been disbanded when, in the
spring of 1490, ambassadors arrived from Portugal to arrange the
betrothal of Alonso, heir apparent to the Portuguese throne, to
the Infanta Isabella of Spain. A series of festivities celebrated
on that occasion in Seville again precluded any attention being
given to the affairs of Columbus, who, in his position of helpless
dependence, could do no more than wait patiently. The fact
that between May, 1489, and the end of 1491 no cash payments
were made to Columbus ; that Las Casas divides the seven years
residence at court ; and that mention is made by contemporary
historians that Columbus had been at court before being
sheltered by the Duke of Medina-Celi, makes it doubtful if a
second visit was not paid by Columbus to his old host during
the year 1490. It must have been about this time that he first
decided to leave Spain, but gave up the idea for a while at the
solicitation of the Bishop of Palencia. In a letter written by
Columbus in December, 1504, he says: "His lordship the Bishop
of Palencia, Diego de Deza, was the one who caused their high-
nesses to now possess the Indies, by inducing me to remain in
Castile when I was already on my way to travel abroad." If
at all, however, Columbus enjoyed the duke's hospitality but a
short time ; for in the spring or summer of 1491 we find him
again with the royal court before Granada, the siege of which
place had begun early in that year. A fire having destroyed the
Spanish encampment in July, and Granada giving no indication
of an early surrender, the building of the beautiful city of Santa
Fe" was decided upon. Santa Fe was intended for the perma-
nent quarters of the army to the end of the war. This was no

1892.] COL UMB us IN SPA IN. 2 2 1

encouraging sign of a speedy termination of the siege, before
the end of which Columbus could not hope to obtain the neces-
sary ships to travel to the Indies.

Columbus had now spent twenty years in fruitless solicitations
in Portugal and in Spain ; he was getting advanced in years,
and decided on pressing the monarchs for a definite answer.
The answer was given, but it crushed all hope from that quar-
ter. "It all ended," says he in a letter, by his "projected en-
terprise being turned into ridicule." In the turmoil of this war
of Granada i.e., during 1490 and 1491 when " the court was
in a constant state of migration," and the Spanish nation, from
the king and queen to the peasant, was engaged in a supreme
effort to crush for ever the power of the hated Moor in their
country, it is no wonder that the foreigner, with his magnificent
schemes, should be neglected and lost sight of. In a letter of
his (see Las Casas, Historia, chapter xxxii.) Columbus says
that in Santa Fe he suffered from cold and hunger. He left
Granada, and, passing through Cordova or Seville to get his son
Diego, took the road to Palos, in the neighborhood of which
lived Miguel de Muliarte and his wife, Violante Muftiz, Colum-
bus's sister-in-law. It was his intention to leave his son in their
charge, to bid farewell to Spain, travel to France and ask of its
king, with whom he had been in correspondence, what he had
failed to obtain in the Iberian peninsula. Columbus and his son
arrived on foot at the convent of La Rabida, and Dr. Garcia
Hernandez and Juan Rodriguez have told us what there hap-
pened them.

Friar Juan Perez, invited by the queen, travels to Santa Fe,
pleads with the queen, who consents to recall Columbus, and
sends him twenty thousand maravedis by Diego Prieto, who con-
signs them to Garcia Hernandez for Columbus (Las Casas).
This sum was intended to defray Columbus's travelling expenses
and to enable him to appear at court in suitable attire. I will
let Las Casas tell what happened on the arrival of Columbus :

" Many investigations were again made, many persons met in
consultation, information was asked of philosophers, astronomers,
cosmographers, mariners, and pilots. These all, with one voice,
proclaimed that the scheme was folly and vanity, and at every
step mocked and ridiculed Columbus, as the admiral himself tes-
tifies, time and again, in his letters to their highnesses. The
difficulty of the undertaking being accepted was increased by the
enormous remuneration Columbus demanded for his works, ser-
vices, and industry : namely, that he should be raised to the
rank of a nobleman, to the admiralty, viceroyalty, and perpetual

222 COLUMBUS IN SPAIN. [May,

governorship of the lands he would discover, etc. These de-
mands were then, as they would be now, to speak the truth,
considered very great and royal. So little credence was given
to the offer of Columbus that, at last, their highnesses dismissed
him with a God speed you. It is believed that the Prior del Pra-
do, Talavera, was the principal cause of this last dismissal of
Columbus. Having been dismissed by their highnesses, Colum-
bus bade farewell to those who had been his upholders, and
took the road to Cordova with the determination of going to
France to do as we have said above."

Alessandro Geraldini was an Italian prelate, who about the
year 1488 had been engaged as tutor to the daughters of Ferdi-
nand and Isabella, and who was in 1491 a member of the royal
household. Somewhere in the year 1520 and 1521, being then
Bishop of Santo Domingo in Hispaniola, he wrote his Itinera-
rium in Latin ; an extract from which, describing the junta of
Santa Fe, will be found interesting :

" Being moved to it by that distinguished man, Brother Juan
de Marchena, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella sent for
Columbus, who came to them in a few days. The opinions of
the leading personages who had met in council differed. Many
of the Spanish bishops, basing their opinion on the authority of
Nicolaus a Lyra, and on that of St. Augustine, who affirm that
there are no antipodes, thought Columbus plainly guilty of
heresy. I, who was then young, happened to be behind Diego
[Pedro ?] Cardinal Mendoza. And I told him that Nicolaus a
Lyra was a brilliant theologian, and Aurelius Augustine was great
for his learning and sanctity, but that of cosmography he knew
nothing, inasmuch as the Portuguese had travelled to the end of
the other hemisphere, and that, having left behind our arctic
pole, had, beneath it, discovered the antarctic. That they had
found the torrid zone everywhere inhabited ; that exactly at the
antipodes they had discovered new stars."

"Among the persons who helped Columbus at the court,"
says Las Casas, "and who desired that his affair should have a
favorable termination, was Louis de Santangel." This worthy
Aragonese gentleman went to the queen, made her a speech in
terse Castilian. This speech he no doubt had prepared in writing,
as was customary in presenting petitions to monarchs. It is too
long to insert here, but it can be found in the thirty-second chapter
of the Historia of Las Casas, from whom I continue to quote :

" As the Catholic queen knew that Santangel had naught but
a good intention and zeal for her service, she expressed herself
as well pleased with the advice he gave her, and said that she
thought well of following it, but that for the present the affair

1892.] COLUMBUS IN SPAIN. 223

would have to be postponed till she could have a little quiet
and rest. 'However,' said the queen, 'if you think, Santangel,
that this man [Columbus] will not suffer to wait any longer, I
am willing that the jewels of my wardrobe be pledged as security
for the loan of the money necessary for the equipment of the
expedition, and that he start at once.' Louis de Santangel bent
his knee, and kissed the hand of her highness. 'There is no
need to pledge the jewels of your highness,' he said ; * I shall
deem it but a small service to your highness, and to my lord
the king, to loan the sum out of my own estate, provided you
send for Columbus, who, I fear, has already departed.' Straight-
way the queen dispatched a horseman on the track of Columbus
to bring him back to the court. He was found at the bridge
called de Piftos, two leagues from Granada, and when he re-
turned with the messenger he was received with great joy by
Santangel. The queen having learned of the return of Columbus,
at once commanded her secretary, Juan de Coloma, to expedite
matters ; to draw up an agreement, and make all the prepara-
tions which Columbus would tell him were necessary for his
voyage."

Friar Antonio de la Marchena was a learned astronomer and
cosmographer, whose accomplishments were not unknown to the
court. When Columbus was about to start on his second voyage
the monarchs of Spain proposed him as a fit person to accom-
pany the expedition in the office of official astronomer. On the
5th of September, 1493, Isabella wrote to Columbus :

" It seems to us that it would be well for you to take along
a good astronomer, and that Antonio de la Marchena would be
the proper person, as he is a good astronomer, and he has al-
ways appeared to us to be of your way of thinking. We enclose
a letter for him."

The letter intended for Antonio reads as follows:

" DEVOTO RELIGIOSO :* Because we have confidence in your
learning we would like you, as he will tell or write you, to ac-
:ompany Christopher Columbus, our admiral, in the voyage he is
ibout to undertake to the islands and to mainland he has dis-
:overed, and to those he may discover, and that you remain in
these new-found countries for some time. We shall write to your
>rovincial and custodian that you may receive permission to
take the voyage."

That he was of the same mind as Columbus is shown by a
;tter Las Casas quotes, wherein Columbus says to the Spanish
lonarchs that during the seven years he spent importuning

* A beautiful Spanish address to a person belonging to a religious community, untrans-
ible into English.

224 COLUMBUS IN SPAIN. [May,

them, " no one was found who did not say that my enterprise
was false except Friar Antonio de la Marchena." Further on he
says that all save the friar ridiculed him. Las Casas adds : " I
could never find out to what order Marchena belonged. Neither
did I succeed in finding out when, how, or in what manner he
helped Columbus." Had Las Casas seen the queen's letter he
would have known that, like Juan Perez of the convent of La
Rabida, Antonio was a Franciscan, for no other body of relig-
ious call their superior " custodian."

The biographers of Columbus, copying one another, make of
Antonio de la Marchena one man with Juan Perez ; or, as they
call him, Juan Perez de la Marchena. That they were two dis-
tinct persons is plain from the documents herein given. An-
tonio was a friend of Columbus from the beginning of his
residence at court. Juan Perez never saw Columbus before the
meeting at La Rabida. Antonio de la Marchena was a learned
astronomer and cosmographer. Describing the meeting of Juan
Perez with Columbus at La Rabida, Las Casas says: "Juan
Perez not understanding Columbus when he spoke of astronomy,
he sent for Garcia Hernandez." Las Casas knew Juan Perez to
be a Franciscan, but he could never find out to what order
Antonio de la Marchena belonged. Juan Perez in early docu-
ments the writings of Columbus, for example, or in the deposi-
tion of Garcia Hernandez is never said to be de la Marchena.
Another witness, one who knew him personally, Arias Perez Pin-
zon, calls him simply Juan Perez.

Columbus took possession of the three caravels that were to
serve in the discovery of the new world on the 3Oth of April,
1492, in the presence of nine witnesses, whose names appear in
full in a document drawn up by a notary. One of these wit-
nesses was the monk of La Rabida, and his name is given as
Juan Perez, not as " Juan Perez de la Marchena."

It was Geraldini of whom Rodrigo de Figueroa wrote to
Philip II. in 1520: "The Bishop Geraldini is altogether use-
less ; he has no more sense than a child, and needs a coad-
jutor."* And Geraldini was the first one to append to the
name of Juan Perez the words " de la Marchena," to confound
him with the Antonio of that name. Gomara, who is taken
to task by Las Casas for having misrepresented facts, follows
in the tracks of Geraldini.

It is possible that both friar Juan Perez and friar Antonio
may have borne the appellation de la Marchena. It has al-

* See Harrisse's Christoph Colomb, vol. i. cap. 368.

1892.] HOME RULE AND THE GENERAL ELECTION. 225

ways been the custom of at least one branch of the Francis-
can order to set aside the patronymics of their members, and
to give them on the occasion of their reception in the com-
munity a new Christian name, sometimes followed by that of
the place of their origin. Thus, we have among the Italians
San Giuseppe da Cupertino, Fra Agostino da Montefeltro, etc.
The Spaniards of Columbus's time may have had both an An-
tonio and a Juan Perez de la Marchena. Marchena was a con-
siderable town in Caetile. But that they were two distinct per-
sons, Franciscan friars, and friends of Columbus, must be accepted
as an historical fact.

I am glad to say that much of what I have written about
them is borrowed from Harrisse, who has corrected the error in-
to which Irving, Prescott, Roselly de Lorgues, Gilmary Shea,
and others have fallen.

L. A. DUTTO.

Jackson, Miss.

HOME RULE AND THE GENERAL ELECTION.

MR. GLADSTONE when introducing his Home Rule bill de-
clared that there were only two ways of governing Ireland, coer-
cion or conciliation. He asked the people of Great Britain,
through their representatives, which policy they preferred. It is
reasonable to suppose that he spoke with a full sense of his re-
sponsibility. His experience is greater than that of any other
English statesman ; his knowledge of the science of government,
beyond all comparison, wider and more profound.

His opponents met him with the answer that there was a
middle way, that conciliation could be combined with coercion,
that the first duty of government was to restore law and order
and thereby pave the way for remedial legislation. The majority
)f the English representatives adopted the latter view against
the judgment of Scotland * and the resentment of Ireland.

Shortly after the present government came into power Mr.
Gladstone was able to point out that the verdict of the civilized
world endorsed his policy. He had the opinion of the United
States in his favor, the opinion of every country in Europe, the
opinion of every colony of the British crown.

A young Irishman, Mr. E. Dwyer Gray, elicited from every
part of the globe a remarkable consensus of opinion on the

* The Scotch are now asking Home Rule for Scotland; a bill was brought in this
session by some of the Scotch members.
VOL. LV. 15

226 HOME RULE AND THE GENERAL ELECTION. [May,

treatment of the persons sentenced to imprisonment under the
Crimes Act. Practically the world condemned the punishing of
these men at all, and not merely the mode of punishing them.
Because if they were criminals, as Mr. Balfour contended, they
should be punished in accordance with the laws. But if they
should not be punished in accordance with the laws, it could
only be because they were not criminals. I don't see how this
conclusion can be avoided.

This certainly seems to have been the *view of Englishmen
who went over to Ireland to encounter risks similar to those
that Irishmen were incurring every day. After all, they were
only asserting the right of public meeting, the right of petition,
and the liberty of the press. All these rights, won by two re-
volutions, were violated by the Crimes Act and the tribunal con-
stituted under it.

By construction of law any meeting may be treated as a
conspiracy ; but the accused in such cases have, under an indict-
ment, the protection of a jury. To obviate this inconvenience
trial by jury was abolished, for the purposes of the Crimes Act,
and a new tribunal created, consisting of two executive magis-
trates dismissable without notice. To expect any one to believe
that such a tribunal would act impartially between the executive
and the accused is to suppose him a fool. Yet Mr. Balfour
for years asked the collective wisdom of the empire to believe this.

The right of petition presupposes the right of public meeting,
and is of no value without it. This is self-evident. Then as to
the press: press offences were created by the Crimes Act. This
has been denied, but when the act made the bare publication of
the proceedings of a suppressed branch of the Land League an
offence punishable with six months' imprisonment it certainly
created a new crime. Any publication may be held as evidence
of a conspiracy at common law ; but to make it the subject of
summary jurisdiction, as that has been done by the Crimes Act,
is virtually creating it a new offence. It would be no greater
violation of constitutional usage and precedent to send a news-
paper proprietor before a court-martial on account of something
that appeared in his paper.

English opinion has, in consequence of such a departure from
the principles of British law and the undoubted oppression of
individuals which has resulted from it, been steadily flowing to
the side of Mr. Gladstone. Every one expects that the verdict
of 1886 will be reversed at the general election ; so that Home
Rule seems safe.

1892.] HOME RULE AND THE GENERAL ELECTION. 227

That it can be made safe there is every reason to believe ;
but this can only be done by making the judgment of the Eng-
lish people a permanent and deeply-seated conviction that will
tolerate no delays or subterfuges, no obstruction from enemies,
no apostasies of friends. American sentiment is with Mr. Glad-
stone, but it can also be made an irresistible force in the com-
ing conflict without violating in any way the comity of nations.
The daily press has pointed out in articles of conspicuous ability
how such aid can be afforded. But if precedents were wanted
for such assistance. England herself supplies them. Nay more,
she has allowed the Foreign Enlistment act to sleep when
friendly powers were in hot water with their subjects.

The struggle will not be ended at the polls. Lord Randolph
Churchill recounted in the press and on the platform the
methods by which Home Rule could be defeated obstruction in
the Commons, rejection in the Lords, and by the stirring up of
a religious war in Ireland. Lord Salisbury, who possesses the
power of appropriating the ideas of other men and urging them
with as much vehemence and passion as if they were original,
proclaimed this policy at esoteric meetings of the Tory party
and in the exoteric meetings to which the Liberal Unionists are
admitted.

However, no one has seriously taken into account the threat
of an Orange rebellion, even with Lord Wolseley at its head.
But obstruction in the House of Commons, or the rejection of
the measure in the House of Lords, would become elements
)f extreme importance, unless the English people were swayed
>y a burning and imperious conviction of its necessity. They
lisplayed such a feeling in the old Reform days, and before its
)ower privileges resting upon the authority and prestige of cen-
iries vanished like a dream. Similarly of other English meas-
res. But it is by no means so clear that an Irish measure
rould enjoy the same fortune.

There was a strong feeling evoked in England in 1880 when
the Lords threw out Mr. Forster's Compensation for Disturbance
bill. People spoke of reforming that august body much as they
would speak of dismissing a fraudulent board of directors or
enjoining a refractory parish vestry. The Pall Mall Gazette, then
a Tory paper, was so much moved by such threats as to express
serious regret that the House of Lords should expose itself to
peril for a few worthless Irish peers and the herd of brutal land-
lords behind them.

This incident seems to deserve fuller consideration as showing

228 HOME RULE AND THE GENERAL ELECTION. [May,

how English opinion may rise and fall on Irish questions. The
year 1880 was one of acute distress among the agricultural popu-
lation in certain districts of Ireland. Americans can remember
the time, for they did their own part in relieving it. The impor-
tant measure of land reform contemplated by Mr. Gladstone's
administration could not be prepared for some time, and cer-
tainly could not be passed for at least a year. Mr. Forster,
his Irish secretary, introduced a measure that might put some
check upon eviction pending the passing of the land act. It was
a fact of social economy in Ireland, as certain as a law of
nature, that landlords would take advantage of the distress to
depopulate their estates. To provide against this Mr. Forster's
bill proposed to render eviction for non-payment of rent a dis-
turbance within the meaning of the act of 1870, which would
entitle the evicted tenants to compensation, as on notice to quit.
But the act was to be limited to certain distressed districts, and
the tenants, in order to obtain the benefit of it, should prove
that their inability to pay the rent was due to the distress pre-
vailing. It will, therefore, be seen that it was a very paltry way
of meeting a momentous crisis. But the House of Lords in its
besotted blindness contemptuously rejected even this.

If that illustrious body were then and there put an end to
no institution that has passed away exhibits such an inglorious
close as theirs would have done. The old oligarchies that fell
amid popular execration from time to time in the history of the
world, much as they were hated, were not despised in the hour
of ruin. In their last moments they possessed something of the
majesty and menace of a dying lion. But the peers of England
were courageous enough to refuse mercy, haughty enough to re-
fuse justice to pauper serfs, to whom a thankless soil and rapa-
cious masters hardly allowed a bare subsistence in the most
favorable years. Yet the English people, satisfied with a few
unmeaning threats, allowed that house of folly and pride to tri-
umph over their good name.

We should not lose sight of the issue of the great agitation
for repeal. It was at one time, at least, as great a power as
the present movement. It had behind it a population nearly
twice as numerous ; and a leader that held a position which no
other popular Irishman has ever attained. The old Reform agi-
tation of England owed its success to O'Connell as much as to
any English leader. There was no great public meeting in Eng-
land at which he was not the principal speaker, there was no
debate in Parliament to which he did not contribute the chief

1892.] HOME RULE AND THE GENERAL ELECTION. 229

influence. His picture in the Reform Club among the Reform
leaders attests the greatness of his services and the estimation of
his English allies.

He was, therefore, justified in expecting that his efforts for
Repeal would command success. And they did to an extent
not generally known. Lord John Russell, the leader of the
Whig party, proposed to him a federal arrangement similar to
that which is the basis of Home Rule. It is not necessary to
consider what prevented the settlement. It may be that the
famine tested Lord John's sincerity. It certainly paralyzed
O'Connell. It was not the first time that a solitude made a
peace in Ireland.

There was a proposal made in 1885 by Lord Carnarvon, an
ex-cabinet-minister and an ex-lord-lieutenant of Ireland, for an
alliance with Mr. Parnell, with a measure of Home Rule as a
condition of the bond between the high contracting parties.
It has been pretended that Lord Carnarvon acted solely on his
own motion and without authority from Lord Salisbury in these
negotiations. It is hard to believe that a man going back to Ire-
land as lord-lieutenant would embarrass himself by negotiations
upon which he had no authority to enter. He had before his
eyes the failures of predecessors of great ability to carry on
government without any such entanglement. He could hardly
hope for success with it. It must, then, be concluded that he
was empowered to treat when he approached Mr. Parnell.

Yet quickly upon this appearance of adjustment followed the
extraordinary regime instituted by the present government in
1886, having for its purpose to prove to the world that Home
Rule was the hollow pretence of a few agitators seeking their
>wn ends. The truth is that the Tories felt the power of the
lational demand, they knew that it should be dealt with either
by themselves or by the Liberals, and they desired to secure
the advantage arising from the settlement of the difficulty. If
they succeeded they looked forward to a long era of Tory rule.

It is quite immaterial to consider why the negotiations failed.
All that is being contended for is, that the mere fact that an
Irish question has been seriously taken up by an English
leader is not necessarily a proof that its settlement is at hand.
In 1885 the Tories thought some measure of Home Rule
would be the right policy for Ireland ; in 1886 they thought
a perpetual coercion act, and the distant promise of an illusory
county councils act, would be the right policy.

It is not at all upon English leaders the success of Home

230 HOME RULE AND THE GENERAL ELECTION. [May,

Rule depends. It has been brought nearer to success by Mr.
Gladstone, perhaps vastly nearer to success, than it would have
been without him. But does it not look as if there was some-
thing of the nature of a scramble between the two great parties
as to which of them should anticipate the other ; if not in dis-
posing of it, at least in using it ? There is no question as to
the sincerity of Mr. Gladstone. At the present moment the
majority of the English people seem to be strongly in favor
of Home Rule. But is it so certain that it will be granted by
the next Parliament, and that the English people will not
change or modify their present opinion ?

If the House of Lords throws out the bill, what then ? Ask
for the creation of a batch of peers, on the old Reform bill pre-
cedent ? That suggestion may be summarily dismissed. The
number of peers required to change the minority to a majority
would be vastly in excess of those required in 1831-2. True,
life-peerages can now be created, and the objection would not
be so great as if the house were to be flooded with noble lords
of the continental kind of nobility. These poor men would not
transmit their coroneted poverty to descendants who would have
every reason to curse the hour that they were born. But it
would be as easy to abolish the House of Lords as to commit
what would be justly regarded as an inexpiable crime against
the sentiment of the British nation.

What Mr. Gladstone would probably do is to ask for a disso-
lution in order that the constituencies would send him back with
an imperative message to control the Lords. This would be in
accordance with constitutional precedent. But there would be
some delay before this could be done. The estimates for the
year should be provided for. Certain measures of a necessary
and more or less formal character should be passed. Such mea-
sures and the estimates would afford unusual, and then for the
first time discovered, grounds for discussion. The vast, compli-
cated, and various relations of the empire would probably receive
attention from members whose exertions had previously been
confined to cheers or cries of " divide." Every hour of delay
the opponents of Home Rule would count a gain.

This is the plan of campaign opened by Lord Randolph
Churchill, endorsed by Lord Salisbury, and accepted with confi-
dence by the party. No one in England, at least, can call it
anything but legitimate warfare. It is the course invariably taken
when the opposition wishes to give the country time to realize
a government measure in all its bearings. It was the course

1892.] " / AM THE WAY:' 231

taken in all the measures dealing with the representation of the
people since Lord John Russell's last reform bill that measure
which heralded Mr. Disraeli's famous leap in the dark. In this
art, which has come to be called obstruction since Irish mem-
bers adopted it, the present leader of the House of Commons
proved himself a past-master. It may be used long enough to
wear down the vitality of the marvellous old man to whom Ire-
land is looking with all expectancy, and the world with unbound-
ed interest, to close a quarrel that was old before many of the
states of Europe sprang into existence, and Columbus opened a
passage to the west.

Such a purpose should be defeated ; and for this the support
of the people of the United States is incomparably more effec-
tive than any other agency. It was instrumental in passing the
Land act of 1881, and making Home Rule the burning ques-
tion of the hour. Perfect preparation is the best means of
shortening a conflict. If the opponents of Home Rule find that
Ireland can rely upon the American people not for a day, but
for every election until the struggle terminates, they will aban-
don the unavailing contest. They know that the institutions
which they profess to have so much at heart are in danger. In
the future the most they can hope to obtain is what judicious
compromise can save. A protracted struggle, causing exaspera-
tion and ending in defeat, will not be the way to secure such a
compromise.

GEORGE MCDERMOT.

"I AM THE WAY."

" I have chosen the way of truth." Ps. cxviii. 30.
THE DISCIPLE.

YET many say, dear Lord, that Thou art hard to find ;
Although of guiding foot-prints surely there's no lack.

THE MASTER.

Those only miss Me who to truth's plain way are blind,
And in their pride refuse to tread the beaten track.

ALFRED YOUNG.

232 BY THE ROANOKE. [May,

BY THE ROANOKE.

THE Roanoke had broadened and deepened here where the
canoes were tied to water-willows whose reddening bark told
that the warm blood of the opening spring was blushing through
their veins. Up near the village the river had made its last
dash, amid much foaming over the mighty rocks that barred its
way, and a little farther down it had parted, still turbulently, to
make the group of small islands through whose bare trees the
massive irons of the new bridge shone like golden bars in the
afternoon sunshine ; but here the current flowed silently and
the yellow waters spread into a broader sheet. Beyond the ca-
noes stood the great stone piers of what had once been a rail-
road bridge until the wrath of mountain-fed floods had risen
against it and swept it away, leaving these pillars to show what
the river could do in its might. Some evergreen vine, brought
down perchance by the same fierce torrent, had found lodge-
ment in the stones of the central pier, and now was crowning it
in wreathing gracefulness and giving to it the dignity of a ruin
whose bareness nature has taken upon herself to clothe. In the
middle of the stream two fishermen, in blue shirts and battered
hats, were paddling their light boat to the fish-slides to set them
for the night's catch of shad, and the faint plash of their oars
was the only sound except the swish of the water against the
chained canoes that struggled to be free. Peace in its deepest
quiet reigned over the scene, and the two who sat in one of
the moored canoes sat silently at this moment, so at one with
each other and with nature that they were unconscious of hav-
ing lost the need of speech. Presently on the stillness came the-
sound of a violin and then the notes of a clear soprano.

" That is Anne singing," said Clare, looking at her companion.
" Listen how sweet it is."

" Oh !. listen to the mocking-bird "

sang the voice in notes no mocking-bird could imitate, while in
the pauses between the stanzas the musician played on his
violin variations and trillings on the theme. But the music, sweet
as it was, had broken the spell which had held the two in its
silent power, and, rising, they started homeward. As they walked,

1892.] BY THE ROANOKE. 233

keeping a sort of time to the air, which became more and more
distinct, they reached the cabin where, seated in the doorway,
was a young mulatto, the village fiddler, and standing beside
him, so that he had to look a trifle upward and backward to
see her, was the singer a quadroon she must have been, for the
dark blood in her veins but gave the deep olive to her clear
skin and the raven waviness to her hair ; and perchance the
submission of a race of slaves softened the gleam of the large
and lustrous black eyes. Beautiful she was in figure and in face,
and the man who played the accompaniment to her song did
so without looking at his instrument, for his face was turned
upward to hers, and his deep eyes were filled only with the
thought of her.

Instinctively Clare stopped, hoping that they could see and
listen without interrupting the pose and the music ; but Anne
saw her, and ceased singing so suddenly that the man put down
his instrument, and, glancing toward them, rose instantly in cheer-
ful deference of greeting.

" That was beautiful, Anne," Clare said with the graciousness
which endeared her to all the negroes about her, " And now
sing ' Aileen Alanna,' won't you ? I want Mr. Parmelee to hear
you."

Only the fiddler saw the glance which the girl threw at Par-
melee, who looked away.

" I cayn't sing that this evenin', Miss Clare," she answered.
" Le' me sing < Gypsy Countess ' for you."

" But that is a duet," remonstrated Clare, " and not half so
sweet as the other."

" Oh ! I kin sing both parts," Anne declared with the confi-
lence born of power, and nodding to the fiddler, whose eyes sel-
lom left her face, they began the old ballad. While she sang
le might herself have been the gypsy maiden, so alive were
ier face and voice with the sadness of a woman who, under a
>an of race, loves one above her, yet only half trusts him while
le listens to his pleadings. Before she had sung the first stan-

the tears were dropping from the eyes of one of her listen-
ers, brought by the infinite pathos of her tones, and perhaps it
ras the sight of them that made Mr. Parmelee say hastily :

" Come, Clare, it is too late to be standing here. Anne, you

l have to sing for us some other time."

" He didn' eben say * Thankee ! ' " exclaimed the fiddler, crest-
fallen ; " an' I thought he'd 'a' gi'en you some money."

" I'd 'a' flung it in 'is face ef he had," the girl replied fierce-

234 THE ROANOKE. [May,

ly ; and not all the persuasion of her lover could make her sing
again that day.

When Parmelee and Clare reached the high bluff on which
the town stood some distance farther up, they turned and looked
backward over the plantation they had just been wandering
through. The landscape stretched before them in a flatness that
had in it no suggestion of tameness. The course of the hidden
river, and the windings of the stream which ran its sluggish way
through the meadows to join it, were marked by tall beeches
draped in wild grapevines, and reed-like willow bushes interlaced
with the bramble and blackberry which a few weeks hence
would make a starry whiteness of bloom amid the green that
then would clothe the earth ; but now all was brown, in every
varying shade and tint, from the dull yellow of the newly-
ploughed fields to the reddened trunks of trees and the bronze
of swelling buds. Around the great gray barns flocks of white
pigeons fluttered, seeking their homes for the night ; and the
wreathing smoke from negro cabins rose and melted into the
mist that was already obscuring the horizon's skirting of blue-
green pines.

The peace that had hovered over the river scene was about
them still and seemed to have become a visible presence in the
person of the young girl, as she stood in the careless pose of
one a trifle wearied, her hands clasped loosely before her, her
large black hat pushed back from her shining hair and the blue
of the sky itself in the wide-open eyes which gazed afar off,
alight with calm happiness.

Parmelee stood apart from her, and while he watched her
standing there, so perfectly a part and crown of the fair world
that lay around her, a sense of his own unworthiness came to
him ; one of those impulses to contrition and amendment, stir-
rings of the Divine recoil from evil within each one of us, arose
in his soul.

" Clare," he said suddenly, " how is it possible for a girl as
pure as you are to love a fellow like me?"

She looked at him in surprise ; this note of humility was a new
one in his relations with her. From the time that the grown
school-boy had tolerated her childish adoration until the man
told her of his love he had always accepted her devotion as in
some sort his due, and she had sometimes the sense that he
loved her in an apologetic way to himself, as if he were wasting
his talents, just as she knew he felt he was doing in remaining

1892.] BY THE ROANOKE. 235

in this remote Southern village. She had felt this for him and
had warned him more than once that he should seek a more
brilliant marriage, wishing sadly that he would scout her warning
more vigorously than he had ever done. But now that for the
first time he was calling himself unworthy of her being a
woman she never felt so ready to give herself, and, drawing near
to him, she said, almost in a whisper :

" How is it possible that I should not, Wilson ? " Then with
a sudden transition to coquetry she added :

"I wish I knew how not to then I wouldn't."

She expected some light answer, but he said, still in his hum-
bled tone :

" I wish I knew how to love you better, sweetheart then I
would."

She slipped her hand through his arm and walked close be-
side him.

" Is anything troubling you that I ought to know ? " she
asked, with the sweet gravity of a woman conscious of the
strength of her love to meet any demand that he whom she
loved could make upon it.

" Do you think you ought to know my past life ? " he asked,
smiling down on her tenderly. He could see, though the dusk
was gathering, that the face upraised to his was full of love and faith.

"Yes," she said, "just as much of it as you feel that you
ought to tell me."

"And how about my present life away from you?"

She laughed a happy little laugh.

" There hasn't been much of it spent away from me since
Christmas," she answered. " But there should be nothing for
you and me to conceal from each other now, should there ? "
she asked, growing grave again.

Though they had entered the village street by this time, he
took her hand and, raising it to his lips, kissed it in the twilight.

"There never shall be from now on," he said solemnly;
and at that moment he believed his own words almost as im-
plicitly as he knew she believed them.

Clare became suddenly conscious of the lateness of their walk
when she saw the lamps already lighted at home, and thought
with a little tremor of the disapproval she would see on her
mother's face when she met her. Indeed, Clare had an uneasy
sense that she was living in an atmosphere of maternal disappro-
bation these days. There was a sort of intangible breach widen-
ing daily between mother and daughter.

236 BY THE ROANOKE. [May,

Mrs. Montfort was a rigidly pious woman ; that everybody in
the village acknowledged, though her children had an idea that
somehow, despite their mother's devoutness, she and they must
be most miserable sinners, and that their way as transgressors
was a wofully hard one. For the announcement of the priest's
rare visits he came but once in six months was a signal for
the household to be plunged into gloom lest some member of it
should fail to prepare adequately for the reception of the Sacra-
ments. Texts of Scripture, setting forth God's searching out of
hidden sins and his vengeance on the sinner, were read and their
impressiveness enhanced by legends of the awful fate which had
overtaken many who received the Sacraments unworthily, until
the children thought of Confession and Communion as mysteries
so exacting as to make their warm young blood run cold with
fear. The priest himself, a gentle, simple-minded man, thought
with dread of the hour he must spend listening to and quiet-
ing as best he could the possible and impossible scruples Mrs.
Montfort poured forth to him, and the penitent generally ended
the day of confession with a prostrating nervous headache, with
the natural result that the irritability of which she accused her-
self with so many sighs and tears became more and more un-
controllable. As her daughter Clare grew up, given to coura-
geous thinking, this strict almost terrified observance of the
letter of the law, and constant insistence on the justice of God,
began to make religion appear a slavery to the young girl.
" Better no God at all than one so petty as this !" she said to
herself once, after witnessing her mother's torment of scrupulosity ;
and with the superficial judgment of youth she began to ques-
tion all the rules of the church, because her mother's practices,
as a superlatively pious Catholic, seemed to her contrary to rea-
son and common sense.

Everything helped this growing tendency to indifference ;
there was no wise confessor to guide her, and all her friends
were of that large class of Protestants who treat the affairs of
the soul with an easy nonchalance, to be considered perfunctorily
for an hour or two on Sundays. Mrs. Montfort was troubled at
her daughter's lack of devotion, but her anxiety became grief
when she saw that she was becoming seriously attached to Wil-
son Parmelee ; and, while she waited for her in the dusk that
afternoon, she decided to remonstrate with her more earnestly
than she had yet done.

" It doesn't matter about a man's having religion, mamma,"
Clare declared, with oracular wisdom, after listening to her

1892.] BY THE ROANOKE. 237

mother's talk that night in their own room ; " men never are
pious, anyhow. Look at papa, good and kind and dear as he was :
I never saw him receive Holy Communion but once in my life."

" Ah ! but Clare, he had the faith ; he had what the best
Protestant lacks ; and he died contrite and believing, although,
alas ! the priest did not reach him in time."

And the widow's face whitened with the anguish of that last
fatal delay. Clare was not looking at her mother or she would
not have said lightly, as if dismissing the subject :

" I never knew a practical Catholic man " she had known
only three Catholic men in her life "and I would just as soon
marry a good Protestant as a bad Catholic. Though, to tell the
truth," she continued, smiling, " Wilson's religion is not enough
to give any one any uneasiness. He would not care if I were a
Mohammedan."

Such airy treatment as this of a matter so paramount shocked
Mrs. Montfort into silence. Herself one of those to whom
piety seems to come at their birth, she had no experience to
give her an insight into her daughter's soul and show her that
it had not yet awakened to its deepest needs. Conversion as of
hardened sinners she knew about, but of that other conversion
of the young and happy who have been so shielded from sorrow
as to have no dread of it, and so protected from temptation
as to be ignorant of their own weakness until some supreme
moment comes when the sorrow-laden heart finds the world
a void, or the untried soul must make its choice between
right and wrong, and when in this flood of many waters the
creature stretches lame hands of faith toward the Creator,
and so is lifted into safety of such conversion as this Mrs.
Montfort could not know, and at this moment she felt that
she had lived in vain since a child of hers could set aside
a law of the church with scarcely a recognition that to dis-
obey it was a thing to think twice about.

The pain of the thought lined her face into misery which
startled her daughter as she looked upon it.

"O mamma!" she exclaimed, hurrying to her side, "don't
look like that. Wilson and I have no idea of marrying for
years to come, and maybe he will become a Catholic by that
time. I ask our Blessed Lady for his conversion every night
of my life."

The child-like faith of the last speech served in a measure to
reassure the mother, and, putting her arm about her child, she
knelt with her before a picture of that other most blessed of

238 BY THE ROANOKE. [May,

mothers and prayed for guidance and strength. Clare left her
mother still at her devotions and soon fell asleep, but the older
woman watched far into the night in anxiety and prayer.

II.

There was no sound of song or violin in the cabin by the
river that chill November night, though the singer and the
musician were both there.

" Hit doan make no diffunce ter me 'bout de baby, Anne,"
the man was saying, as he leaned toward her while she rocked
carelessly to and fro before the fire of blazing logs ; " an' how
come you woan marry me so I kin he'p you take keer o' it?
You an' yo' mammy cayn't do it by yo'se'ves, an' you know dat
white man ain't gwine s'port his chile. He done furgot you
an* hit bofe clean furgot you."

A gleam of indescribable emotion shone in the girl's great
dark eyes.

" Wot make you say he's furgot me ? " she asked, pausing in
her rocking ; " how come you say he ain't goin' s'port his chile ? "

" 'Ca'se I hearn 'em teasin' uv 'im in de barber's shop Sat'd'y
night 'bout his gwine git married right off," the man replied
with the air of one bringing forward a conclusive proof. But
the girl betrayed no surprise, and presently resumed her care-
less swaying motion with an air of relief.

" I thought maybe you was goin' ter tell me sompen new,"
she said, unconscious of expressing thus the dread that hung
over her. " Dey been teasin' 'im lak dat uvver sence Miss Clare
come home fum school. Dat's no sign he's goin' git married."

" But Lawd, Anne, doan you know he's gwine marry some
dese days ? He done tired o' you now. Lawd, Gord ! how
come you will put yo' trus' in er white man ! De devil in hell
ain't ez 'ceivin' ez he is," the mulatto exclaimed, rising as he
spoke, while his splendid chest expanded and his deep tones
trembled in this uncontrollable outburst of jealous love. His
vehemence made the girl flinch a little, but his words must
have roused some strong feeling in her own breast, for her face
had lost its calmness as she said :

" He ain't nuvver 'ceived me yit. He tole me t'o'er day he
would allers take keer o' me an' dat little baby a-lyin' dar,
'sleep."

The voice sank into a sob as she uttered the last words and
glanced over at her child sleeping peacefully in its rude cradle.

"Is he started comin' yere ag'in?" the mulatto asked, con-

1892.] BY THE ROANOKE. 239

scious then how his hopes had led him into believing Anne de-
serted since the birth of her child " a low-lifeded houn' a-fool-
in' you an' dat white ooman bofe, an' bofe o' you believin' in
'im lak he wuz er angel fum on high ! Aw ! Anne," he said
with a note like tears in his passionate entreaty, " how come you
doan gi' 'im up, my precious ? how come you doan gi' 'im up?"

He leaned down toward her and would have clasped her in
his arms, but she sprang away from him and stood erect on
the other side of the hearth, while the flickering firelight threw
strange shadows over both superb figures and the girl's beauti-
ful face. " I ain't nuvver goin' to gi' 'im up," she said defiantly.
" Nare no'er ooman shall uvver have 'im, white or not white. I
ain't nuvver goin' to gi' 'im up ; an' I ain't nuvver goin' marry
no nigger. How many times I got to tell you dat, Hal Burt?
an' how come you doan quit pesterin' me ? You go 'long home,
anyhow; I'se fear'd he'll come an' find you here."

She said this with the very perversity of a troubled and
angry woman, for she knew there was not the smallest chance
of his coming at that hour, and through the driving November
rain which was falling. But the speech roused the mulatto into
fury. He walked to the door, and opening it, looked out into
the darkness, while he listened for a step. Then he returned
and towered above the girl, who had resumed her seat.

" I ain't a-stayin' to wait fur 'im," he said huskily, " 'c'ase I
ain't got no pistol. But I won't nuvver be in sich er fix no
mo' ; an' sho ez tis a Gord in heaven, dat man dies ef uvver he
puts his foot in dis house ag'in. You hear me, Anne Price ?
he dies ! You seen me hit a mark befo'. "

" Wot Hal been r'arin' 'bout now ? " Anne's mother asked,
entering from the other room of the cabin just as the mulatto
stalked out of the door. " Seem lak he ought to know you'se
'bove marryin' er nigger by dis time. Seem lak he ought to
see it don't run in we all's blood," she said, with a haughty
turn of her head.

" I tole 'im all dat to-night," the girl replied, " an' he went
out a-swearin' he meant to kill Mister Parmelee. An' I'm
:eered 'bout it. Hal looked lak he was sho goin' do wot he said."

" Shoo ! " exclaimed the older woman, in an accent of proud
contempt. " Er nigger'll run ef er white man shakes er stick at
'im. Hal Burt wouldn' no mo' try ter kill Mister Parmelee dan
he'd try ter swim Roanoke ruvver in a freshet. You needn'
skeer yo'se'f 'bout dat."

| BY THE ROANOKE. [May,

But the girl did not share her mother's confidence. The
memory of the mulatto's stern face prevented her doing so, and
she determined to warn Parmelee the next day not to come to
her house for some time.

There was great excitement in the village the next night
when Wilson Parmelee strained his horse into town, and sought
the doctor with the news that he had found Anne Price shot
by the roadside on his way through the Island plantation, when
returning from his work as superintendent of the Roanoke lum-
ber mills. People who saw him said he might have been shot
himself, so white and terrified he was ; but it was natural that
he should be shocked the whole village was appalled, for Anne
was liked by every one. There was no doubt that Hal Burt
was the guilty man. His love for Anne was known, and many
remembered his distress when her child was born some weeks
before. But Hal could not be found, and Anne refused to tell
a circumstance of the affair. Wilson Parmelee declared he had
nothing to tell except that he had lifted her, unconscious and
wounded, from the roadside and taken her into her mother's
cabin. Clare herself could not get him to speak of the affair,
anxious though she was to hear about the accident to her old
playmate. A genuine affection had existed between the negro
and the white girl since they were children together, and it was
more the prompting of friendship than any idea of chanty which
made Clare take her way to the negro's cabin a day or two
after the shooting. She knew beforehand the welcome of flat-
tering deference she would receive when she got there, but she
was surprised to find Anne so well as she seemed.

"Are you badly hurt, Anne?" she asked in tender solicitude,
as she took the weakened hand and stroked it.

"Yes'm," Anne replied, smiling at her; "I reckin I'm boun'
ter die ; seem lak I done los' too much blood uvver ter git well.
But den I'm ready. I been washed clean in de blood o' de
Lam'. I got 'lijun er long time ago." No saint could have
spoken more calmly, and such security in such a case appalled
the white girl.

"You are sorry for your sins then," she said gently, "and
beg our Lord to forgive them ? "

" He's done forgive 'em er long time ago," the negro girl re-
plied ; " uvver sence I got 'lijun an' was baptized in Chocayoke
mill-pond."

" But the sins you have committed since then," Clare said,

1892.] BY THE ROANOKE. 241

shuddering inwardly ; " you must ask him to forgive those too,
and must promise him never to commit such sins again if you
get well. That is the only way we can be sure we have
really and truly repented ; when we make up our mind never
to sin again."

Anne looked at her in her old quizzical way.

" Dat's white folks' 'lijun," she said. " I hearn yo' mamma
talk dat way ; hit's white folks' 'lijun, but 'tain't colored folks'.
Colored folks knows 'tis got ter be a new borning o' de soul,
an' a'ter dat no mo' dread o' sin. Jesus done took 'em all on
his own shoulders. He done 'toned for 'em all."

No wonder Clare was puzzled. Here was faith in God and
in Christ's atonement as strong as her own, and far more impli-
cit a faith that no shadow of doubt had ever obscured and yet
how powerless it had been to awaken a perception of right and
wrong ! They had told her that Anne could not get well, though
she might live for weeks, and it seemed awful to her to think
of a soul's appearing before a God of infinite purity sullied by
sin unrepented of.

She knelt beside the bed.

" Anne," she said softly, tenderly, " do you not know that
you were breaking one of God's commandments in having that
little baby ?" pausing here while the hot blushes covered her
face " and that you must be sorry for it and beg our Lord to

Iurgive you, as he surely will if you are but sorry and promise
ever to sin again."
The sick girl's black eyes gleamed with anger and suspicion,
nd she drew away as best she could from the figure kneeling
beside her. " Naw !" she said vehemently, " I ain't sorry fur
havin' dat baby; I'm glad o' it. I loves it better'n I does any-
thing in dis roun' worl' ? I'm glad I got it."

At that instant the baby began to cry, and, as the grand-
mother had gone to do some work outside, Clare went to the
cradle and took the wailing child in her arms. It quieted in-
stantly and nestled close to her. Is there in this world any-
thing sweeter than this close clinging of a little babe to one's
bosom ? this appeal of helplessness to one's strength ? Clare
Montfort was too thorough a woman not to feel her heart glow
in response to this soft infant touch, and she momentarily for-
got everything else in her delight at fondling and cooing to
the now placid child on her lap. The mother watched her with
strange alternations of emotion on her face, which finally settled
into determination ; and as Clare would have resumed the talk,
VOL. LV. 16

242 BY THE ROANOKE. [May,

she stopped her by speaking herself with a slow deliberation as
if husbanding her strength to finish what she wished to say.

" He nuvver meant to shoot me, Miss Clare," she said quiet-
ly. " Hal Burt didn' nuvver mean to hurt me. He was a-shoot-
in' at dat baby's father. He'd done tole me he was goin' ter
kill 'im if he didn' stop coming ter see me, an' I was skeered
he would, an' went down de road ter meet 'im to'ds sunset an'
warn 'im not ter come ter my house no more in a long time.
But Hal he mus' 'a' been watchin' in de bushes, an' so he fol-
lowed me, case ez I come up ter 'im an' he leant down fum his
horse ter speak ter me, Hal he shot twice an' den runned away.
He missed his mark, do, an' hit me. But he didn't mean ter
hurt me, Miss Clare ; he was tryin' kill my chile's father. He
was a-shootin' at Mist' Wilson Parmelee."

However the voice had faltered during the story, it was
clear enough now, with a subtle ring of exultation in it. Like
a flash the truth came to her listener, and as suddenly the scene
last spring rose before her. She felt again the peace that reigned
over the world that day, and she heard once more the infinite
pathos of Anne's voice as she sang the " Gypsy Countess " for
them. This was the meaning of that note of despair that had
moved her to tears as Anne sang ; this was the meaning of Wil-
son's mood of humility and of the promise which he had given
her then, and had broken ever since. She saw it all with a
vividness born of the sudden stillness which seemed to have
clutched her heart so as to silence all emotion. Hers was one
of those natures which any great sorrow renders preternaturally
calm ; and as she rose without a word and placed the child be-
side its mother the marble-like quiet of her face awed Anne into
remorse as no anger could have done.

" Fur Gord's sake, doan look lak I done killed you. Miss
Clare !" she said pleadingly ; " seemed ter me you ough' ter
knowed it. You ain't mad wid me, is you ?" she asked, as
Clare continued to stand quite motionless ; " 'twarn't me in fault.
An' you'se goin' take 'im 'way fum me," she added, sobbing ;
" not me fum you."

The sobs roused Clare into remembering that excitement was
dangerous for Anne in her weak condition, and life-long instincts
of kindliness triumphed over this strange, new pain. Once more
she knelt beside the bed, and, by a supreme effort against the
sudden revulsion within herself toward the woman before her,
she took the trembling hand in hers, which were as cold as ice.

" I am not angry with you, Anne," she said, forcing herself
to speak ; " it was not your fault as much as his. But I can't

1892.] BY THE ROANOKE. 243

stay with you now ; I must go away because I am troubled, not
because I am angry."

" You ain't goin' ter make 'im 'spise me, is you ?" a new
terror coming to her. " He'd 'spise me fur tellin' you. He nuv-
ver wouldn' furgive me an' I been shot fur 'im."

As the white girl looked down on this other one, over whose
beautiful face the tears now flowed from eyes that looked at her
with helpless appeal in their dark depths, she wept for her in
very sympathy. Even at that moment she saw how much more
she was to be pitied than was herself.

" I don't know what is right to do," she said in the sudden
confusion which had come upon her. " I don't know what to
do," she repeated. Then the troubled soul within her instinc-
tively turned to the Spirit of Light. " O Anne ! " she said, tear-
fully, " we both need strength and light. Let us pray for it to-
gether " ; and, steadying her voice, she repeated the " Our Father."
In her need and ^weakness the familiar words were the only
ones that would come at her bidding.

When she stepped out of the cabin-door she was surprised to
see the sun still shining brightly ; with the egotism of youth she
wondered that the world was not darkened by her sorrow. And
yet, by the very circumstances of her training and the innocence
of her life, there was not any outraged sense of the man's fal-
sity to herself. An older woman would have condoned the sin,
reconciled to it by its very frequency among the men around
her, or she would have condemned it in bitter resentment of the
insult put upon herself ; but Clare did neither. She was only
concerned with the fact that this man, in whom she had trusted
with all her generous young heart, was other than she thought
him : that he had wilfully led an ignorant girl into evil, had
done her an injury which he knew he might never repair, not
even by the tardy and questionable reparation of marrying her.
There was a baseness about such an action which made the
girl's chivalric nature recoil in contempt. She was too ignorant
of the world and its ways for the world's plausible excuses to
come into her mind. She but saw that an irreparable wrong
had been done, and she walked through the afternoon brightness
with a dull sense of irretrievable loss upon her. She did not
now think anything of what her own future course would be
toward Wilson Parmelee. Her one feeling concerning herself
and him was a desire that she never see him again. Not yet
had come to her the time when realization of the deception
practised on herself, and of his broken vow to her, would rouse
her into anger, nor that sadder time when the desolate heart,

244 B Y THE ROANOKE. [May,

yearning over its fallen idol, would strive by the very power of
love to shape it once more into its fair proportions but to find
the effort vain.

Such times as these did come, as they needs must, and also
trying scenes between herself and Wilson Parmelee, before he
would believe that she whose devotion had become to him a
pleasant matter of course had resolved to give him up. She
had not told him in words the cause of her sudden change of
feeling, but he knew and her utter condemnation of his con-
duct was incomprehensible to him. He had broken an impul-
sive promise to her yes, but he had done nothing else dis-
honorable. The sternest moralist among his men friends would
not have considered him unpardonable. If Anne Price had been
a white girl, it would have been different ; but who would
think of placing a negro on a plane with a white person in
questions of morals any more than in social questions. A moral
negro was almost an unknown being. By all his training and
thought Clare's views seemed to him absurd, and he began to
look on himself as a man most unjustly treated when she met
him always with a sad yet firm denial.

" Clare," he said at their last interview, determined to speak
plainly, " you have shirked telling me the truth, but I know
it. Anne Price has told you her story." Her face answered
him. " It is a pitiful one," he continued. " I know that far bet-
ter than you do, but it need not separate you and me. Your
religion teaches you that sins are forgiven to those who repent
and amend. Are you going to be more exacting than God him-
self ? Are you going to throw me off despairing even though
I swear to you, as I do, that I will be true to you, and by your
love you can save me?"

It was an appeal calculated to move her, and the eyes which
had made her life's light were looking at her in love and ten-
derness, yet never had her sense of loss and lack in him been
so strong. At that moment she saw with agonized clearness
that, though sin may be repented of and forgiven, the conse-
quences of some sins are still irrevocable. As well might one
go down into the valley of the shadow of death in the throes of
a well-nigh mortal illness, and hope to rise up again in every
part of him the same man physically, as that one who has deeply
sinned should expect to be again the same man spiritually ; re-
turning health may in rare instances bring greater strength than
was heretofore given, and repentance and penance may lift the
sinner into higher planes of virtue, but in each case the risen
man is for ever different from the one that went down. Clare

1892.] BY TPIE ROANOKE. 24$

felt this without formulating it, and she saw plainly that the
man before her was not the man to whom she had given her
love. Her own idealizing of him might account for this ; she
was far from condemning him entirely. Had he been but her friend,
she might have forgiven and pitied him and striven by gentle
ways to uplift him ; but with her high ideals of what a mar-
riage should be, ideals that had of late in her sorrow become
higher and more exacting, she shrank from standing as pitying
guide or kindly monitor toward her husband. A woman given to
self-tormenting and scruples might have believed it a duty to
let the lingering, regretful affection she now felt for the man be-
fore her take the place of the love she had once so freely
given, and so marry him that she might save him. But having
once known perfect love unsullied by mistrust, Clare Montfort
could not become a man's wife without it ; and thus it happened
that Wilson Parmelee found his last plea vain despite the elo-
quence with which he urged it. " She would never marry any
one else," she told him, " but she would never marry him."
The words were proof of how her faith in all men had been
shaken, and with the sound of them in the girl's tones of pa-
thetic hopelessness still echoing through his heart, he left her
cursing the quixotism which could thus lead her to sadden her
life and his he could find no higher name than this for Clare
Montfort's conduct, he had no deeper consciousness of the
guilt of his own.

The Roanoke flows in winter flood and summer sluggishness
past a village where .a woman still young, but no longer youth-
ful, works with her mother among the negro children about
them. Sometimes she dreams of a day when a priest will help
her to instruct them and will bring to them the Sacraments
Christ has left in the church. But this is only a dream ; the day
is afar off, and she must be content to do her best towards im-
proving the morals of these ignorant people who love her so
much. Her mother says her daughter is sceptical about but two
things : men's truth and missionary zeal. Leaving this busy life
which yet reminds one of midday suddenly clouded, the river
rushes on past an humble grave-yard wherein a negro girl was
laid to rest, after a murderer's bullet had done its woful work ;
and curving here the stream widens out before the great lumber-
yards of the Roanoke Lumber Company, whose latest president,
prosperous and respected, is Mr. Wilson Parmelee.

F. C. FARINHOLT.

Asheville, N. C.

246 ON THE UPPER LAKES FORTY YEARS AGO. [May,

ON THE UPPER LAKES FORTY YEARS AGO.

MORE than forty years ago the writer of these memoranda
of service was engaged on the Survey of the Lakes. With par-
ties composed of from twenty to forty men, including two to
four assistants, he made the secondary triangulation, sketched
the shore-line, and completed the hydrography of the north
shore of Lake Huron and the Straits of Mackinac ; and of the St.
Mary's River from the Devour to the rapids below the Sault Ste.
Marie. In fact, the work included a portion of the north shore
of Lake Michigan, for it extended from a point thirty miles west
to nearly fifty miles east of Mackinac.

Forty years ago Mackinac and the Sault were, to summer
tourists, little more than landings on steamboat routes from
Buffalo, Cleveland, and Detroit to Chicago, Milwaukee, and the
mining regions of upper Michigan.

The importance once accorded to them, as trading posts and
depots of the Fur Company, had even then become a memory.
The store-houses were empty or consigned to other uses. The
Agency House was an empty shell, behind whose closed win-
dow-shutters bats hibernated, packed like dried figs in a drum.
The Mission House at Mackinac, built in vain anticipation of
converting the Indians to Protestant Christianity, had long been
a hotel in summer, and tenantless in winter.

In this northern region the people hibernated as well as the
bats. They did not, like the bats, become positively torpid in winter,
but while their narrow fields and the frozen surfaces of the lakes,
the straits and rivers, were buried under the snow, their indus-
tries were reduced to a minimum. The dog-train succeeded the
Mackinac boat and the canoe, as means of transport on journeys
of necessity; but for the most part the people sat by their hot
stoves and firesides, and waited for spring.

The borderlands of civilization sometimes afford studies of
all phases of human character ; from high intelligence and re-
finement, at one extreme, to profound ignorance and degradation
at the other. Some, whose early lives have been 'failures, would
escape from the scenes of their ill-success, either to start anew
in the race of life or else to hide from the world that witness-
ed their defeat. Others, without means or promise of success,
where all its avenues are crowded, accept the counsel to " Go

1892.] ON THE UPPER LAKES FORTY YEARS AGO. 247

West," and find in the conditions of a new or undeveloped
country either stepping-stones or impediments in the road to
fortune.

In 1848 Mackinac and the Sault were still in the far North-
west. The surveyor of hundreds of miles of shore-line, of bays,
straits, islands, and headlands, between lakes Michigan, Huron,
and Superior, was sure to meet, among the few scores of peo-
ple with whom he came in contact, not only many different
characters of men, but various races or nationalities. Not only
Americans of every type, but English, Irish, Scotch, German,
French, Belgian, and Hungarian white men, as well as Indians
and half-breeds. If the population was conglomerate in charac-
ter, the names of localities along the shores were characteristic
of the people. The study of local names sometimes presented
puzzles in philology. The contrast between the old antiquary's
rendering of A. D. L. L. by Agricola, Dicavit, Libens Lubens, and
the old Beadsman's version, Aiken Drum's Lang Ladle, was scarce-
ly more remarkable than that between names given by the old
voyageurs and their modern gloss by Anglo-American tongues and
pens. We have a characteristic example in the name of an
island of boulders off the western coast of Michigan, which the
French voyageurs called Ile-aux-Galets, or Boulder Islands ; and
which, in after years, became known to our Anglo-American
sailors as "Skilligallee" A certain self-taught compiler and en-
graver of maps explained this name as a corruption of " Scull-
or-go-lee," referring to the hazardous navigation under certain
conditions of wind and wave ! The same remarkable geographer
hyphened the syllables of what he called Point Get-ash, so that
the name might be indicative of its supposed origin. The place
designated is a high rocky point connected with the mainland
by a swamp, where ash-trees were once abundant ; and where
the voyageurs obtained the wood of which their oars were made.
To be sure they called the ash le frene, and the Point almost
an island Point Detache", whence anglice Get Ash ! These
nominal absurdities are not mentioned in derision of the igno-
rance to which they are due, but as indicative of the confusion
and misconceptions arising from the successive occupancies of
different peoples.

In 1849, when I first saw the northern shore of Lakes Mich-
igan and Huron, there was on Point St. Ignace, west of Macki-
nac, a small settlement of Indians and half-breeds clustered
around their little church. For thirty miles west of St. Ignace,
the western limit of . my survey, the shore had no sign of civili-

248 ON THE UPPER LAKES FORTY YEARS AGO. [May,

zation or permanent occupancy. North of Mackinac is St. Mar-
tin's Bay, whose extreme north point is about eleven miles from
the north shore of Mackinac. It lies between Gross Point on
the west and Point St. Martin on the east. These points are
nearly eight miles apart ; and between them lie the two islands
known as He St. Martin and Grosse He St. Martin. Grosse He
has an area of about one square mile. On its north side was,
many years ago, an Indian village. He St. Martin is less than
half its size. About four miles east of St. Martin's Bay is the
western limit of the group of islands, headlands, bays, and
channels long known as Les Cheneaux. There are in all twelve
islands : the largest of which, He Marquette, has a length of
some five miles and a width of three miles, though its area is
not more than ten square miles. The next in size, lie La Salle,
is nearly three miles long and less than half a mile in width.
The other islands of the group are very small, varying in di-
mensions between a mile and a half and a half mile in length,
and from a half mile to a few rods in width. A peculiar
feature of this group of islands is the disparity of their lengths
and breadths, and their formation on parallel lines running
northwest and southeast. The water in these bays and channels
is of sufficient depth for the largest vessels navigating the lakes ;
and Les Cheneaux possess several harbors of easy access where
even small craft may ride in safety in any storm. At the time
of my survey an old Indian chief dwelt with his family on the
north shore of He Marquette. This old chief, whose name was
Chab6-we-wh, was in the habit of visiting my camp about once
a week. On one of his visits I asked him which of the three
races of white men, French, English, and American, had shown
the Indians most favor. His reply, given with something ap-
proaching a laugh, was : " Les Frangais, les Anglais, et les Amcri-
cains, sont bons camarades pour voler les terres des sauvages."
This answer covered the whole inquiry, and I had no reply to
make.

From the Cheneaux to the Detour, at the mouth of the St.
Mary's, there is a succession of headlands, bays, and islands
which, forty years ago, were as wild as when the old voyageurs
traversed their shores with birch-bark canoes in summer, and with
dog-traineux in winter. The Detour is about thirty-six miles
east-northeast from Mackinac. In coasting along the north
shore of the lake to the mouth of the St. Mary's, the voyageur
was obliged to make a long ddtour around the point of land on
its western side: whence its name, the Detour. East of the

1892.] ON THE UPPER LAKES FORTY YEARS AGO. 249

Detour are the three large islands, Drummond, Cockburn, and
the Great Manitoulin ; giving three wide channels to the broad
bays between them and the Canadian mainland. They are
called the west, middle, and east channels ; though the western
channel is usually called the mouth of the St. Mary's River.
Cockburn and the Great Manitoulin belong to Canada ; Drum-
mond to the United States. The strait called the mouth of the
St. Mary's is about one mile wide and three miles long ; open-
ing northward into the broad bay of Potagannissing, in which
there are numerous islands, all belonging to Canada. They vary
in size from a hundred square miles to the fraction of an acre.
In all this region there were neither towns nor villages. In
sailing among the islands one might occasionally see a small
cluster of rude dwellings, or a log-cabin surrounded by a few
rods of half-cultivated land. The few inhabitants, of variously
mixed races, seemed to combine the industries of the farmer,
lumberman, fisherman, and sailor in one. There was little in-
tercourse between them and the people of the " American "
shore ; or, in fact, between people living on neighboring islands.
Socially considered, the groups of islands were groups of soli-
tudes.

I once landed on one of the islands where a few acres of
cultivated land suggested the possibility of procuring fresh vege-
tables for my party. On entering the farm-house, a clean though
rough cabin, I noticed one or two articles of furniture not in
keeping with its rude walls. Among other things, an excellent
painting cabinet size of a British officer in full dress, and
wearing some order of knighthood and several medals. Suppos-
ing it to be a portrait of some distinguished soldier, I asked
who it was. I was certainly surprised when the young farmer,
who was coarsely clad, without covering to his feet, replied :

"It is my father, Major /formerly of the Royal . He

lives on the island next north of this." I visited the next is-
land and bought new potatoes, peas, and cucumbers from the
major, who, in person and outward appearance, closely resem-
bled his son. He was evidently a man who had " seen better
days." By birth, doubtless, a gentleman, and certainly one of
superior education. His log dwelling, of four or five rooms,
contained a small library, of perhaps a thousand volumes, of
English, French, Italian, and German authors, and a few Latin
classics. All else in his dwelling indicated the degraded gentle-
man, hidden from the scenes and associations of his early life.
I never knew or sought to learn its story.

250 ON THE UPPER LAKES FORTY YEARS AGO. [May,

The " major " was not the only resident of these northern
solitudes whose education was a buried talent. One of my men
once entered an Indian's cabin, on Point St. Ignace, to make
some necessary inquiry. On his return he appeared much ex-
cited by what he had discovered. " O captain !" said he, " that
Indian has a larger library than yours. There are French, -Eng-
lish, and Latin books. And he reads them all." It was true.
The man an Ojibway Indian had been educated at a college
in France with a view to the priesthood, for which he proved
to have no vocation. He was a highly educated man with no
distinct prospect or purpose in life. His acquaintance with
civilization had only disqualified him for the life to which he
was born, while pride and prejudice debarred him from associa-
tion with the whites ; though few of those with whom he came
in contact were his peers in either intellect or education. These
were but two among several instances of men from opposite ex-
tremes of social life, who, by its vicissitudes, were unfitted for
either civilized or savage life, but who found repose or seclu-
sion in this borderland of civilization. They were like the accu-
mulations of the sea-shore wreckage from the ocean of life, and
drift from the land on its borders.

In my first summer on the Lake Survey in the north we
had two encampments : the first on St. Martin's Island ; the
second on one of the smaller islands of Les Cheneaux. Both
were out of the track of steamers and vessels engaged in the
commerce of the lakes, and so remote from the " busy haunts of
men " that the occasional visits of the government steamer, The
Surveyor, which brought supplies and served as means of commu-
nication with the outer world, were seasons of excitement in our
little camp.

The camp was always astir at daybreak. An hour afterward
the boats were away at their work. The crews were made up
of French Canadians, Irish, and Anglo-Americans ; and some
Alsacians, who, in distinction from the Canadian element, were
sometimes designated " Franqais de France" If, in the four years
of my service between Lake Michigan and " the Sault," there
were quarrels among these men, I never heard of them. They
worked steadily through the long days of summer, and returned
to camp only in time to get their boats washed and safely
moored before dark.

Though more than forty years have elapsed since my service
on the Upper Lakes, not only the scenes of labor, but little in-
cidents which sometimes gave annoyance, sometimes amuse-

1892.] ON THE UPPER LAKES FORTY YEARS AGO. 251

ment are as distinctly remembered as are the occurrences of
yesterday. I can, in fancy, hear the measured strokes of oars,
and the calls of the leadsmen: " And a ha-af four !" " An-d-a-
quar-ter-less-nine /" And in the stillness of a summer evening I
sometimes hear the boat-songs by which the men seemed to re-
lieve the weariness of a long day's toil. They are good men
who, after ten or eleven hours of pulling at the oar, will come
into harbor in the evening singing

" O, rendez moi mon leger bateau,
Et ma cabane au borde de 1'eau," etc. ;

or, if more sentimentally inclined,

" II y a long temps que je t'aime", moi,
II y a long temps que je t'aime"," etc.

As soon as the boats were safely moored officers and men
were called to their respective mess-tables. The work of the
day and its incidents were discussed, and full justice rendered to
the wisdom of government in allowing extra rations to engineers
and their employees in the field. Then came the solace of the
evening pipe, and sometimes the tearful " smudge " to drive
away mosquitoes.

When confined to camp by high winds or rain, the men were
employed in making the buoys used in hydrographic surveying
from cedars found along the shore, or in preparing heavy stones
to anchor them in place. Only very violent storms interrupted
the work of the survey ; and these, in summer, rarely lasted
more than a few hours. High winds without rain might pre-
vent work on the water, and the measurement of angles by
the theodolite, without interrupting the work of sketching the
shore-line. Our shore parties sometimes brought to camp
young animals and waterfowl, captured on the lines of their
work ; and sometimes birds of rarer species. So that at the close
of the season our camp would possess a small menagerie. At one
time it had, inter alia, a bear, two porcupines, two bald eagles, and
twenty to thirty mallards.

Whitefish and trout are always in season in the cold waters
of the north, at least for hungry men ; and no game laws are
efficient restraints upon pot-hunters living in the woods.

Boats whose work might take them to points some miles dis-
tant from camp were sometimes provided with a shot-gun and
a trolling-line. If the crew were employed in cutting lines of
sight through the woods, the assistant in charge might have

252 ON THE UPPER LAKES FORTY YEARS AGO. [May,

opportunity to kill a partridge, a woodcock, or a duck without
neglecting his work. And on the return to camp at the close of
day the trolling-line would sometimes be found fastened to a
lake-trout of twenty or thirty pounds. Such incidents as these,
by breaking the monotony of labor, were recreations, and could
be indulged in without neglect of duty. Some diversion from
servile labor is a necessity of life. If not given in one way, it
will be taken in another. Betting on games of chance was for-
bidden in our camps ; but prohibition of the common imple-
ments of gaming only varied the game. We had some miles of
careful levelling on a base-line. On the return of the levelling
party one evening there was a good deal of earnest questioning
among them. One of the rodmen, on stepping ashore, waved
his hands as he shouted, "Deux fois! deuxfois!" This loud an-
nouncement seemed to be the topic of conversation at their
mess-table. It was found that there was a standing bet between
some of the men on the number of times that a certain rodman
would so adjust the target on his levelling-rod that no change
would be required i.e., on the number of times that he would
guess the exact difference of level between two points five hun-
dred feet apart. They would bet on the depth of water at
places of which they knew nothing; on the weather at some
future day ; at night, on the number of whitefish that would be
taken from a gill-net next morning. I rescinded the order about
betting and advised them not to do it.

DRUMMOND ISLAND.

This large island, between whose western shore and the De-
tour is the passage called the mouth of the St. Mary's, is nearly
twenty miles long from west to east, and twelve wide from
south to north, having an area of nearly two hundred square
miles. Its central parts are high and rolling, the shores indented
by small coves and harbors. On the west side, opposite Point
Detour, is a small harbor, something more than a mile in length,
on whose north shore was, in the long ago, a British military
post garrisoned at one time by several regiments of troops. My
topographical party was encamped here for some weeks in 1853.
The stone foundations of extensive barracks and of detached
buildings, officers' quarters, hospital and storehouses, with here
and there a chimney, yet remained ; though the greater part of
the rough stone of which they were built had long before been
carried to Mackinac and elsewhere for the construction of
wharves and the foundations of humbler dwellings. A row of de-

1892.] ON THE UPPER LAKES FORTY YEARS AGO. 253

cayed and decaying Lombardy poplars, along the front of the
line of barracks, told of the pains taken to give some token of
civilized life to this island wilderness.

A small island opposite the line of barracks, and two or three
rods from shore, was evidently the site of a powder magazine.
Near the head of the harbor and about a mile from its entrance
the opposite shores nearly met, leaving on one side of the gorge
thus formed a large body of water somewhat higher than the
level of the outer harbor, on account of the narrow gorge and
the number of small streams running into it from the high
lands of the island. At this gorge were the remains of a dam.
Squared timbers in and out of place, and more or less decayed,
marked the site of a mill for the uses of the garrison. In 1853
the short and narrow channel at the gorge was still a rapid, and
the deep pool at its foot afforded supplies of black bass.

From a point not far from the harbor's mouth, and near the
site of officers' quarters and hospital, a wide graded road, long
overgrown with trees and shrubbery, extended for a mile or two
in rear of the line of barracks. The heavy growth of timber on
either side, as well as the level grade, distinctly marked what had
been a carriage-way or race-course, probably the latter, when the
garrison of Drummond Island included several regiments. That,
for a short period at least, so large a force once occupied the
island was shown by headstones, marking the graves of men of
different regiments of so nearly the same date as to make it a
certainty that they were serving together on Drummond Island
some time before it finally passed under the government of the
United States. It was, in fact, held by British forces until 1826,
some time after the commissioners appointed under the treaty of
Ghent had decided that it belonged to the United States.

Seven miles north of the Detour is the island of St. Joseph,
whose length is about twenty miles by nine in width. On its
southern point are- the remains of another old military post.
West of the south end of St. Joseph's is Lime Island, containing
about two square miles. The passage between this and St. Jo-
seph's, though about a mile in width, has too many shoals at its
northern extremity for safe navigation. West of Lime Island
the channel is broad and deep. North and west of St. Joseph
we have Sailor's Encampment Island and Sugar Island, the
latter about ten miles long and four miles wide ; the former
about six miles by four miles in extent.

Considering that the water system between Lake Huron and
Lake Superior is only about fifty miles long, and that in this

254 ON THE UPPER LAKES FORTY YEARS AGO. [May,

distance are included the broad bay of Potagannissing, covering
several hundred square miles ; Mud Lake, nearly one hundred ;
Lake George, thirty miles, and Hay Lake, from eight to ten,
the absurdity of calling these bays, lakes, and channels a river
must be apparent. It is a strait, or a combination of lakes,
islands, and narrow channels, characteristic of the whole system
of our inland seas, and their lesser straits, their cataracts and
rapids, from the west end of Lake Superior to the Gulf of St.
Lawrence. The St. Mary's ; the St. Clair, between Huron and
Lake St. Clair ; the Detroit, between St. Clair and Erie ; the
Niagara and its great cataract, between Erie and Ontario ; and
the rapids, " the Cedars," the " Long Sault," " Lachine," etc.,
between the lake of the Thousand Islands there are said to
be seventeen hundred and Montreal are but links in the chain
of inland seas and lakes, from the plateau where branches of the
Mississippi, the 'Red River of the North, and the St. Louis the
most western affluent of Lake Superior, have their common
source, to the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Atlantic Ocean.
The Indians called this and similar localities Mini akapan kadu-
za Whence the water runs different ways. From this region the
Mississippi flows through its sinuous course of three thousand
miles to the Gulf of Mexico ; the Red River, from the source
of its eastern affluent and through Red Lake, Lake Winnipeg,
and the Severn, about a thousand miles, to Hudson's Bay, and
thence to the Arctic seas ; and the most western branches
of the Saint Louis, through the great artery of the St. Law-
rence, twenty-five hundred miles to the Atlantic Ocean.

A characteristic feature of the upper lakes is their great depth
below the sea-level ; so that if the barriers at their outlets were
removed, and their surfaces reduced to the level of the ocean,
while Erie would disappear, Superior, Huron, and Michigan
would still remain large inland seas, with a uniform depth of
nearly three hundred feet ; and Ontario, though reduced in size,
would still have a depth of more than three hundred feet below
the level of the ocean. Is the St. Lawrence a river? From
Quebec to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, something more than two
hundred miles, it is an estuary, varying in width from ten miles
just below Quebec to sixty miles at the west end of the island
of Anticosti, where it opens into the Gulf.

It is worthy of remark that on subtracting the height of the
rapids at the Sault Ste. Marie, the Neebish, the great falls of
Niagara, and the rapids between Lake Ontario and Montreal
as determined by careful measurement from the barometric

1892.] ON THE UPPER LAKES FORTY YEARS AGO. 255

height of Lake Superior, there remains but about ten feet of
difference to be distributed through a distance of more than a
thousand miles the aggregate lengths of Superior, Huron, Erie,
and Ontario. There is, of course, more or less traction due to
cohesion immediately above falls and rapids, and more or less
propulsion from the force of falling water below them ; but there
is no continuous current in these inland seas. When a " blow "
from the north occurs on Lake Huron, the water rises at the
south end of the lake ; so that, for a considerable time after the
gale subsides, there is a set-back of water in the opposite direc-
tion. To this fact may be ascribed the loss of a large steam-
boat from Chicago, on the passage from Mackinac to the Devour,
in May, 1854.

In the summer of 1853 Captain the late Colonel John N.
Macomb, U. S. Topographical Engineers, then in charge of the
survey, had directed me to look for indications of reefs outside
of the limits of shore-soundings. During a heavy southeast gale
breakers were seen at a point about four miles from shore, on
the direct line between the steamboat pier at Mackinac and mid-
crfannel at the Detour. Their bearings from two shore-stations
were observed ; and, as soon as the lake became calm, a line of
soundings was made from one of the two stations to the reef.
Passing over a long distance more than three miles which gave
soundings varying from five to fourteen fathoms, the leadsman
drawled out " By the mark, four ! " and immediately afterward
" Four feet ! " We had struck the crest of the reef ! The dis-
covery of this dangerous reef on the direct line from Mackinac
to the Devour, four miles from shore and thirteen from mid-
channel at the mouth of the St. Mary's, was published in Buf-
falo, Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago newspapers; and ridiculed
by old steamboat captains and sailors who knew " every rock
and shoal between Mackinac and the Soo" But in May, 1854,
the fine steamer Garden City, running between Chicago and the
Sault, chanced to leave Mackinac for the Detour just after a
northeast " blow." There was not a ripple on the surface of the
lake ; and, for once, the set back of water, driven south by the
force of the gale, was just enough to counterbalance the slight
southerly curve of the steamer's course ; and she made a straight
wake toward the Detour, and struck on the crest of Martin's Reef.
She went off in pieces during the next heavy gale ; and evi-
dently displaced a boulder on the top of the reef, for there are
now seven feet of water where then there was a depth of only
four feet.

256 ON THE UPPER LAKES FORTY YEARS AGO. [May,

Soundings on and around Martin's Reef are characteristic of
the hydrography of the straits and the north coast of Lake
Huron. They show a resemblance to the topography of the ad-
jacent shores. Twenty miles west of Mackinac there is a bluff
of great height called Manitou Paymou. It is nearly a mile in
length from east to west, and from one to four or five rods
wide across the top, and so steep as to be inaccessible on either
of its longer sides. Four miles south from the fooT of the bluff
is the reef of Manitou Paymou, rising abruptly from a depth of
six to eight fathoms to within a few feet, of the surface of the
water. On the eastern side of Point St. Ignace, and four miles
northwest of Mackinac, is another high cliff called Rabbit's Back,
which, on the side toward the water, is so nearly vertical that
its height above the water was measured by uniting several
" lead-lines " and dropping them from the edge of the cliff to the
shore below. Where cliffs on the land bore evidence of up-
heaval, the neighboring reefs in the lake indicated a like origin.
There were few boulders and few sand-bars around these reefs of
massive rocks. The whole formation, under the water as well as
along its shores, was suggestive of upheaval instead of drift. It
brought to mind accounts of the great earthquake in Canada,
which occurred in 1663, and continued, with intervals, from
February until August of that year. As this great convulsion
extended through the whole valley of the St. Lawrence, it is not
unreasonable to suppose that to upheavals by subterranean
forces the cliffs and reefs of trapezoidal rocks found along the
shores and under the waters of the northern border of Lake
Huron are to be ascribed.

The recollection of Martin's Reef and the wreck of the Gar-
den City suggests some reference to other and more intricate
parts of the navigation between Mackinac and the Sault. The
East Neebish, a narrow strait and the outlet of the most north-
erly expansion of the St. Mary's, called Lake George, is about
three miles long, and at the most dangerous point less than a
quarter of a mile in width. A reef of solid rock bars the middle
of the strait at this point, leaving a very narrow and difficult
passage between it and a ledge forming its eastern shore. The
passage on the west side is wider and of easier access from
either end of the Neebish, but from some unknown cause was
not used by navigators of the St. Mary's. One result of our
survey was to call attention to this better channel, and to es-
tablish marks on shore by which the passage could be made in
safety. Prior to our survey steamboats and other craft, on

1892.] ON THE UPPER LAKES FORTY YEARS AGO. 257

passing from the Neebish, entered on the east side of Lake
George a narrow channel, barely wide enough for a large steam-
boat, at whose northern extremity there was a bar only eight
feet under water. Long ago, when the Fur Company sent ves-
sels laden with goods and supplies for their northern posts, it
was found necessary to construct a pier across this bar, where
their vessels were unloaded, and, after passing the obstruction,
reladen from its upper side. At the time of our survey nothing
of the old pier remained except a shattered crib. The Fur Com-
pany and its commerce were things of the past ; and steamboats
of light draught were able to plough their way through the mud on
the bar. Our survey discovered a wider and better channel west
of the middle ground a " flat " midway between the east and west
shores but even that was not deep enough to insure safe
navigation. Subsequently a channel was dredged through this
wide flat, which greatly facilitates the navigation of Lake
George.

While engaged on the survey of the East Neebish and Lake
George our camp was on a point at the junction of this narrow
strait with the lake, and on the Canadian side. We had been at
this place but a few days when we had a visit from three per-
sons, who announced themselves as the chief of an Indian village
on the eastern shore of Lake George, a Catholic priest who was
its pastor, and the agent of crown lands. They came to warn
me of the fact that I was on British territory an alien trespasser !
I called their attention .to the fact that we raised no flag over our
camp, and occupied the place for the work of the survey alone.
As this did not seem to satisfy them, I presented a communication,
signed by Lord Elgin, Governor-General, etc., giving ample
privileges of occupancy, cutting lines of sight, and, in short, for
using the Canadian shores for the purposes of our survey. Our
visitors proffered an apology in place of their protest, and left
us in peace.

Incidents of no intrinsic importance are sometimes remem-
bered because of contemporary events with which they are in
some way allied, or as differentia necessary to their description.
In the summer of 1854 I chanced to meet, at the Sault, a
young man who, from his name, I supposed to be a German.
He was introduced to me by a friend with whom he was trav-
elling in pursuit of health. It occurred to me that the pure air
on the borders of the lake, and the balsamic odors of the firs
and cedars, might benefit the young traveller. I invited him to
spend a week in my camp at the West Neebish. It was during
VOL. LV. 17

258 ON THE UPPER LAKES FORTY YEARS AGO. [May,

the most exciting period of the Crimean War. My assistants
comprised three Americans, " to the manner born," an English-
man, and a Belgian. Naturally, the young Briton was interested
for the success of "the Allies." Partly for the sake of discus-
sion, and in part from the recollection of Russian friendship
for our country when she needed friends, I favored the czar.
While our guest was with us a mail arrived from the Sault
bringing our budget of letters, and newspapers with full accounts
of the war in the Crimea. The news from the seat of war re-
newed the expressions of sentimental partisanship in behalf of
the belligerents. At the close of our discussion the young
Englishman turned to our German guest and said : " Well,

Mr. , you will be on my side, for Germany favors the Allies!"

Our visitor had just finished reading a letter received by our
mail ; and in reply said : " My letter will tell you which side I
am on. It is from my mother, and dated at Moscow. I'll
translate a paragraph. * You know, my dear son, that our father
is, at this time, sorely beset by his enemies the enemies of
Russia ! I trust that you never lie down a night, nor rise from
your bed in the morning, without praying Almighty God to
give success to his arms.' I am for God and the czar ! " We
could not forbear laughing at the surprise created by the discov-
ery of a faithful son of " Holy Russia " in our little camp on the
bank of the West Neebish ! The young Russian added one to
the number of different nationalities encountered between Macki-
nac and the Sault. The Catholic Bishop Baraga was an Illyrian
nobleman, who had lived so long among the Indians of upper
Michigan that he had acquired something of their bearing as
well as their languages and dialects ; and was thoroughly accus-
tomed to the rough life of the wilderness. He had lived among
them, a missionary priest and bishop, for some thirty years. In
self-denial and endurance he was the worthy successor of those
early missioners who, while the Plymouth pilgrims were making
war upon the Indians of New England, planted the cross and
preached to the Indians at "the Sault," and on the shores of
Michigan, Huron, and Superior, in their various languages.

Nearly forty years after my service on the straits of Macki-
nac and the Saint Mary's, I spent several months in that re-
gion. I lived at Mackinac. Not the Mackinac of forty years
before ; it had become a summer resort for pleasure-seekers
and invalids. A mammoth hotel with scores of guests, and
several houses of less pretentious character, contended for the
patronage of summer travellers. There were no Indian lodges

1892,] ON THE UPPER LAKES FORTY YEARS AGO. 259

to be seen along the beach ; nor bark canoes of Indians coming
to receive annuities, and then be swindled by civilized Christian
traders. If one met a solitary native in the village, he seemed
a stranger in the land of his fathers ; or like Davie Golightly
staring about the ruins of Tully Veolan, saying: "A* dead and
game, a dead and gane dead and gane"

There were two or three families of Indians left decidedly
the industrious and respectable of the working class on the
island ; to give the lie to the old, old falsehoods about the im-
possibility of Indian civilization and a few descendants of In-
dian mothers who were married to some of the most respecta-
ble of the officials and employees of the Fur Company of long
ago. But the Mackinac of John Jacob Astor and Ramsay
Crooks, of the Abbots and the Biddies, of Gurdon Hubbard and
the Lasleys, and their associates, if not all gone, was all changed ;
but not for the better.

I visited the Cheneaux, and found a steam saw-mill between
the site of one of my camps and the cabin of my old friend
Chab6-w-wh. Of the latter only a ruined chimney remained,
a monument to the memory of the old Ojibway chief. "All
gone ! " Some of the beautiful islands and headlands, once
clothed in perennial green, were now disfigured by the stumps
of felled timber, and brush-heaps partly burned or piled for
burning. Waterfowl, once abundant in these beautiful bays and
channels, were rarely seen. On some smaller islands, the thick
growths of birch and cedar of which were excellent covers for the
partridge, I found little to recall my pleasant remembrance of
"the forest primeval." All gone!

Even the fish, formerly so abundant the whitefish and the
maskinong had found other habitats in the waters of Lake
Huron.

E. PARKER SCAMMON.

260 A CANTERBURY TALE. [May,

A CANTERBURY TALE.

" THIS is the day that the Lord hath made : let us be glad
and rejoice therein." With these words did Canon Power, the
priest of the Church of St. Thomas of Canterbury, begin his
address of welcome to the six hundred pilgrims who on the /th
of July, the Feast of the Translation of the Saint, resorted to
his shrine in the ancient capital of Ethelbert. They had come to
do homage to the memory of the great archbishop, who here
yielded up his life in defence of the authority of the Holy See,
and set back state domination in religion in England for nigh on
to four centuries. " This is the day that the Lord hath made."
Who would have dared to prophesy a decade ago that a pro-
cession of Passionists and Benedictines, of Capuchins and Do-
minicans, of nuns and lay folk of both sexes, would wend their
way unmolested, Rosary in hand and headed by the lovely ban-
ner of our Lady of Ransom, through the streets of Canterbury,
and that, after devotions before the Blessed Sacrament in the
Catholic Church, they would proceed, with the cordial permission
of the Protestant dean, to the chapter-house of the cathedral,
and, having there listened to an explanatory address, would pay
their devotions at the holy places, kissing the pavement at the
spot of martyrdom, visiting the crypt where for half a century
the relics of the saint reposed, sitting on his throne, and wistfully
regarding the site of the ancient shrine, and the chapel " of the
sword's point," or " Becket's crown," where the top of the mar-
tyr's skull and the point of the assassin's sword rested during
long ages. "The day which the Lord hath made." These
words must have found an echo in many hearts among the pil-
grims, men and women ransomed by the direct action of grace
celestial from the false worship of the image which the Tudor
king set up, souls placed by the loving care of the Good
Shepherd in the divine pastures, nourished with the food of
angels, and made to drink of the water which wells up unto
everlasting life.

These pilgrimages, which are now becoming a feature of
Catholic life in the England of to-day, owe their initiative to the
Guild of Our Lady of Ransom, established but two years ago
with the approval and benediction of the Apostolic See, and
already numbering twenty-five thousand members, of whom a

1892.] A CANTERBURY TALE. 261

thousand are priests. The objects are threefold : the conversion
of the country and of individuals, the salvation of apostates,
and Masses and prayers for the forgotten dead. A short daily
prayer is said by the members for the conversion of England,
and, in addition, priests offer the Holy Sacrifice once a year for
the same object ; there are funds for distributing tracts, a lecture
fund, a Mass fund, a rescue fund, and various others. A
monthly penny magazine is issued, and new features are con-
stantly being added to the work ; a committee watches for and
replies to anti-Catholic statements in the public press or at Pro-
testant lectures, and the task of converting the country by
prayer and practical, united effort is taken up with an enthusi-
asm which would have rejoiced the warm heart of Father
Hecker, and will doubtless enlist the sympathy of the commu-
nity which is proud to acknowledge him as its founder.

At half-past eight on the morning of the feast a pilgrimage
Mass was said by Rev. P. Fletcher at the Church of St. Ethel-
dreda, Ely Place, Holborn. after which the London pilgrims be-
took themselves to the neighboring Holborn Viaduct station,
where a special train awaited them. Father Fletcher, the mas-
ter and founder of the guild, is a tall, lithe Oxonian, bubbling
over with school-boy spirits and the joy of conversion, though it is
now over a decade since he abandoned his curacy at St. Bar-
tholomew's Church, Brighton, and sought admission into the
fold of Peter. He is continually travelling the country, found-
ing new branches of the guild, and interesting himself in
orphanages, the Catholic Servant Girls' Guild, and a number of
useful works that his active brain is ever devising. He is a
younger brother of Sir Henry Fletcher, Baronet, who was returned
to Parliament unopposed, in the conservative interest, at the last
general election for the borough of Lewes, seven miles from
Brighton, the place of Simon de Montfort's great victory over
Henry III.

At the station a goodly number of pilgrims were grouped on
the platform, wearing the bronze badges of the guild, the ribbon
of priests being white, and of lay members red or blue, the
former indicating active workers. The journey occupied two
hours, the Rosary and litanies being recited en route, and the de-
votion of the party being kindled at Rochester, where the line
passes close to the cathedral of the Blessed John Fisher, in
whose honor the Protestant occupants of the church have lately
erected a memorial in v this the second oldest Episcopal temple
in England. Arrived at Canterbury at noon, we were met at f

262 A CANTERBURY TALE. [May,

the station by the Ransomers of that city and of various neigh-
boring missions. The banners were unfurled and borne aloft, that
of our Lady of Ransom, beautifully embroidered by the nuns of
Taunton, heading the procession. The White Cross banner, pre-
ceding the clergy, came next ; then followed the Canterbury con-
tingent, with the Red Cross banner, and the London pilgrims,
with the banner of the Blue Cross, brought up the rear. The
Ransomers marched three abreast, Rosary in hand, through the
well-kept public gardens known as the Dane John (donjon), to
the Catholic Church of St. Thomas, not far from the cathe-
dral. Here the Litany of the Holy Name and the guild prayer
were recited, and the hymns " Sweet Sacrament " and " God
bless our Pope " were sung, and if the Paulist Fathers desire to
illustrate the electrical effect, of hearty congregational singing
this short act of devotion would serve as well as another.
The little Church of St. Thomas of Canterbury was opened six-
teen years ago, and stands in the Burgate by the old tower,
sole remnant of St. Mary Magdalene's. It is of stone, and the
work of a local architect. The fagade is most beautiful, a fine
statue of the patron saint occupying the central niche. The
high altar, too, is most striking, surmounted by a canopy, and
backed by a reredos in which are represented the death of St.
Thomas and the penance of Henry II. The tabernacle is of
polished alabaster with gemmed and golden doors. Then there
is St. Thomas's altar, with the shrine containing relics of the
saint, and a fac-simile of the shrine formerly in the cathedral.
There are also altars of Our Lady, the Sacred Heart, St. Gre-
gory, and St. Augustine. The east window, in eight compart-
ments illustrating scenes from the life of St. Thomas, is also
most noteworthy ; and, in fine, the building as a whole is a
noble work, in which not only the congregation of regular wor-
shippers, but English Catholics collectively, may well take a
pride.

We then passed under the crumbling old stone archway,
known as Christ Church gate, into the ample cathedral precincts,
marvelling at the magnificent central tower, two hundred and
thirty-five feet high, which completely eclipses the twin western
towers, beautiful as they are. The buildings in the cathedral
close are of great antiquity, being relics of the ancient Abbey of
Christ Church : guest-house, abbot's lodgings, infirmary, etc. On
his previous visit to Canterbury the writer was the guest of the
late Dr. Parry, suffragan Bishop of Dover, and son of Sir Ed-
ward Parry, the great Arctic voyager. The genial dignitary of

1892.] A CANTERBURY TALE. 263

the Establishment said : " This part of the house is modern ; it was
built in the reign of Edward IV. Come this way and you shall
see the venerable portion of the mansion ; these massive rubble
walls antedate Magna Charta."

To return to the pilgrimage. We assembled in the chapter-
house, now undergoing repairs, and seated ourselves on chairs
kindly provided for us by the cathedral authorities, or on stray
balks of timber. The lecturer, Mr. Hilliard Atteridge, of the
Catholic Times, was then introduced by Father Fletcher, and in
a few brief and lucid sentences explained how St. Thomas, after
his interview with Tracey, De Breton, and the other assassins,
on the further side of the beautiful cloister, passed by it into
the church in the gloom of a December evening, hoping to gain
his throne to the east of the high altar. It was explained how
he could easily have escaped his murderers had he chosen, but
that, on the knights bursting into the obscure cathedral and de-
manding, " Where is the traitor Becket ?" he returned and con-
fronted them, denied their charges, and so, refusing to become
their prisoner, met his death before the altar of St. Benet. We
then visited the holy places, which were closed to ordinary
sightseers, many of the pilgrims kissing the stone where, on Tues-
day, the 29th of December, 1170, the saint fell. This is in the
north transept. A magnificent window has been recently placed
here by a former canon of the cathedral. " In the upper com-
partment on the left we have Becket, the young priest-ambassa-
dor to the pope, the first step, we may suppose, to his after ele-
vation ; the scene is at Rome. Next the story related by Fitz-
gibbon and other authorities, of the king snatching off the rich
mantle of his chancellor to cover the shoulders of a shiver-
ing beggar. No. 3 represents the consecration of Becket in
Canterbury Cathedral, in the presence of the prince and his
court. In No. 4, which closes the life series, we see the recon-
ciliation of Henry with his unyielding opponent ; the king
holds the archbishop's stirrup ; the scene is in a camp before a
fortified city in France. In the lower tier on the left we have
the interview of the four knights with the archbishop in his pal-
ace, as described by Canon Stanley in his Memorials of Canter-
bury. The knights have concealed their armor with cloaks ; the
archbishop rises from the bed on which he had been sitting
while discoursing with John of Salisbury and his friends, who are
seated on the floor. In No. 6 the artist has adhered as
much as possible to the same authority ; the mailed knights have
murdered the archbishop in the cathedral. Having fallen from

264 A CANTERBURY TALE. [May,

the first blows on his knees, he finally fell on his face, his hands
in the attitude of prayer. The attendants take to flight ; one,
bolder than the rest, comes to raise the corpse. In No. 7 the
king does penance at the tomb of St. Thomas, in the crypt of
the cathedral. No. 8 concludes the history with the crowd of
pilgrims who afterwards visited the richly endowed shrine of the
canonized saint, to which miraculous powers were attributed.
The six small tracery lights forming the top of this fine window
represent the laity and the clergy at that period ; on one side
there is a knight, a lady, and a page ; on the other a bishop, a
priest, and a servant of the altar." We have quoted this com-
plete description of this splendid monument to the great martyr
of the Holy See because it illustrates a phase of some minds
external to the church which is simply incomprehensible to many
Catholics. " What impudence !" a priest muttered on beholding
this window. As we said before, something similar has recent-
ly been erected at Rochester in memory of the Blessed John
Fisher, and we have seen at St. Paul's Church, Brighton, win-
dows representing Blessed John Fisher and Blessed Thomas
More, placed there about the date of their recent beatification
at Rome. Yet the one thing which has made this trio of valiant
Englishmen illustrious is their fidelity unto death to Christ's
vicar on earth ; why they should be so honored for this by those
who decline to imitate their example, now that they are free to
do so without peril to life, limb, or civic rights, would indeed
be passing strange if one failed to recognize the truth that every
conversion is a distinct action of divine grace, adding to the
church such as shall be saved.

The " Martyrdom " visited, we passed through the choir-screen
of florid stone-work, containing statues of six English sovereigns,
into the beautiful choir, the circular arches and heavy Norman
pillars indicating its great antiquity. The communion-table of
Caen stone, with its cross, Candlesticks, and handsome embroi-
dered frontal, much resembles an altar. A portion of the shrine
of St. Dunstan has recently been brought to light here, and in
a neighboring aisle were formerly the altars of St. Gregory, St.
John the Evangelist, St. Anselm, Saints Peter and Paul, and the
shrine of St. ^Elfric, for Canterbury was rich in saints, and many
of her archbishops were canonized. The remarkable feature of
this church is the continual ascent by long flights of steps
from the nave eastward, so that, standing in the body of the
building, one can see little beyond the central tower. Thus, there
is an ascent from the choir into the chapel of the Blessed Trin-

1892.] A CANTERBURY TALE. 265

ity, where anciently stood the shrine of St. Thomas, whence it
was often called, after him, St. Thomas's chapel. The floor is
mosaic, and here are the tombs of Henry IV. and his queen, of
Cardinal Castillon, and of Archbishop Courtney, and above all
the beautiful bronze effigy in armor of the darling of English
chivalry, Edward the Black Prince. Hanging aloft one may yet
see his gauntlets, shield, and helmet, with its heavy crest. The
sword has gone ; Oliver Cromwell removed it ; shameful feat in-
deed for one valorous English captain to despoil the last resting-
place of another, his peer in soldierly qualities and ability to
command, his superior in the virtues and in the graceful accom-
plishments of knighthood ! Our pilgrims wistfully regarded the
spot where the great martyr's shrine had once rested. His relics
have been burned and their ashes cast to the winds, and the
only trace now remaining of three centuries of devotion is the
pavement worn by the knees of countless thousands of pilgrims.

" And specially from every shire's end
Of Engle-land to Canterbury they wend,
The holy blissful martyr for to seek
That them hath holpen when they were sick."

" The shrine," says Stowe, " was built about a man's height,
all of stone, then upwards of timber ; within which was a chest
of iron containing the relics of St. Thomas. The timber-work
of this shrine on the outside was covered with plates of gold,
damasked with gold wire, which ground of gold was again cov-
ered with jewels set in gold." Erasmus, who viewed the trea-
sure, thus describes it : " Under a coffin of wood, enclosing
another of gold, we beheld an amount of riches the value of
which was inestimable. Gold was the meanest thing to be seen ;
the whole place shone and glittered with the rarest and most
precious jewels, most of which were of extraordinary size, some
being larger than the egg of a goose." But none of these did
we see, for Henry VIII. confiscated the estate of the traitor
Thomas, sometime Archbishop of Canterbury, who had rebelled
against his lawful prince. Henry stuck the " Regal of France,"
a magnificent jewel presented to the shrine by Louis VII. on
his visit, upon his royal thumb. To quote again from the anti-
quarian Stowe : " The spoil in gold and precious stones filled
two great chests, one of which six or seven strong men could
do no more than convey out of the church at once." Still east
of Trinity Chapel is " Becket's crown," where the crown of the
skull cut off by the stroke of the murderer's sword, as also the
broken sword-point, were anciently placed on a small altar ; and

266 A CANTERBURY TALE. [May,

here is the old archiepiscopal seat of stone, in which a number
of our pilgrims seated themselves by twos with pious devotion.
Here is the tomb of the gentle Cardinal Pole, the last Catholic
Archbishop of Canterbury, who died at the same time as his royal
cousin Queen Mary, and so happily escaped the evil days that
followed.

Having viewed the upper church, we descended, by some
stairs near the Martyrdom, to the crypt or undercroft, a gloomy,
cavernous vastness underlying the choir and adjacent chapels,
supported on sturdy but stunted columns. It was built by Lan-
franc, the magnificent Norman prelate, to replace the old Roman
church, burned the year after the Conquest, and subsequent fires
and changes above have not affected it. This is probably the
only portion of the present building on which St. Thomas has
looked, and here his body was hastily interred for fear of De
Breton and the others, and rested fifty years, till Stephen Lang-
ton translated it to the shrine above in the reign of Henry III.
Here Henry II. did penance, and Louis VII. of France spent
the night in prayer. The pilgrims venerated the holy spot, now
for some centuries given over to the French Huguenots as their
place of worship, as is indicated by a mouldy French text of
Scripture on the damp walls. The chantry, founded by the
Black Prince in 1363, is now walled up, for Anglicanism has no
use for such places, but one still sees the openwork Gothic screen
of stone which enclosed the chapel of Our Lady : the altar,
of course, has been destroyed, and the image of the Blessed Virgin
too, but its empty niche remains let us be thankful for small
mercies ! This is what Erasmus says of the once famous shrine :
"There the Virgin Mother has an habitation, though somewhat
dark, enclosed with a double step or rail of iron for fear of
thieves ; for, indeed, I never saw anything more laden with rich-
es ; lights being brought, we saw more than a royal spectacle."

Ascending to the clear light of day, we passed into the splen-
did nave, with its lofty groined roof of stone and its long vistas
of columns, with numerous monuments to worthies famous in
the history of the country, and the tattered colors of divers gal-
lant regiments, torn by French and Russian bullets. What
memories of the past cluster around the hallowed spot above
which rises this noble edifice ! Here, during the period of Roman
rule, the Christians among the legionaries of the seven-hilled
city adored the Saviour. Here, later, Ethelbert had his palace,
which, yet a pagan, he surrendered to Augustine, as is proved
by existing documents relating to the priory of Christ Church.

1892.] A CANTERBURY TALE. 267

From time to time the Danes burnt and wrecked the buildings,
which were as constantly reconstructed. Near the high altar
rested the body of St. Winifred ; here was the head of St.
Swithin, brought from Winchester by St. Alphege, afterwards
martyred by the Danes. Again, we hear of the head of St.
Fursius, of the tomb of the great Dunstan, and of many another.
In all, eighteen archbishops of Canterbury have been canonized ;
nine were cardinals, and twelve lord chancellors of England.
Lanfranc rebuilt the church and priory, and established in it
one hundred and fifty Benedictines. St. Anselm, his successor,
replaced the choir by one still more magnificent, which, after his
death, was completed by the prior after whom it was named.
William of Malmesbury says of it : " The like was not to be
seen in England in respect of the clear light of the glass win-
dows, and beauty and comeliness of the marble pavement ; and
the curious paintings on the roof. The choir also was so mag-
nificently adorned with pictures and other ornaments by Prior
Conrad that from its extraordinary splendor and magnificence it
acquired the appellation of 'the glorious choir of Conrad.'" In
its centre hung a golden crown to hold twenty-four wax lights;
the aisles were of equal magnificence. It was, however, soon
damaged by fire, but rebuilt and dedicated in 1114 by the king,
the queen, the king of Scotland, and the prelates and nobles of
both kingdoms. The first archbishops were interred in ' the
neighboring Abbey of St. Augustine, which, but for St. Thomas,
would have remained the most considerable establishment of the
city. But Cuthbert in the eighth century broke the rule, and
from this time till 1558, with very few necessary exceptions, the
archbishops were buried in Christ Church. Of the twenty-three
'rotestant archbishops none have found a last resting-place here,
rhere exactly twice that number of Catholic prelates of this see
ive reposed, though some of them, as St. Thomas and Robert
Inchelsey, " whose tomb was destroyed because of his repute
for sanctity," were not sacred from the hand of the despoiler.
'he Protestant bishops have never resided here, for in Cranmer's
time (1544) Augustine's palace was burned, and in it a brother-
in-law of Henry's archbishop. The church contains splendid
though empty marble tombs with recumbent figures of the three
last bishops, Howley, Sumner, and Tait.

We were told that one of the Canterbury jewellers had for sale
fac-similes in silver of the ancient Canterbury pilgrim's medal, in
which sundry of our party invested. Various groups wandered
about the quaint Tudor streets, entering the numerous churches,

268 A CANTERBURY TALE. . [May,

converts being in request to explain to the unenlightened what
was High and what Low church decoration, though everywhere
stray relics of the olden time were remarked, for it is impossible
to kill out all traces of the Ages of Faith. An old guide-book
of 1858 says: "Here St. Augustine first introduced the teaching
of the Romish Church, not without great opposition on the part
of the British clergy, Christianity having been established five
hundred years previously." This is omitted from the modern
edition, however, for we are learning English history by de-
grees.

Canturia, situated at the ford of the river Stour, must always
have possessed a certain importance ; here are dug up memo-
rials of British times copper weapons, " celts," and ornaments.
As " Durovernum " it flourished under the Romans, the roads
to London from their three seaports, Richboro', Dover, and
Lymne, joining here. It is mentioned in the itinerary of Anto-
ninus sixteen hundred years ago, and here Roman rule flourished
during four centuries. Happily the Celts did not occupy the
city on the departure of the legions, so that the deserted houses
fell in, preserving the pavements and mosaic fresh and intact.
The tiles of which St. Martin's and St. Pancras are built had
previously been employed in other Roman buildings, for the pink
mortar on them has only partially been knocked off. The Jutes
of Schleswig-Holstein settled at Rochester so named after Hrof,
their chieftain driving the Britons westward. Ethelbert became
their king at eight years of age, and at sixteen ambitiously as-
sailed Ceawlin, the King of Wessex, but was by him driven back
into his kent canton or corner. Hence Cant-wara, corner folk,
and Cantwarabyrig, or the borough of the men of Kent. Ethel-
bert used the old Roman ramparts to defend his capital, but
built over the ruined dwellings, not even regarding the lines of
the streets. Bertha, his Christian queen, brought her chaplains
with her from her father's court in France, and worshipped at
the old Roman Church of St. Martin, five minutes' walk from the
palace, said to be the oldest Christian church existing. Here her
body reposes, and here is the font in which her husband was
subsequently baptized. In the little Chapel of St. Pancras, after-
wards enclosed in the Abbey of St. Augustine, he formerly adored
an idol, replaced by the Roman missionary by an altar at which
he celebrated his daily Mass, and here of late years an iron box
containing bones, very possibly deposited by the saint himself,
was brought to light. This abbey, dedicated by Augustine to
Saints Peter and Paul, was enlarged by St. Dunstan in 978, and

1892.] A CANTERBURY TALE. 269

devoted by him to its founder, by whose name it has since been
known. It grew in magnificence, extent, and wealth, and King
Ethelstane even granted it a mint; but in 1161 Stephen, pressed
for money in the civil wars, seized on the tempting prize. By
Papal license the abbot used mitre and sandals like a bishop.
John Essex, the last abbot, only surrendered to the officers of
Henry VIII. when two pieces of artillery were trained against
the entrance gateway. It then became a royal palace, and Eliza-
beth kept high court there; but finally it decayed. "Vandalism,"
says one description, " had a long reign within the holy walls
of St. Augustine's. A few years ago the guests' hall was used
as a brewery, with a public-house attached, also a tea-garden
and tennis-courts, etc., until it was rescued from the hands of
the despoiler and is now restored \sic\ to the service of the new
religion." The fact is, that the extensive domain fell before the
auctioneer's hammer, in 1844, to the late Mr. Beresford Hope, who
munificently restored the buildings, following the old lines, and
constituted it an Anglican mission college. Its ancient gateways,
St. Pancras Chapel, and large portions of the old walls, possess
a melancholy interest. Some remains of the Chequers Inn of the
Canterbury Tales may yet be seen, and the old vaulted cellars
are perfect. Then there is the King's School, founded by the
Greek archbishop Theodore in Heptarchy days, and remodelled
by Henry VIII. whence its present title. The names of friars,
Black, Grey, and White, and of many other mediaeval institutions,
still cling to. lanes and alleys, but it is refreshing to visit the
fine College of St. Mary, founded quite recently as a refuge for
the expatriated French Jesuits and their pupils. " La belle
France" once afforded our exiled priests an asylum at Douay
and Rheims ; we can now repay her generosity in kind.

We come to a splendid mass of masonry five centuries old on
the London road, the sole remaining representative of the ancient
city gateways, though much of the Roman wall yet stands. Pass-
ing this we see 'the entrance gateway of the Roper mansion in Tu-
dor brickwork, sole remnant of the residence of the Blessed Thomas
More's faithful daughter ; the old homestead is replaced by a
hideous brewery. Opposite is St. Dunstan's Church, where is a
fine marble monument, with Latin inscription, to the chancellor's
son-in-law. The family have also two handsome altar-tombs in
the chapel which they founded in the reign of Henry IV., and
beneath the church Margaret Roper, " with great devotion,"
placed the head of her beloved father, where it was found fifty or
sixty years ago in a niche in the wall, in a leaden box, somewhat

270 A CANTERBURY TALE. [May,

the shape of a beehive, open in front, closed with an iron grat-
ing ; and there it rests at present. The vestry was a chapel
founded by the king's chaplain in 1330, and a squint and piscina
still remain. Here, too, is a crumbling but still secure record-chest,
evidently of great age. A little of the priory of St. Gregory,
founded by Lanfranc for Austin canons to serve his other hos-
pital of St. John, can be traced. He also founded St. Nicholas'
Hospital in 1084 for six brethren, six sisters, and a master. Then
there was St. Thomas a Becket's Hospital, which bore the found-
er's name ; and that for poor priests, founded by Archdeacon
Simon Langton. It is now a police station ; but in its stead Co-
gan's Hospital has been established in modern times, for "six
poor widows of clergymen, and one ancient maid to attend on
the others and clean their rooms." St. Sepulchre's nunnery,
founded in 1 100, is no more ; but St. Lawrence's house, formerly
a hospital for sick Augustinians, remains, and on a pier of
th'e gate St. Lawrence on the gridiron may be traced. This is
now the entrance to the cricket-ground. Any number of an-
cient churches did we see. For instance, St. Mary Bredin's, built
by William, son of Harno, a knight of the Conqueror's invading
force ; the font here is seven hundred years old. In St. Mil-
dred's Roman brickwork appears. St. Mary's was partially re-
built in 1830; but a brass on the north wall remains, a kneeling
figure saying, " O mother of God ! have mercy upon me," and
the following :

" All ye that stand op on mi corse

remem bar but raff brown I was

alldyr man and mayur of thys cete

Jesu a pon my sowll have pete."

Then there is the Church of the Holy Cross, built in 1380, and
named from the large wooden cross that formerly stood at the
entrance ; this, of course, has gone.

But we returned to present realities at five o'clock, wending
our way to St. Thomas's Church, where a vernacular service was
to be held. If we meditate among the tombs too long we shall
grow gloomy and unpractical. Let us do our present work as our
ancestors did long ages ago, not concerning themselves overmuch
about mouldering relics of the past ; then may we hope to be
joined to their blessed company hereafter.

The church was crowded to its utmost capacity, the passages
being occupied by chairs. The Litany of the Blessed Virgin
was said in English. Then the hymn, " Hail ! Queen of Heaven,"
was sung with great power, the choir in the western gallery lead-

1892.] A CANTERBURY TALE. 271

ing the congregation but not overpowering it ; in fact the vast
body of sound from hundreds of voices had a magnetic effect
which the warbling of an accomplished quartette, performing in-
tricate compositions, fails to produce. The Rev. Luke Riving-
ton then delivered a powerful address on the authority of St.
Peter, briefly tracing its history from apostolic days and the
age of the catacombs to the invasion of the West by Gothic
hordes and the formation of the Frankish empire by Charle-
magne. The speaker then dwelt on the extraordinary and unique
devotion of the Anglo-Saxon Church to the Holy See, and pre-
sented to our mental vision a dramatic picture of the attempts
to subject the ecclesiastical to the civil power under William of
Normandy, " a fortunate pirate," his sons, and the first of the
Angevin dynasty. This contest culminated in the victory of the
church, accomplished by the firm stand made by, and the fideli-
ty to death of, the great saint whose memory we were celebrat-
ing. We were then reminded by the object-lesson we had had
that day in the lifeless cathedral, lovely even in death, of the par-
alysis of religious life in this erstwhile island of saints, that had
followed on the triumph of the secular power in spiritual matters
under the Tudors. Yet those present for the most part had
been rescued from this miserable thraldom, and hence should
take heart to pray with confidence for the conversion of their
friends, still floundering with apparent hopelessness in the slough
of despond. The preacher, who probably delivers more sermons
on occasions of notable solemnities than any other ecclesiastic in
England, has only been a Catholic three or four years ; he was
formerly in the Anglican religious community of St. John, found-
ed at Oxford some twenty-four years ago by Mr. Benson, of Christ
Church, assisted by Mr. O'Neill, of Cambridge, and Messrs. Pres-
cott and Grafton (now a bishop) from the United States. The
writer, at the time a university student, used sometimes to visit
their monastery, and learned a great deal of Catholic teaching
from these remarkable men, of whom Mr. O'Neill was perhaps
the most admirable. He was a tall, stalwart man of thirty or
thereabouts, with the simplicity of a child ; and we well remember
our consternation when, after celebrating early " mass " at St. Cle-
ment's Church, Cambridge, on a Sunday morning in the summer
of 1865, he announced to his friends that this was the last ser-
vice he should perform in the Church of England. He attended
Vespers in the little Catholic church (the first work undertaken
by Pugin after his conversion), an.d was sent by the priest to the
London Jesuits to be received. Then followed a series of un-

272 A CANTERBURY TALE. [May,

fortunate mischances until, meeting with his former rector at
Windsor, he was by him despatched to Oxford to join Messrs.
Grafton and Benson. We saw him at Cambridge again some
years later, in the long cloak and broad-brimmed hat of an " Evan-
gelist Father." Of his chains, hair-shirts, and other austerities
one has heard some rumors, but could not have inferred as much
from his cheerful and peculiarly attractive simplicity of deport-
ment. He became a missionary in India, where, attempting the
rigorous diet and mode of life of a Brahmin, he proved unequal
to the strain and passed quietly away. It is men like these who
keep many in the Church of England. " What is good enough
for an O'Neill, a Liddon, and a Pusey is good enough for me"
and there is nothing for it but to turn one's eyes from men,
however excellent they may apparently be, and trust to God
himself, speaking through the external authority of his divinely
constituted earthly spouse.

But we have again digressed from the pilgrimage. The ser-
mon over, a priest, in rich cope of crimson, bore the relics of St.
Thomas around the church to receive the veneration of the faith-
ful, whilst the " Litany of the Saints " was sung. Then followed
Benediction, the Te Deum, and the hymn " Faith of our
Fathers"; and as the ardent aspirations of Father Faber rolled
forth in stately volume from the large assembly one was re-
minded of a recent utterance of Cardinal Manning : " Western
galleries have ruined the sacredness of choirs. In all other
churches simple music, especially the responses in Holy Mass
and hymns, are desirable. I most earnestly desire to see the
singing of hymns and litanies by the whole congregation. In
most choirs, even at Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, the
choirs hinder the congregation by solos, and by music nobody
can take part in. It is a great misery and a hindrance to piety."
So we wended our way back to the train, in which hymns were
sung on the return to London. A long delay was caused by
the Salvation Army on its annual pilgrimage to the Crystal Pal-
ace ; but, as a lady remarked, one Ave is worth fifty tambou-
rines, and doubtless more than one of the Catholic pilgrims mur-
mured the prayer which, according to the Venerable Bede, St.
Augustine and his companions chanted on their first entrance
into Canterbury : " We beseech thee, O Lord ! in all thy mercy,
that thy anger and wrath may be turned away from this city,
and from thy holy house, because we have sinned. Alleluia!"

CHARLES E. HODSON.

1892.] THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. 273

THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW.

THE recent conflicts in England between capital and labor
conflicts which have caused extreme suffering to many thou-
sands render it doubtful how far counsels of peace and wisdom
will dominate and prevail should the working-men ever obtain
the supreme control for which they are hoping. It would seem
that in the three notable instances which have lately occurred
the employed have been themselves the cause not only of their
own misfortunes that would be but just but also of those of
many others who were in no way concerned in the disputes. The
first of these was the strike and lockout of the engineers at
Newcastle, to which we have already referred. In this case two
unions, those of the plumbers and the engineers, fell out about
the allocation of work. The engineers of a certain firm, in the
face of an arbitration given against them, struck work, and in
the end a general strike took place which involved ten thousand
men. The worst part of the matter was that another ten thou-
sand, employed in branches of work dependent upon the engi-
neers, were forced to remain idle, and they and their families have
had to undergo extreme want. Not only have the immediate
consequences been of the most distressing character, but in many
instances orders have been transferred to other countries, and
there is only too great a prospect that trade will permanently
depart from the district. Moreover, to add to the trouble just
when there was a prospect of settlement, the Durham miners'
strike took place, and rendered the resumption of work im-
possible.

This is the first case in which the blame seems rightly to
fall upon the working-men. The second is the strike of the
Durham colliers, by which nearly ninety thousand miners have
been affected directly, to say nothing of a very large number of
workers in iron and chemical works, the shipping and other
trades ; a strike which has rendered it literally necessary to send
coal from Scotland to Newcastle. In this case the coal-owners
maintained that the trade in general was becoming so de-
pressed that a reduction of wages was necessary, and of such
reduction they gave due notice. Of course we have to speak
with a certain amount of diffidence, but so far as we can judge
VOL. LV. 1 8

274 THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. [May,

the contention of the masters was 'justified by facts. The
miners, however, would not give heed to any such proposal, and
although during the past ten years they have profited by the
good times to the extent of an increase equal to at least thirty-
five per cent, upon their wages, they were unwilling to share
with their employers the disadvantages resulting from the oppo-
site state of things. They would not even submit the question
to arbitration, peremptorily refused even to discuss the question
of a reduction, and by their action they have stopped every coal-
mine in the county of Durham, and brought disaster upon many
other trades. Violence, too, has accompanied the strike ; an un-
fortunate reporter of a paper which had ventured to question
the wisdom of the course adopted narrowly escaped with his
life. The union even forbade the pumping of water, an operation
necessary not only for the supply of the wants of the neighboring
villages, but also to prevent the mines from being flooded and
rendered unworkable. By these extreme measures they hope to
bring their employers to terms.

By far the largest of these troubles, however, is the one to
which we referred last month, and which affected a greater num-
ber of men than was anticipated more, in fact, than three hun-
dred thousand miners having stopped work. In this case there was
at once more and less wisdom in the action of the men than in the
case of the Durham strikers. The men recognized that the state of
trade called for a reduction of wages, but they thought by stop-
ping work to limit the supply. They expected to be able to
control the market, and to prevent a fall of prices ; but the
forces acting in the opposite direction were unfortunately too
great. The only persons who have profited by the cessation
from work are the middlemen, who at the time notice was
given of the intention of the men held stocks of coal ; for, as a
panic took place, they were able to sell their coal at an enor-
mous premium. The persons who suffered most were the
miners themselves, and the very poor who buy coal in small
quantities. At the end of the stoppage the coal trade was
almost stagnant, many iron-works and factories remained closed,
and stocks of coal had been laid in by the public. In a few
cases the men had to submit to a reduction of wages, but as a
rule the previous rates were maintained. It must be pointed out,
however, that the Durham strike having stopped the entire sup-
ply from that county tells in favor of the maintenance of the
old rates, and renders it impossible yet to judge of the full

1892.] THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. 275

effect of the experiment tried by the miners. It is generally
thought, however, that had it not been for this event a general
reduction would have been inevitable. In fact, in South Wales
wages have, by the automatic action of the sliding scale, been
quite recently reduced three and a half per cent.

These troubles seem to show that employers have no mono-
poly of arbitrariness, unreasonableness, and short-sightedness, and
that the men oftentimes stand in need of guidance, and may
be wanting in prudence, consideration, and forbearance. The
British minister to Holland, in his last report on Dutch labor,
affords a striking illustration of the exercise by Catholic
working-men of the opposite qualities. In the busy manufactur-
ing centres of Tilburg and Maestricht almost all the workmen
belong to the church. Sir Horace Rumbold says that the general
well-being and orderly spirit of the factory-hands is recognized
as being in a great measure due to the beneficial influence of
the clergy, and that this is borne out by the fact that even in
recent times, when the industry of the place has been drooping
owing to Belgian competition, wages having in consequence
fallen, there have been no signs of an inclination on the part of
the workmen to resort, as elsewhere, to strikes for an improvement.
And then, in his own words : " In view of the marvellous organi-
zation and fervent spirit of the Catholics of this country, it is
difficult not to believe that the Dutch lower orders professing
that faith are less accessible than their Protestant brethren to the
pernicious doctrines so actively disseminated among the working-
classes of all countries." Being well-instructed Catholics, these
workmen know that they have duties to perform as well as
rights to maintain ; they know that their employers have rights
as well as themselves, and that they are bound while maintaining
their own to respect those of others. We cannot refrain from
expressing the wish that in other countries these principles of
Catholic morality might receive so striking an exemplification
and illustration as they are receiving in Holland.

The advocates of the legal eight-hour day for miners have
been more fortunate this year than they were last, for they
have secured a hearing in the House of Commons for their pro-
posal. The movement has met with the adhesion of a fairly
large majority of the workers in mines, although a by no
means contemptible minority is opposed to it. In fact the
rejection of the bill was moved by Mr. Burt, one of the labor

276 THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. [May,

members of Parliament, and secretary of the Northumberland
Miners' Union, who himself began to work as a miner when
he was ten years of age. Other members of the same party
united with Mr. Burt in opposition to the second reading, and
the bill was rejected by a majority of 272 votes to 160. It was
not made a party question. A large number of Gladstonians,
including Mr. John Morley, voted against the bill, and not a
few Conservatives, including Lord Randolph Churchill, in its
favor. The Irish members voted as a body for the second
reading. Mr. Gladstone and other members of his party, and
three or four Conservatives, refused to commit themselves to
either side, and left the House without voting. Mr. Chamberlain
spoke in favor of the second reading, reserving the right to ren-
der its provisions less rigid by subsequent amendments. It is
too soon yet to judge what effect upon the movement this ad-
verse decision of the House will have. There is no doubt, how-
ever, that the question will hold a very prominent place in the
approaching general election. Apropos of this question, it is
satisfactory to be able to record that the experiment of an
eight-hour day started a few months ago by a ship-building firm
at Sunderland has proved so successful that the employer is
willing to restore the old rate of wages, the men having con-
sented to a five per cent, reduction in consideration of shorter
hours. It is found that the extra work done compensates for
the loss of time.

The details of Mr. Chamberlain's scheme for providing pen-
sions for the aged have been published. A State Pension Fund
is to be provided, to which Parliament is to make an annual
grant, to be supplemented by a contribution from the local rates.
The condition for securing a pension consists in the payment
into the Post-Office Savings-Bank of various sums of money,
a lump sum in advance before the attainment of the age of
twenty-five and annual sums until the age of sixty-five. Should
the money paid be returnable in the event of the person dying
before the age at which the pension begins, the initial payment
will be twenty-five dollars and the annual payment five dollars.
Should the money not be returnable, half of these amounts will
suffice. The age fixed for the pension is sixty-five. The sum
to be secured is five shillings, or about one dollar, a week ; but
by extra payments the pension may be increased to ten shillings,
or two dollars a week. This is the most that can be secured
from the state, but no restriction is placed upon the securing of a

1892.] THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. 277

larger pension by other means. No attempt is made to render
it compulsory to provide in this way for the future except so
far as regards those who are in the employ of the government.
In their case it is made a condition of such employment that
they must open a state pension account. All employers of labor
are empowered to open these accounts for persons employed by
them, and in the event of any of these persons leaving them
they may transfer to other persons the amount standing to the
credit of those who have left. Such are the main outlines of
the scheme. It has not yet taken the shape of a bill, nor do
we think it probable that it will advance so far this year. The
immediate point is to secure discussion of the plan, and es-
pecially to conciliate the Friendly Societies, or at least to ob-
viate their threatened opposition. For this end the framers
of the scheme are now engaged in consultation with the chief
representatives of these societies.

In a speech recently delivered by the Earl of Rosebery he
said :

" I am always haunted by the awfulness of London ; by the
great appalling effect of these millions cast down, it would ap-
pear by hazard, on the banks of this noble stream, working each
in their own groove and their own cell, without knowing each
other, without having the slightest idea how the other lives,
the heedless casualty of unnumbered thousands of men. Sixty
years ago a great Englishman, Cobbett, called it a wen. If
it was a wen then, what is it now? A tumor, an elephan-
tiasis, sucking into its gorged system half the life and the
blood and the bone of the rural districts."

This indicates, perhaps in a somewhat rhetorical way, the effect of
the migration of the rural laborer upon London, and in a pro-
portional degree upon the other large towns of Great Britain. On
the other hand, the rural districts are suffering from the same
cause ; in not a few places there are not enough men to till the
soil to its full capacity, and the villages are being stripped of
the more enterprising class. This migration has assumed the
proportions of a national calamity, and has forced the party most
closely identified with the landlords to take action in order to
mitigate, if possible, these evils. The Tory Minister of Agricul-
ture has, accordingly, introduced a bill which is described as un-
paralleled in the history of British land legislation, and which in
some respects resembles the acts recently passed for Ireland, and
both parties in the House of Commons have received the pro-
posals with favor.

278 THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. [May,

Should the bill become law the local authorities throughout
Great Britain will be empowered to borrow money for the pur-
chase of land. This land they will sell in quantities not exceed-
ing either fifty acres in extent or the annual value of 50, to any
one who wishes to become the owner, and who is able to pay
at once one-quarter of the purchase money. Another quarter
may remain as a perpetual rent-charge, while the balance is to
be paid off by instalments, or as a terminable annuity, within
fifty years. To those who are unable to pay a quarter of the
purchase money and among the agricultural laborers these will
form the majority the local authorities may let small holdings
of not more than ten acres in extent, with a view to their ulti-
mately being able to become the owners. The bill, and this is a
point for which it has been criticised, is not compulsory that is,
it does not give to the local authorities power to buy land
against the wishes of the owners. Nor does it meet with the
favor of those who aim at making public bodies the owners of
the land of the nation, for while it gives to the purchaser the
power to let a quarter of the purchase money remain as a per-
petual rent-charge, it requires the payment of the remaining three-
fourths, and constitutes him the owner to that extent. It does
not, therefore, go so far in the direction of land nationalization as
the programme of the National Liberal Federation which was
adopted at Newcastle last year, and which is supposed to repre-
sent the practical aims of the whole Liberal party. This pro-
gramme included the proposal that the local councils should be-
come, and should remain for all time, owners of the land which
was to be acquired for small holdings, and consequently in
the degree in which the acquisition of land proceeded in the
same degree would the land be becoming the property of public
bodies ; and as the Newcastle proposal included compulsion, this
acquisition would only be limited by there being no demand.

The General Act of the Brussels African Conference is pri-
marily directed to the suppression of the slave-trade. No unim-
portant share, however, in the agreement to which all the prin-
cipal powers of the world have arrived concerns the liquor-
traffic. This traffic has been carried on for many years without
any restrictions by traders whose only concern is gain, and who
care nothing for the ruin they are causing by their infamous
proceedings. This ruin is so manifest that, notwithstanding the
influence wielded by traders upon the councils of nations, far-
reaching measures for the control of the traffic have been adopt-

1892.] THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. 279

ed measures which are said to constitute a new departure in
international law. For the tract of territory in Africa between
20 north latitude and 22 south latitude the powers have
agreed upon the mutual enforcement of absolute prohibition,
both as regards the importation and the manufacture of spirits
in all parts in which the trade has not yet penetrated, as well
as in all parts in which the religious belief of the people is
against it, even if the trade has already penetrated there. In
those parts where the trade already exists, and where it is con-
sidered impossible to root it out, a compulsory .duty, of which
the act fixes the minimum, must be imposed by the respective
powers having possessions or protectorates in such localities.

The act includes a number of practical regulations for secur-
ing the enforcement of the restrictions adopted. Under one of
the articles the powers are bound to communicate to each other,
through the international office at Brussels, information regard-
ing the traffic in alcoholic liquors in their respective territories,
thus giving to the world full information on the liquor-traffic in
Africa. That such an agreement should have been made by so
many nations speaks well for the spirit of our times. The more
important part the enforcement of these regulations remains
to be accomplished ; but we have little doubt that there is enough
of determination and resolve in the various governments to pre-
vent the resolutions, deliberately adopted, being set at naught by
the greedy seekers of gain.

To the student of politics the kingdom of Belgium is at the
present time an object of interest. Since the establishment of
the present constitution in 1830 nothing has happened to cause
serious disturbance, and as a consequence the Belgians have
steadily advanced in prosperity. A smaller share of this pros-
perity falls to the working-classes than is just, and this fact is
attributed to their being excluded from the franchise, and con-
sequently from due weight and influence in the legislature. Tax-
ation forms the sole basis of the franchise ; no one can vote,
still less be elected to a seat either in the Assembly or the
Senate, unless he pays a certain amount of taxes. The qualifi-
cations are so high that out of a population of more than six
millions there are less than one hundred and fifty thousand elec-
tors ; and in the whole country there are not more than six hun-
dred persons eligible for election to the Senate. Efforts have
been made from time to time to obtain a revision of the con-

280 THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. [May,

stitution in 1870, in 1883, and in 1884 but without success. With-
in the last three years, however, the movement has become so
strong that all parties have come to recognize that a change is
inevitable. At the end of last year the Chambers resolved on
taking the first necessary step, and it then became only a ques-
tion what should be the precise character of the change.

The Labor party and the Radicals are in favor of manhood
suffrage, and have been engaged in an energetic agitation in
order to secure- it, the association of miners threatening even to
order a general strike for this end. The Conservatives and some
of the Liberals will not go beyond occupation suffrage, some-
what similar to that which exists in Great Britain. The govern-
ment has given its adhesion to the latter proposal, as also have
the Catholics as a body. In favor of universal suffrage the So-
cialists took very active measures, their committee having sat
from day to day during the discussion of the Revision Bill, and
daily demonstrations were organized outside the Chamber. While
the main feature of the proposed revision is the extension of the
franchise, a point which is calling forth nearly as much discus-
sion is the Referendum. At present there is no such provision
in the constitution, nor, in fact, in any other country except
Switzerland ; but the king has laid great stress upon its being
adopted in one form or another, his desire being in certain cases
to consult the electors directly, and so to make them responsi-
ble for legislation. This is a notable step in the direction of
democracy for a monarch to take, and it is not altogether rel-
ished by the members of either house, and the Liberals in par-
ticular are strongly opposed to it ; for it practically sets the
chosen representatives of the people aside, and to a great extent
deprives them of power.

Although the measure is thoroughly democratic in its charac-
ter, it cannot be said that the king has become so strong an
advocate of its adoption from a pure love of democracy. As in
England, so in Belgium, although theoretically the sovereign has
the right of veto upon every measure which has passed through
both branches of the legislature, as a matter of fact equally in
both countries no such veto is ever given and the provision is a
dead-letter. The King of the Belgians, however, does not desire
to continue to be a mere tool of parliamentary majorities, and
wishes to have the power of referring to the direct vote of the
electors any measure to which he is opposed. Should he be sus-

1892.] THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. 281

tained by a majority he could then veto such a bill, knowing
that the country was at his back. What the consequences would
be to the ministry which is in power at the time and responsible
for the measure, and to the Parliament which had passed it, we can-
not tell. It will be noticed that the right to refer any measure to
the direct vote of the people is by the Belgian proposal given
to the king, in this respect differing from the Swiss Referendum,
where such power is exercised upon the demand of a certain
number of the electors. The proposals of the government em-
brace not merely the submission of measures which have already
received the sanction of the Parliament, but give to the electors
the power to call upon the legislature to enact such laws as the
people deem necessary or desirable. On this point, however,
there is a difference of opinion even among those who are sup-
porters of the proposal in the main. Ample time, however, will
be given for discussion, as the Constituent Assembly, which is to
decide upon all the proposed changes in the constitution, will

not meet before June.

The German emperor, notwithstanding his public declarations
that the will of the king is the supreme law of the land ; that
it is his amiable intention to dash to pieces whoever bars his
way ; that there is only one ruler in the country himself and
that he will suffer no other ; notwithstanding his exhortation to
all discontented persons to shake the dust of Germany from
their feet and to retire as soon as possible from the country,
has bowed precipitately and incontinently before the minority of
his Parliament and has withdrawn the Education Bill, in which a
short time ago he thought to find the only means of safety for
the state. No wonder that his majesty, after so ample a con-
sumption of his own words, should feel unwell and have to re-
tire for a time from the scene. We hope that this experience
has taught wisdom both to the ruler and to his subjects, and
that while the latter have thus learned to set their true value on
the outrageous utterances of their sovereign, the former may learn
to think before he speaks. Notwithstanding the withdrawal of
the bill, it is by no means certain that the majority of the elec-
tors were opposed to it. This is another instance of the loudest
talkers, as is so often the case, gaining the day.

The action of the emperor in withdrawing the Education
Bill involved, of course, the resignation of the Minister for Public
Instruction, Count von Zedlitz, who was directly responsible for

282 THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. [May,

its introduction ; and General von Caprivi, who is Prime Minister
of Prussia as well as Chancellor of the German Empire, had so
warmly associated himself with the bill that it was impossible
fof him, after its withdrawal, to retain the premiership. Conse-
quently, while remaining Chancellor and Minister of Foreign
Affairs in the Prussian cabinet, he has resigned the Prussian
premiership, and the two offices are now held by different per-
sons. It is very doubtful whether this arrangement will work.
It was tried in 1873, and after ten months' experience was
given up as impracticable. If Prussian ways were constitutional,
the successor of Count von Caprivi would have been chosen from
the party to whose action the defeat of the Education Bill was
due. A strong Conservative, Count Botho von Eulenberg, has,
however, been appointed, but for the reasons already men-
tioned it is very probable that further changes will soon take
place, and that the new premier will before long become chan-
cellor of the empire, Count von Caprivi retiring from political
life. What is certain is, that for Germany and Prussia the fu-
ture looks much darker. All confidence in the emperor has
been lost, the Catholic and Conservative parties the supporters
of the Education Bill are naturally disgusted, while the National
Liberals and Radicals have been encouraged in their opposition
to government proposals. The future is in the hands of the
Catholic members of the Reichstag and the Landtag, seeing that
they hold the balance of power.

France is experiencing, in an unpleasant way, practical logi-
cal developments of the revolutionary principles which so many
Frenchmen have adopted. The explosions which have taken
place in Paris have caused something like a panic, and have led
to the introduction by the government of a bill inflicting the
penalty of death upon any one who attempts by explosives to
destroy houses, shops, bridges, roads, or furniture. That such
proposals should be necessary in ^ this the last decade of this
boasting nineteenth century is a sad revelation of the inadequacy
of modern civilization to give complete satisfaction. It does not
seem to have brought home to the minds of the government
the duty of extending even a fair share of protection to the ser-
vices of the church, for on the occasion of some recent brawling
it was the closing of the church, not the punishment of the
brawlers, which was promised by the prime minister in the event
of a renewal of the disturbances. While these things are taking
place, the same ministers are resolutely closing their ears to the

1892.] THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. 283

truth, and valiantly expelling from the country any one who
ventures to tell it. The recent rapprochement to the Republic of
Catholics has been the motive for the formation in the Assembly
of yet another faction, designating itself the Anti-Clerical Union
of Radical Republicans, the avowed object of which is to oppose
every attempt at conciliation. On the other hand, the Royalists,
who have hitherto been accustomed to proclaim their devotion
to the church and to represent the one as bound up with the
other, finding that the church is willing to recognize the Republic,
are beginning to show that, as so often happens in similar cases,
they are Catholics only so far and so long as the church takes

their side.

In a pastoral lately issued, Cardinal Lavigerie relates the
difficulties with which he had to contend, and the dangers
he ran in bringing about what is now, on account of the
recent letter of the Holy Father, the definite acceptance by
the Catholics of France of the republican form of govern-
ment. As our readers will remember, the initiation of the
movement was due to a speech delivered by the cardinal in the
latter part of 1890. The pastoral now issued narrates the cir-
cumstances which led to the making of that speech. In the
October of 1890 he was at Rome, intent solely on his African
missions and on his crusade against the slave-trade. The Pope
asked him to suspend for a time his anti-slavery work in order
to promote the views with reference to the relations of the
church to the Republic which the Holy Father had then em-
braced. Cardinal Lavigerie was struck by the combined sim-
plicity and sublimity of those views, but could not disguise from
himself the storm which he would arouse by entering upon such
a movement. To use his expression, he foresaw the vengeance
which some would endeavor to wreak upon him, and, what
was worse, upon his work should he undertake it. Neverthe-
less, after consultation with the one of the superiors of the
African mission in whom he had the greatest confidence, he ac-
cepted the task, and although as a matter of fact he met with
the full amount of the opposition which he had anticipated,
although there were no injustices, and scarcely any calumnies,
which he had not to undergo, he now rejoices in the hour of
triumph which has arrived, for in his recent letter the Pope has
publicly repeated not only the ideas but the very words to
which the cardinal has been giving utterance during the past
two years. This account is instructive, showing as it does how

284 THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. [May T

strong is the power, even within the church and in opposition
to the Pope, of those who are attached to outworn ideas, and
with what circumspection the Holy Father has to act in order to
serve the best interests of the church and the world.

All the energies of the Italian government are being devoted
to an attempt to make both ends meet an attempt the success
of which is very doubtful, inasmuch as the legislators of united
Italy are above all things anxious to secure for themselves
ample pecuniary rewards for their devotedness to the public ser-
vice, while their constituents are resolute in their resistance to
the imposition of new taxes. Even the warmest friends of
Italy are filled with anxious forebodings as to her future at
least financially. The spoliation of monasteries and convents

does not seem to have profited the robbers. The only point

of interest with reference to the Austrian Empire is the con-
test which is raging in Bohemia between the Germans and
the Czechs. A compromise was made some two years ago
between these rival nationalities, but owing to various
causes it has not yet been carried into effect, and, in fact, the
hopes hitherto entertained that it would be made operative

have now been abandoned. While Russia is suffering from

the famine, her neighbors are relieved from their wonted appre-
hensions of her aggressive projects. The budget this year shows
a deficit of seventy-six million roubles, this being the sum ex-
pended last year in supplying the people in the famine-stricken
districts with food and seeds, and in providing them with em-
ployment by the organization of public works. The situation of
the Jews in the empire is becoming horrible to think of ; Ger-
many having closed her frontier against them, and Austria in all
likelihood being about to. take a similar course, they will be allow-
ed neither to depart nor to remain.

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 285

TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS.

LIKE everything he writes, Mr. Crawford's new novel* has
before all other qualities that of human interest. This author
is not merely a man who can feel deeply and express feeling
strongly, but one who has a firm intellectual grasp of the fact that
feeling, in the sense that he would give that word, is the key
to unlock life's mysteries ; such of them, at all events, as the read-
ing public are most permanently interested in. As a matter of
course, then, his present book is a love story. As his hero, him-
self a novelist, says on one occasion to the lady who plays the
part of Clotho in his life drama :

" ( What else should I write about ? There is only one thing
that has a permanent interest for the public, and that is love.'

" * Is it ?' asked Constance with remarkable self-possession.
' I should think there must be many other subjects more inter-
esting and far easier to write upon.'

" * Easier, no doubt. I will not question your judgment upon
that point, at least. More interesting to certain writers too,
perhaps. Love is so much a matter of taste. But more to the
liking of the public no. There I must differ with you. The
great majority of mankind love, are fully aware of it, and enjoy
reading about the loves of others.' "

So far as we remember, Mr. Crawford has never put his
creed as an author into so compact a shape before, but no one
can have entertained much doubt concerning what it is who has
kept pace with his productions. What we like best in him is
that his creed is based on a more solid, and hence more pure,
appreciation of what love is than the general run of novelists
seem to have attained, though now and again, in an isolated
book, many of them hit upon it as by accident. Anthony
Trollope, among his other merits, had that of an abiding con-
viction not unlike that of Mr. Crawford, and though he ex-
pressed it with less rhetorical force, and adorned it in more
homely fashions, it was one of the great secrets of his popular
success. A certain philosophy of life, as old, certainly, as Plato,
and doubtless much older, underlies it, which commends itself
to that less obvious side of human nature, which always keeps
up a subterranean fire of protest, breaking out into volcanic

* The Three Fates. By F. Marion Crawford. London and New York : Macmillan & Co.

286 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [May,

eruptions now and again, against the bestial view of love which
has enshrined itself in so many high places of the earth.

As we have said already, Mr. Crawford's hero is a novelist
this time, and one whose phenomenal and long-lived success recalls
Mr. Crawford's own with a certain autobiographical vigor of
suggestion. The scene is laid in New York, and the satisfactory
publishers are veiled under the Rob Roy tartan, which is transpa-
rent enough to discover all one cares to know about them and to
hide the rest. Mr. George Winton Wood, besides winning his
laurels and describing in much detail the processes of so doing,
passes, in something like eight years, through two fully outlined
but abortive love affairs, and is left at the story's end in sad
contemplation of the fact that the third, and only true engage-
ment of his heart, is hopeless because it is unshared. True, a
loophole is left for the reader's imagination if he cares to pass
through it. Grace has never yet been sought by her hopeless lover,
and there is, as he hints, "the great ' perhaps,' the great 'if if
she should ! " But the reader, if he be more intelligent than im-
aginative, will decline, like George Wood himself, to believe that
there is any such perhaps. Grace has been painted well
enough, though the strokes devoted to her have been so few
compared with those lavished upon the pale Constance and the
unfortunate Mamie (wretched nickname to be adopted by a
serious writer!), to make it plain that the soon-terminated love
which rendered her a widow has been love enough for an eter-
nity. Besides the psychology which supplies its central interest,
the plot is clever in itself and skilfully managed. The business
of the stolen will, and the manner and consequences of the dis-
covered theft, are both masterly and unexpected. Mr. Crawford
seems as full of resource as ever, in spite of his constant ex-
penditure of imaginative material. Nevertheless, there are breaks
in his narrative which are filled in with unmitigated and not ex-
pensive padding. Among them one instances the three or four
pages devoted to thinly veiled allusions to certain contemporary
novelists and their methods which open chapter xxviii. It re-
mains true, notwithstanding, that the book as a whole, and des-
pite its rather tame setting, is of engrossing interest and worthy
of its author's reputation.

San Salvador* Miss Tincker's latest story, is a somewhat singu-
lar production from any point of view, but more especially so if
regarded as the work of a professedly Catholic author. It is not

*San Salvador. By Mary Agnes Tincker. Boston and New York : Houghton, Mifflin
&Co.

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 287

a novel, except in the sense in which that term might be applied
to Bellamy's Looking Backward, or Ignatius Donnelly's extrava-
ganza, Ccesars Cohimn. Miss Tincker has set her imagination at
work to devise a certain private Utopia, apparently according
to her own heart. On the bank of imagination our personal
checks are always cashed in full, and our accounts can never be
overdrawn. We have invariably deposited whatever we deliber-
ately try to draw forth. This romance opens in Venice, and
the final sentence of its second paragraph introduces the reader
to a youth who, as he has nothing whatever to do with the
action of the story, and never reappears again save in the
second chapter of the Prologue, and then only to accentuate the
sneer conveyed in the sentence we are about to quote, has ap-<
parently some private raison d'etre for which the author undertakes
the responsibility. He seems to serve merely as a pebble flung
at the sanctuary window. The Marchesa Loredan is one of those
intriguing, altogether detestable Italian Catholics whom one en-
counters so frequently in Miss Tincker's later works, and who
could be so easily dispensed with. She has three sons, concern-
ing one of whom the author says :

"The youngest, Don Enrico, was a monsignore, and coadju-
tor of an old canon whom he was impatiently waiting to suc-
ceed."

The mother of the youth makes the further engaging re-
mark that he is under good guardianship or she should tremble
for his future.

" It is true," she adds, " Monsignor Scalchi does live longer
than we thought he would, but, as I say to Enrico, can I kill
Monsignor Scalchi in order that you may be made a canon at
once ? Wait. He cannot live long. Enrico declares that he will
never die."

This occurs in the Prologue. The story proper begins
with the last sickness of one Professor Mora, whose meditations
on the "one perfect thing on earth," the one being in whom he
has found " no flaw, Jesus of Nazareth "; and the manner and
sentiments of whose last Easter Communion, are treated of at
length in the second chapter. He says to himself:

" Shall I confess my sins to a priest ? Why not ? It can do
me no harm, and it may do me good. I will declare what I
know of my own wrong-doing, addressing God in the hearing of
this man. He uses many instruments. Perhaps the forgiveness

288 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [May,

of God may be spoken to me by the lips of this man. Shall

I tell this man that I do not know whether he has any author-
ity, or not ? No. I am doing the best that I can ; and his
claim that he has authority will have no weight with me."

So with his Communion. " Is it true that the Blessed Christ,
the Son of God, is mystically concentrated and hidden in the
wafer?" he asks himself, and replies that he does not know.

II But since it is not impossible, I will bow myself as if He were
here." Then Professor Mora's creator goes on to remark that
he had bent in heathen temples with an almost equal devotion,
but always to the same God.

"To him the Indian praying-wheel, so often denounced as
the height of a material superstition, might be made to indicate a
fuller conception of the infinity of God than was to be found
in much of the worship that calls itself intelligent and spiritual."

Professor Mora is a wanderer from " San Salvador, the city
of the Holy King," an ideal community, flourishing in a hidden
but immensely productive spot, somewhere in that Spain where
castles are always in process of construction by dreamers.

In San Salvador, now ruled by "the ninth Dylar," lineal de-
scendant of him who had founded the community, Jesus Christ
is king. He is adored in a " Basilica," named, apparently, from
an early Dylar called " Basil, the White Father of San Salva-
dor," rather than from any architectural peculiarities of its con-
struction. His worshippers dispense with priests, sacraments,
and sacrifice, and can abide no preaching. In lieu of a tabernacle
they have set up a gorgeous throne of " acacia wood covered
with plates of wrought gold." In lieu of the Sacred Host there
is suspended above this throne " a jewelled diadem that quivered
with prismatic hues," and which "hung just where it might
have rested on the brow of an heroic figure enthroned beneath."

In this temple the names of "beneficent gods and goddesses,
all names which the children of men had lovingly and reverently
worshipped," were inscribed, and at one point, a conception
very characteristic of the author, among the " affrescos" which
adorn its walls, " burning the jungle from which he issued,
a tiger stood and stared intently at the Throne."

As might have been expected, the dwellers in this commu-
nity are of incomparable innocence, nobility, and intelligence.
Among them there are no hard-souled Marchesas of Loredan,
no impatient monsignores like Enrico no hypocrites, in a word,
such as are engendered, or so Miss Tincker pretty plainly hints,

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 289

by the notion that Christianity is anything more than an indi-
vidual fact. The first Dylar, his descendant once explains, was
convinced, after long observation and experience, that Christianity
was the

*' only true civilizer ; but Christianity was an individual, not a
social fact. There was no Christian society."

These are the salient points in Miss Tincker's new imagina-
tive conception, and we give them for what they are worth.
There is extremely little story to bind them together, and no
practical suggestions which are in any sense more valuable than
the doctrinal and spiritual ones just indicated. It is with pain
that one notes the deterioration of a talent which once promised
so much better things.

A charming book* is the collection of Mr. Robert Louis
Stevenson's later essays, just brought out by the Scribners.
Perhaps there is nothing in it so entirely delightful as some of
the papers contained in the earlier volume, called Memories
and Portraits, though, if our memory does not sadly betray us,
the essay on " Dreams," here reproduced, was also included in
the earlier collection. In any case, it bears re-reading extremely
well; as, in fact, the productions of stylists so accomplished as
Mr. Stevenson generally do. There are not many such. Thack-
eray is one example, and Stevenson is fit to name beside him
for the mere verbal charm that almost any sentence from either
writer, selected at random, would be certain to be vivid with.
The last three essays, gently criticised in Mr. Colvin's preface as
less inspiriting than the rest, have an amazing quantity of good
sense in them, none the less. If all young gentlemen, and
young ladies, for that matter, who are aspiring to art or letters
as a profession would take to heart the epistle here addressed to
one such aspirant, it would be well for them and for the public
whose attention they desire to invoke.

M. Camille Flammarion has taken his place definitely though
perhaps not altogether seriously in the ranks of what might be
called planet-walkers. Perhaps Swedenborg was the first of them
he is, at all events, the best known. He was imitated some
years since by his erratic disciple, Mr. Thomas Lake Harris ; and
later still, M. Flammarion has begun to amuse himself and im-
part some definite astronomical knowledge, mixed with a good
deal of more or less harmless vagary, by a pretence of journey-

* Across the Plains. With other Memories and Essays. By Robert Louis Stevenson.
New York : Charles Scribner's Sons.
VOL. LV. 19

290 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [May,

ing in like manner from star to star. It is interesting to note
how each one professes to see just what his natural bent and
previous studies led him to look for. As Swedenborg's angels
all talk Swedenborgian ; all incessantly combat both those anti-
Christian doctrines of Calvin and Luther which the great mystic's
common sense rejected, and those undoubtedly Christian verities
which he rather fatally misunderstood than wilfully denied ; and
all make certain revelations which human nature would desire to
have true, and certain others which natural reason could easily
deduce from given premises, so the Parisian astronomer and
evolutionist beholds from some far distant planet, just visited by
a ray that departed from earth a hundred years ago, precisely
what actually happened in Paris at that period. He is less in-
teresting than Swedenborg because less imaginative. One would,
on the whole, rather go to Saint-Amand for the details of the ex-
ecution of Louis XVI. than get them from the star Capella
through the intermediation of Flammarion.* Now, Swedenborg, if
his taste had run that way, would have devoted his mighty
fancy to telling us what the Capellians were about, and to ex-
plaining why the ray that brought the Paris of 1791 to the star
did not bring back to earth with equal clearness some reliable
news from the Capella of a century since. But beggars must
not be choosers. One would need to be an astronomer to read
the book with full intelligence, and it is only on its scientific
side that it has any value.

Miss Wilton\ is the title of a peculiar, but by no m'eans unin-
teresting or ill-written, novel. The scene is laid in New York,
and the action takes place for the most part in boarding-houses
and hotels. Without lacking naturalness, it yet gives an impres-
sion of having in its totality, if not in its details, been evolved
from the inner consciousness of the writer rather than from ob-
servation. It is a woman's study of a woman, made from a
somewhat singular point of view. The heroine is often described
as beautiful, but seldom in terms that convey any sense that the
description is just ; and as wonderfully attractive to all sorts and
conditions of men, both saints and sinners, while she generally
fails to be so either to the other women of the tale or to the
reader. She possesses, to an almost ideal perfection, that virtue
so essential to woman that, so long as she retains it, she is
usually held to be not seriously compromised by the possession

* Lumen. Experiences in the Infinite. By Camille Flammarion. Translated by Mary J.
Serrano. New York : Cassell Publishing Company.

f Miss Wilton. By Cornelia Warren. Boston and New York : Houston, Mifflin & Co.

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 291

of almost every vice. Several vices, of the sort which ruin a
man's reputation, Lilla Wilton has in a rather unusual develop-
ment. She is not honest, she contracts debts she knows she can-
not pay, she runs away from her creditors, she tells lies, she is
foolishly extravagant, she is in constant difficulties though she
has a fixed annual income of $4,000, which is immensely too little
for her. Her suitors are many and most eligible, but her women
acquaintances almost universally dislike or distrust her. Finally,
the man who attracts her most, a good Baptist layman who
does much missionary slumming, converts her to such a hor-
ror of her own ways that, by some curious transaction with her
conscience which the reader finds it hard to understand, one
finds her living on the alms of a shifty rogue in the vilest sort
of a tenement-house, partly with a view to saving money enough
to pay her debts, and partly as a penitential exercise. In the
end one finds her restored to peace of mind, honest luxury, and
on the eve of marriage with the Baptist. The novel is unduly
long for the story it has to tell.

Having given his novel a catchpenny title,* in the manner
of M. Zola, and then overshadowed it with a portentous preface
in which dark hints, moral and scientific, likewise in the manner
of that master, are given of the absolute verity, the painfully
pleasing verisimilitude of all that is to follow, Mr. Mallock's
actual performance reminds one of the meagre and dingy inte-
rior of those wandering shows which delude the unwary out of
their small change by the wondrous posters which bespread the
outside of the booths. He has, indeed, as was to be expected,
produced a tale whose motive is adultery ; so much as that
may be looked for when a novelist promises a " human docu-
ment " with a blare of trumpets, as if adultery monopolized the
claim to "legal cap" and engrossing interest. The mere fact
of adultery, however, was not precisely what Mr. Mallock was
aiming to exhibit ; that would have been too commonplace for
a philosophic moralist. His end was to show, by " authentic
records of fact, . . . that the sense of virtue and the
practice of right conduct are far from being the monopoly of
those that are technically virtuous." If this preface is to be
:cepted as true in any other sense than the subsequent tale is
true, he had in his hands more convincing proofs of this
thesis than he has furnished to his reader. He apparently
wished to prove that mutual love may so justify adultery before
the forum of conscience as not only to exonerate but to elevate

* A Human Document. By W. H. Mallock. New York: Cassell Publishing Company.

292 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [May,

some who sin in this wise. His story does not prove his point.
In fact, if he had not sharpened it by his preface, his point
might wholly have failed to penetrate readers not abnormally
thick-skinned. In that case, his book would have resembled a
dinner composed of a good deal of very watery soup, a scrap
of the tasteless boiled beef which went to its concoction, and a
few shop-dried cakes by way of dessert. As it stands, however,
the reader is to accept it as a sort of Barmecide feast the roast
does not actually appear and must be taken on trust, but it is
actually in the larder and may be scented though not tasted.
The motive, that is to say, is plain and unmistakable. Mr. Mallock
hints that he has not worked it up out of respect for the scruples
of his English-reading public. He would have done well for
his own reputation, in every way, to have left f this book un-
written. It should be left unread by all who desire to avoid evil
as well as the appearance of evil. There is more of the first than
of the second in Mr. Mallock's story. It is in his accustomed
style, and affords no internal evidence whatever of owing its
existence to any source except his own observation and imagi-
nation. Certain well-known notes, certain incidents, like that
of the French novels read by the heroine and discovered
in her possession by the hero, which Mr. Mallock has used ad
nauseam already, are here reproduced in a way to suggest that
he is haunted, hag-ridden by an imagination which needs to be
exorcised ; which might, at any rate, be cleansed by real obser-
vation of life, providing he would leave its cellars and dung-
heaps and come out of doors into sunlight.

The Cassells have just brought out another collection of
short stories* by Mr. Quiller-Crouch, " Q," whose previous' work
we have praised on occasion. The present volume is weird and
uncanny to a degree, but at the same time interesting, well-written,
and not unwholesome. The first of the tales haunts one with
the suggestion of an only half-hinted moral or psychological
problem for whose solution not sufficient clue is given. The
two " young Zebs " mystify the reader and incline him to be-
lieve that to the writer also they appeared through an only half-
pervious veil. Be just even to your bad angel, and fear him not
if you would escape him, might possibly do as the word to
" Q's " enigma in this fascinating but perplexing tale. The
nearest approach to the commonplace is made in "The Disen-
chantment of 'Lizabeth," but even here the sense of remoteness

* I Saw Three Ships, and Other Winter Tales. By " (?." New York : Cassell Publish-
ing Company.

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 293

is not lacking, *and the author's way of looking at what is
homely is unhackneyed, youthful, and distinctive. He has plenty
of imagination, too, and that of a poetic kind.

M. Hector Malot's novel, Conscience* the original of which is
spoken of as charming, falls a good deal short of being so in
the present translation, of which the English is often faulty in
construction, besides giving unmistakable and not infrequent evi-
dences of misconceptions of the author on the part of the trans-
lator. The story itself is far from being agreeable. The hero
is a young physician whose pursuit of science and the means
of continuing that pursuit is unhampered by religious faith,
and almost equally so by the restraints of conscience as they
are felt by the ordinary man. He commits his first murder to
get out of the hands of his creditors ; he commits a second to
get rid of damning evidence of the first/ It is not until after
the second assassination, which results in sending to the galleys
for twenty years a perfectly innocent man, the only brother of
the woman whom Dr. Saniel loves, and whom he finally marries
after a guilty intimacy of some years, that Saniel begins to be
troubled by his conscience. His trouble takes the form of in-
somnia; and when this yields to fatigue or to drugs, it gives
place to a sleep disturbed by dreams, in one of which he reveals
his guilty secret to his wife. Her love for him gives place to
abhorrence, and she leaves him, although she does not even then
rescue her brother by accusing her husband. He lives, grows
prosperous and famous, seems to those who know him but super-
ficially to have " proved himself stronger than life." The novel
ends with great abruptness. It presents many painful scenes,
hardly a single pleasant one, and none at all that are edifying.

Mrs. Serrano's translation from the 1 French of Emile Souves-
tre's Man and Money\ is not merely a readable novel it -is a
painful and convincing sermon on the text : " The love of money
is the root of all evil." In this tale it is chiefly the evil inflicted
on the innocent victims of that love which is presented not
the self-retributive force by which the weapon that strikes down
the defenceless comes back in a boomerang curve and crushes
the thrower into a still more helpless ruin. The factory of Pen-
hoet, the peaceful, innocent life led there by Severin and his
daughter, Anna's honestly reciprocated attachment, brought to
naught through greed, are all very touchingly described. Con-

* Conscience. By Hector Malot. Translated by Lita Angelica Rice. New York :
Worthington Company.

t Man and Money. By Emile Souvestre. Translated by Mary J. Serrano. New York :
Cassell Publishing Company.

294 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [May,

sidered as a novel, the story lacks relief, but as a study from
life, it is all the more effective for having none.

Another reprint from the industrious pen of " An Idle Exile"
is called By a Himalayan Lake* "Satan," as Doctor Watts de-
clares, " finds some mischief still for idle hands to do," and this
author suggests no emendation of that sentiment. It is an old
question, " Should women be taught the alphabet ? " For one,
we experience a strong inclination to say no whenever one of the
sex proves to have no better occupation for her leisure than the
production of flimsy, immoral, and yet not ill-written trash like
this. In the days before she went into exile and became idle,
this good woman was probably an untiring student of the author
of Guy Livingstone.

Rente's Marriage^ is a pretty and religious little tale, from
the French of Marthe Lachese. It will find its way, doubtless,
into the hands of many young readers at the coming premium
season, and some of its lessons will be improving. Still, it is
doubtful whether the manner of accomplishing such marriages
will not strike the American young girl as painfully absurd.
Here she will see masculine virtue, heroic industry, filial piety,
and Christian devotion suddenly rewarded, not by the opening
of an avenue to the powers indicated by such effects, but by a
rich and unexpected marriage. "Can 'I obtain a clerkship worth
$1200 a year," asks, in effect, the hero. "I have a pious and
infirm grandmother and two little sisters to support at the Sacred
Heart convent. I am, besides, of noble birth, my grandmother
has been * an invited guest even in the dwellings of royalty.' V
" That situation is unfortunately taken," responds the fairy god-
mother, in this case the illustrious Marquise de Valbret, " but I
offer you another as husband to a beautiful, pious, and altogether
admirable young girl worth $100,000 a year. Join your hands
and be happy." The alternative, though doubtless not strange
in the land to which the little tale belongs, will be apt to im-
press an American girl, well brought up on the best American
model, as both false and foolish. In other respects the story is
prettily told and well translated.

Saint-Amand has made a very full book concerning the two
Restorations, although the time he includes is comprised between
1814 and 1816. The Duchess of Angouleme \ occupies here but

* By a Himalayan Lake. By An Idle Exile. New York : Cassell Publishing Company.

t Rentes Marriage. By Marthe Lachese. Translated by P. P. S. Philadelphia : H. L.
Kilner & Co.

\ The Duchess of Augouleme, and the Two Restorations. By Imbert de Saint-Amand.
Translated by James Davis. New York : Charles Scribner's Sons.

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 295

a minor place, although the author's scheme requires her as a
centre-piece. Hers was, in fact, a minor place throughout. Her
solitude in the Temple prison was but a sort of outward ren-
dering of the interior isolation, strongly guarded by both cir-
cumstance and character, of which her whole career is an expres-
sion. The present volume is one of the most interesting of the
series. It gives the other side of the story of Napoleon's return
from Elba, so dramatically told in Marie Louise and the Hun-
dred Days. Then comes the history of the " White Terror,"
as painful in some ways, though of course far less hideous, than
that of the " Red Terror " of 1/93. The restored monarchy,
had it been wiser, would have pardoned Labedoyere, pardoned
Ney, avoided by clemency the ridicule with which it was cov-
ered by Lavalette's escape. For the first time, the Duchess of
Angouleme puts on a wholly unsympathetic aspect, and, as she
turns with a furiously repellant look from Madame de Laval-
ette, vainly imploring her husband's pardon, she stamps that
worst image of herself indelibly on the beholder's memory. She
was moved, one remembers, not by the implacability of revenge,
but by. that of policy or principle. But one would be better pleased
if principle had been more energetic and successful in her
attitude toward Fouch6 and Talleyrand, and less so toward
a woman whose agony might have recalled that of her own
early days. She could overcome Louis XVIII. when it was a
question of dismissing his favorite, Count Decazes ; one would
have liked to be sure she had tried at least as energetically
to banish the unfrocked bishop from the councils of the " Most
Christian King," or to procure the pardon of a man condemned
for a purely political offence, as she did to oust an adviser whose
only fault was that of not being more monarchical than the
king himself. The translation of this volume seems very well

done.

I. NEW EDITION OF A VALUABLE WORK ON THE SPIRITUAL

LIFE.*

The first edition of this translation appeared in 1886, and was
welcomed in our pages with hearty commendation. We are glad
that a reprint is now called for, though it would have been
more creditable to our public if the six intervening years had
each had a new edition of this most valuable doctrinal and

* The Glories of Divine Grace. By Dr. M. Joseph Scheeben. Translated from the
fourth revised German edition by a Benedictine Monk of St. Meinrad's Abbey, Ind. New
edition. New York, Cincinnati, and St. Louis : Benziger Brothers.

296 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [May,

spiritual compendium of Christian perfection. We are intimately
persuaded that the Glories of Divine Grace is a book of the
kind most needed in our day.

What is the supreme danger which besets the Christian in the
intellectual world ? It is the denial of the validity of his religious
aspirations. Science has lent itself to the uses of the sceptic,
many of its exponents questioning the reality of our interior
religious life. As far as man's thoughts bear him towards the
invisible God, and seek for the highest satisfaction in an interior
union with the Deity, in so far is he in the power of delusion,
say many scientists. What is the good of prayer, what is the
use of longing for future joys, what is the sense in trusting for
consolation in affliction to a condition and state beyond the
grave, are questions which stand at the head of the list of theses
now in debate among men. We do not mean to say that
there are no other difficulties, nor to underestimate the contro-
versy on external marks of the true religion. There are
many other questions besides spiritual ones, and they are serious.
But the actual reality of the spiritual phenomena is the fore-
most problem of the present day.

In this book Dr. Scheeben minutely describes the history of
the soul's secret communion with God, not, however, extending
his observations to the domain of what is called the mystical the-
ology. He explains the new character of elevation given to
human life by the Christian state ; the effect of the grace of
God on the mind of its recipient ; he describes the interior as-
pect of the virtues born of this special and altogether super-
natural divine assistance, noting the difference between it and
the natural and,ordinary relation of the Creator to the creature ; he
does all this and much more in a charmingly familiar and per-
fectly comprehensible manner, and yet with great learning.

Now, there are many philosophers before the public doing good
work, defensive as well as aggressive, in the warfare against the
dreary but onmoving hosts of doubt, and among them the late
Dr. Scheeben holds a prominent place. But in this work he
treats of the inner life in an uncontroversial mood indeed, but
for the perfect instruction of Christians themselves, fitting them
to defend their principles as well from evidences gathered in
their own souls in the practice of them as from the arguments
of philosophers.

No one but an accomplished theologian could turn the prin-
ciples of his science inside-out, and reveal their inner glories, as
is done by the author ; more, no one but a sincere lover of the

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 297

best could do it with so much unction. We may add a word
of praise and admiration for the wealth of literary adornment
which is lavished throughout these pages, whether by way of
illustration of obscure topics or in the interest of a familiar
knowledge of what is not commonly known outside the theologi-
cal schools, and for the generous purpose of attracting the reader
to this holy feast of the strong man's food. The book is
delightful reading from beginning to end. Would that a greater
number of our distinguished theological scholars would emulate
Scheeben's example. What theologian in the early days of the
church but wrote ascetical and mystical as well as doctrinal
treatises? Scheeben has that force and sweetness of a divine
vocation evident in the writings of the early fathers of the.
church.

In conclusion we may say that for the purposes of instruc-
tion in the spiritual life this book is so well arranged that it
might serve as a manual for study and recitation.

2. MONSIGNOR SCHROEDER AND THE ROMAN QUESTION.*
The late date at which we have received this pamphlet pre-
cludes anything more than a brief notice in the present number
of THE CATHOLIC WORLD. It is an expansion of an article pub-
lished in the American Catholic Quarterly Review, January, 1892.
The first instigation to the preparation of this article came from
the suggestion of a critic reviewing an article in THE CATHOLIC
WORLD, December, 1890, on the temporal sovereignty of the
Pope. This reviewer, a distinguished Catholic clergyman, urged
upon the author of the article the importance of treating that
aspect of the question which faces republican and American
principles concerning the rights of the people in respect to their
government. A request to Dr. Schroeder to undertake the task
of presenting this aspect of the question at some future and op-
portune time, and at greater length than the limits of a maga-
zine article would admit, was kindly acceded to. This circum-
stance explains the reason for not pursuing the subject of the
temporal power any further in THE CATHOLIC WORLD, and has
given occasion to the present able and thorough handling of
this important and urgent topic by Dr. Schroeder in the pam-
phlet before us. Reserving a more ample review to a future occa-
sion, we recommend most earnestly to all Catholics the careful

* American Catholics and the Roman Question. By Monsignor Joseph Schroeder, D.D.,
Ph.D., Professor of Dogmatic Theology in the Catholic University of America. New York,
Cincinnati, Chicago : Benziger Brothers.

298 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [May,

perusal of the learned and conclusive argument of Monsignor
Schroeder in defence of the violated rights of the Roman
Pontiff, which are, likewise, the rights of the whole Catholic
people, in America and in the entire world.

3. LIBERATORE'S POLITICAL ECONOMY.*

Father Liberatore feels so strongly impressed with the im-
portance of the study of political economy, even for clerics, that
notwithstanding his eighty years he has not spared himself the
toil involved in the production of the present volume. It does not
aim at being a profound or an exhaustive treatise. It is written
with the view of putting <his readers into a safe road. The
'author claims to represent the Catholic aspect of the subject,
and as such it is interesting to note his attitude towards questions
warmly discussed at the present time. For example, he criticises
Jannet as being too strongly opposed to government interven-
tion in the industrial order. While refusing to go the lengths
advocated by state Socialists, Father Liberatore gives to the
state the right of regulating, harmonizing, and even limiting
labor. "We must not suppose," he says, "that whatever is pro-
posed or said by the Socialist is false ^ priori." He admits the
truth of what they say about the evils of unbridled competition,
and is warmly in favor of the proposal to limit the hours of
labor for women and children by international agreement. He
seems to quote with approval proposals to regulate the hours
even of adult male workmen, and to fix theoretically whatever
that may mean the minimum of wages. In some quarters Cardinal
Manning has been criticised for his supposed leanings to Social-
ism, but we are not aware that he has gone so far as this ; nor,
in fact, are there in Great Britain many advocates of state inter-
vention who would venture to propose the direct regulation of
wages by the state. But Father Liberatore loses no opportunity
of pointing out the disadvantages of the modern system of free
competition and laissez faire. In this system he finds the justi-
fication of strikes. If society fulfilled the duty of protecting by
legislation and by its public institutions the rights of working-
men, it would have an indisputable right to forbid strikes and
to put them down ; but as the " liberalistic fancy " (to use the
author's words) for unbridled competition gives the employer the
right to pay low wages, the workman has the right to strike for

* Principles of Political Economy. By Father Matteo Liberatore, S.J. Translated by
Edward Heneage Bering. London : Art and Book Company; New York : Benziger
Brothers.

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 299

high wages, providing he uses no violence and does not break
the law. On the whole this book will be very useful as an in-
troduction to the study of a subject which is as important as
any other which is, in fact, almost indispensable. The book
is not a large one, and the subject matter is so well divided that
with a competent professor it might serve as a text-book. It
is well printed and bound, and is provided with an index.

4. THE JESUIT SYSTEM OF EDUCATION.*

Any contribution to the subject of education by one familiar
with his theme is always seasonable. Especially is this the case
when the contribution itself is possessed of an interest peculiarly its
own. In the volume before us, the second in the Scribner's
Educational Series, both conditions are verified. In it Father
Hughes furnishes us with a clear and concise expost of the
educational methods of the Jesuits, as embodied in what is
technically known amongst them as the Ratio Studiorum. He
does not limit himself to an examination merely of the scien-
tific elements of the plan, tut goes farther and weaves into his
discussion much that is interesting concerning its origin, gradual
development, and present influence within and without the
order.

The book is divided into two main parts, " The Educational
History of the Order" and an "Analysis of its System of Stu-
dies." By way of preface to the former the reader is given a
brief sketch of the life of St. Ignatius, in so far as it has to do
with the matter in hand, and illustrates the views of the saint
upon the subject, and the initiatory steps taken by him for the
building up of what in time was destined to become a system
of immense proportions. For, as the author assures us, it were
impossible to understand the work fully without some previous
acquaintance with the mind that framed it. It were impossible
to appreciate its manifold ramifications and characteristic adapta-
tion of means to an end, did we not get glimpses of the spirit
out of which it grew, and which breathes and speaks in its every
line. Ignatius was a practical man a man of the world. But
what was infinitely more, he was a man of God, delicately sen-
sitive to anything that might enhance or mar the glory of his
Maker. In these two qualities we discover the fruitful germ of
his educational idea. On the one hand, his zeal made him de-

* Loyola and the Educational System of the Jesuits. By the Rev. Thomas Hughes, S.J.
Great Educators' Series. Edited by Nicholas Murray Butler, Ph.D. New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons.

300 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [May,

plore the moral degeneracy so prevalent in the schools of his
time and long to apply a remedy, while, on the other, his prac-
tical good sense made it clear to him that if he would stem the
tide of evil, if he would once again wed virtue to learning, from
which it had been so generally divorced, a new departure in
educational methods was imperatively demanded. The evil must
be taken at its root if taken at all. And this could only be done
by a training begun early and continued late, in which the faith
and morals of the young would be safeguarded at every turn,
and that by men who had been thoroughly qualified for the
work by long and arduous experience in the schools of human
and divine wisdom. Here was the origin of the system in a
thought that runs like a dominant note through the whole sub-
sequent evolution of the scheme. So much so, that the Ratio
Studiorum, or educational plan, drawn up in later years under
the generalship of Aquaviva, and imposed by law upon the
whole body, was but the final outcome and perfected expression
of this fundamental idea of Ignatius. This fact Father Hughes
never loses sight of. He adverts to it frequently, especially in
the chapters upon the intellectual and moral scope of the so-
ciety's teaching as bodied forth in its constitutions. In them he
descants upon the simultaneous cultivation of mincf and morals
as a joint 'requisite in the Jesuit concept of education. One
was to be looked to, but the other was never to be neglected.
Amongst the most effective aids to the former the Ratio provides
for the thorough classification of studies. Modern scholars are
familiar enough with graded courses, but the idea was a compar-
ative novelty in the days of St. Ignatius. " There were practical-
ly only two degrees," remarks our author, " one superior, em-
bracing theology, law, and medicine ; the other preparatory."
Intermediate studies were ill-regulated as a consequence, and
confusion was the inevitable result. It was to obviate this in-
convenience, to shed light upon darkness, that a complete system
of graded classes was formulated. Nor were these " classes " told
in years. They meant a work to be done which had to be ac-
complished before the aspirant could pass to anything higher.
Another, amongst various important features of the new method,
was its Academies, which were nothing else than institutions or-
ganized in the courses of belles-lettres, rhetoric, philosophy, and
theology. Their aim was to gather together the more talented
and exemplary students into select bodies, for the performance
of special work in special fields with a view to special attain-
ments. Moral training, in turn, was diligently cared for. Every

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 301

means which religion affords was taken for the sedulous foster-
ing of virtue in the youthful mind and heart. Prayer, Mass,
the frequentation of the Sacraments, catechetical instruction, and
pious reading were all given a conspicuous place in the daily
routine of collegiate life. Add to this the division of students
into separate ranks and categories according to age, the pre-
mium set upon good conduct, the work done by the sodalities,
and most of all the constant and paternal supervision of men
who, themselves consecrated to God, lived and labored primarily
for the sanctification of their youthful charges, and some idea
is afforded of the pure and elevated atmosphere in which it
was expected the young should be brought up. On almost
every page of this portion of his work the author treats his
readers to a deal of interesting historical and biographical mat-
ter, to which, in the brief compass of a notice, we can but inci-
dentally allude.

Next follows, in the second part, a critical examination
of the system of studies prescribed by the Ratio both for
the master and the student. As the training of the pupil
hinges upon the previous qualifications of his teacher, Ignatius'
idea would not have been rounded out, nor his work completed,
had not ample provision been made in the society's constitu-
tions for the thorough training of its own members. Hence all
its minute legislation upon the subject. Hence the long period
of preparation. Hence, too, its unremitting endeavor to qualify
its members by broad and profound culture for the accomplish-
ment of lasting results in every department of knowledge. An
end so all-embracing would naturally imply an elaborate pro-
gramme of studies. And such was provided, as the author
shows. The number of years and their gradation, the branches
pursued, the numerous methods adopted for their readier inculca-
tion and assimilation, together with the practical results of the
system in operation, are all passed in entertaining review. From
the master thus qualified for his work to the pupil for whom
that work was undertaken the transition is logical and easy.
We are, therefore, introduced by way of close to the entire
subject, to the various means taken for the formation of the
scholar. This leads to a consideration of the attitude which the
professor should assume towards his pupils, class exercises, school
management throughout the lower forms, and finally the system
itself upon which the course, is to be graded from top to
bottom. We will not stop to rehearse the rules laid down for
stimulating young ambition, conducting daily recitations, selecting

302 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [May,

and using text-books. All this is gone over in extenso. But one
peculiarity in the method calls for special observation. A distinc-
tive feature of Jesuit training, and one emphasized by the Ratio,
is what is known as the pr&lectio. We meet with it in theology
and philosophy as well as in the elementary courses of literature.
It consists in a preliminary dilation by the professor upon the
lesson assigned, whether it be a theological thesis or a snatch
from an ancient classic. What might prove to be insurmount-
able obstacles to the pupil are smoothed away, helpful references
are given, allusions are explained where need be. In a word,
whatever collateral information is deemed available is wheeled
into service and put at the disposition of the scholar. Its evi-
dent object is to facilitate his work by rendering it more agree-
able, and make it doubly profitable by developing an analytical
and comprehensive habit of mind the secret of genius and a
pledge of eventual success.

Concluding, we may safely say that the book will be wel-
come as opening up a field of information from which English
readers have hitherto been largely, if not altogether, debarred.
Moreover, Father Hughes has done his work well. " Loyola "
makes pleasant reading. There is not a weary page between its
covers. Indeed, its most attractive feature is the interest with
which the writer has been able to clothe the dry bones of peda-
gogics. We are satisfied that few will lay it down without feel-
ing grateful to the author for the very instructive insight which
he has given into what has been admitted to be, even by hostile
critics, one of the most unique and marvellous systems of educa-
tion the world has ever known.

5. MEDITATIONS ON RELIGIOUS TRUTHS.*

A book of meditations from the pen of a venerable prelate
who, during the greater part of his long life, has been devoted
to the work of training young ecclesiastics for their holy voca-
tion, should possess more than ordinary merit ; and such is the
book of meditations now before us. It is the result of fifty
years' experience in directing the spiritual exercises of candidates
for the priesthood, and of a ripe scholarship and a rare piety
besides, and, as might be expected, it is practical, profound, and
breathes the truest spirit of devotion. The venerable author fol-

* Meditations on the Principal Truths of Religion, and on the Life of our Lord /esus
Christ. By the Most Rev. Dr. Kirby, Archbishop of Ephesus. Dublin: M. H. Gill &
Son.

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 303

lows closely the plan of St. Ignatius, but he develops the differ-
ent meditations in his own way. He is particularly happy in
his application of the Sacred Scriptures to the subjects under
consideration, and we doubt if there be any better commentary
on the famous Exercises in an English dress. The two medita-
tions on the public life of our Lord seem to us especially pow-
erful, but when the treatment throughout is remarkable there is
no need to particularize.

6. WHYMPER'S AMONGST THE GREAT ANDES.*

The long-expected account of Mr. Whymper's adventurous
climbing in the Andes has appeared at last, and though eleven
years have covered up, to some extent, public interest in his ex-
ploits, this tardy publication is well calculated to reawaken it.

There is little or no reason to doubt Mr. Whymper's claim
to have been the very first that ever scaled the mighty summit
of Chimborazo, though apart from this fact there is nothing of
particular interest or information about the achievement. His
ascent of Cotopaxi gave far more interesting results, and was
in every way more satisfactory than his two hurried trips to the
sacred summit of Chimborazo, which he merely touched with his
eager feet. Mr. Whymper's account differs very materially from
the statements made by Humboldt and Boussingault, both of
whom made unsuccessful attempts to climb the Giant of the
Andes, and whose observations seem to have been very imper-
fect. Mr. Whymper's narrative is so matter of fact, so unimagin-
ative, so severely scientific, that we cannot but accept it even
at the cost of a loss of confidence in the great German scien-
tists and explorers.

This book, with its copious maps and illustrations, its terse
yet graphic descriptions of the almost unknown altitudes of the
Andes, its careful scientific observations, its records of atmos-
pheric pressures and climates, and distribution of fauna and flora,
and glacier and volcano, will be a glorious feast to every one
who takes even a casual interest in the grandest features of our
globe. And none can read it without admiring the indomitable
will and pluck and energy of the modest Englishman who ac-
complished the results therein described. Nor can any reader
fail to thank the publishers for the excellent taste and workman-
ship displayed in the publication.

* Travels amongst the Great Andes of the Equator. By Edward Whymper. New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons.

304 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [May,

7. AVE MARIA ESSAYS.*

The attractive blue covers of this little volume tempt one to
pick it up. The name of Brother Azarias compels all familiar
with his other writings to read carefully what he has presented.
As we conclude its perusal a feeling of gratitude to Brother
Azarias steals over us for the pure pleasure to be derived from
his elegant tribute to the Queen of May. It consists of short
essays, which have appeared from time to time in the Ave Maria,
and we are sure all who have met them there will welcome
them in their new garb. The first essay on " Mary, Queen of
May," brings before us in dear remembrance the earthly life of
her whom all nations call blessed.

With reverent love our author touches upon the little acts that
went to make up the daily life of this maiden meek and mild.
He pictures her in such charming simplicity that our awe is
subdued into a desire for imitation. Would that all our sweet
young graduates might carry with them from their school-days
into their future lives the image of this ideal woman, realizing
that only by becoming good may they become cultured !
The second essay tells of Mary and the faithful departed,
and recalls the close union of the souls upon earth with the
church suffering, as in unison voices are raised to beg the interces-
sion of the Mother of Mercy. Brother Azarias presents the
logical side of this intermediate state so clearly that, should faith
waver, reason would compel us to admit the existence of Purga-
tory. The justice of such a state was acknowledged by Plato.
Our separated brethren to-day long for the consolation we may
derive in praying for our dead. The harmonious beauty of our
faith reflects from each page.

The description of Mary in Heaven carries our imagination
beyond the visible into a region of light where we may all make
a friend, and that friend the Queen. We are shown how the
thought of the Assumption has long dwelt in the hearts of men ;
how the honor of God demands the veneration of Mary.

The prologue and epilogue are in quaint and dainty verse
worthy their surroundings.

This little May volume coming in the month of flowers
deserves a cordial greeting for the scholarly work of its au-
thor, for its exquisite language, and above all for the name
of Mary, to whom it is dedicated.

We cheerfully recommend it as a gift-book for the coming
commencements, and as a valuable addition to every library.

*Mary, Queen of May. By Brother Azarias. Notre Dame, Ind.: Ave Maria Print.

1892.] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 305

THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION.

ALL COMMUNICATIONS RELATING TO READING CIRCLES, LISTS OF BOOKS,
ETC., SHOULD BE ADDRESSED TO THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION,
415 WEST FIFTY-NINTH STREET, NEW YORK CITY.

ACADEMY HALL at Syracuse, N. Y., was filled to overflowing
on the evening of April n, in spite of a most untimely snow-
storm, with an enthusiastic audience of young people from all
parts of the city. The meeting was held to promote the inter-
ests of Catholic literature and Reading Circles under the auspices
of the Young Men's Sodality. On the stage were Rev. J. F.
Mullaney, Rev. J. S. Tierney, and Messrs. J. M. Mertons, P. Ford,
Jr., D. O'Brien, the officers of the Young Men's Sodality, and
representatives of the Catholic Total Abstinence Society of St.
John the Baptist Church. An excellent musical programme was
furnished by the Junior Knights of the Church of the Assump-
tion. Like a patriarch of the olden time, Mr. John McCarthy
presided. In his opening address he said :

" I envy you young and middle-aged people, who enjoy to-
night the privilege that up to forty years of age I never en-
joyed, and that privilege is to hear a Catholic lecture. During
my boyhood and early manhood I had many inducements to
listen to anti-popery lectures. But I forego the utterance of the
thoughts connected with the religious intolerance which prevailed
at that time.

" There has been quite recently a new undertaking, and that
is the fostering of intellectual culture by reading which shall
harmonize with true faith. Largely instrumental in the inaugu-
ration of that good work is the religious community known as
the Paulist Fathers, who obtained a special commission from
Pope Pius IX. for a special work in the United States. His
Holiness, with a full knowledge of the purposes of this band of
zealous men, gave them his blessing, invested them with the
necessary faculties to do their work for the spread of Catholic
truth and the conversion of souls.

" To-night we have with us a member of that band of work-
ers. Judging from the title of the lecture with which he is about
to favor us, I conclude that he will disclose to us some of the
methods of that new Apostolate. He may invite u^ of the laity
to assist in that great work of spreading Catholic truth. He
will speak, if he speaks upon that point at all, of the works of
the Paulist Fathers for the conversion of the American people,
which are intended to procure for their countrymen the grace
of that conversion which happily befell their great prototype, the
Apostle St. Paul, on the road to Damascus.

" It is scarcely necessary for me to say that as Americans we

VOL. LV. 20

306 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [May,

fully sympathize with him in that work. In order, further, to
make our aid efficient, it must be animated by an intelligent
purpose. We must think, act, and speak with a reasonable de-
gree of knowledge of the holy faith we profess, and show forth
the elevating and sanctifying influences which it can exert. We
must study the methods suggested to us, but above all and be-
yond all we must listen to the advice and direction of our
respected bishops and zealous pastors. To assist in any way in
the great work of conveying the bread of life to souls who are
hungering in the desert, is a work of great merit in the sight of
Almighty God. Standing here to-night, I experience a feeling
of regret steal over me regret that I cannot live to see the
consummation of this grand scheme of education ; regret that I
cannot live to see carried out the glorious work which has been
so clearly and authoritatively defined by His Holiness, Pope Leo
XIII., in his recent grand encyclicals.

" How fortunate are the young people who are living upon
the threshold of such an era as now opens before the church ! I
have the great honor to introduce to you the Rev. Thomas Mc-
Millan, who will speak on the subject of Catholic Thought in
Modern Literature."

An outline of Father McMillan's address is here given from
the admirable stenographic report prepared by Miss Curry :

" I must distribute to all of the Paulist Fathers the praise
that the chairman, in his kindness, has bestowed upon me, as I
happen to be the only representative here at present. It was
with great pleasure that we noticed among the members of the
convention held last January, at Columbus Hall, New York City,
an able spokesman from Syracuse, the chairman of this meeting,
whose words were listened to there by representative Catholics from
the intellectual centres of the United States, and who contributed
a notable part to the valuable discussions of Catholic literature.

" Father Mullaney made me promise, almost a year ago, if ever
I came within a thousand miles of Syracuse, that I would stop
over, and he would find a little work for me to do. I under-
stand from his friends that it is an old fashion of his ; that he
has been finding a great deal of work for all his neighbors up
here. I did not expect to deliver a lecture, and it was with
amazement that I read his telegram : * Send us on your subject.'
I told him I was willing to give a little talk to his young peo-
ple on Catholic literature. At any rate, the subject came on,
was announced, and that subject we must take up Catholic
Thought in l^odern Literature.

" It is a wide subject and has an extensive bearing, and would
require a great many lectures to exhaust it. I shall only attempt
to give you the headings of it, and some particular application for
practical work. Some of our friends who are not of the Catho-
lic Church, although we like to classify them among our friends
rather than among our enemies, have been trying for a long
time to persuade us that nearly everything began with the Re-
formation. The Catholic Church, however, did not begin then,

1892.] -THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 307

but a long time before, and competent historians no longer at-
tempt to persuade us that King Henry VIII. he who established
what is known as the Church of England was a model of per-
fection in anything. He was not a model ruler of his own peo-
ple ; he was not a model man in his domestic life ; he was any-
thing but a model husband towards his numerous wives ; and,
what is worse in the sight of the historians, he was not a model
man for veracity. He stands condemned to-day before the civil-
ized world from his own state documents. The historian Gas-
quet has unearthed, in the British Museum, records which show
that King Henry VIII., in all his majesty, deliberately falsified
evidence for Parliament, and that Parliament was led thereby to
legalize the royal falsehoods. It was done more than once in
the English Parliament ; many lies were incorporated in the
form of laws, and soldiers were put behind those laws of Parlia-
ment to enforce them, and try to put them into operation
against every instinct of justice and the nobler desires of human
nature. At any rate, that point is sufficient for the purpose of
the argument I have in view.

" It is generally conceded now that there was something
worthy of honor previous to King Henry VIII., and to his so-
called improvement in church matters. We have a non-Catholic
writer, Henry Morley, who has attempted what he calls a history
of English literature, conceding willingly that modern literature
must go back to the great Catholic poet, Dante ; with justice
and 'accuracy Morley says : * Dante has the proud honor of be-
ing the Father of Modern Literature.' Dante is a character of
great interest because he represents an epoch in himself. He
belongs to that much-abused thirteenth century. He penetrated
what might be accurately called the ore-beds of literature, be-
cause literature is not something that exists in cloudland ; it
belongs to the human race, to the people of this world, and has
its foundations in reality. The ore-beds from which Dante de-
rived solid material for his great writings were in the scholastic
scliools, and the greatest of scholastic teachers and doctors was
St. Thomas Aquinas ; so, in the language of business, we might
say, accurately, that the great doctor and philosopher could claim
a first mortgage on everything that Dante ever wrote on account
of having furnished the material. The schoolmen discussed great
problems. It is true that some of them discussed simple ques-
tions, trifling matters ; but that was an age of discussion, and
there are some people who never get beyond trifling matters.
But the age is not to be judged by the worst specimens, but by
the best, and St. Thomas notably stands supreme as having ac-
quired the knowledge of the ancients the knowledge that came
from the Greeks, the Arabians, and the old Romans, and then
sifted everything with a view to its application to the church.
One of the great works for which he is praised is that of Chris-
tianizing Aristotle.

" Brother Azarias has given us, in the preface to his forthcom-
ing work on Phases of Thought, a very good standard by which to
judge these authors of the past. He says we must distinguish

308 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [May,

whether they belong to the world's master-pieces. Their works
are to be analyzed and their underlying meaning explained from
a point of view of thought and criticism prevalent at the time
they wrote. You must not judge them by a false standard.
They knew all that was to be known at the time. One of the
dangerous tendencies of our age is to criticise the individual au-
thor, instead of classifying the great underlying principles of
thought. We can claim that Catholics gave Dante to the liter-
ary world. He derived his valuable material for poetic flights
of fancy from St. Thomas, and, in turn, communicated that ma-
terial to the whole modern world. To any one who has read
' Paradise Lost ' it must be obvious that Milton borrowed largely
from Dante. We can prove that the same thoughts existed
in poetical form anterior to Milton.

" We also trace a development of Catholic thought in the
great writer Shakspere he who has done more, perhaps, than any
one man to give expression and form to the English language.
There has been a great deal of discussion about this wonderful
man. We know more about him than some of his contempora-
ries. We certainly appreciate him more highly than some of
those who lived with him. It is admitted that his father be-
longed to the Catholic Church ; consequently, his training was
under Catholic influence. Being the genius he was, he naturally
absorbed knowledge early. It used to be one of the pet sub-
jects of Daniel O'Connell, at his private castle, to discuss with
friends the writings of Shakspere. It is also said of O'Connell
that there were two subjects which he rigorously excluded from
his own house religion and politics ; but he was always ready
to discuss Shakspere and the intrinsic evidences of Catholic
thought contained in his writings. The more you examine Shak-
spere's works, the more you will be surprised that a man living
in the time of Queen Elizabeth, who could win royal favor by
putting into his plays caricatures of the old faith, abstained en-
tirely from the abuse of the Catholic Church. Never did he
ridicule a Catholic priest or mention the subject of religion in a
disrespectful manner in any of his works.

" Some of the Catholic young men at Liverpool have made
another discovery which shows that our Catholic young men are
getting bright that there is not a single line in Shakspere en-
dorsing the unjust policy of England towards Ireland. That is
certainly a remarkable indication of his convictions. We may
with justice claim Shakspere. We hope that he was personally
identified with the Catholic Church and never surrendered. We
know positively that he represents the Catholic thought of Merrie
England as it was before Henry VIII. established his so-called
Church of England.

" Another of our great writers is Sir Thomas More. He
is especially notable as a great statesman who in his book, Uto-
pia, made good use of fiction. Many opinions have been ex-
pressed on the subject of fiction, but I must say that I am very
liberal in regard to it. A great deal of the fiction produced in
France could not be praised by Christians, being written in the

1892.] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 309

interests of infidelity and agnosticism. But Sir Thomas More
shows how a fictitious narrative of an ideal kingdom, which ex-
isted nowhere, might be used to advantage in dealing with a
king very much in need of reform. Later on, in the same line,
came Edmund Burke, who, though not a Catholic, strongly con-
demned the penal laws. He seems to have risen superior to his
Protestant associations and contributed to the Catholic chain of
thought in literature. We might enumerate many others, es-
pecially Dryden and Pope. It is to be noted that Pope revised
an edition of Shakspere, and in -that way brought him to the
attention of the English public in a way never before attempted.
"Among the authors largely under the influence of Catholic
thought in history we may mention Sir Walter Scott. Although
he has some misrepresentations of Catholic worship, there is no
deliberate, malicious falsification. Our American poet, Long-
fellow, seems to have instinctively selected Catholic subjects for
his best poems. In the story of the Acadians he has pictured
the bravery of a noble people and the injustice of anti-Catholic
tyranny. In his minor poems he shows a love of Catholic ideas.
Many of the facts and legends borrowed from his study and
.travel in Europe are on Catholic lines of thought. It has been
said that Longfellow never wrote a line in support of heresy,
and that his poetry contains much in favor of Catholicity."

x- * *

The Catholic Reading Circle Review, published at Youngs-
town, Ohio, has elicited much information concerning the project
of a Summer Assembly for Catholics devoted to literature and
educational advancement. The discussion was started some time
ago by Rev. J. F. Loughlin, D.D., president of the Catholic
Young Men's National Union. Among those who have written
letters of approval are, Archbishop Elder; Bishop Keane, rector
of the Catholic University of America ; Bishop McGolrick ;
Bishop Chapelle ; Revs. John F. Mullaney, of Syracuse ; John
Conway, of St. Paul ; Martin S. Brennan, of St. Louis ; and
Regis Canevin, of Pittsburgh. Letters have been received also
from prominent representatives of the laity, well known to the
members of the Columbian Reading Union : John A. Mooney,
Maurice F. Egan, Eliza Allen Starr, Katharine A. O'Keeffe, A.
T. Toomy, Mary Elizabeth Blake, Anna E. Buchannan, E. A.
Kenney, Richard Malcolm Johnston, and George Parsons Lathrop.
The Summer Assembly would provide opportunities for lec-
tures on special subjects, concerts, discussions on educational
questions relating to literature, science, and art. Under compe-
tent guidance latent talent could be developed by such a plan,
aided by Catholic teachers of culture and refinement. It is
expected that many of those connected with the Reading Circle
movement would willingly devote a portion of the summer vaca-

3io THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [May,

tion to become acquainted with one another and interchange
ideas on topics of general interest. Where to locate the pro-
posed Summer Assembly is a matter requiring careful consider-
ation. The place selected should have all the accommodations
of a summer resort for rest and relaxation. The time chosen
must be limited to the months of July and August. Whether
one week or more will suffice cannot be easily determined till
a number of Catholic writers, speakers, and musicians give evi-
dence of their willingness to assist. Very desirable places men-
tioned for such a meeting are Syracuse, Saratoga, Albany, and
Lake George, in New York State ; New London, Conn.; and
Marquette, Mackinac, St. Ignace, and Duluth, in the West.

As a logical development of the intellectual forces now at
work we believe that a Summer Assembly for Catholics in the
United States will eventually be established as a safe business
investment. We hope it may be realized in the near future,
and if a satisfactory offer can be secured from a reliable com-
mittee at any of the places named, the plan might be tested

during the coming summer.

# * #

Rev. J. F. Mullaney sends these encouraging words since the
lecture at Syracuse :

" Three new Reading Circles have been organized, and every
society connected with the church has evidenced a desire to
have something of the kind in connection with their regular
meetings. Outside the parish, too, there is considerable enthu-
siasm on the subject. ... A letter from Mr. Mosher, of Youngs-
town, Ohio, states that he is confident of the ultimate success of
the Summer School, and that a meeting will take place in New
York or Philadelphia in a week or two, to formulate programme,
select site, and organize. . . . You must remember our talk
on the subject a year (or less) ago, and may be curious to know
how it happened that the idea made such an impression on me.
Well, for many years at our old homestead near Utica we
would have a reunion of the family during vacation time. Our
dear Azarias, owing to his very poor health, year after year
was kindly granted permission to recuperate on his native air for
a month or six weeks. College and seminary companions would
share our pleasure in this charmed spot. We would read beneath
the shade, tell stories, and in our more serious moods ask Brother
Azarias to solve our difficulties. Ex-Governor Seymour would
occasionally join in our discussions, and often delight us with
his beautiful conversation on nature and men and books. . . .
I look back to those happy days with great pleasure, and often
think how delightful it would be if our people had some means
of uniting pleasure and recreation with useful instruction. The
Summer School, it seems to me, will do this, provided it be made
attractive and put on a good business basis." ^ ^ ^

1892.] WITH THE PUBLISHER. 311

WITH THE PUBLISHER.

A RECENT editorial in the New York Sun on the " Function
of the Press " contains much that the Publisher cannot accept as
true in so far as THE CATHOLIC WORLD is concerned, and he
feels that his readers are in sympathy with him in this convic-
tion. Briefly* put, The Sun maintains that "the prime object of
a periodical is to make money." This certainly is not the prime
object of this magazine ; it was never among the great purposes
of its Founder to realize pecuniary profit ; and if such an end was
ever entertained the magazine would have closed its books long
ago, and its conductors would have made investments that would
have certainly and generously yielded a profit. The day can
never come when the prime object of THE CATHOLIC WORLD
will be to make money. Could such an aim be contemplated,
the magazine would no longer exist ; it would be an Othello with
its " occupation gone."

No, however true The Sun's dictum may be in the case of the
secular journal, profit as a prime object cannot be associated
with a religious periodical, and certainly not with our magazine.
The prime object of THE CATHOLIC WORLD is to be profitable
from the missionary, not the pecuniary point of view ; and in
this sense the history of the periodical has been a chronicle of
profit ; in this sense the balance to its credit is great and ever
increasing. THE CATHOLIC WORLD is a missionary, and it
preaches " from the tallest pulpit in the world " ; it preaches to
willing and attentive ears ; as the years go on it reaches a wider
and yet wider audience. And so, though the Publisher has an
interest in his bank account, and though he is concerned with
the prompt payment of bills, his concern for these matters is
because money represents the greater possibilities of the mission-
ary aims of the periodical. It is the necessary means to the
end, and he therefore reiterates what he has said so often be-
fore, that THE CATHOLIC WORLD is not backed by a wealthy
corporation or conducted with a view to return handsomely on
the investment. The Editors and the Publisher draw no sala-
ries, and every dollar goes into type, press-work, and paper, and
the payment for the articles contributed.

The better our readers understand this, the better will they

312 WITH THE PUBLISHED. [May,

do the important part that is theirs in carrying out the " prime
object " of the magazine. Every dollar they send, every new
friend they can bring to the circle of its readers, means an ad-
vance of its missionary spirit, means a new possibility in the
field of its endeavor. Whatever its ledgers carry to its credit
is religiously and zealously invested in making the magazine
better in every way, and in keeping it where it has ever been
at the front of Catholic periodical literature, the servant of the

Truth, .the Light to a great people.

New friends are often brought to THE CATHOLIC WORLD
by ways that are often mere by-paths, as the following letter
from Australia shows :

QUEENSLAND.
Rev. W. D. Hughes.

"DEAR SIR: Enclosed you will find post-office order for
thirty-six shillings, representing two subscriptions for next year

my own and a new one, , to whom you will kindly

forward your valuable periodical next year.

" No doubt your genial Publisher will go into ecstasies over
this new subscription, believing that it is the result of his con-
stant homilies on the matter in his own department of the pe-
riodical. I am sorry to tell him that such is not the case, be-
cause it was by pure accident that I obtained the new subscri-
ber. As he might wish to make use of the fact for the benefit
of your other subscribers, I shall tell you how it occurred.

" I was travelling one morning in a train to a place where I
intended to say Mass. I had a copy of THE CATHOLIC WORLD
with me which I intended reading when my more important
work was concluded. A gentleman stepped into the same car-
riage, and at once engaged me in conversation. However, I
wanted to read my office ; and in order to get rid of him, I
opened my bag, took out the C. W., and handed it to him to
read. While he was doing so, I read my office. As I was
leaving the train at a station before his, I requested him to
return the magazine, and then he asked me if I would order the
periodical for him. You can tell the foregoing to Mr. Publisher,
and he may make it the text for another homily."

The following letter explains the purpose of a sketch found
in the pages of this issue :

"REV. AND DEAR SIR : I enclose a sketch entitled 'By the
Roanoke.' May I beg you to bring to the reading of it the
belief that it was written to further the cause most dear to the
writer's heart, the conversion of the Southern negro ? It pre-
sents one of the dark, but alas ! one of the direfully true, phases
of life in the South. I earnestly hope you may find it available
for your pages; but whether you do or not, I am glad to have
written it, as I am glad to do anything, however feeble, toward

1892.] WITH THE PUBLISHER. 313

calling the attention of the Catholic world to this most pressing
need for missionary work.

" Yours sincerely and respectfully,

" FANNIE CONIGLAND FARINHOLT."

A pamphlet of much value to those who are given to the
study of the tactics of our separated brethren is published by
Mr. Hugh Margey, 14 Great Clyde Street, Glasgow. Its title is
The New Methods of Evangelical Preachers, and the Right Rev.
Monsignor Munro, D.D., is the author. While there is much to
amuse one in these " methods," there is much to sadden one as
well in the thought that the infamous traditions of the " soup-
school " and the " blanket society " still survive, and that both are
still invoked as proselytizing agencies.

Miss Louise Imogene Guiney, a favorite and valued contribu-
tor to these pages, and a lady who has won distinction among
the writers of the present day, has issued, through the Harpers, a
volume entitled Monsieur Henri, a Foot-note to French History,
in the time of the Revolution and the Vendean War.

The Cassell Publishing Company announce a valuable hand-
book in the Record of Scientific Progress for 1891, by Professor
Robert Grimshaw. It will give a summary of all the most im-
portant discoveries and improvements in every branch of physi-
cal science.

Marah is to be the title of the new volume of hitherto un-
published poems by the late Owen Meredith.

And still, despite all prophecies that the day when the quar-
terly must go is near at hand, we come across new ventures in
that domain of periodical literature. The last to reach the Pub-
lisher's desk is the New World, and is called " a quarterly review
of religion, ethics, and theology." The critic's is not (happily)
the Publisher's task, but he ventures the opinion that there is
much in an article entitled " The New Orthodoxy " which would
make many of our readers simply stare in blank amazement.

An announcement which may be of interest to some is that
made by Sampson Low, Marston & Co. (London) of the early
publication of a series of fac-simile reproductions of the most im-
portant " Block Books " of the fifteenth century. The series
will include the Biblia Pauperum, the Ars Moriendi, the Canticum
Canticorum, and the Speculum Humana Salvationis, in paper
covers, at three guineas each.

Messrs. Macmillan & Co. announce a new edition of the
works of Mr. F. Marion Crawford, in uniform cloth binding, at
one dollar per volume. Each volume will be complete, and the

314 WITH THE PUBLISHER. [May,

edition will include the new novels Don Orsino and The Three
Fates : a Story of New York Life.

A work of much importance to our colleges and academies,
and to all who are interested in literary matters generally, is
announced by the Boston Book Co. It is entitled the Literature
of the English Language and will be edited by George Makepeace
Towle. The work will aim to be a comprehensive dictionary of
the greatest authors known in English literature, will include
critical estimates of their work by eminent critics, and will be so
arranged as to afford the student a reasonably clear idea of the
importance of the author treated.

The work is projected on a large scale, and it is estimated
will be completed in ten octavo volumes of about four hundred
and fifty pages each. The first volume, covering the subject from
Beowulf to Spenser, is almost ready.

Two new volumes by. "The Prig" are entitled Egosophy and
Riches or Ruin, both published by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner
& Co., London.

A new edition of Coleridge's poetical and dramatic works is *
being prepared for Macmillan & Co. by Mr. J. Dykes Campbell.
It will be in one volume uniform with the publishers' editions
of Wordsworth and Shelley, edited by Mr. John Morley and Pro-
fessor Dowden respectively, and will include a considerable quan-
tity of matter hitherto unpublished.

Dr. St. George Mivart, F.R.I., has prepared a volume of
Essays and Criticisms to be published shortly by Osgood, Mcll-
vaine & Co., London. The papers are historical, antiquarian,
and philosophical, besides dealing with problems of biology.

An anthology of poetry written about children, but addressed
to adult readers, will soon be published under the title of The
Child set in the Midst. An autograph copy of Mr. Coventry
Patmore's Toys will be produced in fac-simile. The volume is
edited by Mr. Wilfred Meynell, and will be issued by the Lead-
enhall Press, London.

The latest volume of the Manuals of Catholic Philosophy
(Stonyhurst Series) is Political Economy, by Charles S. Devas,
Examiner at the Royal University of Ireland.

The Catholic Publication Society Co. has recently issued :
Through Darkness to Light. A drama in four acts. For

female characters. By Miss Mary Cody.
Moments before the Tabernacle. By Rev. Matthew Russell,

S.J.

My Zouave. By Mrs. Bartle Teeling, author of Roman Vio-
lets, etc.

1892.] WITH THE PUBLISHER. 315

The same company has in press and preparation :

The Position of the Catholic Church in England and Wales
during the last two Centuries. Retrospect and forecast.
By Thomas Murphy. With a Preface by Lord Braye.

The Letters of the late Archbishop Ullathorne. Edited by
Augusta Theodosia Drane (sequel to the Autobiography].

The Conversion of the Teutonic Race. By Mrs. Hope. Edit-
ed by Rev. J. B. Dalgairns, of the Oratory. A new
and popular edition in two volumes, each volume com-
plete in itself. Vol. I., " Conversion of the Franks and
English"; Vol. II., "St. Boniface and the Conversion of
Germany."

Catholic England in Modern Times. By Rev. John Morris,
SJ.

A new volume of Wayside Tales. By Lady Herbert.

Benziger Brothers' new publications are :

American Catholics and the Roman Question. By Monsignor
Joseph Schroeder, D.D., of the Catholic University,
Washington, D. C. Net, 25 cents.

Manifestation of Conscience. Confessions and Communions
in Religious Communities. A commentary on the decree
" Quemadmodum " of December 17, 1890. Translated
from the French of Rev. Pie de Langogne, O.M.Cap.
With the original decree and the official translation.
Net, 50 cents.

Gertrude's Experience. From the French by Mrs. Mary- C.
Monroe. I2mo, cloth, inked side and back. With a
frontispiece. 50 cents.

Olive and the Little Cakes. From the French. I2mo, cloth,
inked side and back. With a frontispiece. 50 cents.

The Bric-a-Brac Dealer. From the French. I2mo, cloth,
inked side and back. With a frontispiece. 50 cents.

Her Father's Right Hand. From the French by F. W.
Lamb. I2mo, cloth, inked side and back. 50 cents.

Letters. Vol. II. By St. Alphonsus de Liguori. I2mo,
cloth. Net, $1.25. This is the nineteenth volume of
the Centenary Edition of the Saint's works.

Tales and Legends of the Middle Ages. From the Span-
ish. Edited by Henry Wilson. i6mo, extra cloth. $1.00.

They have in preparation :

The Sacramentals of the Holy Catholic Church. By Rev.
A. A. Lambing, author of Mixed Marriages, etc.

Socialism and Private Ownership. From the German of
Father Cathrein, S.J., by Rev. James Conway, S.J.

Words of Wisdom from the Scriptures. A concordance to
the Sapiential Books.

A School History of the United States. Abridged and com-
piled from the most reliable sources. The book will be
very fully illustrated, and contain numerous maps. I2mo,
cloth. 75 cents retail ; 45 cents wholesale.

316 BOOKS RECEIVED. [May, 1892.

BOOKS RECEIVED.

GUIDE FOR CATHOLIC YOUNG WOMEN; especially for those who earn their own
living. By the Rev. George Deshon, Congregation of St. Paul, the Apostle.
Twenty-fifth edition, revised. New York : The Columbus Publishing Co.

THE SPANISH STORY OF THE ARMADA, and other Essays. By James Anthony
Froude. New York : Charles Scribner's Sons.

THE LETTERS OF CARDINAL MANNING. With notes by John Oldcastle. Lon-
don : Burns & Gates ; New York : The Catholic Publication Society Co.

THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. With some account of ancient America and the
Spanish conquest. By John Fiske. In two volumes. Boston and New
York : Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

THE BIRTHDAY BOOK OF THE MADONNA. Compiled by Vincent O'Brien.
Dublin : M. H. Gill & Son.

THOUGHTS AND TEACHINGS OF LACORDAIRE. Translated. Dublin: M. H.
Gill & Son.

ARISTOTLE AND ANCIENT EDUCATIONAL IDEALS. By Thomas Davidson.
Great Educators' Series. New York : Charles Scribner's Sons.

L'EXTASE DE MARIE ou LE MAGNIFICAT. Par le R. P. 'Deidier, Missionaire
du Sacre-Coeur. Paris : Tequi, Libraire-Editeur.

LE ZELE SACERDOTAL. Par le R. P. Laage, de la Compagnie de Jesus. Paris :
Tequi, Libraire-Editeur.

THIRTY-TWO INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE MONTH OF MAY and for the Feasts of
the Blessed Virgin. From the French by Rev. Thomas F. Ward, Church of
St. Charles Borromeo, Brooklyn, N. Y. New York, Cincinnati, Chicago :
Benziger Brothers.

STORIES. By Katharine Jenkins. Baltimore : John Murphy & Co.

A STUDY IN CORNEILLE. By Lee Davis Lodge, A.M., Professor of French Lan-
guage and Literature in the Columbian University, Washington, D. C. Balti-
' more : John Murphy & Co.

THE BIBLE, THE CHURCH, AND THE REASON, the three Great Fountains of
Divine Authority. By Charles Augustus Briggs, D.D. New York : Charles
Scribner's Sons.

THE WISDOM AND WIT OF BLESSED THOMAS MORE. Collected and edited by
Rev. T. E. Bridgett, C.SS.R. London : Burns & Gates (limited); New York:
The Catholic Publication Society Co.

THE POETS OF IRELAND. A Biographical Dictionary. In three parts (part A
to F). By David J. O'Donohue. London: Paternoster Steam Press.

THE CHEVALIER OF PENSIERE-VANI. By Henry B. Fuller. New York : The
Century Company.

A DICTIONARY OF HYMNOLOGY. Setting forth the origin and history of Chris-
tian Hymns of all ages and nations. Edited by John Julian, M.A. New
York : Charles Scribner's Sons.

GUIDE TO LATIN CONVERSATION. By a Father of the Society of Jesus. Trans-
lated from the French of the seventh edition by Professor Stephen W. Wilby,
of Epiphany Apostolic College. Baltimore : John Murphy & Co.

PAMPHLETS RECEIVED.

A CATHOLIC PRIEST IN CONGRESS. Sketch of Rev. Gabriel Richard. By Hon.

Thomas A. E. Weadock, M.C. (Read before the United States Catholic

Historical Society on February 28, 1892.)
SUBSTANTIALISM. The Philosophy of A. Wilford Hall examined. By John A.

Graves. Washington, D. C.: Terry Bros. 1891.
COSTA RICA. Issued by the Bureau of American Republics, Washington, U. S. A.

Bulletin No. 31. January, 1892.
THE REASONABLENESS OF THE PRACTICES OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. By

Rev. J. J. Burke. New York, Cincinnati, Chicago : Benziger Bros.
THROUGH DARKNESS TO LIGHT. A drama in four acts. For female characters.

By Mary Cody. New York : The Catholic Publication Society Co.

CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. LV. JUNE, 1892. No. 327.

REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS, FIRST
BISHOP OF OGDENSBURG.

THE object of the author is not to write a biography of
Bishop Wadhams or any systematic sketch of his life. This I
leave to other hands. I simply wish to record certain familiar
memories I retain of that early and dear friend which might
otherwise be lost ; memories of his early home and surround-
ings in the Adirondacks ; memories of those seminary days
when with myself and others he was moving forward, in an An-
glican atmosphere of mingled beliefs, romances, and illusions,
towards the clear light and settled doctrine of the Catholic
Church ; memories of his priestly life, during a part of which
I was his close companion, and memories also of a frequent
and sweet intercourse which continued throughout his career in
the episcopate, and ended only with his death. These reminis-
cences may be welcomed as valuable by some of my readers,
partly because of the marked individuality of the man, and
partly because of his early connection with a religious move-
ment memorable in the history of our American Church, but
better known to Catholics generally in its effects than in its
causes or progressive course. One born to the faith looks upon
the accession of converts into the church as a man watches an
incoming tide. He sees the waves fall tired on the shore, but
cannot see what draws them or what drives them, or understand
that panting but unsatisfied life out of which they leap.

My first acquaintance with Bishop Wadhams began with the
beginning of autumn in 1842. At that time I entered the Gen-
eral Theological Seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church

318 REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS, [June,

in New York City, situated on Twentieth Street at the corner
of Ninth Avenue. Edgar P. Wadhams, if I remember right,
began at that time his third and last year at that seminary. I
felt much interested in him, partly as being a kinsman in no
very remote degree, but still more by a certain frankness,
heartiness, and moral nobility of character, which made him very
attractive to all who knew him. Many of those who were in
the seminary at that time have since made their mark in life,
but need not be especially mentioned here. The most remark-
able inmate of the institution at that time, and a most familiar
friend of Wadhams, was Arthur Carey, a graduate of 1841, but
still retaining his room at the seminary as being too young to
receive orders. The moral beauty of Carey's character was of
the highest type ; and his intellectual superiority was also some-
thing wonderful. His influence upon Wadhams was very great,
as indeed it was upon many more of us, while Carey himself
was a devoted disciple of John Henry Newman, then a resident
at Oxford, and afterwards a priest and cardinal of the Catholic
Church. When, about a year after his graduation, Carey's name
was put on the list of candidates for admission to the ministry,
a protest against his ordination was made to Bishop Onderdonk
by Dr. Anthon, of St. Mark's Church, and by Dr. Smith, of St.
Peter's Church in Twentieth Street. He was charged with " Ro-
manizing " tendencies. A committee of five clergymen was
appointed by the bishop to try him. On the committee were
Drs. Smith and Anthon, his accusers, and Dr. Seabury, also a pas-
tor in the city. Dr. Seabury published all the proceedings of
the trial in the New York Churchman, of which he was then
editor. Carey was closely questioned, but, young as he was, the
acuteness of his mind and the accuracy of his learning were so
far in advance of his accusers that they were subjected to con-
stant confusion, and unable to push their inquiries as far as they
would for fear of betraying their ignorance. This gave much
amusement to Dr. Seabury, who was friendly to Carey, and after-
wards to many readers of the Churchman. Bishop Onderdonk
and the majority of the examining committee acquitted Carey of
unsoundness in his doctrine, and soon after he presented him-
self to receive ordination. The ceremony took place at St. Bar-
tholomew's Church, New York. This ceremony was interrupted
in a manner so solemn and so startling that no one there pres-
ent can ever forget it. The bishop, before the laying on of
hands, solemnly addressed the congregation and demanded :

1892.] FIRST BISHOP OF OGDENSBURG. 319

" If there be any one here present who has aught to say why
any of these candidates should not receive," etc. " let him now
speak or for ever after hold his peace." To the astonishment of all,
Dr. Smith, of St. Peter's, arose in the middle of the church and
protested against the ordination of Arthur Carey. The protest
was couched in the most solemn language which he could select,
beginning : " In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of
the Holy Ghost. Amen, etc."

When Dr. Smith sat down, the Rev. Dr. Anthon arose and
made a like protest with the same solemn formality. The
charges of both were the same, namely, that Arthur Carey was
unfaithful to the doctrine of his own church and imbued with
the errors of Rome. The sensation that followed was something
fearful, though the silence was profound. My father, who sat
beside me, trembled from head to foot, and turned to me with
a look of awe and wonder which I can never forget. " The
bishop will ordain him all the same," said I. When Carey's ac-
cusers had finished their protest, Bishop Onderdonk arose from
his seat and addressed the congregation. His attitude was ma-
jestic. He looked indignant and determined. He informed the
congregation that the charges against Arthur Carey were not
then brought forward for the first time ; that he had already
given him a trial upon the same complaints ; that the same ac-
cusers had been appointed among his judges then ; and that
Carey had been acquitted at that trial as perfectly sound in the
faith. The bishop praised him also as eminently fitted for
orders both by his great talents and by the moral beauty of his
character. "Therefore," he said, "I shall now proceed to ordain
Mr. Carey with the other candidates, in spite of the scandalous
interruption of these reverend protesters." All present then
breathed again with a deep feeling of relief, and the ceremo-
nies went on to the end.

As memory serves me, among those ordained to a deaconship
at that time was Edgar P. Wadhams. He loved Carey and
sympathized with him fully. Carey died the second winter fol-
lowing, on his way to Cuba, and was buried in the ocean. I
was with Wadhams in Essex County when the intelligence of
his death came, and we mourned for him as men mourn for a
brother.

Besides myself, several of Wadhams' companions at this
Episcopal Seminary have since become Catholics. The first was
Edward Putnam, who left the seminary for that purpose in 1844.

320 REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS, [June,

He became a priest and officiated for a while at St. Mary's
Church, Albany, in 1848 and 1849, a short time before Father
Wadhams' ministrations in the same parish.

An intimate friend and companion at the seminary both of
Wadhams and Carey was James A. McMaster, a very peculiar
and notable character, both when at that institution and during
many long years afterwards as editor of a very influential and
popular Catholic periodical, the Freeman's Journal. McMaster
should, in the natural course of things, have been ordained at
the same time with Carey and Wadhams. He was, however, too
troublesome a responsibility for Bishop Onderdonk to carry.
Not only were his tendencies towards Rome very decided, but
he loved to make that fact stand out. He was always delighted
when his strong enunciations of belief or opinion spread alarm
in the Protestant camp. It became necessary to sacrifice Mc-
Master in order to carry Carey and others through.

Whicher, another companion of Wadhams at the seminary,
was ordained a year later, and became pastor of an Episcopal
church at Clayville, Oneida County, N. Y. About ten years later
he became a Catholic. The late Monsignor Preston, vicar-gen-
eral and chancellor of the Archdiocese of New York, a distin-
guished convert of this period, entered the seminary after Wad-
hams' departure, but in time to make acquaintance there with
some students of the same circle and stamp. He moved into
my room when I left it, saying, with what he intended for a great
compliment, " I am happy to enter into quarters so decidedly
Catholic." The full pith of this remark can scarcely be under-
stood by those whose experience has never made them familiar
with the Oxford movement, and who cannot remember, as
Bishop Wadhams could, how rife this General Seminary was at
that time with the air of Puseyism, which had a marked phrase-
ology of its own, generally earnest enough, but having also its
humorous side.

Father William Everett, for so many years pastor of the
Church of the Nativity in New York City, was a classmate and
friend of Wadhams at the seminary, and one of the leading
spirits there among that class of students who aimed at being
Catholic without any intention at the time of becoming Catho-
lics. He entered the church in 1850 or 1851.

On receiving deacon's orders in the Episcopal Church, Wad-
hams was assigned to duty in Essex County, N. Y., the whole
county, if we remember right, being included in his jurisdiction,

1892.] FIRST BISHOP OF OGDENSBURG. 321.

his principal station being at Ticonderoga, with occasional ser-
vices at Wadhams Mills and Port Henry. I maintained a cor-
respondence with him during the remainder of my own stay at
the seminary, and in the autumn of 1844, or early in 1845, I
joined him in Essex County. My eyesight had so far failed me
that for the time being I could not prosecute my studies. I
longed for his society, and at the same time we had initiated a
plan, very sincere but romantic enough to be sure, for intro-
ducing something like the monastic life into the North Woods.
Another student of the seminary was also in the scheme, who
proposed to join us later in the year when he should have grad-
uated. I carried with me a full copy of the Breviary, in four
volumes ; for we anticipated a time to come when we should
grow into a full choir of monks and chant the office. We spent
much of our time that winter at Ticonderoga village. Later,
however, we established ourselves more permanently at Wad-
hams Mills, lodging with his mother, who lived alone in the old
house. We occupied two bed-rooms and another large room,
which we used as a carpenter-shop, for we had learned that
monks must labor with their hands when not occupied with
prayer or study. We boarded ourselves ; that is, we did our own
cooking. I officiated as cook, occasionally helped by my friend.
We did pretty well at first, aided by the instructions and super-
vision of the old lady, although she occasionally laughed at us,
as when our fingers stuck in the dough, or when she found the
bread all burned to a crisp for want of watching. Wadhams'
favorite idea was to educate boys of the neighborhood, training
them specially to a religious life, which should serve finally to
stock our convent with good monks. A handful of boys who
gathered with other children on Sundays in the school-house for
catechism seemed to afford a nucleus which might afterwards
develop into a novitiate.

We actually laid the foundations and built up the sides of a
convent building. It was nothing, indeed, but a log-house and
never received a roof, for the winter was intensely cold and the
ensuing spring opened with events which sent me into the
Catholic Church and to Europe, leaving nothing of the convent
but roofless logs and a community of one. But I mistake ; Wad-
hams had a Canadian pony which, in honor of pious services to
be thereafter rendered, we named Be'ni, and a cow which for
similar reasons we named Bontt.

Our log-house cloister was built on a lovely spot under the

322 REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS, [June,

shelter of a hill which bounded a farm inherited by Wadhams
from his father. The farm contained a fine stretch of woodland
on the south, while the greater part from east to west was open
and cultivated field, the half of which, high and terraced, looked
down upon a lower meadow-land which extended on a perfect
level to a fine stream bordering the farm on the east. Beyond
the brook and along its edge ran the road from Wadhams Mills
to Elizabeth. There was much debate before we fixed on the
site of our convent. A fine barn stood already built on the
natural terrace near the south side, while under the terrace at
the north end was a magnificent spring of the purest water.
Where should the convent be, near the barn or near the spring?
Every present convenience lay on the side of the barn, and the
horse and cow were actual possessions. But our hopes looked
brightly into the future. What would a great community of
hooded cenobites do without a holy well near by? So we laid
the foundations of the future pile on the edge of the terrace
just above the spring. We did not consult either Btni or
Bont/.

In the meanwhile Wadhams and myself endeavored to prac-
tise, in such ways as actual circumstances would permit, a
religious life, the truest type of which we even then believed to
be found in the Catholic Church, though our knowledge of it
was very imperfect. We commenced Lent with a determination
to fast every day on one meal alone, and that not before three
o'clock, with no meat, not even on Sundays. As we worked
hard in our carpenter shop, besides other physical exercises, this
privation soon began to tell upon us. I took the cooking upon
myself, he assisting in washing the dishes. My principal talent
lay in cooking mush. This agreed with me and I throve on it
very well, but Wadhams, who was large, strong, and full-blooded,
and to whom fasting was always something very severe, began
after a time to look pale and wild. " Look here," said he one
day " look here, Walworth ! This mush may agree with a fellow
like you, who have no body to speak of ; but I can't stand it.
I don't want to eat meat, but you must give me something else
besides mush." "All right," said I, "you shall have something
better to-morrow." So I killed a fat chicken, and got Mother
Wadhams to show me how to prepare and cook it. When my
friend came in for dinner I pointed it out to him triumphantly.
" But," said he, " I can't eat meat in Lent ! " " Well," said I,
" I don't want you to. That is chicken." I really believed that

1892.] FIRST BISHOP OF OGDENSBURG. 323

chicken was allowed among Catholics, and succeeded in convinc-
ing him. We found Lent much easier after that.

It was not easy for Wadhams to make the necessary rounds
through Essex County in the winter-time. When starting from
Wadhams Mills he could always command a horse and sleigh,
but when setting out from other points he was often obliged to
trudge through the deep snow for many miles on foot, to the
great admiration even of the hardy inhabitants of the North
Woods, who wondered at his sturdy strength as well as at his
zeal. His fondness for children was remarkable. He would often
rein in his horse or stop in his walk to question some strange
child on the road. " Where do you live ? What is your name ?"
he would ask ; and always, " Have you been baptized ?" and
" Do you say your prayers ?" And if answered favorably, he
added, " Good for you ; that's the kind of boy to meet ! " He
took me with him to witness a baptism. It was somewhere in
the neighborhood of Port Henry. There was a whole family to
be baptized, as I now remember, nine in number, all on their
knees ranged in a row along the kitchen floor, which was the
biggest room in the house. The zealous deacon did not spare
the water. I held the basin, which was nearly empty when he
got through, while the children and the floor were wet
enough. He had no faith in sprinkling. It may seem that the
surroundings of this ceremony were not very solemn, but I
never saw people more deeply impressed by a religious rite than
these poor, simple cottagers.

The frank, open, guileless simplicity, and energy of Edgar
Wadhams' character, and a certain moral heroism which was
always his, made his influence magnetic whenever any call to
duty roused him into action. He then took command, and there
were very few who felt like resisting. He had received the im-
pression that a certain gentleman, a familiar friend and parish-
ioner at one of his stations, frequented too often the village inn.
There may have been nothing very serious in the matter, but he
was a man of high character and influence, and a good church
member. Mr. Wadhams felt it his duty to interfere. He an-
nounced his determination to me, and asked me to help him in
drawing up a pledge to keep away from that inn, which he in-
tended to make him sign. The gentleman was himself a man
of great energy and pride of character, a captain of one of the
lake boats, and more accustomed to command than to obey. "All
right," I said, " go ahead. He won't sign it, but it may do him

324 REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS, [June,

some good to see it." " He will sign it," was the reply. " I
should like to know how he will get out of it." The captain
was thunderstruck. "Who told you to bring this to me?" said

he. " Did ?" (naming a common friend). " No matter about

that," was the resolute rejoinder. " There it is, and you must
sign it." He did sign it. His own strong nature yielded in
the presence of a pure and noble spirit the magnetism of which
he himself, a true man, could not help but recognize.

The idea of marrying never seems to have occupied Wad-
hams' mind. From the time of his entering upon the study of
divinity the marriage state for him was out of all question.
His views in regard to all clerical celibacy are plainly and
strongly stated in a correspondence between himself and an old
school-fellow, a candidate for orders also like himself. This cor-
respondence took place in 1843, while Wadhams, then an Epis-
copalian, had just begun his career of deacon in Essex County.
His friend, already uxorious in intention and very garrulous on
the subject of girls, took occasion to consult his old college-
mate. The reply came in a letter from Port Henry, dated
October 18, 1843. A ^ ew extracts will suffice to show Wadhams'
deep aversion to the idea of a married clergy. It amounts to
an abhorrence :

" My view of a priest is, that he is a man so long as he re-
mains unmarried, and as soon as he is married he is an old
granny. ... I am not a fit person to ask advice upon this
subject. My prejudices are wholly and for ever against a mar-
ried clergy. They are generally a fat, lazy, self-indulgent, good-
for-nothing, time-serving race. . . . To your second argu-
ment, that there is not enough to keep a celibate employed, I
know not what to reply."

Of course no reply could be made by a young minister to
such an argument as this, without strange thoughts of the value
of a church and clergy where so little occasion for clerical work
could exist.

The question of clerical celibacy was one much mooted
amongst Episcopalians at this time, and particularly by the stu-
dents at the General Seminary. One party strongly decried the
marriage of clergymen as un-Catholic, and professed to see the
seminary surrounded by old maids, spreading their snares for
unfledged seminarians. On the other hand, the evangelical party
with equal vehemence denounced celibacy as popish and a revi-

1892.] FIRST BISHOP OF OGDENSBURG. 325

val of that heretical doctrine, " forbidding to marry," against
which St. Paul cautioned the early Christians. A practical joke
was played at the seminary upon one of the students, an earnest
opponent of celibacy, by pinning against his door a pair of baby
stockings, underneath which was written, " A plea against po-
pery ! " Such discussions, of course, had contributed to augment
Wadhams' aversion to marriage.

During my visit to him in Essex County, and in the spring
of that year, we found time to spend a few days in Montreal.
To us, whose minds were so strongly inclined to the old church
and the old faith, the chief attraction was the desire to see a
Catholic city, and the Catholic life and Catholic institutions
wh ch abounded there. When we came to the coast of the St.
Lawrence, opposite to the city, the river was breaking up and
not yet free from floating ice. There was no way to cross ex-
cept in batteaux, and though the boatmen assured us the pas-
sage was sufficiently safe, it looked highly dangerous ; in fact,
the flood was so high that an American gentleman and lady
who, like us, were on their way to Montreal, were afraid to cross,
and much time was lost while the boatmen were urging them to
get into the batteaux. A French gentleman belonging to Mon-
treal was there also, and, wearied by the delay, succeeded in rous-
ing their courage by appealing to their religious pride. " Come,
come, my friends !" said he, " don't be alarmed. You are, I am
sure, good Protestants, and ought not to be afraid to die. If
you do, you'll go straight to Heaven without any purgatory. I
am nothing but a poor papist and full of sin ; and yet you see
I am not afraid. Entrez, monsieur ; entrez, madame ! "

We were anxious to hear the boatmen sing. In those days
all the world was familiar with the " Canadian Boatman's Song,"
but not every one had heard Canadians sing it. The men were
too much occupied with their labor to be in a humor to sing.
We would not have pressed the point ; but our French compan-
ion, who seemed to be a man of authority and well known to
them, insisted upon it, and stood up to enforce his orders.
" Yes, messieurs, they shall sing for you. Chantez ! mes freres,
chantez. Quoi ! Chantez, dis-je /" They did sing, and we had
romance enough to enjoy it, although not a little alarmed by
the wild riding of the boat and the blocks of ice that surround-
ed us. " Great Christopher !" said Wadhams, " this is glorious."

In Montreal we cared little to see anything except its
churches, its convents, and its religious services. At the Grey

326 REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS, [June,

Nuns' we each bought a Rosary. We inquired with much inter-
est whether these were blessed, but were informed that this was
not done before selling, and that we must apply to a priest to
get them blessed for our special use. Of course, not being of
the true fold, we were not in a condition to get this done. We
did the next best thing to this that we could think of. We
dipped them into the holy-water font at Notre Dame. This
was done on the sly.

To us, who knew little at that time of the history of Mon-
treal, and of the interest which old traditions attach to so many of
its localities, the chief point of attraction was this great parish
church of Notre Dame. Its size astonished us, but the religious
novelties which we witnessed there were still more wonderful.
Conscious of our ignorance, we were afraid of committing some
transgression at each step. We felt devout enough to kneel at
every altar, but were afraid of exposing ourselves to ridicule by
some blunder. A young Frenchman took us to Vespers with
him. When the "pain btnit " was handed around through the
pews, our Catholic friend told us to take some and eat it ;
but utterly ignorant of what it was, we dared not even touch it,
though he laughed when he saw us shrink from it and said it
wouldn't hurt us.

To Wadhams' musical ear the chanting at this church opened
a new world of religious delight. In the sanctuary stood rows
of chanters in rich copes. Their singing was followed at times
by a burst of music from the organ-loft. A crowd of children
lifted up their voices from one of the galleries. This was sup-
plemented by another crowd of children whose echo came in
with a new surprise from the opposite gallery. All this may seem
very commonplace to those who began life as Catholics, heirs of
the faith and " to the manner born," and who live near to ca-
thedrals or large churches. These can have no idea of the effect
produced on the minds of men brought up in the barrenness of
Protestantism by the infinite variety of thought and worship in
the great Church Catholic. Perhaps it is to his remembrance of
these services at Notre Dame that so many of our New York
congregations owe the combination of choir and sanctuary music
first introduced at the Albany Cathedral by Bishop Wadhams,
when he was its rector.

Shortly after this visit to Montreal, and about the opening of
the summer of 1845, I left m 7 friend for New York City in
order to enter the Catholic Church. We parted with great

1892.] FIRST BISHOP OF OGDENSBURG. 327

regret, but his mind was in no mood to undertake to dissuade
me from my purpose. When, however, I urged him to go with
me " Don't hurry me, Walworth," he said ; " I am in a posi-
tion of responsibility and confidence, and when I leave, if leave
I must, it shall be done handsomely. You have no charge.
You have only to let your bishop know what you are about
doing, and then do it."

I have no recollections nor any data to show in what way
Wadhams announced and perfected his withdrawal from the An-
glican body. He was not a man to neglect any necessary civili-
ties, nor to forget any kindly relations which had existed be-
tween him and early associates in religion. That he was cautious,
however, as well as frank and generous, appears from the follow-
ing fact. When asked to send in a formal renunciation of the
Episcopal ministry, he did not think proper to do so. Perhaps
he thought this might seem to imply a recognition on his part
of some validity in the deacon's orders which he had received
in that sect. It was far from his mind to acknowledge the An-
glican body as a branch even a dead branch of the true Catho-
lic Church.

I carried out my own purpose by a letter from me to my
diocesan, Bishop De Lancey, of Western New York, asking him
to take my name off from his list of candidates for orders.
This letter crossed on its way one from him directing me to
come to Geneva for ordination. I then went to New York,
where I made my profession of faith in the Church of the Holy
Redeemer in Third Street, and soon after left, in company with
McMaster and Isaac Hecker, for the Redemptorist novitiate at
Saint Trond, in Belgium. Wadhams became a Catholic in the
ensuing autumn. A letter to me, addressed from Baltimore,
brought the announcement of this happy event. I cannot find
the letter itself, but one characteristic passage in it is pretty well
fixed in my memory. I had just before written to him, giving
some account of our convent life at St. Trond. "It's all right
now," said he ; " I am a Catholic now as well as yourself. But
don't talk to me about your convent rules and routine for get-
ting up early, reciting the office, meditating, fasting, discipline,
recreations, and mortifications, and all that sort of thing. I have
just been scoured through a general confession. You can't beat
that."

After our separation in 1845, which took place at the steam-
boat landing near Ticonderoga, we did not meet again until the

328 -REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS. [June,

winter of 1851, when I was a missionary and he a priest at Al-
bany in the household of Bishop McCloskey, and officiating at
St. Mary's, then the cathedral of that diocese. We were after-
wards together once more for about a year at the new cathedral
in Bishop Conroy's time, and continued to live near each other
in the same city until his consecration as Bishop of Ogdensburg,
and his departure for that see. He was pleased with his ap-
pointment and displayed no affectation of humility in regard to it.
" You must feel somewhat depressed," I said to him, " in view
of all this new responsibility." He replied, " No, I don't. I
like it first rate." He asked me to draw a device for his offi-
cial seal. Looking upon him as an apostle to the cold region of
the Adirondacks, and venturing upon a poor joke, I drew an
iceberg, with a sled drawn by a reindeer at the foot of it, and above
it the north star. The motto which I chose for him, suggested
by this star, was " Iter para tutum" " Well," said he, " I like
the motto and the star; but we don't need any icebergs or
reindeer at Ogdensburg." He was much attached to the dis-
trict embraced in his diocese and to all its interests. " Hang it !"
said he once with great animation, " I should like the people of
New York to find out that we are something better than a con-
venient water-shed."

C. A. WALWORTH.

St. Mary's Church, Albany, N. Y.

(TO BE CONTINUED.)

1892.] THE CLOSING SCENE. 329

THE CLOSING SCENE.

THE great Protestant religious drama is nearly played out.
The prompter's bell has rung up the curtain upon the last act
of the play, entitled " Change; or, What shall we have next ? "
Interested auditors, both from within and without the Protestant
religious organizations, find their attention strongly drawn to wit-
ness the denouement of this three-hundred-year-old exhibition
of religious variation, prepared to receive the final tableau with
great and prolonged applause or with shouts of derisive laughter,
as they may be impressed by the conviction that they have
witnessed what, from its beginning to its end, has been either a
mock tragedy or a sad farce.

As a play it cannot be doubted that Protestantism has suc-
ceeded past all imagining in sticking, even to the letter, to the
programme of its due performance as indicated by its title. The
zest of the play has been kept up by the fact that the question
of " What shall we have next ? " is being always asked and
never decided upon. The reply is left to the vague imagination
of whosoever cares to exercise that faculty upon the question.
We are not without grave authority for the wisdom of this, es-
pecially in the matter of religious belief or practice. " It is one
of the many boons we owe to recent psychology that it has
taught us to recognize the Vague as well as the Definite in the
life of the soul." Many other equally profound dicta are to be
gathered from the writings of a recent critic of the closing
" scene " in the Protestant drama now being enacted on the
stage of its religious theatre ; it has been advertised, as fully as
circumstances will permit, in a new journal, the opening number
of which is now before us, specially devoted to the interests of
the "What next?"

It is to be remarked, however, that the next performance of
this unique drama is always announced in the bills as " Positively
the last change ! " It is confidently so proclaimed in the present
advertisement ; and it is beyond all doubt that it is indeed the
last change of Protestantism, save that which compels the senses
to bury its remains out of sight and far from smell.

The journal we allude to is entitled The New World : A Quar-
terly Review of Religion, Ethics, and Theology, which sounds to the
casual reader something like : " The New Computation : A Quar-

330 THE CLOSING SCENE. [June,

terly Review of Arithmetic, the Rule of Three, and the Science
of Numbers." It is the organ of the " New Orthodoxy " et ultra,
that now is, and, by process of evolution, is to be, the very last
change in Protestantism. Not that this change is to be one
that can be defined, so that you can know what it is, or even
precisely what it expects to be. The supreme beauty of this
last change lies in the fact that this is to be the unquestionable
outcome, the last word of Protestant variations, proclaiming the
oncoming of the Religion of the Vague, logically evolved, as its
writers show, from the Religion of the Indefinite and Uncertain,
which brought itself into being by a Protest against the Religion
of the Definite and Sure. It is a taking bill, and we argue for
this last performance of the Protestant phantasmagoric exhibition
a full house. Deaths by violence always attract great crowds of
sightseers.

That we are fully justified in treating a subject, to others so
grave and important, in such a light and satirical vein will,
we doubt not, be shown by the quotations we shall make from
this accredited organ of a movement deserving on the part of
Catholics what its chief spokesman, in his article on " The Fu-
ture of Liberal Religion in America," instinctively felt it would
get when he said : " The Roman Catholic Church, rich in the
reassured inheritance of nineteen centuries, confronts the rising
spirit of liberal religion with a serenity and confidence disturbed
only by contempt."

To speak seriously, this " New Orthodoxy," as is plain, gives
voice in greater or less degree to the mind of nearly all the
thoughtful and honestly outspoken adherents of every Protestant
sect. The same writer (Dr. J. G. Schurman, of Cornell Univer-
sity), in the course of his article, proclaims the utter loss of faith
and of divine rule of conduct among non-Catholic religious bodies,
and looks forward, with evident good reason, to recruiting what
he is pleased to call the new " Religion of the spirit " largely
from all of them. He says :

" In view of the revolutionary work of critical science, scholar-
ship, and philosophy a work demanded by the spirit of Protes-
tantism it is no longer possible for any Protestant sect to wave
the banner of final and infallible authority in matters of religion.
Protestantism, in all its forms, originated in the assertion of
creeds or polities ; but the spirit of Protestantism has always
carried it beyond its starting-point. . . . Now, what Ameri-
can history shows is the decay of this creed [the prevailing
Calvinistic one], and, with it, of all merely creedal [Protestant]
religion. . . . Their fundamental principle the Bible, the

1892.] THE CLOSING SCENE. 331

Bible only taken in connection with their polity, has enabled
them to drop the old theology, and unconsciously to adjust
themselves to the new spiritual environment. . . . The relig-
ious movement (especially the one culminating in the proposed
revision of the Westminster Confession) was not so much a re-
action against Calvinism as a protest against the interpretation
of Christianity as a system of dogmas. ... Of doctrine [in
sermons] there is nowadays scarce a word."

Need we say how true all this is, or remind them that this is
the, to us, lamentable ending of Protestantism predicted by Catho-
lic writers over and over again. Well does he say that " the
religion of dogma has always appealed to a supernatural reve-
lation." And now at one fell swoop these ultra-reformers
propose to brush away all the religious notions, faiths, and con-
duct founded upon supernatural revelation, and leave their unhap-
py selves to the mercy of vague rationalistic theories of the so-
called scientific evolution of self-consciousness, grasping after God
with no light but their own self-conceited judgment, blessing
" recent psychology for the boon it imparts to recognize the
Vague " !

To what else but to the regions of the Vague can the wisest
as well as the most unlearned of the numerous Protestant bodies,
deprived of an authoritative divine guide to find and know di-
vine truth, hope to come ? When a cultivated field is no longer
under control of the hand of the master, it at once begins to
sink into the savage state, and the germs of noxious and un-
profitable weeds, thistles, and thorns, long dormant in the ground,
spring up to fulfil the primal curse, and exhibit what nature
alone will do when the hand of grace is withdrawn.

By the very force of Catholic tradition, which it has hitherto
been unable wholly to eradicate, the field of dogmatic Protes-
tantism has not been entirely devoid of trees bearing good fruit.
Such truths of divine faith as the fact of a supernatural revela-
tion ; of the Tri-Personality of God ; the divinity of Christ, and
his redemption of the world through a divine atonement ; the
certainty of his miracles, and especially that of his resurrection,
and the absolute need of divine grace in order to fulfil the
Christian moral law and attain the destiny of heaven merited
by Christ ; the acceptance of the apostolic doctrine that " with-
out faith it is impossible to please God " all these primary
and fundamental truths of Christianity have been generally held
by Protestants, and though erroneously attributing to private in-
terpretation of the Bible that necessary infallible magisterial au-
thority which Christ conferred upon his living, ever-present,

332 THE CLOSING SCENE. [June,

visible " Body, the Church," they reaped in no small degree the
good fruit of their divine and, in many cases, implicit Catholic
faith. These are indisputably true ways of salvation, and they
walked in them, despite their ignorance of the hand that led
them, and their protest against the light shining from the bat-
tlements of the Catholic City of God, lacking which they could
not have seen one step of their way.

No doubt the founders of Protestantism, and a large number
of their successors in the chair of doctrine, were conscious and
responsible heretics, and it would stretch charity beyond the
limits of reason to quite dispel suspicion of the same sin of
Satanic pride in some of their teachers to-day ; yet it is
plain that the majority of Protestants have been in good faith.
Many of them are in about the same condition of responsibility
for error as the members of a Catholic congregation of simple-
minded people who had been gradually led into error by an
heretical priest, yet imagining themselves to be truly and in all
things Catholic. As the heathen of whom St. Paul speaks had
fallen away from the primitive divine revelation, and, not being
able to know that of the newer Christian revelation of divine
truth, were " a law unto themselves," so these ignorant Protes-
tants, fallen away from the true and full Christian revelation
through the church, are, in their own measure of knowledge, a
law unto themselves. As their knowledge is so shall be the
measure of their responsibility, and of their ultimate union with
God. " To whom much is given, of him shall much be required."

That Protestantism as a system, having promulgated the doc-
trine of private judgment, should have been able to prolong its
existence beyond a few years has been matter of surprise
to many. Logically it could not possibly end in anything
short of religious anarchy a catastrophe towards which the
present outlook shows that, without pilot or compass, it is rapid-
ly hastening. Such a process of disintegration would long ago
have been completed but for one fact, which we seem to have
overlooked in our study of the workings of the anarchical prin-
ciple in religion. That fact is, the illogical faith of Protestants
in what may be called the "personal" infallibility of the
Bible. They protested against the infallibility of the church,
but instinctively felt the logical necessity of some infallible au-
thority as offering reasonable grounds for acts of faith in what
is of super-rational revelation. But while it was logical to place
such an infallibility somewhere, it was illogical and absurd to
maintain at the same time the right of private judgment. But

1892.] THE CLOSING SCENE. 333

when was heresy ever consistent? So we have been presented
with this singular anomaly: whilst claiming and exercising the
right to submit the words of the Bible to the judgment of the
individual reader, not a single Protestant ever dreamt of allow-
ing any one to use that right to question the " personal " infal-
libility of the Bible itself.

By the shibboleth, " The Bible, and the Bible alone, is the
religion of Protestants," we can now see was really meant what
we Catholics would mean by saying, " The church, and the church
alone, is the religion of Catholics." That is, for the Protestant
" The infallible personal medium, speaking for God, is the Bible."
Now, for the Catholic such medium is the church, and not the
mere recorded dicta, dogmatic decisions, or moral pronounce-
ments of the church ; but rather the living, personal organism it-
self, the perpetuated Body of Christ, endowed by force of the in-
dwelling Holy Spirit with divine life. Through union with that
Body the Catholic is enabled to live the life of Christ, which
if he were left to his mere rational adhesion to the written word
of the church he could never do.

If Protestants could have kept up the fiction of an infallible
personality of the Bible, they might have hoped for a much
longer lease of definite religious organization ; they might actual-
ly enjoy the ability to make at least implicit acts of Christian faith.

But this ignorant and unscientific worship of the Bible could
not last for ever. We have both the pleasure and the pain of
living to see the day when these false worshippers have dared to
ask questions of their idol which it could not answer ; and lo !
with their own hands have they cast it down from its sacred
altar and trampled it under foot. It cannot but be a pleasure to us
to see falsehood and error confounding itself, and Protestantism, as
a system, going to wreck upon its own rock of " private judg-
ment." It is this same private judgment, fearlessly applied not
only to the meaning but to the supposed infallible personality
of the Bible, which is politely called " The Higher Criticism."
Out of that pitiable wreck the church will rescue many souls of
good will and good sense. But it none the less offers a painful
spectacle. If anything be patent it is that Protestants, as a body,
are in imminent danger of giving up all motives of Christian faith.
Many among both clergy and people have eagerly drunk in the
poison of Agnosticism. Whither shall they go ? The only road
open to such is that of a dreary and sceptical rationalism. The
pits of pantheism or rank infidelity already yawn for their stum-
bling feet.

VOL. LV. 22

334 THE CLOSING SCENE. [June,

The Rev. Dr. Lyman Abbott, successor in the pulpit to
Henry Ward Beecher, and editor of the Christian Union, is the
writer of the opening article in the New World. It is not to the
subject which he has chosen that we wish to allude now, but to
lay before our readers evidence of the fideicidal attacks upon
the Bible made by himself and other would-be apostles of the
New Orthodoxy. He lately preached a sermon in Plymouth
Church on infallibility ; and thus he casts down the Bible from
its throne of truth :

" The Bible is not a rule, nor a book of rules. It is a-
book of powers, influences, inspirations. It is a great store-
house a magazine of spiritual dynamics. ... I, for one,
am determined to have and to hold such a doctrine of
the Bible that this Holy Word shall no longer be sent pettifog-
ging among the wrangling sects, peddling proof-texts among a
lot of feeble ' ites ' and ' isms ' that are not worth the paper on
.which they are written. Already we have the established pro-
verb, ' You can prove anything from the Bible.' I do here and
now solemnly recant and renounce any vows which I have ever
taken binding me to that view of the Scriptures. The Word is
not here to teach the ' system of doctrine contained in the Con-
fession of Faith/ or in the Thirty-nine Articles, or in any other
creed or symbol under heaven." *

This Biblical iconoclast stops at no half-sacrifice in offering
up this long-cherished and devoutly worshipped notion of an
infallible and inspired Bible to the pretentious demands of the
latest agnostic scientific theory of the day. Hence, with infalli-
bility and inspiration go, of course, all definite doctrine, and
religious truth of the supernatural order hitherto held as cer-
tain. Without these divine criteria what, indeed, are " doctrinal-
ism " and " dogma " worth ?

So, again, he preaches : " If there is any evil in doctrinalism,
with its schism, debate, strife, bitterness, wrath, evil-speaking
among the [Protestant] children of God, it is directly traceable
to the dogma of an infallible book that decides absolutely all
questions of faith and practice. One would think that a single
look at Protestantism to-day were enough to banish for ever this
absurd notion of infallibility." Here is an arraignment of Pro-
testantism, old and new, that should satisfy its most vindictive
enemies.

Dr. Abbott's article in the New World, on the " Evolution of
Christianity," is of the same temper and tone with his sermon,
and in it he is logical in concluding that there never was nor
could be definitely revealed divine truth. With him revelation
of truth is nothing but a psychological process. There neither

1892.] THE CLOSING SCENE. 335

is nor can be any revelation of supernatural truth, because, as he
and his fellow-Reformers argue, man is incapable of receiving
and apprehending it. Man can only receive and apprehend what
is evolved out of his inner consciousness, following the means of
this evolution afforded by his environment. He says : " The
whole notion of revealed religion, consisting in a revelation made
once for all, and therefore forbidding progress or confining it
within very narrow limits to the criticism and interpretation,
for example, of a Book, or a restatement of what the Book
says grows out of a singular misapprehension of the nature of
revelation. . . . As in physical so in moral science, revealing
is a psychological process. It is the creation of capacity moral
and intellectual, or both. Truth cannot be revealed to incapaci-
ty." There is plenty of the same denial of all divine revelation,
both from the same pen and from other contributors to this singu-
lar but remorselessly logical organ of the new " Religion of the
spirit " a small s, if you please, meaning man's own spirit, and
not the Spirit of God.

But amidst all this impending, or already crashing and disas-
trous wreck, with total loss of honor as being forced to admit
that it embarked upon a foolish and fruitless voyage, has not
the scuttled, sinking ship of Protestantism yet some hold upon
the sheet-anchor of Christianity faith in the Divinity of Christ ?
Not even that. How could it have ? With all other revelation
from God, it is equally impossible to evolve the truth of the In-
carnation from one's inner consciousness, or from scientific in-
vestigation, either material or moral. No ; it is all gone. And
in one of the articles in the New World, signed Charles Carroll
Everett, of Harvard University, entitled " The Historic and
Ideal Christ," we are plainly told that the belief in His divinity
was the result of doctrinal evolution :

" It is an interesting and important fact," says this writer, "that
in the deification of Jesus, and in the modifications which the
dogma of his divinity has undergone in its gradual relaxation,
we have simply an example of doctrinal development."

We are led to wonder if this New Religion of the spirit is
going to call itself Christian.

The reader will not be surprised to find in the same review
another article upon " The Theistic Evolution of Buddhism,"
as a pendant to the same theory of the theistic evolution of Chris-
tianity offered by the writer of " The Historic and Ideal Christ."

To round out the series there is a special criticism from out-

336 THE CLOSING SCENE. [June,

side of the " New Orthodoxy " upon that movement. There is
agnostic applause and encouragement to its ardent apostolic
leaders, and as well to the timidly halting Andover school to
advance still further, and give over any pretence to set up any
more claim to orthodoxy in religion than one would to " ortho-
doxy in botany, physiology, chemistry, or anatomy." Private
judgment is having its revenge at last upon the usurped infallible
authority of the Bible.

No one can fail to see that this whole movement in all its
yet varied views for Protestantism without variety has no
raison d'etre is a rapid descent to mere Naturalism, bare of all
the distinctive characteristics of religious faith which has hither-
to sought to found the reasons of a higher and supernatural
destiny for man in the union of the soul with God through the
action of divine light and grace. They do not scruple to speak
of the movement as a " revolution." It is indeed a revolution,
and a radical one ; for, sentimental and pietistic phases apart, it
is a return to the baldest form of Rationalistic Deism, with per-
mission to hold Pantheistic " views" if more agreeable to the
individual who may find the religion of his spirit evoluting that
way. The most curious, not to say amusing, feature is that in
their proposals for proselytizing they call upon all the sects for
encouragement and membership, even within the separate Protes-
tant folds, if folds these shepherdless flocks may be said to have.
They do not demand that ritual, or symbol, or what-not be
given up, neither the abandonment of any preferred form of
"church" organization. They do not call upon Baptists, Presby-
terians, Methodists, or even Episcopalians, to change their names
or to come out and join a new " church." On the contrary : " One
thing," says the writer of the article on "The Future of Liberal
Religion," " they [the new believers] must not do : they must not
part company with their present brethren." Why not ? " Be-
cause they, being the children of light, must not leave their less
favored brethren in absolute darkness" ! This is funny, but here
is something despicable and dishonest, something that outrages
one's whole moral sense : " If a true Christian (!) discovers that
the creed of his church is no longer tenable, his plain duty
is not to leave the church, but to let his light shine," etc.
The author acknowledges that such a course would likely be
denounced as immoral by both the religious and secular press ;
and yet he has the unnamable impudence to reassert his pro-
posal and say : " Apart from the consideration of expediency
lest their motives should be misinterpreted, I see no reason why
an honest man should withdraw from a communion in whose

1892.] THE CLOSING SCENE. 337

formularies he has ceased to believe." There is something dis-
gusting in this barefaced advocacy of religious hypocrisy.

He shows how there is hope to glean from all the sects, and
especially from the Episcopalians, as indeed is most likely to be
the case, seeing that anybody can be an Episcopalian and be-
lieve anything or nothing. All he has to do in order to " receive
the ordinances " of this singularly elastic sect is to hire a pew
in an Episcopalian church. Catharine Beecher brought that fact,
otherwise well known, to book from the mouths of its own
ministers.

Indeed, we shall look for an early article in the New World
from the pen of the latest elected American Episcopal bishop,
whose doctrine concerning the superfluity or worthlessness of
" dogmas," as presented by him in Trinity Church pulpit in this
city, is evidently the same as that held by these last actors on
the stage of Protestantism. But we must give the hope of the
writer in that direction in his own words, for they merit repeti-
tion: " The Episcopal Church has, indeed, some advantages over
the Presbyterian. For it has not to the same extent desiccated
religion into dogma, and thus it cannot suffer so much from
desquamation." It will be many a long day before we meet with
so apt, and yet not at all too flattering, a definition of Episco-
palianism as that. Of course, there is no harvest for the New
Orthodoxy to be gathered from within the fold of which Christ,
the God Man, is the shepherd. They do not even suggest the
possibility of it. The acknowledgment of there being no such
hope has been already expressed, but it also deserves repetition :
" The Roman Catholic Church, rich in the reassured inheritance
of nineteen centuries, confronts the rising spirit of liberal religion
with a serenity and confidence disturbed only by contempt." It
could not be better said.

Enough has been written for the present to give our readers
something of a clear notion of this last performance of decrepit
Protestantism. It is indeed nearing its end. The play so long
upon the stage is at the last scene, and one must make haste
if he would be in at the grand final tableau ; for sooner than a
man may run the length of his own shadow the curtain will fall,
the lights will be put out, the empty theatre be left to silence
and the falling of upraised dust, and the history of the Protes-
tant religious drama, as a disastrous error, a fatal mistake, a
foolish, self-destructive religious undertaking, will begin to be
written with numerous apologies, doubtless, for the fact, inter-
mingled with expressions of wonder that it ever had any exist-
ence at all. ALFRED YOUNG.

338 THE LONGING FOR GOD AND ITS FULFILMENT. [June,

THE LONGING FOR GOD AND ITS FULFILMENT.

THE Sphinx has recently been painted as the scene of the
first resting-place of Mary of Nazareth and Joseph, as they
neared the Nile in their flight with the Child Jesus from King
Herod. The Mother is represented as reclining with her Babe
at the foot of the statue, while Joseph rests upon the sands
below. The great stone face is staring at the cloudless and
starry sky, as it had done for ages. But " the riddle of the pain-
ful earth," which it had asked so long in vain, has received its
solution in the group now resting between the immense stone
paws. The Son of God and of the Woman has come. The
yearning, hungry gaze that man had always bent on earth and
sky, seeking the realization of an ideal above himself, shall rest
hereafter with perfect content upon the Child of Mary.

We need to appreciate that the doctrine of the Incarnation
is not a hard one to accept. There is no revolt in the natural
mind against the thought of God becoming man. It is not a
thought which arouses aversion in us. Indeed, we give it wel-
come. That man should be raised to a participation in the
divine nature is a difficult thing to understand, if the word is
meant to imply a full and clear comprehension. But the human
race or any part of it has never felt it to be incredible.

To inquire into this favorable tendency of our minds towards
the Incarnation is our first task. We shall, I trust, find it of
much interest to discuss why men in all ages have seemed
readily inclined to believe that God and man could by some
means be brought together on terms of equality. I do not
mean to take the reader over the long windings of historical re-
search ; my purpose is not a historical treatise. But it is essen-
tial to realize that reaching after the possession of the divine is
a distinct fact of human experience. In bringing this out, how-
ever, I am not going to exclude the historical argument for the
Incarnation. To prove that any being comes from God on a
special mission, miracles are required ; that is to say, the special
display of the divine power. Much more necessary are they if
he claims to be God himself. We affirm Jesus of Nazareth to
be true God, the Creator and Lord of all things, begotten of

1892.] THE LONGING FOR GOD AND ITS FULFILMENT. 339

the Father before all ages, and one and the same being with
him, born of Mary in the fulness of time ; in essence, power,
wisdom, goodness, and joy true God.

The sense of want in man is of such a depth as to be the univer-
sal argument for his need of more than human fruition, and in the
moral order it is the irrefragable proof of both his native dig-
nity and his natural incapacity so to demean himself as to be
worthy of it. This want is implanted in man, and it attests the
need of God in a higher degree than nature can provide. God
plants this yearning in the human soul as a gift superadded to
the high endowments of innate nobility.

The best spirits God ever made have always felt this huge
universe no bigger than a bird-cage. But during the ages prior
to Christ's coming human aspiration had beat its wings against
the sky in vain.

When God made man to his image and likeness, he impreg-
nated his creature with an infusion of the divine life ; what can-
not God do with man when he has in him his own divine life
to work with ? " He breathed into his face the breath of life."
What life ? A twofold life, the human and the divine ; so that
God's dealings with man are with a noble being whose every
act, if true to his native nobility, suggests the Deity.

The most admirable trait of human nature is the desire for
elevation ; this is the root of progress, this is the justification
of laudable ambition. To aspire to better things is the original
law of our nature. The yearning after entire union with God,
though not a trait of nature, is nevertheless like the knowledge
that there is a God ; it is so quickly generated in the mind as
to resemble instinct. How easily do I not know that there is a
God ! I know without argument that I did not make myself ;
I know that dead nature, with its mechanical laws, will-less and
unthinking, could not plan or make me ; I am master of nature.
How quickly do I realize there is a supreme being who is
the Creator and Lord of all things. By just as quick a move-
ment do I leap into the consciousness that there is nothing in
myself good enough for my own ideal, nothing in nature. I
must have the Supreme Good in everything, and I am supreme
in nothing, although I am a king and nature is my realm.

And yet this eagerness of desire trembles at its own bold-
ness, for it longs to be God's very son. The true revelation of
God will have as one of its marks that it seems too beautiful to
be anything else than a dream, too much of God to be possible
for man to compass ; and yet I must have it.. In its maxims it

340 THE LONGING FOR GOD AND ITS FULFILMENT. [June,

seems too disinterested to be real, too difficult in its precepts to
be practicable and yet alone worthy of human dignity. God,
who is first and with no second, is the longing of the soul God
to be held and possessed on some awful footing of equality, so
that love may be really reciprocal. " Ye shall be as gods " was
the only temptation which had a possibility of success in Eden.

Man is essentially a longing being. The human soul is a
void, but aching to be filled with God. Man's capacity of know-
ing craves a divine knowledge ; of loving, to enjoy the ecstasy
of union with the Deity; of action, to increase the honor and
glory of the infinite God ; of life, to live as long as God. Dan-
iel's praise from the angel was that he was " a man of desires."
It is not contact with God that we want, but unity. It is not
enlightenment that the human mind wants, but to be of the fo-
cus of light. It is not fellowship with God that we need, but
sonship, some community of nature ; to be " partakers of the
divine nature," as says St. Peter. It is not inspiration from
above that will content us, but deification. The end of man is
not to be rid of ignorance and sin ; these are hindrances to his
end, which is to be made divine. The satisfaction of the human
heart is a calm of divine peace and joy. The supernatural at-
traction of the divinity is such a stimulus that human ambition
never heard its full invitation till it heard : " Be perfect as your
heavenly Father is perfect." That marks the lowest point of
satisfied human ambition.

Cardinal Newman makes Agellius say to the yet heathen
Callista that " the Christian religion reveals a present God, who
satisfies every affection of the heart, yet keeps it pure." A pre-
sent God : less than this were a revelation unworthy of God to
a creature instinct already with supernatural divine questioning.
In the satisfaction of the affections of such a being the best is
a necessity. A present God is God possessed ; and he is one
with the beloved. I want God so present to me that I can
taste and see that the Lord is sweet ; I want to be owned by
him ; nay, I want to own him. And this means the change
from the relation of Creator and creature to that of Father and
son.

There are certain delicate tendencies felt in our soul's
best moments towards what is higher. They take the form of
perceptions of unreasoned truth, unreasoned because imperative ;
or they are driftings upon the upward-moving currents of
heavenly attraction, making for purity of life ; or they discover,
as by a divining ro,d, the proximity of the soul's treasure, causing

1892.] THE LONGING FOR GOD AND ITS FULFILMENT. 341

a distaste for perishable joys. Of these holiest influences every
one is some form. or beginning of a more than natural yearning
for the possession of God in a love which shall have the free-
dom of equality. Man's aim is God ; and every human impulse
reaches out, whether blindly or not, towards God ; and every
revelation of God broadens man's capacity for him and makes
his pursuit more eager. At the summit of reason's ascent the
human soul is greeted with a more than natural light, in which
it irresistibly looks to be deified.

The teeming mind, the overflowing heart of man, will be
content with nothing less than all that God can do and give.
" All the rivers of the world," says the Psalmist, " flow down in-
to the sea, and yet the sea doth not overflow." So all the power,
and riches, and pleasures of this life, if given to our hearts in
unstinted measure, would but mock that empty void which can
be filled by God alone.

Human life is never known in its solemn and overpowering
reality till it is known as destined to union with the life of God.
To say that life is real is to say that our interior yearnings for
God shall be satisfied by a union divinely real. This greatest of
facts is also an argument. For if all man's higher needs, aims,
desires, aspirations, demand an object, then there is an object :
the appetite proves the food. So the Psalmist : " My soul thirsts
for thee ; oh ! how many ways my flesh longs for thee, O Lord
my God." In the spiritual life, wants, longings, aspirations are
the appetite ; the food is God. The entire possession of God,
in very deed and reality, in nature and person this is the ade-
quate satisfaction of the soul. Its realization is in sharing the
divine Sonship. For union with God, as he is known to unaided
nature, is not enough. By the creative act God made me in
his image, yet only his creature ; I long to be his son. " All
nature is in labor and groaneth, waiting for the revelation of
the sons of God." There is a divine communication which I
need, and which yet transcends all my natural gifts : I must
share God's natural gifts. I must be his son.

The widest horizon of the soul has a beyond of truth and
virtue, whose very existence is not understood by the mere,
natural man, and only the dim outlines of which are caught by
the uttermost stretch of vision of even the regenerate soul. Hu-
man nature hardly can steadily contemplate this lofty and glori-
ous state, even when it is revealed, much less compass its posses-
sion ; and yet man instantly learns that there is his journey's end.
The dearest victory of mere nature is to know that there is

342 THE LONGING FOR GOD AND ITS FULFILMENT. [June,

something somewhere in the spiritual universe which it needs
and cannot of itself possess ; we have a measure of God which
overlaps all that we by nature possess of him.

There is a strength of character everywhere made known to
man as the highest fruit of knowledge and love, and which is
yet strange to him : a strength to conquer time and space, moral
weakness and mental darkness divine strength. This strength
he feels the need of ; striving alone, he cannot have it. This
strength of God and the character which it generates in us have
ever claimed and received the name supernatural. Man obtains
.this quality of being by the infusion of a new life in the spirit-
ual regeneration, by which he is made God's son. He sees the
glory from afar, and then he hears, " Unless a man be born
again he cannot enter into the kingdom of God."

The inequality of men and the difference of races cry aloud
for universal possession of God. There is no joy of life which
can be universal except it be God. There is Greek and barba-
rian, bond and free, male and female, and their common medium
of unity, as well as their common joy, can only be God, revealed
as a father.

The dignity of man suggests the possibility of the Incarna-
tion ; the aspirations of man suggest its probability ; the degra-
dation of man cries out for it, and implores its immediate gift.
As a matter of fact, the entire human race has ever expected
that God would come among men. The ignoble taint of idola-
try is thus palliated a vice so widespread and deep-rooted that
without palliation it were fatal to humanity's claim of dignity.

The palliation of the guilt of self-worship by ancient humani-
ty is in the truth that, somehow or other, man is or can be
made one with God. That any error may be possible of cre-
dence it must taste of truth ; man's palate cannot abide unmixed
falsehood. Now, in many forms of idolatry men beheld the
possible deity instead of the real. When we consider what
the Incarnation proved human nature capable of, we can
pity as well as condemn that highest form of idolatry called
hero-worship. "Ye shall be as gods" was a cunning temptation,
because Adam and Eve already felt within them a dignity with
something divine in it.

In the far East the Chinese, the Japanese, and other kindred
nations have cherished an immemorial tradition that God was to
descend upon earth in visible form, to enlighten men's ignorance
in person, and redeem them from their sins. One of the most
precious results of the later learning has been to show that the

1892.] THE LONGING FOR GOD AND ITS FULFILMENT. 343

Hindoos and the Persians, the two dominant races of southern
and central Asia, looked for nothing less than the coming of the
Supreme Being among men, to cleanse them from vice and to
elevate them to virtue. The Egyptians, Plutarch tells us, looked
for the advent of the Son of Isis as a God-redeemer of the
world. Humboldt has recorded that among the aboriginal Mexi-
cans there was a firm belief in the Supreme God of Heaven,
who would send his own Son upon earth to destroy evil. The
same is true of the ancient Peruvians.

But how much clearer was this tradition among the Greeks
and the Romans, the two most powerful and most enlightened
races of antiquity, and how energetic was its expression ! Soc-
rates, at once the wisest man of heathendom and the most guile-
less, taught his disciples, and through them the entire western
civilization, man's incompetency to know his whole duty to God
and his neighbor, and his inability to perform even what he
does know of it ; and he implored a universal teacher from
above. Plato bears witness to this teaching of his master and
reaffirms it.

The Romans had their Sibylline prophecy of a divine king
who was to come to save the world. The illustrious orator
Cicero, the enchanting poet Virgil, voice this tradition or this
instinct of their imperial race : God is needed, and needed in
visible form. The historians Tacitus and Suetonius tell of the
universal conviction, based on ancient and unbroken tradition,
that a great conqueror, who should subjugate the world, was to
come from Judea.

So that the long-drawn cry of the Hebrew prophets, now
wailing, now jubilant, always as sure as life and death, and in
the course of ages rising and falling in multitudinous cadence
among those hills which formed the choir of the world's temple,
was not the monologue of a single race, but the dominant note
in the harmony of all races. " God himself will come and will
save you," says Isaias in solemn prediction. And again : " Lo,
this is our God ; we have waited for him," as if answering by
anticipation the question asked by John the Baptist on the part
of humanity : " Art thou He that art to come ?" No voice ever
heard by man has sounded so deep, clear, peaceful, and authori-
tative as that which said in Judea : " I am come that they may
have life, and may have it more abundantly." They that shall
hearken to that voice, " to them shall be given the power to be
made the sons of God."

Here, then, is the meaning of the promises made of old.

344 TIIK LONGING FOR GOD AND ITS FULFILMENT. [June,

Even to Adam a Redeemer was promised. Abraham was his
chosen stock, Israel his race, David his house and family. By
Isaias his attributes were sung, by Daniel his coming was fixed
as to time, by Micheas Bethlehem was named as the place of
his birth. The angel foretold his titles, his royalty, and his
divinity to Mary, his mother. The question, " Where is he that
is born King of the Jews," put to the doctors and rulers of
Jerusalem by the first pilgrims to his shrine, was answered with
decision and the spot pointed out.

O what a boon ! To possess God, and to possess him as our
brother ; to have his Father as our father, his Spirit as the spouse
of our souls ! What are all the joys of this life but mockeries
compared to the possession of God ! O that serene, gentle,
tender Master, who came on earth to teach us how to become
divine ! O that valiant Saviour who died that we might live the
life of God !

II.

The entire human race is divided into two classes, those who
know Christ in the inner life, and those who do not. The former
bear testimony of Christ to the latter, and their testimony is
true. The value of this inner witness is shown by the large
number of persons who are silenced but not convinced by the
outward and historical testimonies for Christ ; conviction comes
to them only after an interior experience.

The work of Christ is personal. From man to man he goes,
teaches, exhorts, entreats, by word, by influence. If he sends a
messenger without, he stirs the heart within to hearken to the
message. No book can make a man a Christian. No man or
number of men can do it unless they be Christ-bearers in life
and doctrine, and Christ's Spirit work meantime in a hidden
way. On the other hand, there are men to whom Christ would
be known if all the books in the world were burned.

" Come unto ME all ye that labor and are heavy burdened."

The evidence of which we speak is not that of an exceptional
experience, but of a cloud of witnesses. In every community in
the civilized world there are at least a few leading spirits, lead-
.ing in all moral and beneficent activity, and easily distinguish-
able from fanatics and visionaries, who characterize their lives as
transformed by Christ ; ami with them and around them is a
multitude in a lo\\vr ^r.ule of conscious union with him. All
those together and everywhere are the kingdom of the Son of
God. The evidence of personal knowledge of Christ given by

1892.] THE LONGING FOR GOD AND ITS FULFILMENT. 345

such men as St. Augustine and St. Francis of Assisi, though
none of them ever saw him with their bodily eyes, carries con-
viction. They say with the Apostle : " We have the witness of
the Spirit." Listen to St. Augustine : " What, then, is it
that I love, when I love Thee ? Neither the beauty of the body,
nor the graceful order of time, nor the brightness of light so
agreeable to these eyes, nor the sweet melody of all sorts of
music, nor the fragrant scents of flowers, oils, or spices, nor the
sweet taste of manna or honey, nor fair limbs alluring to car-
nal embraces. None of these things do I love when I love my
God. And yet I love a certain light, and a certain voice, and
a certain fragrancy, and a certain food, and a certain embrace
when I love my God, the light, the voice, the fragrancy, the
food, and the embrace of my inward man ; where that shines to
my soul which no place can contain; and where that sounds
which no time can measure ; and where that smells which no
blast can disperse ; and where that relishes which no eating can di-
minish ; and where that is embraced which no satiety can separate.
This it is that I love when I love my God." Such witnesses reaffirm
in a word, by speech, and more than all by action, the conscious
presence of that " hidden man of the heart " of whom St. Peter
says that he manifests himself " in the incorruptibility of a
quiet and a meek spirit."

The greatest activity of Christ is invisible, and his noblest
victories are in the secret trysting-places of love in the thoughts
of men. The elevating and purifying influence known as the
Christian Inner Life, is neither a mere force nor an idea ; it is
a person. It is Christ. It is the introduction of a new life,
His own life, into men's souls ; not superimposed upon the mind,
nor imputed to the soul, but infused into it by the spirit of
God. "I live, now not I, but Christ liveth in me."

This new life is, in its consciousness, a new interior experi-
ence, carrying the soul far above the highest flight of reason,
and dominating it with a divine authority. It is the most per-
sonal of all our unions, and is therefore entirely capable of descrip-
tion. The simple affirmation of this inner experience is of
weight as an argument. " I know he is God," says the Chris-
tian, " for my inner life has proved it to me."

Apart from the graces attached to office, the real power of
religious organizations to convince is not in the spectacle of dis-
ciplined masses, but in the influence of regenerate persons ; let
them move forward in unity, and everything bows before their
banners. The impulse of a soul filled with God upon one

346 THE LONGING FOR GOD AND ITS FULFILMENT. [June,

wanting, or at least needing, to be so filled is constantly proved
and acknowledged to be resistless. Such evidences as revelation
and history give of authority, unity, continuity, and universality
are all concerning divine qualities, whose possession is a neces-
sary note of Christ's fellowship. But Christ's kingdom is not
exclusively external. "The kingdom of God is within you." The
testimony of the inner life is that of a living and present wit-
ness, and it is a high motive of credibility. It is monopolized by
Christians ; no such union is claimed by un-Christian religions :
" I know Mine, and Mine know Me."

The dogmatic position of this truth is given by the Council
of Trent, which affirms, as a fundamental article of faith, that
belief and hope and Jove and repentance, if worth anything for
eternal life, must be preceded in the soul by the inspiration of
the Spirit of God, which is the Spirit of Christ. Christians tell
you that by faith they know Jesus Christ as one person knows
another; and although this personal knowledge is in a dark
manner, yet they say truly, " I know whom I have believed, and
I am certain."

Faith is that interior perception, quick and clear, by which
the intelligence recognizes the teacher and accepts the truth
which he teaches, and this is conferred by Christ as a new and
superior activity of the power of knowing. It is the baptismal
gift, the first pledge of the supernatural life. In the light of
faith Christ reveals himself as God, and it is to create and
maintain this inner power that church, scripture, and tradition
are given us. In it the human mind is endowed with a force
far beyond its natural gifts, and is made partaker of a divine
activity. It is an unshakable certainty of conviction, a heavenly
clearness of perception, and an intuitive knowledge of a kind
superior to that of natural reason ; it is what the Apostle calls
"having the mindl of Christ." This has a twofold effect on us:
one to dominate the mental forces, and the other to stimulate
their activity, proposing to them an infinitely adequate end.
" Faith is the substance of things to be hoped for, the evidence
of things that appear not." So that Christian faith is the evi-
dence of the substantial personal presence of the Spirit of Christ
within us.

The first fruit of faith is hope " Christ in you, the hope of
glory "; that is to say, out of the root of high and supernatural
knowledge of Christ's divine presence within me springs a divine
assurance of his purpose that the union shall be perpetual. We
have faith in order that we may know Christ, the object of love ;

1892.] THE LONGING FOR GOD AND ITS FULFILMENT. 347

hope that we may courageously journey towards our heavenly
home ; but we have love that we may possess Christ, for love
is the unitive virtue. Faith says : Christ is here ; Hope says :
He will abide; Love says: He is mine. We know that it is
the Divine Son that is within us, for his presence communicates
to us a son's love for the Eternal Father. " Because you are
sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying
Abba, Father."

Faith, hope, and charity, knowledge, confidence, and love,
are the entire life of the renewed man. " Now I live ; yet not I,
but Christ liveth in me." Surely a man can give testimony of
his life; and such is the witness of the Christian to Christ. Faith
is the light, and hope is the warmth, but love is the very fire
of Jesus Christ in our hearts. " Was not our heart burning
within us whilst He spoke in the way and opened to us the
Scriptures," said the two who' met him on the way to Emmaus.
This explains why simple men can stand their ground against
learned scoffers. Even when puzzled by sophistries they have
an interior view of the truth, coupled with a personal guarantee.
Resistance to doubt as well as to vice is confided by them to
that hidden man of the heart of whom St. Peter speaks.

This interior union with Christ is the spur of heroism, the
seed of martyrdom, the sweetness of repentance, the fortitude
of weakness, all of which forces are arguments bearing witness
to their origin : " I can do all things in Christ, who strengthen-
eth me." No man has ever deliberately adhered to the doctrine
of Christ as the Son of God, and sought to obey his precepts,
but that his inner life was most distinctly enlightened and in-
flamed with a force far above his natural capacity a force con-
sciously present and felt to be divine. " If a man will do His
will he shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God, or
whether I speak of myself." The affirmation of this by men
and multitudes is competent and unimpeachable evidence. The
proof of it by the martyr's heroism, the pauper's cheerful
patience, the repentant sinner's abounding hope, the dullard's
wisdom, the superhuman benevolence of the Sister of Charity, is
irresistible.

Not only has the Christian religion always looked true, it has
always felt true. We dwelt in the beginning upon the longing
of the soul for sonship with God, affirming that as the appetite
proves the food, so the divine sonship was not only a possible,
but altogether a probable, though supernatural, end of human as-
piration. A co-ordinate argument is the one we are now con-

348 FORGIVEN ! [June,

eluding, for digestion and assimilation prove a food still more
conclusively than appetite. " He that believeth in the Son of
God hath the testimony of God in himself." All who have tried
any other object of devoted love ambition, science, pleasure
mournfully agree that they remain unsatisfied. All who try this
object of burning human love exclaim together, in an ecstasy,
that they have received a fulness of satisfaction beyond the
scope of created power to bestow. The object is divine it is
the only end of man. If I am conscious of an excellence within
me, which is not myself because it is infinite, and which when
I love it assimilates me to itself, my affirmation of its presence
and character commands respect. If the analysis of a raindrop
tells of an infinite Creator, how much rather may the introspec-
tion of a single soul reveal the infinite Lover of men.

WALTER ELLIOTT.

FORGIVEN!

FATHER, forgive me! At Thy feet,

In deep contrition, see
Thine erring child for mercy sweet

Pleading with thee.

" If thou forgive, thou art forgiven ! "

" My God, my pardon free
To all my foes is gladly given :

Be merciful to me ! "

ALICE VAN CLEVE.

1892.] DIVERGING STREAMS. 349

DIVERGING STREAMS.

THERE was something particularly attractive about the long,
narrow drawing-room of Mrs. Marshall's pretty cottage when the
gray twilight softened the signs of wear in carpet and furniture
and brought out all the beauty of the fragrant vases of flowers
scattered here and there, and the bright bits of silken draperies
that were carelessly disposed over the old-fashioned, spindle-
legged tables that had too demure an ugliness to make one
easily credit the possibility, since realized, of their return to the
popularity of fashion. The long French windows at either end
of the room were hung with straight, soft folds of muslin. The
windows, facing the west and opening upon a wide veranda,
were filled with growing plants. The whole room gave evidence
of the presence of a refined woman's personality ; the woman
whose taste veils gracefully, though it does not quite conceal, her
poverty ; who has been known to sacrifice a dinner for a bunch
of flowers. It is doubtful if either Mrs. Marshall or her daugh-
ter Eleanor would have committed the latter sin against hygiene
and common sense, in spite .of their woman's fondness for beau-
tiful things.

A year or two before the time of which we are writing Mrs.
Marshall had been left a widow, with no provision for the future
beyond the couple of thousands of her husband's life-insurance
policy and the little home in which she had spent the twenty-
five years of her married life a life of peace and sufficient com-
fort, whose memories were now her chief happiness aside from
her absorption in her two children Jack, a lad of three or four
and twenty, and Eleanor, a year or two younger. ' After their
father's death friends had come to their help, and that vague
but powerful lever called " influence " had procured the young
man, who had just finished his college course, the eminently re-
spectable but far from lucrative position of bank clerk, and Elea-
nor a place as teacher in a public school, that universal bread-
giver to American widows and orphans. The mother was a
woman of the delicate and fragile type which, less than a gen-
eration ago when conservative women regarded the new-fangled
notions of physical culture as not only not a necessity but a
VOL. LV. 23

350 DIVERGING STREAMS. [June,

positive impropriety, was the American type par excellence. Na-
tive common sense she had, and a capacity for good manage-
ment that made it possible for her to have a comfortable and
pretty home for her children on their small earnings.

On the evening in question she sat in her drawing-room in a
willow rocking-chair beside an oriental jar, in which a beautiful
palm was growing. Her small, thin hands were busily occupied
with some dainty crocheting, for she belonged to the class of
women whose chief amusement is fancy-work. A fleecy white
shawl was thrown over her black gown. This shawl was always
part of her toilette, perhaps because she was one of the few
women who wear a shawl gracefully, and perhaps because of
her susceptibility to draughts. At the other end of the room,
near the opposite windows, stood an old-fashioned, square piano
whose yellowed keys with their tiny, loose-slipping sound, serv-
ed to remind the casual auditor that music divine and lucre
filthy cannot on the mundane sphere be successfully disassociat-
ed. The auditor on this occasion was not a casual and impar-
tial one. It is safe to presume that to his mind the performer
on this veteran instrument surpassed the latest German virtuoso.
Some people, not too cynically inclined, may agree with me
when I have mentioned that the pianist was Miss Eleanor Mar-
shall ; the auditor, her affianced husband, Mr. Philip Osborne.
The young people made a sufficiently attractive tableau to the
loving eyes at the other end of the. room that were occasionally
raised to them. Even a disinterested observer would have smiled
indulgently as his eyes rested upon the girl seated before the
antique piano and the handsome youth bending over it. The
light from the western windows gave a radiance to each young
face, bringing out all the glow of her brown eyes and short, au-
burn curls, and giving to his face a warmth that it did not gen-
erally possess. There was ordinarily a certain languor about
Philip's face and form, although he was a very well set-up young
man, with clear, merry blue eyes. The glowing sunset light, so
kind to youth, so cruel to age, seemed to the observant mother
to make visible in these two faces not only the beauty that she
saw in each, but the love and trust, the union of soul which,
she was convinced, existed between them. Thus she mused, arid,
being an unworldly woman, did not dream of her daughter's
future in that provident and far-seeing fashion which is gen-
erally reckoned a strict maternal duty among more worldly wo-
men. Mrs. Marshall looked at life simply in a fashion at once
broad and narrow, as is the way of most good women. She saw

1892.] DIVERGING STREAMS. 351

no reason why her daughter should look for more worldly ad-
vantages in marriage than she herself had enjoyed. As much
happiness and serenity, and more years of earthly life together
than had been hers she could wish Eleanor no better joy. And
then the widow's thoughts surged to their accustomed channel.
Soon, from furtively dropping her crocheting to wipe an intru-
sive tear from her eyelids, she dropped it altogether, and, letting
her head fall back against the ornamental head-rest of her chair,
slept quietly. The restfulness which retrospective sorrow, when
there is no better element in it, is so often characterized by
lay softly upon her spirit, and her low, deep breathing seemed
full of peace. In the meantime the music continued, and from
Beethoven the pianist passed to Mendelssohn's deep-speaking
" Songs without Words " and Schumann's exquisite " Traiimerei."
Eleanor's repertory was extensive and probably a trifle preten-
tious, but I think that even the great master Beethoven himself
would have forgiven her presumption in attempting to repro-
duce with her untrained technique, on her worn-out instrument,
his sublime thoughts, could he have seen in her face how great
was her love for them, how much soul she brought to their in-
terpretation. Philip was content to look and listen, and believed
profoundly in her musical ability ; perhaps because he held, in
common with other lovers, that " music is love in search of a
word." Probably because of this narrow but comforting defini-
tion have lovers, with and without talent, from time immemorial
devoted themselves to music and its search for the all-complete
word that true love never finds, to its full contentment, this side
of heaven. As for the small quota of lovers who are not, and
who are too honest to pretend to be, musical, the benevolent
spectator cannot help but regard them with pity, as their only
refuge seems to be common sense or sentiment pure and
simple.

As Eleanor finished the " Traiimerei " Philip came gently be-
hind her, and taking her hands from the keys, drew them within
his owrr as he said : " That is very beautiful, dear ; but I am afraid
you are tired. I have kept you playing without thinking how
late it has grown, till your fingers are weary and the darkness
is slowly creeping towards you from every corner. Come and
rest on the veranda a little while."

He led her, unresisting, towards the windows opening on the
veranda. She paused before her mother's chair. Mrs. Marshall
was still asleep. Her crochet-work had fallen to the floor and
one delicate hand hung over the arm of her chair. Eleanor bent

352 DIVERGING STREAMS. [June,

over her and touched gently with her lips the soft rings of au-
burn hair, slightly threaded with white, that clustered over her
mother's forehead. Light as was the touch, Mrs. Marshall awoke
at once.

The likeness between the two faces became even more strik-
ing when each pair of soft brown eyes gazed smilingly into
the other. The resemblance did not extend to their figures.
The mother was tall and slight, the daughter short and almost
sturdy-looking save for the perfect grace with which she carried
herself.

"Well, children," said Mrs. Marshall, looking with an amused
smile at the laughing faces above her, " I suppose I have been
nodding a little. You see what a terrible thing it is to be get-
ting old," with the deprecating air of a woman who knows that
Time has found her too amiable to press his fingers very heavily
upon her youthful comeliness.

"Yes, little mother, you are getting positively venerable with
age and its infirmities," answers Eleanor mockingly, whose habit
it is to apply a caressing diminutive to her tall mother ; " come
out on the veranda with Philip and me."

The next moment Philip has taken one of the delicate white
hands and Eleanor the other, and all three have stepped through
the long, open window and are settled in the comfortable rock-
ing and lounging chairs which every American veranda, with
any pretensions to comfort, possesses in abundance. The scene
of this narrative is one of the great lake cities which might very
properly be called "veranda towns." From June till September,
sometimes October, the veranda is the parlor, sitting-room,
library, sewing-room, everything but chamber and dining-room, of
those residents fortunate enough to possess this graceful, vine-clad
addition to their houses, and so unfortunate or fortunate as
not to desire or be able to afford the expense of a summer trip.
In spite of the pessimistic statisticians and the editors of the
society columns of the Sunday papers, both of these classes are
very numerous.

Consequently the Marshalls were one of many families in
Burton who spent the greater part of their summers on their
veranda. Their home was a very modest red brick, of the un-
pretentious, comfortable style of architecture with which people
were well contented a quarter of a century ago, before they
were fascinated by the vagaries and shingle efflorescence of mod-
ern Queen Anneism. The Marshalls had a bit of carefully
trimmed lawn before their house, boxes of flowers on the wide

1892.] DIVERGING STREAMS: 353

railing of the veranda, and two sides of that important structure
were, like most of its veranda neighbors, curtained in luxuriant
vines. The front had only the boxes of flowers by way of or-
namental drapery. Nothing else obstructed the view of the
placid expanse of the lake, and the green and rushing river
that from thence hurried along on its disquieted course.

In a few moments the moon rose, and one by one the stars
mounted guard over the night. There was a weirdness in the
bars of silver light that lay across the water, and there was
something weird, too, in the glint of the moonbeams on the
bicycle wheels passing swiftly and silently on the broad asphalt.
Except for the murmur of the pure breeze in the tree-tops and
an occasional boat or bicycle whistle, there was not a sound. It
was one of those moments when happy people are happiest
silent, and the pressure of a hand says more than many com-
monplace words. But, as even the lovers' creed admits the de-
sirableness of occasional speech, the silence on Mrs. Marshall's
veranda soon gave way to the commonplaces of conversation,
and, as usually happened, Eleanor was the first to break the
pause.

" Do you know, little mother, it is just one week to-morrow
till the end of school ? Then two months reprieve, and I can
forget for a while that I belong to the great army of labor."

" How I hate to see you drudging so ! " muttered Philip with
a scowl.

Mrs. Marshall drew her shawl closer about her shoulders
with a little nervous motion of her hands, and said in tremulous
tones, " If your poor dear father were alive "

Eleanor caught the nervous "hands in her own warm clasp.

" Yes, I know ; but if father were living he would be wise
enough to see what is best for me, and that I am sure is my
daily work, which I like a great deal and dislike not a little, and
would be miserable without. But you must let me grumble a
little bit occasionally, and not take it all seriously as you always
do, you foolish people. If I have to keep all my disagreeable-
ness to myself I'll die of spontaneous combustion in no time. I'd
like to know what you'd do then, you two ? " she concluded
with the short, trilling laugh which was one of her greatest
charms, an infectious merriment to all who heard her. " I really
believe," she continued, resting her arm upon Philip's chair, " I
shall never cease to be something of a child. I've been count-
ing the days for the past month just as the little tots in my
school-room do. The morning offerings that some of the most

354 DIVERGING STREAMS. [June,

affectionate or the best-off in worldly goods bring me daily form
a sort of calendar to hasten on the days. First, it was an
orange or an apple or a home-made delicacy, to tempt my
ferocious appetite, that ornamented my desk when I assumed my
pedagogic manner for the day, and a shy little voice would pipe
up, 'Please, ma'am, ma thought you'd like it!' Then it was a
little cluster of crocuses or a bit of hyacinth ; then a big bunch
of snow-balls or lilacs ; then syringas. Finally it is roses, as an
inspection of our humble premises will convince the curious ob-
server. You have no idea how glad I felt as the successive
changes in the oblations at my shrine told me that the end of
June was speeding on its way."

Although these remarks had not been more particularly ad-
dressed to Philip than to Mrs. Marshall, or the silent wheelsmen
passing, or the gleaming river in the distance, it was he who re-
plied, in low and fervent tones : " Why shouldn't there be offer-
ings at your shrine ? That, at least, is some comfort to me,
* to know that your pupils appreciate you. I'd like to know how
they could help it, though. Could anybody be near you and
not love you?"

A smile, half-humorous, half-tender, was Eleanor's reply.
Then Mrs. Marshall broke in with the irrelevant question : " Don't
you think Jack is staying a very long time to-night ? I am really
afraid this night-work is too severe for him. He has looked
quite fagged out for the last few days."

" The sudden heat is very exhausting," said Philip, " and the
night-work is a bother, though fortunately it is only necessary
twice a year when the books are straightened out. I ought to
be down myself to-night, but I couldn't resist the temptation to
take a night off for once. I hope my absence hasn't made it
harder for Jack. Remorse for a pleasant evening is one of the
luxuries I don't care to indulge in."

While he was still speaking the subject of his remarks came
swinging up the walk, and threw himself upon the steps with an
exhausted but cheerful " Well, mother ! Good-evening, children !
I tell you it's been a broiler to-day. I'm completely done up with
the heat and fifteen hours of stupid bank work. How did you
manage to get off, Philip?"

" I felt the absolute necessity of rest and relaxation," was the
indolent reply. "And so, I've been taking mine ease in mine
inn ; which means your mother's delightful veranda."

" Wish I had had the same good luck," said the exhausted
one, fanning himself energetically with his straw hat.

1892.] DIVERGING STREAMS. 355

" There's a nice little bit of supper that I've been keeping
hot for you, dear. Do come in and have it at once while it is
good," said his mother anxiously.

" Hot ? " groaned Jack ; " it's an inducement my inner man
responds not kindly to to-night."

" O come, Jack ! don't be nonsensical," urged Mrs. Marshall ;
and, without further demur, the young man resigned himself
and his hat to his mother's tender care.

There was something beautiful in the affection that existed
between these two. Jack's feeling for his mother was at once a
comradeship, a friendship, and a chivalrous devotion. Mrs.
Marshall was wont to say that neither of her children had ever
given her a moment's pain, and that one was as dear to her as
the other. This statement was only in part true, though the
mother was unconscious of its untruth. In spite of her deep
and real love for her daughter, Eleanor was not quite so dear
to her as her son. Jack was the well-beloved of her heart, not
because even a mother's eye could have found in him merits
lacking in Eleanor, but purely and entirely for the woman's rea-
son that he was her first child, and that he was in face and
manner and voice what his father had been at his age.

The mother's face assumed a look of solicitude as Jack trifled
with the tempting viands set before him. His usually robust
appetite had disappeared. " I'm all right, mother," said he, in
response to her anxious gaze, " but I believe I'm too tired to
eat. Just give me another cup of tea, please."

"Your work is too hard for you, Jack."

" Nonsense ! mother dear. Have I ever been an invalid ? It
is only the heat and the dreadful routine of this bank work that
have knocked me out a little. Not that I'd mind the routine
or the work if I felt that I were helping you as much as I
ought. What was the use of my father giving me an expensive
college education if a bank clerkship is the outcome of it all? "

" Your father did what he thought best for you, dear," in-
terposed the widow's low voice.

" I am not complaining, mother. I am only regretting that
my father did not see fit to send me to work when I was a
young lad, inasmuch as he was unable to leave me the means
of pursuing a profession. If he had done so I would not now
be quite at the foot of the ladder. The advantages he gave me
are not advantages in the business world. Every day the real-
ization of my own uselessness is forced more bitterly upon me.
I ought to do so much for you and Eleanor ; I do so little.

356 DIVERGING STREAMS. [June,

How is Eleanor ever to marry until my salary is sufficient to
enable you to get on without her teaching? And when, in the
name of Heaven, will that be ? I think night and day of the
promotion that may never come. Bank fellows, you know, never
die or leave or get discharged. They're so confoundedly healthy
and sensible and well-behaved ! If you would only let me go
away and try my luck somewhere else ! There's no chance for a
poor fellow in this conservative old town."

Jack put down his cup untasted and there were bitter lines
about his mouth. The mother's hand softly touched his fore-
head and brought his dark head gently against her shoulder.
" Child, child ! do not be so impatient," she murmured tenderly,
and the smile upon her lips seemed touched with infinite love
and patience. To her, her boy and girl were still little children,
whose fretfulness her loving touch could heal.

In the meantime the moments sped for the two upon the
veranda. What they talked of is a matter of too little import-
ance to be worth transcribing. To each other their words were
wisdom more golden than the Stagyrite's, to other auditors they
would have been undiluted nonsense. Let us, for the moment,
accept Thackeray's classification of the world as lovers past,
present, or future, and intrude no invisible chronicler upon them to
attempt the fatuous task of weaving their idle words into a narrative.

As Philip walked homeward that evening his mind passed
in review every incident connected with his brief engagement to
Eleanor. She would have laughed, and, at the same time, been
half-afraid, half-ashamed, could she have known how every look
and word of hers were glorified by him, till no touch of earth
remained in them, in such reflective moments. A little impa-
tiently he thought of the necessity of delay for their marriage
till Jack and he had both received the promotion that the im-
pending change rendered a desideratum, and that seemed some-
times very distant. But, in spite of this drawback, Philip
Osborne felt that he had everything to be grateful for, and this
evening, as he walked slowly on, a sudden impulse made him
uncover his head and raise his eyes in deep thankfulness to
the Giver of all good. The feeling of transport, evanescent as
the passionate intensity of sunset colors, that possesses for a
rare instant the man who realizes the casket of precious oint-
ment that a pure woman's love gives into his keeping, took hold
of Philip, and straightway this perfect June night enshrined for
him one of those hours, which come at least once into every life,
vvhen earth touches heaven.

1892.] DIVERGING STREAMS. 357

II.

We are apt to fancy when we are young, and life still
wears a delightful mystery, that a change of place means a
change of nature. The lesson of self-weariness is early learned,
and there is a comfort in the crude notion that new surround-
ings will mean a new self. It is probable that this fancy lies,
an unacknowledged, scarcely realized element, in the roaming
tendencies of many young men. Jack Marshall would undoubt-
edly have scorned such an imputation. He would have affirm-
ed, in calm and logical language, that his motives for wishing to
leave his native city were altogether unselfish, and perhaps they
were seven-eighths of them. However we may analyze his
desires, they grew every day more intense and uncontrollable.
He began to feel a fervid hatred for the routine of his daily
life, for the very streets and buildings of his birth-place. Always
amiable in his manner, and demonstratively affectionate towards
his mother and sister, there was little outward change in him
during these stifling days of early summer, except that the fever-
ish brightness of his eyes, his flushed face and hot hand, gave
token of some strong feeling stoutly repressed. Two or three
times he broached the subject nearest his heart, but Eleanor
laughed at him, and Mrs. Marshall was so earnestly and utterly op-
posed to it that he kept silence thereafter and in secret matured his
plans. Slowly but steadily his resolve grew from the possible to
the actual. He could best decide for himself and for his mother
also ; why need he give her the pain of argument and dissen-
sion ? In the end she would see that his views were best. It
was only the inherent weakness, the clinging tenderness of her
woman's nature that counseled a stay-at-home policy. The bird
in the hand is the narrow end of a woman's argument. As if
the many birds in the bush were not also desirable, easily caught
under certain conditions, and surely the fun of the pursuit count-
ed for something ! As for the conditions, a man has certainly
a right to take some things for granted. A strong, honest
man, who is willing to work, has luck and health on his side
if he keep his eyes open, his brain alert, and take decent
care of himself. Capital, of course, was a good thing, but
what had been honestly achieved without it could be honestly
achieved again. There were thousands of chances awaiting a
man who took the trouble to look for them. Thus Jack ar-
gued to himself, as many another lad has reasoned defectively

358 DIVERGING STREAMS. [June T

before him, for youthful enthusiasm clings often to the reeds
of sophism, and potential and actual, possible and probable,
become synonyms to the minds heated with desire.

One evening, early in July, Jack came home to tea rather
earlier than usual. His manner was quieter and more composed
than it had been for a long while. His face was pale, but the
tension of indecision had left it. After the meal was finished
Eleanor went to the piano, and Mrs. Marshall and her son ad-
journed to the veranda. Jack threw himself into a huge rocker
near the open window with its screen of palms. For several
minutes his gaze was fixed steadily upon his sister's unconscious
face, her auburn curls haloed in the sunset. His eyes had the
concentrated look of one who is trying to photograph a face
for ever in his memory. Turning to his mother, his eyes met
hers with the ready smile with which each had always welcomed
the other's glance. " Mother, dearest," said he caressingly, " did
you ever think how it would be if one of us three should leave
this dear little home of ours? Don't you think, if such a thing
should happen, the picture of this veranda and the flowers and
vines, and Eleanor there at her old piano, and you and I to-
gether here, would remain for years and years and for ever in the
heart of the absent one ? "

His tone was low and thoughtful, and his dark eyes, which
were lowered as he spoke, glittered with tears. As she listened
a foreboding awoke in the mother's heart which not all his talk
of fortune-hunting had ever stirred before.

" My boy, what is the matter ? What is it is in your mind ?"
she asked anxiously. " Promise me "

A familiar step ascended the veranda and a famijiar voice
said, laughingly: "What! at it again, are you? It is something
tremendous the inveterate love-making you two are perpetually
indulging in. Mrs. Marshall, do you know that you should have
been a mediaeval dame of high degree, and I'll wager more
than one gallant Sir Knight would have broken a lance in your
behalf. And one of them, I hope, you would have permitted to
be the very unworthy individual before you."

With a very courtly bow Philip bent over Mrs. Marshall's
white hand. The lady laughed, not ill-pleased at the compli-
ment, and the serious tone of her thoughts gave place to a
lighter mood, much to Jack's relief. In a few moments Eleanor
had joined the group on the veranda, and the ripple of her
merry laugh was the keynote of pleasant converse for an hour
or two. Then Jack rose and announced that he was going to

1892.] DIVERGING STREAMS. 359

make trial of a part of the old saw, in the confident expectation
of wealth and wisdom unlimited rewarding him.

"Well, you've plenty of health, Jack," said Philip lazily. "I
can't vouch for your wisdom, of course."

" Perhaps it could endure the endorsement," retorts Jack.
" My own painfully positive knowledge of the state of my wealth
presupposes the necessity of a balancing power of health and
wisdom that the rest may be added unto them."

" Learned and Scriptural in one breath ! " exclaims Eleanor.
" What change has come upon your spirit ? "

Jack laughs and, bending over his sister, kisses her. " Good-
night, dear," says he gently. Then he goes to his mother and
gives her a bear's hug, and again he says "Good-night," in a
strangely subdued and solemn tone. As he steps through the
window into the drawing-room, he hears Philip's mocking tone:
" Truly a goodly youth is he ; a most devoted son and brother."

Jack turns back and says as lightly : " True merit rejoices in
honest appreciation. Good-night, my brother." He takes Philip's
hand in his and gives it a hearty pressure, and then he is again
gone. The strangeness of his manner, however, has not escaped
his mother's observation. Half an hour has scarcely passed when
she has followed him into the house, and, with a tiny night-
lamp in her hand, stands at his bedside. One arm is thrown
carelessly over his head. He breathes as easily as a child, and
his slumber is, apparently, as deep. The mother smiles as she
notes the serenity of his clear-cut, handsome features. But, even
as she smiles, the tears gather in her eyes. She leans over him
and kisses his forehead and a tear falls upon his cheek. She
drops upon her knees at the bedside, and, just as she used to
do when he was a little child, prays with all the fervor of her
soul for her sleeping boy.

When his mother had softly slipped from the room, Jack
opened his eyes and tossed wildly about the bed, unable any
longer to exorcise the strong restraint he had been exerting over
himself while she was near him. Her tear was still warm upon
his cheek. He felt as if it were burning into his soul, for ever to
torment him if he proved unworthy of her love ; but he was
more and more convinced that there was no unworthiness in
what he meditated. It was for his mother's sake that he was
leaving her, he told himself again and again. After tossing rest-
lessly about for a couple of hours, he arose and dressed himself
and set quietly to work to pack his valise and put all his be-
longings in order. Then he took pen and paper, and sat down

360 DIVERGING STREAMS. [June,

to the difficult task of explaining his conduct to the mother who
worshipped him and whom he idolized. It was a difficult task
indeed. One sheet after another was begun and torn up. Fin-
ally, after much effort, his letter was finished, folded, and ad-
dressed. He placed it in the frame of the mirror, so that the
loving eyes for which it was meant could not fail to see it. It
was dawn when he had finished all his preparations and stole
quietly from the house. The chill of early morning was in the
air, and the glittering cobwebs of the dew hung over the vines
and the grass. The river was half-veiled in the cloud of smoke
from two or three tugs that were noisily steaming down. The
volume of smoke rolling heavily up, pushing onward in dense,
heavy columns and then dispersing in delicate mist-rings, was
like the first flame of passion or ambition pouring itself in as
dense and unsubstantial masses from some young heart. Jack's
thoughts, however, were not occupied in such sinister reflections
as he glanced idly towards the river, and then, after a last lin-
gering look at the home of his childhood and youth, strode
rapidly away.

Eleanor, who was always an early riser, had spent over an
hour among the plants before her mother came down-stairs.
They sat idly rocking, and chatting as idly, in their accustomed
corner of the veranda for a few moments till the breakfast-bell
sounded. As Jack had not yet made his appearance, the neat
little maid-of-all-work was sent to rap on his door. A quarter
of an hour passed and still there was no sign of the delinquent.

" Dear me," said Mrs. Marshall with an indulgent smile, " how
that boy sleeps ! Do you mind running up, Eleanor, and waking
him? He will be very late at the bank, in spite of his early
hours last night."

When Eleanor had departed to do her bidding, the mother oc-
cupied herself in rearranging the table, giving it a daintier and
more tempting air, the smile still lingering about her lips. In
five minutes Eleanor returned. Out of her face all the joyous
unconcern that had made one glad to look upon her had flown.
With heavy, dragging steps she came to her mother and silently
drew her to her heart, as if she would shield her from the blow
falling swiftly upon her.

" What is it, child ? " asked the mother in alarm. " Is any-
thing wrong with Jack?"

" Mother, dearest little mother," and the girl's voice broke
into sobs, " be brave ! oh, try to be brave ! "

"What is it, Eleanor?"

1892.] DIVERGING STREAMS. 361

The daughter put into her hands Jack's letter. Mrs. Marshall
sank into a chair and read the letter through without a word,
though the paper shook in her tremulous hands. When she fin-
ished it she looked piteously into Eleanor's face.. The agony in
her look was keener than it had been when she stood beside
her husband's coffin. Silently she handed Eleanor the letter.
Every word breathed affection and was animated by youth's un-
reasoning hope, unreasoning despair and impatience. He could
not wait, he said, for the slow chances of promotion. He felt
that he must go out into the world and wrestle with fortune
in a broader field. His plans were very vague. He might go
to Nicaragua, where some fellows he knew were doing famously.
He might try the West or go mining in Alaska. He would trust
in Providence, and luck, and his own sense and courage to ob-
tain an opening somewhere once he had got out of Burton. He
begged his mother and Eleanor to forgive him, and to share his
confidence that what he was doing would be best for them all
in the long run. For the present he would not write, as he
thought it would save them worry to know nothing of the hard
tug he might have to go through before getting a firm grip of
success. He bade them remember the fortunes that pluck and
hard work had won for many a young man before him, and
assured them they would hear from him as soon as he was defi-
nitely settled with a winning prospect before him. In the
meanwhile no news was good news, and his present necessities
were more than covered by the hundred dollars of savings he
had taken with him. It was a warm-hearted, impetuous sort of
letter, but it had the thoughtless cruelty of the affection that
seeks first itself.

Eleanor, too, was silent when she finished reading. The
necessity of concentrating all her energies for the endurance of
this terrible blow was forced rigorously upon her. Up and
down the room her mother was nervously pacing, wringing
her hands and moaning faintly, " My boy ! my boy ! "

III.

Days that compel a readjustment of life under altered
and sadcler conditions drag their hours and moments very slowly
into weeks, the weeks into months less slowly, and the months
into years with a certain steadiness of pace that is neither slow
nor rapid. For Mrs. Marshall and Eleanor, Jack's absence had
become the accustomed pain which is borne without outward

362 DIVERGING STREAMS. [June,

complaint of comment. Since his departure no word had been
received from him. Neither good nor ill news of the wanderer
had found its way back to Burton. Sometimes Mrs. Marshall
persuaded herself that he was dead, and would spend many a
sleepless night moaning in dry-eyed agony. On stormy nights
she would wander about the house in the anguish of terror con-
jured up by her vivid imaginings of Jack as a homeless, penni-
less wanderer. It was only when Eleanor's strong arms were
around her that she felt relief from the dreadful fears that be-
sieged her soul. Curiously enough, when she dreamed of the
absent one, it was as a happy little child she saw him. " What
dreams may come " was a possibility that gave her sleeping
hours more charm than the waking ones, for only then did the
aching consciousness of her loss leave her, and husband and son
were given back to her.

In the first bitterness of their grief Philip had been a greaf
comfort to mother and daughter. It was the sweetest of con-
solations for Eleanor to realize that whatever befell her, his
heart shared and softened her sorrow. He had made strenuous
efforts to obtain information concerning Jack, in the hope of
inducing him to return. All his exertions were in vain. His
voluntary departure had left as few traces behind it as any of
the mysterious disappearances our newspapers are so fond of re-
cording.

A month after Jack's departure Philip came one evening
with a very melancholy face, and, throwing himself into a chair,
said moodily : " What a sarcastic truth it is that ' everything comes
to him who knows how to wait ' ! To-day Jack would have got
his promotion. I have been offered the assistant cashiership of
a new bank in Boston, in which some old friends of my father's
are the principal stockholders. It's a splendid rise for me, and
would mean that Jack would step into the place I vacate if he
had only waited."

His listeners sighed and for a moment did not think to con-
gratulate him on his own good fortune, although the congratu-
lations were only more hearty for their tardiness. In spite of
the cordiality of her words, Eleanor felt that fortune, by turning
her scale in Philip's favor, had indeed been hard to her. Life
without Jack was difficult, without Philip it was inconceivable.
Her thought seemed to be her lover's also, for Philip con-
tinued : " My good luck seems more than luck now when I
want, as far as I can, to take the place of a son to you, my
dear Mrs. Marshall. My position will allow us to marry at

1892.] DIVERGING STREAMS. 363

once, and will be amply sufficient to permit me to offer you an
unpretentious but comfortable home. In any case, even had
Jack remained at home, I could never have had the cruelty to
ask Eleanor to live at any distance from her mother. It is per-
haps better that circumstances should help our desire to stay
together and give me Eleanor's mother for mine as well."

Mrs. Marshall's face quivered with emotion. She clasped his
hand silently, and, when she had sufficiently recovered herself,
said quietly : " I thank you, dear Philip, for your thoughtfulness,
and I have no dread in giving Eleanor to you ; but what you
propose is impossible. Until my son returns I can never leave
this house. Whatever day or hour he may come his home and
his mother must be ready to receive him. When Eleanor goes
to Boston with you I shall remain here. I am not yet too old
to support myself by my own hands."

In an instant her daughter's arms were around her. "And
do you think, little mother, that I would leave you ? No, Philip
must go alone, and we will wait till Jack returns."

In vain the mother unselfishly urged her daughter to think
first of her own happiness, and to remember that her duty now
lay nearest to Philip. In vain Philip argued his plea for a joint
household. Both mother and daughter stood firm. Mrs. Mar-
shall would not leave her home till Jack returned, or until, at
least, some communication had been established with him, and
Eleanor absolutely declined to leave her mother alone, maintain-
ing that it was the right and duty of her hands to earn bread
for both.

" What could you do, mother ? " she insisted ; " teach school
or take boarders? the two alternatives of most women's schemes
of self-support. As for the second course, you would never
make a success of it. As for the first, it would be too hard for
you, even were you sure of getting an appointment or if I were
permitted to resign in your favor. To be sure there are plenty
of women book-keepers, stenographers, type-writers nowadays,
but you were not educated with a view to the acquirement of
those specialties, nor are you precisely the sort of woman who
would be at home in the atmosphere of most offices. You are
just a dear, sweet, gracious woman, wise and clever in a woman's
way, and in all things a treasure of a little mother."

So the argument ended, and in a few weeks Philip went
alone to settle in his new home. For the two women left alone
the glowing summer became enveloped in the drab atmosphere
of their own thoughts. The most interesting figure to them was

364 DIVERGING STREAMS. [June,

the gray-coated postman, whose comings and goings brought con-
tinually renewed hope and disappointment for the letter that
never came, renewed life and courage for Eleanor with the long
heart-pourings that came to her almost daily from Philip. In
September she resumed her school-work. A gulf of time, deep-
er and darker than many years, lay between the pause and the
resumption of her teaching. She put forward all the force of
her nature to bridge it over. In every fibre of her being she
was grateful for the work that took her out of herself, her lone-
liness and anxiety. There is truth in John Boyle O'Reilly's say-
ing, " A man's strength is in his sympathies." It is also true,
as Eleanor began to discover in these first hard weeks, that
happiness lies in the daily, helpful, rightful exercise of one's
sympathies. With the passing of the months her interest in
her pupils quickened, her influence became deeper, her capacity
for usefulness enlarged.

Several times during the year Philip spent a brief but happy
day with her a day that was welcomed and remembered by her,
as the housed invalid welcomes and remembers the days of
sunshine that break the monotony of many weeks of cloud and
rain. With such chance bits of comfort, in constant and healthy
occupation, with the friction of friendly intercourse amongst
their small circle of acquaintances ; above all, with the daily
anointment of the oil of gladness in the loving converse of soul
to soul, did time push onward, month upon month and year
upon year, for mother and daughter. One revenge he had taken.
He had torn the last gleam of youth from the face under the
widow's cap. Mrs. Marshall's hair had become perfectly white,
and innumerable faint lines were traced, almost imperceptibly,
on brow and cheek. The patient sweetness of her smile re-
mained, and about her face there was still a sort of delicate
beauty from which only the bloom of youth and health had
vanished. Always fragile and lacking in vitality, she had be-
come frailer and more easily fatigued, while never suffering from
any definite ailment. Eleanor's loving care surrounded her
mother with every possible attention, but, as the nearest
and dearest is always the last to perceive the failing vigor, she
did not realize how feeble was her mother's hold on health.
Eleanor herself gave little sign of the wearing effect of constant
and monotonous labor. Almost five years had passed since
Jack's departure, and in all that time her teaching had been un-
interrupted except by the winter's brief holidays and the
summer's long vacations. A week in the country or at the

1892.] DIVERGING STREAMS. 365

sea-side was the only out-of-town diversion they ever expe-
rienced. Invariably Mrs. Marshall returned from these holiday
trips in a state of feverish anxiety. Who could tell but the
wanderer might be awaiting their return ? The collapse from
high-wrought nervousness to the inevitable disappointment drew
so heavily on her scanty fund of vigor that the summer jaunt
never proved the rejuvenation it promised. It was always after
the reaction following such excitement that the two women
realized most acutely the pause in their lives that had been un-
broken since the summer day when Jack strode away from his
home. Many women have known such a waiting, unpunctuated
life, but not many have endured it with the quiet courage, the
ready cheerfulness of these two. The bubbling joyousness that
once characterized Eleanor had given place to a self-contained
dignity. Her auburn hair no longer clustered in short curls
about her head, but was drawn back, as smoothly as its crisp-
ness would permit, in a knot at her neck. Her complexion was
paler, her expression more resolute.

Among her friends opinions were divided as to whether
Eleanor Marshall had lost her beauty entirely or was even
handsomer than she had been as a young girl. Philip, with that
unqualified frankness which a man adopts after marriage or after
his engagement has beerr of such long standing that he feels it
has given him most of the privileges of matrimony without any
of its obligations, often told her that she was greatly changed.
The first time he made this speech to her it was a knife in her
heart. When he had gone she took herself to task for the
pain he had given her, and, in the woman's way, adjusted her
nature anew to the change in her lover's. She could not deny
that there was a change. It is true Philip still came to Burton
whenever he had a day or two of leisure, but nowadays his
talk was woven of threads of humor, chit-chat of the day, politi-
cal and social gossip ; it was no longer cloth-of-gold. His let-
ters still came, but the weekly budget of news he sent now was
very different from the daily rhapsodies Eleanor had once re-
ceived. His devotion had become an amiable friendship an un-
ceremonious, agreeable comradeship. For a man or woman from
love to friendship is a much longer step than from friendship to
love. Eleanor ignored this as she ignored many things, content-
ing herself with the altered atmosphere of Philip's affection as
humbly and as sorrowfully as the disciples contented themselves
with earth after Thabor. The question of marriage was mutually
ignored. Several times Philip had impatiently broached it ; but

VOL. LV. 24

366 DIVERGING STREAMS. [June,

as affairs still rested as at the first discussion, the same conclu-
sion, greatly to his displeasure, was always reached. Jack's
name was seldom now mentioned before him, as it always aroused
a sarcastic comment and an angry scowl. At first Mrs. Mar-
shall tried to persuade Eleanor to yield to his entreaties and
allow the marriage to take place, insisting on her own willing-
ness and ability to remain in Burton alone ; but Eleanor's firm
refusal finally caused the subject to drop. Occasionally the
mother's heart was agitated with fear for her daughter's future.
She too noticed the change in Philip, but as Eleanor seemed
unconscious of it, she comforted herself with the hope that she
was mistaken, and reminded herself of his constant kindness to
both of them, his many proofs of devotion to Eleanor. All
women are born hero-worshippers, demanding the right to give
their whole intense admiration to the men belonging to them.
Father, brother, lover, husband each has frankincense offered
before him. Women demand the god-like in their men, and
if it does not exist, their belief in it lives to the end ; and so a
woman's lack of logic saves her many a heart-pang.

Suddenly Philip's letters ceased entirely, and for a month
Eleanor heard nothing from him. In spite of the generous ex-
cuses she made for him, her uneasiness grew upon her. She
lulled it to rest with the magic word " to-morrow," and the firm
belief that, unless she received news of his illness, her birthday
would bring him, or at least his affectionate greetings, to her.
It was a day that Philip nearly always spent in Burton, and
Eleanor had come to look forward to it as the one day in the
year that brought a return of his old devotion.

The first of August dawned upon her twenty-seventh birth-
day. She dressed herself with more than ordinary care, and ran
lightly down the stairs and out to the veranda. For half an
hour she walked up and down with quick, impatient steps. The
few hours that would elapse before he came seemed intermina-
ble. Well, there would be word of him in a few moments. For
years, before she sat down to breakfast the morning of her birth-
day, a huge box of white carnations, her favorite flower, was
handed her. To-day but it was not yet breakfast-time ! In a
quarter of an hour, or less, Mrs. Marshall's feeble step sounded,
and she approached her daughter with outstretched arms and
congratulations, accompanying a little gift, too fervent to be
audible. They went into breakfast almost immediately, but the
florist, who had heretofore been entrusted by Philip with the
secret of the carnations, had not yet sent her flowers. She

1892.] DIVERGING STREAMS. 367

anathematized his stupid laziness as she poured the coffee and
talked gaily to her mother. It was long since she had felt her-
self in such a state of pleasant excitement. The postman's ring
sounded and she went to the door. An invitation, a bill, a
trivial note from a chance acquaintance were all that he handed
her. She felt relieved. Philip's letter was always welcome, but
doubly welcome would be Philip himself. In two hours he
would surely come. The first hour flew, the second dragged,
the last minutes almost stood still altogether; but he had not
come when the lagging moments had gone on their way at last.
Till noon she still hoped, though a great dread had taken the
place of her morning's exuberance. To her mother she said
nothing of her disappointment or her fears. The mother's pain-
ed eyes had noticed the absence of Philip's gift and letter as well
as the non-appearance of Philip himself, but she held her peace, still
hopeful that what seemed ill might be well, and upheld by the
American mother's belief in her daughter's ability to manage her
own affairs. The afternoon post brought Eleanor a Boston news-
paper, addressed in a strange handwriting, containing a marked
paragraph in the society news. Three times the girl read the para-
graph before she grasped its meaning. It was an account of a fash-
ionable wedding which had taken place on the 29th of July. The
bride was Miss Harriet Porter, the beautiful and accomplished
daughter, and only child, of a representative and very wealthy
Bostonian. The groom was Mr. Philip Osborne, a gentleman
well known and well liked for his cleverness, his varied culture,
and his many sterling personal qualities.

The paper fell from Eleanor's hands, and for a few seconds
everything swam before her eyes. Only one thought framed
itself in her mind, which she repeated over and over. " The
29th ! And my last thought that night was ' in two days I shall
see him again !' "

Then her eyes fell on the paper again and a sudden sense of
shame overcame her for herself and for him for herself, that
she should have loved a man whose heart was another's yes,
she remembered now that months ago he had spoken to her,
somewhat hesitatingly, " of a Boston friend, a Miss Porter, who
reminded him much of Eleanor except that she had not so
much sweetness but more fascination." Yes, those were his very
words, the man for whom she felt now such a burning shame in
her keen sense of his unworthiness. " Faith is the soul of love,"
she told herself proudly, as her soul rose within her and branded
him traitor and coward. Could he not have asked honorably

368 DIVERGING STREAMS. [June,

for a dismissal from the chains that galled him ? Did he not
realize that her keenest wish was for his happiness ? No, she
discerned at last, his temperament was too dissimilar, of a tex-
ture too light, to let him comprehend any of the depths of her
nature. Not yet did she thank God for her release, but the
blow that crushed her happiness brought her grace to dissever
the real from the unreal Philip Osborne the actual man from
Philip Osborne her idealized hero.

Mechanically she picked up the paper and went upstairs .to
her mother's room. Mrs. Marshall was taking her afternoon nap,
and looked so peaceful and so fragile as she slept that Eleanor
reconsidered her decision. Why give her mother this additional
grief ? Why need she know anything of Philip's defection, at
least for a while, till the wound was less raw ? With Eleanor to
resolve was to do. She softly left her mother's room, and going to
her own, locked the door and prepared to spend an hour in kindling
a fire in her grate for which the Boston paper furnished the first
fuel. Then she brought out the packets of Philip's letters which
were neatly stowed away in her desk. She resisted the impulse
to read these chronicles of a dead love, principally because she
could not get rid of the horror that possessed her at the thought
of having received love-letters from the man who was now an-
other woman's husband. One by one she threw the letters
into the blaze and watched them burn into cinders. The charred
ashes in her grate represented to her the promise and the fail-
ure of her life, the incineration of all her past memories and
hopes and desires, the resolution to live henceforth in to-day,
and for to-day only. One smiles as one chronicles such a re-
solve ; for, if we all lived up to it, what saints and what sages
we would be !

IV.

One afternoon in early September a gentleman of thirty or
thereabout, tall and rather distinguished-looking, rang Mrs.
Marshall's door-bell. A trim little maid responded to his ring
and answered his query as to whether Mrs. Marshall still lived
there in the affirmative. In response to his further inquiry if
the ladies were at home, she said : " Miss Eleanor won't be
home for an hour yet, and Mrs. Marshall is just recovering from
a severe cold and is not able to see visitors."

" That is very unfortunate," said the gentleman; " I am par-
ticularly desirous of seeing Mrs. Marshall to-day. Will you give

1892.] DIVERGING STREAMS. 369

her my card, and ask if she will allow me to wait till Miss
Marshall comes in if she is unable to see me herself?"

The little maid ushered him into the drawing-room. He
looked curiously about him. How familiar and yet how strange
everything seemed ! Furniture and carpet were a little more
worn and faded, and new rugs and draperies, inexpensive but bright
and fresh-looking, hid the old defects. Everything in the room
still showed the deft touch of fastidious women's fingers. Charles
Otto smiled as he looked about him. He forgot that six years
had passed since the last time he had sat waiting for Eleanor
in this room. Then, as now, he felt that the room was filled
with the aroma of her presence. Then but he shrugged his
shoulders and sighed. " Why should a man be perpetually re-
living the hour of pain he has tried for years to forget ?" he
asked himself for the hundredth time, and endeavored to con-
centrate his thoughts entirely upon the present. The sound of
a feeble step descending the stairs came to his assistance. In a
moment Mrs. Marshall appeared in the door-way. Mr. Otto
rose to his feet, but for an instant neither spoke. Then the
simultaneous exclamation came from each : " Mrs. Marshall ! "
" Charles Otto ! " and they cordially shook hands.

" It is very good of you to see me. I was told that you have
been indisposed, and, I fear, you are not yet quite well. You
are paler and thinner, I think, than when I saw you last."

" And older and graver, you may add, Charlie. I have no
hesitation in acknowledging, even to myself, how terribly I have
aged in the last five years."

" My dear Mrs. Marshall, are you going to compel me to en-
force the various truths upon you which you used to scorn as
compliments?" was the gentleman's gallant response, while his
thoughts echoed the truth of her words. She had, indeed, grown
very old and feeble. He felt genuinely concerned as he looked
at her.

" You have said nothing of the change you must notice in
me," he continued. " Six years of knocking about the world
alter a fellow more than a dozen years of quiet home-life. The
circumstances under which I left home, as you are aware, took
a good deal of the zest of life away from me, and I have been
under the further disadvantage of having my ambition bound and
disabled by the weight of my pockets. When love is taken out
of a man's life and an inherited fortune put in, there's not much
incentive to exertion left him. But I have no right to complain
of my lot. Life has run pretty smoothly for me, and I have tried

3/o DIVERGING STREAMS. [June,

to make the most, in my own way, of the days as they drift. Be-
sides, suffering is the key to many interests and many sympa-
thies that, otherwise, are never unlocked to us. How is Elea-
nor ? " he ended abruptly.

" She is always in perfect health, and her vigor is like her
temper, unalterably even. She never spends an idle moment,
and her interest in her teaching never flags. Nevertheless, it is
a constant grief to me that her life should be spent in such a
treadmill. Are there many such daughters as Eleanor, do you
think ? "

There was a moment's pause before the listener said ear-
nestly : " You know what I thought of Eleanor, Mrs. Marshall,
and I assure you my feeling will never change. Is she
happy? "

" She is always cheerful. Happy ? Scarcely. You know that
circumstances have postponed her marriage indefinitely, and that
our anxiety about Jack has never lessened. Since he left us,
five years ago, we have heard nothing. We do not know
whether he is living or dead."

Her voice and her face were shadowed by the pathos that
always fell upon them when she spoke of her son. Mr. Otto
rose impetuously and, taking her hand in his, gave it a sympa-
thetic pressure. " Mrs. Marshall," said he, " I was, as you know,
Jack's best friend, and I have always, since I heard of his unfor-
tunate departure from home, reproached myself with my ab-
sence from Burton at that time. I felt that I might have done
something to prevent so mistaken a step, though I am proba-
bly exaggerating the extent of my influence over him in so
thinking. At any rate, for this reason and many others, I am
more pleased than I can say to be the bearer of news to you of
Jack."

Her face grew deadly pale and her whole body trembled as
if in an ague. Her eyes, glittering with excitement, were fas-
tened upon his face as if her whole soul were merged in his
words.

" It is good news," he continued. " Jack is well and, at last,
on the road to fortune. In all probability he will soon be with
you again. I ran across him on Broadway the other day, and
we had dinner together and a fine talk over old times, and, of
course, we unwound our adventures since for each other's bene-
fit. I'm not going to spoil Jack's story by telling you everything
he told me. I'll leave the details to him, and give you the sum-
mary that things have not been altogether rose-colored for him

1892.] DIVERGING STREAMS. 371

since the day he set out to make himself 'master of his fate.'
Life was a hard battle, with sickness and accident and false friends
all leagued against him. More than once, he said, he was on
the point of throwing up the fight and acknowledging himself a
failure. But the misery of having accomplished nothing to prove
his affection for you, helped him, he says, to stick it out. 'Jack's
pluck ' was an adage at school, you know. Well, the long and
the short of it is, that failure after failure, unsuccessful ranching,
unsuccessful mining, unsuccessful everything, in one part of the
world after another, finally ended in a stroke of luck, I have
forgotten just how and where, and Jack found himself in New
York with the chance of a lifetime before him ki the unexpected
opportunity of buying a tract of land near Yonkers. It was a
wonderful bargain and he is now at the head of a land company
there. I tried to persuade him to come on to Burton with me,
but he did not dare run the risk of leaving his affairs in an un-
settled condition. A land boom, you know, is of too cyclonic a
nature to be dallied with. In a few months he expects that the
entire tract, which has been cut up into building lots, of course,
will be sold out, and that his share of the profits will be a cool
hundred thousand. He absolutely declined either to come or
write till his success had become a surety. He is working night
and day, and living in a state of the wildest excitement, at the
prospect of making a little fortune for his mother. It is beauti-
ful to hear him speak of you and Eleanor, although I told him
it was difficult to reconcile his behavior with his affection. But
he seems to have a logic of his own and to live accordingly."

It was not in response to these last sentences that Mrs.
Marshall murmured a fervent " Thank God ! " Indeed she
scarcely heard his last words. The sense of relief she experienced
was so intense that she felt as if her whole being had gone
through a series of Delsartean relaxations. She sat perfectly
quiescent for a while, realizing, bit by bit, the good news she
had heard. When she looked up her eyes were suffused with
tears. " How am I to thank you, Charlie, for the happiness you
have given me ? '' she asked tremulously.

" Dear Mrs. Marshall, am I not the one to be grateful for the
happiness I have had in bringing good news to you? But I
am not going to inflict any more of my company upon you just
now. You need a good rest after the excitement of this talk. I
am craving a sight of Eleanor, but I sha'n't remain to-day, if I
may come again soon."

A gracious invitation to come at any time was extended and

372 DIVERGING STREAMS. [June,

accepted, and then, after a warm hand-shake, Mr. Otto departed.
Biting the end of his cigar reflectively, he strolled leisurely home-
ward, his thoughts still in the widow's little drawing-room. He
passed a telegraph office and stood irresolute for a moment ;
then, with a muttered, " By Jove ! I think I will," entered, and,
calling for a blank, wrote a message. He read it over, hesitated
for a few seconds, and finally tore it across and left the office.
He had concluded to write to Jack Marshall instead of sending
him the abrupt message that, if he wished to see his mother
alive, he must come at once. Charles Otto, was a very thought-
ful man, and it seemed to him a wanton cruelty to needlessly
alarm the son wh&se work was already a sufficient drain on his
health, and whose misfortunes made amends for his youthful
thoughtlessness, A letter would explain all so much more clear-
ly and satisfactorily. Cause for alarm there certainly was. The
change in Mrs. Marshall's appearance was not to be accounted
for on the plea of time or anxiety alone. Her health must be
in a very precarious condition. He would write to Jack imme-
diately. Now, immediately is a very elastic word, and Charles
Otto's good intentions did not succeed in getting themselves
carried into effect before the evening of the next day.

One letter, however, had been written to Jack at once. As
soon as Mrs. Marshall and Eleanor had had a long and happy
talk over their visitor and his wonderful news, the mother sat
down to write to her boy. Hour after hour she wrote, pouring
out all the tenderness of her soul, all the repressed love of five
long years, upon the wanderer. At last her pen paused in its
nervous course and she folded the letter, .remembering with a
pang that she had forgotten to ask Charles Otto for her son's
address. But he would come in a day or two, so it did not
matter. She could well afford to be patient for days when she
had learned to be patient for years.

When she had finished writing she felt completely exhausted
in every nerve and fibre. Eleanor's strong arms undressed her
and put her tenderly to bed. Anxiety for her mothers health
had begun to prey on Eleanor lately. Day and night it was a
weight at her heart, vague and ominous. Although it seemed to
her she had grown familiar with the book of sorrow, she found
it difficult to con this new lesson the cruelty of illness when
poverty is bound to it. To count one's scanty earnings for
every-day necessaries when the beloved of one's heart is in need
of every luxury, is indeed to feel the curse and not the blessed-
ness of poverty.

1892.] DIVERGING STREAMS. 373

To-night Mrs. Marshall was strangely restless. Eleanor held
her in her arms, the magnetism of her touch controlling the
quivering nerves and soothing them to sleep. Before she slept
she said, in the reflective tone of one who is solving a difficult
problem : " Eleanor, what a different thing it is a daughter's
love and a son's. Jack was a good boy always, and never gave
me a moment's trouble till he went out into the world to win
a fortune for me, while you stayed at home and gave me your
life. That's the difference he loved me and you lived for me.
But, please God, it will all come right in the end, and you will
be a happy wife yet."

The mother closed her eyes and soon fell asfeep without no-
ticing the involuntary shiver that ran through her daughter's
frame at her last words. Her sleep was not of long duration.
About five the next morning Eleanor was awakened by her
mother's coughing, and fearing she had taken a fresh cold rose
at once and prepared the simple cough-mixture which was con-
sidered an infallible remedy by mother and daughter. When
she went to her, Eleanor was appalled at the change in her
mother. She was in a raging fever, coughed incessantly, and
breathed with such difficulty that Eleanor feared she would
suffocate before her eyes. Her faith in the home-made cough-
mixture failed Eleanor at this crisis. She rushed for the little
servant, and, shaking her out of her heavy slumbers, despatched
her for the doctor, who came in a very short time, pronounced
the patient suffering from a severe attack of bronchitis, and was
grave and non-committal over her condition. After leaving a
prescription and giving Eleanor, who was utterly unversed in
the duties of a trained nurse, minute directions in regard to the
giving of the medicine and general care of the patient, he de-
parted, promising to call again in a few hours. For the next
two days his visits were frequent and regular, but he gave
Eleanor no encouragement. During the greater part of the
time Mrs. Marshall was quite unconscious. On the morning of
the second day, during one of the doctor's visits, Mr. Otto called
and for a brief moment held Eleanor's hand in his. She was
preoccupied and worn after a sleepless night, and the constant
agony of anxiety she had been enduring for the past two days.
But as Charles Otto took her hand he felt all his old-time love
and admiration for her coursing through him in a more over-
whelming current. She was genuinely glad to see him and
greeted him with all possible friendliness. He was deeply
grieved to hear of Mrs. Marshall's illness and announced that

374 DIVERGING STREAMS. [June,

he would telegraph at once to Jack, inwardly regretting the un-
lucky impulse that had prevented his doing so two days before.

In the evening the doctor confirmed the dreadful fear that
had from the beginning hung over her. He told her, with much
genuine sympathy in his voice, that her mother might live till
morning and might even live through the next day. Beyond
that he could give her no hope.

" Stunned by the blow," is a phrase we use carelessly, un-
thinking what a merciful compensation of nature it conveys ; for
if the moments when we realize with full intensity the tragic
'element of life were very frequent, the keenness of the agony
would be more than our human frames could bear. So Eleanor
lived through the night watching the flame of life in her mother
grow fainter and weaker with every hour. Her thoughts strug-
gled to free themselves from the weight that pressed them
down. Over and over again her passionate prayers broke from
her lips, until the whole room seemed athrob with the intensity
of her petitions. At last the morning came, and the cruel sun-
light broke through the windows and gleamed mockingly upon
the agony within.

Suddenly, as Eleanor bent over her, Mrs. Marshall opened her
eyes and listened intently. "Don't you hear his step?" she
whispered. " Go and bring him to me ! "

Her manner was authoritative. Eleanor, bewildered but
afraid of agitating her, went down the stairs and opened the
door. As she looked out she caught sight of the figure of a
man coming towards the house. He looked worn and anxious
and prematurely aged, but in his walk there was the indescriba-
ble something that marks the man who has won success from
fortune. Eleanor trembled in every limb. There was no power
in her to come forward and meet the stranger, but she made
no resistance when he sprang wildly towards her and took her
in his arms. There was much love and pity in her heart, but
no exultation that Jack had at last returned.

Together they entered the sick-room. The mother was again
lying with closed eyes in the stupor of unconsciousness. Not
quicker nor slower beat the flicker of life in her when Jack
stooped over her and his tears fell upon her face.

MARIE LOUISE SANDROCK.

1892.] WHY I BECAME A CATHOLIC. 375

WHY I BECAME A CATHOLIC.

I WAS born and educated in an atmosphere of Protestantism,
but without any fixed or definite beliefs. My friends and asso-
ciates were Protestants, and I had few if any acquaintances
among Catholics. Correct principles of honor and morality were
instilled into my mind in my early training, but it was years
after I attained to manhood before the necessity for any dis-
tinct religious beliefs first impressed me.

While I was not imbued with any bitter prejudices, yet all
my impressions went strongly against the Catholic Church, for
I had accepted without examination the common Protestant ob-
jections to its dogmas and policies, though the beauty and dig-
nity of its ritual and ceremonials excited my admiration.

The importance of seriously examining the subject of religion
candidly and impartially occurred to me from time to time, un-
til finally I determined to investigate the whole subject with all
the candor and earnestness that I possessed.

I had been trained as a lawyer to analytical and logical
methods of thought and investigation, and I proposed to use these
methods in this as I would in the examination of any other sub-
ject, rejecting all prejudices and preconceived impressions, and re-
solved to follow with all possible fidelity the logic of my inquiry.

I believed in the existence of God in a general way, but the
evidences of his existence were not clear or distinct to my
mind. I remember that Paley's works on the Evidences of Chris-
tianity and his Natural Theology were disappointing to me, and
instead of proving the case rather threw a shadow of uncertainty
about it. The theory of design in nature proved clearly enough
that there is some all-pervading intelligence presiding over and
governing matter, but it did not prove to my mind that there
is a personal God with moral attributes. I could not see the
reflection of such a God in the face of the physical world.
Finally I set myself to the task of solving the problem in my
own way, and I now purpose to reproduce faithfully my methods
and process of reasoning.

These questions presented themselves at the outset : Is there
a God ? Has man a soul ? Was there a divine revelation ?
Was there an Incarnation ? Without a moral law coming from
a supreme being, what is the value of the quality that we term

376 WHY I BECAME A CATHOLIC. [June,

morality ? Is the divine truth one and indivisible ? Who holds
it, and who is authorized to teach it ? In a word, is there a
visible true church established by Almighty God, or are there
hundreds of true churches all divinely commissioned and each
proclaiming a different creed ?

It is idle to suppose that these things can be accepted on
faith alone ; for those who earnestly and honestly ask these
questions a rational and satisfactory answer must be given. I
did not demand or expect that exact quality of reasoning that
produces mathematical certainty or demonstration, but another
philosophical method that would bring, if possible, certitude to
the mind of the reasonableness of the scheme that was to be
accepted ; such a degree of probability as would form the basis
of action in the most important temporal concerns.

I began with the inquiry : " Is there such a force or quality
or essence in our nature as a conscience, and has the thing that
all men call morality a positive and an actual existence." These
two ideas blended themselves very closely together in my mind.

No man denies to himself the essential quality or attribute
of his nature that impels him to moral action. Sceptics and re-
ligionists alike speak of morality and conscience. How did these
things come into existence? Did man create a conscience for
himself, or did it come by evolution ? Why did he create it,
or why did generations of men evolve it ?

Why should man have created out of his imagination a con-
science to torture him for many of his actions which are purely
natural in themselves, and for his most secret thoughts. And
having felt its sting, why should he persist in retaining it ? If
he created it, why does he not annihilate it. If it is simply an
idea he should have the intelligence to perceive that it is with-
out real force, and should emancipate himself from this artificial
and self-imposed bondage. I could not deny or ignore the ex-
istence of my conscience as a distinct part of myself. Nor
could I deny the existence of morality. The question was, To
what source do they owe their origin, and upon what authority
do the laws of morality repose for their sanction ?

These questions came at once into view : What is life in its
entire fulness ? what is its end ? and has it any fixed and positive
value ? Suppose that it extends no further than death and ends in
oblivion, is it worth having? The answer is clear and undeniable
that to some it is sweet, to many it is bitter, to some it is
bright and beautiful, and to others it is a sorrowful and heavy
burden. It would follow that to many it has a real value, and

1892.] WHY I BECAME A CATHOLIC. 377

to many it has no value at all. And this would depend not up-
on the conduct but upon the environment of each individual. And
for each individual there would be a different answer. But to a
serious and honest mind resolutely bent upon a reasonable solution
of the problem these answers are unworthy of acceptance. Life
should be worth living to all men, and its ultimate goal should
be within the reach of all men. But if it begins and ends in this
world, and there is no accountability hereafter, what meaning can
there be in such terms as virtue, honesty, morality, right, and
wrong. If these qualities have any positive existence, there must
be a moral law defining right moral action, intrinsically capable
of enforcement, and which meri motu imposes itself as a force
upon the conscience. If there can be sin and impurity of
thought it is obvious that this moral law must be self-enforcing.

Can such a moral order have been created and these laws
prescribed by society, upon a sociological theory that shuts out
of view at once everything but the life of this world ? And can
it be possible that obedience to laws thus enacted constitutes the
ultimate object and end of life?

Is the true aim of life the happiness of the individual ? If
so, then I know that all the moral philosophies ever formulated
by the human mind are utterly incapable of making men happy.
Excluding from the problem all idea of an existence in a future
state, it must be evident to the commonest understanding that
this life has no positive value ; that happiness is attainable by
many, and unattainable by others without any fault of their own,
and finally that success and failure, prosperity and adversity, are
distributed without the slightest reference to the private morality
of the individual.

The thought presented itself to my mind with great dis-
tinctness and force that there must be a broader and higher
view of life, and a solution that would place its aim and end
within the reach of all men.

There is a generally accepted belief that happiness of some
sort is the chief object of life, and we are to struggle for that
happiness by conforming our conduct to certain lines of action
defined by the laws of morality. From these premises it should
follow that conformity to these rules of conduct would result
in the happiness of the individual, but such is not the
case so far as this present life is concerned. On the con-
trary, if this world alone is considered, the violation of some
of the laws of morality, in the estimation of many, contribute to
the enjoyment of life. Again, all men speak familiarly of the

378 WHY I BECAME^ A CA THOLIC. [June,

duties and obligations of life. But the question then arose,
What power created these obligations and defined these duties ?

Have the laws of morality only a human origin ? Have they
been enacted by one set of men calling themselves virtuous,
and imposed upon other men who enjoy life more keenly by
not being virtuous? Jf so, it is quite clear that the moral code
is purely conventional, and without any positive moral qualities
whatever, and that morality thus resolves itself into the science
of government. Or, in other words, everything becomes a pure-
ly human conception of the particular lines of conduct which are
supposed to contribute most largely to the well-being of society.
But this brings into view only the horizon of this life.

The impossibility of imagining a moral law without a moral
law-maker, the singularity of the notion that one set of men
can make a law of moral conduct binding on the conscience of all
men, and that there can be no higher source for the laws of mor-
ality, forces the mind logically to the acceptance of one or the
other of two alternatives. We must reject absolutely the idea
that there is such a thing as a moral law possessing positive
and fixed qualities, or we must believe that there is a superna-
tural law-maker, or, in a word, that there is a personal God.
There is no via media.

I could not accept the first of these alternatives, and the
whole inquiry resolved itself into the question of the reason-
ableness of the existence of a divine moral law. The existence
of a moral nature, a conscience, and a soul bound to accounta-
bility to some superior power involved the idea necessarily of a
divine law. A law must be prescribed by a superior power and
must be capable of enforcement. Without these essentials it
may be some sort of a precept, but it cannot be a law.

I perceived a marvellously wonderful and complex physical
world, presided over and governed by physical laws having no
human origin. And when I accepted the belief that there is a
moral life and a moral order, the conclusion followed irresistibly
that this was presided over by moral laws, having their source
in a supreme moral being, who must be the perfection of all
truth and morality. And, moreover, as his laws are the perfec-
tion of all laws, and involve every essential quality in the adap-
tation of means to ends, and as there can be no obedience to
an unknown law, the conclusion became inevitable that this di-
vine law has been revealed.

I reflected that none of the various religions proceed on the
theory of a special and direct divine revelation to each individual

1892.] WHY I BECAME A CATHOLIC. 379

soul. On the contrary, they all insist upon the widely differ-
ent theory of a general revelation entrusted to human agencies
for its dissemination and perpetuation. This opened the ques-
tions, When was it revealed and to whom was it confided ?

I did not closely examine the claims of Judaism, Mohamme-
danism, or any of the various forms of. paganism, as the en-
lightened world is rapidly rejecting all of these, and limiting its
inquiry to the truth of Christianity. And thus at once the
claims of Protestantism and Catholicity came into view, and the
whole question was narrowed to the inquiry in respect to which
one of these two great divisions of Christians holds the whole
truth and nothing but the truth.

I perceived that there are fundamental differences in the
theory and principles upon which each rested. They are not in
harmonious relations, but essentially antagonistic. Protestantism
charges the Catholic Church with teaching false and superstitious
doctrines. While the latter declares that no body of Protestants
accepts the whole truth. To my mind the proposition is unde-
niable, or self-evident, that the divine truth is one and indivisi-
ble, and can make no compromise with error. So the whole
question came at once to the issue between Catholicity and
Protestantism.

One stands for the theory of individual and private judgment,
the other for church authority. One asserts the proposition that
each individual is to construe the Bible for himself, and select
or formulate his own creed ; the other declares that when Al-
mighty God revealed his law he entrusted it to his church with
the authority to teach and interpret it. One regards the entire
aggregation of all the various Christian bodies as constituting
the Church of God. The other claims for itself the prerogative
of divine authority, and in its unity of doctrine and creed that
it is the visible Church of Almighty God. Protestantism declares
that the Bible is the only true guide, and from its pages each
individual is to work out his creed. In a word, this logically
and necessarily implies that he can construe these laws correctly,
and formulate a creed which will hold the truth and exclude all
errors.

I set myself to the task of analyzing this fundamental charac-
teristic of Protestantism. It seemed at the first view, and upon
careful consideration, out of harmony indeed, at variance with
every theory of human laws and government.

The entire conception of the human mind attributes to a
government of law and order these essential and fundamental

380 WHY I BECAME A CATHOLIC. [June,

attributes ; it must be one and undivided, its policies must be
harmonious, it should assert supreme authority, it should con-
strue its own laws, and aim at absolute exactness and uniform-
ity in their interpretation. Moreover, it must provide for the
perpetuity of its own existence by regular and orderly succes-
sion.

In the entire experience of mankind I could perceive noth-
ing which furnishes a parallel, an analogy, or a sanction for the
Protestant conception of the administration of the laws of God
and the moral order of the universe. The operation of its fun-
damental principle has produced the greatest variety of creeds,
and a multiplicity of churches. It is the principle of the indefi-
nite divisibility of the truth.

Logically, according to the Protestant principle, there is no
reason why each individual should not have his own peculiar
creed, differing in some of its shadings from all other creeds.
There could then be no organizations in the sense of visible
spiritual communions. The idea of the certainty, as well as the
value, of the unity of the truth is at once lost, unless this Pro-
testant answer is accepted, that while the different Protestant
denominations differ in many particulars, yet they all concur in
what it terms the essential truths of Christianity. What are the
essentials ? And what authority is to give the answer ? The au-
thority should be infallible to warrant the soundness of the
judgment pronounced. But no Protestant church claims infalli-
bility. And all together they cannot possess a power which no
single one of them possesses.

I perceived that the different Protestant communions do not,
in fact, concur in what constitute the essentials. There is no-
where to be found an authoritative declaration concurred in by
the entire body of Protestants, and against which there is no
dissent, defining a creed which contains the truths essential to be
believed, and an enumeration of the truths not necessary to be
believed. If Protestantism could secure unification upon a
creed defining the essential truths, there would then be present-
ed the question whether this unified Protestantism or Catholicity
represented the true church. But all the efforts of Protestantism
in this direction have failed.

In this multiplicity of creeds how was I to decide ? I per-
ceived that Protestantism did not logically have its origin in
the Reformation. It was simply a new expression of dissent
from the Catholic .Church, which had existed in various phases
from the earliest days. Arianism, for example, was not as ex-

1892.] WHY I BECAME A CATHOLIC. 381

tensive as Protestantism, though it was a wide-spread and for-
midable dissent from the doctrine of the co-equality of the Father
and the Son. And hundreds of other dissents and protests ap-
peared from time to time. Protestantism was of larger dimen-
sions and spread more rapidly than any of its predecessors, but
it does not differ from them in its essential principle of the
right of private judgment and in its rejection of church au-
thority.

The question presented to my mind at this point was, why
the church established by Almighty God needed reforming ? And
the answer that Protestantism gave was that errors had crept
into its doctrines and teachings. But I could not perceive now
errors could find their way into the teachings of a divinely es-
tablished church. Was it divinely established originally, with au-
thority from Almighty God to teach his law ? Did the apostles
have this authority, and what of the commission of their imme-
diate successors?

Catholics and Protestants alike agree that Almighty God re-
vealed his laws, commanded his apostles to teach all nations,
and made the covenant that he would be with them to the con-
summation of the world. This presented two distinct conclusions :
first, that this Divine Institution, thus created, was to live as
long as the world ; and second, as it held the Divine commission
to teach the law of God, it must teach infallibly the truth to
the end of time. In these two essentials lay its whole value to
humanity. It was to exist, not for one generation but for all
generations, and it was to be infallibly true, not for one genera-
tion but for all generations.

If it really ended in collapse and failure at the Reformation,
then I could not believe in its divine creation, because I could
not reconcile these two events. It was simply impossible for me
to comprehend the idea that the work of Almighty God co.uld
be reconstructed and reformed except by a new revelation.

The apostles were divinely inspired, and the church, as it
existed in the days of the apostles, must have been a visible
church ; in a word, a distinct and visible organization, with divine
authority to teach the truth. It was as incomprehensible that
this authority should be withdrawn as that this church should
cease to exist. If it taught errors, and so became corrupt, so
that it forfeited its commission, then indeed the Christian reli-
gion must have come to an end.

The logic of Protestantism is self-destructive. If true, it de-
stroys utterly the claims of Catholicity to be a true religion; but

VOL. LV. 25

382 WHY I BECAME A CATHOLIC. [June,

unfortunately it fails at the same time to establish the authority
or to prove the claims of Protestantism.

The inquiry narrowed itself to the alternative of accepting
the Catholic Church as the true church of Almighty God. To
my mind it was this or nothing Catholicity or Agnosticism. I
reflected that the whole subject of religion should require the
same methods of reasoning, combined with the same quality of
faith, that are applied to the important temporal concerns of
life. When forced to come to some conclusion, we act upon the
best evidence attainable, and mixed with our reason there is a
certain element of faith. We never stop and refuse to act, where
action is demanded or is important, because we cannot have
mathematical demonstration. Using these methods I began the
inquiry into the doctrines and faith of the Catholic Church.

I should not omit to state in this connection that the con-
trolling idea with me was, that the only logical mode of inquiry
has first to decide whether Almighty God had established a visi-
ble church, and then endeavor to accept its teachings on faith,
instead of taking the opposite course of making out a creed to
suit my private judgment and then selecting a church to fit
my creed. Intellectually I was convinced of the divine authority
of the Catholic Church long before I had the faith to accept its
doctrines. In all that preceded this point I had used my rea-
son, and upon the theory of the strongest probabilities and the
best and highest attainable evidence I believed that there is
a personal God, a revealed religion, a visible church invested
with divine authority, and from these premises the conclusion
was irresistible that the Catholic Church is the visible church
of Almighty God.

It was now apparent that faith in things that I could not
fully comprehend must enter largely into the work of finishing
the , task.

My reason had convinced me that there was a divine revela-
tion, and my faith must accept the mysteries of this revelation
as true. Upon investigation I perceived that many of the ob-
jections to the doctrines of the Catholic Church rested upon
misconceptions in respect to their true character. And I also
perceived that some of its dogmas were incomprehensible, and
apparently contradicted by our senses ; for example, the doctrine
of the Holy Eucharist.

But here again I reflected that the whole Christian scheme
of salvation, as understood by Protestants as well as Catholics,
rests largely upon miracles, and accordingly makes great demands

1892.] WHY I BECAME A CATHOLIC. 383

upon our faith. Protestants and Catholics alike agree in the
doctrine of the Incarnation, and believe in the divinity of our
Lord, and yet this belief is contrary to the experience of the
human race, is truly miraculous, and must be accepted by faith
alone.

I recognized a striking analogy between the doctrine of the
Real Presence in the Holy Eucharist and the divinity of our
Lord. And the idea impressed me with overwhelming force that
every Protestant argument against the Catholic dogma of the
Real Presence could be logically and consistently urged against
the divinity of our Lord. According to the evidence of the
human senses, our Lord was a man made of the same flesh and
blood as other men ; eating, sleeping, getting weary and resting
as other men, born of a human mother. He claimed to be God,
and to be co-equal with Almighty God himself. Wrapped up in
all the seeming and appearance of a man, there was the Real
Presence of God.

All the apparent evidences of the senses, the entire expe-
rience of the world, were to weigh nothing in the scale, and
Protestantism demanded that I should believe that this man was
a God. And yet the same authority demanded that I should
follow implicitly the apparent evidence of my senses, and for that
reason reject the Real Presence in the Holy Eucharist. To all
the senses it seems to be bread, and therefore it is only bread.
Our Lord was to the human senses, and according to the ex-
perience of mankind, only a man ; and yet these evidences and
tests were to be discarded, and this most extraordinary and won-
derful of miracles accepted on faith alone, as above and beyond
these human senses and this human experience.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, in the whole scheme of Christi-
anity requires a more implicit faith than the story of the Incar-
nation. After this it is idle to argue that the Catholic doctrine
of the Holy Eucharist must be rejected on the ground that it
is apparently contradicted by our senses. As for that matter,
the doctrine of the Trinity, of the Real Presence, of the Incarna-
tion, and of the Atonement of our Lord are incomprehensible
intellectually. Philosophically and accurately considered they
are not positively contradicted by our senses, but they are
beyond the senses, and they all fall within the same cate-
gory. The evidences of each are the same, and rest upon the
word of God and the testimony of the church. The same wit-
ness that proclaimed the Incarnation and the Blessed Trinity,
declared the doctrine of the Real Presence in the Holy Euchar-

384 LEO XIII. [June,

ist. If, therefore, the objection of incomprehensibility can be
urged successfully against one of them, it must prevail logically
against all of them.

To my mind the conclusion became clear that revealed truth
must be one and indivisible, and therefore the impossibility of
accepting part and rejecting any other part of this truth.

The dominating logic that pressed me to the final accep-
tance of the Catholic faith was the profound conviction that
there must be a visible church as an essential part of Christianity,
that the Catholic Church was established by Almighty God
with infallible authority to teach the divine truth, and that an
institution thus established and commissioned could not teach a
false doctrine.

FRANK JOHNSTON.

Jackson, Miss.

LEO XIII.

TWIN burdens of imprisonment and years

Upon his trembling form have left their trace ;

The foe's sharp malice in his saintly face
Has cut deep sluices for his bitter tears ;
Dethroned and captive, bent with anxious fears,

His foes would crush him with one last disgrace,

The Kingdom's Keys with pilgrim's staff replace,
And stone the weeping fugitive with jeers.
Then they with fleets and myriads of swords

(Such is their thought) would suffer no return.
One weak, old man against these ruthless hordes!

Lo ! through the night old Moscow's ruins burn,
Canossa's tower a refuge still affords,

And tear-dimmed eyes Lepanto's decks discern.

FRANCIS LAVELLE.

1892.] THE THIRD ARCHBISHOP OF WESTMINSTER. 385

THE THIRD ARCHBISHOP OF WESTMINSTER.

THE proverb which assures us that " the unexpected always
happens " has, happily, not been borne out in the appointment
of a new Archbishop of Westminster. In this instance it is the
event which was most generally anticipated that has actually
come to pass. For many years, and at a time when the late
Cardinal Manning's hold upon life showed least signs of relaxing,
the then Bishop of Salford was regarded by almost universal
consent as the heir presumptive to the archiepiscopal throne ;
and though, when at length the melancholy moment arrived for
filling up the vacancy, the claims of more than one perfectly eli-
gible candidate were put forward, there was never at any time
any very real doubt as to the one upon whom the choice would ul-
timately fall. Certainly at the present moment there is no dearth
of wise and zealous ecclesiastics in the English hierarchy who
might worthily hold the helm, but Dr. Vaughan seemed to many
to be in an especial manner marked out for the post, and this
widespread consensus of opinion has now been confirmed by the
convincing approval of the Holy Father.

It would be unreasonable to deny that the task of the new arch-
bishop, which would be, under any circumstances, an onerous and
exacting one, is rendered in the present case doubly difficult by the
fact that he has to succeed a man of so striking and commanding
a personality as the late cardinal. It is a fortunate circumstance,
therefore, that Archbishop Vaughan comes to rule over his new
flock with independent and long-established claims of his own
upon their consideration and regard. Indeed, it is a fact which
is in itself well worthy of note, that the three successive occu-
pants of the throne of the archdiocese should have such per-
fectly distinct, as well as suqh undeniable, titles to the great
position which they have, in turn, been called upon to fill. Each
of them has assumed the reins of government under a totally dif-
ferent condition of affairs, and there has been in each case so,
at least, it would appear to us a happy appropriateness in the
man selected for the purpose. Of the relative claims to great-
ness of Cardinal Wiseman and Cardinal Manning we do not feel
called upon to speak, any more than we feel that we have the
power to prophesy whether the new archbishop will surpass, or
whether he will fall short of, the splendid traditions of his pre-
decessors. All we wish now to point out is that, while there

386 THE THIRD ARCHBISHOP OF WESTMINSTER. [June,

is ample room for drawing parallels between the three archbish-
ops, the difference of the circumstances which surround each case
almost wholly precludes the possibility of making comparisons.
This difference, we believe, will be visible at a glance. Cardinal
Wiseman had to do violence, as it were, to the deep-rooted pre-
judices of Englishmen, and, though an Englishman himself, he
was generally regarded by the great mass of his countrymen as
the emissary of a foreign power. Unreasonable though this view
may appear in the light of the present day, the fact, neverthe-
less, remains, and it furnishes some proof of the bigotry which
he had to combat. The establishment of the hierarchy was
much in the nature of a surgical operation. It was the violent
remedy which alone could bring about a better order of things ;
yet for the time being it only stirred up fever and irritation.
Protestant England resented what it termed the " Papal aggres-
sion," and, though it at length became partially pacified, it could
never wholly reconcile itself to the great cardinal who had forced
the Catholic hierarchy unwillingly upon the country. The ap-
pointment of Cardinal Manning, therefore, came at a singularly
opportune moment. The vigorous policy of his predecessor had
been accomplished ; England had been reclaimed by the church
and parcelled out into sees, each under the rule of a separate
bishop. The time had now come for reconciling the great mass
of the people with the ancient faith, and what instrument surely
was more fitted for the accomplishment of such a task than the
man whom the Protestants still, with a kind of resentful affec-
tion, regarded as one of themselves ? Cardinal Manning exhibited
in its most forcible manner the undying vitality of the church,
and the irresistible power which she still possesses of carrying
conviction even to the minds of her most intellectual antagonists.
In a word, he represented not so much the glorious traditions
of the past though to these he always loyally subscribed as the
great promise of the future, for he was, like Newman, the represen-
tative, par excellence, of that powejful phalanx of converts which
is one of the mainstays of modern English Catholicism. It is in
this particular respect that we may regard Archbishop Vaughan
as an especially appropriate successor to the late cardinal. It
seems fitting that the see which has been so long presided over
by one of the most distinguished examples of the returning faith
of England, should now be governed by one of the descendants
of those old English families who never once faltered in their
fidelity. Time enough has elapsed under the beneficent rule of
Cardinal Manning to have allayed the fears and attracted the
sympathies of the English people, and the moment would now

1892.] THE THIRD ARCHBISHOP OF WESTMINSTER. 387

seem to be ripe for giving them some visible and living reminder"
that the Catholic faith is not only a powerful modern institution,,
but that it is also the faith of their forefathers. This, it is to
be hoped, will prove to be one salutary effect of Dr. Vaughan's
appointment.

It is, of course, needless to state here what is, indeed, little
better than a truism, that mere length of pedigree counts for
little in the eye of the church, for the church in the present day
knows no other title to preferment than that of personal merit.
Nevertheless, it cannot be otherwise than an interesting and
pleasing circumstance when individual worth and ancient lineage
are so remarkably combined in one person as they are in the
case of the new archbishop. The family "of the Vaughans traces
its ancestry back to the Herbert, Count of Vermandois, who
landed in England with the Conqueror, who married one of that
monarch's granddaughters, and who acted as chamberlain to Wil-
liam Rufus. From this historic beginning the family can be
traced in a direct line, through Herbert, Lord of Gwarindee (in
the time of Edward III.), down to its chief living representative,
Herbert, Archbishop of Westminster. Throughout its history it
has remained steadfast to the Catholic cause, and has suffered
much in consequence. It even cast in its lot with the final and
desperate struggle for the Catholic succession in the last century,
and one of its members was attainted for treason for participation
in the futile battle of Culloden. Dr. Vaughan thus forms a link
between the Roman Church in England of the pre-Reformation
and the post-Reformation periods, and is a striking proof of the
unbroken continuity of English Catholicism. The name of
Vaughan is derived from the Welsh associations of the family,
the word Vychan, or the Younger, which was affixed to the
name of one of its early members, having been eventually cor-
rupted into the now familiar patronymic. The mottoes of the
family, of which there were two, are both particularly appro-
priate, the Welsh one being Duw a digon (God suffices), and
the Latin one. which gives rise to the crest of a child's head en-
circled by a serpent, being Simplices sicut pueri, sagaces sicut ser-
pentes. The ancient traditions of the Vaughans, which are thus
inseparably bound up with the Catholic faith, have been consis-
tently followed by the later representatives of the family. This is
sufficiently indicated by the fact that the late Colonel Vaughan,
Dr. Vaughan's father, had among his six brothers and sisters
three who were priests one being the present Bishop of Ply-
mouth and two who were nuns; while among his thirteen
children he numbered two archbishops (the late Archbishop of

388 THE THIRD ARCHBISHOP OF WESTMINSTER. [June,

Sydney and the present Archbishop of Westminster), two re-
ligious (Father Bernard Vaughan, S.J., and Father Jerome, foun-
der of St. Benedict's, Fort Augustus), two secular priests, and
four nuns. Seldom, it is safe to assert, has the grace of a relig-
ious vocation been so abundantly bestowed upon the members
of one family, and still more rarely, we may add, has the call
been met by so spontaneous and generous a response. There is
much that might be ""written that would be of deep interest con-
cerning the life and labors of other members of the family, but
on the present occasion we must confine ourselves to a brief
survey of the career and the achievements of its leading and
most distinguished representative.

The Most Rev. Herbert Alfred Vaughan, Archbishop of West-
minster and Metropolitan of England, is the eldest son of Col-
onel John Francis Vaughan, of Courtfield, in. Herefordshire, by his
first wife, Eliza Louisa, daughter of the late Mr. John Rolls, of
the Hendre, County Monmouth. He was born at Gloucester on
April 15, 1832, and was educated at Downside and Stonyhurst
Colleges in England, and subsequently at Buegelette, on the conti-
nent of Europe. Putting aside his early inclination to follow in his
father's footsteps by joining the army, he determined to devote
his life to the service of God, and with a view to preparing him-
self for the priesthood he, in December of 1851, at the age of
nineteen, became a student at the Accademia dei nobili Ecclesias-
tici at Rome. It was just at this time that Father Henry
Edward Manning, then newly ordained a priest of the Catholic
Church, which he had entered but a few months previously, also
became a member of the Roman Accademia, and there the two
English students the one still on the very threshold of life, the
other already in his prime passed some years together in pro-
found theological studies. It was a happy omen that the two
future archbishops should have been thus early associated, and
it is a still more gratifying fact that the bond of association and
sympathy which they then formed was never loosened, but grew
closer and stronger as years went by. Their training and ante-
cedents could not well have been more dissimilar ; their relig-
ious and political traditions stood out in the boldest contrast ;
yet, as all roads are said to lead to Rome, so all Catholics are
certain at last of finding themselves within a common centre of
unity ; and thus, in spite of differences of birth and education,
in spite of diversities of political predilection, there was always
a remarkable union of thought and intention between the Cardi-
nal and Bishop Vaughan.

In his twenty-third year namely, on October 28, 1854 Dr.

1892.] THE THIRD ARCHBISHOP OF WESTMINSTER. 389

Vaughan was ordained priest by a Franciscan bishop at Lucca, and
returning shortly afterwards to England, he was at once appoint-
ed vice-president of St., Edmund's College, in Hertfordshire. As
an early instance of the close connection which always exist-
ed between Cardinal Manning and Dr. Vaughan, to which we
have just alluded, it may be mentioned that it was with the
latter's co-operation that Dr. Manning founded the Congregation
of the Oblates of St. Charles at Bayswater a community to
which Dr. Vaughan has ever since belonged, and of which he
now becomes, by right of his position, the head. The future
archbishop's connection with St. Edmund's College continued un-
til 1862, but prior to that year he had, on his recovery from a
severe illness, paid his second visit to Rome, and in the early
part of 1863 he visited Spain. During this time he had, while
in England, taken up his abode with the Bayswater community,
then presided over by Dr. Manning. His residence here, how-
ever, was only transitory, for he was now on the point of em-
barking upon that wider and more exacting field of labor which
forms by far the most interesting and memorable episode in his
life, and furnishes him, at the same time, with a certain pass-
port to the grateful consideration of the Catholic people of
America.

For many years Father Vaughan had been inspired with an
intense zeal for heathen missionary work, and the more imme-
diate object on which he had set his heart was the establish-
ment of a heathen missionary college in England. The terri-
ble and indubitable fact that, in this the nineteenth century of
the Christian era, the saving truths of the Gospel were as yet
unknown to the great majority of mankind, had not merely fired
his imagination, but it had also awakened within him a practical
project for doing something to remove the evil. England's duty,
in particular, to the vast numbers of her heathen subjects had
impressed itself forcibly upon his mind, and he felt that the
time had surely arrived when England should become the or-
ganized and permanent centre of an ever-expanding missionary
crusade. In an eloquent, if somewhat reproachful appeal, issued
in 1868, he said:

" A pressing and peculiar responsibility, arising out of our
national position in the world, lies pleading at the door of our
conscience. The wail of utter misery and spiritual death is as-
cending from 200,000,000 of human beings who are subject to
our national power and influence ; it pierces to the very heart.
During the day of this their miserable life they toil and enrich
us with their wealth. Their gold and silver, their silks and tis-

3QO THE THIRD ARCHBISHOP OF WESTMINSTER. [June,

sues, their gems and spices are scattered up and down our coun-
try ; they feed and adorn our earthly life. But what effort do
we make in return to speed to them the blessings of eternal
life ? And yet these blessings were poured out upon us gratuit-
ously ; they were brought to us from afar, when we neither
prized nor sought them. Are we not bound to plant in other lands
the seed of life, which has been generously sown in ours? 'Free-
ly you have received, freely give.' Or are we the ultimate term
of the Gospel dispensation ? Has a blight of selfishness fallen up-
on our young life and centred our thoughts inward upon our-
selves? Have our Catholic hearts become stunted and strait-
ened within the narrow limits of our four seas ? Or are we
under some fatal ban of exclusion from the apostolic life of the
church amid the unevangelized nations of the world ? No, none
of this. We are a minority and with many needs, true : so was
the early Church of Palestine ; so was the Church of Rome ; so
was* the early Church in Ireland and in England ; yet no
sooner had they begun to live than they began to hasten abroad
to diffuse their life."

From the time of his ordination to the priesthood Father
Vaughan had sought to impress these views upon his superiors,
but from the outset he encountered nothing but discouragement.
Every one, naturally, sympathized with the great object -upon
which he wished to embark, but it was pointed out and not
without reason that the spiritual needs of England herself, at
that moment, were all-engrossing; that the coffers of the church
were but meagrely filled, while on every side there was evidence
of a lamentable scarcity of priests. In this state of things such
a project as the one he proposed was declared to be impracti-
cable, or at any rate premature, and Father Vaughan was com-
pelled for a time to yield to this decision. But he did not re-
main passive for long. About the time of the termination of
his connection with St. Edmund's he submitted his scheme,
" with some hesitation," as he has himself declared, to the con-
sideration of Cardinal Wiseman, and, to his no small surprise, re-
membering his previous experiences, he found that it was wel-
comed by the cardinal with enthusiastic approval. The cordiality
of this reception was presently explained, and it then appeared
that the undertaking of a foreign missionary college in England
so far from being, as might have been supposed, a gratuitous
addition to the cardinal's many cares, came upon him almost
as the providential fulfilment of a duty which he had long since
laid upon his conscience. The circumstances related by Cardi-
nal Wiseman to Father Vaughan, at that interview, were in
some respects remarkable. It seemed that many years before,
when the cardinal, then rector of the English College in Rome,

1892.] THE THIRD ARCHBISHOP OF WESTMINSTER. 391

was on the eve of receiving episcopal consecration, he was trou-
bled in his mind by a variety of doubts and anxieties respecting
the momentous task that lay before him, and, as a help and con-
solation in his difficulties, he sought the counsel of the saintly
Padre Palotti, founder of the Society of Pious Missions, who
afterwards received the title of " Venerable Servant of God."
The padre, on hearing what his friend had to say, assured him
in the most earnest words that he would never be free from his
anxieties until a foreign missionary college was established in
England. This declaration took the cardinal completely by sur-
prise, for the subject had not previously occurred to him, but
from that moment the resolve to have such a seminary started
was fixed in his mind. On entering upon his great work in
England, however, he found that a number of more urgent and
imperative duties demanded his attention, and as time went on
the prospect of the missionary establishment grew more and
more remote. Still he possessed his soul in patience, feeling
confident that the man who might be destined for this great
work would in due time be forthcoming. When, therefore,
Father Vaughan laid his scheme unasked before him, it was not
surprising that Cardinal Wiseman looked upon him as the very
man for whom he had waited to bring about the fulfilment of
his hopes.

With Cardinal Wiseman's influential co-operation one great
difficulty in the way of the missionary project was removed.
But others still remained to be faced, and the most important
of these was the necessity for funds. The resources of English
Catholics were already sufficiently drained by the fact that they
were just then beginning again, with labor and self-denial, to re-
establish in some comprehensive and organized form those flour-
ishing institutions of which they had been so violently despoiled
at the time of the Protestant usurpation. Father Vaughan, con-
sequently, had to turn his gaze to a more distant, yet a more
certain prospect. The benefits which he proposed to confer
were no restricted or insular benefits ; and he, therefore, failed
to see why his appeal for help should be in any degree less
broad and expansive. As the result of these reflections he started
alone, in the latter part of 1863, on a begging expedition
through South America, armed with the most convincing cre-
dentials in the shape of the blessing of Pius IX. and the good
word and " God-speed " of all the English bishops. In such an
expedition as he had undertaken it was not to be supposed that
he would find all plain sailing. He met, as was only to have
been expected, with many rebuffs and vicissitudes, but he met

392 THE THIRD ARCHBISHOP OF WESTMINSTER. [June,

also with much kindness and encouragement. Passing through
Panama in the course of his travels, he found the people there
stricken down by a deadly disease and deprived, by the harsh
edict of the new constitution, of the ministrations of their pas-
tors. Moved by the cruel exigencies of the case, he halted on
his journey and, risking the dangers both of infection and im-
prisonment, attended zealously to the spiritual needs of the sick
and dying. The former scourge he escaped, but he soon fell a
victim to the latter. He was arrested and sent to prison for a
breach of the laws, but after a short incarceration was allowed
to continue his tour. While in America he visited California,
Peru, Chili, and Brazil, and in the course of two years collected a
sum of about sixty thousand dollars. In 1865 Cardinal Wiseman
died and Archbishop Manning, on succeeding him, summoned Fa-
ther Vaughan back to England. He had by this time, however,
raised sufficient funds to make, at all events, a beginning, and on
his return to London he began forthwith to seek for a suitable
spot on which to start his college. Such a spot presented itself
at Mill Hill, an elevated locality situated about ten miles outside
the metropolis, and Father Vaughan at once opened negotiations
with a view to securing a house and forty-five acres of land
which were advertised for sale. But the negotiations, which
opened propitiously, suddenly threatened to collapse. The ven-
der became acquainted with the object for which the property
was required, and, possessing, presumably, strong anti-Catholic
prejudices, resolutely declared that the house should never be
used for a Catholic purpose. At this critical juncture Father
Vaughan adopted a course which is strikingly characteristic of
the simple faith that is in him a faith that has borne as con-
spicuous a part in the success of his various undertakings as
have his undoubted shrewdness and business qualities. Entrust-
ing the matter in an especial way to the powerful mediation of
St. Joseph, he was speedily rewarded by receiving a letter
from the hitherto inexorable, but now mysteriously mollified,
vender informing him that he might have " Holcomb House "
on his own terms. In this transaction Father Vaughan may be
truly said to have fulfilled both the spirit and the letter of his
family motto, Simplices sicut pueri, sagaces sictit serpentes.

On March i, 1866, the missionary work was fairly launched,
Father Vaughan on that day entering " Holcomb House," thence-
forth called "St. Joseph's College of the Sacred Heart," with
one student and one servant. The beginning was small, but
the work was great ; and from the first the institution began to
grow. Innumerable embarrassments had, of necessity, to be

1892.] THE THIRD ARCHBISHOP OF WESTMINSTER. 393

faced owing to the continued lack of funds, but these were in
every case courageously met and successfully overcome. With
the steady increase in the number of students, the college soon
outgrew its early home, and, as the result of incessant exertions
on the part of its founder, the first stone of the present building
was laid by Archbishop Manning on the feast of Sts. Peter and
Paul, 1869. The new college was entered on the first of March,
1871, and in the October of the same year the Propaganda
granted the institution its first mission that, namely, to the ne-
groes of America. Four students were ready to start, and, in re-
sponse to the request of the late Archbishop of Baltimore, who
was then at the point of death, Father Vaughan decided to
accompany them to the United States. The American arch-
bishop, who declared that he had rallied on hearing of their
coming, welcomed the missionaries with open arms, and just
lived long enough to see all the arrangements for the mission
successfully carried into effect. After the inaugural ceremony
at Baltimore Father Vaughan travelled for some months through
the Southern States in quest of stations for future missions, and
in June, 1872, he returned to Mill Hill. Two months later
Bishop Turner, of Salford, died, and on September 27 Father
Vaughan was appointed to the vacant bishopric. From that
time forth his life was to be cast in widely different places ; his
first duty was no longer to the scattered heathen nations of the
world, but to the teeming Catholic population of one of England's
greatest manufacturing districts. Nevertheless, his heart was al-
ways with the work of his Missionary College his head was ever
the most potent influence in its councils. In 1875 he once more
conducted a band of missionaries abroad, having in the previous
year taken part in the Papal coronation of the statue of St.
Joseph at Mill Hill a privilege conferred by special brief from
the Pontiff and in 1884 he accomplished an important develop-
ment of his scheme by the opening of St. Peter's School at
Freshfield, Lancashire, as a preparatory institution for St. Jo-
seph's College. The work of the college has now been going on
for twenty-seven years its silver jubilee having been celebrated
in 1891 and it has in that time achieved a record which is in
every way remarkable. It has already established missions in
America, in Borneo, in the Punjaub, in Kafifiristan, in Cashmere,
and among the Maoris in New Zealand, and to these various
stations it has sent forth upwards of eighty zealous missionary
priests. It has three vicars-apostolic namely, in New Zealand,
Cashmere, and Borneo.

This one immense work would, of itself, have been more than

394 THE THIRD ARCHBISHOP OF WESTMINSTER. [June,

sufficient to render Archbishop Vaughan's career a memorable
one ; but since his appointment to the see of Salford he has
embarked upon and completed a number of other undertakings,
less far-reaching, perhaps, in their immediate intention, but
scarcely less important. On the feast of Sts. Simon and Jude,
1872 the anniversary of his ordination Bishop Vaughan was
consecrated in St. John's Cathedral, Salford, by Archbishop Man-
ning, and at the very outset of his new life he gave a striking
proof of the unselfish spirit which animated him. Canon Ker-
shaw, a member of the diocesan chapter, called his attention to
the insufficiency of the bishop's mensa, remarking that the
Bishop of Salford was less well provided for in this respect than
the bishop of any other diocese in England, and suggesting
that, without any intervention on the bishop's own part, an ap-
peal should be made for materially increasing his resources.
With this delicate suggestion Dr. Vaughan gracefully declined to
comply, urging as his reason for so doing that the diocese was
at that moment suffering from a want which " took a long pre-
cedence of every other want, and by the side of which the
episcopal mensa sank almost to the level of a personal ques-
tion " that want being a more certain means of promoting the
apostolic training of those who were aspiring to the priesthood.
As the result of this characteristic correspondence the bishop at
once set about establishing a seminary of pastoral theology in
his diocese a work which he carried to a successful issue with
surprising rapidity. Another project which immediately engaged
his attention was the founding of a Catholic commercial college
in Manchester. The English, he declared, were a commercial
people, and there was no reason why the Catholic Church should
not supply as highly efficient a commercial education in Man-
chester as she did a liberal and classical education elsewhere.
" She is fully equal to the task," he added ; " she is a friend to
commerce and industry, and to all the honorable pursuits of
man." Profiting by the practical experience he had gained in
the great seaports and cities of America, he, in 1877, founded
on a thoroughly business-like basis the Commercial College of St.
Bede, and nine years later he enlarged the scope of the under-
taking by starting a branch establishment on the Rhine for the
better cultivation of the French and German languages. Early
in his episcopal career he took up a prominent position as a
temperance advocate, and under his auspices was started the
" Salford Diocesan Crusade against Intemperance," which within
two years had a membership of ten thousand persons. In 1885
a new evil forced itself upon his attention an evil which had

1892.] THE THIRD ARCHBISHOP OF WESTMINSTER. 395

already come under the keen eye of Cardinal Manning in Lon-
don that, namely, of the " insidious and active proselytism "
whereby thousands of Catholic children were being robbed of
their faith. As the result of the investigations of a special board
of inquiry it was shown that the district of Manchester and
Salford was " honeycombed by proselytizing agencies." " I be-
lieve it to be no exaggeration to say," the bishop declared,
" that Catholic children are lost to the faith by thousands every
year in Great Britain, through agencies and societies professedly
philanthropic and neutral, but secretly animated by an anti-
Catholic proselytizing spirit." To combat this grave evil the
Salford Protection and Rescue Society was started in 1886, and
in the course of a little over five years it has brought about a
very material improvement in the condition of affairs.

In the midst of all these multifarious and engrossing labors
Dr. Vaughan has not permitted his attention to be in any way
diverted from the more immediate concerns of his diocese, where
his help has been constantly enlisted in the establishment of
parochial churches and schools. He has, moreover, long enjoyed
a very high reputation as a preacher, and there is about his
published discourses and pastorals that forcible and incisive elo-
quence which always commands attention. He has not had
leisure to devote himself as much to literary work as could have
been wished, but he has written a number of practical religious
books for the people, and he has for many years been well
known in the literary and journalistic world as the proprietor of
two prominent organs of English Catholic opinion namely, the
Tablet and the Dublin Review. His views upon some questions
of current politics, and notably on the question of Home Rule
for Ireland, are undoubtedly not those of a very large portion
of his co-religionists and the same remark with a difference was
equally applicable to his great predecessor but there is, per-
haps, no more remarkable evidence of the real union that exists
among Catholics all the world over than the fact that upon all
purely political questions they can " agree to differ." Dr.
Vaughan has on many occasions given expression to the pecu-
liar veneration which he entertains for the Irish race, but per-
haps never more forcibly than in a sermon preached in the
church of the Irish Franciscans at Rome on St. Patrick's Day,
1873. According to the brief report telegraphed by a Roman
correspondent at the time, Dr. Vaughan contended that the
Irish people had been set apart by Providence to do the mis-
sionary work of the church, and that they had received special
gifts and favors for this purpose.

396 THE THIRD ARCHBISHOP OF WESTMINSTER. [June,

" In the ancient world such a mission had been given to the
Jews, who appeared a very humble and insignificant race com-
pared with the great empires with which they were surrounded.
They appeared in a state of bondage and oppression when suf-
fering from the Egyptian yoke ; but their very bondage and
oppression formed the most important part of their spiritual
training. In the course of time the truths entrusted to them
until Christianity spread the lessons at first taught only to Abra-
ham became diffused over the whole world. Fourteen hundred
years ago a similar mission was given to St. Patrick, and one
was now only beginning to see the real extent and character of
the labors of Ireland the apostolic nation. St. Patrick had
taught Ireland ; Ireland had taught England and Scotland, Ger-
many and France ; and the great apostolic work of the chosen
nation was still in prosecution before the eyes of all mankind in
the crowded cities of the British Empire, in the United States,
Canada, Australia everywhere. God had specially given to the
Irish the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity ;
and, to enable them more effectually to perform their mission-
ary works in spreading these virtues to the most distant lands,
he had likewise especially blessed the Irish population with the
two great gifts of poverty and chastity. It had not been to a
comparatively great and powerful nation that the duty was en-
trusted of keeping alive religious truths in the ancient world
when it was imposed upon the Jews ; and in like manner in the
modern world oppression, wretchedness, and their consequent
poverty were the blessed means by which the Irish were fitted
for their sublime task of regenerating and purifying all the na-
tions of the earth."

In recording the achievements of the new archbishop's full
and busy life, so far as it has yet gone, is it too much to anti-
cipate that he will be able to accomplish a corresponding amount
of good work in the future ? His archiepiscopal career has
opened with a most auspicious demonstration, for it is not often
that it is permitted to a man to experience simultaneously, and
in so marked a manner, the double tribute of sorrow and rejoic-
ing which has recently been paid to Dr. Vaughan. His loss has
been genuinely regretted by his old flock at Salford, and his
advent has been cordially welcomed by his former diocese, to
which he now returns as its pastor. He has assuredly the good
wishes of all English-speaking Catholics, and, notwithstanding
the brilliant records of his -immediate predecessors, it will be
surprising indeed if the light which has shone forth so brightly
in his past career does not diffuse itself even more widely by
being raised to a higher and more commanding elevation.

HENRY CHARLES KENT.

Kensington, London, Eng.

1892.] THE PSEUDO-SHAKESPEAREAN PLAYS. 397

THE -DOUBTFUL," OR PSEUDO-SHAKESPEAREAN

PLAYS.

[CONCLUDED.]
II.

HAVING devoted so much space to the methods of Shake T
speare as an adapter of plays (a most important branch of a play-
wright's duties), as -shown in the re-writing of the old " Trouble-
some Raigne " of 1591, I will pass for the present the old "Fa-
mous Victories" of 1598, merely remarking that the magnificent
play (which I have already spoken of as a quarry of information
as to the morale and personnel of a volunteer English army in Tu-
dor times, such as no historian or sociologist ever could have writ-
ten or ever can write again) was Shakespeare's own matchless pro-
duct out of the crude, formless, and lifeless old piece, which is
so childish, trivial, and utterly incompetent that " Gammer Gurton's
Needle " is a masterpiece of dramatic force by the side of it !
And it is to be noted that this re-writing, or adaptation, of old
plays is to be carefully distinguished from what, in a former
number of this magazine, I have called " The Growth and Vicis-
situdes of a Shakespearean Play " ; * the former being the dra-
matist's own personal work, while the latter is the resultant of
the stage life of the plays for which the theatre of Shakespeare's
date, and not Shakespeare himself, was responsible.

As I propose, at the close of this paper, to offer a suggestion
as to a possible comparative estimate of the circumstantial value
of these "Doubtful" Plays in compiling Shakespearean statistics,
I will now ask the reader's indulgence while briefly noting the
facts of record as to the appearance in print or on the Station-
ers' Registers of other plays entitled in the above list :

THE ARRAIGNMENT OF PARIS. This play, Thomas Nash,
in his preface to Robert Green's " Arcadia," says was written by
George Peele. The belief or report that it was written by
Shakespeare can be directly traced to the gratuitous statement
that it was " by William Shakespeare " on the title-page of an
edition thereof, brought out in London in 1660 by the booksel-
lers, Francis Kirkman and Winstanley, who knew nothing, and
probably cared nothing, about the truth of the matter, so they
covered themselves on their expenses in the publication.

* THE CATHOLIC WORLD, October, 1888.
VOL. LV. 26

398 THE PSEUDO-SHAKESPEAREAN PLAYS. [June,

THE MERRY DEVIL OF EDMONTON. This play was first
found, bound with eight others, in a volume formerly be-
longing to King Charles II., which afterwards came into the
possession of David Garrick. The word " Shakespeare " was
stamped on the back of this volume (probably because one of
the plays so bound in was the " Love's Labours Lost "). This
is all there is of evidence, external to the play itself, of a
Shakespeare authorship. But Kirkman, the bookseller above
named, affixed Shakespeare's name to the play, this book-
binder's evidence being good enough for his purposes. Thomas
Coxeter, the antiquary (1/47), assigns this play to Drayton. It
was entered by Huntard and Archer (publishers) on the Station-
ers' Register, April 5, 1608, as by " T. B."

THE LONDON PRODIGAL. The only edition of this play was
printed in quarto in London in 1605, with Shakespeare's name
in full upon the title-page.

THE PURITAN, OR THE WIDOW OF WATLING STREET.
This play was entered on the Stationers' Register, August 6,
1601, and was printed in that year as by " W. S." It has been
conjectured that those letters may have stood for Wentworth
Smith, a play-writer connected with Henslowe's company, who
(according to Henslowe's Diary) wrote fourteen plays for The
Lord Admiral's Servants, between April, 1601, and March, 1603.

THE HISTORY OF KING STEPHEN. The name of this play is
all that we have. It occurs in a list of plays " by Will Shake-
speare " entered on the Stationers' Registers by Humphrey
Moseley, June 29, 1660. This Humphrey Moseley was, in the
latter part of 1645, the leading bookseller and printer of dra-
matic literature in London. His sign was " The Prince's Arms
in Paules Churchyard," and here he issued Milton's first volume,
" Poems, both English and Latin, by John Milton," in the year
above mentioned, stating in the preface, " The Stationer to the
Reader," that he issued the book not for " any private respect
of gain," but for " the love I have to our own language that hath
made me diligent to collect and set forth such pieces, both in
Prose and Verse, as may renew the wonted Honor and Esteem
of our English Tongue." Possibly it was in this laudable en-
deavor that he became responsible for the bogus Shakespeare
plays mentioned in this list.

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF THE LORD CROMWELL. The
foundation of the claim of this play to a Shakespearean author-
ship lies in the following entry in the Stationers' Register, viz. :
"nth August, 1602, a booke called y e Lyfe and Deathe of

1892.] THE PSEUDO-SHAKESPEAREAN PLAYS. 399

y e Lorde Cromwell, as y i was lately acted by the Lord Chamber-
leyn his servants." It was printed in the same year 1602 with-
out any author's name on the title-page. But as Shakespeare's
company or* the company with which he is known to have been
connected was named "The Lord Chamberlain's Servants," the
accrediting the play to him is sufficiently accounted for.

THE Two NOBLE KINSMEN. The title-page of this play in
its first quarto is as follows :

THE Two NOBLE KINSMEN.

Presented at the Blackfriers

by the Kings Maiesties Seruants

with great applause :
Written by the memorable Worthies

of their time :

j Mr. John Fletcher, and \ r
| Mr. William Shakespeare \ u
Printed at London by Tho. Cotes, for lohn Waterson :
and are to be sold at the signe of the Crowne
in Pauls Church-yard, 1634.

In the second edition (1679) of Beaumont and Fletcher this
play was one of seventeen new plays, which were added to the
contents of the first edition. The quarto, above entitled, was
printed carelessly from a prompter's copy, and several MS. notes
from that copy went in with the text. From these it appears
that the name of the actor who took the part of the messen-
ger was Curtis, the same as that of the actor who was Petru-
cio's house-servant in " The Taming of the Shrew." These facts
and the name of the publisher, Cotes, who issued, as we have
seen,* some of the genuine Shakespeare plays, point Shake-
speareward somewhat more strongly than in any of the preced-
ing pieces in our list so far.

THE BIRTH OF MERLIN. The title-page of the first quarto
reads :

" The Birth of Merlin ; or, The Child hath found his Father :
As it hath been several times Acted with great applause.
Written by William Shakespeare and William Rowley. Printed
by Tho. Johnson for Francis Kirkman and Henry Marsh, and are
to be sold at the Prince's Arms in Chancery Lane. 1622."

THE HISTORY OF CARDENIO. "The History of Cardenio, by
Mr. Fletcher and Shakespeare," was entered on the Stationers'
Books by Humphrey Moseley September 9, 1635. The play
itself does not appear to be extant, but during the year 1613
the company known as " The King's Servants " several times

* THE CATHOLIC WORLD, November, 1890. Art. "Shakespeare's Publishers."

400 THE PSEUDO-SHAKESPEAREAN PLA vs. [June,

acted a play mentioned in one entry in the Stanhope accounts
(MS. Rawl. A. 239) as " Cardenno " and in another as " Car-
denna."

THE DOUBLE FALSEHOOD. In 1728 Lewis THieobald, the
editor of Shakespeare, printed a play of this name, of which he
says he possessed the original MS., which was " of above sixty
years' standing, in the handwriting of Mr. Downes, the famous
old prompter, and, as I am credibly informed, was early in the
possession of the celebrated Mr. Betterton and by him designed
to have been ushered into the world, and that it was written by
Shakespeare at the time of his (Shakespeare's) retirement from
the stage," Further than this Mr. Theobald sayeth not, except
that his " credible " informant was " a noble person who supplied
me with one of my copies."

THE SECOND MAIDEN'S TRAGEDY. In the Lansdowne col-
lection in the British Museum there is a manuscript play of this
name. It appears to have been licensed for representation in
London in 1611. It is anonymous, but somebody wrote upon it
" by George Chapman," and somebody else erased this name
clumsily, and wrote over the erasure " William Shakespeare."

A WARNING FOR FAIR WOMEN. The (London) Athenceum
of February 15, 1879, prints a 1-etter from Mr. J. Payne Collier
then in his ninetieth year announcing that, after sixty years of
uncertainty, he had finally decided from internal evidence that this
play, printed anonymously in 1599, and which records the history
of a murder occurring, according to Holinshed, in 1593, was
by Shakespeare, or that in its composition he was importantly
concerned. " I suspected it at thirty, and now at ninety I am
convinced of it," were Mr. Collier's own words. So far as I
know, no Shakespearean scholar ever concurred with Mr. Collier.
George Wilkes, in his clever but popular work, " Shakespeare
from an American Point of View,"* restates Mr. Collier's pro-
position with some apparent inclination to accept it.

SIR JOHN OLDCASTLE. This play was printed in quarto by
Thomas Pavier, whom we have already met as a well-known
dealer in Shakespeare quartosf, in 1600, with Shakespeare's name
in full on the title-page. But in Henslowe's Diary, in entries of
October, November, and December, 1599, the authors of the play
are expressly stated to be Munday, Drayton, Wilson, and Hath-
away. From a subsequent publication of this play by Pavier,
however, Shakespeare's name was removed.

FAIR EM, THE MILLER'S DAUGHTER. This play was one of

*See THE CATHOLIC WORLD, June, 1887, note to p. 348. t Id., 1891.

1892.] THE PSEUDO-SHAKESPEAREAN PLAYS. 401

those contained in the volume above described as belonging to
Charles II., and ultimately to Garrick, and ascribed by the un-
identified bookbinder to Shakespeare. The comedy was first
printed in 1631, and there is a record of its having been acted
by the company known as Lord Strange's Servants.

DUKE HUMPHREY. Among the manuscripts said to have
been destroyed by " Dr. Warburton's careless servant " of famous
memory was a play of this name, which, we have the good
doctor's word for it, was " attributed to Shakespeare." And in
the list of plays entered on the Stationers' Books by Humphrey
Moseley, June 29, 1660 (see " The History of King Stephen,"
supra), is the following : " Duke Humphrey, a tragedy by Will.
Shakspeare."

LOCRINE. "The Lamentable Tragedie of Locrine, the eldest
son of King Brutus," was entered in the books of the Stationers'
Company, July 20, 1594, and printed in quarto by Thomas
Creede, in 1595, " As newly set foorthe, overseene and corrected by
W. S." It is a patriotic play, and Dr. Ulrici judiciously observes
that the pompous verse in which it is generally written sounds
like the play of " Pyrrhus," which Hamlet asks the leader of the
actors to recite for him. It would appear to be from the above
statement, " as newly, etc.," that it was a much older play than
either the above entry or date would make it.

ARDEN OF FEVERSHAM. Entered anonymously in the Sta-
tioners' Books, April 3, 1592, and first published in that year.
It was again entered and published in 1599 and 1633, showing
it to have been a popular play. In 1770 a bookseller of Fever-
sham, Edward Jacob, issued a reprint of it, stating generously on
its title-page that it was " by William Shakespeare."

MUCEDORUS. Another of the plays bound together in the
King-Charles-Garrick volume, assigned by the book-binder to
Shakespeare. Its earliest edition is anonymous, and appeared in
1598.

KING EDWARD THE THIRD. It is uncertain when this play
was first assigned to Shakespeare. It begins to appear in old
booksellers' catalogues under that name at about 1660. It is a
fine old play, and Shakespeare need not have been ashamed to
have written it, as it rings with patriotism and pride of native
land. It was certainly popular, being repeatedly entered for pub-
lication on the Stationers' Books from 1595 to 1625, but always
without any author's name.

A YORKSHIRE TRAGEDY. This play was entered on the Sta-
tioners' Register, May 2, 1608, with the uncompromising state-

402 THE PSEUDO-SHAKESPEAREAN PLA vs. [June,

ment that it was " Written by William Shakespeare." It was
published by Thomas Pavier in 1608 and 1619, with that state-
ment made point blank on the title-page, with the further infor-
mation that it was " played (together with three other small
pieces) by the King's Players " that is, by Shakespeare's com-
pany. Pavier, as has been seen,* was a printer of Shakespeare
quartos, and altogether this is about as direct evidence as could
have been given by anybody.

EURIALUS AND LUCRETIA. A play of this name was entered
on the Stationers' Register, August 21, 1583, to one Robert
Scott, also mentioned in the Register in connection with " Ham-
let " and some other plays in 1630.

GEORGE A GREENE. Of this play Dr. Halliwell-Phillipps has
the following note: "This comedy was acted in December, 1593,
by the players of the Earl of Sussex's company, who produced
* Titus Andronicus ' the following month. It was entered at Sta-
tioners' Hall in 1595, but the earliest known edition bears the
date of 1599. The statement that there was an early tradition
assigning this play to Shakespeare is a pure invention, and, ac-
cording to an early manuscript note in a copy of the first edition,
the great dramatist is himself a witness to its having been com-
posed by some other writer."

IPHIS AND lANTHE. In the list of plays above mentioned en-
tered in the Stationers' Registers, by Humphrey Moseley, June
29, 1660, was this title described as " A Comedy by Will. Shake-
speare."

HENRY THE FIRST AND HENRY THE SECOND. Of this play
Dr. Halliwell-Phillipps says:

" In 1653 Moseley entered ' Henry the First and Henry the
Second, by Shakespeare and Davenport,' on the Registers of the
Stationers' Company. Henry the First, * by Will. Shakespear and
Rob. Davenport,' is on the list of the manuscript plays said to
have been destroyed by Warburton's servant about the year 1730,
so that the two plays seem to have been registered under the
above titles; and Sir Henry Herbert, in 1624, licensed 'for the
King's Company the " Historye of Henry the First," written by
Davenport.' Whether Moseley intended to assert that each
drama was the joint composition of Shakespeare and Davenport,
or that the one first named in the entry was written by the for-
mer and the other by the latter, is a matter of uncertainty as
well as one of no consequence. A drama called ' Harey the
Firste Life and Deth ' was produced by the Lord Admiral's Com-
pany in May, 1597, and another on the events of the same
reign was written by Draytori and others in the following year."

*THE CATHOLIC WORLD, November, 1890.

1892.] THE PSEUDO-SHAKESPEAREAN PLAYS. 403

LORRINO and ODRASTES are plays mentioned in Winstan-
ley's Lives of the Poets, 1637, p. 132, in a list of Shake-
speare's dramatic works, but there is no other data at hand
for judging as to whether they were or not. Winstanley does
not say whether he ever saw those plays ; nor would he
have been competent to judge whether or no they were Shake-
speare's.

The reader has now all the evidence before him, and can as-
sess the probabilities from it quite as well as can the speculative
critics. As to internal evidence, drawn from a reading of the pro-
ductions themselves, I have always contended that there was no
standard of opinion, and that every reader had a right to judge
for himself. What reminds one of Shakespeare might ap-
pear rubbish to another ; and what another of us would call rub-
bish, still another of us might recognize as Shakespeare ; and if
he did, it would be a hopeless task to labor with him for a con-
trary opinion. All of us do not read Shakespeare in the same
mood, or admire the same passages. But all of us estimate
whatever we admire most in him as " Shakespeare," and bend
our requirements to that standard : that is, our " Shakespeare."
Nor must it be supposed that, in the above list, there are not
numerically a great many fine and eloquent passages of superior
literary flavor and of master-workmanship from a literary point
of view. " Arden of Feversham," " The Yorkshire Tragedy,"
"The Two Noble Kinsmen," and others are fine pieces. Cu-
riously, however, the play which, according to the above resume,
has the very least evidence to connect it with Shakespeare, was
the one of them all which enjoyed the greatest public favor and
was the oftenest printed, and so whose authorship would be the
most likely to be inquired into, but to which Shakespeare's
great name never was attached. This play, the " Edward the
Third," has more (whole scenes, indeed) of what most of us
would call Shakespeare's work (or work likest to his), than any of
the others. On the other hand, the play which, according to the
above resume, possesses the most emphatic record-testimony of
a Shakespearean authorship " The Yorkshire Tragedy " is never
included, even by editors who accept both "The Two Noble
Kinsmen " and the " Edward the Third " into the canon, and so
the contradiction rules or misrules, like a very Lord of Misrule
himself, among the critico-commentators and the commentative
critics! Again, "The Merry Devil of Edmonton" and "The
Birth of Merlin " (excluded) are exceptionally clever and enter-
taining, and the " London Prodigal " and " The Puritan Widow "

404 THE PSEUDO-SHAKESPEAREAN PLAYS. [June,

(included) are exceptionally stupid; and so it goes. It is there-
fore, I submit, the safer plan to adhere to a simple statement of
the external record, and to award to each student his perfect
right to assess the internal evidences as he may be moved to
estimate them. Mere familiarity with Shakespeare in history will
not always give weight to a critical opinion as to the text. As
mentioned above, Mr. J. Payne Collier, after almost seventy
years of Shakespearean study, deliberately pronounced " A Warn-
ing for Fair Women " to be Shakespeare's work ; a proposition
not one of his fellow-critics, before or since, ever troubled him-
self for a moment to discuss !

There are, however, two suggestions which I deem it worth
while to make as to these " Doubtful Plays " from a circumstan-
tial point of view alone. And with them I will draw this paper
to a close.

FIRST: Sir William D'Avenant, godson and putative son of
Shakespeare, lived and died devoted to the memory and the
fame of his great namesake. Through the Decadence the inter-
regnum ; the dreary days when the rampant Puritans were mak-
ing England barren, and doing their best to drive art and let-
ters, both sacred and profane, from the face of the earth he
alone so far as we have a record kept the name of Shakespeare
green. When the days of the Restoration again made England
endurable, he restored Shakespeare to the stage, revising and re-
stocking the plays, as a concession necessary to keep them alive
at all in the face of that " refined age," as Pepys and Evelyn
called it. But he worked always with reverence (however, in our
present moods, the re-stocking looks like sacrilege). John Dry-
den, the connecting link in English literature between Eliza-
bethism and the moderns, was taught his Shakespeare by
D'Avenant, and, as he himself tells us, was soon himself a wor-
shiper. It is an error to suppose that these men adapted Shake-
speare to the tastes of their time because they supposed themselves
greater than Shakespeare. As well say that Pope translated
Homer because he thought his long bastard-hexameters superior
to the onomatopceia of the Father of Poetry ! Shakespeare was
to be translated to meet the taste of the ladies and gentlemen
of whose doings Pepys and Evelyn kept diaries, or else to lie
moribund. And D'Avenant deserves grateful remembrance for
ever for bringing back to the English stage, which has never
surrendered them since, the dramatic works that once held the
stage of which William Shakespeare himself was proprietor and
manager.

1892.] THE PSEUDO-SHAKESPEAREAN PLAYS. 405

Now, D'Avenant lived until 1668, Dryden until 1700. Both
of them were alive when, in 1663-4, Philip Chetwynde, a book-
seller in London, brought out the Third Folio. Chetwynde ap-
pears to be but a name in the catalogue (at least there are no
records of him or his acquaintances that I have been able to
discover). But it is certain that both D'Avenant and Dryden
were friends and intimates of Henry Herringman, a famous Lon-
don publisher, who brought out many, if not most, of Dryden's
poems ; who, many a time and oft, is recorded to have come
to Dryden's financial relief, and whose bookstore was a sort of
club for Dryden and his fellow wits and literary workmen. And
this Herringman in 1685, when Dryden was alive and at his el-
bow, issued the Fourth Folio of Shakespeare's " complete "
works. Both the Third and the Fourth Folios were edited from
the Second Folio of 1632 as far as the text went. But each
added the seven other plays, viz., " Pericles," and (from the above
list of thirty plays we have just examined) the following six:
" The London Prodigal," " The History of Thomas, Lord Crom-
well," "Sir John Oldcastle," "Lord Cobham," "The Puritan
Widow : A Yorkshire Tragedy," " Locrine." Is it not impossible
to suppose that these two folios were issued without the know-
ledge of even if they were not edited and prepared for the
press by Sir William D'Avenant, who was by common consent
the guardian of Shakespeare's memory, to say nothing of Dryden,
who wrote of Shakespeare's work " Within that circle none durst
walk but he"? What, then, are we to think? Were the seven
last above-named plays selected as Shakespeare's out of the list
of thirty, by D'Avenant and Dryden, or were they selected by
two booksellers who, although intimate with those poets and con-
curring in their judgment in everything else, in the most impor-
tant literary question they were ever called upon to decide
moved entirely upon their own responsibilities and took no coun-
sel of the two poets whatever?

The question is relieved a little as to the " Pericles " by the
fact that Dryden does appear to have been called upon or to
have thought it necessary to express some .opinion as to the
authorship of that play, and to apologize for its inferiority to
the general of the Master's workmanship.

In his prologue to D'Avenant's Circe he wrote :

" Shakespeare's own muse his Pericles first bore,
The Prince of Tyre was older than the Moore.
'Tis miracle to see a first good play
All Hawthorne's do not bloom on Cristmas day" [sic].

406 THE PSEUDO-SHAKESPEAREAN PLA YS. [June,

I regard Dryden's opinion, as expressed in these lines, as of far
less importance than the fact that he thought it necessary, or
took occasion, to express any opinion at all. Let us sum up the
situation : I. Sir William D'Avenant, putative son of Shakespeare,
calls Dryden's attention to Shakespeare's works, and (as Dryden tes-
tifies) taught him to admire them. 2. Two publishers, intimate
friends of Dryden and of D'Avenant, publish as Shakespeare's seven
plays which two prior publishing houses had rejected as not Shake-
speare's. 3. Dryden writes a prologue to a work of D'Avenant's, in
the course of which he justifies the publisher in assigning one of
these plays to Shakespeare. Does it not appear self-evident that
D'Avenant and Dryden must have had something to do with
the insertion in the third and fourth folios of the seven Doubt-
ful Plays ? (I pass Dryden's statement as to the chronology of
the " Pericles," as quite as valuable or worthless as a modern
chronology, by Fleary or Furnivall or Dowden that is to say,
as mere guess-work). But how about the six other plays, " The
London Prodigal," the " Thomas, Lord Cromwell," " The Puritan
Widow," "The Yorkshire Tragedy," the " Locrine " ? which
were selected to go into the folios at the same date and on the
same occasion ? (All of these are manifestly inferior in every way
to the "Pericles" by common consent of the non-critical as well
as of the most critical of readers ; but let that pass.) Did D'Ave-
nant and Dryden, worshippers of Shakespeare in an age when
his worshippers were few, tacitly permit these also to go in
among his collected works ? (or seeing them put in, abstain from
protest, even if their intimate friend, the publisher, failed to con-
sult the two recognized literary authorities not to say despots,
of the day ?) Let us look at the dates and the record of these
plays, and see if any presumption or quasi-presumption of autho-
rity would have influenced them. " The London Prodigal " had,
as we have seen above, been printed in quarto in 1605 with
Shakespeare's name in full, uncompromisingly, and not concealed
by an initial or abbreviations, upon the title-page. The " Thomas,
Lord Cromwell," had been printed three years earlier, in 1602,
and, although no author's name appeared on the title-page, it was
there announced that the play was printed " As y 1 was lately acted
by the Lord Chamberlaine his Servants " (the company with
which Shakespeare was connected ; for which he wrote : and
which possessed the " Richard the Second," " Richard the
Third," "The Merchant of Venice," the "Midsummer Night's
Dream," " The Merry Wives of Windsor," the second " Henry
the Fourth," the " Henry the Fifth," and the " Much Ado
about Nothing " in its repertoire). Two years earlier still, the

1892.] THE PSEUDO-SHAKESPEAREAN PLAYS. 407

" Thomas, Lord Cromwell," had appeared, in 1600, printed by
Thomas Pavier (the printer who had issued the quartos of the
first and second " Henry VI." and the " Titus Andronicus "), and,
as in the case of "The London Prodigal," with Shakespeare's
name in full on the title-page. (As to this, however, as stated
above, the Henslowe entry, giving the play to other dramatists
by name, should, by our own rules, reasonably control.) It was
not impossible that the fact of the removal of Shakespeare's name
from subsequent editions of the play should have been over-
looked, for until Malone's time we search in vain for any evi-
dence of circumstantial assessment of Shakespeare evidences (and
this Henslowe Diary was only unearthed by Malone about a
century later than Dryden's date). " The Puritan, or the Widow
of Watling Street," was issued in 1601, the title-page stating
that it was "written by W. S." "The Yorkshire Tragedy" was
(again by Thomas Pavier) issued in 1609 and 1619 with the
point-blank statement, both on the title-page and on the 1608
Stationers' entry : " written by William Shakespeare " and " played
by the King's Players" (who presented the " Pericles," the " Lear,"
and the " Othello." I am proceeding on the supposition that the
company mentioned as " His Maiesties Seruants" was the same as
" The King's Players "). The " Locrine " was even earlier than
any of the foregoing, having been issued by Thomas Creede (who
printed the " Henry V.," " The Merry Wives," and the " Romeo
and Juliet"), he having entered it of record on the Stationers'
books July 20, 1594, and when printed declared on its title-page
that it was " newly set foorthe, overseene and corrected by W. S."
The facts appear to be self-evident, therefore, that these
seven newly included plays were admitted simply because the
prior quarto title-pages had assigned them to either " William
Shakespeare," or to his company of actors, or to " W. S.,"
and that " W. S." was understood by the booksellers (and that
Dryden and D'Avenant had no information to the contrary) to
stand for the name of the great dramatist. And it seems to me,
on this simple showing (made in good faith and before the day
of rival critics who quarrelled over each other's competency, and
devoted themselves to exhibiting each other's follies), that the
reasonable conclusion must be that Dryden and D'Avenant were
consulted, and proceeded, in their zeal, on the principle that it
was better to include too much than too little, and that (and I
respectfully submit that these two poets were quite as compe-
tent to form an opinion, and to give what Mr. Best calls " opin-
ion evidence," as we are to-day) they were of opinion that a
man who wrote " Hamlet " was not utterly incapable of having

408 THE PSEUDO-SHAKESPEAREAN PLA vs. [June,

written lesser work if he\had seen fit to do so. At any rate,
here is a good working hypothesis, and it at once marshals au-
thorities to its aid whose testimony has quite as much proba-
tive force as the guess-work or " say so " of the aesthetic critics
of two hundred years later on.

In this view, of course, the fact that Dryden saw fit to
apologize for the " Pericles," and not for the other six plays,
can be urged under the probate rule of the Latin lawyers : In-
clusio unius est exclusio alterius, a powerful argument always as to
testamentary devises or questions arising between matters or
things of equal affinity. But, while we cannot always look for
the lawyer's instinct in the zeal of the literary expert or virtuoso,
I am rather inclined to believe that D'Avenant or Dryden
could perceive, quite as clearly as we do to-day, the difference
between the "Hamlet" and the "Titus Andronicus " ; or be-
tween the " Othello " and the " Two Gentlemen of Verona."

Will Shakespearean critics ever admit a reasonable doubt ; or
an operation, in their field, of the doctrine of causation or of
chances ? If Shakespeare had been directed to cease libelling
Sir John Oldcastle, why should, or might, he not have written
a play called " Sir John Oldcastle," to emphasize the public de-
nial he instructed his actor to earnestly make in the epilogue to
the " Second Henry IV." that he had harbored any such inten-
tion ? And if his heart were not in the work, is it so very
strange that his work in the latter play was purely perfunctory,
and so fell below his actual standard of composition ? Or,
once more, if Shakespeare wrote historical plays upon the reigns
of the Henrys IV., V., VI., and VIII., why should he have not
have written plays on the reigns of Henry I. and II. ? I
do not, for my own part, believe that he ever did, but while
there is just the faintest statement that he did however improb-
able there is actually no evidence at all, nor a soupgon of it,
that he did not !

In conclusion, I can only hope that my efforts in these pa-
pers in THE CATHOLIC WORLD to examine facts as I am able
to find them, independently of my personal admiration for the
splendid and despotic genius of the dramatist who was " not of
an age but for all time," and who was not only " soul of the
age " but " the applause, delight, and wonder of THE STAGE "
(and so must have catered to the audiences who sat before his
stage and paid their shillings in to support it), will not be consid-
ered supererogative in the time to come, when aesthetic criticism
shall survive only in the Catalogue of Curiosities of Shakespearean
Commentary ! APPLETON MORGAN.

1892.] AT THE CHURCH DOOR. 409

AT THE CHURCH DOOR.

I. NOONTIDE.

HERE is the open portal, whereby Peace

Doth woo thee to her most secure retreat ;
Without, the noise and groaning of the street,
In the fierce strife for wealth and wealth's increase,
Surges like baleful thunder, nor doth cease

While morn to night and night to morn repeat
The dreams of wild ambition, and the fleet,
Strong tide flows onward, giving no release.
But enter thou ; a soft encircling gloom
With slender sprays of jewelled light abloom,

Mellow with incense and the breath of prayer;
And in the mystic glory of His shrine,
One, Holiest, who with welcoming hands divine
Doth wait, to free thy soul from sin and care.

II. SURSUM CORDA!

Falls on the kneeling multitude a sweet

And sudden hush, as if with one accord
Their eyes beheld the Presence of the Lord,

And bowed in gracious homage at His feet.

Before the shrine the veil of incense rolls ;

Enraptured voices, rising high and higher,
With one long burst of love and joy aspire,

In breathless longing of uplifted souls.

O blissful ecstasy ! Most precious gift !

That thus can free from all the bonds that pull
The winged spirit backward to the clod ;

And through the mist of earthly cloud uplift
This moment of rapt silence, beautiful
With holy fear, and holier love of God.

MARY ELIZABETH BLAKE.

4io A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE. [June,

A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE.
FROM THE RUSSIAN.

NASTA, the letter-carrier, had never ceased to weep over the
loss of her little Wasylek. One day the pope of Tersow, meet-
ing her on the high-road as she was going her rounds from the
town of Smolnica to the villages, stopped and, wishing to con-
sole her, said : " Why do you continue to grieve in this manner,
Nasta ? You may be assured that your little boy is now among
the cherubim in heaven."

The cherubim ! Never in her life had Nasta heard of such
beings, and the words of the friendly priest, far from affording
her any comfort, only seemed to trouble and agitate her. It
was a year ago that her darling Wasylek had died, a year ago
that the poor, shabby little coffin was carried to the cemetery
by a kindly neighbor amid a blinding snow-storm, carefully
sheltered beneath his sheepskin cloak.

For a whole week the poor woman thought over what the
pope* had said to her, but the words conveyed no meaning to
her mind. The next Sunday, however, it happened that as she
was passing a Latin church which was on her daily route she
thought she would go in. She was just in time for the sermon.
The preacher spoke of the majesty of God, of the armies of
heaven, of the legions of angels, of the seraphim and cherubim
standing around the throne of the Most High. Nasta listened as
if spell-bound, and eagerly drank in all he said. It seemed to
her as if she were listening to one who had lately seen her lost
boy and knew all about him.

When she left the church her head was full of the wonders
of which she had been hearing, and as she went on her way to
the village of Spas she strove to treasure up in her memory the
words of the preacher, repeating them over and over to herself
like the prayers of the Rosary. But the thread of her intelli-
gence was too weak to retain them ; one by one the ideas
slipped away and were lost, like the beads of a necklace when
the string has broken. One expression alone remained im-
pressed on her memory : the armies of heaven !

* This name is given to the secular clergy of the Russian Church, of which the czar is
the supreme head. The Latin, or uniate, priests, still in union with Rome, are in Poland few
in number, and are regarded with jealousy and dislike by the parochial clergy.

1892.] A MOTHERS SACRIFICE. 411

This idea was a new one to the ignorant peasant-woman,
and by no means a welcome one. Then God, too, who was the
King of heaven, had an army like the Emperor of Russia, and
in that army Wasylek had taken service in the capacity of a
cherubim. Now, Nasta knew a good deal about military life ;
she had often heard letters from soldiers read aloud, and they
were invariably in the same strain : always begging for money,
always complaining of the captain's harshness or of the brutality
of the corporal. The remembrance of this caused her great con-
cern. Until then she had simply mourned for the loss of her
only child ; now anxiety on his behalf was added to her grief.
If the poor little fellow were really enrolled in the ranks of the
celestial militia, one of two things must be true : either he was
ill-treated, and it was his mother's duty to exert herself to pro-
tect him ; or he was unhappy, and she must do something to
cheer and help him. The thought that the child, who was now
beyond the reach of all earthly sufferings, might perhaps be en-
during still worse torments in the unseen world to which he had
gone, filled the poor mother's heart with anguish.

If she had dared, how gladly would she have at once turned
back and gone to the Latin priest in his presbytery, and asked him
what the army of heaven really was, and what were the nine
choirs of angels of which he had spoken. A clergyman would
know all about such matters, and who knows, might he not per-
chance even be able to inform her into what choir, or rather
what battalion, Wasylek had entered ? But how should a poor
woman like her take the liberty of questioning a priest, and a
Latin priest too ? Besides, she was already late, she would be be-
hind her time in reaching Spas, and M. Krzespel, the inspector
of the imperial domains, would be getting very impatient at not
having his papers.

Nasta was the walking post between the village of Spas and
the post-office at Smolnica. It was her business to deliver the
letters first to the inspector, then to the Jews who kept the
public-houses, and the small proprietors in the neighboring ham-
lets who could not fetch their own letters, and lastly, in sum-
mer-time, to the visitors who came thither for the benefit of
the mountain air. Her husband had been the postman of the
district, and on his death, ten years before, Nasta had been al-
lowed to take his place.

She had not married young, and scarcely two years after the
birth of her little boy her husband had died suddenly. All
that he bequeathed to her was a cottage whose roof was fast

412 A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE. [June,

crumbling into decay, a barren strip of garden ground through
which ran a stream, shaded at its source by a pear-tree of such
antiquity that no one could remember having seen any fruit on
its boughs. Nasta's duty consisted in walking to and from the
post-office every day with the letters. For this she was paid two
florins a month about five francs ! She used to start at day-
break, for it took her two hours to walk there and two to come
back ; for the remainder of the day she worked in the fields.
In summer-time her task was comparatively easy, and she could
easily get back by midday ; but in winter, in the long, hard
frosts, it was indeed toilsome work, since the post was often
delayed by the weather, and at times she had to wade through
deep snow-drifts, for on that side of the Carpathian Mountains
the winters are very severe. But as long as her child was alive
what did Nasta care for hard work and biting cold ?

One day an epidemic broke out among the village children.
It attacked their throats, and in two days proved fatal. Soon
there were as many newly made mounds in the churchyard of
Busowiska, where Nasta lived, as there had been children of
twelve years old or thereabouts at that time. Just a year
before our story opens, when Nasta, coming back from her daily
round one morning, reached the foot of the mountain where she
was accustomed to see Wasylek, who took care of the sheep of
a neighboring farmer, waiting for her, the child was nowhere
to be perceived. A horrible apprehension seized upon her ; she
ran like one demented to her cottage. There she found Wasy-
le"k, wrapped in his father's old sheepskin, lying on the ground
beside the earthenware stove, his round eyes fixed on the ceil-
ing in a stupefied stare. Alas ! the next day but one those
eyes were closed for ever. Until that fatal hour Nasta had
envied no one, she had been as happy as a queen ; her dark,
dilapidated cottage was to her a palatial residence, the old pear-
tree a smiling orchard, the murmur of the brook the sweetest
melody ; but from the moment when Wasylek was laid in his
narrow churchyard bed all the sunshine faded out of the poor
woman's life. Her cabin appeared desolate, her orchard a sterile
plot of ground, while the babble of the stream became a strain
of such woful sadness that many a time, as she listened to it
in the stillness of the night, she thought she really must di-
vert it from its course, that she might no longer hear its mourn-
ful plaint. Everything wore an altered aspect in her eyes ; even
her daily walk to the post seemed to have become lengthened
in distance in an unaccountable manner, and the road looked

1892.] A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE. 413

dull and dreary, although it was enlivened by many carriages
and briskas containing travellers from far and near.

Formerly, in happier times, when she neared home after de-
livering the letters in some outlying hamlet up among the
mountains, she used to descry a little figure crouching among
the furze-bushes, hardly distinguishable at a distance from the
stones and rocks around him. And then this little figure would
be seen flitting among the bushes and over the greensward, or
lost to sight for a moment between tall sheaves of corn, to
reappear suddenly at the bend of the road. Poor Wasylek !
With his huge, unshapely straw hat, his jacket of coarse hempen
cloth, caught together in front and fastened with a bit of stick,
and his whip three times as big as himself in his hand, he
looked uncommonly like the scarecrows set up in a wheat-field
to keep the birds from the corn. But the queer little mannikin
had two bright black eyes that gleamed under the rim of his
battered hat, and very dear he was to the poor letter-carrier,
who when she caught sight of him used to stop and open her
bag, from the depths of which she never failed to produce some
toothsome cake or crisp biscuit. But now, alas ! though spring
was spreading its verdant covering over the earth, there was no
little gray figure awaiting her by the road-side, or running over
the freshly ploughed fields. Alas, indeed, the earth, the inex-
orable earth, had swallowed him up and held him fast locked in
her prison-house !

However, from the time that the idea that her darling boy
was enrolled among the cherubim in Paradise had sunk into the
mind of the bereaved mother, she no longer felt lonely. As she
went on her daily rounds one thought constantly pursued her
like a spectre, and life was no more a dreary, hopeless blank.
If only she could acquaint herself with what her child was doing
up there in the choirs of the heavenly host ! But how was she
to learn this ? How was she to span the gulf that separated him
from her ? For some time this idea engrossed her mind so com-
pletely that she could think of nothing else. Being naturally
diffident and slow of speech, she was reluctant to make her diffi-
culties known to others and seek information from them. One
day, however, she plucked up courage to begin to speak on the
subject to the organist of the Latin church.

" What can I do to prevent my poor little Wasylek feeling

himself a desolate orphan up in heaven ? " she inquired in a

mysterious whisper. The organist, who considered himself a

great authority on theological matters, looked at her with an air

VOL. LV. 27

4H A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE. [June,

of supreme commiseration, and, after a moment's reflection, an-
swered : " Wasylek will only cease to be an orphan in heaven
when you die."

Nasta was completely silenced by this unexpected answer.
When she died ! But who knows how long it may be before
one dies, and must the poor child wait in misery all that time ?
Perhaps Honorius, the man at the Monastery of St. Basil, who
had grown gray in the service of the monks, would be able to
give her some wise counsel. She resolved, therefore, to watch for
him on this road when he was driving back from market through
the forest.

Honorius was a taciturn man, and he let her tell her tale
without interruption. When she had done, he fixed his eyes for
a minute on the leathern bag strapped across his chest, then
slowly taking his pipe from his lips, and pointing upward with
his long, lean finger, he replied in a grave tone, not unmingled
with irony: "What would you have? If only some clever per-
son would invent a postal service between earth and heaven ! "

Satisfied with this laconic answer, he replaced his pipe in his
mouth and closed his lips, as if to say nothing more was to be
got out of him that day. " If only there could be a post to
heaven ! " Nasta repeated to herself, as she watched him disap-
pear beneath the archway of verdant pines. " But unfortunately
there is not any !"

At Busowiska there was no Catholic church, nor even a
cerkiew of the Greek Church, the one that existed there having
been burnt down several years previously to the time of which
we are speaking, and never rebuilt. The inhabitants were conse-
quently, as is the case in many villages of the Carpathian
Mountains, destitute of all religious teaching. This accounts for
the benighted condition of Nasta's mind, and her strange igno-
rance of sacred things. On great festivals the people were in
the habit of going to the church of Tersow, the nearest parish.
Nasta was accustomed to go there once a year, on Good Friday,
to adore the holy images, and to get her Easter eggs and cakes
blessed. Since the death of her child she had not been at all.
What was the good of getting her cakes blessed when there was
nobody at home to eat them ? And as to prayer ! since her
affliction the unhappy woman had had less than ever recourse
to prayer.

But now that a fresh direction had been given to her
thoughts she felt the need of religion, and resolved to go again
to church. There would certainly be a sermon, and who could
tell whether the priest might not say something on the sub-

1892.] A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE. 415

ject of the cherubim and the angels, about which she had heard
on a previous occasion?

This time, however, there was not a word about the armies
of heaven. The preacher spoke of prayer; how omnipotent it
was, how it afforded consolation and strength to the afflicted
and suffering souls, how by it a communication was opened with
heaven, so that it might be termed a kind of post between earth
and the unseen world. Of the*' first part of the sermon Nasta
comprehended little. She sat and listened, heaving a deep sigh
and striking her breast now and again, after the manner of the
Russian peasant, who believes the word preached would be of
no profit to him without such exterior demonstrations. But
when the last words fell on her ear she was startled and
aroused. She ceased to strike her breast, and fixed her eyes on
the preacher, anxious not to lose a word. So there really was
a post between earth and heaven ! Honorius had been quite
mistaken when he said there was no such thing. But in order
to make use of this means of communication one must know
how to .pray, and Nasta was sadly conscious of her own igno-
rance in this respect. If she could get through the Pater it
was as much as she could do ; as for the Credo, she could go
no further than the first sentence. Besides, she reasoned to her-
self, in this one prayer that she knew by heart there was not a
word that could apply to Wasylek ; so of what use could it be ?
If a prayer was to be compared to a letter, one must make it
very clear to whom it was addressed, just as if a letter was to
be delivered the direction must be clearly written on the out-
side. Now, Nasta' could not pray any more than she could
write. She must find some one to do it for her. Now, at Buso-
wiska, if a poor man wanted to write to his son in the army,
he went into the town to a public scribe, whose business it was
to write letters for those who could not write for themselves.
Of course the writer was paid for his trouble, but that was not
all ; one had to go to the post-office and get a stamp to put on
the letter, otherwise it would be no use. Then, too, there ought
to be a remittance enclosed to make the letter of any value.
She knew that the man Dimitry had even sold his goat in order
to send money to his son, who was a soldier. Another of her
neighbors had pledged her coral necklace for the sake of send-
ing a few florins to a boy who was serving in Hungary, far
away beyond the mountains. She must not imagine, Nasta told
herself, that she could get what she wanted for nothing. She
was poor enough, Heaven knows ! but that could not be helped,
and in this world nothing can be got without paying a price for

4i 6 A MOTHER' s SACRIFICE. [J unc >

it. For some time Nasta went about with her head bent down,
her brows knitted as if she were endeavoring to solve some ab-
truse problem. In fact, just then her ideas were not very clear ;
people and things were oddly jumbled together in her brain :
the celestial cherubim, Honorius the convent servant, the priest
of Tersow, the post to heaven, the public scribe, and Dimitry's
goat. And yet through the darkness of her unenlightened and
untaught mind a ray of divine light was slowly struggling.
Little by little, through the maze of her own singular process of
thought, she arrived at two conclusions. First she learnt to
master her grief, and then, with the marvellous intuition of ma-
ternal love, she discerned that most sublime of Christian truths,
the necessity of sacrifice. Whatever it might cost her, she must
make some sacrifice for Wasylek the sacrifice of something in-
dispensable, something purchased by the hardships of her daily
life ; by hunger and thirst, sleepless nights, toilsome journeys
beneath a burning sun, in cutting wind and biting frost. Some
alchemy must be found whereby these privations, these vigils,
this sweat of hers, nay her very lifeblood, should be transmuted
into that thing most valuable and most difficult to procure
money ! What was so precious in her eyes as money, slowly
and painfully coined out of the toils, the sweat of the peasant ?
Nasta knew by experience how indispensable money is. How
often had she seen the tears, the misery, the despair, occasioned
by the want of this miserable pelf! There was a man in an ad-
jacent village who had met with a series of misfortunes ; his
son had been taken by the conscription, his wife had died short-
ly after, his crops had failed ; these and other troubles he had
borne with tolerable equanimity, but when his savings were
stolen, the small hoard he had amassed so laboriously to satisfy
the claims of the money-lender, the poor man had shut the door
of his cabin and hung himself in despair. Yes, everything was
hard in this life, but to earn money was the hardest of all.

The result of Nasta's reflections was the practical conclusion
that in order to do anything she must have money, and a con-
siderable sum too. But her idea of a considerable sum was ex-
tremely vague. What would constitute a considerable sum?
Perhaps when one could begin to count, not with copper coins
or paper money, but with shining gold pieces. She would spare
and save to the utmost of her power, and surely in time she
would have enough.

A new epoch now commenced for Nasta. The world wore
a brighter aspect ; and if her mind had not altogether regained
its former serenity, at any rate she now had a definite pur-

1892.] A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE. 417

pose in view, to save money ! Hitherto no one could have ac-
cused her of avarice, but now at the sight of a few coins a hun-
gry look came into her eyes, and when she could clutch a few
dirty bits of copper in her horny hand, it seemed as if the gates
of Paradise were opening to her. So sparingly did she live that
she actually managed to keep intact the few francs which were
paid her each month. She denied herself salt, the sole con-
diment of the peasant, and lived on dry bread and boiled
potatoes, her only beverage being the water from her own
spring, since milk was a luxury which must henceforth be dis-
pensed with. No sooner did she return from her daily jour-
ney than she went to work in the fields of a neighboring
farmer, laboring like a horse to earn a scanty meal, never com-
plaining so long as she could meet with employment. So great
was her anxiety to obtain money in every possible way that
one day she was caught by old Marina, a professional beggar, in
the act of soliciting alms from the passers-by on the high-road.
That was too bad ; such impudence could not be allowed, that
she, an employee of the state, should have the effrontery to
stand there in open daylight and take the bread out of the
mouths of honest beggars ! Amid a torrent of abuse the old
woman hobbled after Nasta as fast as her failing breath and her
infirmities would permit, prepared, could she overtake her, to
deal her a sound blow with her crutch. But Nasta quickly
made off without a word, and as soon as she was out of the
old cripple's sight resumed her mendicant character.

After several months had elapsed she bethought herself that
it was time to consider what should be done with her hoard.
In the interval she had made inquiries as to the customary way
of testifying affection for and remembrance of the dead. She
had been told this was done by reciting prayers, having Masses
said, and giving alms on their behalf.

It is a good work to give alms to the poor, the priest had
said to her. Alms to the poor ! Pray, who in all Busowiska was
so poor as herself? Certainly not the old beggar-woman who
had threatened to beat her with her crutch ; but even if Nasta
were to give all her earnings to Marina, who would be the
gainer? Why Marina, of course, not Wasylek ; and Nasta wanted
Wasylek, and Wasylek alone, to have the benefit of every penny.

A Mass would certainly be far more profitable, but then
what a very short time a Mass lasted. No sooner had the priest
gone up to the altar than it was over. Nasta must really con-
tinue to find some means of praying continually for her child.
She remembered that a wealthy lady in the vicinity, whose

4i 8 A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE. [June,

children had all died one after the other, had built a chapel in
honor of the Mother of God, and not long after a son had been
born to her, a fine, healthy child, who was growing up as sturdy
as a young oak. In consequence of having erected this
chapel the lady had acquired the title of foundress, fondatorka
of the parish. Nasta pronounced this word with an accent of
respect not unmingled with envy. Would to God that she could
have become a fondatorka for her little Wasylek's sake ! Of
course a chapel was quite out of the question, but might she
not erect a statue ? That would be the very thing she wanted ;
something that would pray night and day for Wasylek, which
would itself be a continual prayer. Moreover, no one would
pass by it without paying it some token of respect, without
making the sign of the cross, or sending up to heaven some
supplication, and all that would be so much the more for Wasy-
lek. What a harvest might thus be gained !

Delighted with her idea, .Nasta began to make a minute in-
spection of all the statues and sacred images situated on the
high-road. Here a lofty cross stretched its arms to heaven ;
there, within a tiny shrine, the feeble flame of a lamp flickered
before a holy picture. Further on an imposing figure of St.
Nicholas, clad in pontifical vestments, met the eye ; or of St.
John Nepomucen, wearing a white cotta and black biretta.
What struck her most was a life-sized figure of St. Michael,
arrayed in helmet and cuirass, proudly contemplating a formid-
able dragon writhing at his feet. This statue was an object of
great veneration in all the country round, and certainly it had
the chief claim on Nasta's devotion, for had not the sacristan
told her that the glorious archangel was the captain of the
heavenly hosts? Undoubtedly, therefore, it was with him that
Wasylek had to do. How delightful it would be if she could
only erect a statue like this at the foot of the mountain by the
wayside, where in happier days her beloved child used to be
waiting to greet her ! But the difficulty was to find out where
statues were manufactured. Nasta had never heard of one of
her neighbors getting anything of the sort, nor did she remem-
ber having seen such wares exposed for sale at any fair or
market. An unexpected turn of events enabled her to obtain
the desired information.

II.

The reason why the parish of Busowiska was so much neg-
lected was because, as has been said, several years previously the
church had been burned down, and, despite the repeated admo-
nitions addressed to them by the government, the village com-

1892.] A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE. 419

monalty, not knowing how to raise the necessary funds, had
taken no steps for its reconstruction. Besides, they argued, what
object was there in doing so ? They might just as well go to
the next parish to perform their devotions. And once, when the
mayor did make a stir about the matter, he was quickly over-
ruled and silenced by the votes of his colleagues. In fact, the
good people thought themselves quite secure until one day, when
the local board was sitting, who should suddenly appear on the
scene but the archdeacon of the diocese, accompanied by the
pope of Tersow and his sacristan.

The archdeacon began by upbraiding the peasants for their
negligence in tolerating such a disgraceful state of things. It
was a shame to the village, he said, and to the diocese, and a
mortal sin on the consciences of all of them. The bishop was
so angry with the people that he declared Busowiska to be the
most godless parish under his charge, and predicted that if they
persevered in their obstinacy they would become like the barren
fig-tree of the Gospel, which bore no fruit, and was only fit to
be cut down and cast into the fire.

The village magnates listened in blank silence to this address,
and the mention of the barren fig-tree impressed them forcibly.
In the preceding year as many as ten fires had broken out on
different homesteads in the parish, and again that year there had
already been four. Perhaps this was a judgment upon them. Af-
ter all there was a great deal of truth in what the archdeacon said.

Scarcely was this short allocution ended when a rumbling
was heard on the pavement outside, and, amid a cloud of dust,
M. Krzespel, the government inspector, alighted from his yellow
cabriolet in all the dignity of his official cap and gold-laced coat.
The peasants made way for him with deferential respect, and
he began at once to harangue them in the loud, commanding
tone he assumed on important occasions.

" Yes, yes," he said, " I fully concur in everything that the
venerable archdeacon has been saying about the church. In fact
the matter is quite settled ; the deeds are drawn up and officially
stamped and signed. There is no getting out of it now ; the
community is bound to rebuild the cerkiew whether they like it
or no. I, the imperial inspector, have come in person to an-
nounce this to you ! " Then, finding his hearers, who were all
aghast at these tidings, uttered no word of protest, he added in
a somewhat less imperious manner that his majesty the emperor
had graciously given permission for the wood required for the
building to be cut in the imperial forests. There was, therefore,
no time to be lost a commission must be appointed to arrange

42o A MOTHER' s SACRIFICE. [June,

about the work at once. The discomfited village authorities
glanced furtively at one another. They all felt that further re-
sistance was impossible. The order was drawn up, signed and
sealed. The bishop, the archdeacon, the inspector all said it
must be done, and done it must be. But what had most in-
fluence with them was the assurance that the emperor would
provide the material for the structure. " Well, well," they said
resignedly, " we will rebuild it."

Before many days had passed the inhabitants of Busowiska,
were not only completely reconciled to the idea, but took all the
credit of it to themselves, boasting of the alacrity with which they
had spontaneously agreed to make the sacrifice, and incur the
expense of rebuilding the cerkiew for the public good. Some
braggarts even went so far as to say that it must be constructed
of solid bricks, that the cupola must be surmounted by a gilded
cross, and that the services of a first-rate artist must be secured
for the decoration of the interior.

All that sounded well, but the offer of the inspector to fur-
nish the wood reduced the fine talk to sober sense. The church
was to be of wood, but at any rate the best builder that could
be found must be commissioned to build it. This gave rise to
fresh discussions. Some proposed a local celebrity, who had
erected a church at no great distance ; others wanted a man
whose name was more widely known. Finally all agreed that
Klymasko, an architect of some note, was the man most suitable
to be entrusted with the work. Had not engravings of the
beautiful temples he had erected appeared from time to time in
the illustrated journals ? Besides, one of Klymasko's peculiarities
was that he always preferred to construct his churches of wood
rather than of brick. He used to conceive the designs for them
out in the forest, lying on his back on the mossy ground in the
shade of the pines. What material, he would say, so fitting for
a temple to the Most High as the trees of the forest, which
breathe an atmosphere of recollection and of prayer, in whose
branches the whispering wind and the song of the birds pro-
claim the power and greatness of God? Better far than walls
of mud raised by the hand of man. Undoubtedly, Klymasko
was the man they wanted ; and a deputation was forthwith ap-
pointed who should go without delay to the great man, and re-
quest him to erect in the village of Busowiska a cerkiew of ele-
gant design and ample dimensions.

Klymasko at first made some difficulties about accepting the
commission on account of his age and infirmities, but he ended
by yielding to the entreaties of the villagers ; and a few days

1892.] A MOTHERS SACRIFICE. 421

later he came in person to inspect the site of the former church.
He was a little, old man, with finely cut features and a long,
white moustache. In his clear blue eyes there lurked a mischiev-
ous twinkle, while his snow-white hair, falling onto his shoulders
from beneath the large felt hat worn by the mountaineers of
those parts, gave him somewhat of a patriarchal aspect. He
first examined the plot of ground where the old church
had stood, and expressed his approval of it. It was a level
space surrounded by lime-trees, and from its height it dominated
the whole village. Then he took his measurements carefully
with line and rule, planting little stakes at regular intervals in
the ground. He laid strict injunctions on the villagers that no
one was to interfere with these and gave a few directions as to
the preparation of the wood. This done he tossed off the glass
of brandy offered him by the mayor, and took his leave.

After these preliminaries had been arranged, the people of
Busowiska considered the enterprise fairly begun. The myste-
rious little stakes were regarded with solemn veneration, and
most of the inhabitants came at least once a day to inspect
them. Soon, however, the work was commenced in earnest.
The blows of the axe and the grinding of the saw were heard
beneath the branches of the lime-trees, mingled with the rough
voices of the carters unloading the huge trunks from their wagons.

Nasta, her mind still engrossed with her fixed idea, often
hung about the spot. It occurred to her that she could easily
learn from the workmen what she desired so much to know. She
began in a roundabout way by inquiring timidly : " Isn't it very
hard work to plane those great beams ? " The men answered
with another question, after the manner of the Slavs :

" That is so ; but how should it be otherwise than hard ? "

Nasta took courage to continue : " But to shape stone, is
not that still harder work?"

" Of course it is ; what a question to ask !"

Gradually she contrived to worm out of the men the infor-
mation she wanted. She learnt that there were masons who
worked in stone, some of whom fashioned fine statues like those
she had seen, and that the nearest sculptor resided in the town
of Stambor, a long distance from Busowiska. Having elicited
these facts, Nasta resolved to act with promptitude. The very
next day, on her return from the post-office, she would
walk to Stambor. True, she would have twenty-one kilometres
to cover on the way there, and the same to come back ; but no
matter : if she could not return before sunset, she would come
by night. The next day happened to be Thursday too, the

422 A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE. [June,

market-day at Stambor, so the people from the villages would
be driving in to make their purchases, and surely some one or
other would give her a lift on the way. Nasta had never been
in Stambor in fact, she had never been in any very large town :
thus on arriving there she was greatly impressed by its magnifi-
cence. How different it was from anything she had ever seen !
How spacious the market-place was, and how beautifully paved
with flag-stones ! And on one side of the great square there
was a town-hall with an imposing clock-tower, and over the
clock there was a golden stag that glittered in the sun and
turned with every breath of wind ! And, greatest wonder of all,
every time the hour struck a watchman came out of the tower,
and blew his horn towards each of the four points of the com-
pass. But what Nasta admired most was the handsome church,
with white walls and a red roof, and the rows of beautiful shops
under the arcade, where everything might be bought for which
heart could wish.

Nasta did not linger among these novel sights, but inquired
her way to the stonemason's yard. It was quite out of the
town, and as she went thither she felt no slight trepidation.
However, she summoned up all her courage and presence of
mind, and, on reaching the door, she entered boldly. Two men
were at work in the yard ; they wore long aprons and were
almost as white as millers. They were engaged in chiselling two
great blocks of stone, and at every blow of the hammer a
shower of chips fell all around them. Now, Nasta had dressed
herself in her best for the occasion ; she had tied a clean white
'kerchief over her head, a string of beads round her neck, and
her Sunday apron round her waist, yet the men actually took
her for a beggar, and in no gentle terms bade her begone !

She was not going to be so easily baffled. Now that she was
once there, it behooved her to stand her ground bravely and
show no sign of timidity. She therefore began in a low, steady
voice, as if she were reciting a prayer, to explain the object of
her coming. She came, she said, to procure a statue, because
some one had told her that there were sculptors at Stambor who
carved statues, and she wanted one of stone, hard stone, of a
man's height, with wings and a plume of feathers. Yes, with
two wings, and a helmet with a crest, and a sword at his side,
like the one at Staromiasta they must surely know it ; it stood
on the highway near the toll-gate, not far from the cottage
where the cobbler lived. He was an archangel, named Michael,
and stood under a little shrine, but the roof was falling to pieces
and wanted repairing.

1892.] A MOTHER' s SACRIFICE. 423

The masons had stopped their work, and stared in bewil-
dered amazement at the intruder, who thus rambled on about a
cobbler named Michael who lived in a shrine near the toll-gate !

"What Michael is she talking about?" asked the foreman,
coming forward. " Have we an order from any one of that
name ?"

He made Nasta repeat her story, and at last got an inkling
of her meaning. " A statue of the Archangel Michael, you mean,
like the one at Staromiasta ? Yes, yes, I understand. And for
whom is it wanted?"

" It is I who want it," Nasta faltered.

" It is for yourself ? Are you, then, the fondatorka ?"

The faint color suffused the thin cheeks of the letter-carrier,
and a feeling of indescribable gratification filled her heart.
" Yes, it is for me," she repeated.

" Have you the money to pay for it ? "

Nasta nodded in sign of assent.

"Are you aware how much such a figure of St. Michael
would cost ? "

" No, I am not," she replied.

" Do you want a pedestal, too ? "

Nasta had not the slightest idea what a pedestal was, but
she would not betray her ignorance. "A pedestal, too," she re-
joined unflinchingly.

" It would cost at least a hundred florins."

A hundred florins ! A sudden darkness fell, before Nasta's
eyes, and strange noises sounded in her ears. Her head grew
dizzy, and she experienced the awful sensation of one who, at
the cost of infinite pain and toil, has scaled an inaccessible
height, and feels the ground giving way beneath his feet.

Poor Nasta ! In a moment she fell from the ideal height of
her cherished dream the dream which but a few minutes be-
fore had seemed so near realization. Down she fell on to the
pitiless stones of the weary road her aching feet had unremit-
tingly trodden for so many years. And alas ! at the same time
all hope vanished of acquiring the glorious title of fondatorka f

A hundred florins ! The idea of such an enormous amount
had never entered her head. She had never even attempted to
reckon so high, for never had any but the most trifling sums passed
through her hands. She stood dumbfounded, transfixed to the
ground in the presence of the stonemasons, not knowing what
to do next. Suddenly she resolved to have recourse to flight, as
the best means of escaping from the embarrassing situation. Before
the men could recover from their surprise she turned on her

424 A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE. [June,

heel, crossed the threshold, and ran off down the road as fast as
her feet could carry her. On and on she ran, like a hunted
hare, until she reached the toll-gate, where she sunk breathless
and exhausted on the roadside.

Who can tell the thoughts that passed through her mind in
the course of her headlong flight ? Was it as much the revelation
of her own impotency as a bitter sense of humiliation that wound-
ed her so keenly ?

Side by side with the laudable desire of sacrifice, that spon-
taneous and pure offspring of maternal solicitude, pride, the in-
herent vice of human nature, had insidiously taken possession of
her soul. Actuated at the outset simply by the wish to benefit
her child, she had gradually been attracted by the dazzling
prospect of herself becoming a fondatorka. Now the anticipated
glory had vanished like smoke, and left nothing but the sorrow
of a disconsolate and crestfallen mother.

But when the first sharp pang of disappointment had sub-
sided, Nasta settled down by degrees into the stolid, resigned,
apathetic indifference that characterizes the Slavonian peasant,
and is the result of the dogged resistance of the race to foreign
dominion. She had been foolish and proud, and now she was
punished for it. How could a miserable, poverty-stricken crea-
ture like her, who earned a scanty pittance in the sweat of her
brow, dream of aspiring to imitate a great and wealthy lady !
She had certainly quite forgotten who and what she was.

After a while, however, a new project began to take shape
in Nasta's brain. She could not have a statue, since the price
asked for it was so exorbitant, but she would have a picture.
What an excellent idea ! A painting could not be expensive,
for what was wanted for it ? Only a square of canvas and a
few colors. She might have a painting of the Blessed Virgin,
for instance, and the picture could be nailed upon the old ash-
tree by the wayside at the foot of the hill just on the very
spot where Wasylek used to feed his sheep and watch for her
coming. A couple of boards would make a roof over it, to pre-
serve it from being spoilt by the rain. Only this time she must
take good care to inquire beforehand about the price, and when
she had made quite sure, go to the painter without hesitation
or diffidence, and, above all, without pride.

A. M. CLARKE.

Stindon, Arundel, Eng.

(TO BE CONTINUED.)

>2.] AMERICAN CATHOLICS AND THE ROMAN QUESTION. 425

AMERICAN CATHOLICS AND THE ROMAN
QUESTION*

AMERICAN Catholics have always been loyal and devoted to
the Holy See. Nor have they ever felt that this devotion in
any way interfered with their patriotism, or that any degree of
even enthusiastic devotion to the republic founded by Washing-
ton was incompatible with a supreme devotion to that Catholic
commonwealth which was founded by the Lord upon the Rock of
Peter. The spiritual supremacy of the See and the Successor of
Peter has always been fully recognized, and exercised without
any resistance in this portion of the Catholic Church. The great
act of supreme teaching authority by which Pius IX. defined
the Immaculate Conception was received with acclamation by all
our bishops, clergy, and faithful people. In like manner, the
definition of Papal infallibility by the Vatican Council was re-
ceived with unhesitating faith and without a murmur of dissent.
The encyclicals of the popes have been always received with
docile respect and obedience by the American clergy and laity.
Moreover, when the violent and unjust invasion of Rome de-
prived the Sovereign Pontiff of his temporal principality, the
deepest sympathy was felt for him, and an equal indignation
against the sacrilegious despoilers of the Roman sanctuary. These
sentiments have been confirmed and strengthened by subsequent
events. They have been manifested in various ways up to the
present time. And now, it is assuredly the common desire of
the whole Catholic body in the United States to support in
whatever way is right and practicable, by all the moral influence
it may possess and be able to exercise, the efforts of the Roman
Pontiff and of the loyal adherents to his sacred cause in Europe,
to put an end to his present intolerable position under the usurp-
ed dominion by which he is oppressed.

The sympathy of American Catholics with the Pope on ac-
count of the spoliation of his temporal sovereignty, and their in-
dignation against the usurpers and all those who have positively
aided or negatively connived at their unjust invasion, is derived
from their religious loyalty to the Pope as the Vicar of Christ

* American Catholics andthe Roman Question. By Monsignor Joseph Schroeder, D.D.,
Ph.D., Professor of Dogmatic Theology in the Catholic University of America. New York :
Benziger Brothers.

426 AMERICAN CATHOLICS AND THE ROMAN QUESTION. [June,

and the successor of St. Peter, as its principal source. Political
considerations, important as they are, are secondary, in the esti-
mation of Catholics, especially of Americans, who are so far re-
moved from European affairs and interests. It is because the
free and unhindered exercise of his supreme spiritual, pastoral
office demands the perfect liberty and independence of the Pope,
that Catholics cannot endure his being subject to any political
sovereignty, either of a king or a republic. The question is
therefore a religious one. Moreover, as the freedom and inde-
pendence of the Pope requires for its sufficient security and sta-
bility that he should possess a temporal principality, his right to
the peaceful and undisturbed enjoyment of the political dominion
justly acquired by the Roman Church is drawn into the religious
sphere.

It follows, also, from the religious nature and relations of the
whole question of the temporal power, that the Pope is the su-
preme judge of the right, the necessity, and the expediency of
asserting, maintaining, and defending the temporal sovereignty of
the Roman pontiff, and of rescuing it from the usurpation of an
unjust invader.

Consequently, all Catholics are bound to accept, to follow,
and so far as possible by lawful means to support and second
the efforts made to bring into actual execution, the judgment of
the Sovereign Pontiff in this matter. His judgment is, by itself
alone, supreme and decisive. But it is also sustained by the
concurrent judgment of the entire Catholic episcopate, which has,
with and under its head, judicial authority. The wisest and
most learned of the clergy and the laity, theologians, statesmen,
publicists, men fully competent to understand all the reasons of
the case, and the whole mass of the faithful, whose Catholic
sense and conscience are unerring in their spiritual instinct, con-
cur with all the moral weight of their consent, with the authori-
tative decisions of the Holy See.

Securus judicat orbis terrarum. The whole Catholic world
cries out that the highest interests of the faith and the church
are involved in the Roman Question, and are imperilled by the
usurpation of the sovereignty over the capital city of Christen-
dom. Many enlightened and impartial non-Catholics condemn
this usurpation and admit that the demand of Catholics for the
independence of their chief priest and spiritual ruler is just.
The enemies of the Catholic religion and the bitter foes of
Christianity perceive clearly that the final subversion of the tem-
poral sovereignty of the Pope would be most dangerous to his

1892.] AMERICAN CATHOLICS AND THE ROMAN QUESTION. 427

spiritual supremacy, and the destruction of a great bulwark of
the Christian religion. The question of Roman sovereignty is
eminently a religious question of the highest moment, concerning
Europe and all Christendom, the whole world indeed, whose
destinies and future welfare are dependent on Christianity and
Christian civilization.

Christianity is essentially Catholic, and Catholicity is essentially
Papal. For Christ founded the church upon the Rock of Peter,
who survives in his successors. The inheritors of the supremacy
of St. Peter are his successors in the Roman episcopate. Dr.
Schroeder very properly, therefore, makes a preliminary argu-
ment in proof of the indissoluble connection between the Papacy
and the Roman episcopate. It is surprising that any Catholic
writer could ever have treated this connection as accidental and
of purely ecclesiastical institution. Rome was the See of Peter,
in which the chair of Peter was placed. The Roman Church
was made by St. Peter, in virtue of the supreme power vested
in him by Jesus Christ, the centre of Catholic unity, the prima-
tial see of Christendom, the " Mother and Mistress of Churches."
It is the " Apostolic See." The true church of Christ is the
" Holy, Catholic, Apostolic, Roman Church," which is extended
in all the bishoprics subject to her jurisdiction, throughout the
world. All these are parts of the universal church, subsist in
unity, and are Catholic, by virtue of their communion with the
Roman Church. The Bishop of Rome succeeds to St. Peter,
inherits his chair and episcopate, and in virtue of this succes-
sion, alone and ipso facto, is endowed with all the powers and
prerogatives of the sovereign pontificate and spiritual supremacy
in the Catholic Church. The Papal Question, which is a ques-
tion of life and death for Catholicity and Christianity, is, there-
fore, necessarily and perpetually a " Roman Question." The
Pope must always have Rome as his episcopal see, and sit in
its chair, in order to possess the " Apostolic See of Peter,"
and to sit in the "chair of Peter." Consequently, he ought
always to reside in Rome. Residence in any other city is
exile. The exile of the Popes to Avignon, although to a
great extent voluntary, was abnormal, violent, disastrous, and
so fraught with evil and peril, that only the almighty power
of Divine Providence prevented the gates of hell from pre-
vailing against the church by subverting its foundation, the
Rock of Peter. If the Pope were obliged by the persecu-
tion of his enemies to leave Rome and seek an asylum
elsewhere, such a calamity must be endured with resignation to

428 AMERICAN CATHOLICS AND THE ROMAN QUESTION. [June,

the will of God. But to propose a measure of this sort as a
voluntary cession to the usurpers of sovereignty in Rome, and a
solution of the Roman Question, is utterly unworthy of any
loyal Catholic, and altogether futile. The same may be said of
a proposition that the Pope should content himself with the
possession of the Vatican, under the protection of the European
powers. These are suggestions of impatience and discourage-
ment. In like manner, when recourse is had to a passive aban-
donment of the whole affair into the hands of Divine Provi-
dence, on the plea that God has many ways of providing for
the liberty and independence of the 'Pope, without restoring to
him his just and legitimate sovereignty in Rome, we suspect the
existence of more pusillanimity than genuine faith and confidence
in God. We are reminded of the behavior of the Moslem sol-
diers at Kars, during the famine, who sat down apathetically
with folded hands, saying : " Allah will send us pilau." We must,
indeed, place all our reliance on Divine Providence, and we can-
not foresee how the Lord will bring about his own final tri-
umph and the triumph of the church on earth. For this very
reason, it is not for us to make conjectures about future changes
in political constitutions, in the social order, in the relations be-
tween church and state, which may alter the attitude of the
Holy See toward governments and peoples and introduce a new,
profoundly different era in ecclesiastical and civil history.

The disturbed, unsettled state of the world, the tremulous
condition of the intellectual, moral, political, and social earth
under our feet, the anxieties and forebodings which agitate the
minds of men respecting what is to come, make a great tempta-
tion to indulge in these conjectural forecasts. Some try to inter-
pret the prophecies of Holy Scripture. Some have searched
after private revelations and prophecies, in a more or less credu-
lous disposition. The signs of the time have been curiously
and eagerly scanned by many, in the hope of gaining an out-
look into the future. Speculations are rife, and are as various
as the temperaments, the intellectual habits, and all the biasing
influences which act upon the opinions, the judgments, and the
horoscopic views of individuals and classes.

Some take a very gloomy view, which in certain instances
appears to afford a sombre delight, like the panorama of a fear-
ful battle, the appearance of the ocean in tempest, or the sight
of a volcanic eruption. The signs of the times are interpreted
to indicate universal degeneracy, the triumph of impiety and all
wickedness, an age of the persecution of Christians, the coming

1892.] AMERICAN CATHOLICS AND THE ROMAN QUESTION. 429

of Antichrist, and the near end of the world in the flames of
the Last Judgment. Of course, if the line of the popes is near-
ly completed, the destruction of Rome, and probably of Paris
and London also, impending, and a worse period than that of
Diocletian close at hand, with the general conflagration of the
world closely following, it is hardly worth while to trouble our-
selves about the Roman Question.

There are those, however, who look for a descent of our
Lord upon the earth, not to destroy it, but to purify and re-
generate mankind, and to inaugurate his personal reign in a tem-
poral kingdom which will last for a thousand years, or perhaps,
as one very devout Catholic gentleman whom the writer met
some years ago in Europe conjectured, for 365,000 years. If
we take this view of what is coming, we may cheerfully wait for
the settlement of the Roman Question by the Lord in person.
Not many Catholics, however, indulge in these anticipations of
a millennial reign of Christ on the earth. Nor have we reason
to believe that the expectation of the near reign of Anti-
christ is common at the present time.

The greater number of those who endeavor to forecast the
future keep on the lower level of rational philosophy. They ob-
serve the trend of events and seek in causes which are at work
the germs and principles of future resulting effects such as may
be expected to follow in the natural order of sequence. Some
are given to foreboding evil days for religion and civilization.
Others expect a happy, progressive movement, and have brightly
colored visions of an era to come better than any the world has
ever seen. ^

Quite often, the passing away of monarchical and aristocratic
institutions and the universal prevalence of democracy are re-
garded as unavoidable results of present tendencies and world-
currents in the flowing stream of human history. If this pros-
pect is regarded with hope and pleasure, there is no fixed limit
to the ideal perfection which can be imagined as destined to be
reduced to actuality in the future Christian fraternity of repub-
lics, living in amity and constituting one world-wide Christian
commonwealth. Let us suppose all nations and all men united
in faith, all laws and administrations conformed to the maxims
of the Gospel, one Christian fold under one shepherd, no
more wars among nations, no more conflicts between church and
state, and we have, in our imagination, constructed a true king-
dom of Christ on the earth. In such an ideal condition of
human society, the Vicar of Christ might exercise fully all the
VOL. LV. 28

430 AMERICAN CATHOLICS AND THE ROMAN QUESTION. [June,

power and influence of his spiritual supremacy without needing
to be encumbered with the lower cares of political government.
To adopt the beautiful expression of St. Ignatius of Antioch, he
would then, literally, be " presiding in the Love."

When this ideal condition is realized, it will be evident that
God has always been leading the church and humanity to this
happy consummation. Until then, the utmost which can be
reasonably hoped for, is an approximation of the actual to the
ideal. It is not unreasonable to hope that a reign of Christ on
the earth, which will be the most complete fulfilment of the pro-
phecies which is destined to take place in and through the
church militant, is approaching. It is not unreasonable to an-
ticipate extensive and profound modifications of political and
social order, which will give a new face to Christian civilization,
equalize and ameliorate the conditions of the struggle for well-
being in all classes. Leaving aside all radicals and fanatical ene-
mies of the venerable institutions ancl customs of the past, it is
certain that there is a prevalent and increasing belief among
sensible and well-principled men, that the democratic element is
destined to become more predominant and universal in politics
and sociology as the march of events goes on in its irresistible
progress. Probably, some of this sort of men look forward to
a transformation of all the empires and kingdoms of the civil-
ized world into republics, and the abolition of hereditary mon-
archy and aristocracy. It is not surprising that such persons
should regard the preservation of one kingdom in and around
Rome, and one king, the pope, as a solecism. Hence their in-
clination to find some way of accommodation, jpy which, in the
preservation of a new order of things in Christendom, the liber-
ty of the pope and the church may be secured by other means
than the possession of a papal principality.

This may appear to be a plausible view, but it is wholly un-
practical. It is mere theory, and has for its unsubstantial foun-
dation a collection of uncertainties. No statesman or philoso-
pher can foresee the political future of Europe. There is a
general expectation that a European war is coming. If such a
war actually breaks out, who can foretell its final issues ? Who
can foresee what the changes and transformations may be which
the future may bring forth? When this future becomes the
present, statesmen will know how to reconstruct the policy of
the nations, and to guide the course of public affairs in a man-
ner suitable to the altered conditions of the civilized world.
And the popes of that time will know how to solve the prob-

1892.] AMERICAN CATHOLICS AND THE ROMAN QUESTION. 431

Jem of adjusting the relations of the Church and the Holy See
to the governments and peoples existing in that new age.

But, meanwhile, it is folly to think of regulating the policy
of the present according to a preconceived and perhaps falla-
cious theory of a future and altered condition of affairs. It
would be folly for the government of the United States to de-
sist from building up a navy and providing for the coast-
defences, in the expectation that wars are going to cease, and
all disputes of nations are to be settled in the coming age by
peaceful, amicable arbitration. It is equally foolish to attempt
to persuade the Holy Father to make a cession of his rights to
the Italian usurper, to give up the contest he has been valiant-
ly maintaining, and content himself with the Vatican palace un-
der Italian or European guarantees of liberty in the exercise of
his pontifical supremacy. The Pope is the judge in this case.
Dr. Schroeder has amply shown that Pius IX. and Leo XIII.
have continuously and emphatically proclaimed to the Catholic
world the necessity and obligation of insisting on the restoration
to the Sovereign Pontiff of his temporal principality.

American Catholics are docile and obedient to the voice of
their supreme judge and ruler, and we, therefore, take for
granted that they will conform their judgments to his in respect
to the Roman Question, and will respond to his exhortation to
give him their moral support in his intrepid contention for the
rights of the Holy See.

The attitude of American Catholics toward the contention of
the Sovereign Pontiff has a special interest and importance from
the circumstance that we are citizens of a free republic, and are
not dominated or biased by prejudices or sympathies which are
anti-democratic. We are aloof from the dynastic conflicts and
political complications of Europe. It is as a religious question
that the Roman Question interests us. Our maxim is : The
welfare of the people is the supreme law. The welfare of the
entire Catholic people of the world is involved in the solution
of this question, their highest welfare that is, their religious
welfare. As we are convinced that the highest religious inter-
ests of all mankind are bound up with those of the Catholic
Church, we must say, that the welfare of the world is involved
in the Roman Question. The moral, political, and social welfare
of the nations depends on religion on the universal domina-
tion of Christianity. Rome is the central seat of Christianity,
and of genuine Christian civilization. The well-being of the
Roman Church and the Papacy is involved in the present, press-

432 AMERICAN CATHOLICS AND THE ROMAN QUESTION. [June,

ing, and burning Roman Question. And as all the highest in-
terests of mankind depend on this well-being, the solution of
the question, the application of the maxim : The welfare of the
people is the supreme law: ought to be made in view of this
universal good of the Catholic Church, of Christendom, and of
the world.

The case is sometimes put in such a way as to represent
the political interests of the Italian kingdom and the Roman peo-
ple as having an exclusive right to be considered. These in-
terests, elevated to the rank of rights, are placed in opposition
to the claims of the Pope to sovereignty in Rome. And, it is
further argued, that these claims cannot be advocated and de-
fended by Americans, without coming into collision with Amer-
ican ideas and principles.

It becomes, therefore, important to refute this contention,
and to prove that American Catholics can give their unreserved
and hearty support to the side of the Pope, without in any way
compromising those principles which may justly and properly
be called American.

This is the principal thesis and motive of Dr. Schroeder's pam-
phlet, and he has elucidated the topic admirably, as if he had
been " to the manor born."

It is first of all requisite to get a clear idea of what are
American principles. We are not to take all notions which may
be in vogue among the people, advanced by political orators,
uttered by writers in newspapers, or even proposed by writers
of reviews and books, as entitled to claim this rank. American
principles are those which lie at the basis of our institutions and
laws, which may be said to be incorporated with our republic,
and which have been the guiding maxims of our best statesmen
and legislators from the beginning. We are to look for their
exposition to the writings of our standard jurists, publicists, and
moral philosophers, among whom the illustrious Dr. Brownson,
an ornament of the church and the republic during the last
half-century, from whom Dr. Schroeder has frequently quoted
in his pamphlet, holds a distinguished place. The fundamental
principle by which we must all be guided, in order to be loyal
American citizens, is the legitimacy, authority, and divine sanc-
tion of our republican constitution. This is sufficient for essen-
tial patriotism, loyalty, and fidelity in the fulfilment of all civic
duties to our own country. Beyond this, every one is free and
the enjoyment of this freedom is a part of that liberty which is
recognized and protected by our laws to form his own theories

1892.] AMERICAN CATHOLICS AND THE ROMAN QUESTION. 433

and opinions concerning civil government and the various forms
of state constitutions. Yet, it is an almost necessary conse-
quence of the love of country which naturally grows up in the
bosoms of all who are born and bred here, or who have volun-
tarily sought a new home among us, that an American citizen
should regard our republican constitution as not merely lawful
and essentially good, but as being, for us, the best and, indeed,
the only possible form of political society. The very common
and general sentiment is, that it is, in itself, the best and most
perfect form. And many think it would be desirable, and may
eventually become practicable, to establish similar constitutions
in all civilized nations. A Catholic may hold all this without
any detriment to faith or the most loyal devotion to the author-
ity of the church and its supreme head.

It is very commonly held, and especially insisted on by those
whose political theories are democratic, that it is a principle of
natural law that all government derives its authority directly and
immediately from the people. This opinion, also, a Catholic is
free to hold. In fact, this is the doctrine taught by many stan-
dard Catholic authorities in the science of ethics. It is called
the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, which most
modern states have received into their public law, and which in
our republic is the basis of all civic obligation.

Now, the inference which certain persons draw from this
doctrine of popular sovereignty, and apply to the case under
consideration, is : that the people of Italy, and in particular of
Rome, have a right to determine for themselves what their gov-
ernment shall be, a right to make Rome the capital of a united
Italian kingdom.

This is not a necessary inference from the principle of pop-
ular sovereignty rightly understood. This sovereignty cannot be
attributed to any and every collection of men who may call
themselves the people ; but to a political body of people possess-
ing a rightful autonomy. Moreover, a Christian who holds that
the authority of government is immediately, in the first instance,
conferred by the people, must also hold that the authority is
derived mediately from God, and possesses a divine sanction.
This is more worthy to be called an American principle than
any lower doctrine of anarchists, atheists, or fanatics, who have
no claim to be regarded as representatives of the Christian peo-
ple of our republic.

The legitimate political order is sacred ; obedience to just laws
and rightful authority is an obligation in conscience, rebellion

434 AMERICAN CATHOLICS AND THE ROMAN QUESTION. [June,

and resistance are sins against God. The individuals who have
taken part in the original constitution of the state and the
conferring of authority upon its government, are, therefore,
singly and collectively bound by their own acts, and are capable
of binding their posterity. They are not owners of a capricious,
lawless, irresponsible dominion, to be exercised at will, but trus-
tees of a certain valuable investment, acting by a power dele-
gated by God, to whom they are responsible. All compacts and
vested rights, all co x mmon and individual interests, must be re-
spected. The order established must be permanent and durable.
The notion, therefore, of a popular sovereignty remaining in the
multitude, and independent of the constitutional government, is
totally false and destructive of all law and order. It is, more-
over, utterly un-American. Dr. Brownson has well and truly
said : " The notion which has latterly gained some vogue, that
there persists always a sovereign people back of the government
or constitution or organic people, competent to alter, change,
modify, or overturn the existing government at will, is purely
revolutionary, fatal to all stable government, to all political au-
thority, to the peace and order of society, and to all security
for liberty, either public or private" (Works, vol. xviii. p. 451).

The government of the United States, supported by the
majority of the States of the Union and of the people, engaged
in a war, to maintain the inviolable unity of the nation against
the seceding, confederated States, and obtained a decisive victo-
ry. All who believe that the victorious side was in the right,
must recognize the principle which triumphed to be the genuine,
American principle. All those who hold to the idea of State
sovereignty, must recognize the same principle, only substituting
the obligation of loyalty to the State for that of loyalty to
the United States.

It is no American principle that a republican constitution is
the only one which is legitimate and inviolable by unjust in-
vasion or rebellion. The legitimate government of the Roman
State was the. papal monarchy. Its overthrow was not an act
of popular sovereignty emanating from either the Roman or
the Italian people. The Italian kingdom was established by
conquest. It is not a question of conflicting claims of right
between the Pope as sovereign of Rome and the people of
Rome or Italy. It is a question between the Pope and the
Italian king and monarchy. The cause of the Italian occupa-
tion of Rome cannot be defended on the plea of the right of the
people to change their government, but only on the plea that

1892.] AMERICAN CATHOLICS AND THE ROMAN QUESTION. 435

the welfare of the people of Italy and Rome, as the supreme
law, justified the armed invasion a,nd conquest of the city, in
order to make it the capital of the new kingdom. No other
reason can be adduced to show that the Pope ought to cede
his rights to Humbert.

The plea is false. It has become so evident that the attempt
to make Rome the capital of an Italian kingdom has turned
out to be a disastrous fiasco, that there is no need to prove
what is so generally admitted. If we accept the unification of
Italy as an accomplished fact, which ought to remain as a per-
manent condition, for the good of Italy and Europe ; still, there
is no advantage to be gained for either Rome or Italy by the
continued occupation of the city. On the contrary, it is a great
disadvantage, and the supreme law of the salus populi demands
the restoration of the Papal sovereignty. Besides all this, the
political welfare of Europe and the preservation of the equi-
librium of the powers require it.

In addition to all this, the Roman domain has been given and
consecrated to God and the church, and the donation is irrevo-
cable. The spoliation of the Pope was not only an unjust, but
also a sacrilegious robbery, like the desecration of a church.
Rome is the precinct of the cathedral and palace of the popes.
It belongs to the whole Catholic Church, which has been out-
raged, robbed and despoiled, by the seizure of the domain be-
longing to its supreme see and bishop.

In the application of the maxim, Salus populi suprema lex, the
salus populi has a wider extent than Rome and Italy, and em-
braces the whole Catholic commonwealth.

Therefore, even though the separation of the Roman do-
main from the Italian kingdom involved some temporal disad-
vantage, which it does not, the welfare of the Catholic people
of the world, and even the political welfare of the European
nations, would require that local and particular interests should
give way to the more universal rights.

Dr. Schroeder points out the analogy which exists, in this
regard, between Rome and Washington. The supreme authority
of the President and Congress in the District of Columbia is
not derived from a cession made by its inhabitants, nor could it
be taken away by an exercise of the right of popular sover-
eignty on their part. We are disfranchised for the advantage
of the great commonwealth of the United States. There is no
American principle, therefore, which is compromised by Ameri-
can Catholics who deny to the people of Rome a right to de-

436 AMERICAN CATHOLICS AND THE ROMAN QUESTION. [June,

termine the government under which they choose to live. In
point of fact, it is not by fche Roman or Italian people that
the Pope has been deprived of his throne and the Sardinian
king installed in his place. The only right on which the usurpa-
tion rests, is the right of force.

The Catholics of the United States are not in any way acting
inconsistently with American principles in sustaining heartily the
cause of the Pope in unison with their European brethren.
Many of us are sons of the American Revolution. We will not
admit, for an instant, that we are one whit behind our ances-
tors, who in battle and in council aided in founding and consoli-
dating this republic, in loyalty and patriotism. Neither are we
willing to be surpassed in loyalty and devotion to the Holy See
and our Sovereign Pontiff, Leo XIII. , by any other Catholics in
the world.

In conclusion, we recommend to the attentive perusal of our
fellow-Catholics and our other fellow-citizens who love justice
and hate iniquity, the pamphlet of Dr. Schroeder in which the
Roman Question is so fully and ably discussed.

AUGUSTINE F. HEWIT.

Catholic University of America, Washington.

1892.] THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. 437

THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW.

AT the moment when the British government is about to in-
troduce compulsory education into Ireland it is interesting to
learn the opinions of teachers who have had experience of its
results in England. At the meeting of the National Union of
Teachers recently held at Leeds, the president, who has been a
teacher for many years in a Board school, and who is now a
candidate for Parliament as the special representative of the ele-
mentary teachers of the country, declared that, on the whole,
compulsory attendance had been a failure ; that the attendance
could hardly be worse if there were no pretence at compulsion
at all. This was shown by the fact that, whereas 4,800,000
children should be in attendance at school every day, not more
than 3,700,000 were actually there. Children were wilfully ab-
sent for fifteen months at a stretch ; perfectly healthy children
began school four years after the age which the law required ;
there were many sturdy children of thirteen who had never at-
tended school at all. Various methods were suggested in order
to secure the more exact fulfilment of the legal requirements;
but from cases which from time to time come before the courts,
it would appear that the circumstances of the parents are often
such that it is impossible for them to obey the law. In fact,
its enforcement involves hardships so great that magistrates dis-
miss the guilty parties with merely nominal fines.

A deeply felt grievance of the teachers is the system of gov-
ernment inspection, and the manner in which it is carried out.
They complain that inspection, as at present conducted, implies
distrust of the teachers ; and while recognizing the need of mod-
eration, regulation, and control, half the regulations and at
least half the inspectors serve only, they maintain, to harass and
hamper the teachers in their work. The system of examination
according to the present methods is declared to be fatal to zeal
in teaching, fatal to joy in learning, fatal to that inventive spirit
of experiment and amendment which alone can bring about im-
provement in educational methods and ideals. The inspectors
are not taken from the ranks of experienced teachers ; they are
generally university men new to the work. If inspectors exist
for the purpose of guarding against the incapacity of teachers, is

438 THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. [June,

it not even more necessary to guard against the incapacity of
inspectors ? Accordingly, the chief reason why complaints are
made of the instruction given in the schools is declared to be
the appointment by the Education Department of the wrong
type of inspector. Without doubt, if the door were absolutely
closed against the elementary teachers, so that none of them,
even the most capable, can rise to an inspectorship, there would
be a just ground of complaint ; but we cannot help thinking that
on the whole the cause of elementary education must gain by
being controlled by men who have had the advantage of pass-
ing through one of the great English universities. Any change
which would lead to their being supplanted would be detri-
mental to the best interests of scholars and teachers alike.

The value of the evidence which is being collected by the
Royal Commission on Labor, appointed in pursuance of act of
Parliament, and by various other committees, depends, of course,
upon the witnesses being able to state facts without fear of suffer-
ing pains and penalties should such testimony be distasteful (as it
naturally must be) to the parties guilty of grinding the faces of
the poor. One of the witnesses before the Committee on the
Hours of Labor of Railway Servants revealed certain features
of the management of the Cambrian Railway which the manager
and the directors of that company strongly objected to being
brought to the knowledge of the public. They accordingly pro-
ceeded to render the position of this obnoxious witness as bur-
densome as possible in order to force him to retire, and on his
not taking this very broad hint, in the end dismissed him from
the service. The matter, however, did not end here. Committees
of Parliament share the privileges of Parliament, and one of these
privileges is that no one shall be made to suffer for the evidence
which he is called upon to give. Accordingly the committee,
having satisfied itself of the truth of the allegation, reported
the matter to Parliament.

Now, all who are guilty of a breach of the privileges of Par-
liament render themselves liable to various penalties, the lightest
of which is an admonition, the more severe a reprimand, the
severest of all indefinite imprisonment in the Clock Tower. In
this case the offenders escaped with the lightest of these pun-
ishments. The directors of the railway company (one of whom
was a member of Parliament) and its manager were summoned

1892.] THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. 439

to the bar of the House, heard in their own defence, and, in
consideration of their humble apology, allowed to depart after
having received an admonition from the mouth of the Speaker.
This will, it is to be hoped, prove a salutary warning to other
employers. It is worthy of mention that, although more than
thirty railway servants gave evidence before the committee, and
scores of others gave information to the secretaries of their so-
cieties as to the long hours which they worked, not more than
four made any complaint of improper action on the part of the
directors or managers of the companies, and of these four three
were found not to be proved. Moreover, the effort to restrict
the perfect freedom of witnesses is said not to be confined to
the employers. A case is now under investigation by the com-
mittee in which some members of the union to which one of
the witnesses belonged tried to dismiss him from his office as
secretary on account of their displeasure with the evidence which
he gave before the committee. Should this be proved it is held
that it also would be a breach of privilege, and the capitalists
would have the satisfaction of seeing the leaders of their oppo-
nents placed in the same humiliating position as the directors
of the railway lately occupied. Students of the labor question
will rejoice at the infliction of penalties upon every one, whether
capitalist or working-man, who tries to prevent the bringing to
light the facts in a case on trial.

It is impossible any longer to resist the evidence which
proves that the tendency of trade in Great Britain is in the
wrong direction. The returns show that there has been a dimi-
nution of exports for the first three months of 1892 as com-
pared with the same period of 1890 of 7^ per cent. With the
United States this diminution amounts to 10 per cent., so that
the McKinley tariff has caused a loss of 2^ per cent. The
usual results have been experienced in the labor world strikes
have diminished in number. There is, however, one exception
the strike of the Durham miners ; nor would we deny that other
causes, such as the growing feeling in favor of arbitration and
conciliation, have contributed to the same result. Almost all
the satisfaction which springs from this diminution in the num-
ber of strikes is, however, destroyed by the ruinous effects of
the strike in Durham upon every one concerned upon the mi-
ners themselves, the coal-owners, the dependent traders and
manufacturers, and thousands of helpless women and children.
This has proved one of the greatest disasters that has been ex-

44Q THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. [June,

perienced for many years. From the beginning, too, the strug-
gle was seen to be hopeless. Why, then, was it begun ? The
real reason seems to be that the men were without a competent
adviser an adviser who should not only know the facts of the
case, but have the courage to tell the real truth. Those who
acted as leaders, seeing the natural reluctance of the men to
submit to a reduction of wages, and wishing above all things to
retain their own positions as the nominal heads, humored the
predominant inclinations and have led or been led to ruin. The
methods adopted by the strikers alienated public sympathy itself
an indispensable element of success. The necessity of wise, fear-
less, and independent guidance is illustrated by what has just
taken place in the adjoining county of Northumberland. Here the
miners proposed to strike for an increase of wages. The leaders
in this case were of a different calibre ; they told the men plain-
ly that the state of trade did not justify such a demand, and that
it could not be granted, and they were able by this plain speak-
ing and by the confidence which was felt in them to prevent
the threatened action. It was at once to his sympathy and to
his fearlessness that the influence and power of Cardinal Man-
ning were due."

In his Budget speech Mr. Goschen gave some interesting and
even surprising facts as to the profits of manufacturing and coal-
mining in Great Britain compared with those of other trades
and professions. The income-tax enables the government to
learn with a fair degree of accuracy the incomes of the various
classes of British citizens. From the returns it appears that the
total profits of the cotton lords are less than those made by the
medical profession. The profits of the legal profession are
greater than those of all the coal-owners in the United King-
dom. Again, if the totals of the profits of all the productive
and manufacturing industries are taken, they amount only
to half of the profits which fall under the head of distribu-
tion and transport. In other words, the profits made by those
who distribute and transport the articles when they are made is
twice as great as the profits of the manufacturer and producer
of the articles. Another noteworthy feature of the Budget is
the immense sum which is paid to employees in the way of sala-
ries ;5O,ooo,ooo as well as the fact that, although profits may
diminish for the employers, this amount remains unchanged.
This does not apply to the wages of the working-men, however.
As no income of less than 150 is liable to the tax, these returns

1892.] THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. 441

throw no light upon the stability or amount of the wages of the
most numerous class of the community.

The aims and the methods of French working-men are frequent-
ly considered to be unpractical and visionary. The manner in
which the Possibilist labor party are organizing their eleventh con-
gress, to be held next June, exempts this body, at all events, from
every criticism of such a character. In fact, the scheme is a model
of well-directed action to a definite end. One subject for discus-
sion has been selected with reference to which immediate legis-
lation is possible. That subject is hygiene, and it is sub-divided
into three sections the hygiene of the workman's food supply,
the sanitation of the workshop and factory, and the hygiene of
the workman's home. As these are all technical subjects involv-
ing difficult problems requiring special knowledge for their right
solution, an appeal was made to the leading representatives of
sanitary science in France to give the workmen who are to take
part in the congress an opportunity of instructing themselves in
these subjects. A cordial response was made to this appeal.
Six of the greatest authorities in France are to give as many
lectures on the different branches of the science in its special
application to the lives and the work of artisans. Visits are also
to be paid to the sewers, the sewer-farms, the disinfecting ap-
paratus, model dwellings, the municipal laboratory, etc. After
six weeks spent in these preliminary studies the congress will as-
semble, and no one will venture to say that the resolutions which
it may pass are likely to be the utterances of thoughtless and
uninstructed men. It would be well if the same pains were taken
to arrive at right decisions in more important matters ; in that
case the sufferings entailed by recent strikes would have been
averted.

A question which has been long before the public is the
trade in opium carried on by the British government in India.
The reform of this trade forms one of the many objects which
those persons who are laudably striving to better the condition
of mankind are earnestly striving to accomplish. Hitherto the
efforts directed to this end have met with but small success.
Last year, however, a resolution was carried in the House of
Commons declaring that the system by which the Indian opium
revenue is raised is morally indefensible, and urging upon the
Indian government that they should cease to grant licenses for
the cultivation of the poppy, except to supply the legitimate

442 THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. [June,

demand for medical purposes. Although this declaration of the
House had not the force of a law, it was a significant indication
of the opinion of the public with reference to the trade, and it
has had the effect of leading the authorities in India to take
measures to discourage the sale, and not to foster it for the sake
of the revenue. It is in its effect on the revenue that the prac-
tical difficulty lies. No less than twenty-five millions of dollars
accrue annually to the government from the trade in opium as
at present conducted, and it is a matter of the greatest difficulty
to find a way to supply the deficiency which would be caused by
its abandonment. The taxes in India, too, are already so heavy
that it would be next to impossible to impose new ones. Is the
zeal of the reformers in England great enough to make them
willing to take this burden upon themselves to tax themselves
in order to supply the deficiency ? If this is the case, they are
more worthy of praise than many reformers who are willing
enough indeed to have wrongs righted, but at other people's ex-
pense.

The resolution passed by the Canadian House of Commons,
by which the Dominion is pledged to reduce the duties now
levied on British manufactured goods as soon as the Imperial
Parliament " admits Canadian products to the British market on
terms more favorable than it grants to foreign products," has
given the greatest possible encouragement to the advocates of a
protective policy for Great Britain and her colonies. Even the
Times, which is wont to treat free trade as an article of faith,
the denial of which is deserving of everything which may exist
in the way of economical condemnation, admits that, should the
Australian colonies and the Cape Colony concur in urging upon
the mother country similar proposals, a case will have been made
out for taking the matter into serious practical consideration.
Meanwhile the United Empire Trade League, which was formed
about a year ago for the purpose of promoting this policy, is
steadily growing. The first report states that it has now 5,120
members, included among whom are the premiers of Cape
Colony, Queensland, and Newfoundland, many other leading
colonial statesmen, and three hundred members of the colonial
and imperial legislatures. At the last meeting of the National
Union of Conservative Associations in Great Britain a resolution
in support of the aims of the league was passed. There is no
doubt that a strong feeling is gradually being formed in favor of
a modification of the free-trade policy of Cobden and John

1892.] THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. 443

Bright, and that the Canadian resolution will give the movement
a great stimulus.

The successor of Cardinal Manning in the see of Westmin-
ster is in full sympathy with the social policy (if we may so
speak) which has been the glory and praise of his predecessor.
In fact, he has been, during the last years of the cardinal's life,
his active coadjutor, and even substitute in this work, having
come from Salford to visit different institutions in the East End
of London in which experiments were being made for the
amelioration of the lot of the poor. The various institutions of
the Salvation Army were included in this list. And now that
it is proposed to raise a memorial to the cardinal, it has been
decided that it shall take the form of an institution for the
benefit of the poor. A refuge is to be built in the East End
and endowed with sufficient funds. This refuge is to be for
the homeless poor of whatever nationality or creed, and is to
be under Catholic management. As the archbishop said, such a
memorial is better fitted to do honor to the work of the cardi-
nal than a beautiful cathedral, or a handsome but useless mau-
soleum, and he has promised that he will give to its furtherance
his utmost care and attention, and all the industry and zeal he
can command. And so the cardinal's greatest work will be con-
tinued.

A very comprehensive and intelligible view of illegitimacy in
Europe has been given to the public by a distinguished Ameri-
can physician, Dr. Alfred Leffingwell, of the Sanitorium, Dans-
ville, N. Y. (Scribners). The fruits of unlawful sexual union,
as made known by statistics, are carefully collated as to race,
country, climate, education, and religion, and the learned author
has given us the result of his studies in a small volume, full of
suggestive facts, and of inferences of all the greater value be-
cause flowing from a well-balanced mind entirely competent by
education and scientific observation to the task in hand.

What interests us most is, of course, Dr. Leffingwell's view
of the influence of religion on the prevalence of guilty union be-
tween men and women. His studies of the relative conditions
of Catholic and non-Catholic peoples in this regard are very in-
structive, making in favor of the former. One thing, it seems
to us, is lacking : a more intimate knowledge of the condition of
the people of Bavaria and Austria. Although the author holds
the reader mainly to the races in the British Islands, he yet

444 THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. [June,

brings in the condition of the European peoples in general in
regard to children born out of wedlock, and this brings out a
bad showing for Bavaria and Austria. But multitudes of chil-
dren noted in the government statistics of Bavaria as illegiti-
mate are born of married parents married in God's sight ; for
the laws of Bavaria have placed such impediments in the way
of marriage as to force its citizens back on their rights as Chris-
tian men and women. Of Austria it may be said that large
portions of its people are but nominally Catholics or Christians
of any sort, and this is especially true of the city of Vienna.

A fair comparison can be made between prosperous Protestant
Scotland and pauperized Catholic Ireland, for in both countries
the marriage laws are practically the same, and the social condi-
tions are all in favor of Scotland. Yet in every thousand chil-
dren born in Scotland seventy-nine are bastards, and but twenty-
eight in Ireland, and this has been the relative numbers for a
century back. But, moreover, it is from the Protestant districts
of Ulster that Ireland surfers her disgrace, comparatively light
though it be, there being, for example, nearly ten times as
many illegitimate births in the Protestant County Down as in
the Catholic County Mayo. Of course it is not meant that Pro-
testantism positively fosters vice, or that vice is never found in
black congestion upon a body of believers in the true faith.
But this is certain : Catholicity tends to reach down and up and
everywhere among its adherents and to purify the lives of all,
whereas Protestantism tends to throw off the weak and the way-
ward into a class by themselves without God in the world and
without hope, holding together in permanent virtue only those
who are naturally virtuous anyway.

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 445

TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS.

MRS. NEEDELL'S novel* is so interesting and well written that
it will doubtless gain the attention and success to which it is on
many counts entitled. It is very queer in spots, however, as a
rapid condensation of its story may go to show. The hero,
when introduced to the reader, has been studying for priest's or-
ders at St. Sulpice, and although family circumstances have oc-
curred which make it seem obligat6ry on him to consider whether
he ought not to return to the world, he is still firm in his voca-
tion. He has desired from childhood to be not merely a priest
but a missionary among pagans. The death of a cousin leaves
him the only heir of a long-descended and wealthy family of
English Catholics, and his uncle has summoned him to take up
the duty of continuing the line. Philip remains beyond persua-
sion. His vocation is dear to him, and neither wealth nor
domestic life holds out any lure to which he is susceptible. The
only thing he can be induced to promise his uncle is that he
will leave the decision of his case to the Archbishop of Paris ;
and even this he yields only because he feels morally certain
that the decision will be in his favor. But the prelate and
Philip's uncle are old friends. Philip has not yet been admitted
to minor orders. When, on his return to the seminary, he is
summoned to meet the archbishop, it is to learn that the 'latter,
after careful consideration of the matter, has reached the con-
clusion that the young man's sphere of duty lies outside the
church. He reminds Philip of the

" claims his uncle has upon his duty, and of the social obliga-
tions which lay upon him, and which were recognized by the
church herself, to perpetuate a family which maintained the true
faith in the midst of an inimical nation. ' Not,' he added, drop-
ping the tone of the ecclesiastic for that of the man of the
world, 'that it is necessary to make a religious duty of a fore-
gone conclusion. Love is as much a law of nature as is growth,
and, without flattery, you are entitled to expect the best that it
can give. Tell my good friend, Sir Giles Methuen, that I shall
hold myself at his disposal at any time to pronounce the nuptial
benediction.' "

Philip's accession to fortune had been coincident with the

* The Story oj Philip Methuen. By Mrs. J. H. Needell. New York : D. Appleton &
Co. Authorized edition.
VOL. LV. 29

446 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [June,.

mortal illness of an old friend, Lewis Trevelyan, " a disciple of
Schopenhauer," who burdens the young man with the care of
his daughter. Anna is a beautiful girl of fifteen, inoculated by
her father with unbelief, wretchedly trained in other directions
by mere peasants, selfish and passionate to a degree, and penni-
less. Trevelyan's only sister, whom he had irrevocably offended
in their youth, is the wife of the Anglican parson in the village
where the Methuen estate is situated, and Philip confides the
girl to her aunt's protection, a protection which is grudgingly ex-
tended, and only in consideration of the very liberal payment
made by the young guardian. Mrs. Sylvestre, a bigoted Protes-
tant, and ignorant that the sums paid for Anna's care and train-
ing come from Methuen, is unwilling that any intercourse shall
be maintained between the families, lest the blight of Catholicity
might somehow fall upon her children. She has reckoned with-
out her host, however, in proposing to dispose of Anna accord-
ing to her own notions. Though the girl has no feeling stronger
than self-love, yet her love for Philip, cherished from early child-
hood, and sanctioned, as she believes, by his acceptance of the
charge laid on him by her dying father, is not so much the
rival of that sentiment as identical with it.

Philip, meanwhile, presently finds himself in love with one
of his neighbors, Honor Aylmer, an heiress of the neighborhood,
who is engaged to her cousin, Adrian Earle. Desiring to with-
draw from this dangerous situation, he accepts an offered
post as secretary to a Catholic diplomatist, Lord Sainsbury,
and goes with him to India, where he remains three years. We
emphasize the fact of Lord Sainsbury's belief, and the stress
laid upon it by the author, because it throws up into curious
relief one of the queer spots we have already referred to in her
novel. She set out, apparently, to draw the character of a high-
minded, strong-principled, absolutely faithful Catholic, living a
model life under exceptional difficulties ; and she has in many re-
spects succeeded. Our point is simply that these difficulties were
not only self-created, but such as no typical Catholic man, let
alone a Catholic with a religious vocation, would have allowed to
entangle him. Philip's remark to Lord Sainsbury, that unless
the latter's faith were the same as his own, " I should not now
have the honor of listening to Lord Sainsbury's conditions of
service," looks singularly like "straining at a gnat " when uttered
by a man who is presently found engaging himself to a Protes-
tant young lady as the preliminary step toward keeping up an
ancient Catholic family! On his return from India Philip finds

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 447

Honor Aylmer's engagement broken, and he proposes marriage.
He is accepted, and for a very brief space the course of true
love runs smooth. Honor has every virtue, and a feeling for
Philip which so exactly matches his own that the question of
differences of faith never occurs to either as matter for discussion.
And yet Mrs. Needell's hero is not only the most fervent of Catho-
lics, but Honor alone has reconciled him to the thought of aban-
doning the work of preaching the faith to heathens !

At this point, Anna Trevelyan comes on the scene again.
Though nettled and hurt by Philip's lack of attention to her,
she believes herself engaged to him and does not suspect his love
for Honor. She is reckless and passionate, and finding that
Philip has gone back to London on one occasion without hav-
ing visited her at the rectory, she follows him to the city, and
contrives by a lie to get access to his lodgings. After spending
the night in a room given her by his landlady, she astounds
Philip by entering his quarters at breakfast next morning and
informing him that she thinks it is time their engagement should
be terminated by marriage. Before he has quite succeeded in
comprehending her meaning, his room is further invaded by Rec-
tor Sylvestre and his wife, who have pursued the runaway to
London. They too demand that he shall marry Anna, and at
once, in order to save her reputation. Philip is at first very
manly and decided in his refusal. He has never thought of
marrying her, he says, and is in nowise responsible for her delu-
sion. But, on Mrs. Sylvestre's threat to abandon the girl in
London, he weakens, and agrees to marry her in three days'
time. He uses the .interval to announce the news to Honor, with
whom his engagement had not yet been made public, and taking
up his burden as the husband of a woman whom he does not
and cannot love, goes through what might fairly deserve the title
of purgatory, which Mrs. Needell gives it, if it had not been
entered into with such flagrant and wilful injustice. There was
not only no heroism in such an act as Philip performed in mar-
rying Anna, but there was absolute weakness so far as it con-
cerned himself, and shame and dishonor where it touched the
girl to whom he had been solemnly betrothed. Mrs. Needell,
who has painted her hero so submissive to the voice of author-
ity when it withdrew him from his vocation ; so scrupulously
faithful to a marriage vow made only from his lips outward,
should have considered also the binding force of a promise of
marriage, spontaneously given and never forfeited. The very
stuff itself of heroism is lacking in a soul which could volunta-

448 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [June,

rily put both its vocation to the higher love and its call to
the highest purely human love at the mercy of such an ex-
terior solicitation or command. But, these exceptions apart, the
story of Philip Methuen is certainly entertaining, and at times
almost painfully interesting. Mrs. Needell has exceptional skill
as a narrator.

There may be room for doubt as to whether poetry is Mr.
Lathrop's most notable gift as a writer, but no one will be likely
to deny that he possesses it in an eminent degree who reads
some of the charming verses included in the present collection.*
Although his technique is not, as a rule, on a level with his
conception and feeling, which are exceptionally delicate and true,
yet such poems as " Breakers," " Incantation," " A Rune of the
Rain," " Bride Brook," " A Christening" are felicitous both in
melody of phrase and in power of suggestion and description.
We quote in full the verses called " A Flown Soul," which seem
to us to show Mr. Lathrop at his best, both as man and poet.
They commemorate the death of an infant son :

" Come not again ! I dwell with you
Above the realm of frost and dew,
Of pain and fire, and growth to death.
I dwell with you where never breath
Is drawn, but fragrance vital flows
From life to life, even as a rose
Unseen pours sweetness through each vein
And from the air distils again.
You are my rose unseen ; we live
Where each to other joy may give
In ways untold, by means unknown
And secret as the magnet-stone.

" For which of us, indeed, is dead ?
No more I lean to kiss your head
The gold-red hair so thick upon it ;
Joy feels no more the touch that won it
When o'er my brow your pearl-cool palm
In tenderness so childish, calm,
Crept softly, once. Yet, see, my arm
Is strong, and still my blood runs warm.
I still can work, and think, and weep.
But all this show of life I keep
Is but the shadow of your shine,
Flicker of your fire, husk of your vine ;

* Dreams and Days. Poems by George Parsons Lathrop. New York : Charles Scribner's
Sons.

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 449

Therefore, you are not dead, nor I
Who hear your laughter's minstrelsy.
Among the stars your feet are set ;
Your little feet are dancing yet
Their rhythmic beat, as when on earth.
So swift, so slight are death and birth.

" Come not again, dear child. If thou
By any chance couldst break that vow
Of silence at thy last hour made ;
If to this grim life unafraid
Thou couldst return, and melt the frost
Wherein thy bright limbs' power was lost ;
Still would I whisper since so fair
This silent comradeship we share
Yes, whisper, 'mid the unbidden rain
Of tears : ' Come not, come not again ! "

Considered merely as a piece of literary workmanship, Miss
Du Bois' third novel, Columbus and Beatrix,* has many merits,
among them the first and most indispensable one of being inter-
esting. Yet even if the theory on which it is constructed were
to be accepted as well-founded, one would not be far wrong in
saying that the reputation of Columbus would not be greatly
enhanced by it. The author anticipates this objection in her
preface, where she says that she does not write in the hope of
vindicating Columbus, but in that of doing some tardy justice
to the memory of Beatriz Enriquez. The motive is a good one,
but the question involved is, as we hardly need say, almost be-
yond the reach of controversy. The gravest authorities, from
Las Casas down, take the other view, and support it with a
weight of evidence not lightly to be overthrown. We should
like to see Miss Du Bois at work in a field wholly her own,
unhampered by the stubborn weeds of evil-smelling facts, and
free to sow those seeds of fancy and imagination which her pres-
ent story plainly shows her to possess.

It is pleasant to be able to recommend such stories as those of
Marion Brunowe,f now when the premium season is fairly at the
doors. The author is a young aspirant for literary honors with
good promise of success. The Sealed Packet is for and largely
about girls. There is plot enough to create interest and sym-

* Columbus and Beatriz. A novel. By Constance Goddard Du Bois. Chicago : A. C.
McClurg & Co.

t The Sealed Packet. The Ghost at our School, and other Stories. By Marion J. Bru-
nowe. Flora MacAlpin : Mary Stuart. By Mrs. Maxwell-Scott. Philadelphia : H. L.
Kilner & Co.

450 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [June,

pathy for the young heroine, Nita Perry. The interest and
charm of the story, however, lie chiefly in the naturalness with
which girl-character, school-life, its intercourse, trials and tri-
umphs, the influence of good teachers and pleasant homes, are
set forth. The narrative is bright and varied, rising to con-
siderable power in certain scenes, as in Ida's rescue, the death
of Miss Bell, and Nita's failure before the temptation of for-
bidden, dangerous reading. The characters are well drawn and
interesting, and the tone healthy and elevating. We congratu-
late the new-comer on her first serious venture, and hope she
may have many more " sealed packets " as interesting and readable
when opened as this.

The second book contains a collection of short tales from the
pen of Miss Brunowe previously told to, and well received by, the
younger readers of the Ave Maria. The two volumes, accompanied
by one containing some semi-historical sketches concerning Mary,
Queen of Scots, and her times, from the pen of Mrs. Maxwell-Scott,
are from the publishing house of H. L. Kilner, and do credit to it.

The contents of a volume of short stories by Mrs. Burton
Harrison* may be described as uniformly light and pleasant in
handling and motive, but not in anywise important. They com-
prise, besides the tale which gives the book its name, six brief
sketches, entitled " A Thorn in his Cushion".; " Mr. Clenden-
ning Piper"; " Jenny, the Debutante "; " Wife's Love "; " A Harp
Unstrung "; and " A Suit Decided. " The latter is perhaps the
pleasantest of the collection, Mr. Cyrus K. McCunn being a
pretty fair American of his class. Apparently, they have all
been published already in various magazines.

A name that no confirmed novel-reader can afford to pass
by who has a nice appreciation of flavors and distinctions in his
chosen literary diet, is that of Maarten Maartens. So far as we
know his stories their scenes are laid chiefly in Holland, and
his characters are mainly Dutch, but he uses English as if it were
his native tongue. The one at hand f is very simple in plot and
construction, and the " taste " whereof there is question is mere-
ly that of a mayonnaise salad-dressing. Far be it from the
present writer to depreciate the importance of that taste in its
own time and place. It is by no means out of place as a peg
(if that be not an excessively stiff term of comparison, even
when the other is that stiff but not too stiff matter, a mayon-
naise) on which to hang a story so full of quaint humor, kindly

* A Daughter of the South. By Mrs. Burton Harrison. New York : Cassell Publish-
ing Co.

t A Question of Taste. By Maarten Maartens. New York : Lovell, Coryell & Co.

1892,] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 45 i

satire, gently malicious affection for human nature as this one;
Joris and Joris's mother, Mevrouw Middelstum, are as pleasant
in their modest fashion as the old maid and her scape-grace but
kind-hearted nephew in Maartens' much more elaborate and pow-
erful tale, recently noticed in this place, " An Old Maid's Love."
The charming sentiment which sometimes binds the old and
young of opposite sexes together when they are near akin
seems a favorite one with this author, and he manages it de-
lightfully. The narrow-minded and deep-hearted woman who
can pour out upon her own flesh and blood a stream of affec-
tion all the more intense because it is forced through so strait
a channel, and who turns a rough side to most other things the
world contains, is a figure that, doubtless for some personal rea--
son, has an attraction for him. The comedy of Joris's expe-
rience arises from the coddling to which he has been accustomed
by such a mother. Mostly through sheer affection, but in part
also from an unacknowledged fear of a possible daughter-in-law,
she has made herself the queen of cooks, and habituated her
son's palate to a discrimination in flavors of which he never be-
comes fully conscious until after her death has put him at the
mercy of servant maids and restaurant kitchens. Joris is still
young enough for a man to lie behind the epicure in him, never-
theless, as he proves when he offers himself to the girl he loves
just after she has demonstrated her insufficiency as a cook by
putting sugar in the mayonnaise to be served with lobster. The
story brims with quaint humor, but the reader who enjoys it
fully may possibly require a mental palate somewhat epicurean,
either by nature or by training ; he must, at all events, prefer
quality to quantity, suggestion to substance.

The clever author of Some Emotions and a Moral has produced
another booklet,* included, like its predecessor, in the handy
" Unknown " library. It is cynical, well-written, unmoral though
not actively immoral, brilliant and epigrammatic in a fashion that
is frequently suggestive of the manner of George Meredith. It
is so brief that an hour would suffice to finish it, and fortunate-
ly, since, once taken up, it will not easily be laid down until its
last page is reached. But while no one would be the better for
reading it, there are susceptible persons with an analytic and
brooding sort of mind who might be distinctly the worse for
doing so. ' On the other hand, a tolerably large majority of
those who devote much time to novel-reading would be likely
to find it almost wholly devoid of interest.

* The Sinner's Comedy. By John Oliver Hobbes. New York : Cassell Publishing Co.

452 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [June,

Such readers, for example, as take pleasure in tales of mur-
der, mystery, the exploits of wondrous detectives and other in-
genious unravellers of ingeniously ravelled-up plots a long and
wide class be it remembered, at the head of which one may
reckon Bismarck if he chooses, remembering the " Blood and
Iron Man's " alleged passion for fimile Gaboriau, and at the ex-
treme : foot the present writer, who has just been finding real
entertainment in a novel by Mr. Hudson, called On the Rack*
Mr. Hudson is improving in his style and his methods. His
mysterious murder is very well managed, and his amateur de-
tective, Tom Bryan of the New York Sol, has a naive freshness
about him, as of a reporter miraculously unspotted by the con-
tagion of the world (how hardly one avoided the scandal of
italics !). In his hero and heroine Mr. Hudson has painted a
manly man and a womanly woman, and his murder trial per-
mits itself to be read with amused interest.

From the same publishers comes a volume containing two
of Edmond About's shorter stories, The Mother of a Marquise
and the Aunts Stratagem. They are amusing, and seem to have
been carefully translated by Mrs. Kingsbury.

The thoughtful of both sexes may find food for thought in
Mrs. Clifford's recently published volume, Love Letters of a
Worldly Woman.^ The author is, we believe, the widow of the
late William Kingdon Clifford, somewhat widely known both as
an agnostic and a mathematician. It was doubtless his eminence
in science and not in nescience which induced the British gov-
ernment to pension his widow after Professor Clifford's early
death. The clever book she has just brought out displays her
as a well-equipped and scientific explorer of that debatable
land occupied by the hearts of women who think as well as feel.
Mrs. Clifford, we observe, describes even women of this sort as
feeling first and thinking afterwards, and, moreover, as neglecting
to think at all until some severe prick or goad in the sensitive
part has communicated its invitation to the reflective side of their
feminine complexity. But in this respect, perhaps, they do not
differ so widely from their brothers who feel as well as think.
All round the board we have our " green and salad days," and
they pretty generally come before the roast, instead of between
it and dessert.

Mrs. Clifford's book is composed of three sets of letters, en-

* On the Rack. By William C. Hudson. New York : Cassell Publishing Co.
t Love Letter s of a Worldly Woman. By Mrs. W. K. Clifford. New York: Harper &
Brothers.

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 453

tirely distinct from each other. It is the middle one which
gives' the volume its name, although it is itself misnamed. These
are not the " love letters of a worldly woman," but letters ad-
dressed by one to a less worldly person of her own sex, de-
scriptive of a youthful infatuation with the wrong man. They are
undoubtedly clever, but, though more exciting and told with
greater fulness of detail, they form the least unusual portion of
the book. It is always "the wrong man" with whom the wo-
men studied by Mrs. Clifford are concerned. He turns up first
invariably; as, for that matter, there is excellent reason for be-
lieving that he does under all circumstances, and not those
alone which environ the passion commonly described as love.
Moreover, he never surrenders his ground to the right man, the
new man, without a mortal struggle. In two of the encounters
hinted at rather than described by Mrs. Clifford, he is beaten off
the field without his rightful successor making any visible ap-
pearance. In the case of the " worldly woman," too, he van-
ishes, but apparently of his own accord ; and that is a state of
things which may always be interpreted as meaning that he, or
that invisible bad influence he represents, is fully aware that the
stake he has been playing for is virtually won, though there be
no outward semblance of it. The most satisfactory of these
sketches is the last one, " On the Wane," and it is also the
most amusing in the complete turning of tables which goes on
between the lovers, between Gwen deserted by Jirr and Gwen
deserting Jim, and both times in charming simplicity and real
truth to one of the best types of feminine human nature. Mrs.
Clifford is a genuine accession to the class of feminine psycholo-
gists.

Mr. Thomas Hardy has written no story comparable to his
last* in intensity, pathos, and power. Yet he has written more
good stories than most men now writing in the English tongue.
The sordid tragedy df his heroine's existence, the misery, the
hopelessness, the terror, the pity of it, pursue the reader like
the memory of a bad dream. One does not indeed wholly ac-
cept the author's classification of her ; one objects that while
this mother of an illegitimate child, this murderer on whom the
gallows executes human justice, might yet have been a pure
woman had that been all, she forfeits the title when at the
last she sells her honor, though it were to put bread in the
mouth of her mother. But in that which first made shipwreck

* Tessofthe />' Urbervilles : A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented. By Thomas Hardy.
New York : Harper & Brothers.

454 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [June,

of her life she was as little a sinner as that other injured inno-
cent, Clarissa Harlowe.

Mr. Hardy, who knows both his trade and his limitations
very well, has chosen rural life for the setting of his scene, and
filled his stage for the most part with laboring people. Tess
the poultry-keeper, the dairy-maid, the field-hand, is the lineal
descendant of an old Anglo-Norman family, tumbled into utter
decay and almost extinction. She is fair to look upon, and as
honest and pure and innocent as she is fair. Yet fate and cir-
cumstances make her the prey of a brutal violator, whom, when
conscious, she has always repelled, and whom she departs from
when her innocence has arrived at full knowledge of the shame
put upon her. So, at least, Mr. Hardy wishes his readers to
understand. He would have done well in her interest had he
left her to trudge homeward alone after her discovery, and
omitted the scene with Alec D'Urberville on the roadside ; the
thing aimed at and attained in this scene, which we take to be
the presentation of the fact that the scoundrel who violated her
had won neither late love nor liking from her, could have been
indicated quite as faithfully and with less risk to a character
whom Mr. Hardy has succeeded in making so real a personality
that it is she, and not altogether her delineator, .whom one
criticises.

Tess's baby is born, baptized by her in its last extremity,
but buried in unconsecrated ground. It is rural England Mr.
Hardy is describing, and it is superstition and love, not faith,
which move Tess to administer the sacrament herself when her
father refuses to allow her to call in the parson. Then she goes
away to a dairy-farm, the life on which is described as no one
but Mr. Hardy can describe it, and there she meets, loves, and
is honestly loved by a man above her in station, Angel Clare,
the agnostic son of a Calvinistic Anglican parson, who is learn-
ing to farm preparatory to seeking his fortune in Australia.
Her love, which she does not resist, and his love, which she
tries to fly from because she feels herself hopelessly degraded
and unworthy of an honest man's affection, end, almost despite
herself, in marriage. Try as she will, and she has tried many
times, to tell him her story, she never gains courage to do so
until, on the evening of their marriage, he confesses to her the
only stain on his own purity. Her confession, which would
have been made in any case, follows it, with the result of set-
ting them apart at once. Angel cannot forgive her what was
neither sin nor crime; he judged, says Mr. Hardy, not from his
heart or his convictions, but from his conventions, and putting

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 455

her away, he goes to Brazil. He provides for her maintenance,
and there lurks in his heart, though it never comes to his lips,
the thought that at some time he may send for her and bury
their mutual shame in exile.

Misfortune pursues Tess, however. The money given to her
is absorbed by the necessities of her family, and she goes back
to hard labor, loving her husband with a miserable intensity,
and accepting his treatment of her as nothing but her due.
This period of her life is described with a harrowing cruelty of
detail. Then she meets Alec D'Urberville again, transformed
from a libertine into a Calvinistic revivalist, and ranting with
great effect in a wayside barn. He catches sight of her in the
midst of his sermon, and is strangely moved. He follows her,
tries to convert her, begs her pardon for his sins against her,
and offers her marriage. Pardon he can obtain, for Tess is
great-hearted, but love for him is as impossible as ever to her ;
moreover, she is already a wife, although a deserted one. And
as to conversion, it happens that Angel has upset most of her
traditional beliefs, and that her memory has retained with abso-
lute fidelity some arguments against Christianity "which might
possibly have been paralleled," says Mr. Hardy, "in the Diction-
naire Philosophique" It is a curious stroke, and one of whose
entire bearings Mr. Hardy seems to us not wholly aware, though
he is plainly so to some of them, to make the repetition of
these arguments by Tess the hinge on which revolves the door
which finally shuts her out from happiness. Had Alec retained
his new faith and continued to tremble at death, judgment,
and hell, her road would have led in the end to the recon-
ciliation which her husband's heart has begun to crave as keenly
as her own. But Alec, emancipated from Calvinism, is Alec the
ruffian. And so, by ways that go from one unmerited hardship
to another, Tess is brought at last to the point where, to save
her mother and little brothers and sisters from dire poverty, she
consents to live with the man who presses the point that she
has once belonged to him and never to any other ; that her
husband has deserted and will never reclaim her, and that no
one but himself can or will take care of her family. Then
Angel returns and she drives him away. But when Alec taunts
her as she is bemoaning the pity of her fate, she stabs him, and
before the deed is discovered, runs away to her husband, who
has not yet got far from her door. Then the reader follows them
through a week of heart-breaking life together, as they vainly
try to reach the coast and escape the pursuit of justice.

It is a terrible story one of those in which pity predomi-

456 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [June,

nates every other sentiment, the circumstances being skilfully
arranged in such a way that nothing but the religion which has
made a martyr to wifely purity of many another woman, as out-
raged as Tess, could have availed to make the issue other than
such as Mr. Hardy has painted. And of religion of any sort he
has taken care to eliminate the motives. Novelists, as is getting
more evident every day, consider that they must bind them-
selves flat to earth and recognize the natural only, if they are
to attain great popular successes. Such a tragedy as that of
Tess, at all events, could have been wrought in no other way.
On the whole, it is an unwholesome story, which, if according
to nature, is depraved nature. It had better never have been
written, and when read leaves a bad taste in the mouth, and
nausea in the stomach.

I. IN THE CATACOMBS OF ROME.*

During the past fifty years the Roman catacombs have fur-
nished many evidences of early Christian art, yet no class of
antiquities has given the zealous searchers more genuine pleasure
than the few fragmentary " documents " in sarcophagus, gilded
glass, and fresco of which Dr. Shahan makes mention in the
richly bound volume from the press of John Murphy & Co. Not
alone are they valuable on account of their antiquity, but more
so from the fact that they bring forth silent and eloquent testi-
mony of the veneration of the Blessed Mother of God by the
early Christians. Fleeing from the cruel tyrants of the third
and preceding centuries, these heroes of the faith deposited
their witness of Catholic truth in enduring form ; and as, through
generations following, our fathers in the Christian religion adorn-
ed with pious skill these burial places of their martyred an-
cestors and brethren, it is very appropriate that their work as it
is brought to light adds testimony to their love for her who
bears the title Queen of Martyrs.

The book before us is an enlarged reproduction of a lecture
on church history delivered by the author at the Catholic Uni-
versity of America. It contains reliable results of modern
study on the archaeological evidences of the faith of the early
Christians, and the fragments which form the subjects of
illustration add to the already conclusive proof that venera-
tion of Mary is no modern invention. The author by no
means pretends that he has exhausted these rich sources of in-
formation as to early Christian belief ; but he presents a series

* The Blessed Virgin in the Catacombs. By Rev. Thomas J. Shahan, D.D., Professor of
Church History in the Catholic University of America. Baltimore : John Murphy & Co.

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 457

of monuments from the first to the fifth century which success-
fully demonstrate his point, and, as he says, " show that the
cultus of the Blessed Virgin is not a late and artificial, but an
early, natural, and organic development of Christianity." In these
days of multitudinous books an author must needs have an in-
teresting subject and a pleasing style if he expects to reap a
harvest in cash. Dr. Shahan has both. Any reader may be in-
terested in this beautiful volume, so well written, so beautifully
illustrated. And all who recognize the continuity of Christ's
work on earth will find here an argument of a peculiarly power-
ful kind in favor of the Catholic claim.

2. D'HULST'S LIFE OF JUST DE BRETENIERES.*
This is the first volume of St. Joseph's Missionary Library.
Its purpose, as declared by its editor, is to stimulate the mis-
sionary vocation among our American youth. The commission
of the Catholic Church, Go, teach all nations, makes her essen-
tially aggressive. Hers it is to conquer and hers it has ever
been to conquer. While her aggressiveness must be along the
lines pointed out and led up to by the Spirit of God, yet that
same Divine Breath " breatheth where he listeth "; and this char-
acteristic the Holy Ghost most perfectly manifested in our
Lord's life. Poor and humble from his youth up, the leper-like
and rejected, the sorrow-laden and the crucified, he yet went
about overcoming men's minds .and conquering their souls.
Similar traits are the missioner's, who, walking in his Master's
footsteps, goes far away from his home, people, and race in or-
der to assist the progressive development of the kingdom of Christ.
No greater delusion can be thought of than for any one to
believe that " we have enough to do at home "; or that it is
enough " to look after the heathen at our doors "; or again,
" our own parishes need all our care, the people who are now
Catholics must be kept up to their duties, the children have to
be brought up thoroughly conversant with their religion," etc.
True, all these duties and many more like them are imperative.
But, while they should be done, the other works of charity
above all, the conversion of those races which are yet unevange-
lized must not be omitted.

We remember hearing it said of a clergyman that if he had
been an Apostle, he would have died in Jerusalem. Alas ! if

*A Martyr of our own Times (Rev. Just de Bretenieres). From the French of Rer.
Monsignor D'Hulst. Edited by Very Rev. John R. Slattery, Rector of St. Joseph's Seminary,
Baltimore. New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago : Benziger Brothers.

458 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [June,

Patrick had stayed in Lerins, chanting in its choir the praises of
God, what would have become of our pagan ancestors ?

This little work, A Martyr of our own Times, reminds us, more-
over, of the mission to which its editor, Father Slattery, belongs.
The eight millions of negroes in our country are a true mission-
ary field. Dealing with them is in very many ways more diffi-
cult work than laboring among the Eastern pagans. The unholy
race prejudice ; the painful apathy of Catholics, both within and
without the sanctuary and cloister ; the unsparing exertions of
Protestants, and the fact that the South is almost entirely and
bitterly Protestant, conspire to render the negro missions very
difficult. Hardly will the bloody crown of the martyr be the
lot of the negro missionaries, but their martyrdom will be that
of the daily cross. They will taste rather of Gethsemani, they
will learn what it was to be the fool of Herod's court, they
will feel the scourging, the preference of the Barabbas. And only
after long years of the way of sorrows will they, if God grant
them perseverance, find Calvary.

The reader will not wonder if we say that this book should
be read by our Catholic mothers. The great school, the first
divinely established school, is the home ; there the mother must
implant the virtues which are needed to make saints. What a
saintly mother our martyr had ! The author thus relates : His
was u the austere simplicity of a family wholly regulated by the
spirit of Christianity. It was one of those blessed, holy homes
where the parents withdraw from the world, in a measure, the
better to devote themselves to their children's education ; where
everything, occupation, residence, intercourse, is regulated solely
with a view to this work ; where religion enlightens the con-
science and conscience reigns over all (p. 19)."

May Father Slattery's prayer, that the missionary spirit shall
grow up and develop among our youths, boys and girls, be an-
swered ; and may this little work receive a wide reading, and
the apostolate a healthy increase in vocations !

3. COLUMBUS AND THE NEW WORLD.*
The work might, perhaps, be more appropriately entitled

" The History of American Geography." The Discovery of

America^ however, suits just now the author and the publishers

better.

Whoever desires to learn how the islands and the continent

of America came gradually to be known to the white man, with-

* Discovery of America. In two volumes. By John Fiske. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin
&Co.

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 459

out wading through voluminous Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and
French works, may read with profit and pleasure Fiske's two
volumes. They are written in a cursive and pleasant style, free
from the ponderous rhetoric or the obscure conciseness of many
other historical works. It has become fashionable with a class
of writers on American history to heap abuse on Columbus and
the Spaniard on account of the cruelties inflicted on the natives
by individual adventurers or early colonizers all of which is
absent in Fiske's book. He knows how to think and how to
speak as his historical personages did really think and speak
i.e., he knows how to judge and appreciate their characters ac-
cording to the philosophical, moral, and religious standard of
the century in which they lived.

When Fiske studies thoroughly an historical fact he gener-
ally proves a good critic. But in his book are to be found in-,
dications of hasty preparation. After reading that Harrisse's
Christophe Colomb " is a work of immense research, absolutely
indispensable to every student of the subject " (Discovery of
America, volume i. page 341), we have a right to suppose that
Fiske studied Harrisse from cover to cover. But he evidently
did not, or he would never have written, at page 349 of his first
volume, that " In this opinion " (that Columbus was born either
at Quinto or Terrarossa) "the most indefatigable modern in-
vestigator, Harrisse, agrees with Las Casas." For Harrisse
plainly says in a note at page 403 of the second volume of his
Christophe Colomb that "dans Vetat actuel de la question, on doit
admettre que le dtcouvreur du Nouveau Monde naquit dans en-
ceinte meme de la ville de Genes." Neither has Fiske any evi-
dence to prove the assertion that "between 1448 and 1451 Do-
menico " (the father of Columbus) ". . . moved into the city
of Genoa."

We may readily subscribe to the magnificent eulogy of Las
Casas, found in the second volume and ending at page 482, but
we must take exception to the assertion that he was "one of
the most faithful historians of that or any other age " (vol. i.
P a g e 334)- The "protector of the Indians" made it the object
of his noble life to defend their rights and to protect them from
the oppression and cruelty of the Castilians. That this predomi-
nant idea of the good Bishop of Chiapa beguiled him often into
gross exaggerations of the crimes of the Spaniards is now admit-
ted by competent critics on both sides of the Atlantic.

The reader should also beware of the author's " crotchet."
He is an evolutionist with a vengeance and a blind worshipper

460 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [June,

of modern scientism. Fiske has no doubt that the red man has
been the lord of the American forest for hundreds of thousands
of years and that the theory of the unity of the human race is
" absurd." Many of the author's deductions from geology and
philology, which he gives us as history in his first volume, will
be received by many a reader with a good-sized grano salts. It
is to be hoped that that part of his work will not, on account
of the ever-shifting and changing of scientific theories, cause the
whole work to be relegated to the shelves of " eccentric literature."
For in the two volumes before us there is much that is really
good. On the whole, the main object of the work was attained.
The story of the " Discovery of America " is well told. But
Fiske will do well to let philosophizing or moralizing alone.

He ends his work by explaining how Spain lost and England
acquired her supremacy over the seas, and this seems to be in-
tended as the moral of his book. Spain's adherence to the old
faith and the Inquisition caused her downfall. England's Protes-
tantism gave her freedom of thought and made her the fore-
most nation of the world. To say that such reasoning is quite
antiquated seems sufficient.

If a few lines of the first page, and the last, be left out in
future editions, which we think will be made of this work, we
think that Fiske's Discovery of America will be improved.

4. NEW VOLUME ON LACORDAIRE.*

The compiler and translator of this volume, whose name is
not given to the public, has shown excellent judgment in the
selection of passages. Apart from his fame as a pulpit orator,
Lacordaire is also one of the greatest modern thinkers. He
studied Christian principles with a view to the needs of his own
age and his own people. His loyalty to the teaching of St.
Thomas Aquinas was more conspicuous in his utterances than
the unreasoning adhesioif to effete monarchies which prevailed
in many Catholic circles of France.

Lacordaire fully appreciated the value of intellectual labor
for the church. He says : " The literary man is consecrated ;
and if the ministry of souls demands a sacrifice of self, the min-
istry of thought, when one is worthy of it, exacts also austeri-
ties. Poverty is the inevitable companion of the literary man
who has resolved to sell his pen neither to gold nor power,
and poverty is sweet only to the solitary man who lives in the
immortality of his conscience."

* Thoughts and Teachings of Lacordaire. Translated. Dublin : M. H. Gill & Son.

1892.] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 461

THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION.

ALL COMMUNICATIONS RELATING TO READING CIRCLES, LISTS OF BOOKS,
ETC., SHOULD BE ADDRESSED TO THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION,
415 WEST FIFTY-NINTH STREET, NEW YORK CITY.

THE Catholic Fortnightly Reading Circle of Buffalo, N. Y.,
was organized November 7, 1889, for the purpose of fostering
serious study in Catholic literature according to the plans pro-
posed by the Columbian Reading Union. At the beginning
considerable attention was devoted to leading topics treated by
eminent writers in the standard magazines. Many of the sub-
jects selected by the advisory board for discussion among the
members were furnished by articles in THE CATHOLIC WORLD,
the American Catholic Quarterly Review, the Month, and the
Lyceum. The salient points of many leading articles were de-
veloped in this way, and the members gathered the best thoughts
of noted writers on current literature.

The following outline of topics shows the scope of the work
undertaken for 1891-2:

Quotations from Spalding's Education and the Higher Life
Introduction to the history of the middle ages The invasion
and conversion of the barbarians (395-604).

Quotations from Ozanam's Little Flowers of St. Francis
Foundation of the temporal power of the popes Mohammed-
anism.

Quotations from Orestes A. Brownson's Popular Literature
The Church and Christian civilization Invasions in the ninth and
tenth centuries.

Quotations from Abbe" Roux's Meditations of a Parish Priest
and Madame Swetchine's writings (Airelles) Battle of Hast-
ings Church and feudalism.

Quotations from Father Hecker's Aspirations of Nature
Character Sketch, Pope St. Gregory VII. History of the feud
between the Guelphs and Ghibellines.

Quotations from Calderon's Dramas History of two famous
orders of knights, the Templars and the Hospitallers History
and description of the Holy Sepulchre.

Quotations from Newman's Idea of a University Heroes of
the Crusades Discussion : Did the Crusades result in any good
to the church or civilization ?

Quotations from F. von Schlegel's ^Esthetic and Miscellaneous
Essays Distinguished women of the middle ages Character
sketch, The Cid.

VOL. LV. 30

462 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [June,

Quotations from Pope Leo XIII. 's encyclicals Thomas a
Becket Discussion : Results of the Norman invasion.

Quotations from Kegan Paul's Faith and Unfaith The be-

f inning of English misrule in Ireland, and the origin of the
rish " Land Question " The literature of Ireland : Early Irish
schools.

Quotations from Aubrey de Vere's Essays Genghis Khan
compared with the three great barbaric leaders of the fifth
century St. Thomas Aquinas.

Quotations from Thomas a Kempis Meaning of the " Holy
Grail " Origin of the Inquisition.

Quotations from T. E. Bridgett's Life and Writings of Sir
Thomas More Education and literature in the eleventh and
twelfth centuries Famous Italian poets.

Quotations from Boyle O'Reilly's poems and speeches
Origin and results of the Hundred Years' War Career of
Wycliffe.

Quotations from Shakspere Life of St. Dominic Fra
Angelico.

From one of the pupils of the Superior Course at the Holy
Angels' Academy, Buffalo, N. Y., we have secured this interest-
ing account of a pleasant visit :

"The quiet school routine at the academy was agreeably in-
terrupted last Wednesday by a visit from Father McMillan, of
New York, accompanied by Father Mullaney, of Syracuse. The
ladies of the Academy Alumnae Association and Fortnightly
Reading Circle were also present, and the delightful home-like
talk to which we were treated by both gentlemen will be re-
corded in the annals of " '92 " as one of the brightest events of
the year.

" Although quite impromptu, Father McMillan's words on
Catholic authors were perfectly adapted to the seekers after
literature of the present day. His aim is to diffuse good litera-
ture ; to introduce to the public, and especially to young peo-
ple, good Catholic authors safe companions for a rainy day
who possess that happy faculty of being at once both agreeable
and instructive. We trust his words have not been lost ; that
the seed has fallen on good soil, and that Buffalo society will
reap an abundant harvest therefrom. He complimented the
Alumnae Association and the Fortnightly Reading Circle on the
good work they had done, and wished them success in their future
undertakings.

" Father Mullaney spoke of the good that might be done by
establishing a Catholic literary school where Catholics could
meet during the summer, and thus obtain valuable knowledge
both by study and lectures. The ladies and pupils then had the
honor of individual introductions to the reverend fathers and
many kind words were exchanged. The reception lasted till

1892.] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 463

about six o'clock, when Fathers McMillan and Mullaney took
their leave, thus bringing to a close a visit which will live long
in the minds of the members of the Alumnae, the Reading
Circle, and the present pupils of Holy Angels' Academy.

The Le Couteulx Leader, of Buffalo, in a notice of Father
McMillan's lecture for the library endowment fund of the Catho-
lic Institute, especially commends his suggestions regarding read-
ing matter for boys. A person officially appointed should be
found in every public library to kindly direct the young in choos-
ing their books, so that they may get the best, not the worst.

" Father McMillan observed that all readers are interested in
the personality of authors ; and incidentally he mentioned how
impossible it had been to obtain more than the scantiest infor-
mation concerning a modern writer who has given us at least
one immortal book Miles Gerald Keon, author of Dion and the
Sibyls. That he was a profound student of the classics and of
classical times, that he was appointed by the British govern-
ment to the position of librarian in an important locality; that
Bulwer was greatly indebted to him for material used in The
Last Days of Pompeii ; that he was colonial secretary for Ber-
muda ; that he wrote another story, entitled Harding, the Money-
Spinner, and dedicated his Dion to Bulwer, are the only facts in
his career which it seems most diligent inquiry, up to the pres-
ent time, has been able to learn."

Mr. William E. Foster, librarian of the Providence Public
Library, has made very satisfactory arrangements to assist the
reading of school children under the intelligent guidance of their
teachers. By his personal efforts he has supplied abundant
facilities for topical reading and study. He believes that a libra-
rian should be concerned with the needs of individual readers,
and should study units, as well as take note of groups or classes
of readers. We are pleased to notice in his report that he has
endeavored to co-operate with the plans of Catholic Reading
Circles. He makes mention of the Columbian Reading Union
as an aid " in the development of some very encouraging lines
of study and reading."

* * *

From a friend at Rochester, N. Y., we learn that representa-
tives of the several Catholic Reading Circles of that city, among
them the Rochester Catholic Reading Circle and the Cardinal
Newman Reading Circle, and the Catholic Literary, met at Cathe-
dral Hall for the purpose of organizing a central committee

464 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [June,

which should have charge of the combined interests of the socie-
ties represented. The meeting resulted in the election of these
officers : President, W. A. Marakle ; First Vice-President, Mrs.
James Fee ; Second Vice-President, Miss Emily Joyce ; Third
Vice-President, Miss E. Cunningham ; Corresponding Secretary,
Miss Gaffney ; Recording Secretary, Mrs. K. J. Dowling ; Treas-
urer, Dr. James H. Finnessy. This central board will arrange
for a course of lectures and entertainments, and will have the in-
terests and affairs of the various Catholic Reading Circles gen-
erally in hand.

Cathedral Hall was the scene of a very pretty book social
when the donation to the library took place under the auspices
of the Rochester Catholic Reading Circle. After a chorus com-
posed of members of the society sang the "Wedding March,"
by August Soderman, the titles of books and names of authors
represented in the costumes of those present were guessed and
prizes awarded, which afforded much interest and amusement, as
some were very cleverly represented. A table prepared by a
member of the society on which were religious symbols intend-
ed to represent a book was unique. While refreshments were
being served vocal and instrumental solos were rendered, which
ended a very pleasant evening. About one hundred and fifty
books were donated.

* # *

The Alumnae of the Normal College, New York City, re-
cently held a social reunion. Mr. Charles Dudley Warner gave
them a talk on education as applied to women. He explained
at length the system of the Paris schools, where women had
every opportunity granted the sterner sex, and in many ways
he seemed to consider their system superior to ours. There the
classics and the higher mathematics are dispensed with, and
hence more time can be given to the study of their own lan-
guage and studies which will be of a more practical benefit to
them in their life's work. Here, Mr. Warner contended, women
were taught everything, whether they had a natural tendency
for certain lines of study or not. He was particularly severe on
the indiscriminate teaching of music. No woman thought she
had had her education completely rounded out until she could
play a few tunes on the piano. One girl out of ten had some
talent for music, and the other nine should leave it alone. This
indiscriminate piano-playing was good for the piano-makers, but

1892.] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 465

peculiarly hard on the populace at large. Speaking of the text-
book Mr. Warner said that the more the living teacher took the
place of the text-book the better it would be for the student.
He spoke of the good a teacher could do by strengthening the
character of the pupil by his or her own influence, a result
which can in no way be gleaned from a text-book. " The principal
associate you will have all your life," he said, " is yourself."
Then he showed how necessary it was on this account to make
yourself companionable and worth while associating with.

In connection with the allusion to Shakspere's religious be-
lief mentioned in this department last month, the Columbian
Reading Union has received from Mr. John Malone a letter in-
dicating the line of his special researches. He has kindly sub-
mitted a copy of his unpublished notes bearing on the domes-
tic life and ancestry of the ablest writer in the Elizabethan era
of English literature. The Columbian Reading Union will gladly
receive any additional evidence to aid Mr. Malone in his lauda-
ble undertaking. He is of opinion that much valuable material
can be gathered by students in England from a careful inspec-
tion of the legal documents and papers compiled for the old
Catholic families of Warwickshire. Perhaps some of the learned
members of the St. Anselm Society would assist in this investi-
gation.

* * *

The number of summer schools is increasing every year in
the United States. Besides the one at Lake Chautauqua, in
Western New York there is to be a summer university at Bay
View, Michigan, from July 12 to August 10. The fifteenth an-
nual session of the Martha's Vineyard Institute will open on July
ii. At Harvard and Cornell the university buildings will be
utilized for summer courses of lectures, especially intended to aid
teachers. Other schools for profitable work during vacation will
be held at Glens Falls, N. Y., near Lake George ; Plymouth,
Mass.; Deerfield, Mass.; and at Exeter, N. H.

The Catholic Reading Circle Review for May contains letters
from Archbishop Janssens, Bishop Messmer, Principal George E.
Hardy, and Principal J. H. Haaren in favor of beginning the
summer educational assembly for Catholics. Bishop Messmer
says : " Most of our schools and colleges are conducted by re-
ligious orders. There is no difficulty in the Brothers taking
part in this Catholic Chautauqua. But what about our good

466 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [June,

Sisters? ... If the matter is properly arranged I
believe many bishops would be only too glad to give the
Sisters full permission for such a summer vacation."

The magnificent library of the Catholic Club, 120 West Fifty-
ninth Street, New York City, was a fitting place for the prelimi-
nary meeting held May u and 12, in furtherance of the
project for a Catholic Summer Assembly. By a happy thought
which came as a- welcome solution of a difficulty, the name Car-
rollton was suggested for the new organization as a fitting honor
to the illustrious Catholic signer of the Declaration of Indepen-
dence. This name will serve as a reminder of the honorable de-
fence of American institutions made at great personal risk by
Charles Carroll of Carrollton. His example as a Catholic and a
patriot is deserving of permanent recognition.

Among those who attended the meeting at the Catholic Club
were: Revs. J. F. Loughlin, D.D.; Morgan M. Sheedy ; F. P.
Siegfried ; Thomas Joynt ; M. J. Lavelle ; Joseph H. McMahon ;
John F. Mullaney; P. A. Halpin, S.J.; John Talbot Smith;
Thomas McMillan ; T. J. Conaty, D.D.; and Brother Azarias.
Representatives of the laity were : Professor John P. Brophy ;
Principal J. H. Haaren; Principal George E. Hardy; Mr. War-
ren E. Mosher ; Mr. William J. Moran ; Mrs. A. T. Toomey ;
Miss Byrne ; Miss Toomey, and others. Nearly every phase of
educational work among Catholics was well represented. A plan
of organization was discussed at great length, and a provisional
constitution adopted, which declares that the object of the Sum-
mer Assembly is "to foster intellectual culture in harmony with
true Christian faith, by means of lectures and special courses oa
university extension lines, in literature, science, and art, conduct-
ed by competent instructors." In arranging the details of this
programme due allowance must be given to healthful recreation
and profitable entertainment. Under the provisional constitution,
the Rev. Morgan M. Sheedy, of Pittsburgh, Pa., was elected
president; the Rev. P. A. Halpin, S.J., of New York, first vice-
president ; Principal J. H. Haaren, of Brooklyn, N. Y., second
vice-president; Mrs. A. T. Toomey, of Washington, D. C., third
vice-president ; Mr. Warren E. Mosher, of Youngstown, Ohio,
secretary and treasurer. The president selected the heads of the
standing committees as follows : the Rev. Thomas McMillan,
chairman of general council ; the Rev. Joseph H. McMahon,
chairman of course of instruction ; Principal George E. Hardy,

1892.] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 467

chairman of committee on entertainment ; and Mr. William J.
Moran, chairman of committee of arrangements.

Our space will not permit a detailed account of the journey
to the Thousand Islands by the invitation of Messrs. Butterfield
and Folger, representing the New York Central Railroad and the
St. Lawrence Steamboat Company. The Right Rev. Henry Ga-
briels, D.D., Bishop of Ogdensburg, and many other distinguished
members of the clergy and laity, joined the committee appoint-
ed to report on sites on the trip from New York to Cape Vin-
cent. Representatives from Albany, Rochester, Syracuse, Buffalo,
Watertown, and Ogdensburg gave assurances of their profound
interest in the movement to establish the Catholic Summer As-
sembly. After making a visit to Point Pleasant, New Jersey,
the committee decided to postpone the inspection of places, and
especially the consideration of the offer made by Dr. Webb of
a site in the Adirondacks, and reported unanimously in favor of
New London, Conn., for the present season. Though the time
for preparation is limited, it is hoped that the first session of
the assembly may be continued for three weeks, beginning July
30. Tickets for the season will cost five dollars. The course
of lectures will be of particular value to teachers, and of general
interest to all intelligent Catholics. The subjects to be treated
by eminent specialists are history, literature, ethics, political
economy, science, and revealed religion. A miscellaneous course
will also be added on topics yet to be determined.

The Columbian Reading Union will gladly procure for its
members and others any additional information. Now that the
long-discussed project has taken definite shape, we hope that
the first session of the Catholic Summer Assembly will bring
together a chosen band of earnest minds sincerely devoted to
intellectual advancement.

M. C. M.

468 WITH THE PUBLISHER. [June,

WITH THE PUBLISHER.

SUMMER is near at hand, or rather it should be if the calen-
dar be accepted as a guide, and with its coming there is a ten-
dency to lessen energy all along the line of ordinary human
activity. The great exception to this state of things will be
found this summer in the political world, and from all the
portents it is safe to say that the country will witness the dis-
play of far more than the usual upheaval that attends the Presi-
dential elections. Up from the craters of the two great con-
ventions what candidates will come? From the storm of
ballots next November which party will emerge the victor?
These will be the main questions of interest to every one dur-
ing the coming months. The pros and cons of candidate and
party will be the great staple for conversation.

And it is but right that such should be the case. At the
same time the Publisher begs to be remembered, and he knows,
as his readers know, that the issues of political life do not and
will not entirely engross attention. Politics will claim and ob-
tain a very large share, but other interests cannot be neglected,
and the Publisher puts in advance a plea for remembrance and
a hope that his "homilies," as they have been called, will bear
good fruit and abiding fruit during the coming summer.

Don't forget THE CATHOLIC WORLD during the summer;
above all, don't forget the missionary agency it is, the mission-
ary agency you can make it among those you meet. This can
be realized during the summer in ways that never come to you
otherwise. The acquaintance you make during your vacation
often presents chances for the work of the Apostolate of the
Press. You can do much in making the magazine known, you
can do more in making an acquaintance see why he should
read it. There are several millions of Catholics in this country.
There are hundreds of thousands of them who do not know of
the existence of THE CATHOLIC WORLD. There are thousands
who could read it and who ought to read it, but they have not
yet been told the reasons why they ought to read it.

1892.] WITH THE PUBLISHER. 469

That's just where you can do effectual work. You can talk
to such a man when he comes in your way, and you can talk
with the persuasive power that is every man's inheritance if he
has a belief in the good he has gained from the magazine, and
has the zeal which the possession of that good ought to give
him. That there are many men who have this sincere belief
in the good that the magazine can accomplish, the Publisher
is rejoiced to know. Here is a sample letter selected from his
mail during the past month :

" REVEREND DEAR SIR : It pleases me to say that THE
CATHOLIC WORLD has given me excellent satisfaction. Its tone
is in touch with the best thought of the age, and is at the
same time thoroughly Catholic, thus showing that true progress
and true Catholicism are not enemies, but, on the contrary,
are cordial friends, moving hand in hand.

" Very respectfully,

You share the sentiments of the writer and the many
others who have written letters similar in spirit. But let your
acquaintances know your estimate of the magazine ; tell them
what you think of it ; discuss its pages, lend your copy to
your chance acquaintance at the sea-side or the mountains,
and you will sow seed that will bear fruit in a larger and
yet larger circle of readers and greater improvements in the
magazine itself ; for the Publisher's motto is " The farthest
point of the progress of to-day is but the starting-point of to-
morrow."

An author well known to our readers, and one on whom God
has recently bestowed the grace of clearly seeing and embracing
the Truth, Mr. George Parsons Lathrop, has just issued, through
the Scribners, a volume of poems entitled Dreams and Days.
Mr. Lathrop has spent some time in collecting his poems, and
his book makes a substantial volume. In one way its variety is
even more noteworthy than its substance, but no one can turn
its leaves without appreciating the genuineness of its author's
title to be called a poet, however much readers may differ as to
the rank he holds as such. In the wide range of subjects he
touches from Starlight to Thanksgiving Turkey, from New York
to the Golden Gate everything reveals the touch of him whose
expression naturally turns to the poetic, and whose literary

470 WITH THE PUBLISHER. [June,

equipment and capacity endow his pen with refinement in form

as in finish.

It gave the Publisher much pleasure and he knows his
readers will share it with him to note in a recent issue of the
Academy the very generous and well-deserved praise accorded to
Miss Katharine Tynan's latest books, a volume of Ballads and
Lyrics and the Life of Mother Xaveria Fallen. The praise is val-
uable coming from a journal of the highest standing in the Eng-
lish literary world, and not usually inclined to look with favor
upon Catholic work. The praise, too, is valuable in its discrimi-
nation and as showing the marked advance Miss Tynan has made
on her earlier work, so that " she has already by her verse won
herself a place in English literature." This is high praise and
these are bold words to find in a journal so exacting in its de-
mands and so high in its standards ; is higher even that the
high praise which calls her book of verse, because " of its deli-
cacy, beauty, and insight, a classic of its kind," the kind being
religious verse. Some of the verse has already appeared in these
pages and there are few of our readers, we venture to say, who
will not echo this praise.

Harper & Brothers announce The Kansas Conflict, by Charles
Robinson, the famous war governor of Kansas. Aside from its
interest as an independent narrative, the work will be a valuable
companion and supplement to Eli Thayer's The Kansas Crusade,
published two or three years ago, and the two together will be
the most important contribution yet made or likely to be made
to the history of the memorable struggle between slavery and
freedom in 1855-8.

From the same house is issued an elegant edition in two vol-
umes of the Letters of Dr. Samuel Johnson, collected and edited
by Dr. George Birkbeck Hill. Although not including any of
the letters contained in Boswell's Life, this is the most complete
collection yet made, and shows, as no other publication has
done, how admirable Dr. Johnson was in his correspondence.
The work is a fitting companion to the superb edition of Bos-
weirs Life of Johnson, edited by Dr. Hill, and recently pub-
lished by the same house.

A new book by Mr. J. Fitzgerald Molloy has just been issued
by Ward & Downey, London. It is entitled The Faiths of the
Peoples, and its contents embrace brief studies of the various
Protestants sects as well as papers on the Catholic Church and
the monastic orders in England.

1892.] BOOKS RECEIVED. 471

The Recollections of Marshal Macdonald, Duke of Tarentum,
the general "who, though he never won an important battle,
was a brave and experienced officer ; who was upright and loyal
and truthful to a fault," have been translated from the French
edition of Camille Rousset by S. L. Simeon and published by
Bentley & Son, London.

The Catholic Publication Society Co. has just published :
Lectures on Slavery and Serfdom in Europe. By Very Rev.

Canon Brownlow.
The Catholic Church in England and Wales during the last two

Centuries. By Thomas Murphy. Preface by Lord Braye.

(With map.)

True Wayside Tales. Fourth Series. By Lady Herbert.
Catholic England in Modern Times. By Rev. John Morris,

S.J.

The same company has in press and in preparation :

History of the Church in England from the Beginning of the
Christian Era to the Accession of Henry VIII . By Mary
H. Allies.

The Poetical Works of J. C. Heywood. Second revised edi-
tion in two volumes, containing " Herodias," " Antonius,"
" Salome," and " Sforza."

Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost. By Cardinal Manning.
Fourth edition (the last work revised by the Cardinal).

BOOKS RECEIVED.

THE SACK OF SOLLIER. By George Teeling. Dublin : Sealy, Bryers & Wal-
ker.

THE SEMINARIAN'S MANUAL FOR VACATION. By a Priest of the Congrega-
tion of St. Sulpice. Translated from the French. Second revised edition.
Baltimore : McCauley & Kilner.

CATHOLIC TRUTH CONFERENCE PAPERS. Read at the annual Conferences at
Manchester, Birmingham, and London, England. Three volumes. London,
S.E.i 1 8 West Square.

THE BRIC-A-BRAC DEALER. Translated from the French. New York, Cincin-
nati, and Chicago : Benziger Bros.

HER FATHER'S RIGHT HAND, and NANNIE'S HEROISM. New York, Cincin-
nati, and Chicago : Benziger Bros.

NATIONAL SONGS OF IRELAND. Edited by M. J. Murphy. Cincinnati : The
John Church Co.

472 BOOKS RECEIVED. [June, 1892.

HINTS FOR LANGUAGE LESSONS AND PLANS FOR GRAMMAR LESSONS. A
hand-book for teachers. By John A. McCabe, M.A., LL.D., principal Otta-
wa (Can.) Normal School. Boston : Ginn Co.

POLITICAL ECONOMY. By Charles S. Devas, examiner in political economy at
the Royal University of Ireland. (Manuals of Catholic Philosophy.) New
York, Cincinnati, and Chicago : Benziger Bros.

MY WATER CURE : As tested through more than thirty* years. By Sebastian
Kniepp, parish priest of Worishofen (Bavaria). Translated from the thirtieth
German edition. New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago : Benziger Bros.

VISITS TO THE MOST HOLY SACRAMENT OF THE ALTAR. Translated from the
German of Very Rev. Maurice Klostermann, O.S.F., by Rev. Aug. Mc-
Glofy, O.S.F. St. Louis, Mo.: B. Herder.

HIERARCHY OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH IN THE U. S. Edited by
Maurice Francis Egan, LL.D. Parts 6 to 10 (inclusive). Philadelphia:
George Barrie.

LETTERS OF ST. ALPHONSUS DE LIGUORI. Translated from the Italian. The
Centenary Edition. (Vol. II., Part I, General Correspondence.) Edited by
Rev. Eugene Grimm, C.SS.R. New York : Benziger Bros.

MANIFESTATION OF CONSCIENCE. Confessions and Communions in Religious
Communities. Translated from the French of Rev. Pie de Langogne,
O.M.Cap. New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago : Benziger Bros.

THE EVOLUTION OF CHRISTIANITY. By Lyman Abbott. Boston and New
York : Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

THE AUGUSTINIAN MANUAL. Comprising a practical Prayer-book and a book
of instruction for the members of the Archconfraternity of the Cincture of
SS. Augustine and Monica. American edition. New York and Cincinnati :
Fr. Pustet & Co.

WHITHER GOEST THOU? OR, WAS FATHER MATHEW RIGHT? Notes on
Intemperance, Scientific and Moral. By Rev. J. C. MacErlain. (Fourth
Edition.) Brooklyn, N. Y. : The Author.

PAMPHLETS RECEIVED.

THE SCHOOL QUESTION. Discussed by leading thinkers of the clergy and laity,
among whom are Right Rev. Monsignor Farley, V.G.; Hon. Morgan J.
O'Brien, Gen. James R. O'Beirne, and others. New York : Columbus Press.

THE DECREE QUEMADMODUM. With explanations. By Rev. A. Sabetti, S.J.,
Professor of Moral Theology at Woodstock College, Md. Baltimore : John
Murphy & Co.

CATHOLIC EDUCATIONAL EXHIBIT. World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago,
1893. Circular of Information and Directions. Chicago: Donohue &
Henneberry.

DANTE AND BEATRICE. An essay in interpretation. By Lewis F. Mott, M.S.
New York : William R. Jenkins.

THE REAL PRESENCE. By Rev. C. F.Smarius,S.J. Pamphlet No. 17. St. Paul,
Minn. : The Catholic Truth Society of America.

REASON AND CATHOLICITY. A course of Lenten Conferences by Rev. Dr.
Dillon, of Bloomington, 111. New York- D. J. Sadlier & Co.

AGNOSTICISM, NEW THEOLOGY, AND OLD THEOLOGY; on the Natural and
the Supernatural. By Rev. Jos. Selinger, D.D., professor of dogmatic the-
ology at St. Francis' Seminary. Milwaukee : Hoffmann Brothers Co.

THE APOLOGY FOR STATE OMNIPOTENCE. "Education: To Whom does it
Belong?" by Rev. Dr. Bouquillon, examined by the Right Rev. J. De
Concilio.

ST. VINCENT'S HOSPITAL (of the City of New York). Forty-second Annual Re-
port, 1891. West Chester, N. Y.: Boys' Protectory Print.

EXTRAVAGANCE, WASTE, AND FAILURE OF INDIAN EDUCATION. A review of
the progress in civilizing and instructing the habitants of the reservations. By
C. C. Painter. Philadelphia: Indian Rights Association.

THE

CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. LV. JULY, 1892. No. 328.

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE INDIANS.

BEFORE the coming of the white man the Indian roamed at
will over this vast continent, lord of all he surveyed. How dif-
ferent his condition to-day ! He finds himself stripped of his
vast possessions, and confined within the limits of reservations
some of which are not larger than a single township. The In-
dian has not, however, tamely submitted to the encroachments
of the white man. He has waged relentless war on his despoil-
ers, disputing with them for every foot of territory. We blame
him for this and call him a blood-thirsty savage. But let us
put ourselves in his place. Suppose that we were the original
inhabitants of this land, and that a superior race coming from
distant countries dispossessed us by force of numbers, took our
best lands and forced us farther into the wilderness, and that
when we objected to their encroachments they paid no atten-
tion ; that their government made treaties with us, but rarely
kept them ; that from year to year we saw our condition becom-
ing worse and worse, till finally we came to regard ourselves
doomed to extermination. Would we not in such an hypothe-
sis fight our aggressors with all the energy of despair? That is
simply what the aborigines have been doing all along ; and can
we blame them for it? Indeed, the blackest pages in the his-
tory of our country are the records of our dealings with the
Indians. What wonder that the majority of them have remained
pagan till this day. What respect could they have for Chris-
tianity, when men calling themselves Christians robbed them of
their lands ? Still there have been some redeeming features in
our treatment of the red man. In this brief sketch we shall no-

474 THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE INDIANS. [July,

tice what the government, and what the church, is doing to im-
prove his condition.

General Grant recognized in a very practical way that the
Indians had grievances to be redressed and rights to be respect-
ed. His so-called peace policy was an honest effort to deal fairly
with the Indians. It was only partially successful owing, to a
great extent, to the fact that the spoils system still dominated
the Indian Bureau. Political services, and not personal fitness,
have been the qualifications sought for by both parties in their
appointments to office in the Indian Department. Still, there
has been a most decided improvement in the government's
treatment of its wards, as the Indians are called, during the last
twenty years ; much progress has been made especially in their
education and civilization.

EDUCATION.

According to the recent census we have 249,273 Indians,
showing a slight decrease during the decade just elapsed. The
last official report gives the number of children attending the
government and contract schools at 17,926, the cost to the gov-
ernment for the year being nearly two million dollars. The
reservation boarding-schools, similar to those inaugurated by the
Jesuit missionaries, have produced the best results. They train
most of the Indian children attending school. The government
schools are purely secular institutions ; no religion is supposed
to be taught in them. But as a matter of fact the teachers,
who are almost all Protestants, do what they can to influence
their pupils in favor of their respective denominations. The
contract-schools, on the other hand, are professedly religious.
They aim expressly at Christianizing as well as civilizing the In-
dian. Many years ago the Interior Department encouraged the
religious bodies to co-operate in the education of the Indians,
and Catholic missionaries, aided by the generosity of the Drexel
family, established a large number of schools among the differ-
ent tribes. The Protestant denominations also availed them-
selves of the government's proffer of aid, and built as many
schools as they could. The government entered into an agree-
ment with the managers of these institutions to pay a certain
sum yearly for each child educated by them. They gave a full
equivalent for the amounts received, giving general satisfaction
to the government. Secretary Vilas gives the cost of maintain-
ing children in the government boarding-schools as one hundred
and thirty-three dollars each, and in the contract-schools as

1892.] THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE INDIANS. 475

ninety-five dollars. The reason of this difference is that the re-
ligious bodies have their own funds wherewith to build schools
and support teachers, whereas in strictly public institutions the
government has to provide for everything.

The mission, or contract-schools, as they are called, have had
difficulties to contend with, mainly owing to the opinion in some
quarters that the entire system was un-American and tended
to the union of church and state. Jealousy of the church has
had, doubtless, much to do with this hostility to the contract-
schools, for the most of them are Catholic. Of the sum-total
of $570,218 expended on contract-schools in the" year 1891, Cath-
olics received $363,349. Of course there is a perfectly good
reason why they should receive this large amount namely, that
they keep up a larger number of schools than all the others
combined. But it is made to appear as if undue favor had
been shown to Catholics, and as an unfair discrimination against
Protestants. All this was brought out so well in the Mohonk
Conference of last year that we cannot refrain from quoting
some remarks bearing on the subject:

Rev. J. M. King, of New York, secretary of the League for
the Protection of American Institutions, thought it time that
Commissioner Morgan should call a halt, seeing that Roman
Catholics were receiving two-thirds of the funds. " Better do
away with the contract-schools entirely. Give the Indian the
public-school. Let the government do its own work of educa-
tion, and trust to the churches for the Christianization of the
Indian. This will be for the best interest of the Indian, and
of the American principle of entire separation of church and
state."

Rev. Dr. Foster, of Boston, was of the same mind, though
he thought it unwise to do away with the contract system at
once. " How can we Protestants," said he, " be satisfied if the
Catholics get seventy per cent, of the government money? The
Catholics, indeed, have money to erect schools. A certain excel-
lent lady has given it to them ; and their teachers are unsal-
aried. But we feel that it is unjust that they should receive
such a large share of the funds." Much more was said by
others in the same strain.

Then arose General Armstrong, of the Hampton Indian
school. He considered that the best thing for the Indian was
a practical Christian education. " The government is giving him a
practical education very generally. The government school is
more or less Christian according to the ever-changing manage-

476 THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE INDIANS. [July,

ment. The only permanent force in Indian education is the
churches, working through the contract-schools. At the bottom
of this trouble is the Roman Catholic question. I think the
Catholic work is a great gain for ^he Indian. Industrially it is
as good as any; often superior. The Catholic Church, as a
moral and religious power, is at its best among the Indians.
From the first it has made a noble record of heroism, and done
most valuable work for the red man ; but of the seventeen
thousand in school only three thousand five hundred are under
direct Catholic influence. The rest are mostly under Protestant
influence. This is the case in the government schools generally.
Our action should not be destructive, but progressive and con-
structive. Improve all along the line. Let us press forward and
do what we can for the twenty thousand children out of school."

Another speaker thought the contract system had worked
well. " It will come to an end by limitation when the Indians
become civilized. The civilization hitherto attained has been
due to religion more than to anything else."

Rev. Dr. Mitchell thought the real question was not whether
the churches needed the help of the government in this work,
but whether the government can afford to dispense with the
help of the churches. " Certainly there is nothing in the history
of the government schools to show that such schools, swayed by
political influence, and by no means pervaded by religion, can lift
up the Indian. For the elevation of those pagan tribes the gov-
ernment needs all the help the churches can give. It is easy to
say: * Let the government look after the secular training and the
missionaries after the religion of the Indian.' That is the method
followed in the States for the civilized races. Yes, but it is not
practicable among the Indians. In the States the child has a
Christian home to go to where he is surrounded by good influ-
ences, but the Indian child leaves the school to go to a home of
barbarism. To cut off the religious teaching which the mission-
aries are able to give in the school is to cut off the means of
doing the most effective work. After having visited many im-
portant reservations, and studied the schools of every grade and
kind, I have no hesitation in saying that the contract-schools
are the most useful of all."

Professor Morse said : " We are making too much of this
fear of union of church and state. Some two thousand years ago
the Celt and Teuton were in very much the same condition as
the Indian to-day. It was the union of church and state that
Christianize^ and civilized them. There is no satisfactory solu-

1892.] THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE INDIANS. 477

tion of the Indian question except through the hearty co-oper-
ation of the Christian people of this country; and there is no
better way to bring about this co-operation than through con-
tract-schools."

The reader has perceived that the great volume of testimony
was in favor of the contract-schools. Still there is no guarantee
of permanence for them. True, Secretary Noble is favorably
disposed towards them. So is President Harrison, who declared
in his last message to Congress " that the co-operation between
the government and the mission-schools, which has wrought so
much good, should be cordially and impartially maintained."
Notwithstanding all this the system seems to us to rest upon a
foundation of sand, inasmuch as it depends on politicians and
politics, and these are as changeable as the winds.

CIVILIZATION.

For a long time past the government has been endeavoring
by various means to civilize its Indian wards. But its efforts
have met with many failures, owing to the defective means em-
ployed. It was thought that by placing the Indians on reserva-
tions in the midst of a white population they would soon ac-
quire civilized habits. But it has been found from experience
that such contact only demoralized the Indians. The class of
whites found on the frontier have not been good models to copy
after. The Indians learned from them many of the vices and
but few of the virtues of civilization.

The experiment of book-learning was also tried. The school-
master was sent out to enlighten the rising generation. He did
all that was expected of him, teaching reading, writing, and
spelling, often, however, in a tongue utterly unknown to many of
his pupils. His mission failed to accomplish satisfactory results.
The evil influence of the wigwam more than neutralized the
good done by the day-school. Thousands of Indian youths of
both sexes were sent every year to training-schools, such as
those at Carlisle, Hampton, and Albuquerque, in the hope that
on their return home they would be the teachers of their re-
spective tribes in the arts and manners of civilized life. This
plan has by no means been an unqualified success. Educated
Indians, when left to shift for themselves, fare as the vegetables
of our gardens when remanded to the freedom of nature.
They soon become wild again.

The reservation boarding-schools have met with much better

478 THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE INDIANS. [July,

success, especially those under the control of the church. They
educate the whole man the head, the heart, and the hand.
While the head is trained to reason and is stored with knowl-
edge, the heart is being trained to the practice of virtue, and
the hands to honest work. This is the only education that can
ever effect the Christian civilization of the red man. Our gov-
ernment will be guilty of an enormous blunder the day it dis-
cards the contract-schools and commits itself to a purely secu-
lar education for its wards. We may then expect to see the
Indians become civilized pagans. The results of a godless edu-
cation are apparent enough already among many tribes. Indian
free-thinkers, with a smattering of education, are everywhere to
be found who scoff at Christianity as a relic of the past.

The government is doing much for the material advancement
of the Indians. It has been engaged for several years past in
dividing the reservations into separate farms, each member of the
tribe getting a plot of one hundred and sixty acres. Over six-
teen thousand have already received their allotments in severalty,
are released from the tribal relation and have become citizens.
The work progresses slowly, and not without many hardships to the
Indians concerned. They are mostly without any experience of
farming, and also without farming implements. If the govern-
ment would only supplement the allotments of land with a grant
of farming utensils, and the employment for a few years of
practical farmers to teach them, the condition of the Indians
would be greatly improved. Last year they cultivated 288,613
acres of land, mostly in the Indian Territory. Three-fourths of
the Indians support themselves, and are no burden to the gov-
ernment except in the matter of schools.

About 60,000 are still depending on the government for ra-
tions. During the past year the following articles were furnished
them : Flour, 8,456,000 pounds ; beef, 36,000,000 pounds ; bacon,
900,000 pounds ; beans and corn, 368,400 pounds ; coffee, 487,000
pounds ; tea, 9,000 pounds ; granulated sugar, 952,000 pounds ; the
amount of blankets and clothing is not specified. We do not
quote these items to show* the liberality of the government
for it is bound to do all this by treaty stipulations for lands
ceded by the Indians but rather to call attention to a policy
that is vicious and degrading. Far better to expend this
money in a way that would make the Indians self-sustaining
and independent. It is true the government aims at this in
its allotment plan. Perhaps the system of supplying rations is
to be only a temporary evil after all.

1892.] THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE INDIANS. 479

The following extract from a recent work, as instructive as it
is entertaining, bears directly on this question :

" General Crook believed that the Indian should be made self-
supporting, not by preaching to him the merits of labor and the
grandeur of toiling in the sun, but by making him see that
every drop of honest sweat meant a penny in his pocket. It was
idle to expect that the Indian should understand how to work
intelligently in the very beginning ; he represented centuries of
one kind of life, and the Caucasian the slow evolution of cen-
turies under different conditions and in directions diametrically
opposite. . . . The American Indian, born free as the eagle,
would not tolerate restraint, would not brook injustice; there-'
fore, the restraint imposed must be manifestly for his benefit,
and the government to which he would subject himself must be
eminently one of kindness, mercy, and absolute justice, without
necessarily degenerating into weakness. ... At the date of
the reduction of the Apaches the success of the government
schools was not clearly established, so that the subject of Indian
instruction was not then discussed except theoretically. General
Crook was always a firm believer in the education of the Ameri-
can Indian ; not in the education of a handful of boys and girls
sent to remote localities, and there inoculated with new ideas
and deprived of the old ones upon which they would have to
depend for getting a livelihood, but in the education of the
younger generation as a generation. Had the people of the
United States taken the younger generation of Sioux and Chey-
ennes in 1866, and educated them in accordance with the terms
of the treaty, there would not have been any trouble since.
The children should not be torn from the parents, to whom they
are a joy and a consolation just as truly as children are to
white parents ; they should be educated within the limits of the
reservation, so that the old folks from time to time could get to
see them and note their progress. . . . The notion that the
American Indian will not work is a fallacious one ; he will work,
just as the white man will, when it is to his advantage to do so.
The adobes in the military post of Fort Wingate, New Mexico,
were all made by Navajo Indians, the brothers of the Apaches.
The same tribe did no small amount of work on the grading of
the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad where it passes across their
country." (On the Border with Crook, by Captain John G. Bourke,
U.S.A., ScribnefS) pp. 226 et seq.)

WHAT THE CHURCH IS DOING.

We give below a tabulated statement showing the present
condition of our Indian mission work. If it is not as full and
accurate as it should be the missionaries themselves are to
blame, inasmuch as they do not take much pains to keep the
Catholic public informed in regard to their labors:

480

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE INDIANS. [July,

DIOCESES.

INDIAN
POPULATION

CATHOLIC
INDIANS.

CHURCHES.

| PRIESTS.

BAPTISMS.

| SCHOOLS.

PUPILS.

SISTERHOODS.

CHILDREN

ADULTS.

Arizona,

Brownsville,

45,000

Cheyenne, .

3,000

Bl. Sacrament.

Duluth, .

8,304

2,100

140

Benedictine.

Fort Wayne,

C Franciscan.

Grand Rapids,

3,500

2,500

212

< Dominican.

( Notre Dame.

Green Bay,

3,637

1,300

177

\ St. Joseph.
} Franciscan.

La Crosse,

1,650

152

2 4 8

Franciscan.

Helena,

12,000

6,000

I,OOO

Ursuline.

Idaho,

2,200

1,200

130

Providence.

Indian Territory, .

3,000

250

\ Mercy.
\ Franciscan.

Los Angeles, .

4,000

Marquette, .

4,500

2.500

1 20

St. Joseph.

Natchez, .

300

Mercy.

Nesqually, .

I7,OOO

6,000

260

( Providence.
( Franciscan.

Oregon City,

4,OOO

1,500

159

( Franciscan.
\ Benedictine.

Portland,

I.OOO

1,000

174

Mercy.

San Francisco,

I5,OOO

1,000

200

Franciscan.

Santa Fe,

28,OOO

18,000

558

Loretto.

Sioux Falls,

25,571

5,35

373

252

946

( Franciscan.
( Benedictine.

Vancouver's Island,

35,000

3,7oo

400

150

Winona,

St. Augustine,

150

Totals,

207,778

106,801

1^588

5 06

5.559

This vast mission field, spread over twenty-four dioceses, is
worked by the religious orders, chiefly the Jesuits and Benedictines,
and by secular priests. The number of missionaries is lamentably
small, and this is almost our only drawback. The Indians are every-
where showing a greater desire than ever before to become Chris-
tians. Among the various tribes there are two elements, the pro-
gressive and the pagan. The progressive party, which far outnum-
bers the pagan, is in favor of taking everything good that the white
man has to offer, including his religion. The church has already a
firm footing among many of the tribes. With more men and means
she could readily, extend her work among the pagan members of
those same tribes, and also establish new missions among tribes
yet unevangelized. The Black-gown is ever welcome by pagans
as well as by Christians. They all recognize him as a disinter-
ested and faithful friend. He has but little difficulty, therefore,
in winning converts to the faith. With the aid of the female
religious communities, now happily found on nearly all our mis-

1892.] THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE INDIANS. 481

sion fields, the missionary is able to lay solid foundations. The
sisters' activity is confined to the children, whom they mould and
form into devout Christian women and useful members of so-
ciety. They do their work thoroughly, leaving nothing to be
desired. Christian doctrine holds the first place in their teach-
ing; then, in addition to reading and writing, the girls are taught
housekeeping in its various branches, whilst the boys are exer-
cised in out-of-door employments. Indeed, the work of the de-
voted sisters cannot be too highly praised. By their kind and
gentle manners they win the confidence and affection of both
parents and children, making themselves all to all in order to
gain all to Christ. Would to God that vocations to the mission-
ary sisterhoods were more plentiful ! Then we might hope for a
larger harvest of souls.

In the heroic age of the Indian missions the church had the
field all to herself. This is not the case to-day. The different
sects employ a large force of both ministers and teachers, many
of whom are native Indians. They are supported by such asso-
ciations as the Native Missionary Society, the American Mis-
sionary Association, the Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel, the Ladies' Home Missionary Society, etc., etc. They
have far more laborers in the field than we have, and there is
no doubt but that they are making considerable headway in
gaining those simple people to their various forms of religious
belief. Owing to the want of official statistics and to the vague-
ness of their missionary reports, it is impossible to give the num-
ber of their converts.

If they confined themselves to the pagan Indians we would
have no reason to complain. But they seem to pay special at-
tention to the perversion of the Catholics as, for instance, in
New Mexico and Arizona. Many Catholic Indians, who for the
want of missionaries get but little attention, are in great danger
of losing the faith in this way. This is indeed deplorable ; but
we should rather lay the blame upon ourselves, and resolve to
put forth greater efforts for the future. If we neglect the In-
dians now they will soon be absorbed into the various sects,
with no prospect of ever becoming Catholics. The salvation of
hundreds of thousands of souls is, in a manner, placed in our
hands. Unborn millions appeal to our zeal. Shall the Indian
and his descendants down to the last generation be numbered
among the faithful children of the church ? That will depend
on what we Catholics in our day and generation are going to
do for him. D. MANLEY.

Epiphany Apostolic College, Baltimore, Md.

482 REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS, [July,

REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS, FIRST
BISHOP OF OGDENSBURG.

II.

184.1-184.4..

I HAVE now so far drawn on my personal reminiscences of
Bishop Wadhams as to present to the reader a general and, as I
trust, a characteristic sketch of the man, such as nature and
divine grace conspired to make him. It is, if I have succeeded
in my design, a picture which may serve as frontispiece to what
follows. I propose now to go over the same general ground
again, and by producing letters which have come into my hands,
chiefly such letters as he had himself treasured up from his cor-
respondents, to show him in such light as the eyes of friendship
saw him, more especially during that momentous transition time
which led him and so many other converts, both in England
and in the United States, into the bosom of the Holy Catholic
Church.

One of the earliest of these letters is from James Lloyd
Breck. a young friend of Wadhams in sympathy, like himself,
with Newman, Carey, and others. Breck was at Nashotah, in
Wisconsin. His letter is dated "October 21, 1842." The
Nashotah mission was a somewhat romantic attempt to found
an Episcopal monastery in the Northwest. Breck was the
" superior " or " prior." Besides the superior, the community at
this time consisted of one assured member, the Rev. William
Adams, who was at the head of the school department, while
Breck labored on the mission as evangelist. The number of
scholars in this school is not stated in the letter, but, as the
writer assures us, " the foundation of a permanent church school,
in all respects adapted to the most Catholic principles," had
been laid. A seminary was also embraced in this institution,
and thus far had a nest-egg consisting of one seminarian. The
size of the institute at this time may be estimated from the di-
mensions of the building, which measured thirteen feet by seven-
teen feet. It consisted of one room only, which served as
kitchen, study, sleeping apartment, etc., for the whole communi-
ty. Two vocations for this monastery had not turned out well.
A young clergyman, the son of an Episcopal bishop, had felt

1892.] FIRST BISHOP OF OGDENSBURG. 483

obliged to absent himself too frequently, for too long periods,
from the cloister. Another difficulty was that he had en-
gaged himself to be married. The other applicant had been
found too scrupulous. Breck and Adams were only deacons as
yet, and the applicant, who was in priest's orders, considered it
as not canonical or rubrical to have a private communion ser-
vice for their benefit. The household had, in consequence, soon
been reduced to the slender community already stated. In his
letter the reverend superior earnestly urges Wadhams to come
and join them.

" If," he writes, " dear Wadhams, you conclude to come, re-
member we receive you on the ground of our first principles,
which are : (i) so long as connected with this institution to re-
main unmarried ; (2) to yield implicit and full obedience to all
the rules and regulations of the body ; (3) community of goods
so long as community of purpose ; (4) teaching on the staunch
Catholic principles ; (5) preaching from place to place on cir-
cuits route, mode, etc., to be determined by the bishop or by
one authorized by him. We sincerely hope that you will find it
your duty to join us. ... I learn from Brother Adams
that he has just written to our dear Brother Carey. How greatly
we long after him, as a companion in our labors ! "

A letter from this Brother Adams to Wadhams, directed, like
that from Breck, to the General Seminary in Twentieth Street,
New York City, is dated " December 6, 1841." He begins by
giving at some length a description of the country surrounding
this new monastery ; its beauty, its productions, and the charac-
ter of its inhabitants. These latter he praises far above their
neighbors of Illinois, Michigan, and Kentucky. " Nowhere have
I seen any specimen of that vile animal that is called ' loafer '
among them. . . . They have none of the Eastern prejudices
against the church ; they will listen to any sermon respect-
fully and with attention ; not in the yawning, spitting, pick-tooth,
boots-upon-the-bench sort of style and attitude in which your
Kentuckian graces the house of God, but calmly and respect-
fully ; and yet, mark you, my brother, a sermon, however strong
it may be, or however pointed, will have as little effect upon
these men as boiling water flung in the face of a marble statue.
Sermons can make no impression."

The writer then proposes his remedy for this difficulty, which
lies in an example of penance and self-mortification united to a
" Catholic " churchmanship. He then urges his friend Wadhams
as follows :

484 REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS, [July,

" Dear brother, if you can in almost every way deny yourself,
can be content to remain unmarried for an indefinite period, to
live on the coarsest food, to deny yourself the pleasure of culti-
vated society ; then come to Wisconsin. . . . Whether you
do come or no, in the name of God, and if you would not fall
into many a perilous pit, begin a systematic course of self-denial,
fasting upon the stationary days of the church. This is the only
thing that will save a man from the legal spirit on the one side,
and the luscious and animal spirit of religionism on the other.
If you want direction on this point, Carey will give it you.
The spirit you see in him (what a spirit it is!) is the offspring
of this practice."

Not long after his letter Adams visited our theological sem-
inary in Twentieth Street ; and many of us gathered around
him, listening eagerly to his description of Nashotah, which
seemed to us like a holy shrine set up amid the prairies, the
nucleus of another Citeaux, with Breck for a St. Bernard. It
must have increased very much from this small beginning. Nearly
twenty years later two students from that institute visited me
when I was officiating as parish priest in St. Peter's Church,
Troy. They were tired of the kind of Catholicism they found
at Nashotah, sincere though it was, and were resolved to become
true Catholics. One, named McCurry, attached himself as priest
to the diocese of Albany and was assigned to St. John's Church,
in that city. The other is Father Henry L. Robinson, now
rector at Chicopee, in the diocese of Springfield, Mass.*

Whether Wadhams felt any inclination for this attempt at
monastic life in Nashotah, I cannot say. Some others did my-
self among the number. I endeavored, but without success, to
persuade my father to transfer me to it from the seminary in
New York. He took time to consider, and consulted Dr. Hora-
tio Potter, then in charge of St. Peter's Church, Albany, but
afterwards Bishop of New York. The answer was unfavorable,
Nashotah being represented as a nest where Catholic Protes-
tants might be fledged into Catholics of the Roman type. My
father gained still stronger impressions of danger from a Presby-
terian [clergyman, the famous Dr. Cox, formerly of Brooklyn.
When asked what he thought of Puseyism, his answer was given
in his own characteristic language: "Puseyism, sir, is the quint-
essence of the blackness of the darkness of the dark ages
squirted into the nineteenth century. " The doctor had some

v NuhoUkh is iu>\\ , .is 1 .un informed, a flourishing -seminary, receiving students from va-
rious part- of the Vnited State>. How far it has retained the spirit of its founders is a point
upon which the writer lacks information.

1892.] Fsxsr BISHOP OF OGDENSBUX 485

reason to speak in strong language. Puseyism had invaded his
own household. He is said to have uttered his grief upon a
public occasion in the following manner : " Hear, O Heavens !
and give ear, O earth! I have nourished and brought up chil-
dren, and they have turned Episcopalians !"

I introduce next a precious letter from Arthur Carey, written
after Wadhams had taken deacon's orders and was settled in
Essex County. It was directed to Ticonderoga. Carey was
looked upon at the seminary, both by professors and students,
and by a host of others outside, as a sort of Saint Aloysius.
His was, indeed, a beautiful and lovable character, and only a
man like Wadhams could have secured and cemented a friend-
ship so strong as that which existed between these two pure and
fervent souls. We give the letter, therefore, as a memorial of
both:

"NEW YORK, October 23d, '43.

" DEAREST WADHAMS : Do you recollect how happy I used to
be when you tapped at my room door at the seminary, and I
said 4 Come in ! ' and in you came ; and how I used to jump
up to receive you, and how we used almost to hug each other ;
and how we sang together, and, horrible to tell, looked over the
breviary together, and talked and laughed together; and how
you abused my pope, on the door, and how I took his part, and
how we discussed all the affairs of the church so wisely, and
then adjourned and took a nice long walk, and so on. And
now it is all over, and we are parted, and you are doing I
know not what, and I am all alone in my room, writing to you,
and feeling funny, queer, strange, a kind of blue feeling do you
know what I mean ? I hope not, for it is very far indeed from
pleasant ; and yet I seem to wish you might occasionally feel
blue, so as to sympathize with me, and to make you think over
past times, that are gone for ever, and are never coming back
again. Think of that : Never coming back again ! No, never !
I have a good deal, or at least a little, news to tell you, but it
seems so natural to run on in this old-fashioned, loose way that
I hardly like to stop it. Does it remind you of old times ?
Does it make you think of those times, when you used to visit
me and eat brown bread and sit before the fire ? Or, are you
now too parsonical for these seminary reminiscences? It is
cruel even to hint that you have got above those times, when
I know perfectly well that you have not, and that you will not
in a hurry I mean that you never will. Will you ever ? Will
you ever, Wadhams ? Ah, why do not you answer ? Why do
not you say, ' No, never !' and pacify me ? Why do not you
speak ? But, poor me ! it is not your fault ; you can't speak to
me when you are so far away, can you ? If you could you
would ; would not you ? Wouldn't you try and make me laugh
now, and cheer me up a bit, if you were here ? Yes, to be sure

486 REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS, [July,

you would, like a good fellow as you are, ain't you ? This is
something like the way we used to run on together, I think ;
but I must stop it now and begin to be serious. And to begin,
I must beg ten thousand pardons for forgetting so shamefully to
leave the Critic for you to take with you. I have been think-
ing ever since that I would send it by post, but my brother
tells me it would cost you a dollar in postage. Tell me what I
am to do, and it shall immediately be attended to. If you tell
me to send this one by post, I shall conclude you will wish me
to continue and send them all the same way ; unless you say
to the contrary. Pardon me for my carelessness. And now
about myself. I am engaged as Dr. Seabury's assistant. His
vestry renewed their call immediately after the convention, and
as the bishop urged me strongly to accept it, I have done so
for six months. The salary is five hundred dollars per annum
quite enough to support me, but no more. I am lodging at
101 Charlton Street, quite near the church. I preach on Sunday
afternoons, and open the church for Wednesday and Friday ser-
vices, morning and evening, and saints' day services. I was
afraid to begin with daily services, and the doctor thought bet-
ter not at present. He says I may do anything I please, and
he will never interfere with me, but always support me, which
is pleasant, at all events. Dr. Sherwood, of Hyde Park, gave
me a book (which I must lend you, as soon as I see you) by
old Dr. Smith, of Connecticut. It is very interesting indeed.
Its title is Primitive Psalmody^ and he maintains that chanting is
the only canonical ecclesiastical music ; that metre psalm-sing-
ing is an abomination, and that metre hymns are only to be
tolerated. He is very warm, quite eloquent, and rather learned ;
he is extremely severe on the Puritans and Calvinist party, and
wonderfully polite and reverential toward the Church of Rome.
He was himself a very good musician. He was a Scotchman,
and came over with Bishop Seabury. Dr. Sherwood was his
pupil, and he is a churchman of the very highest grade, and an
admirer of the O. [Oxford] Tracts and the British Critic, of
which he is a ' constant reader.' Please direct to me, at my
lodgings, when you write, and this you must soon and frequently
do, and I will endeavor, as I can, to answer you. Isn't Bishop
Mcllvaine cutting some strange capers ? He will do mischief
yet, before he stops ; it is impossible to say what he may not
do, if he once makes up his mind to it; but I doubt whether
he carries any great weight out of his own diocese. The
laity and clergy cannot really do much harm in our church, be-
cause they can never carry anything against the bishops ; I sup-
pose the bishops can always carry their own dioceses ; but, on the
other hand, the bishops may do almost any amount of harm, if
they be once opposed to each other. Our diocesan organization
enables each bishop to separate his own diocese, in effect, from
all others ; and so we may place ourselves in a position of rela-
tive schism, and eventually break up our general convention.
McMaster is now sitting by my side ; he has just come down

1892.] FIRST BISHOP OF OGDENSBURG. 487

from the seminary, and is now reading to me out of the Octo-
ber number of the British Critic. He sends his best love to
you.

" Yours ever, in all brotherly love,

"A. CAREY."

The active religious zeal fermenting in the minds of the more
fervent students at the General Seminary, and looking forward
to future work, extended itself in two directions. There was
much interest^ in foreign missions. Some took a special interest
in China and the Eastern countries of Asia. Others were more
interested in Bishop Southgate's efforts to establish an unity
between Anglicanism and the ancient schismatic Greek churches.
Not that these students looked upon the Eastern churches as
schismatic, for that would have placed themselves in the same
category ; but there was a feeling 1 that the nearer Anglicans,
with their " apostolical succession," could be made to harmonize
with the various Greek churches, the more appearance of real
unity they would present in the face of that great church whose
centre was at Rome, but whose circumference encloses all na-
tions and all ages.

A missionary society was existing at the seminary and was
in a flourishing state. There was a class of students, however,
in whose minds there was a strong yearning for what in the
Catholic Church is called " the religious life " ; meaning not
merely a general aspiration towards Christian perfection, but
embracing those special means to this end which consist in a
mingling of community life with a seclusion from the world. It
is hard, nevertheless, for an earnest American mind, however
much it may long for internal purification and sanctification, to
divest itself of the thought of active work for others, and there-
fore, in the mind of Wadhams and men of his own type, the
highest ideal of a Christian ministry naturally took the form of
a community of missionaries bound to poverty, chastity, and
obedience. The institute at Nashotah was an honest and ear-
nest attempt at this ; and no wonder that so many eyes at the
New York seminary were fixed upon that land of lakes and
prairies. New York State, however, had its wilderness in the
North Woods, of which Essex County formed a part. There,
immediately upon his ordination, was stationed Edgar P. Wad-
hams. There he was already doing missionary work, with a
heart yearning after perfection. This pointed him out as a natural
centre round whom others might gather. What has just been
said will make the following letter seem both natural and intelli-

488 REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS, [July,

gible. Henry McVickar, the writer, had been a fellow-semina-
rian with Wadhams, was a classmate of my own, was familiar
and in active sympathy with both. Let me also say of him
here, briefly but emphatically, that he was a most fervent soul
of rare endowments, and a Christian gentleman of the most
perfect type.

His letter to Wadhams, directed to Ticonderoga from Chel-
sea, bears the date of August 30, 1844. It must be understood
that " Chelsea " was then the name for that part of New York
City in which is situated the General Seminary, at the corner of
Ninth Avenue and Twentieth Street. The letter was, therefore,
written in McVickar's room at the seminary. After some previ-
ous matter, which for brevity's sake I omit, he launched into
the subject which was uppermost in his mind, in the following
words :

" Walworth and myself have been plotting against your free-
dom all the morning, and as I don't feel easy I propose to con-
fess the whole truth to you which is this, that we propose offer-
ing our assistance in transforming you into a monk, Prater or
Pater, whichever may seem best.

" Mr. Dyer's death (what a blow it must have been to you ! I
can well feel) has opened the Essex County mission so that it
may be put upon a new and better footing (I speak under cor-
rection). You may remember some conversation we had together
before you left here, in which you expressed the opinion that
you might find one or two young men, desirous of preparing for
the ministry, who would live with you and form the nucleus of
such an institution as Nashotah. I wish to remind you of the
idea you then brought out. I confess it struck me very much
at the time, and has been a hope next my heart ever since.

" Can anything be done to realize it ? Are you inclined to it ?

Will Judge B back you ? If so, let me know ; when it will

be needed I will provide some more backing. In the meantime
I can offer you a coadjutor after your own warm heart Wal-
worth, . . . who finds himself unable on account of his eyes
to proceed with the seminary course. . . . Inclination would
lead him to Breck, but in compliance with his father's wishes
he gives that up, and he now looks to your quarter. He could
lay-read and teach, with a moderate use of his eyes. ... I
have seen some late letters from Breck, by which he appears to
be prospering. Although he is the only clergyman, he has among
his students some five lay-readers, and thus supplies twelve or
thirteen stations every Sunday, and finds his efficiency far greater
than he could have expected.

" Walworth proposes to come and see you in September say
the fourteenth ; meanwhile he will be here ; and we should like
to hear from you in the interval."

1892.] FIRST BISHOP OF OGDENSBURG. 489

It seems very probable that even at this early date Wadhams*
mind had been visited by strong misgivings as to the character
of the church to which he was attached whether he could safely
trust himself in it as being in any true sense a branch of the
church of Christ. There is a passage in this letter which evi-
dently shows that McVickar believed him to be troubled with
misgivings of this kind. The passage refers to some previous
letter of Wadhams :

" I fear your rainy sky in Essex makes you low-spirited.
. . . I had intended to urge you to give up the idea of the
possibility of your leaving the mother who begot you to God, but
I cannot bring myself to believe that you will ever leave an
altar on which lies the body of our Lord while life is in
you.

"Whatever is true we have a right to believe and act upon,
but always with prudence, tempering truth with mercy, ' Jesus
with Mary.'

" It was very kind of you to write, and I shall long to hear
from you again. I beg the benefit of your prayers at the * offer-
ing of the Salutary Host,' and remain,

"Yours most sincerely,

" HENRY MCVICKAR."

Shortly after the above letter Wadhams came down to New
York, and upon his return to his mission took me with him.
On our way north we visited McMaster, at Hyde Park, and the
Rev. Mr. Wheaton, at Poughkeepsie. McMaster was full of ad-
vanced ideas and disposed to rally us both as slow-coaches.
When driving one day from Hyde Park to Poughkeepsie, as we
passed an Episcopal church McMaster called out suddenly :
" What are you taking your hat off to, Wadhams ? To that old
meeting-house? There's nothing inside of that but a communion
table, where the vestrymen put their hats. Wait till you come
to a real church with a real altar and a sacrifice."

We did not find Mr. Wheaton at home, but visited the church
in which he then officiated as assistant. While standing outside the
chancel our advanced friend said : " There are four sacraments ad-
ministered in this church, if any at all." " Baptism, the Lord's
Supper, and Confirmation," said Wadhams ; " that makes three ;
but what is the fourth ? " " Why, Penance," said McMaster.
"Do you see that chair inside the railing? That's where Whea-
ton sat when I made my confession to him. It was something
new for him and he didn't want to do it, but I insisted upon
it ; and didn't I frighten the life out of him ! " Years afterwards
VOL. LV. 32

490 REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS, [July

it was a pleasure to meet Dr. Wheaton when he had become a
Catholic.

Wadhams and I proceeded from thence to Ticonderoga,
the trip from Troy to Whitehall being made on the canal. After
a few weeks I was obliged to return to New York to consult my
oculist. From there McVickar and I addressed a joint letter, or
rather two letters on the same sheet, to our friend at Ticonde-
roga. Mine runs as follows :

" DEAR FATHER EDGAR : If this epistle should be too brief
charge my eyes with the offence. I don't know where to direct
it to, but trust it will find you at Ti. I will be ready to come
back to Wadhams Mills just as soon as you wish me. . . .
Please write me immediately. . . . Say what books you

would have me purchase. McV has just given me a check

for $50 for tools, books, etc. I shall purchase all the Lives of
Saints, breviaries, and two or three manuals of devotion ; what
more would you like in the way of books or else ? Can the cook-
ing-stove, shovel and tongs, beds, bedding, etc., be obtained best
in Essex Co. ? Shall I bring writing paper, etc.? We are, I think,
all three ready (i.e., willing) for action. May God and Our Lady
prosper us ! My love to Judge B , etc. . . .

"Yours faithfully for ever,

"CLA. W."

This is McVickar's letter :

" November 6, 1844.

" MY DEAR WADHAMS : Walworth's return last Saturday gave
me the greatest satisfaction. I had missed his sympathy more than
I could have suspected I should, and I can appreciate better
than before the comfort you will be to one another this winter.

" Any plans you shall adopt I shall subscribe as the best, only
I would have you consider this winter as one of trial, and on
that account perhaps, as well as others, we should practise the
doctrine of reserve ; consider the mighty game we are playing,
and how sure we ought to be of our moves before we make
them ; but in all these matters you are a far better judge than
I am, and I am ashamed (if it were not an evidence of the in-
terest I take) of my self-sufficiency.

" I hear that they want to call McMaster to Fishkill, if the
bishop will ordain him ; but the bishop is so full of his own
matters (having been presented for trial for immoral conduct)
that he cannot bestow much thought upon Mac, who has had a
severe trial. Our turns may not be very far distant.

"The Lives of the English Saints I am delighted with, and
would not part with them upon any consideration.

" Could you not manage to pick up some orphan child this
winter belonging to no one (the younger the better), over whom
you might exercise complete control ? They are the stuff we
must in a great measure depend upon. As my letter is made

1892.] FIRST BISHOP OF OGDENSBURG. 491

up of patches, I will end it by an extract [from] Ward's book
which may point out the course ' the Apostolicals ' in England
would advise : * However, the one method that carries God's
blessing with it of reforming a bad system is first of all to load
the existing framework with all possible good, if it will bear
it well ; if not, God himself has solved for us the question, and
the system breaks down with no direct agency of ours ' (p. 368).
" Your promised letter I shall expect with great anxiety, and
I shall feel authorized hereafter to apply to you for guidance in
any difficulties into which I may fall, and shall ever remain, with
the sincerest love, Yours truly,

" HENRY MCVICKAR."

All the earnestness and hopefulness with which we three as-
pirants after monasticism set to work to realize our vision is to
be seen in our purchase of breviaries and other books for pray-
er and pious reading, and of tools for manual labor, for we be-
lieved, with Saint Bernard and his Cistercians, that good monks
must labor as well as pray. That hope was very high in our
hearts may be seen from the fact that Wadhams and McVickar
made their wills to secure a sort of endowment for the institute.
I, who had no other property but myself, either in possession
or in prospect, had only myself to bequeath, and I did it with a
will. We had even fixed upon a name for our " Clairvaux,"
which was to be called St. Mary's, and our minds were some-
times occupied in designing cloisters. I have no personal recol-
lection of McMaster as included in our proposed community.
It would seem, however, from the following letter (written in
1844, and mailed from Hyde Park, N. Y.) that he had offered
himself to Wadhams for some kind of a combination which
was to be cemented by vows :

" IN FESTO O SAPIENTIA, Dec. 16.

" MY DEAR WADHAMS : I would have written to you long
ago, but I was determined you should keep your word and write
first, as in duty bound. I am delighted to hear how well you
are coming on ; things seem to be nearer what you would wish
than you could have hoped a few months ago. I am sorry you
did not write a week earlier than you did, for then I would
have had time to make this letter twice as long as it will be
now. However, if you answer it soon, I will write a longer one
soon after the holidays. I spend next week in town, and am
full of business in the meanwhile. I have had two letters from
England, within the month ; one from Dalgairns, the other from
Oakeley. Both are very kind and interesting. Oakeley cannot
immediately g*o on with St. Bernard ; his intimate friend and co-
adjutor, who was to have assisted him, has crossed and is gone.
O says he has no intention of following him at present. He

492 REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS, [July,

thinks the step (which was taken without consulting friends)
was owing to morbid excitement of mind and peculiar circum-
stances. He means as soon as he can to resume his labors on
St. Bernard. Dalgairns is full of the state of parties consequent
on the recent election of V. Chancellor, and, like Oakeley,
writes in bad spirits. The breach is irreparable between the
thorough-paced ones and the Hook party, and this seems to
discourage them. Ward's book they speak of in the highest
terms. Of course an attempt is being made by some in au-
thority to get hold of him and punish him, but this is not
likely to succeed. He is coming out in a new edition in two
volumes, enlarged from the first. Of the lives of the saints, St.
Augustine is by Oakeley ; Sts. Wolstan and William, by Mr.
Church (a fellow of Oriel, and follower of Mr. Newman, author
of the articles on St. Anselm in the B. Critic) ; Sts. Paulinus,
Bega, etc., constituting No. VI., is by F. W. Faber, the poet.
I am rejoiced to see him so true a man ; he talks harder than
any one of them, and I think from several things that he has
recovered very much from his self-conceit, which used so to
spoil his writings. Dalgairns leads me to infer that he himself
is the author of St. Stephen and St. Gilbert, being Nos. I. and
VII.; finally some of the shorter of the Legends of the Hermit
Saints are by Newman. Have you all these? I see No. VIII.
announced, and volume vi. of the Plain Sermons.

"You ask very kindly about my own affairs. I know little
about them externally. That Fishkill business is all nonsense ;
they would not think of me. To tell the truth I am very care-
less about taking orders. I believe a furious storm is gathering,
and will very soon drive us to Rome. The only possible alter-
native is the breaking up of our communion between different
dioceses. Whether that could save us, considering the reckless
character of the VJhitting-hamites or, as I am disposed hence-
forth to call them, the " Hamites," as if from the father of
Canaan the accursed whether such a division can save us, is, I
say, very doubtful. I think our present tack is a deep love for
our church of course for her poor remnant of Catholicism,
which remnant we as dutiful sons will strive to preserve and in-
crease. I think we may well express ourselves strongly both in
the way of affection for her, and of deep consciousness that she
has forfeited almost everything, and may very shortly forfeit
the rest, which we are striving to prevent. I think, however,
that it is most likely when we openly avow belief in the unity
of the church as consisting in communion with St. Peter's chair,
and in communion of saints as implying, or rather including, in-
vocation of them, that they will stop their ears and hurl us out.
I shall have a good deal to say to you when I return from the
city. I am going to urge Seabury, furiously, to advance his
colors, and take a bold stand in the Churchman. \ wrote him a
week ago a letter that I dare say has frightened him a little,
and I mean to frighten him still more. If we stay, as we want
to, in our church, we stay to work and to talk, not to be quiet.

1892.] FIRST BISHOP OF OGDENSBURG. 493

And this must and shall be allowed us ; and so I told him. (By
the way, he spoke very highly of you a few weeks ago when I
was in town, and expressed regret that he never could get hold
of you.) I must thank you for offering me a retreat at St.
Mary's. There was nothing to keep me from joining you in the
spring, so far as I am concerned ; but it will not do to make
schemes. I feel that hitherto I have done nothing to fit myself
for what may be in store for us. My wretched want of hu-
mility has spoiled me in everything, and now, if now indeed,
gives me everything to do yet. If I am ordained in the spring,
which may be, cannot you come down ? I speak only on con-
jecture, but there are several who will be likely to urge it. I
have gone every length with Mr. Wheaton, and he goes "with
us heartily. Oh, if his wife was only in a convent ! He is very
religious and earnest, I assure you, in spite of his wife. When
have you heard from Shepherd ? Wadhams, I want to see a
common rule adopted by us, whether living together or not,
to be observed strictly. It must be general, but include regu-
lar canonical hours, celibacy by vow, and obedience to the su-
perior of the ' order,' if we may so call it. Let it not surprise
you when I say I am free to take these vows. Don't say so to
any one. I cannot explain farther. To these, of course, confession
must be added oh ! how I long to see it established with us,
for my own sake. Platt wrote me lately from Rochester, and
expressed a great wish to see you. He finds it hard work with
those nasty High-Churchmen. I wish he was in this diocese. So
say I of every one that is right-minded : Concentrate first, and
go forth thence.

"Thank you for Spooner's Sermon; there are good things in
it, but he is crochety and out of joint. He deals harder with
others than with himself, I fancy, or he would be more religious
in his tone. Have you seen Questions for Self -Examination, re-
published in Albany, under auspices of Williams & Potter, of
Albany ?

" I am glad Walworth is contented. Remember me kindly
to him. I tried to see him when in town, but could not find
him. Write me very soon, and a long letter. The details of
your doings interested me much. Believe me ever most sincerely

"Yours, etc.,

"B. B. J. McMASTER."

The Oxford Movement, so called, was now fast coming to a
crisis, both in England and in America. In June, 1844, William
George Ward, of Balliol College, Oxford, published his celebrated
Ideal of a Christian Church. This Ideal was so plainly contrary
to the actual Anglican Church, so radically different, in truth,
that it produced a general horror in the minds of average
churchmen, and no small dismay in the ranks even of Tracta-
rians. To borrow a simile of Dr. Newman, the result was like
that produced by " Sindbad the Sailor " and his companions when

494 REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS. [July,

they kindled a cooking-fire on the back of a barren little island.
The experiment changed the island into a whale. The sluggish
animal first shivered, then threw his tail high up in the air and
relieved himself speedily both of the coals and the cooks. In
Oxford a prosecution was soon initiated to condemn Ward and
deprive him of his degrees. Affairs at the Twentieth Street
seminary drew on towards a crisis at the same time. The
American whale also woke up and prepared to dive, and the
first that fell into the water were certain Catholicizing semina-
rians, who happened to be where the coals were hottest. The
hard-listed old Knickerbocker bishop, who was president of the
seminary and had hitherto been their protector, had come into
disgrace and was unable to give any efficient help. The High-
Church bishops of the " Catholic " kind were made feeble
through fear, and those of the Low-Church grew correspondingly
bold and clamorous. What followed at the seminary is suffi-
ciently developed in a letter from McVickar to Wadhams, dated
at the seminary, December 31, 1844. The first few lines of the
letter we omit. They refer to architectural plans for the new
"St. Mary's" at Wadhams Mills.

"... An affair in which Walworth is interested, and of
which, if report says true, he has already heard of from his
bishop, is keeping the seminary in hot water." (This was a mis-
take so far as to any communication between Bishop De Lancey
and myself.) "The history is this. About two weeks ago
Mr. Ogilby sent for Watson (m. class) and told him that he had
been informed that there was an organized party in and out of
the seminary, including clergy, for Romanizing the church.
Donnelly, Taylor, Watson, Platt, Walworth, and myself be-
longed to it. He questioned Watson on his views, and W
acknowledged that he used prayers to the saints and considered
the Church of England schismatical. As soon as we heard it,

we (Donnelly, Taylor, and myself) called on Mr. O and

asked him what he had heard against us and who had informed
him. He refused to answer, and asked us to answer some of his
questions, which we refused to do, and he reported us all to our

bishops. D - and I had seen Bishop O , who says he is

satisfied ; but the faculty have taken it up, and I am to appear
before them on the 7th proximo on the charge of recommend-
ing Romish books, and also on the charge of believing in the

papal supremacy. The information comes through P , whom

I think Walworth knew, and who has used the basest decep-
tion to get information. Whatever happens it will make no
difference in my remaining in the P. E. Church. We call our-
selves Catholic. I may, therefore, hold all Catholic truths, which
I am determined to do.

1892.] SUKSUM CORD A ! 495

" Whicher is here, and gives out that he is sent for by his
bishop. I think that Platt may be down also.

"A letter has lately appeared by Mr. Oakeley giving his
reasons to a Roman Catholic for remaining in the Church of
England. It is said to be a very thorough thing. The reports
of Mr. Newman's having gone to the Church of Rome are all
false. Mr. Forbes is getting on astonishingly well, and Dr.
Seabury's sermons are noble in doctrine and power; but Mr.
Wheaton of Po'keepsie, under Mr. McMaster's guidance, is
becoming the staunchest priest in the church. So we have no
reason to despair, and if we did not meet with trouble we
should want one mark of holding the true faith. Remember
me kindly to Walworth, etc."

C. A. WALWORTH.

St. Mary's Church, Albany, N. Y.

(TO BE CONTINUED.)

SURSUM CORDA!

WHENCE comes this peace? In truth it doth surpass
Man's understanding who can tell me whence?

Wretched I was and weak, and went to Mass
In such dismay as unbelief will bring

A thing of iron with a heart of brass.
But even as I knelt a peace immense

Flooded my soul a voice began to sing
' Asperges me ' and then I shall be clean.
O sprinkle me with hyssop ! if you can

Thereby make white again as Wayland snow
Drifted in orchards this worn spirit of mine ;

And I will come again, thou white-robed man,
And through the mist of many things divine

Shall at thy Sursum corda ! leap from woe.

T. W. PARSONS.

496 IRISH MINSTRELS AND MINSTRELSY. [July,

SOME THOUGHTS UPON IRISH MINSTRELS AND

MINSTRELSY.

WHILE all important phases of Irish history have been writ-
ten up in standard works, and rendered familiar to members of
the race, comparatively little is known of the men who swayed
the emotions of our ancestors emotions of love, valor, patriotism,
and wit and gave them reflection in their songs, some of which
have been transmitted to posterity, though in fragmentary shape,
as the heritage of a people now found in every corner of the
habitable globe. " Give me the making of a people's ballads,
and I care not who makes their laws." Thus runs the familiar
proverb. How admirably this expresses the potency of a na-
tion's folk-song !

Moore, while he resurrected Irish national music, and served
it up in a modern dress though the purely nationalistic and lo-
cal color of ancient Irish music was to an extent lost in his
adaptations contributed little, if anything, to rescue the person-
alities of the bards from oblivion. He paid comparatively little
attention also to the origin of the various airs, yet he was always
ready to dispute the claims of Scottish and English writers re-
garding some of the melodies set to his words whenever they
conflicted with his sense of patriotism. Moore, however, was fa-
miliar with the efforts of Bunting, Holden, and other scholars of
his time, and interested in a general way in the subject ; but he
never set himself up as an authority on the history of Irish airs
beyond satisfying himself that they were Irish.

With the exception of Carolan, whose " Coulin " throbs with
the impulse and blood of the Celtic heart, not one Irish scholar
in a hundred is acquainted with the names of the other famous
bards whose genius fired the souls of our ancestors in the past
centuries ; and yet there were such men as Gerald O'Daly, the
author of " Aileen Aroon " which our kinsmen, the Scotch, ap-
propriated in the version " Robin Adair " a famous seventeenth
century bard of whom several English writers speak in glowing
language. O'Daly spent many years in Spain, where he gave
performances before distinguished people ; but love of home as-
serted itself, and he finally returned to end his days among his
people, which he was enabled to do thanks to the interest of
one of the Butlers. Spenser speaks of him as a man of patriar-

1892.] IRISH MINSTRELS AND MINSTRELSY. 497.

chal appearance, with a strange combination of passion and ten-
derness in his nature. O'Daly was an uncompromising hater, al-
beit a man of infinite tenderness, for no inducements or threats
could get him to sing for the representatives of the English
king. I fancy that he was far from being an intolerant or igno-
rant hater, however. He did not hate the English because they
were English, but because they were invaders and usurpers, and
he never could " awaken the sounds of his harp to strains of hy-
pocrisy," as he always said in explanation of his unswerving
course. " Aileen Aroon " is the only identified relic of his muse
handed down, but it serves to show us the plaintive and tender
side of his disposition far more eloquently than words could,
while it is not devoid of fine passion too, even though it be the
passion of tenderness and sorrow. I do not wonder that the
Scotch protest so vigorously against yielding up the credit of
such an exquisite melody to their cousins.

Rody Dall O'Cahan, whom Sir Walter Scott makes the
teacher of Annot Lyle, was an earlier bard than O'Daly, and
better known throughout Ireland. Tradition credits him with the
air now set to " Let Erin Remember the Days of Old," by
Moore, but the belief finds no verification. Spenser also heard
O'Cahan with pleasure. The author of th'e " Faerie Queene " was
a man of such exquisite refinement, sensibility, and fine sense of
perception in all things forming or pertaining to art, that his
praise must be prized at a high value. And for Irish music and
bards he had nothing but respect. So eulogistic are his refer-
ences to the subject throughout his writings, that one may brush
aside with contempt the paltry and prejudiced criticisms of the
numerous other English writers who are often quoted in order
to show that ancient Irish music was of an aboriginal order, and
lacking in all those characteristics which appeal to the educated
and refined intellect.

Meanwhile, it is an admitted and incontrovertible fact that
the Irish school of music was famous in the early centuries.
If the ancient Irish did not possess a system of notation
they were not behind the world, since notation was developed
only within a comparatively recent period. That they maintained
a school of applied theory in composition is, however, beyond
question, for ancient instruments in preservation prove it, apart
from the melodies bequeathed us. John of Salisbury, writing in
the twelfth century, says of the Irish : " The attention of these
people to musical instruments I find worthy of commendation, in
which their skill is beyond comparison superior to that of any

.498 IRISH MINSTRELS AND MINSTRELSY. [July,

nation I have seen." Bromton and Giraldus Cambrensis, of
the same century, in or about, testify to this opinion. Fuller
also says : " Yea, we might well think that all the concerts of
Christendom in this war " (meaning the Crusade conducted by
Godfrey of Bouillon) " would have made no music if the Irish
harp had been wanting." Fordun of the thirteenth century,
Clynn of the period following him, and Polydore Virgil, Vincent
Galilei, Bacon, and Standihurst, among others, speak with equal
warmth of the Irish as a musical people. In that connection
and for national reasons it is to be regretted that no relics are
left in the form of musical manuscripts similar to the beautiful
illuminated manuscripts and examples of Celtic skill in carving
and metal work which many writers, including Mr. Charles
De Kay, of the Century Magazine, have exemplified and ex-
tolled.

Another celebrated harper was Myles O'Reilly, born at Kil-
lincarra, County Cavan, in 1635. O'Reilly had a warlike muse,
and is probably the author of "The Moreen," to which the
" Minstrel Boy " is wedded. John and Henry Scott were equally
famed, contemporaneous with the latter. About 1640, at Cloon-
mahoon, County Sligo, were born Thomas and William O'Conal-
lan or Conallon, as they are best known two other bards, one
of whom, Thomas, followed the fortunes of Sarsfield. Thomas
Conallon, the more popular, died in Edinburgh, where he had
settled.

Cornelius Lyons, the teacher and patron of Eochlin Kane, was
famous throughout Leinster and Ulster when O'Conallon came
into existence. Little is known of his life or history beyond the
tradition of his fame and genius. Of Kane, his favorite pupil,
however, it is known that he travelled on the Continent exten-
sively, giving exhibitions of his skill. These were confined chief-
ly to the expatriated Irish and the Jacobin Scotch, who fled
after the Charles Stuart rebellion. It is also known that the
Pretender was very fond of Kane, who followed his fortunes
with a devotion worthy of a better man and cause.

O'Carolan, or " Carolan," as he is popularly known, was the
most recent of the great bards, and the most famous during the
period in which he lived, owing largely to the fact that he was
singular, having few contemporaries. This relic of an ancient
race or sept, whose peculiar genius lent a romance and light to
Irish history throughout all its varying phases of struggle and
sorrow, was born at Newtown, County Meath not very far from
the birthplace of John Boyle O'Reilly in the year 1670. Some,

1892.] IRISH MINSTRELS AND MINSTRELSY. 499

however, claim that he was born at Hobber, Westmeath. He
was descended from an old family in that county, so his histo-
torians tell us, after whom Carolanstown is named. Much of
his education was due to a wealthy lady of the old school,
Madame MacDermot Roe, who at an early period noted his
natural bent of character. At sixteen he lost his sight from
small-pox a misfortune which was not without its compensations,
too, for he was consequently thrown more into the society of
his own thoughts, while compelled to adopt some means of liv-
ing suitable to his unfortunate condition. His kind patroness,
however, took him in hand at this critical period, had him in-
structed in music, and taught the Irish language, which he only
knew to converse in, without being able to write or talk it accord-
ing to grammatical law. And it was she also who, when O'Caro-
lan was twenty years old, and in great demand in the homes of
the well-to-do classes and gentry, supplied him with a horse and
a body servant to take care of him in his journeyings to and
fro. Many anecdotes are told of the bard, and many curious
and somewhat conflicting tales are related of his talents for im-
provising music and lyrics to fit every occasion and every senti-
ment. Among his gifts was a species of occult or psychical
power, which is demonstrated to-day in the strange performances
of mind-readers, clairvoyants, hypnotists, and persons of that
order. Carolan manifested this faculty on many occasions in
connection with his vocation. Of course, many readers will smile
at the absurdity of these alleged manifestations of what is super-
natural only because we cannot gauge them by accepted rules
of phenomena ; meanwhile, certain it is that O'Carolan is credit-
ed with doing curious things things which we find reflected in
the traditions and superstitions of our ancestors in many direc-
tions. For instance, we have fairy and ghostly traditions, with
which are mixed stories of the " fairy man " or " fairy woman,"
or some such person gifted with alleged supernatural powers,
which even a firm devotion to religion and a reverence for its
teachings could not efface from the popular mind. Annexed is
a remarkable tale of O'Carolan, and well verified too. The bard
was the honored guest of the Brett family during a visit to
Longford, and in order to express his gratitude for their kind-
ness, and in particular to pay tribute to the charms and gra-
ciousness of Miss Brett, he attempted in his usual way to im-
provise a song. Running his fingers over his harp with confi-
dence, O'Carolan's mood quickly changed to surprise and disap-
pointment. In vain did he attempt to open the flood-gates of

500 IRISH MINSTRELS AND MINSTRELSY. [July,

his inspiration ; again and again did he try to find words and
sounds to express his feelings. His face grew clouded with sur-
prise and sorrow. Attempting to laugh it off, he tried again and
again. At last he flung his harp away and burst into tears.
His friends crowded around asking him what was the mat-
ter, but the bard could not explain. He bade his attendant sad-
dle his horse, and prepared to go. Finally, he requested that
Miss Brett would leave the apartment, and then he declared
that not a string in his harp but vibrated with a melancholy
sound. " I fear," he cried, with tears running down his cheeks,
"that she is not long for this world. Nay," he added, "she will
not live a twelvemonth." Within twelve months Miss Brett was
dead. It has been remarked that the great bard was a fine
conversationalist, and remarkable for the philosophic faculty
which he possessed ; a rather curious concomitant of his type of
genius. That faculty rarely belongs to the mediocre class of
poet or musician, and when it appears in a poet it marks the
presence of the highest order of endowment!

Carolan, meanwhile, cannot be set down as a poet or musician
in the accepted sense ; he was merely a bard a species of min-
strel now extinct in all lands who expressed his emotions off-
hand at the dictates of imagery and inspiration. This faculty
was meanwhile favored peculiarly by the Gaelic tongue. O'Car-
olan's improvisations, according to eminent authorities, were
colored with a gravity and sincerity which reflected the charac-
ter and mentality of the man. Once, in referring to his loss of
sight, he said to Swift : " My eyes have been merely transplanted
into my ears." So extraordinarily sensitive was he to impressions
that it is said that he recognized Miss Cruise, his first love, after
a parting of twelve years, without having heard the sound of
her voice, by accidentally touching her hand while crossing
Lough Dearg in a boat. The result was a burst of tears.
Lover's song, "True Love can ne'er Forget," is founded upon
this touching incident. O'Carolan died at Aldersford House,
March 25, 1748, after a short illness, having survived his wife
only five years. The time of his death he also frequently fore-
told, so tradition has it. He left an only son, who subsequent-
ly taught the Irish harp in London. The latter published a
collection of his father's compositions by subscription, but they
were badly edited. Carolan had a most fertile and prolific
muse, but the essence and cream of his inspirations passed away
into the mysterious source whence they came. A few gleams of
his genius, however, have been imprisoned in the meshes of the

1892.] IRISH MINSTRELS AND MINSTRELSY. 501

musician's scroll if the simile is deemed acceptable and trans-
mitted to us. O'Carolan was buried near the family tomb of
the MacDermot Roes. For many years the grave remained
unmarked and unidentified, until Lady Luisa Tenison, an ar-
dent admirer of his genius, had it enclosed and distinguished
by an inscription.

The fame of O'Carolan was not limited to Ireland or England,
but extended into France, Germany, Austria, and Italy. Bee-
thoven, the greatest of all the masters, when arranging his collec-
tion of Irish airs, remarked in a letter to Mr. George Thompson,
of Edinburgh, that O'Carolan would have made his country
famous had he been educated in musical art under continental
masters. Goldsmith, who heard Carolan in his boyhood, also
remarked : " His songs may be compared to Pindar ; they bear
the same flight of imagination." It is true that the bard never
attempted any constructive musical works, and cannot be rightly
set down in any category except that assigned to his order of
genius ; but then as a professional book-taster or " reader " in a
publishing house can judge of quality and style from a few
pages or even sentences of writing, so a musician and composer
like Beethoven could estimate Carolan from the few fragmentary
relics of his muse bequeathed to us. Lady Morgan, who wrote
the " Wild Irish Girl," and herself the composer of the familiar old
song " Kate Kearney," bequeathed one hundred pounds to the
sculptor Hogan for the purpose of executing a bas-relief of
Carolan's head in marble. This has been placed in St. Patrick's
Cathedral, Dublin, where it occupies a prominent position.

Denis Hempson, one of the best-known contemporaries of
Carolan, was born in 1695, twenty-five years later. He is said to
have excelled Carolan as an executant. Of a wild and impulsive
nature, he used to fire the hearts of his listeners with impas-
sioned lays of his country's ancient glory, her struggles and
hopes. To Celtic hearts Hempson appealed with peculiar effect.
When the news of Charles Edward's invasion of Scotland
reached Hempson, he bade his friends good-by and immediately
started off to offer his services. Like those periodical lights that
come out of the gloom of history to shed gleams of hope in
Irish hearts for instance, the appearance of James II. as a
friend of Ireland ; later on Napoleon, in the role of Irish lib-
erator ; then the '48 movement throughout Europe, through
which Irish patriots hoped to accomplish the freedom of their
country the efforts of the Pretender, as he is called, awoke
the slumbering spirit of national freedom throughout Ireland.

502 IRISH MINSTRELS AND MINSTRELSY. [July,

Had his first efforts been propitious the Irish would have
flocked to his banner, but after a brief series of minor successes
he collapsed at Culloden. Hempson was so disappointed over
the result of the struggle that he returned home, and for
years refused to touch his harp. He fled in sorrow, after Cul-
loden, and was among the first to bring news of the disaster to
Ireland. A rival harper named Blaney, of the itinerant order, a
roving, careless fellow, given to pot-house and shebeen exhibi-
tions of his skill rather than to performances in the homes of
the gentry, who were the chief supporters of Irish music strange
as it may seem wrote a comic song upon Hempson's de-
parture and speedy return from the seat of rebellion, which
set the latter wild with anger. Blaney and Hempson, however,
became great friends in time, and in after years travelled very
much together, the latter having elevated Blaney somewhat
through his association and patronage. Like the majority of
the bards, no examples of Hempson's genius remain, though
some probably exist among the mass of unidentified melodies to
which Moore set his words. Other well-known bards of the last
century were: Charles Byrne, born in 1712; Dominic Mungan,
1755; Thaddeus Elliott, 1725; Owen Keenan, 1725; Arthur
O'Neill, Charles Fanning, 1736; and James Duncan, who died
very rich, according to that earnest and sympathetic exponent
and historian of Irish minstrelsy, Sir R. P. Stewart, of Dublin.
" Savourneen Deelish," that exquisite gem of Irish melody to
which Moore set his poem " Tis Gone and For Ever," has been
frequently attributed to O'Neill, but not with certainty. The
song, " Savourneen Deelish, Eileen Oge," is, however, a com-
position produced toward the beginning of this century ; the
original subject which inspired the air is not known. O'Carroll,
a noted Irish singer, it was who suggested the setting of the air
to the words of " Savourneen Deelish," which the younger Col-
man composed. The latter was the son of Colman, who wrote
the " Jealous Wife " and other dramatic works. Colman senior
was of Irish origin, like the majority of his contemporaries in
the domain of English drama of the period. He is best known
as the translator of Terence. " Colman the Younger," as he
always signed himself out of respect for his father's genius, and
in order to distinguish himself from his sire, introduced " Savour-
neen Deelish " into his musical drama, " The Surrender of Ca-
lais," at the Haymarket, where it met with much success. Thom-
as Campbell made it still more dear to Celtic hearts by wedding
his poem " The Exile of Erin " to its sympathetic and patheti-

1892.] IRISH MINSTRELS AND MINSTRELSY. 503

cally impassioned strains. Campbell wrote the latter in his early
days while in Germany, and the " Exile " referred to was An-
tony McCann, a scholar and patriot who fled from his na-
tive country in '98 with a price upon his head. Regarding
O'Neill's authorship of the original air, I merely give the state-
ment for what it is worth. O'Neill was also credited with the pro-
duction of the melody of " Lochaber no More," that peculiarly
pathetic and sad Scottish song. " Lochaber " has such an effect
upon Highlanders away from home that the British military
bands are forbidden to play it. The origin of the air created
considerable discussion in past years, but Samuel Lover made
out a good case in favor of Tom Conallon, though O'Neill and
Myles O'Reilly were said to be the authors by other Irish
authorities, while the Scotch maintained that it was the produc-
tion of a Scotchman. Samuel Lover found it in a collection of
airs in the British Museum dated 1676, where it was entitled
" The Irish Tune." It was also discovered in a manuscript book
of airs for the viola de gamba written in 1683, and here it was
entitled " King James' March into Dublin." " Lochaber " ap-
peared in 1724. The composer of the words was Allan Ramsay,
father of the painter of that name. Owing to the fact that
O'Neill was not born until past the latter date, he obviously
could not have been the composer of that melody. Bunting
gives the author as Myles O'Reilly, but he knew nothing of the
manuscript found by Lover.

Writers, Scotch and English, have frequently asserted that
the Irish harp was a crude instrument of small compass, and
incapable of any but commonplace effects. That is, however,
wholly disproved by harps in preservation. A noted instrument
in Trinity College, Dublin, known as the harp of Brian Boru
(Sir R. P. Stewart and other authorities have contradicted this
claim to antiquity), contained thirty strings of a good length.
It shows that ancient Irish makers of harps had a good know-
ledge of acoustics, and when in playable order it must have been
an excellent instrument. Another harp, said to have been the
property of Robin Adair, an Irish chieftain, was preserved some
time since at Holybrooke in Wicklow. This contained thirty-
seven strings. The finest example, however, is the Dallway
harp, which has fifty-two strings.

That Ireland was famous for its school of harp music in the
past centuries is emphasized by the fact that the harp, the na-
tional instrument, was given a place on the currency of Henry
VIII., while it was also attached to some state papers A.D. 1567.

504 IRISH MINSTRELS AND MINSTRELSY. [July*

Meanwhile, the government made systematic efforts to stamp
out everything savoring of nationalism in Ireland, and bards were
made the subject of special persecution. Yet it is noteworthy
that, though willing to wipe out every form of antagonism to
the plan of Anglo-Saxonizing the Irish, the descendants of the
English settlers became frequently the warm patrons of the
bards. It was owing to this tolerance that they found support
at all. William's accession to power brought German and Aus-
trian musicians into England, and these flocked to Ireland, where
as teachers and executants of the clavichord and harpsichord,
and later the pianoforte, they gradually took the place of Irish
harpists, with results easy of calculation.

Though Ireland had lost her harp school long before the
end of the last century, it is some pleasure to know that it was
in Dublin the modern harp received the most significant im-
provement, namely, the pedal action. Sebastian Erard, of Paris,
is credited with the invention of the pedal system in its im-
proved form, but while searching up the records of the British
Patent Office about three years ago (those granted for improve-
ments in musical instruments), I had occasion to examine the
patents of William Southwell, of Dublin, the inventor of the up-
right piano, and there found that he had anticipated Erard sev-
eral years in that direction. Correspondence which took place
later between the writer and one of his grandsons living in Phil-
adelphia elicited many curious and interesting facts about South-
well, whose inventions Haydn examined and commended. South-
well, who was famous in Dublin during the Parliament days, is
buried in Glasnevin Cemetery.

Various attempts were made in the last century to establish
the Irish harp school in popularity. The " conventions of bards "
held at Bruree, County Limerick, in 1730 and 1750, under the
leadership of Rev. Charles Bunworth, an enthusiastic lover of
Irish national music, himself a fine harpist, were among the
most notable of the earlier efforts. James Dongan, a grand-
nephew of the first governor of New York as I have been
informed a very rich Irish gentleman, who lived largely on the
Continent, was another generous patron of his country's music.
He it was who organized the convention of harpers held at
Granard, in County Longford, in 1781, and also bore the brunt
of the expenses incurred.

With the partial establishment of Ireland's legislative inde-
pendence came an historic development of national feeling
throughout the country, which found its expression in the revival

1892.] IRISH MINSTRELS AND MINSTRELSY. 505

of her industries, arts, and literature, a' condition which the
union of 1800 effectively checked, to refer to a well-known
fact of history. This expansion of national feeling was empha-
sized by the systematic effort made to resurrect Irish music in
1792. In that year there was an assemblage of harpers in Bel-
fast for the purpose of re-establishing the harp as the national
instrument. Representative harpers were present from all the
provinces, one of them being a former pupil of Carolan. The
session lasted a week. One outcome of the convention was the
employment of Edward Bunting to record the traditions of the
various melodies, to compare notes with the harpers present, and
other incidental offices, with a view of publishing the results in
a volume. This appeared in 1796, and met with a cordial re-
ception from scholars throughout Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.
Bunting thereupon devoted himself to the subject of the history
of Irish music and bards with considerable enthusiasm and zeal.
Consequently a second volume appeared in 1809, and a third in
1840. Bunting's labors deserve the warmest and broadest thanks
of the race, though his works lack some essentials which are
found in Petrie's volume published in 1855. Petrie's work was
inscribed volume i., indicating that its author intended to
follow it up with another, but for some reason it never ap-
peared, though eagerly looked for by readers of his first book. I
venture to think that with modern printing facilities and through
the aid of the art of photo-engraving it would repay some pub-
lisher in this country to reprint these works in a cheap form.
They would make an indispensable addition to the library of
every Irish scholar.

Goldsmith was the first to remark that Scotland could not
have produced those plaintive and expressive airs which are
claimed by that country, owing to the absence of any popular
instrument of a refined character such as the harp. The Scotch
pipes are clearly not adapted to the expression, or likely to
assist the production, of very refined and pathetic inspirations,
and philosophers have contended that it is impossible to
imagine national music without national instruments suited to its
quality and character. One can, of course, readily see the con-
gruity of a Highland piper playing " Blue Bonnets over the Bor-
der," the " March of the Cameron Men," or tunes of that order,
for which the Scottish pipes are peculiarly adapted, but the very
thought of one of these artists attempting to perform "John
Anderson, my Joe," "Robin Adair," "Auld Lang Syne," or "Ye
Banks and Braes" is a manifest incongruity. I once heard a
VOL. LV. 33

506 IRISH MINSTRELS AND MINSTRELSY. [July,

Scottish piper essay such a task a good piper he was, too and
the impression on the writer was one of indescribable sorrow.

" Ye Banks and Braes" and other Scottish songs of a modern
origin were produced through the aid of the harpsichord. Many
fictitious stories are in circulation concerning the air, but Burns,
in one of his letters to George Thompson on the subject of
Scottish music, describes how it was composed. Its author was
one James Miller. Miller and a Mr. Clarke happened to be dis-
cussing Irish and Scottish music. The first-named expressing a
wish to be able to compose an original air with a distinctive
Scottish or Irish flavor, Clarke jokingly advised him to keep to
the black keys of the harpsichord, adding that with the exercise
of a little ingenuity he could manufacture one. Miller took the
suggestion seriously, tried the plan, and the result was "Ye
Banks and Braes," to which Burns wrote his beautiful words.
The majority of ancient " Scottish melodies," as they are said to
be, were, however, composed in times when keyboard instruments
were either unknown or in use in few households, and it is
manifestly absurd to attribute them to such an accessory as the
pipes. The abstract conclusion, which arguments and facts war-
rant, is that it was in Ireland that nearly all these airs, particu-
larly those of a refined and pathetic character, originated.

In a line with the strange fact that it is chiefly to authors
and investigators with cognomens not always distinctively Irish we
owe whatever has been written and conserved concerning the
history of Irish music and Irish bards. I must remark that it is
to a Scotchman, George Thompson, of Edinburgh, whose name
occurs frequently in Burns's posthumous correspondence and else-
where, we owe the connection of Beethoven and other masters
with Irish music. He it was who engaged Beethoven to ar-
range some Scottish melodies while in England, and at the same
time, recognizing the kinship of Irish music and having wide
sympathies, he enlisted the services of the great master in the
cause of the latter. The first of Beethoven's collections was
made up of sixteen airs arranged with variations for violin
or flute for the piano (op. 105, 107) and three melodies,
namely, "The Last Rose of Summer," "While History's Muse,"
and " Had We Some Bright Little Isle." The master served
them in an idealized form after the style of instrumental music
of the order then in vogue, and in doing so sacrificed their best
characteristics. It was through this channel that " The Last
Rose of Summer " became Germanized. Thus, when the air
was introduced into the opera of " Martha," the Germans, who

1892.] IRISH MINSTRELS AND MINSTRELSY. 507

had come to regard it as theirs, protested vigorously against
the assertion that it had an origin outside of Germany. Bee-
thoven became a great admirer of Irish music subsequently.
When he died another collection of twelve Irish airs transcribed
for the pianoforte, violin, or 'cello was found among his manu-
scripts. This was published in 1855 by Artaria & Co., of
Vienna, but had only a very small circulation for the reason
that it was not placed on sale in Great Britain or Ireland. Yet
another collection of twenty-five Irish airs form No. 261 of
Breitkopf & Harteb's celebrated edition. Other transcriptions of
Irish melodies were issued in No. 259 of the same publishers'
catalogues, while No. 262 consists of twenty Irish airs. Haydn
also adapted some Irish airs in the form of transcriptions, but
the settings are of too florid and elaborate a character to per-
mit of their being popular with amateurs, while professional
pianists or other instrumentalists find ample work to select from
outside of national music. Mendelssohn also arranged some of
Ireland's airs, and had them published in London. Haydn,
furthermore, was known to have a deep interest in Irish music
and Ireland's history. When he visited Dublin, in 1794, he was
spoken of commonly and introduced into Dublin society as a
man who derived his name from an Irish ancestor who had set-
tled in Austria. Meanwhile, the name Haydn is quite unknown
in Austria or Germany. It belongs to Scotland and Ireland,
and was originally McHayden. The great composer frequently
signed his manuscripts " Hayd'n," which shows that the family
name once carried an e. Mozart was also very much interested
in Irish music, of which he had an intimate knowledge. Folk
music of all nations interested him deeply, however. He doubt-
less derived his sympathies and acquaintance with the music of
Ireland through Michael Kelly, his close friend, and afterwards
his first biographer. Kelly was in the original cast of " Don
Giovanni " at its historic production, a fact worthy of special
remark.

Kelly, who settled in London after studying music and
travelling on the Continent, was born in Mary Street, Dublin, in
1762. He was the father of Miss Kelly, the famous "English"
actress, who created such a furor during her visit to this coun-
try in the " twenties." He lived in Vienna for many years,
where he formed his intimacy with Mozart. He was also a great
favorite at the court of the Emperor Joseph II. His appear-
ance at the Drury Lane Theatre in London, in 1787, was a de-
cided success, anfl his popularity led to the appointment he held

508 IRISH MINSTRELS AND MINSTRELSY. [July,

up to his death in 1826, in connection with that famous house,
namely, the post of musical manager and composer. For over
forty years he furnished music for nearly all the pieces produced,
among them Colman's " Bluebeard." " The Woodpecker," form-
erly a very popular domestic song in this country, was set to
music by Kelly. Moore wrote the words during his travels in
America, and it has been irreverently declared that Poe got the
embryo inspiration of the " Raven " from that song, plus the
effects of a heavy dose of liquor. Kelly was very popular in
London, and was a representative Irishman in the large circle of
artists, authors, actors, and miscellaneous individuals of Irish
birth and blood who upheld the genius and traditions of Ire-
land in the English capital in those times.

Many interesting incidents could be given, and much written
about individuals and works associated with the modern Irish
race' as it was in Kelly's time, and as it is seen to-day in its
diversified aspects at home and throughout the English-speaking
world ; considerable has been told, but much remains uncovered.
In the meantime I think that a history of Irish minstrels and
minstrelsy, giving a digest of the costly and rare works already
published, together with the many facts elicited by the researches
of numerous other more recent scholars, remains to be published.
Persons of Irish birth and blood, in America especially, know
too little of the dignified, romantic, and picturesque phases of
Ireland's history, though too well informed, through outside and
prejudiced sources, upon the conventional estimate which preju-
dice and accumulated falsehood have placed upon their race.

Meanwhile, the vast number of distinctively Irish names as-
sociated with the practice and progress of the arts, sciences,
laws, literature, government, commerce, and the other accessories
of civilized communities at this period in various nations go to
prove, that with the removal of traditional restrictions came an
eloquent vindication of our ancient race to which the history of
Ireland's minstrels and minstrelsy is intimately related. We
catch lovely glimpses of Ireland's ancient glories in the pages
which Bunting, Petrie, and other faithful scholars compiled.
These views of Irish history cannot be found in general records
such as those which deal with the multifarious aspects of a na-
tion's origin and history.

DANIEL SPILLANE.

1892.] A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE. 509

A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE.

FROM THE RUSSIAN.

(CONCLUDED.)
III.

EVERY summer a considerable number of visitors used to
come to Spas for the sake of the mountain air, and to drink
the gentitza, or sheep's milk. For the most part they were
Jews from Lemberg, but now and again there were people of
some distinction among the temporary residents in the pictur-
esque village. Now, it happened this year that the arrivals were
of a better class than usual, and Nasta, for once, was in luck's
way. No one grudged a gratuity to the bearer of letters often
anxiously looked for and eagerly welcomed ; thus many were
the copper coins, not to speak of occasional pieces of silver,
that were placed in her outstretched palm. Nasta knew every
one of the visitors by sight. Amongst all who came this sea-
son two persons specially interested her : a lady of rank a real
countess, the owner of large estates in the neighborhood and
her nephew, a young artist. All the inhabitants of Spas, from
M. Krzespel and his family down to the humblest peasant,
deemed the presence among them of a lady of such high degree
a great honor. Every day the countess's plump, short figure
might be seen trotting up and down the mountain paths, lean-
ing on her gold-headed walking-stick, and attended by her
companion, a lady no longer young, tall and thin, who was in-
variably dressed in some shade of gray. The countess did not
drink the gentitza, and certainly she did not look as if she
wanted it, for she was the very personification of health.

The young man, on the contrary, appeared extremely fragile
and delicate. He spent almost the whole day out of doors,
wandering about alone, or else walking with the countess, though
he was scarcely able to keep up with his vigorous and vivacious
companion. Nasta, watching him, observed that he was frequent-
ly compelled to stop and gasp painfully for breath. Every day
he dragged himself with difficulty up the zigzag path that led
to the summit of a fir-clad hill, where a summer-house had been
erected. At intervals along the path rustic seats were placed,

510 A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE. [July,

and at almost every one of these the poor young man was fain
to pause and rest. And when once he got to the top, he re-
mained there so long that Nasta sometimes asked herself if
he was going to spend the night there. He sat gazing out on
the blue mountains in the distance, drawing on large sheets of
paper, reading the books he took up with him ; or else he sat
motionless, leaning back with his eyes closed, and so melancholy
an expression upon his countenance that it went to one's
heart to see him. But when the countess made her appearance
and sat down by him, somewhat out of breath, and with her
merry chatter drew him into conversation, his manner changed,
and he would laugh and joke until a violent fit of coughing
reduced him to silence. Nasta was sorry for him, for day by
day the dark circles round his eyes grew deeper, and his hollow
cheeks looked still more sunken. One day, when she went up
to the summer-house with a letter for the countess, she heard
her speaking very seriously to M. Sigismund. He appeared much
agitated, and hid his face in his white, emaciated hands. Nasta
handed the letter to the countess, who, glancing at the hand-
writing, exclaimed eagerly, " There, it is from Vera ! " M. Sig-
ismund looked up with an anxious, wistful expression, and made
a movement as if he would rise from his seat ; then, dropping
back, he kept his large eyes, bright with the light of fever,
fixed on the letter, as if he expected it would contain some-
thing for him. But apparently there was nothing, not even a
message ; for the countess, after running her eyes over the pages,
thrust it impatiently into her pocket, and with a thoughtful, ab-
sent air began nervously to trace figures on the sand at her
feet with her gold-headed cane.

On another occasion, when Nasta went up with the letters,
she found the young artist alone in the summer-house. He was
seated at an easel painting something on the canvas before
him. Every moment he raised his eyes and looked at the land-
scape, stretching away from the village at his feet to the distant
frontier of Hungary. It was a delightful morning ; in the valley
below the Dniester, meandering among the meadow-lands, shone
in the sun like a silver ribbon, whilst the blue peaks of the
Carpathians rose majestically in the background, and in the far
distance, so clear was the air, the outline of the Beskides might
be discerned, trending away towards the horizon. Nasta, ad-
vancing cautiously on tiptoe, standing in the shadow of the
pines, saw, to her surprise, on the canvas upon the easel the
exact counterpart of the panorama before her : the same blue

1892.] A MOTHERS SACRIFICE. 51 r

sky, the same verdant hills, the same river winding round the
ramparts of Staromiasta, the very groups of firs that marked
the familiar homesteads. An involuntary exclamation of wonder
and delight escaped her lips. M. Sigismund turned round
sharply, and the poor woman, fearing lest she should have dis-
pleased him, hastened to deprecate his anger by giving him his
letters. He smiled, and thanked her with a nod ; then, perceiv-
ing that she lingered a moment, he thought she expected some-
thing and put his hand into his pocket. But it was not money
that she wanted. A sudden thought had flashed into her mind.
Here was an opportunity such as she could never hope to meet
with again. Throwing herself on her knees before the young
man, she kissed his hands and feet, murmuring that she had a
great favor to ask of him. Her tongue once loosed, her words
flowed apace, and encouraged by M. Sigismund's manner, which
betrayed no impatience, she confided to him, without any cir-
cumlocution, her desire to procure a picture of Our Lady a
large picture, not painted on paper, but upon a board, so that
it could be nailed upon the tree where Wasylek used to meet
her. She did not ask it as a gift God forbid that she should
be so bold no, she would give for it all that she possessed.
And as she spoke she put aside her neckerchief and drew out a
tiny bag, which she wore round her neck like a scapular, con-
taining her little hoard, and plucked at the strings to open it ;
but her hands trembled so violently that she only got them in-
to a knot.

The artist motioned to her to desist. " Leave your bag alone,
my good woman," he said, " and tell me why you want this
picture. Have you made a vow ?"

Emboldened by the interest he displayed, Nasta poured out
her whole story. She told him of Wasylek's death ; what she
had heard about the cherubim and the army of heaven ; of her
wish to obtain a statue of St. Michael, and the disappointing
result of her expedition to Stambor. A smile passed over the
young man's features as he listened to this strange tale. He
thought for a moment, and then said : " I will paint you a Ma-
donna, and it shall cost you nothing ; only instead of being
painted on a board, and fastened to the ash-tree by the way-
side, it shall be painted on a smooth canvas, and you can give
it to your village cerkiew. Is there not a church in Busowiska?"

Flushed with excitement, Nasta listened without a word.
She hesitated what to reply. The proposal was almost too good
to be true ; and yet, on the other hand, it was hard to give up

512 A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE. [July,

the project she had formed of having her picture exposed on
the high-road in the place she had chosen for it. But on re-
flection her reason told her that it would be folly on her part
to make difficulties where so generous an offer was concerned.
She answered that a new church was actually in course of
erection at Busowiska, that it would soon be finished, and that
she could wish for nothing better than to present a holy pic-
ture to it. In fact, her neighbors were clubbing together to
offer, one a pair of candlesticks, another a chalice or a mon-
strance, and so on. When she came to think of it, too, a pic-
ture such as she wanted would be far more suitably placed in
a church than by the wayside, where the rain and sun would
spoil it. How much longer it would be preserved ! Why, it
would be there for years and years when she herself was in her
grave. At this thought her heart overflowed with gratitude ;
she kissed her benefactor's hands again and again, with tears of
joy and thankfulness.

M. Sigismund promised that the picture should be taken in
hand the very next day. He was only a dilettante, who paint-
ed for his own amusement, and had never, attempted a religious
subject ; but the idea of painting an altar-piece for a village
church up among the mountains took his fancy, and his natu-
ral kindness of heart found pleasure in the thought of giving
real delight to a poor and lonely woman. Besides it would be
an object to work for, and the composition of the picture would
be a distraction from the gloomy thoughts that harassed him.
Accordingly, he set about it with a passionate energy that he
had not displayed for years, throwing himself so completely in-
to his work that he forgot all else, and almost grudged himself
the time to take his meals. He could hardly be persuaded to
leave the house for a breath of fresh air. The countess, not
knowing what whim had taken him, scolded and lectured him
by turns on the folly of shutting himself up in-doors, when he
had come there for the express purpose of enjoying the warm
sun and invigorating breezes. He expressed contrition and pro-
mised amendment, but no sooner was she gone out than he took
up his brushes again with undiminished zeal and feverish im-
patience.

The character in which he had chosen to represent the
Blessed Virgin was that of a reaper. She was seated on a heap
of sheaves, her sickle by her side, apparently resting after a
day's labor. The child Jesus, at her feet, was playing with a
garland of cornflowers which she was holding out to him with

1892.] A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE. 513

a smile. There was an easy grace, an indefinable attraction
about this composition which charmed and fascinated the be-
holder. The Virgin was dressed in the picturesque costume worn
by the peasant women of that part of Russian Poland : the che-
misette richly embroidered with colors, the bodice trimmed
with lace, the bead necklace, the brightly tinted apron ; but, con-
trary to all custom, she had not the muslin 'kerchief which
formed the traditional headdress of the Slavs. Her head was
bare, its only ornament a thick plait of golden hair. In the
background of the picture the thatched roofs of Busowiska and
the new church were discernible, while the outline of the gray
Carpathians stood out against the azure sky. The only fault
that could be found with this Madonna was that her features
had more of poetic beauty than the sublime purity that one is
accustomed to connect with the Mother of God. The counte-
nance was so human, so appealing, that when once seen it could
not easily be forgotten.

The day when Nasta was admitted into the studio, and the
finished work 'was exhibited to her, was a memorable one indeed.
It was so much more beautiful than anything she had been able
to conceive that she could hardly believe her senses. Was it
possible that this lovely countenance, this life-like figure of the
Blessed Virgin, was really for her? She was almost beside her-
self with joy. At last her wish was fulfilled, her long-cherished
object attained ! By giving this to the church she would be
able to perpetuate the name and memory of her child, to seize
the mysterious connecting link that would reunite the desolate
mother on earth with the lost son who was enrolled in the ranks
of the angels. When she realized this gratitude too strong to
find expression in words filled Nasta's heart. She burst into
tears, and stood speechless, with parted lips and clasped hands,
looking alternately at the picture before her and the young man
at her side, who had been the means of procuring for her such
unspeakable happiness.

Meanwhile the edifice which was being erected under Kly-
masko's orders was rapidly approaching completion. Already
its slender cupolas might be descried from afar sharply defined
against the clear blue sky ; stout buttresses of solid oak sus-
tained the wooden walls, and skilfully carved pillars supported
the pointed arches of the windows. Every one admired the ele-
gance and originality of the design, and the inhabitants of Buso-
wiska, on whom so much pressure had to be brought to bear
before they would undertake the construction of their church,

514 A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE. [July,

were now delighted with the success of their enterprise. All
the talk of the village was of the magnificent gifts which various
individuals had announced their intention of making. One had
promised a bell, another an altar, a third some fine candelabra.
But these vague promises could not be relied on ; it was neces-
sary to know definitely what was to be contributed ; a day was
therefore fixed on which a meeting should be held in the new
building, when, in presence of the authorities, each intending
benefactor should give in his name and specify the nature of
the offering he was prepared to make.

On the day in question the Pope Tarezanin, the priest of
the adjoining parish, accompanied by the inspector in his offi-
cial dress, came to preside over the meeting. The mayor of the
village, too, was there with the sheriff, and the sacristan of Ter-
sow, Sorok, was seated at a table, pen in hand, ready to note
down the promised gifts. A crowd of villagers had assembled in
the unfinished church, but, strangely enough, it was remarked
that those who stood in the foremost ranks were the poorest of
all, who certainly could not be expected to offer anything, where-
as those who were in affluent circumstances, who had boasted of
the liberality they were about to display, kept in the background
or held aloof altogether. An ominous silence prevailed ; no one
came forward. The pope looked up inquiringly, not well pleased
at the aspect of affairs ; the mayor moved uneasily in his
seat ; the clerk brandished his pen expectantly ; every one
seemed embarrassed. At length M. Krzespel's patience was ex-
hausted; he rose up, and, speaking loudly enough to be heard by
all present, exclaimed : " What a set of simpletons you are ! Do
you suppose I have taken the trouble to come here that you
may stare at me as if I were a wild beast ?"

Stirred up to action by these words, the mayor in his turn
sprang to his feet and threw himself into the crowd, as if he
would compel the intending benefactors by main force to come
forward. Indescribable confusion prevailed ; every one began to
protest, to excuse himself, to repeat the promises made by
others. The wealthiest man in the place, who had been heard
over and over again to say he would give a peal of bells to the
church, now swore by all his gods that he never intended to
give anything more than a hand-bell. Another, who had agreed
to present a triptych with gilded doors, now declared he had
only spoken of a small statuette. The gorgeous set of vestments
which a third had as good as pledged himself to provide shrank
to the dimensions of a few yards of linen ; and the altar of

1892.] A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE. 515

which a fourth was to be the donor was replaced by a couple
of wax candles. What was to be done? There was no alter-
native but to accept the situation ; a feeling of disappointment
and shame weighed on all who were present. Just as the as-
sembly was about to break up a woman elbowed her way
through the crowd. It was Nasta, her haggard features trans-
formed by an unwonted glow of pride and happiness. She ad-
vanced to the table, respectfully kissed the pope's hand, made a
profound obeisance to the inspector, nodded to the sacristan, and
then said in a low voice : " I wish my name put down."

A murmur of surprise, an ironical titter, ran through the
crowd ; all listened eagerly, pressing forward to see what would
happen. Nasta did not note this, as her back was turned to
the people ; but the satirical smile on the face of the mayor dis-
concerted her so much that she was on the eve of making a
hasty retreat, when Pope Tarezanin came to her help, inquiring
kindly : " Well, my good woman, what is it you wish to offer ? "

"An altar," was the reply.

An altar ! The pope himself could not restrain a smile, as he
contemplated the poverty-stricken appearance of the figure be-
fore him. " Speak out, my good Nasta," he continued; " do not
be afraid, tell me what you really mean. You know the small-
est offering from the poor man is more acceptable to God than
the most munificent gifts of the rich."

" I wish to give an altar, a complete altar," rejoined Nasta.

" I think you hardly know what you are pledging yourself
to," the pope replied. " There are so many things wanted to
furnish an altar ; there must be an image or picture, a pair of
candlesticks, and many things besides."

" I will give a picture," answered Nasta calmly, " a beautiful
picture of the Holy Virgin, painted in oils. And as for the
other things there, put my name down." As she spoke she
laid upon the table a small, greasy bag, and without waiting to
explain herself further, or take any notice of the members of
the building committee, she turned round, made her way through
the crowd and disappeared. Once outside the door she ran off,
followed by the shouts and jeers of the people, who had tried
in vain to hold her back, and never stopped until she reached
her half-ruined cabin, her neglected orchard, her murmuring
brook.

Meanwhile the pope took up the bag and, with ever-increas-
ing wonderment, emptied the contents on to the table. It con-
tained nothing but florins, paper money, dirty, tattered, and

516 A MOTHERS SACRIFICE. [July,

torn. One by one he unfolded them and began to reckon them
up ; the longer he went on, the greater was his astonishment
and that of the bystanders 5, 10, 15, that was nothing like all;
20, 25, 30; there were still more; 35, 40, 41, that was the last;
41 Austrian florins ! The worthy priest could scarcely believe
his eyes, and the peasants around stood staring in open-mouthed
amazement.

Touched to the heart by this unexpected incident, the priest
resolved to turn it to account for the edification of the people.
With tears in his eyes, and in tones less steady than usual, he
spoke to them of the widow's mite, an offering more pleasing to
God than any other, adding that the sacrifice made by this poor
woman ought to be an example to all the village, for doubtless
that day there was joy in the presence of the angels of God on
account of it. This short address was not without effect on the
impressionable peasants. Some struck their breasts in compunc-
tion, others hung their heads in shame. Then a man stepped
up, rather red in the face, twisting his hat awkwardly in his
hands, and said that as to the hand-bell he had promised, per-
haps it would be more convenient to have one that could be
hung in the belfry, for after all it was a full-sized church bell
that he had the intention of giving. Another man followed im-
mediately, and in a fussy manner asked the clerk to read out
what his name was put down for to prevent any mistake, and
when Sorok replied that two tapers stood inscribed on the list,
he laughed aloud and said the most important thing was omitted
the altar itself that he meant to offer ! After the same fashion
almost all the other intending donors came forward to make ad-
ditions to their respective contributions ; thus an hour later, when
the Pope Tarezanin was driving home in his briska, his counte-
nance wore a satisfied smile, and he told himself that the meet-
ing which had opened so unpropitiously had terminated far bet-
ter than he could have hoped.

And what had become of Nasta ? When the almost fanatical
excitement that had sustained her until then at last gave way,
she threw herself down, worn out with fatigue and consumed
with hunger, by her desolate hearth, and drawing from among
the ashes the bowl of porridge that had been standing there
since the morning, devoured its contents with the avidity of a
famished animal. The cravings of her appetite satisfied, she drew
around her her scanty garments, and laid herself down where the
last rays of the setting sun cast a parting gleam, and, closing her
eyes, slept the dreamless sleep of the weary and over-wrought.

1892.] A MOTHERS SACRIFICE. 517

Thus terminated the momentous day, the day of Nasta's
greatest happiness and triumph, the day when she earned the
coveted title of fondatorka, the day wherein, if the Pope Tare-
zanin is to be believed, the angels in heaven rejoiced over the
sacrifices she had made.

IV.

Shortly after the altar provided by Nasta's generosity, and
fashioned by the skilful hand of a local carver, was set up in a
side-chapel of the new building, and the picture of our Lady of
the Harvest, handsomely framed, was carefully hung in its place
by M. Sigismund's own servant. Placed in a good light it was
a conspicuous object in the half-empty church, and the effect it
produced was very fine. The whole village flocked to see this
picture, of the existence of which they had been kept in ignor-
ance, and all, whether they came from devotion or curiosity, were
greatly impressed by its beauty and elegance. But it was with
the women especially that the Virgin of the Harvest found favor.
Their feminine intuition went straight to the mark. They com-
prehended that this picture was intended to be, to a certain ex-
tent, the apotheosis of their own life of daily toil, and their
hearts went out in gratitude to her who had deigned to work
and to be weary like them. The men, on the other hand, were
less warm in their admiration. The very thing that was so at-
tractive to the women had a contrary effect on the sterner sex.
Our Lady of the Harvest was too much like one of themselves
to inspire them with the profound veneration and respect where-
with they were accustomed to regard their sacred images. Stand-
ing in a group before it, they shook their heads with a dissatis-
fied air, unable to formulate in words the feelings it evoked. At
that moment the painter who had been engaged to decorate the
church made his appearance. He was brother-in-law to Sorok,
the sacristan of the neighboring parish of Tersow, by whose per-
suasions the building committee had been induced to give him
the commission ; but not until two of their number, who considered
themselves competent to judge of such matters, had been deputed
to inspect some specimens of his talent to be seen in an adja-
cent town. One of these consisted of an elaborate sign-board
suspended over an apothecary's shop ; the other a religious pic-
ture in a church, supposed to illustrate the parable of the grain
of mustard-seed, although the connection between the subject
and the execution was not quite apparent. But the vivid colors

5i8 A MOTHERS SACRIFICE. [July,

and burnished gold of these gaudy but worthless productions suf-
ficed to convince the ignorant peasants that the painter merited
their confidence, and on his arrival at Busowiska he was escorted
by the mayor himself to the church. Like most self-educated,
pretentious persons, this man, whose name was Kurzanski, was
excessively conceited and consequential, and expected every one
to treat him with deference. He was fashionably dressed, and
behaved to the mayor and the members of the committee in a
supercilious, condescending manner. No sooner did he enter the
church than the painting over Nasta's altar caught his eye.
"What do I see here?" he exclaimed indignantly; "what is
this disgraceful thing ? " And, heedless of the sanctity of the
place, he spat on the ground, according to the Russian mode of
expressing scorn and disgust. Sorok, his brother-in-law, who fol-
lowed him, immediately did the same.

" It is a scandal," the painter went on, addressing the by-
standers. " Do you hear ? I tell you it is a scandal to have
that here ; it is no sacred picture. Take it down and throw it
out of the church."

" Yes," echoed Sorok emphatically, " it is a scandalous thing
nay more, it is heretical."

The members of the committee looked at one another in
consternation.

" See there," some of the men whispered ; " did we not say
there was something wrong about that picture ? Kurzanski saw
at once what was amiss : it is heretical. There is no gold or sil-
ver about it ; it is not like a Madonna."

" It is not a Madonna at all," said one. " Heaven knows
what it is," murmured a second. " That comes of Nasta's mys-
terious ways, and her fine altar," added a third. " We knew it
from the first ; we were fools not to say so."

Kurzanski, meanwhile, standing in front of the picture, con-
tinued to give vent to his feelings by contemptuous shrugs and
gestures of scornful pity, when suddenly a woman came forward
and, placing herself before him, said reproachfully : " You should
know that this picture represents the Blessed Virgin, the holy
Mother of God."

The speaker was one Thecla, a woman of good sense and
sound judgment, whose education and means entitled her to
rank among the aristocracy of the village ; she was the only
person who would venture to bid defiance to such a man as
Kurzanski. " It is the holy Mother of God," she repeated, look-
ing him full in the face.

1892.] A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE. 519

" That the Mother of God ! " he exclaimed ; " that the Blessed
Virgin ? Never in my life did I see such a one ! And what Vir-
gin is it, if you please ? I know all the icons "/ he ran off a
list of names: "Our Lady of the Pillar, Our Lady of Ransom,
Our Lady of Dolors, etc., etc. Pray what may this be ? "

" Our Lady of the Harvest," replied Thecla, unabashed. " What
is there to object to in that ? "

Kurzanski laughed derisively. "Our Lady a working-woman,
a day-laborer ? I like that ! See the way she is dressed, like
any one of you people. She has got a coral necklace and an
embroidered bodice, like a mountaineer of Busowiska. Why, the
next thing will be to paint Christ in a sheep-skin and felt hat,
with an axe in his hand. And you ask what there is to object
to? Never in my life did I meet with so ignorant a woman!"

"And never in my life," retorted Thecla, "did I meet with
a painter who knew so little about art ! Is a mere dabbler in
colors like you to decry such a beautiful work as this? What
if Our Lady is represented as a peasant, though she is Queen
of Heaven ? Have I not myself seen his majesty the emperor
dressed like any one of his subjects ? Besides, when our Blessed
Lady was on earth she was a poor woman, just like one of us,
and worked for her daily bread. Perhaps you do not know
that she used to spin the garments that her Divine Son wore?
I advise you to keep your clever remarks to yourself, if you
care at all about your reputation."

The illustrious sign-painter felt he had found more than his
match, but just as he was opening his mouth to reply a fresh
person appeared on the scene. It was the architect Klymasko,
who had come over to Busowiska to complete some unfinished
details, and take a survey of his work as a whole. His coming
was hailed by all parties as a relief. " Here is Klymasko ; Pro-
vidence has sent him at the right moment," they cried. " He
understands these things ; let him be the judge ; he shall de-
cide."

When the old man had been informed of the subject of dis-
pute he stood awhile contemplating the picture in silence. As
he gazed a smile began to play about his lips, and he muttered
something under his breath. The painter, who was watching
him closely, interpreted this smile as a victory for himself.
" Well," he asked at length, " did you ever see such a Madonna
as that?"

" Such a Madonna as that ? " repeated the architect slowly,
without withdrawing his eyes from the canvas ; " no, I never did

520 A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE. [July,

never in my whole life." Had Kurzanski been a little less
undiscerning he would have perceived that the smile on Klymas-
ko's features was not one of contempt, but of deep feeling ; the
old man seemed struggling with an emotion which he could
hardly repress. Long and fixedly he looked at the picture, and
the longer he looked the more it gained on him. Besides, did
he not recognize in the background a fac-simile of the new
church, his last production, which he had designed and planned
and placed under the protection of the Holy Virgin ? As he
looked, a tear gathered in his eye, and presently rolled down
his furrowed cheek. Then he fell on his knees, and touched
the ground with his forehead three times, as is the custom on
Good Friday when the Cross is adored.

Carried away by the force of example, all present prostrated
themselves before the Madonna, in whose favor the scale was
now turned. Kurzanski and the sacristan did the best thing
they could, which was to slip away unperceived.

On the following day the village maidens brought garlands
of flowers to adorn the new altar. Thecla, who had as yet pre-
sented nothing to the church, procured from the nearest town
two splendid candlesticks of shining metal, fitted with tapers of
the whitest wax, while some pious ladies of the vicinity ar-
ranged some drapery around the picture, tied with bows of rib-
bon, and finally contributed a handsome carpet, f his done, so
elegant was the appearance of the chapel that the villagers agreed
among themselves that the proposed artistic decoration would
be quite superfluous. Nasta knew not how to contain herself
for joy ; every fjree moment she hastened to the church, and
knelt motionless at the feet of her Madonna in ecstatic adora-
tion.

One afternoon an equipage stopped at the door of the little
church, and from it the countess was seen to alight, followed by
her inseparable companion. No sooner did the countess's glance
rest on the picture than she started, colored slightly, and, turn-
ing to her companion, her eyes flashing with indignation : " Look,
Mile. Pichet," she exclaimed, " just look at that! What, do you
not see ? It is she it is Vera ! "

The lady addressed, whose apathetic demeanor showed a
complete absence of interest in what she saw around her, glanced
in the direction of the picture.

" Yes, certainly, countess !" she rejoined ; " it is she ; there is
no doubt about it."

1892.] A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE. 521

" No, it cannot be," the impetuous little lady resumed ; " my
eyes deceive me. Sigismund would never have been so bold ! "

However, it was impossible to deny that the features depicted
on the canvas before them were those of M. Sigismund's beauti-
ful cousin. The countess recognized the perfect oval of her face,
the dark violet eyes, the thick plaits of golden hair, of which
she was so vain, wound round her shapely head ; it was un-
doubtedly Vera herself. And yet it was not Vera, for there was
something in this portrait which was lacking to the coquettish
votary of the world ; her beauty was etherealized, spiritualized.
The light that gleamed from Vera's eyes was a far more mun-
dane flame than the chaste brilliance of the Virgin's pure orbs ;
there was little that was akin to the calm, sweet smile that
played on Mary's lips in the voluptuous expression of Vera's
somewhat sensuous mouth. The grave countenance of the Ma-
donna reflected the serenity of a spotless soul, while Vera's
haughty features bespoke the insolence of the fashionable beauty,
confident of her charms. No, the countess would not allow that
it was Vera : there was the whole world, or rather the whole hea-
ven between the two ! So she appealed once more to her com-
panion.

" It cannot be, Mile. Pichet ; most decidedly it is not she ! "

"You are right, madame," rejoined the echo; " most assuredly
it is not she ! "

" And yet," added the elder lady, " I could never bring my-
self to pray before that picture."

" No, countess, neither could I."

But after all, the countess said to herself, perhaps Sigismund
was not to blame if he had invested the Queen of Angels with
the features of his earthly love. What harm was there in ideal-
izing and refining her beauty, surrounding it with a celestial
halo, the creation of his poetic fancy. All the celebrated Ma-
donnas were not conceived by the artists in moments of rapture,
revealed in an ecstatic vision. What matter if Sigismund had
really drawn his inspiration from the countenance of the woman
he adored ? Should she on this account refuse to kneel before
this picture, the offspring of his hopeless love, of his sorrowing
heart, the last work perhaps he would ever execute ? " Come,
Mile. Pichet," she murmured gently, "let us kneel down and say
a prayer for him, poor fellow ! and for her."

"With all my heart, madame, for him and for her."

VOL. LV. 34

522 A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE, [July,

From the day when the partisans of Our Lady of the Har-
vest had won so memorable a victory, a storm seemed gathering
over the village of Busowiska. The enthusiastic admiration
which Nasta's picture excited in all true lovers of art exasperated
the narrow-minded sign-painter, who could not endure to see
homage paid to talent to which he could not but be sensible
that his own was vastly inferior. Both he and his brother-in-law,
Sorok, the sacristan of Tersow, neglected no means of covertly
stirring up the villagers against this production of modern taste,
which ran counter to all their ignorant prejudices and precon-
ceived notions of what religious pictures ought to be. Gradually
the discontent so carefully fomented spread to the building com-
mittee, while among the laboring class the aggrieved painter
found ready listeners, since their jealousy was excited by the
distinction accruing to that beggar Nasta, as they termed her,
on account of her being the donor of the picture. " What does
it matter to us," said some of the most opinionated and undis-
cerning of the committee, " what Klymasko, or Thecla, or any one
else thinks about the picture ? We do not like it ; it is different
from what one is accustomed to see in the churches, and bears
no resemblance to the famous time-honored Madonnas, nearly
black with age, on a gold background, surrounded with ex
votos"

" I think," said Sorok, " that you are very wrong to tolerate
such a painting in your church. It is a sin for which you will
have to answer."

"It gives us scandal," interposed another, "and in the inter-
ests of the parishioners we should do well to get rid of it."

" Who obliges us to keep it ? " demanded a fourth.

The mayor, a man of pacific temperament, here intervened.
Of all things he dreaded a public scandal, and he did his best
to effect an accommodation. " It would never do to lay hands
on a gift that has been approved and accepted by the committee,"
he said authoritatively ; " indeed, I could never give my consent
to such a thing. It is a matter for the clergy to decide ; let us
await their judgment."

This proposal was received with approbation by all present.
At the suggestion of Sorok a deputation was sent to 'the
neighboring monastery of St. Basil, to consult an old monk who
had been Kurzanski's teacher, and who enjoyed the reputation
of being a great master of the Byzantine school. The result of

1892.] A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE. 523

this step was, however, only to make matters worse. The aged
artist, who could give no opinion respecting a picture which
he had never seen, having listened to the description given him,
began to discourse sagely about art in general in terms of which
his hearers understood nothing. But the impression made on
them, owing to the previous bias of their minds, was anything
but favorable to the Virgin of the Harvest, and from that mo-
ment the fate of the picture was decided. The only question
was what should be done with it ; some wanted to turn it out
of the church, others would be content with nothing less than de-
stroying it altogether.

The unhappy Nasta, alarmed on behalf of her Madonna, had
not a single tranquil moment. She went about her work with
set teeth, a despairing look on her countenance, and a ferocious
gleam in her eyes. It was said that she carried some weapon
hidden in her dress, and kept watch all night at the door of the
church to safeguard her treasure. When these rumors reached
the ears of the mayor, he deemed it advisable to take the pre-
caution of locking up the church and keeping the key in his
own possession. Then he sent for Nasta, and assured her that
she need fear no violence being done to the picture, and that,
should the clergy pronounce against it, not only should it be re-
turned to her, but all the money expended on the altar should
be refunded. The poor woman was tranquillized to a great ex-
tent by these assurances, but she could not feel quite satisfied
as to the safety of the picture. One morning, when she was on
her way to Spas, the thought struck her that she would appeal
to the kind artist on its behalf. Surely the young man would
not refuse to enlist the good offices of the countess, who on her
part would use her influence with the inspector, and induce him
to give directions to the municipality of Busowiska not to touch
the picture. Who could say that he would not even drive over
himself, in his official cap and gold-laced coat, to issue his com-
mands, and then all would be well.

While Nasta was consoling herself with these reflections, as
she tramped with bare feet along the dusty road, Pope Tareza-
nin arrived at Busowiska. He was met at the door of the
church by the wily sign-painter, who explained in a few words
the state of affairs.

Now, the good priest was himself in nowise insensible to the
subtle charm of this unconventional painting, and as he looked
at the lonely Madonna he resolved to spare no effort to save it
from destruction. He had not been many minutes in the church

524 A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE. [July,

before he was surrounded by a crowd of clamorous villagers,
calling on him in no very respectful manner to order the re-
moval of the picture. The babel of yoices was deafening, and
the priest felt that the Madonna would not long be safe among
these angry disputants. He saw, too, that in order to pacify them
prompt and decided action was necessary. He therefore gave
orders to the sacristan to take down the canvas from its place,
and having seen it carefully deposited in his briska, he whipped
up his horses and drove off at a quick pace in the direction of
his presbytery.

This unexpected act was regarded in the light of a victory
by the iconoclastic faction, and they exulted accordingly. Just
as the jubilation reached its height, Thecla, who had been ap-
prized of what was going on, came hurriedly into the church,
her countenance all aglow with indignation. When her eyes fell
upon the dismantled altar she wrung her hands and uttered a
cry of consternation.

" You will have reason to repent what you have done to-day,"
she exclaimed, snatching from their places the tapers which had
been her gift. " God will punish you for it ; yes, mark my
words, he will surely punish you for it ; you have driven away
the Blessed Mary, the holy Mother of God ! "

These prophetic words, solemnly pronounced, sounded like a
knell in the ears of the astonished villagers. They looked at
one another in dismay, and even those who had boasted the
loudest went home in crestfallen silence.

Meanwhile, Nasta, on reaching Spas, went at once to ask for
M. Sigismund. But she was met with the intelligence that on the
preceding day he had been found in the summer-house in a
state of unconsciousness, and had been carried home looking
like a corpse. In fact, he was at first thought to be dying.
Later on he had recovered, opened his eyes and tried to speak.
In the night, however, he had been taken much worse, so that
another doctor was called in, and a messenger dispatched in all
haste to Lemberg to summon a physician of eminence. The
countess was in deep distress ; she had never left his bedside.

These tidings were a great shock to Nasta. She turned as
white as a sheet, her head swam, and for a moment she could
not collect her senses sufficiently to find her way to the hotel
where the young artist was staying. She did not ask herself
for what purpose she was going thither ; she did not even know
whether she would gain admission ; she obeyed a st>rt of instinct
like that which impels a faithful dog to seek his master's side.

1892.] A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE. 525

She found the house-door standing open and entered without any
one saying a word to her. Many people were coming and go-
ing, so that she had no difficulty in gaining access to the roorru
adjoining the sick-chamber, where she occasionally caught at
glimpse of M. Sigismund lying motionless on a couch, more
pale, more hollow-ey^d than ever. The countess sat beside him,
her countenance disfigured with weeping, her eyes fixed upon
his pallid features. Now and again she spoke a few words to
him in a caressing manner, but without eliciting any response.
At length, bending over him with the air of one who announces
welcome news, " Come, Sigismund," she said, " look at me. You
must get a little better now. You know we are expecting a
visitor to-day a visitor whom you will be delighted to see."

He turned towards her his large, dark eyes, lustrous with the
light of fever, and smiled a strange, sad smile.

" Cannot you guess," she continued, looking at him with a
scrutinizing gaze, " who is coming to-night ? Cannot you guess
whom I mean ? "

The sick man heaved a deep sigh, the smile that played about
his lips grew sadder still, as he faintly murmured : " You mean
Vera. But I am awaiting the coming of another visitor." Then
the smile faded away, and he relapsed into apparent lethargy.

At that moment the physician from Lemberg was announced.
The countess came forward to meet him and Nasta crept away
on tiptoe. She went down-stairs and seated herself on the door-
step, where, her head resting on her hands, she gave herself up
to her own melancholy thoughts.

She had been there about an hour when the doctor issued
from the house, looking very grave, and drove away in his car-
riage. Not long after a tinkling bell was heard, heralding the
approach of the Latin priest, who, arrayed in cassock and cotta,
preceded by an acolyte and followed by the sacristan, came to
administer the last sacraments to the dying man according to
the rites of the Catholic Church.

There was a great deal of stir and bustle in the hotel for a
time ; then it gradually subsided, and Nasta became aware that
the stillness which followed was the stillness of death. Throw-
ing her apron over her head, she remained sitting there in a
sort of stupefaction until she was aroused by a hand laid upon
her shoulder. Looking up she beheld one of her neighbors from
Busowiska, a woman named Frederica, one as poor and lone-
some as she herself, but far less ignorant, and held in great es-
teem for her piety.

526 A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE. [July,

" I am glad to find you here, Nasta," she said, u for now I
need look no further for some one to watch with me to-night
by the gentleman who is dead. Come along; the countess will
pay you well."

Nasta stared at her with an air of bewilderment. She arose
mechanically and followed her companion. It was growing dark,
and when the two women entered the chamber of death they
found that the sacristan was already lighting the wax tapers
that stood in tall candlesticks on each side of the couch, while
the countess' companion, with a basket in her hand, was placing
some freshly-cut roses on the pillow and in the hands of the
deceased. Frederica, who was said to know all the prayers in
the prayer-book by heart, knelt down at the foot of the bed and
commenced reciting her orisons ; Nasta, kneeling by her side,
listened in admiring attention, marvelling in her ignorance at
the length of the prayers and the fluency with which they were
uttered. Here and there she caught a familiar word, and re-
peated it over and over to herself with all the fervor of her
heart.

In those still hours of the night, in the solemn presence of
death, Nasta learnt how to pray. A sentiment of profound
compunction stirred within her soul, and brought the tears to
her eyes. Her belief in the unseen world, whither her child,
and now her friend, had gone, was strengthened, and the light
of true faith dawned upon her untutored intelligence. Thus the
long hours passed away; Frederica's lips still moved, but her
utterance became broken and indistinct, and the beads she was
holding slipped from her fingers. Nasta's head dropped upon
her breast, and, overcome with fatigue and emotion, she fell
asleep.

Just as the rosy dawn touched the mountain-tops and lit up
the heavens a slight noise, like the rustling of wings, startled
the two watchers. They sprang to their feet in vague terror,
and a cold perspiration broke out over them. For there, close
to the head of the bed whereon the young man lay, something
moved, something quivered, and in the dim light of the tapers
the outline of a figure was plainly discernible. And while the
women, paralyzed with fear, stared straight before them with
wide-opened eyes, the first soft rays of light stealing into the
darkened chamber revealed the fair and gentle countenance of
Our Lady of the Harvest ! Awe-struck and amazed, in reverent
silence they bent their faces to the ground, afraid even to gaze
upon what appeared a celestial vision.

1892.] A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE. 527

When Frederica at length ventured to look up the figure
had disappeared, and the room was flooded with golden light.
Thereupon the old woman got up, and, without saying a word
to Nasta, quickly took her departure, eager to be the first to
communicate to her friends and neighbors at Busowiska the
wonderful apparition she had seen, and kneel in homage before
the picture of the Madonna.

Nasta did not move until the men came to arrange the cata-
falque and lay the body in the coffin. Nor did she leave her
post when they had finished ; she was still kneeling in a corner
of the room when the countess and her companion came in to
pray beside the dead. Presently a whispered conversation in
French passed between the two.

" Where is Vera?" asked the countess, bending towards
Mile. Pichet.

" She left about an hour ago," was the answer.

" What, so soon ! " exclaimed the countess, and a frown of
displeasure contracted her brow. The younger lady then ex-
plained that Mile. Vera had arrived very late on the preceding
night, and had been much distressed on hearing what had hap-
pened. She would not be persuaded to go to bed, but at dawn
she insisted on going alone to the chamber of death ; the sight
had so much overcome her that, without so much as opening
her travelling bag or waiting until the countess was dressed,
she had returned at once to the friends from whom she came,
leaving word that she would perhaps come for the funeral. The
countess listened with ill-concealed anger. " Gone back to her
friends, did you say ? Ah, I understand, heartless creature !
This is Mme. Lanowski's fete and there will be dancing to-night."

VI.

The tidings brought by Frederica created a great sensation in
Busowiska. The story of the apparition spread from house to
house like wildfire and was everywhere believed, for the narrator
bore the character of a truthful and trustworthy woman. Before
many hours had passed every one in the place was talking of
the singular occurrence. Doubtless, they said, it was as a re-
compense for having painted the picture in her honor that Our
Lady had appeared at the bedside of the artist after his death.
But in that case a miracle had taken place, and alas ! the pic-
ture which had won for him so signal a mark of her favor was
gone ; they had banished it from their cerkiew, they had ban-

528 A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE. [July,

ished the Mother of Christ from their village ! Thecla's words
now recurred to their memory like the oracular utterances of
an inspired sibyl. A sense of guilt weighed upon them, and
those who had decried the picture most vehemently contrived
to keep out of the way.

Nasta, unaware of what had taken place on the previous day
during her absence, trudged slowly homewards, her mind deeply
impressed with all that had just occurred. On reaching her
cabin she hardly paused a moment, but hastened on to the
church to prostrate herself before her beloved picture, now more
precious than ever in her eyes. The door was no longer locked ;
it stood wide open. She flew towards the Chapel of our Lady ;
the painting was not there ! On each side of the altar the mus-
lin drapery hung in strips, the ribbons were torn, the flowers
crushed, the candlesticks removed ; worst of all, the Madonna,
her own Madonna, was gone ! Wild with excitement and grief,
Nasta rushed from the church uttering inarticulate cries, which
soon drew a crowd around her. Thecla came up and, putting
her arms around her, endeavored to soothe the poor woman.
Her friends were triumphant now. "Yes," they said, "we were
right all along. We knew it was a wonderful picture; it was
that wretched Kurzanski's jealousy that did all the mischief.
Was it not proof enough that so many strangers came all
through the summer, from all the country round, to pray before
it ? And the flowers and offerings they brought, too did all that
mean nothing ? Klymasko was right when he bent his head to
the ground and venerated it as we venerate the holy icons.
Every one knows how clever he is, and how many churches he
has built to the glory of God. Now the Blessed Virgin has
asserted herself and discomfited all her enemies. Perhaps the
poor young gentleman had seen her in a vision before he painted
the picture. Alas ! how foolish they had been to let it go.
Who could tell what would be the consequences of their folly?"

Now, there was an old soldier sitting on a fence close by
who had listened with a satirical smile to this jeremiad. At its
close he stood up, and, taking his pipe from his mouth, addressed
the assembly : " What will be the consequences of your con-
duct, do you ask ? Cannot you guess, you simpletons ? I can tell
you what the consequence will be. The consequence will be that
the parish of Tersow will possess a miraculous picture, and you
will not. Hundreds will flock from far and near to see it ; a plen-
ary indulgence will be granted every year ; pilgrimages will be
made to it and processions will come, and of all this you will

1892.] A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE. 529

not have the benefit. The Pope Tarezanin knew very well what
he was about when he carried off that picture ; a Madonna like
that is a mine of wealth. It makes the fortune of the priest, of
the sacristan, of the whole parish. Devout people will bring
offerings to the shrine ; the concourse of strangers will be the
making of the town. That sly fox, Sorok, has outwitted you.
He remembered that he was sacristan at Tersow, not at Buso-
wiska. Now that he has your picture in his safe-keeping, he can
afford to laugh at you."

These plain, matter-of-fact words produced the desired effect.
This practical view of the matter had not presented itself to
the minds of the peasants, and the halo of sentiment was quick-
ly dispelled. The most sceptical and indifferent now took a
personal interest in the picture. The man who had formerly been
sacristan, and who looked forward to filling the same post in the
new church, felt that he had been duped nay more, made the
victim of a vile conspiracy, sacrificed to the interests of another.
Who of all men would suffer to the extent he would from the
loss of the picture, which would have been to him a source of
many privileges and much emolument ? " If that is so," he said,
" we must get it back ; we must get back our Madonna."

"Do you not know better than that?" retorted the soldier.
" It is easy enough to part with a thing, but not so easy to get
it back. The people of Tersow are not the fools we are ; they
will not give it up." *

"We will take it from them," all present exclaimed with one
voice. "Come, friends, let us go at once to Tersow!"

" To Tersow !" repeated the women, and even the children
re-echoed the cry. "To Tersow!" shouted Nasta, shaking herself
free from the hands that sought to detain her and starting off
at once in the direction of the town. The crowd, arming them-
selves with whatever came readiest to hand sticks, stakes, flails,
and even hatchets, followed her in disorder, some impelled by the
hope of material advantages, others actuated by religious fer-
vor, but one and all bent on the recovery of Our Lady of the
Harvest.

The soldier alone held aloof, deeming it more prudent not
to mix himself up in the disturbance he had been the means of
exciting. However, as his neighbors were hurrying off, he gave
them a few hints as to their strategical movements, bidding them
advance upon the presbytery from behind, so as to gain access
to the adjoining church without giving the alarm to the inhabi-
tants of the place.

530 A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE. [July,

Just as the party of villagers, bent on the execution of their
hostile designs, approached Tersow, which was not many miles
from Busowiska, by one road, the Pope Tarezanin, unaware of
their coming, drove away by another that led in an opposite
direction. He was going to consult his ecclesiastical superiors
as to the course to be pursued in regard to the picture ; thus
he was absent when the enemy appeared under the walls of the
presbytery. The door was cautiously opened by Sorok, the sac-
ristan ; but when he caught sight of the forces drawn up out-
side, he hastened to close it again. Before he could accomplish
this, however, he was seized and dragged out by two or three
stalwart peasants. " We want our Madonna," they shouted in
his ears ; " give us back our Madonna ! Do you hear, you
thief ? What have you done with it ? "

The terrified beadle pointed towards the door of the sacris-
ty, for there in reality the pope had locked urj the picture.
" Where is the key? Give us the key!" vociferated the crowd.
" Let me go," replied the wily Sorok, " and I will fetch you the
key immediately." No sooner was he released from the hands
that held him in their iron grasp than he sprang over the gar-
den fence, and darted away with the speed of a greyhound. A
few men started in pursuit of him ; but it was useless, he had
completely disappeared from sight. The party of attack wa-
vered, at a loss how to act. At this juncture Nasta, almost
maddened by disappointment and the long strain she had under-
gone, snatched a hatchet from the hand of a bystander and
led the way to the sacristy. The others followed her; the door
soon yielded to a few vigorous blows, and as it fell the serene
and smiling features of Our Lady of the Harvest were revealed
to the intruders' view. Involuntarily they fell upon their knees
before the picture, in hushed and reverent silence. At the self-
same moment, as the people were pressing round the door of
the sacristy, the glittering helmets and gleaming bayonets of a
band of gendarmes appeared on the road. Sorok in his hasty
flight had encountered them on their way towards the town,
and had begged them to interfere to prevent the pillage of the
church. The sight of an armed force had not in this instance
its usual effect of intimidating the peasants ; they held their
ground firmly, standing in front of the Madonna, whilst the
younger men greeted the approaching gendarmes with a volley
of stones. Then, taking the picture on their shoulders, all pre-
pared to depart. But the gendarmes, incensed at being assailed
with a storm of missiles, endeavored to bar their passage ; where-

1892.] A MOTHER'S SACRIFICE. 531

upon one of the villagers, losing patience, hurled the hatchet he
was carrying at his opponents. The report of a rifle immediate-
ly followed, and some one was heard to fall heavily to the
ground. It was Nasta who fell, wounded by the gendarme's
bullet. At the sight of blood the people of Busowiska attacked
the gendarmes with such fury that, being few in number, they
were fain to retreat into the presbytery ; while the others, find-
ing the road clear, hastily formed into ranks and marched off
in the direction of their own village.

Nasta strove to regain her feet, but fell back powerless.
Her neighbors raised her in their arms and carried her home-
wards in the rear of the picture, which was borne aloft like a
standard.

Presently one of the party began to intone the hymn, " O
Virgin Immaculate"; the rest took it up, and like a triumphal
procession they proceeded on their way. Attracted by the
sound of the singing the peasants came out of their cottages by
the road-side, or ran up from the fields where they were at
work, and seeing the band, now orderly and devout, joined
their ranks, until hundreds of voices swelled the chorus of joy
and praise that echoed along the valley of the Dniester, and
rose in solemn strain to the very gates of Heaven.

The procession halted at the door of the new church of
Busowiska. But when the men who were carrying the fondator-
ka attempted to place her on her feet, that she too might enter
and behold the Madonna replaced upon her altar, she was
found to be dead. Poor Nasta ! her sacrifice and her sufferings
had been accepted ; she will grieve over the loss of her little
Wasylek no longer.

Our Lady of the Harvest still continues to be an object of
veneration in the church of Busowiska. It is hardly necessary
to inform the reader that the popular idea that the picture is a
miraculous one has never received authentication, nor has the
local devotion been sanctioned by the ecclesiastical authorities.

A. M. CLARKE.

Stindon, Arundel, Eng,

532 THE CATHOLIC SUMMER-SCHOOL. [July,

THE CATHOLIC SUMMER-SCHOOL.

AN editor of one of our New York journals was pleased to
say, recently, that the Catholics who have devised a Summer-
School took their idea from the Methodist camp-meeting. The
very name " school " a scholars' name should have saved the
scholarly editor from making a statement that is pardonable
only if made with humorous intent. To the pagan Greek we
are indebted for that word "school," and by his correct idea
we are directly influenced in our new undertaking. " Leisure,
rest, ease " were, to the right-minded Greek, not the mere ac-
companiments of intellectual training, but indeed the prerequi-
sites. Having leisure, intelligent men and women may, nay
should, use it to converse about things intellectual, to listen
to the teachings of masters of the arts and sciences, to
discuss learnedly what is unknown to them, or but imperfectly
known ; thus thought and said the reflecting Greek. It is his
" school " that Catholics are about to revive ; the school of lei-
sure, rest, ease, the true school of learning.

Some people, it may be, imagine that, only since the first
Methodist camp-meeting was held, have Catholics had any ideas
worth speaking of. The fact is that, inasmuch as the modern
world has any correct ideas about the school and about school-
ing, it is because Catholics have lovingly, dutifully preserved,
and wisely developed, adapted, the Greek tradition. Of this
tradition the most splendid development was the mediaeval Uni-
versity as exemplified at Paris in the days of Albert the Great
and St. Thomas where, moved by a passion for learning, men
of all ages gathered from all lands, to acquire a knowledge of
all that it was possible to know, at the feet of a Master, a Doc-
tor, an Angel of the Schools. Catholics have a double tradition
as to the school. They have ideas to give, and freely shall they
be given to Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist. In the Summer-
School Catholics purpose re-adapting the Greek and the mediae-
val schools to the conditions existing in the United States. At
New London, vainly will the visitor look for a Catholic camp-
meeting, excursion, picnic. Leisurely students and teachers will
be there, restfully learning, quietly instructing, conversing at
ease, and enjoying in-doors and out-of-doors the pleasure, the

1892.] THE CATHOLIC SUMMER-SCHOOL. 533

delight of simple, hearty, and refined association with kindred
spirits.

" A school of Philosophy," the Right Rev. Bishop of Ogdens-
burg called, and justly called our Summer-School, during the
recent agreeable trip to the Thousand Islands of the friends of
the movement ; for to the study of the principles that underlie
all science, human and divine, our scholars will devote their
leisure. Never was there a time when the knowledge of these
principles was more important. Never was there a time when
the habit of wrong, illogical thinking was more common. The
true principles on which all science must rest, the true method
of logical thinking, are to be had from Catholic teachers and
from them only. .Many creeds men profess. There is but one
Faith : the true Faith. We alone have it. Have we this Faith,
not merely as a divine gift, but also intelligently, soundly,
wholly, as it is and not as we surmise, will, assume ? The ethi-
cal laws that limit almost every human act, individual and social,
have we studied their import and application ? The law of na-
ture,, the law of God, the law of the Church, how many of us
may reasonably be satisfied with our training in these great and
most necessary sciences ? Long, weary, uncertain is the road
that leads to learning, between rows of books. The spoken
word of the scholar will direct us through shorter, surer paths.
At the Summer-School those who are seeking competent and
safe guides will not be disappointed.

Is the Summer-School to be a school of Philosophy, and
nothing more ? No, the sciences that deal simply with facts
will hold their proper place, the natural sciences so-called, and
the science of history. Literature and the fine arts will be cher-
ished in the old homestead where they were nurtured, and
where they have been tended so carefully through the ages. It
is to be a school for the " higher education " ! Unquestionably
for the higher and the highest education. And a popular
school ! Yes and no ; popular in the sense that it is intended
for people who desire, leisurely, to fit themselves for intelligent
action by the acquirement of a substantial fund of true princi-
ples and of truthful fact yes ; popular in any other sense no.

Are we ready for such a school? The interest shown in the
movement from the first day of its inception would prove our
readiness, were proof needed. From the hierarchy, from the re-
ligious communities, from the clergy generally, from that large
and powerful body, the Catholic lay-teachers in public, private
and parochial schools, from our writers, from our Press, a chorus

534 THE CATHOLIC SUMMER-SCHOOL. [July,

of commendation, of encouragement has testified to the timeliness
of the movement. The incompleteness of our so-called popular
education, teachers soon learn. The reading, the thoughtful man
and woman find themselves, early in life, embarrassed by the
crowd of questions that press upon them ; questions having to
do with their calling, with their rights and duties as members of
society, as citizens, as parents, as Catholics. Something is wanting,
evidently ; and the want is a more complete education. How,
where is this to be had ? Heretofore this question was not
easily answered. Now we have an answer for all questioners:
At the Summer-School. During two months out of twelve, can
one hope to make up all that is requisite ? Not all, decidedly ;
though two months of leisurely study under Catholic Masters,
and two months of constant association with earnest, intellectual,
educated Catholics will be worth more than a year's schooling
under less favorable conditions, and more than several years of
solitary and unguided reading.

Were evidence needed of the awakening among Catholics to
the deficiencies of the current popular instruction, and of the
prevailing desire for a sounder, higher education, we have it in
the experience of Rev. P. A. Halpin, S. J. This well-known
teacher of philosophy opened a night-course of Ethics, at St.
Francis Xavier's College, New York, during the autumn of
1891. Though the course was modestly announced, and though
no special efforts were made to attract an audience, a class of
two hundred men was quickly formed. Had women their way,
a number of the more gifted sex would have been members of
the class. So great an interest was excited in moral questions
by Father Halpin's lectures that, of their own motion, the men
who followed the course organized, before the close of the year,
an Ethical Club, which has done and is doing good work.
From this experience and from the no less notable develop-
ment of the Catholic Reading Circles, we have no hesitation in
saying that Catholics have been expectantly, anxiously awaiting
the " Summer-School."

Lest we may have dismissed too hastily the matter of the
Summer-School course, a word as to the plans of its founders
may not be amiss. Just now they are confining themselves to
one subject, the School at New London in the coming August ;
but their scheme provides for an all-the-year course of studies,
to be directed through the agency of the Catholic Educational
Union. Of the prompt realization of this scheme there can be
no doubt. The men who have taken up the work are zealous

1892.] THE CATHOLIC SUMMER-SCHOOL. 535

and experienced. They have determined to move slowly, pru-
dently, surely. There will be no halting, no turning back.
" Forward " is their motto. United in their aims, prepared for
every difficulty, backed by the strongest intellectual forces, our
hopes of their prosperity cannot be, will not be disappointed.
One great danger they have to fear, a success too pronounced,
at the start.

As the Summer-School will not be a camp-meeting, so it will
not be a Syndicate Hotel, or a Land and Improvement Com-
pany. The Board of Managers will confine itself to mental
speculation. After the work to be done has been thoroughly
systematized, after a choice teaching-body has been organized,
after the Board has gathered together an earnest, harmonious
assembly of men and women ; when experience has taught what
experience alone can teach, then the Summer-School, we may
be assured, will have a fitting, permanent habitation, charmingly
located, wisely administered, true modern "Academy," a scho-
lars' garden. Wait awhile, watching meantime ! No halt, we said ;
neither shall there be a rush, but all patiently, orderly, and well
devised and done. Some Catholic writers have patronized the
new movement, because, forsooth, it will help to raise the mean
of education among Catholics up to a standard assumed to be
the norm of American education. Not too positively can it be
affirmed that these writers are wholly unacquainted with the
conditions existing in the United States. The mean of educa-
tion among Catholics is the norm of American education. The
largest body of Christians in the United States, the Catholics
are at the same time, man for man and woman for woman,
the best educated and the most highly instructed body. How
could it be otherwise ? Take our Hierarchy, our secular clergy,
our religious men and women, and compare their exceptional learn-
ing and training with that of all the ministers of all the sects.
Read the debates in Assemblies, Presbyteries, clerical convocations
of all sorts, follow the farce of Sunday morning and evening ser-
mon ; education ! And with this low standard among the teach-
ers, what must be the level of education among the listeners,
the flocks ! Imagine a Council of the Catholic Hierarchy, a con-
ference of Catholic priests, wherein defect of truth, defect of
reason, defect of scholarship, would mark a man as a typical
leader! Picture to yourself a Catholic congregation that would
insist on being fed on bare husks !

Coming to the higher education, the average among Catholic
laymen is superior to that of all the non-Catholic denominations.

536 THE CATHOLIC SUMMER-SCHOOL. [July,

We are apt to lose sight of this fact, because the educated
Catholic layman is almost completely shut out from a career
that is open to all other men, the career of a college teacher
or professor. Yet the educated Catholic layman is here, active
in every other walk, and carrying in his mind a treasury of true
principle and fact that men of other creeds have not.

Representing to-day the highest average of American educa-
tion, Catholics are about to lift that average higher still. Their
love of country, their love of truth, their zeal in the cause of
education, prompt them to action. Through the Summer-School
they hope, they intend to benefit not themselves only, but all
their fellow-citizens as well.

To-day there is, practically, no religion in the United States
except the Catholic religion. We do not exaggerate ; we state
a fact patent to all observing men. " The great Protestant re-
ligious drama is nearly played out," says the Rev. Alfred Young
in his suggestive article on " The Closing Scene," in the June
number of THE CATHOLIC WORLD. From Monday to Monday
the newspapers report in detail the humorous, the tragic inci-
dents of the closing scene. The details are truthful ; we can
test them by the figures of census reports and of statistics no
less credible. Science, scholarship, philosophy, give these noble
names to the miserable contrivances that can effect only the
destruction of Christianity, of all creeds except nihilism !
Were it not for the hard cash that has been capitalized in
the sects, the professing Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists
would not make an old-time camp-meeting gathering. Without re-
ligion society must go to pieces. Anarchy shakes a warning
hand look yonder! Catholics are alive to the situation. They
know the inevitable day is at hand ; but if society is shaken to
its very foundations, if anarchy does come, it will be only after
Catholicity has made a brave fight to save America. "The Ro-
man Catholic Church, rich in the reassured inheritance of nine-
teen centuries, confronts the rising spirit of liberal religion with
a serenity and confidence disturbed only by contempt," says a
liberal religionist whom Father Young quotes. Serenely, confi-
dently, yes ; the Church is ever serene and confident, but she is
never contemptuous, she is always sympathetic, always charitable.
No means will she miss that may save faith, morality, science,
civilization to Americans.

Moved then by a high spirit of patriotism and of religion are
the founders of the Catholic Summer-School ; and their ideas
are far-reaching. In the short time that has elapsed since Mr.

1892.] THE CATHOLIC SUMMER-SCHOOL. 537

Warren E. Mosher took the matter in hand, proofs have accu-
mulated of the speedy development of these ideas. For the
first time, representatives of the secular clergy, of the religious
communities of men, and of the lay teachers, have united in the
interest of higher education ; and Right Rev. Doctor Messmer's
hopeful words make it seem not improbable that the uncloistered
teaching-orders of women may be partners in the good work.
Through the establishment of the Summer-School, and through
the systematized courses of the Educational Union, our Colleges,
and indeed all our educational institutions, will be immediately
and largely advantaged. Their sphere of usefulness will be wide-
ly extended. Their professors will have new opportunities for
using acquired stores of knowledge, which may or may not be
useful in the class-room. Our learned men, our specialists will
be known, as they should .be, far and wide; known to grown
men and women as well as to youth. Our Catholic teachers in
public and private schools will be brought into closer relations
with our Colleges, and thus we shall at last have that most im-
perative demand supplied, the demand for a school of Catholic
pedagogics. How painful it is to run over the current published
works on a science which Catholics, century after century, have
done so much to build up, a science of which they alone have
the key!

"A school of Philosophy," quoting Right Rev. Doctor Ga-
briels, we said the Summer-School would be ; and thus it will
encourage Catholics to ask for, and our Colleges to supply, a
more complete course of Philosophy. The Summer-School is to
be no less a school of History, awakening a more hearty interest
in a science which affords strongest proof of our creed, our
claims; strongest, defence against lying attack; strongest evi-
dence of the glorious doings, glorious sufferings of Catholics,
and of the apostolicity, unity, holiness of the Church. With the
new interest in history, we shall have more extended courses of
history in our Colleges. The Colleges will act on the Summer-
School, and the School will react on them. Thus our various
teaching bodies will be unified for special ends, and teachers and
scholars will rise together, and grow strong together.

Will there be but a single Summer-School for the United
States ? Safely we may answer with a negative. Monopolies are
unpopular in the United States. A single School would be un-
wieldy. How locate it so as to avoid little sectional vanities ?
Then local customs, traditions, conditions are so various. We ex-
pect to see a number of Catholic Summer-Schools spring up with-
VOL. LV. 35

538 THE CATHOLIC SUMMER-SCHOOL. [July,

in a few years. There are many reasons, however, why they
should all be organized after a common plan, differing only in
details ; and there is every reason why they should work to-
gether in harmony, aiding one the other so that everywhere the
same great end shall be attained. With a number of them,
adapted to local requirements, we would have so many added
centres of Catholic thought, Catholic learning, Catholic truth.
The good influences that will be exerted from these centres, who
can calculate?

There is nothing too great for Catholics to attempt. They
have a most ancient tradition of great things done. Here what
great things have they not done, materially as well as in the
sphere of thought ? The material sub-structure is well and truly
laid. A new duty presses. On to the sphere of thought ! Fed
on the manna of heavenly wisdom ; freshened, inspired by
draughts from the clear spring of Truth priceless possession !
what should we, what shall we, not do, if our intent be sincere,
unselfish ? Outside of our churches, our local societies, our reli-
gious confraternities, we have been thus far unaccustomed to
working in common for purposes looking to the general welfare.
Now that we have begun, let us work generously, enthusiasti-
cally, all together, with might and main. We are not going out
to fight an enemy, it is true ; but would you not train, if there-
by you were sure you could gather strength to rescue a friend ?
You would, certainly. Then begin ! You are meant to be the
saver of many. But train leisurely, restfully, easily, at the
Catholic Summer-School !

JOHN A. MOONEY.

New York City.

1892.] HOME. 539

HOME.

IN lands o'er sea, with ceaseless toil,
He felled the wood and broke the soil
In unremitting sweat of brow
He trod the furrow of the plow.
Afar from home and kith and kin,
He gathered golden harvests in,
Grew proud of purse and high estate,
With fortune's smile inebriate.

He clomb the pinnacles of fame
And wrote thereon a noble name ;
Till now, in toil grown gray at last,
With hoarded wealth of gold amassed,
One want there was 'mid all his pride
One craving still unsatisfied.
So to his childhood's home he turned,
For homeward aye his heart had yearned,

He sought his native town : alas !
A stranger in the place he was.
Where'er he went he found a change,
The people all around were strange.
Remembered voices all were stilled,
Their places with new faces rilled;
And men returned his kindly glance
With unfamiliar looks, askance.

Like one in dreams he wandered down
Beyond the bridge and past the town,
Till like a vision, faint and dim,
The abbey gray confronted him.
There on the carven stones he read
The requiescats of the dead ;
Old names half-hidden 'neath the moss
He recognized on slab and cross.

540 HOME. [July,

" Pray for the soul of Jean Baptiste ! "
He read athwart the gathering mist
That dimmed his eyes; the legend here
Was " Louis," yonder one " Pierre "
His boyhood's friends all gone ; and now,
As on his hand he leaned his brow,
Between his fingers trickled clear
Upon the old man's cheek a tear.

Then as he wept there wandered by
A maiden singing merrily.
Whereat quoth he " Dost thou not fear
Alone at eve to wander here ? "
" Nay, sir, to gain my home," she said,
" I needs must pass among the dead.
There at the door, by yonder tree,
A loving father waits for me."

And singing still she passed afar,
Beneath the moon and evening star,
Unto her father's home ; whereat
The old man mused disconsolate.
" To reach my home I, too, alas !
Beyond the graveyard ground must pass!
Though late, and full of pride and sin,
My Father yet may let me in ! "

PATRICK J. COLEMAN.

1892.] CHRISTIAN ANTHROPOLOGY. 541

CHRISTIAN ANTHROPOLOGY.*

THE natural history of man is one of the most interesting
and important branches of physical science, and it is gratifying
to know that our Catholic writers are beginning to recognize the
great importance of the subject and to devote their attention to
it. Our scholars, it must be confessed, have been somewhat
tardy in taking hold of the problems raised by the rapid growth
of the physical sciences, and have been too long content with
defending truth on the old lines, regardless of the new methods
of attack.

We have never been wanting, it is true, in men profoundly
versed in the natural sciences, and perfectly competent to deal
with all the difficulties suggested by them ; but the fact cannot
be overlooked that many of our modern theologians still rigidly
follow the methods of the mediaeval schoolmen, and are slow to
realize the great change in the intellectual aspect of the age
which scientific investigation has wrought. While the truth, as
it is in God and his Holy Church, can never vary, and its logical
presentation in' the works of our great theologians cannot well be
improved upon, it must be recognized that new facts have come
to light which materially affect the general range of our intel-
lectual vision. Our knowledge of the universe has vastly in-
creased, and there are very many pregnant principles and laws,
well known in the world to-day, which even St. Thomas never
thought of. The advance in the domain of science has un-
doubtedly been very great, and the addition to the sum of hu-
man knowledge very considerable, and no one can successfully
address the intellect of the age who does not take cognizance of
all this. Moreover the intellectual tone and temper of the times
is scientific, and it must be met on its own ground. It is very
necessary to understand, then, that a course of scholastic philoso-
phy or theology, however thorough it may be, will not fit a
man to fight the battle for the faith in our day; it must be
backed by at least a general acquaintance with scientific subjects
to be effective ; for certain it is that in the intellectual atmos-
phere in which we live a mind stored with nothing but mediae-
val lore would appear empty and ignorant, and would not get a

* Christian Anthropology. By Rev. John Thein. New York : Benziger Bros.

542 CHRISTIAN ANTHROPOLOGY. [July.

very respectful hearing in any quarter. This is a matter of great
moment to all who are preparing to defend revealed truth, and
they should concern themselves with it, and come forth equipped
from their studies with weapons suitable for the combat.
Mediaeval armor will not turn a bullet from a Label rifle, nor
will the authority of a mediaeval philosopher be a secure shield be-
hind which to fight a modern evolutionist.

The value and the necessity of a sound philosophical training
cannot, indeed, be over-estimated, but to be really practical and
effective it must be supplemented by a general knowledge of
science ; and the time has come when scientific branches should
receive as much attention in our colleges and seminaries as any
other department in the curriculum, for their importance can no
longer be ignored. Very little practical use can be made of a
formal syllogism in every-day life, and very few will be met with
who are disposed to discuss matter and form ; but the question of
the antiquity of man or the theory of evolution is constantly
cropping up, and some answer based on scientific facts and prin-
ciples must needs be forthcoming.

The defence of the sacred Scriptures is to-day the great task
of the Christian apologist, and most of the attacks that are
made upon the Bible are based on scientific theories of some kind
or other. No doubt the false philosophy of the school of higher-
criticism, so-called, is an important factor in this warfare, but even
here questions of archaeology and philology are relied upon rather
than philosophy. Not speculative but positive knowledge is what
the age demands, and although scientists themselves deal in the
most reckless speculations, and advance a thousand theories for
the one fact they establish, they also deal in positive knowledge,
and here is the real source of their power and influence. Now, facts
can be successfully met only by facts, and hence the need of
our becoming acquainted with the assured discoveries and con-
quests of science, and their general bearing upon the truths of
revelation.

It is quite noticeable, too, how rapidly scientific views and
teachings are filtering through the masses, and how much the
general public are interested in them. The man who reads noth-
ing but the daily or weekly newspaper knows something about
the nebular hypothesis and the double stars, and he is curious to
know how long the solar system can hold together. The won-
ders of the universe are no longer fairy tales, but sober facts
from which deductions are constantly drawn ; and it is vastly im-
portant that God and religion be associated with them, and that

1892.] CHRISTIAN ANTHROPOLOGY. 543

the pulpit as well as the press become their interpreter to the.
people.

Father Thein's book on Christian Anthropology discusses in a
frank and fearless manner some of the vital issues raised by
science. He displays a thorough acquaintance with the best and
latest results of scientific investigation ; his range is wide and his
knowledge is accurate, and he is careful to quote some recog-
nized authority for every assertion he makes. He does not call
in question a single well-established position or principle of phy-
sical science, and yet there is no attempt at compromise any-
where noticeable throughout his work. He is perfectly fair toward
his opponents ; presents their views in their own words, and
meets them on their own ground. He does not, of course, pre-
tend to be a professional scientist, but he does claim to have
mastered the general principles of science, and to be familiar
with the actual results that have been achieved ; and we feel
confident that few, if any, of his readers will be inclined to
doubt his claim. His knowledge of scientific men and their
works and theories is not confined to the English school, but
embraces the French and the German as well it is practically
universal and covers the whole field. Father Thein's analysis of
the great theory of evolution is most searching and satisfactory,
and, though he differs from the majority of scientists, Mr. Mi-
vart included, in the conclusion he draws, we believe the weight
of probability is on his side. Evolution, after all, is only a
theory a brilliant and comprehensive theory, no doubt but
there are so many essential links wanting in the chain of evi-
dence that the possibility of its ever passing from the region
of theory into the realm of established fact seems slight. It af-
fords a most remarkable illustration of a stupendous working
hypothesis built up by scientific men on a very slender founda-
tion of fact, and with all the data before us, it is difficult to
see how it can be regarded in any other light. It is well known
that many able and conservative men amongst us are disposed
to accept a modified form of evolution, and like every other crea-
tion of the human mind' this gigantic theory has also a modicum
of truth underlying it, but it has been recklessly exaggerated and
extended.

The vexed question of the antiquity of man receives a large
share of attention in Father Thein's admirable work. He ex-
amines for us the evidences on which geologists base their calcu-
lations, and shows that they are far from conclusive. The asser-
tions of scientists as to the age of strata in which the remains

544 CHRISTIAN ANTHROPOLOGY. [July,

of man have been found are, in truth, largely gratuitous ; there
is no certain method of computing the actual time of forma-
tion of the different strata, or the actual duration of any par-
ticular period. It is quite reasonable to suppose that Nature, in
her earlier and more vigorous days, operated more rapidly than
in her later days and calmer moods, and to measure the rate of
past formations by the present rate of formation is a very arbi-
trary rule, and certainly it cannot be an infallible one. As to
the arguments deduced from the finding of human remains with
those of extinct animals, that is open to the very same objec-
tion, for it is simply impossible to tell just when these animals
became extinct,

The theory of the industrial developments of man from the
stone age to the bronze age, and the bronze age to the iron
age, and the computations founded upon it, are nothing if not
fanciful. It cannot be demonstrated that these ages were con-
secutive ; they may have existed side by side in adjacent terri-
tories at the same time. In any case, who can say just how
long it took primitive man to advance from the unpolished
to the polished implements of the chase, and the exact period
that intervened between the flint and the bronze, and the
bronze and the iron ? We know that the aboriginal inhabitants
of this country used stone and metallic weapons simultaneously,
and to-day you may find Indians in the far West armed with
bows and arrows and Indians armed with Winchester repeating-
rifles marching side by side over the mountains. It is perfectly
legitimate, of course, to make deductions from all these data ;
without this there would be no scientific progress ; but we insist
that all such calculations are only tentative, they are not con-
clusive, and this is what Father Thein's argument goes to show.
He admits that man existed in the quarternary epoch, but he
proves that this epoch is by no means as distant as some geolo-
gists claim, and that man might have flourished in it without
doing any very great violence to Biblical chronology. But for
the matter of that there is no real chronology given in the
Bible, and a learned Belgian theologian has maintained that as
far as the Bible is concerned, man may have existed on this
planet anywhere from six to ten thousand years ; and science
has never demonstrated an antiquity greater than this, though,
of course, it has claimed for man an origin indefinitely more
remote.

The actual state of the controversy is faithfully reflected in
the pages of this book, all the important discoveries pertinent

1892.] CHRISTIAN ANTHROPOLOGY. 545

to the subject are referred to, and their bearing upon it fully
stated ; we have here a complete resume of the whole subject,
clear, concise, and accurate. Though hardly a part of the natu-
ral history of man, the cosmogonies and legendary lore of the
different races and peoples are passed in review, and a strong
argument for the consanguinity of the human race is deduced
from them. This line of argument has not much weight with
men of science nowadays ; they are disposed to look upon it as
antiquated ; yet they cannot well deny its force. The evidence
for the unity of the race from comparative philology is also regarded
as unsatisfactory, though it has done good service in its time.

Father Thein sums up the. general results that have been
arrived at from anatomy and physiology, and shows that they
are altogether favorable to the unity of the species. It has al-
ways seemed to us that the projection of creation on one grand,
harmonious scale is the strongest possible argument for an infinite
Creator, and that similarity in structure simply proves unity of
plan. The fact that the same general features pervade the whole or-
ganic world is certainly not the result of chance ; and if man
in his physical organization is found to resemble other crea-
tures, it only affords an additional proof, if indeed any addition-
al proof were needed, that by his body he belongs to the
animal creation.

The closing chapters of the book deal with the psychological
side of man's nature, and although there is nothing original in
the treatment of the subject the proofs of the immortality of the
soul are well chosen, and the arguments are driven home with
a powerful hand.

On the whole, we do not know of any other work in which
the evidences from the Christian stand-point are so well massed,
the points so clearly brought out, and the field of controversy
so fully covered. It is a book which every student of Catholic
philosophy and theology should master. The knowledge it con-
tains is essential for the successful defence of religious truth in
our times, and any man who makes himself familiar with its
facts and arguments need not fear to face the scientific infidelity
of the age. Its perusal will, moreover, tend to excite an inter-
est in scientific studies amongst us, which is much to be de-
sired. We may even be permitted to express the hope that this
excellent work of Father Thein's will be the beginning of a
Catholic scientific literature in every way worthy of the enlight-
ened zeal of the American Church.

E. B. BRADY.

546 AT THE PENSION ROGUET. [July?

AT THE PENSION ROGUET.

PEOPLE who are hopelessly American called it Roguet's
Hotel, or the Hotel Roguet. Divers matrons of uncertain age,
and very certain avoirdupois, catering to the wants, real and
imaginary, of the homeless hordes who spend their lives in
" apartments," envious of its superior attractions, actually spoke
of it as a boarding-house ; but to the cultivated patrons of this
very pleasant establishment it was the Pension Roguet, and as
the Pension Roguet it figured in the bills which were rendered
with surprising accuracy as to little things like gas burned after
midnight, friends to dinner, luncheons served in the rooms,
cracked or defaced crockery ; and an accuracy not so exact
when it came to deducting absences and other trifles which
might have lightened the scales on the other side. It was de-
scribed as a strictly first-class family hotel in the advertise-
ments, and if one were well up in metaphysical subtleties and
mental reservations, he could say it afforded the comforts of
home of course, with a due regard to the meanings which are
attached to a term becoming more and more elastic.

It was an old family mansion, with spacious, high-ceiled
rooms, remodeled to afford the greatest good to the greatest num-
ber. It cannot be disputed, however, that the good, which
translated into thought means the comfort, was often sacrificed
to the number. It was substantially built with solid stone walls,
on a street which has fallen somewhat from its high estate of
wealthy exclusiveness, as even the best of streets have a weak-
ness for doing ; but enough of its charm still lingers to keep it
semi-fashionable and wholly desirable. The house stands in a
large yard, with terraced steps leading to the gate, and in the
rear is a grove of sturdy oaks which were old before the city
was born.

I had been a widow three years, and was just thirty when I
went to the Pension Roguet to spend a winter, simply because
my income was too limited to admit of an establishment of my
own; but I soon came to be regarded as belonging to the "per-
manents," and, in spite of intermittent longings for a real home,
have remained here five years, with every prospect of staying
an equal length of time.

1892.] AT THE PENSION ROGUET. 547

The Pension Roguet was not so large but that everybody
knew of it twenty-four hours after an apartment was vacated,
only the smaller ones were called rooms, and speculations as to
a successor followed as a matter of course. The interest was
greater than usual when the second story east room became va-
cant in the middle of winter, for it was one of the most choice
apartments in the house, and its occupants ranked, according to
the great unwritten law of precedence which applied to the Pen-
sion Roguet, with the front-room people and those on the par-
lor floor. It had a bay-window at the side, which commanded
a view of the lawn and a perspective of the street, besides the
advantage of the sun all day long. Those who imagine that
sunshine and fresh air are free, have never lived at the Pension
Roguet. Madame made no secret of her desire to get a mar-
ried couple or two young men for that room, and when the
news flashed around that it had been taken, not by two tenants
but one, and that one a woman, our surprise was mixed with a
curiosity more than usually strong. It was not only a woman,
but a very young woman in fact, a mere girl it was said. A
young lady from Miltonville, so madame told Mrs. Rollins, fa-
miliarly known as the " Postal Telegraph," who quickly told
everybody else. Mrs. Bradley, who was propriety epitomized,
said it was a little singular for a girl to come alone to the Pen-
sion Roguet, and shrugged her shoulders in a way which insinu-
ated all sorts of unsayable things. Mrs. Bradley was an actress
who did not confine her talents to the stage, either amateur or
regular. All the information which Mrs. Rollins could give was
that her name was Beatrice Bonner, that she had brought satis-
factory references we smiled at that ! had paid a month's
board in advance, and had with her but one medium-sized
trunk. Madame either did not know, or else, for reasons of her
own, did not choose to tell anything more definite about the
young person. Everybody was a person at the Pension Roguet
until proofs were afforded which entitled one to be called a gen-
tleman, a young lady, or a charming woman. Of course, none
of us blamed our affable hostess for acting upon the discretion
which is the better part of valor with Mrs. Rollins, and no one
denied that madame was discreet ; but we were not a little star-
tled when it transpired that she really did not know any par-
ticulars about the tenant of the east room. It was hinted
among ourselves that madame had made a mistake. None of us
had ever kept a first-class family hotel, or a hotel of any kind,
and madame had spent twenty years in the business ; but

548 AT THE PENSION ROGUET. [July,

that did not prevent us from giving advice as to how it
should be done, which was courteously received and never fol-
lowed.

Miss Bonner did not give any of us an immediate chance to
pass upon her attractions, for she dined in her own room on the
first evening of her arrival, and either took her breakfast very
late or very early, for no one saw her until luncheon the second
day. Mrs. Rollins, Mrs. Bradley, Mrs. Horton Campbell, our
litterateur, and I were seated together at a table discussing
realism in fiction, and trying to persuade ourselves that the rice-
pudding of our American girlhood was taking on a new and un
definable flavor under the guise of ponding du riz, when Miss
Bonner came into the room. She paused timidly by the door
until Emil, the head waiter, came over rather languidly to show
her a seat. Emil knew as well as Mrs. Bradley what was and
what was not good form. We all stared at Miss Bonner more
pointedly than any of us would have liked to have people stare
at us. She was rather petite, almost too slender, with Titian
hair done up high on her head, a fluffy bang, straight nose, and
very pretty dark-blue eyes, which seemed to have an appealing,
almost a pathetic, look in them as she glanced around the
room with its sea of strange faces. She wore a stylish suit of
navy blue, and we decided on the spot that wherever her home
might be her clothes were certainly city made. Mrs. Horton
Campbell was saying that the reason of the lack of general ap-
preciation for Tolstoi and Tourgeneff was that they wrote too
far above the intelligence of the proletarian reader, and that we
have here in America not only the conditions for tragedy, but
that the conditions generate the facts, and we were all feeling
very superior and cultivated ; but that did not prevent our tak-
ing in the details of Miss Bonner's appearance, or keep us from
seeing Bunnie Hines when he came in and took the seat next
to the stranger. He was popularly supposed to have another
name which he signed in his bank-book and used on ceremoni-
ous occasions, but with us it was only a tradition, since none of
us had ever happened to be around when the occasion was seri-
ous enough to. banish " Bunnie." But it was personal know-
ledge and not mere theories, which are often vague and unsatis-
factory, which we had that Bunnie Hines would flirt with
anything in petticoats, over sixteen and under sixty, so we were
not surprised, but only amused, when he handed Miss Bonner
the cream jug, which sometimes actually did contain cream, and
said something which we could not hear, accompanied with the

1892.] AT THE PENSION ROGUET. 549

dazzling smile which, with a blond moustache, constituted the
piece de resistance of his fascinations.

Mrs. Parks, who sat at the next table to us, gurgled an inar-
ticulate assent to everything that was said, but Mrs. Campbell
did not mind her in the least. Mrs. Parks was the victim of an
unrequited attachment for Mrs. Campbell, which dated back to
the first month of her residence at the Pension Roguet. She
announced one morning that she and Mrs. Campbell ought to
be good friends because they were both literary, and that, for
her part, she just doted on books. And when Mrs. Campbell,
who belonged to a Browning Society and read papers on
transcendentalism and the American immortals before the Tues-
day Club, discovered that Mrs. Parks read Berthas Lovers and
counted the " Duchess " among her favorite writers, the look
she bestowed on her literary confrere would simply have extin-
guished a less unextinguishable mortal than Mrs. Parks.

There was only one other person at the table with Miss Bon-
ner, and she came in rather late, some time after Bunnie Hines
had evidently made the acquaintance of the young lady. Miss
Deets was a spinster from the top-floor hall bedroom, who had
practised Christian science unsuccessfully enough to get her
name in the papers in connection with a child who died under
her care. As a rule we were very liberal in the matter of
other people's opinions and prejudices, but after Miss Deets sent
Mrs. Parks into hysterics trying to drive away a belief in neural-
gia, and had failed to cure Mrs. Bradley 's baby of a belief in a
fractured ankle, we decided that the religious rights guaranteed
by the Constitution could be abused, and quite unanimously
drew the line of our toleration at Miss Deets.

We noticed afterwards that Miss Bonner always exchanged
greetings with her two companions at table, but seemed to
utterly ignore the rest of us. We were willing enough to be
made acquainted with her life, prospects, and previous condition
of freedom, and if they proved satisfactory to permit her to en-
joy our society, but she showed no inclination whatever for that
boon. Mrs. Rollins said it was always a bad sign when a wo-
man kept aloof from other women. But it was 'probably Mrs.
Parks's insistance on the romantic which made us all agree finally
that there was something really mysterious about Miss Bonner.
Mrs. Parks speculated daily as to whether she was a runaway
wife, a truant daughter who wanted to go on the stage, an em-
bezzler hiding from justice, an accomplice in some terrible crime
of which we might have read in the newspapers in her very

550 AT THE PENSION ROGUET. [July,

presence, an heiress seeing the world incognito, or a modern Juliet
being forced into a loveless marriage which she had run away to
escape in any case she was sure that the girl had run away.
My own modest suggestions that perhaps she had come to the
city to study stenography, or art, or telegraphy, or to do shop-
ping, or prove her claim to an estate in Europe, or perhaps just
for a change of air, were not listened to for a moment. After
a fortnight or so I ceased to pay much attention to Miss Bon-
ner or her secrets. I was actively engaged in a newly organized
charity the establishment of training-schools for working-girls
and my time was very much taken up with it ; my fourth cousin,
with her seven servants and her carriage, had the sublime assur-
ance to say to me : " You have no house and no children to
take care of, so you can afford to devote a great deal of time
to the schools." Still at various odd moments I was regaled
with the tittle-tattle of our charming Pension.

Mrs. Rollins told me that Miss Bonner went out every day
for several hours, generally in the morning. Mrs. Parks discov-
ered that twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, she
watched eagerly for the postman, and that she received a letter
each time in a large envelope. Mrs. Bradley saw her give a let-
ter to Emil to post one evening when it was raining, and quite
by accident she was coming down the stairs at the same time
with Emil she saw a fragment of the superscription, " Law-
rence " " Wash Her correspondent was evidently a man
who lived in Washington. Mrs. Rollins, whose room adjoined
Miss Bonner's, told us with the air of imparting a state secret,
one morning, that the girl had sobbed all night, adding that she
frequently heard her pacing the floor and that her gas generally
burned long after midnight. The mystery was deepening. Mrs.
Watts hoped that her presence would not have a bad effect on
Lucy. I am afraid I smiled in the good woman's face at that.
Lucy Watts was a maiden who had long since cut her wisdom
teeth, with a very evident desire not to remain Lucy Watts, and
in her methods of belleship she had not omitted one jot of the
privileges which an independent American girl of the most radi-
cal type could claim. In fact, before the advent of Miss Bonner
we had vented much virtuous indignation on Lucy Watts, and
Lucy Watts's mother.

Mrs. Rollins's announcement sent a great wave of pity surg-
ing through my heart, and I silently determined to make some
friendly advances to the occupant of the east room. The picture
of the girl sobbing out her anguish, friendless and alone, touched

1892.] AT THE PENSION ROGUET. 551

a chord of pity which, amidst the cares of the world, perhaps
vibrates too seldom for our sister women. Who was she, and
what was she ? and who was Lawrence ? and what was she doing
at the Pension Roguet ? were the questions which no one could
answer.

And what was her terrible trouble ? Tears were not unusual,
for tears are the portion of women, but a grief which surged in-
to audible sobs was certainly no common grief. A chance had not
presented itself for me to put my good resolutions into practice
when I was startled one evening, on my return from the matinee,
by the news that Miss Bonner had gone. She had paid her
second month's board in advance only the week before, and her
trunk and possessions had been left in the east room ; but she
herself had flown. She had told madame that she would be
away for a couple of weeks, telephoned for a cab, and in it, with
a big valise, had taken her departure.

Mrs. Parks was sure that she had eloped with Lawrence.

II.

Lent began rather early that year, and Miss Bonner's unex-
plained departure on Friday was overshadowed the next week by
the penitential sackcloth and ashes. It was considered quite
good form at the Pension Roguet to observe Lent, although it
was not required by many of the churches represented there.
Mrs. Rollins was a Presbyterian, whom some of us suspected had
consigned certain ones to regions not Elysian ; Mrs. Parks was
a Unitarian some very nice people had joined the Unitarians
since Doctor Harris became pastor of Bethany, the most fash-
ionable Unitarian congregation in town ; Mrs. Bradley was an
Episcopalian as a matter of course, and went to service twice a
day with a dainty prayer-book bound in purple, with gold clasps ;
equally of course, Mrs. Horton Campbell was a Liberalist, alto-
gether beyond the shackle of creeds ; madame herself was a
Catholic who went to her duties once or twice a year, and to
Mctss on Sundays when she had time and the weather was pleas-
ant ; she never objected to religious discussions if her children
were not present, or she could make some excuse for sending
them out of the room and they generally ended amicably
enough, without a single change of opinion.

The next installment of the tragedy which we had come to
believe had begun under our roof was given quite casually by
Mrs. Horton Campbell's husband he was generally designated in
that way who remarked, over a game of whist, that he had seen

552 AT THE PENSION ROGUET. [July,

Miss Bonner down-town the day after she had left the Pension
Roguet talking to Bunnie Hines. And so she had entangled
Bunnie Hines in her meshes in one short month ! Mrs. Parks
wanted to know why in the world he had not mentioned so im-
portant a matter before. He could not see that there was any-
thing important about so simple a fact as a young lady talking
to a young man standing by a florist's window, but Mrs. Brad-
ley said it was of vital importance when the young lady was
supposed to be out of the city. I feebly put in that perhaps she
was visiting friends, but Mrs. Parks declared that during her
sojourn at the Pension Roguet she had never had a single caller ;
so that theory was altogether untenable. It certainly was a
mystery, and mysteries are bad form, as Mrs. Bradley would say.
When Mrs. Rollins interviewed Bunnie Hines the next morning
he seemed even more stupid than usual, and all he could tell
was that he had seen and spoken to Miss Bonner for only a
minute on the day in question.

Mrs. Parks confided to me a few days later that she had
been in Miss Bonner's room whilst the chambermaid was clean-
ing it, and that she had found two or three bottles, a picture of
an awfully handsome man on the dresser, another picture of
herself taken in evening dress, a work-basket with some crochet
in it, and a statue of the " Virgin." Mrs. Parks was uncompro-
mising in her horror of images, having been raised a Methodist.

Whilst I was shocked at so flagrant a want of honor, I must
confess that I listened to her account with interest. To invade
a private apartment during the absence of the occupant, and go
prying into drawers and baskets, was a deed I should have
thought even beyond Mrs. Parks.

Nearly three weeks went by since Miss Bonner's departure
and no light had yet been thrown on the mystery. It was one
of those soft, bright days which sometimes come in March as a
herald of spring, and Mrs. Campbell and I were out in the yard
inhaling the balmy freshness of the air, when a carriage drove
up, and Miss Bonner was assisted out of it looking simply Kke
death, and tottered up the steps and into the house. By a com-
mon impulse we went in, but she was already disappearing at
the top of the stairway, leaning on the strong arm of Emil.
Madame went hurrying up the stairs a moment afterwards, and
came down a half-hour later with a troubled countenance. To
our inquiries she said that Miss Bonner had been very ill, and
that the exertion of returning had been too much for her
strength and she was temporarily overcome, but it was nothing

1892.] AT THE PENSION ROGUE T. 553

serious. Madame's horror of sickness in the house would have
prevented her from describing even the small-pox as serious, we
knew very well, and I for one thought Miss Bonner was a very
sick girl. There was nothing more to be said, although it should
not be inferred that we said nothing, and we resigned ourselves
to await developments.

It was after ten o'clock that night, and I was already prepar-
ing for bed, when madame knocked at my door. It was not of-
ten that the gifted mistress of the Pension Roguet took counsel
with any of her patrons, and when she did her confidence was
both an honor and a responsibility. With the most graceful of
apologies for troubling me the French know so well how to
say a thing, and how to stop at exactly the right point she
said that she was alarmed about Miss Bonner, who was feverish
and partially delirious ; she thought a physician ought to be called,
but Doctor Powell's name was marked on her medicine bottles ;
she had telephoned for him and the message had come back
that he was not in. She declared, sinking with a tired expres-
sion into a rocking-chair, that she did not know what to do.
Madame has a good heart, although twenty years of experience
with all sorts of people has put a little crust over some of its
softer spots, but anything like real suffering breaks through it as
if it had never been. I immediately offered to go down and
stay with the girl, well knowing how impossible it was for ma-
dame to be in all parts of her house at once looking after her
children, managing her husband, and directing her servants, and
nursing Miss Bonner at the same time. I slipped on a house-
gown and a pair of old slippers and went down to our patient.

She was slumbering uneasily, tossing about on her pillow
and murmuring a word now and then. I was struck with the
pictures Mrs. Parks had told me of ; her own with a bright,
happy expression none of us had ever seen her wear, and the
handsome, manly-looking fellow who gazed with a frank directness
out of the easel-frame on the bureau. The Blessed Virgin seem-
ed to look down with an all-embracing pity from a shelf in one
corner, and a vase with a few withered flowers stood at her feet.
I felt, somehow, that a girl who placed flowers before the statue
of the Universal Mother could not be a bad girl radically, what-
ever may have been her temptations or even her sins.

It is such a sad old world after all, and I, with my thirty-five
years, had learned some of its sorrows only too well.

I bathed her face in cologne, brushed her hair, and admin-
istered a dose of celery compound and some pellets which I al-
VOL. LV. 36

554 AT THE PENSION ROGUE T. [July,

ways keep, but seldom take. The advantage of these homoeo-
pathic remedies is that whilst they may do some good, espe-
cially if you believe in them strongly enough, they never do any
harm.

She closed her eyes again as if unutterably weary, and I
seated myself at the side of her bed and began to stroke her
forehead and hair with the movement Fred, my poor husband,
always liked. He used to say I was a born nurse. Presently
she went to sleep again, and I caught the name " Lawrence,
Lawrence ! " under her breath. I thought, with a little sob ris-
ing in my throat, that if only science could find a way of taking
out a woman's heart by a surgical operation the part of it that
feels and loves and suffers what a heritage of pain would be
spared so many!

Who was Lawrence, and what was he to this girl, hardly
more than a child, tossing on a bed of pain in a strange hotel?

Madame came again for a little while, and seemed relieved
when I told her that I should spend the night with our patient.
Miss Deets came down also, wearing a flowered challie Mother
Hubbard, and with her bangs put aside for the night, and in-
sisted on curing the poor young lady; but her offer was most
heartlessly declined. She said the consequence of my refusal
must be on my own head, and took her departure not in anger
but in sorrow.

I was always rather fanciful, and as I kept watch at my post,
the silence disturbed only by the breathing of my patient and
the ticking of the clock, memory and imagination were given full
play. That very room, in the palmy days of the mansion, had
belonged to the youngest daughter of the house, and her life,
so guarded, so happy, so loved, rose up in dramatic contrast to
the wan little creature in it then. The room adjoining, where
Mrs. Rollins had set up her household gods the few she pos-
sessed had been an elder sister's. Truly, these old family
mansions are haunted, not by the ghosts of departed spirits
but by the wraiths of departed hopes and pleasures, familiar
faces, and lost honors. The beautiful salon parlor had been
divided by a cheap partition into two bedrooms, which were
occupied by a commonplace couple and their son ; the library
had been converted into a general parlor ; the dining-room, where
statesmen and wits and belles had feasted, was given up to the
heterogeneous crowds of a family hotel. Mrs. Horton Campbell
had the President's room, so-called from a tradition that a presi-
dent of the United States had once been the guest of the owner

1892.] AT THE PENSION ROGUET. 555

of the mansion, and had slept in that room. Little Mrs. Parks
seemed strangely out of place in the apartment which had once
belonged to the eldest daughter, described as a queenly girl with
a train of admirers. A bit of statuary, a child leading a lamb,
had been left in the room, and around the neck of the lamb
Mrs. Parks had tied a progressive euchre favor. I resisted the
temptation more than once to tear it off and pitch it into the
grate. In one room a young man, the second son, handsome,
talented, with fairest prospects, had died just after leaving col-
lege ; in another a bride had donned her wedding robes ; here a
sick child racked its mother's heart, there an .ambitious boy
pored over his lessons ; ghostly music and ghostly flowers and
ghostly laughter filled the air, and a ghostly train of talent and
beauty swept through the ghost-lit hall. About midnight the
wind came up and clouds began to chase each other across the
heavens ; the stars disappeared and the moon put on a veil. The
shutters rattled gruesomely, and as the wind got stronger and
went moaning around the house, the image came to me of the
girl, sleeping now almost quietly, walking the floor, sobbing out
her grief, or pressing her face, feverish and hot, against the win-
dow-panes (for the windows went down to the floor), and seek-
ing from nature the sympathy withheld by creatures. Here in
the bay-window, where that other girl had dreamed her dreams
and drunk in the beauty of a night in June, this one had bat-
tled with despair. The constellations shone on the one as they
had shone on the other, their eternal beauty ever the same.
Nature does not change, nor God. Only man grows hard and
cold and cynical, or sinks and rises with weary endeavor, and so
goes on until life's pilgrimage is over.

I went over to the embrasure of the window and sank on my
knees to think, for my conscience was saying many things that
were not pleasant to hear. It said that I called myself a Chris-
tian woman, and went to the asylums and the purlieus of pover-
ty seeking for objects of kindness, and that the stranger at my
gates had been neglected ; and whether sinning or only sad, she
was a woman like myself and with claims on our common wo-
manhood. The Saviour of men had not spurned even the out-
cast, and why should we hold ourselves aloof from a sister, even
granting that she had erred? and of that we had not the slight-
est proof. Why had we been so ready to think evil, so slow to
think good ?

The next morning everybody seemed to know that Miss Bon-
ner was ill, and not a few asked perfunctorily if they could be

556 AT THE PENSION ROGUET. [July,

of any assistance in nursing. Mrs. Parks was quite excited ; she
was sure that the tragedy was deepening, and that the fifth act
might be on at any time. I had put her out of the room al-
most by force ; for she was of no earthly use and of very de-
cided harm, for the patient seemed to know that an alien was
in the room, and tossed about uneasily until she left. She came
back to say that she had camphor and salts and quinine, if they
would be of any benefit, but I declined her supplies. They all
wanted to be around when Doctor Powell came, satisfied that he
could give a clue to the mystery; but madame, with her usual
prudence, refused* to allow any one to enter the room when she
came up with the physician, a good old man whom I had met be-
fore. He said that he had treated Miss Bonner for some time ;
that she had been in the hospital for three weeks, and he was
very much surprised and very angry when he found that she
had left.

So she had been in the hospital ; that was the solution. But
why had she made such a mystery of her acts; and why had
she not gone to the hospital at once if she had come to the
city for medical aid? The doctor did not say for what malady
he had treated her, but pronounced the present attack to be a
low fever, brought on by over-exertion, which might prove very
serious. As I was the self-constituted nurse, he gave me the
directions, the most imperative being that she was to have as
much sleep as possible.

In the afternoon I saw a boy in the familiar uniform of the
Western Union Telegraph Company mounting the steps ; by a
sort of intuition I immediately connected his presence with Miss
Bonner. Madame brought up the message, but the girl had just
dropped off to sleep and I feared to wake her. Still the message
might be of the first importance, so, after some little deliberation,
we decided to open it ourselves. It was dated at Washington,
and was sent to " Miss Beatrice Bonner, 16 Langdon Place."
It ran :

" I am unexpectedly called to New York ; may have to go
on to Bermuda ; awfully sorry. Received but one letter from
you last week ; am uneasy. Send letters to the Brevoort. Wire
me if you are ill.

" LAWRENCE."

At last here was some one on whom 'we could shift the bur-
den of Miss Bonner's welfare. Whether lover, brother, or guar-
dian, " Lawrence " was certainly the one to be informed of her

1892.] AT THE PENSION ROGUET. 557

illness. So we indited a reply, whilst the boy was humming
snatches from " La Cigale " . in the hall below, from which we
hoped a speedy and special result :

" Miss jBonner is very ill. Wire instructions.

" MRS. JACQUES ROGUET."

And then we realized the important fact, before overlooked,
that we had no address. " Lawrence " Lawrence who f We
could not very well send a message to a man named Lawrence.
Desperate diseases require desperate remedies, I thought, and
proceeded to break open the lock to Miss Bonner's writing-desk
in the hope of finding a letter or some clue to the name. There
was not a scrap in the way of a letter, but in a little compart-
ment was a pressed rosebud and a card with a verse scrawled
on it, and yes, the name, " Lawrence Orbison."

Towards evening the girl awoke and seemed to be less fev-
erish.

I gave her the telegram, and when she read it she burst in-
to tears, moaning, " Lawrence not coming after all." After a
little while she added, " But I am glad he is not coming ; I
would not have him come and find me ill for anything." I
thought of the telegram, but still I did not regret sending it.
Sick people do not always know what is best for them, and I
saw no reason why her friends should be kept in ignorance of
her illness. We received no answer all the next day, and I was
seriously afraid that Lawrence had already sailed for Bermuda
when the telegram reached New York.

In the evening she seemed to be much better and perfectly con-
scious, so I asked her if there was no one in Miltonville she would
like to send for ; she shook her head and said : " I have no one
in Miltonville ; I have no one anywhere but Lawrence. You are
surprised at that I see, but I can explain it all. You have been
so good, so good to me, I should like to tell you all about
everything. Even when I was asleep I knew that you were
near me. I thank you more than I can tell for all your kindness.
You have nursed me as tenderly as a mother or a dear sister
could have done, and I shall love you always, always. But you
think it strange that I have no friends I know." Then she
raised herself slightly on the pillow and turned her face, resting
her head lightly on* her hand ; it was a gesture I remembered
in Fred when he wanted to talk.

" My parents died when I was a child," she went on ; " my

558 AT THE PENSION ROGUET. [July,

mother when I was a baby, my father when I was ten years
old. I had no near relatives ; my father's brothers were all
killed in the war, and my mother was an only child. A friend
of my father's was made my guardian. I had a few thousand
dollars, and I was sent off to school, where I remained for seven
years, with the exception of vacations, passed at first with my
guardian and afterwards with different school friends. M^ guar-
dian's wife died ; he married again, and I did not get along with
the new wife ; she was very young, and not very good to the
children, and I, of course, sided with them. So after I left
school, instead of living with my guardian, I went to board with
a widow in reduced circumstances residing in the village. We
were not particularly congenial, so there was no intimacy be-
tween us ; still I lived a comparatively happy life with her. I
occupied my time with my music and books and painting, and
in the little amusements which even a small town affords, until
six months went by, and then I met my fate, as the girls say.
I met Lawrence Mr. Lawrence Orbison ; he was state senator
at the time, and considered one of our leading men in that part
of the country. I suppose it was love at first sight for both of
us, or very near it ; and in less than three months he asked me
to be his wife and I said ' yes.' I could not have said anything
else, for he had come to mean all the world to me. In the
meantime he had been nominated for Congress, and of course all
his ambition was centred in the campaign ; and he is very ambi-
tious. We were to have been married just after the election ;
no one doubted that he would be elected ; but elected or de-
feated, that would have made no difference in the time of the
wedding. We had only been engaged a little while when I was
thrown from my horse and hurt rather seriously, although I soon
got well, excepting a lump in my side which puzzled all the
doctors and caused me a great deal of pain. Suddenly I re-
' membered and no one can ever realize what the recollection
cost me that my grandmother had died from a cancer, and the
thought that perhaps a similar fate would be mine came with
the horror the thought of death in any other form could not
have had. I concealed my fears from everybody from Lawrence
most of all ; he is so generous, and noble, and good, he would
have insisted on our marriage taking place at once so that he
could take care of me. But I wanted to leave him entirely free
for his political duties. I knew how all his Hopes were centred
on going to Congress, and I also knew how much depended on
his success during his first term. The record made then would

1892.] AT THE PENSION ROGUET. 559

be the hinge of his political career. I did not want him to be
harassed with a sick wife; so much would depend, too, on his
social footing, on knowing just the right sort of people, and yet
he could not go out and leave an invalid bride at home. I
thought the matter all over, and determined to postpone the
marriage at any sacrifice until I was cured, if cure were possible.
I said I wanted to take a post-graduate course in music, have
my trousseau prepared in the city, and trumped up various ex-
cuses for deferring the marriage until spring ; he was angry at
first, and could not understand why I could act so in view of
my professed love for him and my friendless condition, but
finally he assented to my plan. And then I came here. I saw
the house advertised and liked the name, and I found out that
it was considered a nice, quiet place. I dared not go to a hos-
pital for fear of arousing Lawrence's suspicions. The doctor I
went to see Dr. Powell the first day I came did not think I
had a cancer, but only an abscess which could have been healed
before if my physician had understood his business. An opera-
tion was, however, necessary, and so I went to the hospital for
that, directing the postman to send my letters there. I was just
able to be out of bed when I got a letter from Lawrence say-
ing that he was compelled to go to Miltonville to attend to
some business, and that he would be here in a few days. My
first thought was that it would never do for him to find me
in a hospital ; so, in spite of the protests of my nurse, I came
back to the Pension Roguet. I did not ask Dr. Powell, for I
knew he would forbid the move. And now to find that Law-
rence is not coming after all !"

There was a quiver in her tones as she said the last which
made my heart ache.

Her voice was getting husky, so I gave her a sup of cham-
pagne with a bit of cracked ice, and made her rest for awhile,
realizing for once in my life the full sting of remorse. I felt
like getting on my knees, and forcing every evil-minded, ignoble
woman in the house to do the same, to beg that poor girl's
pardon. Self-sacrifice and the heroic are familiar terms ; they
have been enshrined in song and story, in the annals of history
and in the pages of the novelist, but a nobler character had not
been conceived, either by Mrs. Parks's romanticists or the real-
ists of Mrs. Horton Campbell, than this same girl who had
chosen a lonely exile on a bed of pain, perhaps a friendless
death, rather than injure in any way the prospects of the man
she loved.

560 AT THE PENSION ROGUE T. [July,

I wondered if the Honorable Lawrence, even granting that he
was a very superior person, and the testimony of Beatrice on
that point would not hold in any fair-minded court, would have
sacrificed himself for her, and my experience compelled me to
answer my own question with a decided negative. Men are
naturally selfish, not from deliberate intention, but from thought-
lessness, and whilst ninety-nine out of a hundred would accept
any sacrifice from a woman, only the hundredth man would
think of so sacrificing himself for her.

Without giving all the details, I quickly informed Mrs. Hor-
ton Campbell and Mrs. Rollins that Miss Bonner was a most
lovely girl in every way ; that she was engaged to one of
our brilliant young Congressmen, who was one of the most
prominent men in the State ; of course I accepted the valua-
tion of Beatrice as far as sounding his praises to the public
went. He might or might not be a superior personage, but his
face inclined one to the former opinion. I explained that she
had come to the city for medical treatment, having been injured
from being thrown from a horse, and that as she had not chosen
to take a lot of blabbing, strange women into her confidence, it
only showed that she still possessed the prudence with which
every well-constituted baby is born.

It relieved my feelings wonderfully to say this, and I went
back to my post quite refreshed. Mrs. Rollins said that she had
always thought there was something very distinguished about
the girl. Mrs. Bradley insisted that a well-brought-up person
ought to have known better than to come, as she did, to a big
city alone, but acknowledged that girls, even the nicest, do
strange things sometimes through mere thoughtlessness. Mrs.
Parks was slightly disappointed that the clue to the mystery
(she still clung to the "mystery") had not been more romantic.

The next day was drawing to a close and I was resting by
the window when a carriage drew up ; it looked very much like
the one which had brought poor Beatrice back to the roof which
had given her so cold a welcome, and a young man jumped out
with a spring and entered the gate. I did not have to be told
that the Honorable Lawrence had come. And then I realized
that I had been looking for 'him all day. Premonition, or what-
ever it was, I did not stop to analyze, but I knew that the
panacea for one girl's weary heart was then but a few feet
away.

Madame came to the door I heard her tripping up the stairs
and said in a whisper that Mr. Orbison had come and would I

1892.] AT THE PENSION ROGUET. 561

break the news to Beatrice? It is so easy to prepare one for
good news ; it is only the bad that rends our souls in the telling.
I turned away when madame and the young law-maker came
in, but the happiness expressed in the little cry of " Lawrence "
swept the years away and made me eighteen again myself.

Forty-eight hours afterwards a wedding took place, by special
dispensation, which Mrs. Parks would have pronounced delight-
fully romantic if by any chance she had been permitted to wit-
ness it. Mr. Orbison insisted on it, and under the circumstances
it seemed the best, in fact the only thing.

It was a romantic bridal in the sense that there was nothing
conventional about it. No stately procession up a broad church
aisle, no shimmering satin train and orange-blossoms, ushers and
music, and hundreds of staring people ; no flash of tapers, and
odors of incense, and beautiful ceremonies ; but it was an im-
pressive wedding nevertheless. The bridal dress was a Grecian
robe of soft silken white, confined at the waist with a heavy
cord, the hair was coiled loosely with a coronet of white hya-
cinths. The statue of the Virgin Mother was half-hidden in a
bower of roses, and the odor of flowers filled the room. A
priest in surplice and stole received the vows which made the
two one, and Madame Roguet and myself were the only wit-
nesses.

Although Mr. Orbison is not a rich man, he chartered a car,
swung a hammock in it, and took his bride to Washington.

That was two months ago. Last week I received a long
letter from Beatrice she writes to me constantly and persists
in exaggerating the little service I was able to render her in
which she tells me that she has entirely recovered from her ill-
ness. After devoting four pages to her house which I imagine
must be charming, and which she says contains a room furnished
especially for me a paragraph to her husband, who is simply
the most perfect of men, she ends with an allusion to herself as
the happiest girl in the universe, and signs : " Beatrice Orbison."

^T....- . -~^ BUGG.

Wichita, Kansas.

562 THE COMING TOTAL-ABSTINENCE CONVENTION. [July,

SUGGESTIONS FOR THE COMING TOTAL-ABSTI-
NENCE CONVENTION.

THE drink problem, no matter whither we turn, everywhere
confronts us. It , enters largely into all the great reform move-
ments of our day. The Catholic priest, who is by his sublime
calling a reformer in the best sense of that much-abused word r
finds intemperance the worst foe he has to meet and the hard-
est to conquer. In the daily rounds of parish work, especially
in our large towns and cities, there is a constant state of war-
fare between the zealous pastor and this stubborn enemy of
man's peace and happiness.

In the parish school, in the homes of the poor, in the atten-
dance at church on Sundays and holydays, on sick-calls, in his
efforts to relieve the awful misery and distress with which no one
is more familiar than the priest who ministers in any of our
large parishes everywhere he has to witness the terrible ruin
and havoc that intemperance has wrought in the souls of his
people. The faithful pastor is soon convinced that there can be
no truce with a foe like this. He sees that this horrid vice
withers and blasts everything that it touches ; that it destroys
utterly the domestic, social, intellectual, physical, and moral life
of the individual upon whom it fixes its clutch. The priest,
therefore, who is ever conscious of the solemn responsibility
the burden of souls laid upon him I set down as a leader in
the battle that is being waged against the demon of drink. His
natural position is in the front ranks of the fight that is going
on all around us. Others may falter and desert the field ; but
he never. The good people of his parish, the best citizens, the
moral sense of the community, as well as his own conscience,
will lend him support and encouragement, will applaud his zeal
and second his efforts. And immediately back of the Catholic
priest stands the Church of God, which has given her seal and
sanction to the doctrine of total abstinence. Through her coun-
cils and the voice of the Supreme Pastor, we are appealed to
" never to cease to cry out boldly against drunkenness and what-
ever leads to it."

It is quite true that a multitude of prejudices, based on social
and national customs of long standing, and perhaps some more
reasonable causes, have impeded the efforts to check the ravages

1892.] THE COMING TOTAL-ABSTINENCE CONVENTION. 563

of intemperance. There can hardly be a doubt that the extre-
mists without the Catholic total-abstinence movement and some
few within have not always advanced the cause which they pro-
fess to serve, by the advocacy of measures and methods which
are untimely, if not impracticable. It has been often urged that if
we could unite all those various bodies that are fighting the
evils of intemperance and the abuses of the liquor-traffic on a
reasonable and common platform, our efforts for reform would
prove more successful. We are fighting the enemy with de-
tached forces, and without a well-defined plan of campaign, at a
time that we sorely stand in need of the very best generalship
and a concentration of all our strength.

To illustrate what I have been saying, let us take the single
instance of the sale of intoxicating drink at the Columbian Ex-
position in Chicago. It is now almost certain, despite the ear-
nest protest of a strong Christian sentiment against it, that in-
toxicating drink will be sold on the grounds. But the case
might be entirely different if the various temperance societies,
Catholic and non-Catholic, had united with the Woman's Chris-
tian Temperance Union in the strenuous efforts made by this
band of noble women to prevent the sale of intoxicants at the
Exposition.

Again, when the question of high license or restriction of the
liquor-traffic comes up in our legislatures, or a new excise bill
framed solely in the interests of the saloon, the temperance
people are divided in their views. There is not that united and
firm support of a sound and practicable measure, nor is there
that vigorous and watchful opposition to a bad and dangerous
measure, that one should look for. The friends of the liquor-
traffic and the advocates of the open saloon on Sundays are
permitted to " drown out " the feeble voice of protest that is heard.

Or, to take another instance, here in Pennsylvania we have
an excellent high-license law that is most satisfactory in its
general results. The applicant for a license to sell, whether by
wholesale or retail, has to make an annual application before
the judges of our county courts. He has to satisfy the court of
three things ; namely, that he is a citizen, a person of good
moral character, and that there is a reasonable necessity in the
matter of public accommodation for the place for which a
license is asked. Now, right here our temperance societies could,
if they were alive and thoroughly earnest in their work, do a
great service to the cause which they have pledged themselves
to promote by all lawful means. They could file remonstrances

564 THE COMING TOTAL-ABSTINENCE CONVENTION. [July,

with the courts against all unnecessary and objectionable places,
and against the granting of a license to a saloon-keeper who is
notoriously unfitted to carry on the business. Have our Catho-
lic societies done so ? There have been in the last four years
only a few cases where a remonstrance has been filed by an in-
dividual or society in Pennsylvania against an applicant, no mat-
ter how unworthy he may have been, no matter how much
injury his saloon has been doing to the peace, good order, and
morals of the community. In our conventions we pass ringing
resolutions setting forth our principles and methods of action ;
we reaffirm our belief that intemperance is the chief cause of
poverty and vice, sin and crime ; we support our statement by
a long array of statistics ; we cite the utterances of the venerat-
ed head of the church, the repeated declarations of church
councils, of eminent public teachers of morals, of students of
social science, of national conferences of charities and correction,
of medical men, labor leaders, the heads of great corporations,
judges, and statesmen. We draw a dark picture that brings out
with ghastly plainness the ruin and desolation wrought by the
drink plague ; we lay at the door of the saloon the responsibility
for the chief share of the social discontent and political and
moral corruption that threatens us as a people ; we proclaim
that the mighty power wielded \>y the liquor interest, and which
it constantly exercises on our politics, is a menace to the re-
public ; we make known to the world the means we shall em-
ploy to attain the desired ends. Besides the means pointed out
for us by the church, the influence of prayer, the grace of the
sacraments, good example, kind persuasion, and charity at all
times and under all circumstances, there are " other means "
that are of undoubted value, and most efficient if we would
only put them into a more practical and general use.

What are those " other means "? And what practical use are
we making of them ? Are these weapons of our crusade against
the curse of intemperance only to be brought out of the armo-
ry of Catholic total abstinence once a year, when our grand
army of total-abstinence men and women are, as it were, on
dress parade before the country in our national conventions ?
And are we to lay them aside just as soon as the convention
adjourns without making the enemy feel their keenness and effi-
ciency?

The answer to these questions will furnish some of the rea-
sons why, in the writer's opinion, the cause of total abstinence
does not spread more rapidly among our Catholic people in the

1892.] THE COMING TOTAL- ABSTINENCE CONVENTION. 565

United States. I firmly believe that if everybody, but more es-
pecially the Catholic citizens of the Republic, had definite knowl-
edge of the wide ruin which is being daily wrought by drink
there would be a general movement that would end in the
gradual disappearance of drinking habits. The trouble is that
too many of us see but the faint shadows of the evils against
which we are struggling ; and -too many of us are afraid to
grapple at close quarters with the monster whose deadly work
we would fain stay, if it did not cost us so much.

Let me enumerate a few of those practical means which, in
our conventions and assemblies, we, time and time again, resolve
to put in force. We resolve to put to good use all educational,
industrial, and social means to meet the invasion of this widely
extending evil. In the use of the first of these means we have
recently taken a practical step forward in having prepared and
introduced into our Catholic schools an admirable Manual of
Total Abstinence. This Manual deals with the whole subject in a
simple, clear, and most convincing manner. Our Catholic teach-
ers will, it is to be hoped, make good use of it in our day and
Sunday-schools.

Let me here note the headings of its seven chapters : " The
Virtue of Temperance ;" " Total Abstinence ;" " Temperance in
Scripture ;" " Causes of Drunkenness ;" " Temperance and Bodily
Health ;" " Convivial Drinking and the Saloon ;" " Remedies for
Intemperance." We find in this admirable little Manual clear-cut
ideas, accurate definitions, striking illustrations, valuable testi-
mony, reliable statistics ; in short, everything that is desired on
the subject, and the whole presented in a pithy, attractive form
of question and answer. We find quotations that are striking,
like this from the late Cardinal Manning : " Temperance is good,
but total abstinence is better." And then we have a. definition
of total abstinence which should satisfy the greatest stickler for
theological distinctions. The motives, religious, as well as lauda-
ble human motives, why total abstinence should be practised,
are fully presented. The sin of drunkenness is defined ; the
fearful and sinful consequences of partial drunkenness are
brought out ; experience is appealed to, which shows that many
a man commits his worst sins and crimes when in this condi-
tion. Dealing with the testimony of those who have spoken of
the ravages of this vice of intemperance, we have Mr. Glad-
stone's remarkable words : " Intemperance inflicts more calami-
ties on the world than the three great historical scourges, war,
pestilence, and famine, combined." At the risk of tiring the

566 THE COMING TOTAL-ABSTINENCE CONVENTION. [July,

reader I cannot help making one more extract. It is the fol-
lowing solemn declaration of Cardinal Manning ; no words could
make a deeper and more lasting impression, especially upon a
priest ; they have been ringing in my ears since I first read
them. That great man and priest declared : " For thirty years I
have been priest and bishop in London, and now I approach my
eightieth year. I have learned. some lessons, and the first thing
is this : the chief bar to the working of the Holy Spirit of God
in the souls of men and women is intoxicating drink. I know
no antagonist to that Holy Spirit more direct, more subtle,
more stealthy, more ubiquitous, than intoxicating drink. I know
of no cause that affects man, woman, and child, and home, with
such universality of steady power as intoxicating drink." Every
priest of God laboring in any of our large American cities could
re-echo these words. They come home almost daily to those
among us whose attention has been riveted to them from the
very moment the startling truth which they convey was fully un-
derstood by us.

When we pick up our morning or evening newspaper and
read almost in every issue the long list of crimes, the outrages,
the murders, and suicides, committed by men and women crazed
by strong drink, and find those same men and women bearing
Christian names alas ! too many of them baptized Catholics
then we realize, together with the sense of shame and humilia-
tion that comes upon us not only for our Christianity but
for our common humanity, the sin and misery of it all.

People fish out all sorts of wondrous and obscure causes for
crime. As far as my own experience goes I am almost ready
to agree with those who lump the influences provocative of crime
and productive of misery into one, and call that one cause
DRINK. They hold, and I believe the facts are all on their side,
that drink is to-day the root of almost all evil. It is heartbreak-
ing to know what is going on at our own doors. For, however we
may shuffle and blink, we cannot disguise the fact, even from
ourselves as Catholics, that " Intemperance is," as Archbishop
Ireland expresses it, " our misfortune" It blocks the way of the
church's progress. Until we crush it out Catholicity " can make
but slow advance in America." Other difficulties we can con-
trol and successfully remove, but intemperance, as nothing else,
41 paralyzes our forces, awakens in the minds of our non-Catholic
fellow-citizens violent prejudices against us, and casts over all
the priceless treasures of truth and grace which the church car-
ries in her bosom an impenetrable veil of darkness."

THE COMING TOTAL- ABSTINENCE CONVENTION. 567

What need is there to cite the facts so familiar to all,
and of which both friends and foes are constantly reminding us ?
He who runs can read them. They have burned themselves into
the very souls of many of us. We cannot brush them aside.
Like the ghost in the play they will not down. There they
stand in all their horrid ugliness ; they confront us sleeping and
waking; no matter whither we turn they rise up before us. The
damning record we cannot blot out.

Who will deny it ? Catholics have almost a monopoly of
the liquor-traffic. At this year's session of the License Court of
Allegheny County, in which Pittsburgh and the twin city of Al-
legheny are located, one of our priests requested an official of
that court, who was personally acquainted with almost every ap-
plicant for license, to give him the number of supposed Catholic
applicants, and the proportion they bore to the whole list of ap-
plications filed. The official reported that at least seven out of
every ten of the nineteen hundred applicants for license in Al-
legheny County were Catholics. And I have but little doubt
but the same figures would hold elsewhere. In the great cities
of New York, Chicago, Boston, Cincinnati, San Francisco, St.
Louis, Buffalo, Albany, and others, our people practically " run "
the " dangerous business." They have such a liking for it that
the words of warning and counsel of the fathers of the church
in America, uttered in the Baltimore Pastoral, have influenced
but few, if they have any, to abandon the saloon and find a more
" decent and honorable means of livelihood." The writer of
this article has had some experience in testing this matter ; and
he candidly confesses that he does not know a single instance
where a Catholic man, or even woman, engaged in the liquor
business, either wholesale or retail, has given it up because the
church besought him to do so. But, on the other hand, he has
quite frequently heard from persons who were Catholics only in
name, and hardly that, remarks like the following : " It is none
of the church's business ; I can look after my own affairs with-
out direction or dictation from my church or pastor; if the State
grants me a license that's all I care about "; and many similar
comments have come from the same quarter, furnishing an ad-
ditional proof, if that were needed, that faith no less 'than
morals is sadly impaired by saloon-keeping.

And, what is stranger still, we have seen those who are re-
garded as exemplary, representative Catholics, instead of doing
something to keep their fellow-Catholics out of the saloon busi-
ness, moving heaven and earth that is to say, using their influ-

568 THE COMING TOTAL-ABSTINENCE CONVENTION. [July,

ence to get them into it. Our courts and excise boards have Cath-
olics of this stamp daily vouching for the " character " and good
standing of the applicant and the crying necessity for his saloon,
although the place for which application is made may have al-
ready a dozen or a score of saloons on the block. How long is
this kind of thing to continue ? The Catholic saloon-keeper may
be in ignorance of the advice and solemn warnings of the
church ; but surely our " representative " Catholics cannot plead
ignorance in this matter. In God's name, let us be consistent.
Since the Catholic Church in America has set its face against
the saloon, let us all, priests and laymen, hear the Church.

As to the social and industrial means of advancing the cause
of total abstinence much might be said. Our societies and priests
and teachers in our schools can do a great deal in influencing
our youth to avoid those trades and lines of business where the
workers are more exposed to form habits of drinking. I have
noticed many a young man of most temperate habits, and even
some who were members of our total-abstinence societies, become
addicted to drink simply because of the bad influence of his as-
sociates in the factory or workshop. The temperate young man
could not withstand the badinage of his " boozing " companions;
and he very soon found his way to the saloon with others on
pay-night, to hand over to the saloon-man " who sows not,
neither does he spin" his week's hard earnings, leaving, per-
haps, a widowed mother or a helpless wife and family almost to
starve for the week to come.

It is, indeed, a hopeful sign, that we gladly recognize and hail
as a happy omen of better things for the future, that the social
means employed in the work of total abstinence are being
rapidly developed, and are bearing much fruit.

It must be admitted that the saloon is, in a certain sense,
the poor man's club ; and hence it flourishes most vigorously in
the poorest sections of our cities. The saloon is made attractive ;
it is conveniently located, right round the corner ; it is well
lighted ; it has plants and flowers in the windows ; in some cases
it is provided with a reading-room, and the daily and weekly
papers can be had there ; there is music and lively companion-
ship, and always obliging proprietors. In fact, nothing is left un-
done to draw patronage.

Now wise men are beginning to see very clearly that a sub-
stitute must be supplied to take the place of the saloon, which
shall retain all its good features and simply discard its evil ele-
ments. Of course, this does not mean that we can recognize that

1892.] THE COMING TOTAL-ABSTINENCE CONVENTION. 569

the saloon, as it exists in America, discharges any necessary
function in society ; or that any one, outside of those interested
in the business, would advocate the monstrous and absurd proposi-
tion of the Rev. Dr. Rainsford, of opening " church or religious
saloons." But it means this : that we must find an adequate
substitute for the "saloon, a place equally attractive, where work-
ing-men and boys can spend a pleasant evening with their com-
panions without being exposed to dangerous and evil influences. It
means that we must supply, what is at present being done in many
places, reading-rooms, lyceums, gymnasiums, halls ; and make
such places as attractive as possible. In those places temperate
refreshments could be served to the members and visitors at
cost ; entertainments could be given frequently ; lectures and
regular courses of instruction followed, as is done with such
success in the Young Men's Christian Association. The Colum-
bian Reading Union idea, or the Catholic Reading Circle, will
serve the same purpose. Work of this kind is what is needed
just now, and we thank God that to some extent it is being
done.

Another hopeful feature of the successful application of social
means brought to bear on temperance work is found in the
growing practice of dispensing with intoxicating drinks on the
occasion of reunions, public banquets, and the like. A cold-
water banquet is no longer regarded by many of our " best peo-
ple " as a very "funereal institution," but rather as the proper
thing. I have been much edified, in attending recently a ban.
quet of newspaper men, to find that nothing stronger than
Apollinaris water was served at table. And I was informed
within the past few days by two of my friends, one a clergyman
and the other a prominent physician, who were returning from
an alumni reunion, where a few years ago not "a drop of water"
could be had for love or money imported beer being the re-
gulation beverage that this year there was quite a quantity of
mineral water drank, even at the dinner. And furthermore, it
was related how this change was effected. It came in this wise :
a few of the more prominent members were total abstainers, and
they had the courage it actually needed a little backbone in
this instance to stand by their colors. And because they did
so many others have come over to their side. There are many
of the members of our total-abstinence societies connected with
other organizations ; if they will only carry with them into those
other bodies not only the practice, but also the utterance of
their convictions and principles, they will frequently find an ex-
VOL. LV. 37

570 THE COMING TOTAL-ABSTINENCE CONVENTION. [July,

cellent opportunity for doing some effective missionary work.
What we need in this great movement is to multiply the num-
ber of men and women who are thoroughly in earnest and who
are always ready to express, if with moderation yet with de-
cision, and in words and actions, their personal convictions. Let
us put aside timidity as well as apathy, and stand firmly by a
cause blessed of God and man.

There remains something to be said of the power of the
printed word as a means of repressing drunkenness, and we are
awakening to an understanding of the value of the " Apostolate
of the Press " for promoting total abstinence. The press is a
most powerful means for good. We must make the best use of
it. We know " we are right and can prove it " ; let us employ
the most universal medium of doing so the printed page. How
to do it, why it should be done, when and where it can best be
done, by what agencies and by overcoming what obstacles
these are practical questions which might well be settled at the
approaching Convention of the Catholic Total Abstinence Union
of America, which assembles in the early part of next month at
Indianapolis.

Our constitution has made wise provision for the establish-
ment of a publication bureau as one of the great means where-
by the objects of our National Union are to be attained. The
present is an opportune moment for a more practical and
thorough organization of this department of our work. There is
a vast amount of educational seed-sowing to be done. We are
in very many parts of America not past the spring-time, and in
other parts we have not quite escaped the cold, withering blasts
of winter in this work of Catholic total abstinence. There are,
we are told yes, we know it in this fair land to-day vast
" spiritual deserts " where the voice of Catholic temperance has
never been heard, and where the practice of total abstinence
is almost regarded as a degrading thing. There are persons in
high and low stations who have not even a kind word nor a
friendly sentiment for the doctrine if I may use the word of
total abstinence. These places and persons we must reach and
win to the side of temperance. Let us stop the expenditure of
our energies upon ourselves ; that is to say, as a friend has re-
cently observed, let us not be wasting so much force in " recon-
vincing and converting ourselves."

At the Washington convention last year, Bishop Keane urged
upon his hearers the necessity of, as he put it, " concentrating
our forces." Let us concentrate our forces at once on the estab-

1892.] THE COMING TOTAL-ABSTINENCE CONVENTION. 571

lishment of a Temperance Apostolate of the Press. With a
grand army of sixty or seventy thousand agents and mission-
aries, and a busy printing-press, what victories may we not
achieve ? My experience during the past four years, as head of
the organizing department of the Catholic Total Abstinence
Union of America, has forced upon me this conclusion : that it is
idle to expect an enlarged membership in our unions until we
have summoned to our aid and put to practical use the machin-
ery of the press. Let us thoroughly convert men and women to
total-abstinence principles ; and then, when we organize them
into societies and unions, they will stay organized. In the pre-
sent stage of the work I know of no means better calculated to
bring about this conversion and reformation than the printed
page.

The Catholic Total Abstinence Union has done a great and
noble work ; its means and methods are admirably fitted to suc-
cessfully carry out its beneficent mission ; the weapons it is
using are all right, but they need to be burnished and bright-
ened, that the work may be better done and more of it done.
Jf the Union has failed to accomplish greater things, it is because
the expectations of some were pitched too high ; or due account
has not been made for the great obstacles that have hitherto
stood in the way, and which are now being rapidly removed.
All of us can turn to the future with hope and confidence, look-
ing for the dawn of that better day when every Catholic wor-
thy of the name, and every good citizen, no matter of what
creed or party, will from his heart bless this Catholic Total Ab-
stinence movement for the great work it has done in America
for religion, home, and country.

MORGAN M. SHEEDY.

Pittsburgh, Pa.

572 JOHANNES JANSSEN. [July,

JOHANNES JANSSEN.

IT is now well-nigh seven years since Johannes Janssen wrote
to me from the German summer-resort Cronberg : " I am trying
here to find again what for a long while I have all but lost :
4 sleep, the best friend of man.' " Another friend of humanity
and a greater one came to that long-tried sufferer on Christmas
eve last, when all over Germany the Christmas-trees were being
lighted and joy filled every Catholic heart.

We who knew what his life had been of late, and not of late
only for years his doctor allowed him to work but two hours a
day on his history we do not begrudge him the rest that was
at last granted him. Yet the Catholic world could ill spare him ;
and not the Catholic world alone. His work, though above all
Catholic and German, was of a kind to endear him to scholars
of all creeds and nationalities, and even those who opposed and
abused it benefited by it indirectly. Those approaching a sub-
ject after it had been once treated by him might differ ever so
widely from his views ignore them they could not. Probably
the general judgment of the non-Catholic world on Janssen's
work was never more aptly summarized than in these words of
a French historian in the Revue des Deux Mondes : " To get im-
patient with Janssen is easy : to prove that he is wrong, just the
reverse."

II.

The work upon which Janssen's fame will rest is his History
of the German People, and to be sure it is a work of enduring
worth. Howbeit in the immense success it scored almost in-
stantly there were, as in all great literary successes, elements
other than that of mere scientific merit, the chief one of these
secondary causes being, in Janssen's case, that it came at a time
than which none could have proved more favorable. The victo-
ries of 1870-71 and the resurrection of the empire brought about
in every department of life in Germany what was somewhat
pompously styled "a German renaissance." The style of the
latter half of the fifteenth century became the rage, and unde-
niably Janssen's volumes offer not a little resemblance with those
" renaissance-rooms " which were soon to be found in number-

1892.] JOHANNES JANSSEN. 573

less German houses rooms where everything, from the carvings
of the ceiling to the tiles of the fireplace, from the mottoes
(" Spruche ") on the wall to the oddly-shaped mugs on the man-
tel-piece, were either genuine relics from that great age, or more
or less felicitous imitations. The only difference is that while
most of those parlor-renaissances, not having been arranged by
an artist's hand, are apt to be somewhat lacking in consistency
and harmony, the late historian often notably in his famous
" first volume," which treats of German culture in the fifteenth
century performed the all but incredible feat of producing a
work that reads like contemporary chronicles.

His remarkable knowledge and command of German enabled
him to attain such a result. Few Germans have loved their lan-
guage so well as he, fewer still have been capable of proving
their love as effectively. To the knowing reader few things can
be more interesting and instructive than to study the way Jans-
sen makes use of his quotations. Taine has said anent Car-
lyle's Cromwell, if I mistake not that he would like all histori-
cal writing to consist in extracts from authentic documents, with
just so many words of the author's own as were barely needed
to connect the quotations. But only in the hands of a master
will such literary proceedings work well. Few possess the subtle
instinct that was Janssen's, of selecting exactly such passages from
the documents as convey in fewest words the most information
and convey it at the same time in the most telling way. His
volumes abound in samples of his fine linguistic sense ; in fact,
each page will furnish some. No one who has once read it will
ever forget the chapter on the foundation of the Jesuits, with
the epitome of the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius, every word
breathing purity, self-sacrifice, and loftiness until the author sud-
denly breaks off and winds up with a few frantic passages from
contemporary Protestant sermons against the Society of Jesus.
It is like the push of the foot that sets the boat floating. All
of a sudden we are made aware that the sacred abode where we
dwelt in prayer and meditation is not a temple only, but a for-
tress, a place inviting and soothing to some, repellent and de-
fiant to others. At once we realize the situation and behold the
society that St. Ignatius founded standing out in bold relief, so to
speak.

Another striking instance of Janssen's linguistic taste, trifling
though it may appear to the hurried reader, just comes to my
mind the way in which he has twice employed a sentence from
a letter written by the good burghers of a great German city

5 74 JO HA NNE S JA NSSEN. [July,

Frankfort or Mayence, I forget which in response and refusal
to the urgent appeal of the Emperor Maximilian for pecuniary
aid in his efforts to restrain the Russians. The very words of
this quaint document, and more particularly those of the sen-
tence in question, depict with a vividness that no English trans-
lation can adequately render the cowardly pompousness of those
greedy merchants who, their eyes turned heavenward, bewail
loudly the "terrific undertaking of the Muscovites," clasping all
the while their money-bags with a grip that no patriotic consid-
erations whatsoever could loosen. Janssen's appreciation of this
delightful bit of mediaeval German is made evident by his quot-
ing it first in a little book from the sixties " On the Genesis of
the first Division of Poland " and then afterward transferring
it like the gem it is into the first volume of his History, where
it may now be seen shining in appropriate setting.

In fact, his books are like those large mosaics, wrought by
Venetian masters, where countless multitudes of stones of* many
colors have been made to combine all and every one in the
production of pictorial effects, as artistic as they are original.

III.

What Janssen purposed to write was a work that, while not
neglecting what was strictly necessary of diplomatic intrigues
and military operations, concerned itself chiefly with the life of
the people in the broadest sense of this term, delineating with
such accuracy as only modern historical science is capable of
all the public functions, every phase of the private life, of those
slowly moving masses of whom a German poet * had sung :

" The foreign conquerors come and go :
We submit but we remain."

The chief difficulty here is to manage the numberless minute
traits, so as never to let the naked lines of the fundamental de-
sign become visible, nor drown these altogether under shapeless
heaps of details. In this he succeeded, in my opinion and that
of many others, as admirably as any great modern historian
M. Taine or Mr. Lecky, for instance. And whoever compares
his first volume with the corresponding chapters in Ranke's His-
tory of the Reformation, will at once realize how meagre and
unsatisfactory is the account given by the latter.

Another accomplishment which it is highly beneficial for a
historian to possess is such plastic talent as may be evinced in

* Schiller.

1892.] JO HA NNE S JA NSSEN. 575

the portraits occasionally drawn either in separate essays or irf
the course of the historical narrative. This quality, strange to
say, is almost never to be found with German writers, and I aril
thinking now not of historians only. Here we have one of the
reasons why German novels, as compared with French, Russian,
or English, enjoy so little popularity abroad ; their characters do
not stand out full and massive like statues ; they are continually
floating about, very much like the vague figures formed by the
clouds. Of the historians, Ranke has been extravagantly praised
for the plasticity of his characters ; yet Luther, Charles V., and
Frederick the Wise seem misty and commonplace when con-
trasted with the Dantons or the Robespierres of a Taine. I need
scarcely add that a writer may be lacking in this ability and yet be a
great historian, it being a distinctly artistic quality so I shall be
saying nothing extremely hard on Janssen when I state that he
never gave proof of possessing it in any remarkable degree.
The only volume of essays he ever published Zeit- und Lebens-
bilder contains one perfectly beautiful sketch, that of the Ger-
man Capuchin, Francis Borgia Fleischmann, which might seem
to disprove my verdict. On closer inspection, however, it may
easily be seen that the author's personal acquaintance with his
subject has given to his treatment in this case a certain distinct-
ness of touch which we look for in vain where he is concerned
with strictly historical figures. Moreover, the lovely friar's char-
acter was one of great simplicity and thus comparatively easy to
draw, while more complex psychological problems seem to baffle
our author.

Compare, for instance, with Taine's portrait of Napoleon the
one of Maximilian inserted toward the end of the first volume
of Janssen's History. Surely this Maximilian is not the, to say
the least, careless husband, the astute diplomat, and vain-glori-
ous knight whom we know of from other sources. Janssen pre-
sents us the hero of a popular play or novel, with all the abstract
nobleness that such a creature is supposed to glory in.

It should be at once added that the deficiency just pointed
out is hardly noticeable in Janssen's great History, for the obvi-
ous reason that only in the first part does he make a few at-
tempts at direct portrait-painting, while in the following volume
he relates simply such facts concerning the characters as the
course of the general narrative necessitates, thus leaving it to the
reader to form by himself pictures of the actors, not even stop-
ping to sketch in full the heroes of the period. Howbeit I can
scarcely believe that this action of Janssen's is to be ascribed to

576 JOHANNES JANSSEN. [July,

his acknowledging his lack of the sculptor's gift. I am rather
inclined to think he chose this peculiar way of historical compo-
sition out of other than artistic considerations.

IV.

The thing was, he understood fully that he was producing a
work which it would prove extremely difficult to make the non-
Catholic public accept with anything like an even mind. His
aim was solely to present the truth, pure and simple, but only
a blind man might have been unable to suspect that this truth
was of a kind to make hundreds of thousands burst with indig-
nation. And Janssen had keen eyes, so he chose to remain
hidden, as it were, behind the facts, allowing these to speak for
themselves. Through copious and careful selections, mostly from
the letters, diaries, and writings of the very persons concerned,
he furnishes the reader with material sufficient to form his own
judgment.

You hear no qualifying words from Janssen's own lips, you
never get a peep at his own face, yet while reading him one comes
across passages which one would almost swear to have been penned
with a grim smile as, for example, when at the close of a
chapter, made up of the atrocities committed in Wiirtemberg by
the duke himself, in order to crush out the Catholic faith, Jans-
sen puts in this single sentence : " Thus was ' the pure word of
God ' introduced into Wiirtemberg." Notice that " the pure
word of God " is within quotation marks, this being one of the
pet phrases of the " reformers."

With the few exceptions above mentioned Janssen employs
his impersonal method throughout his work, although for the
first volume the considerations just indicated would be of little
weight. Coming, as already noticed, at a time when it was the
fashion to exalt everything German, it furnished ample evidence
that the fifteenth century in Germany had been in sundry re-
spects a period of high culture and noble achievements ; it was,
moreover, reading as fascinating as any novel. No wonder, then,
that it met at once with a success equalled among works of
similar character by that of Macaulay's history only. Editions
accumulated like those of sensational novels, copies were in the
Jiands of every one, and even those that never get through a
book felt compelled to assume a knowing air when Janssen was
mentioned. This volume was almost unanimously praised even
decided antagonists of the Catholic religion like the learned Pro-
vost Kawerow in Breslau, Professor Ludwig Geiger (a Jew) in

1892.] JOHANNES JANSSEN. 577

the University of Berlin, and the aged controversialist of the re-
formed churches, Dr. Ebrard, a notorious enemy of Catholicism,
acknowledging their indebtedness to the author for valuable in-
formation.

But on the appearance of the ensuing volumes it did not take
the modern admirers of the " reformers " long to find out that
this kind of impersonal history-writing was a hundred times
more damaging to their interests than might have been any
controversial treatise, however trenchant. To many Germans it
appears that if Luther's work were proven to be one of no rare
and enduring merit, a weighty claim of Germany to the grati-
tude of the world would have been done away with. Conse-
quently down upon Janssen's head poured insult and abuse such
as only furor theologicus can suggest. One professor compared
Janssen to Judas, another called for the police to stop his work ;
the whole brotherhood of German historians was in uproar.

One of the several incidents of a decidedly humorous charac-
ter was when Professor Koestlin, the biographer of Luther, pub-
licly and in the strongest terms accused Janssen of having falsi-
fied an important quotation from Luther, and then a short while
afterwards had to come out in the same paper confessing that
some one had drawn his attention to the fact that the quotation
in question was to be found verbatim in one of Luther's letters,
and that he, Koestlin, had mistaken the passage in Janssen for
another one of somewhat similar wording but of far more inno-
cent character. It shows to what blind fury Koestlin had
worked himself up that, according to his invariable custom, Jans-
sen had given at the bottom of the page the exact date and
number of the letter from which the sentence had been culled.
This Koestlin had overlooked, incredible as it may appear. Pro-
vost Kawerow and Professor Baumgarten in Strassburg blundered
in pretty much the same way, and were both exposed by Janssen
before a wondering public.

One could never study too carefully the two pamphlets in
which Janssen, having let the missiles of his adversaries cluster
like arrows in a shield, drew them out one by one and held
them up to the light so as to make obvious their utter futility.
Dignity, manliness, sincerity, are the words that constantly arise
to one's lips during the perusal. Said a German university pro-
fessor of high repute himself a free-thinker to the present wri-
ter : " Since Lessing wrote his Anti-Geoze nothing like these
pamphlets of Janssen's have appeared in the line of polemical
literature."

578 JOHANNES JANSSEN. [July,

And all the while Janssen's fame and the dread he inspired
grew throughout Germany and the adjoining Protestant countries
until it assumed proportions quite fantastic. A German priest
has told me that once he, together with another clergyman,
called on Janssen at his summer resort in the mountains and
had strawberries with him on the piazza. The next day a tele-
graphic notice ran through all the liberal papers of the Father-
land, to the effect that " two emissaries of the Papal Curia waited
on Dr. Janssen at Cronberg yesterday ; important diplomatic
events may be looked for in the near future." The unassuming
professor, who all his life was quietly teaching history to both
Catholic and Protestant pupils of the gymnasium at Frankfort r
had in no time become shrouded in a cloud of mystery and
sinister power he and he only was the indomitable foe of Bis-
marck ; he was taking it upon himself to kindle the flames of
religious war in unhappy Germany !

And Janssen went on teaching history and sending forth,
year after year, volumes of his work. Through translations it
became known abroad, and especially in France the recognition
was hearty and unanimous. Taine is reported to have ex-
claimed : " This is the resurrection of history ! " and as a matter
of fact more than one interesting parallel might be drawn be-
tween the demolition of the revolutionary legend by the French
historian in his " Origines de la France contemporaine" and the
kindred work performed by the German scholar in regard to the
myths of the "reformers."

There are thoughtful people in all camps. When Janssen a
few years before his death celebrated his twenty-fifth anniversary
as a priest, there were among the countless letters and telegrams
from all over the world some twenty messages from distinctly
Protestant scholars and clergymen. After all, honesty is as good
policy in history as in any other walk of life, and a man may
delight in sundry of the changes brought about by the Refor-
mation without worshipping Luther as a saint, just as people
may deem France happier, after all, under President Carnot than
under Louis XV., without thereby endorsing every act of the
Marats and the Robespierres who accomplished the downfall of
the old regime. Even the Emperor William sent a wreath for
the Catholic historian's coffin, and future criticism will rank him
with the great ones of modern historical science, with the Rankes,
the Taines, and the Lafuentes. His manuscripts have been

1892.] FOR WILD FLOWERS. 579

handed over to his pupil, Professor Paster in Innsbruck, whose
History of the Popes is gaining universal fame. He is to finish
the work, carrying it down to the nineteenth century. Let us
rejoice that such a teacher has left such a disciple, even though
we may not help feeling a certain sadness when we are reminded
that the lips of the master have been closed for ever.

JOSEPH ALEXANDER.

Brooklyn, New York.

FOR WILD FLOWERS.

WHAT true insight was thine, dear friend, to lay

Those passionless and modest flowers before

My city gaze, long wearied by the sights

Of sin and strife, of sorrow and of wrong !

These guileless buds, these clean and verdant leaves

By Heaven-wafted breezes into being kissed,

Nurtured by purest dews from Dawn's pure breast ;

Whose strength is innocence, whose form and hue

Untrammelled, unadorned, to beauty burst

Beneath the unsoiled sunshine of the Day ;

Who, fearless of Night's coming loneliness,

To slumber wooed by Evening's zephyr lullaby,

Learned how to dream of Heav'n that is to come,

These woodland children with their artless voice

Shall to my spirit speak only of what

Is smiled upon by God of Peace of Rest

Of Truth and Chastity of those sweet sounds

Soul-soothing murmurs in the pleasant glades

Of Earth where these all joyous, chosen flowers

Stood waiting for the coming of thy hand

Of all dear Nature's faultless orisons

Ascending ever to His gracious ear

Who doth delight to scatter o'er the sad

And sorrow-bearing bosom of the world

Such fitting emblems of His love ; as chaste

As are the starlights He has sprinkled o'er

The firmament above : Love signals both ;

And promissory of a Paradise

Than Eden brighter and of Heav'n more sure.

ALFRED YOUNG.

580 THE CATHOLIC EDUCATIONAL EXHIBIT IN [July,

THE CATHOLIC EDUCATIONAL EXHIBIT IN THE
COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION*

ALL who think at all in our day, find their thoughts turn to
the subject of education ; for all men now understand that right
education offers the best means to give being and life to our hu-
man ideals ; since all efforts to develop, strengthen, and perfect
character are educational. The school, of course, is but one,
though a most important one, of the agencies by which educa-
tion is given. Its influence is constantly widening, and the ten-
dency seems to be to have it supersede both the family and the
church in the work of moulding men and women.

" Whatever we wish to see introduced into the life of a
nation," says William von Humboldt, " must first be introduced
into its schools." Now, what Catholics wish to see introduced
into the national life, first of all, is true religious faith and
practice. Religion is God's presence in the soul,^t is the revela-
tion of life's goodness ; it is the fountain of hope and joy ; it
is the impulse to a noble activity in which we are conscious
that failure itself means success. In happy days, it is light and
perfume ; and when the waters of life are bitter, it draws them
heavenward, and again they are sweet. Through it the sense of
duty duty to ourselves, to others, and to God is awakened ; and
the caring for duty is the vital principle in the creation of charac-
ter. Hence to introduce true religious faith and practice into
the national life is to introduce that which is more important
than material prosperity or intellectual activity ; for religion is
not merely the manifestation of our kinship with God, of the
divine and imperishable nature of the soul ; it is the only air
in which morality thrives, in which virtue becomes fervent, and
goodness kindles with beauty's glow. Conduct rests upon a
firm basis only when we believe in the infinite and godlike
nature of the good; in a universe of moral ends in which the
right is also for ever the best.

No school, therefore, is good which attempts to educate the
body, or the mind, or the conscience without the aid of religion,

* The writer of this article has considered the question of religious education from a
general point of view, and in its bearings on the Catholic Educational Exhibit, without any
thought of recent controversies, or any desire to offer an expression of opinion on recent
utterances of the Propaganda on the subject. J. L. S.

1892.] THE COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION. 581

for man is not a patchwork of parts, but a something whole
and organic, which springs from God, and which can be devel-
oped into harmonious completeness only through vital union
with the Author and End of its being.

Hence the church does not and cannot consent to the ex-
clusion of religion from any educational process. As we live
and move and have our being in God, the moral and intellec-
tual atmosphere we breathe should be fragrant with the aroma of
religious faith ; and the inspiratidn to goodness and duty, which
comes chiefly in early years, and is imparted with most power
by a voice made persuasive by an open and enlightened mind,
should be received in the school-room as well as in the home
and in the house of worship. To forbid the teacher who holds
the child's attention during those years when aspiration is pur-
est, when conscience speaks most clearly, when reverence is
most natural, when belief in the heroic and godlike is most
spontaneous, to appeal to his pupils' religious nature, and thereby
to strive to awaken in them a keener sense of the divine, a more
living consciousness of the sacredness and worth of life, is to
repress in him precisely that form of activity which is most sal-
utary and most helpful from an educational point of view.
What is education worth if the spiritual side of our nature be
permitted to lie dormant ? if the sense of modesty and purity,
of single-mindedness and reverence, of faithfulness and dili-
gence, of obedience and love, be not called forth? What kind
of education can be given by the teacher who may not speak of
the evil of sin, of the harm wrought by vanity, jealousy, envy,
cowardice, hatred, and vulgarity of thought and word ? If he
be forbidden to enter the inner life of man, how shall his soul
ever be brought into contact with the souls of his pupils?
He becomes a machine, and his living personality, in which con-
sists his power to educate, is condemned to inaction.

When our common-school system was finally organized as ex-
clusively secular, nothing was left for Catholics to do but to
build and maintain schools of their own, in which the will, the
heart, and the conscience, as well as the intellect, should be edu-
cated. If Catholic children have a right to a Catholic education
it follows that the duty devolves upon Catholics to provide
the means whereby it may be received ; and the Catholics of
the United States have accepted the task thus imposed with a
spirit of generous self-sacrifice which is above all praise. They
have built three thousand and five hundred parochial schools, in
which seven hundred thousand Catholic children now receive a

582 THE CATHOLIC EDUCATIONAL EXHIBIT IN [July,

Christian education. They have also established and maintained
a large number of universities, seminaries, colleges, academies,
reformatories, and asyhims, in which religious influence is made
to interpenetrate all the processes of nurture and training. The
development of this Catholic educational system is carried on
from year to year with increasing zeal and energy. The begin-
nings were difficult ; progress is now comparatively easy. What
has been done shows us not only what we have still to do, but
gives confidence that we shall be able to do it. The people
take an interest in the work not less earnest than that of the
bishops and priests, while the teaching orders make almost
superhuman efforts to meet the ever-growing demands for their
services. The indispensable need of religious schools, which
thirty or forty years ago was proclaimed by but a few, is now
conceded by all Catholics. The utterances of Pius IX. and Leo
XIII. on this subject have no uncertain sound ; and the bishops
of the Catholic world, in pastorals and in councils, have raised
their voices, in unison with that of the visible head of the church,
to proclaim the vital importance, whether from a religious or a
social point of view, of thoroughly Christian schools. They de-
clare that a purely secular education is a bad education ; that if
our civilization is to remain Christian, our schools must recog-
nize the principles of Christianity. In the third Baltimore Coun-
cil, held in 1884, the zeal of the American hierarchy in the
cause of Catholic education glowed with greater warmth than
in any previous assemblage of our bishops. The eighty prelates
gathered in this national council decree that a parochial school
shall exist close to every Catholic church, and that no ordinary
difficulties shall be considered as an excuse for its non-existence.
A pastor's serious neglect to build a school is declared to be a
sufficient cause for his removal ; and they affirm that it is a
bishop's duty to provide schools which shall be Catholic, not in
name alone, but which shall be thoroughly efficient. As a
means to this end, they would have the pastor consider himself
the principal of his school. He should watch over it an4 make
it the object of his special care and devotion. To equip priests
more fully for this office, the bishops urge that a course of peda-
gogics be made part of the curriculum of theological seminaries
Can we make our schools as good as the best of the public
schools ? Can we make them even better ?

"Can we do this?" asks Bishop Hennessy, of Dubuque, and
he answers : " If I had a voice that would resound from New
York to San Francisco, with that voice I would say We can !"

1892.] THE COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION. 583

He adds : " The parochial school as it should be, and as it will
be, will, not only guard the faith of the children and transfigure
the church of God, but it will prove to be the most potent fac-
tor at our service for the conversion of our beloved country."
Those who know with what earnestness and zeal the Catholic
body of the United States is enlisted in the cause of Catholic
education, will readily understand why the American bishops
have determined to have a " Catholic Educational Exhibit" in
the " World's Columbian Exposition."

Our school system is an organic part of our ecclesiastical con-
stitution. It rests upon principles as wide as human nature, as
immortal as Truth. We cannot if we would, we would not if
we could, recede from the stand we have taken. We hold
that the common-school system is radically defective, though we
have no disposition to interfere with those to whom it commends
itself. We concede to others, as we demand for ourselves,
religious and educational freedom. Our convictions on this
point are unalterable ; and since here there is question of vital
temporal and eternal interests, there can be no compromise
which conflicts with the principle of religious education.

The Catholic Church is irrevocably committed to the doctrine
that education is essentially religious, that purely secular schools
give instruction but do not properly educate. The commemora-
tion of the discovery of America, by holding an Exposition which
will attract the attention and awaken the interest of the entire
world, offers an opportunity such as we cannot hope to have
again in our day, or in that of our children, to give public evi-
dence of the work we are doing. In the four hundred years
which have flown by since the stars of heaven first saw reflected
from these shores the white man's face, beside his white sail,
there has been no such occasion for such an advertisement, and
when the fifth centenary shall be here there will be no need,
we may confidently trust, of special efforts to commend and up-
hold the cause of religious education. Catholics assuredly have
a right to a prominent place in this great celebration. Juan
Perez, Isabella, and Columbus, to whose lofty views and gener-
ous courage the discovery of America is chiefly due, were not
only devout Catholics, but they were upheld and strengthened in
their great undertaking by religious zeal and enthusiasm. Their
faith was an essential element in the success of their enterprise.
There should be no desire to ignore or obscure this fact, even
on the part of the foes of the church, and it is a duty which
Catholics owe to the honor of the name they bear to see that

584 THE CATHOLIC EDUCATIONAL EXHIBIT IN [July,

the part which their religion played in opening to the Christian
nations a new hemisphere, thereby extending and quickening the
forces of civilization through the whole world, shall not be mis-
understood or passed over in silence at this time, when the eyes
of all men turn to America to behold the marvels which have
been wrought here by strong hearts and awakened minds.

To this end the Catholic Educational Exhibit, if rightly
made, cannot but contribute; and since it will be the only dis-
tinctively Catholic feature in the Columbian Exposition, every
honorable motive should impel us to leave nothing undone to
make it worthy of the event commemorated and of our own
zeal in the cause of Christian Education. We shall thus place
before the eyes of the millions who will visit the Exposition a
clear demonstration of the great work the Church in the United
States is doing to develop a civilization which is in great part
the outgrowth of religious principles, and which depends for its
continued existence upon the morality which religious faith alone
can make strong and enduring. There can be little doubt that
many are opposed to the Catholic school system from the fact
that they have never given serious attention to the principles
upon which it rests, or to the ends which it aims to reach. It
is the fashion to praise education, and hence all declare them-
selves favorable to it ; but those who love it enough to make it
a matter of thoughtful and persevering meditation are, like the
lovers of Truth, but few. But those who do not read seriously
or think deeply, may be got to open their eyes and look ; and
what they see may arouse interest and lead to investigation.
Opinion rules the world, and the Catholic Exhibit offers a
means to help mould opinion on the subject of education, which
in importance is second to no other ; and in an age in which
the tendency is to take the school from the control of the
church, to place it under that of the state in such a way as to
weaken its religious character, nothing which may assist in direct-
ing opinion to true views upon this subject may be neglected
by those who believe that education is essentially religious.

The Exhibit will help also to enlighten and stimulate teach-
ers, by diffusing among them a more real and practical know-
ledge of the various educational methods and appliances. It
will arouse a new interest in pedagogics, as a science and an
art. We may easily become victims of the fallacy that a school
is Catholic because this adjective is affixed to its name, or be-
cause in it prayers are said and catechism is taught. A poor
school cannot exert a wholesome influence* of any kind. Idle, in-

1892.] THE COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION. 585

attentive, listless, and unpunetual children will not become re-
ligious however much they are made to pray and recite catechism.
In a truly religious character self-respect, truthfulness, a love of
thoroughness and excellence, a disinterested ambition, are as im-
portant as a devotional spirit. Where the natural virtues are
lacking, the supernatural have no proper soil in which to grow.
A right school system does not necessarily make a good school.

An educational exhibit will help to impress these and simi-
lar truths more vividly upon the minds of educators ; it will
enable a very large number of Catholics to take a general sur-
vey of the educational work which the church in the United
States is doing, of which most of us have but a very inade-
quate knowledge ; it will bring into juxtaposition the methods
and systems of the various Teaching Orders, and will make it
possible for all to adopt whatever may be found excellent in any
of them. There will, of course, be no unworthy rivalry, no
thought of advertising this or that institution or teaching order.
The aim is to advance the cause of Catholic education. We
care little where or by whom good work is done ; it is enough
to know that it is done. In certain instances a bishop will pre-
fer to make a separate exhibit of the work done in his diocese,
because he believes that in this way the end will be attained
more effectually. From a similar motive the Teaching Orders
may choose to make collective exhibits of their work ; and in-
stitutions of learning which stand alone and have an individuality
of their own, will avail themselves of this opportunity to offer
evidence of the kind of education they give. All our institutions
of learning, from the university to the kindergarten, come within
the scope of this display of educational work.

The third Plenary Council emphasizes the urgent need of a
wider and more thorough training of the priesthood, and it is
believed that the theological seminaries will make an exhibit
which will be interesting and at the same time a valuable evi-
dence of the progress we are making in fitting our priests for
the special and arduous tasks which this age of unsettled opin-
ions and weak moral convictions imposes upon them. It is not
rash to hope that the Catholic Educational Exhibit will awaken
new zeal, arouse a more generous spirit of sacrifice, inspire a
deeper enthusiasm, in the cause of Christian Education, which is
the cause of our country and our religion.

The suggestion has been made that this Exhibit will offer a fa-
vorable opportunity to hold a congress of Catholic teachers. The
good results to be expected from such a meeting are numerous

VOL. LV. 38

586 THE CATHOLIC EDUCATIONAL EXHIBIT IN [July,

and manifest. Those who have paid any attention to the work-
ings of the associations, whether county, state, or national, of
the public-school teachers, are aware of the stimulating and
illumining effect which their discussions and deliberations pro-
duce. It is desirable that our Catholic educators should be
brought together, that they should learn to know and appreciate
one another, that they should enlighten and correct one another
by a comparison of opinions and experiences. This, and much
else, could be done in an educational congress. A regret is
often expressed at the absence of lay action in Catholic affairs.
Education is precisely the field in which Catholic laymen can
most readily and most effectively bring their zeal and knowledge
to bear upon the living issues and interests of the church. They
build and maintain our schools, and there is no good reason
why they should not take an active part in stimulating them to
higher efficiency. A certain number of our teachers are of the
laity, and their relative proportion will doubtless increase. One
need not be a Brother or a Sister to be at the head of even
the best of Catholic schools. Why should not the intelligent
laymen or women of a parish be invited to visit the school and
to examine the pupils? Their presence would have a good in-
fluence upon the children, and their knowledge of the school
would enable them to counteract the apathy or opposition of
indifferent and foolish parents.

Finally, is it not probable that the Catholic Educational Ex-
hibit and the Congress of Catholic Teachers will lead to the
founding of a Catholic educational magazine ? Catholic news-
papers we have too many of them possibly. Catholic reviews
and magazines we also have ; but we have no periodical of any
significance devoted to the cause of Catholic education. The
establishing of a periodical of this kind, with competent editors,
would certainly be a safe venture from a financial point of view.
We have nearly four thousand schools, and the heads of a very
large number of them, at least, would take such a magazine, and
among its subscribers would be found all the priests who are
really interested in education. As an advertising medium it
would have special advantages. The directors of the Catholic
University, at Washington, have decided not to have a general
review of their own, but might they not consent to edit a
purely educational magazine ? Or if they do not see their way
to this, might not the heads of the University of Georgetown
or of Notre Dame be induced to undertake the work? What
more interesting subject is there than education ? It is a ques-

1892.] THE COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION. 587

tion of life, of religion, of country ; it is a question of science
and art ; it is a question of politics, of progress, of civilization ;
it is a question even of commerce, of production, of wealth.
What could be more instructive than a series of articles on the
history of education, on the great teachers and educational re-
formers, on pedagogics as a science and as an art ; on educational
methods ; on the bearing of psychology upon questions of edu-
cation ; on hygiene in its relations to the health of teachers
.and pupils ; on the educational values of the various branches
of knowledge ; on personal influence as a factor in education ;
on the best means of forming a true religious character?

An educational magazine would become the organ of the
great and growing system of Catholic schools. In its pages the
practical and speculative questions which are constantly suggest-
ing themselves to teachers would be discussed, and thus the
body of Catholic educators would be brought into active, intelli-
gent communion with one another. At all events, to whatever
practical results and undertakings the Educational Exhibit may
lead, there can be no doubt that its influence will be for good.
The bishops and Catholic educators have already shown their
great interest and earnestness in the work, and as the time for
holding the Exposition draws nearer an increasing enthusiasm
in the success of the enterprise will manifest itself. The gen-
eral expenses of the manager and his secretaries will be borne
by the prelates ; but it is well to call the attention of all true
friends of Catholic education that the more money we have, the
more creditable and effective will the Exhibit be made, and we
confidently believe that an appeal to the priests and Catholic
laymen of the United States will place in the hand3 of those
who have control of the enterprise a sufficient sum to make the
Catholic Educational Exhibit in the World's Columbian Expo-
ition a memorable event in the history of religious education.

J. L. SPALDING.

Peoria, III.

588 THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. [July,

THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW.

THE Durham miners, with characteristic North-country obsti-
nacy, continued for more than three months their hopeless con-
test. In the course of this time the men offered to submit to a
reduction, first of 7j^ per cent., then of 10 per cent, the amount
demanded by the employers at the outset. The condition of
the coal trade, however, was said to have become so much worse
that the employers insisted upon a reduction of 13^ per cent.,
and to this the men would not accede. The demand of the em-
ployers and refusal of the men gave an opportunity for interven-
tion to Dr. Westcott, the Establishment bishop of the diocese,
perhaps the ablest and certainly the most sympathetic with
modern wants of the Anglican prelates. He appealed to the
employers to let work begin at the reduction of 10 per cent, to
which the men had consented, and to leave the question of any
farther reduction to subsequent regulation. Through his efforts
a meeting was arranged between the wages committee of the
Durham Coal-owners' Association on the one part and the Mi-
ners' Federation on the other, at which meeting the bishop
presided, and as a result it was decided that work should recom-
mence on the terms accepted by the men, the employers being
moved thereto by the impoverished condition of the men and
the* generally prevailing distress. The men have undertaken to
favor the establishment of an organized system of conciliation
for the future, so as to obviate the recourse to strikes. The
present settlement, it is understood, will hold good at the ac-
cepted rate of wages for three months' time. It is to be hoped
that the state of trade will not necessitate a further reduction.

After the bitter experience which the miners have had of the
miseries attendant upon strikes, and of the losses of which they
are the cause, we hope they will lay to heart the evidence which
has lately been presented to the Royal Commission on Labor,
which shows how little is the necessity of having recourse to
this method if only the proper means is taken to settle disputes.
A working-man employed in a certain gas-works near London,
who had had forty-seven or forty-eight years' experience, testi-
fied that he had never known a case of a strike which had not
arisen out of a misunderstanding between employers and em-

1892.] THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. 589

ployed ; whenever masters and men were brought into direct con-
tact they could always settle any dispute. For the prevention of
strikes this witness advocates the method, which is every day be-
coming more widely adopted, of the formation of boards of ar-
bitration and conciliation composed of workmen and employers.
As proposed by him, these boards should meet at least
once a month for the purpose of receiving reports from
any quarter in which anything arose which was likely to
cause a disturbance, and should deal with it at once by
mutual arrangement. We do not mean to say that all the wit-
nesses have had so satisfactory a tale to tell, but undoubtedly
the dislike to strikes is becoming stronger day by day.

The colony of Queensland has brought to the front a labor
question which is intimately associated with a modified form of
the slave-trade. The climate of the northern portion of that
colony does not admit of white labor, and unless natives can be
found it is doomed to sterility and unproductiveness. In order
to obtain the requisite laborers the natives of the islands in the
Pacific were introduced. Some years ago, however, the frightful
atrocities practised by those who undertook to bring over these
islanders forced an unwilling Parliament to suppress the traffic
altogether. Time, however, has elapsed, and it is now a ques-
tion between reviving the trade and permitting the ruin of that
portion of the colony, and, as for colonists the making of money
is the summum bonum, the former alternative has been adopted.
The prime minister of the colony, formerly a strong opponent,
has become its warm advocate. Those in England who know
the facts of the case, and who, of course, have no pecuniary in-
terest of their own in the question, have tried to prevail upon
the imperial government to disallow the act. This it is unwill-
ing to do, as Queensland is none too loyal, and might resent
such a step. It promises, however, carefully to watch over the
way in which the natives are recruited, and to prevent any
abuse. Whether it will be able to fulfil its promise remains to
be seen.

In this matter the action of the working-men was on the
same side as that taken by philanthropists. We fear, however,
that it cannot with truth be said that they were inspired by
purely philanthropic motives. It is, in fact, asserted that their
desire was simply to restrict the supply of laborers, even though
they could not do the work themselves. It may not be out of

590 THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. [July,

place to point out in this connection that the Australian colonies
afford an interesting field for investigation to all who are inter-
ested in the question of the effect upon legislation of the work-
ing-class vote. In this country, called the paradise of working-
men, they have had from the beginning greater influence than
in any other part of the world. And yet the results seem far
from satisfactory. It becomes those who are so far away to
speak with diffidence. But from what we hear of trade con-
flicts, of financial depression, of want of employment, of the
necessity for the establishment of relief works and state labor
bureaus, it would seem that the social and political arrange-
ments of Australia have proved no more able to avert calamity
than the arrangements made in the older nations, in which the
aristocrat and the capitalist have had the controlling power.

'An idea of the length to which some legislators and legis-
lators belonging to the Conservative party, too are willing to
go, may be derived from recent utterances of Lord Randolph
Churchill and the newly elected member for Hackney. The
former distinctly enounced the principle that, as in former
times the laws and the entire polity of the country had been
framed by the landed and by the capitalist interests for their
own advantage, the time had now come when the laws and
the general polity will and should be framed by the labor in-
terest for the advantage of labor. To effect this change the
Conservative party should give its assistance and active support,
and be quick to meet the demands of labor. In fact, so far
did he go that Mr. John Morley felt called upon to enter a
protest, and to remind the Conservative ex-leader of the House
of Commons that it was the duty of every politician before
accepting the demands of labor to form their own opinion as to
whether such demands were really for the advantage of labor.
But upon the principle both are agreed. " The nation lives in
cottages," and all politicians must be for labor.

The declarations of the Conservative member for Hackney
are not only in the same general sense, but include several prac-
tical proposals, one of which is very remarkable, for the realiza-
tion of the new regime. After declaring that the poor-laws re-
quire prompt reconsideration, he says that the temporarily un-
employed should be dealt with, not as paupers or by charity,
but by some " permanent organization sufficiently elastic to meet
the very varying demands which would be made upon it." He

1892.] THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. 591

advocates the establishment of a special department of the
state, with a responsible minister for labor matters, which should
have for its object the furtherance of industrial interests. More-
over, the taxation upon incomes which are earned by " sweat of
brow or brain " should not be so heavy as that upon those derived
from investments. Only a few years ago these proposals would
have been looked upon as radical if not socialistic, but as their
author was elected to Parliament, it is clear that they are ac-
ceptable to a large number of present-day Conservatives. In
fact, it would appear that some Tories are more ready to look
with favor upon the proposals of the new unionism than some
of the older Liberals. Mr. Gladstone recently decfined to re-
ceive a deputation of the organizers of the movement for the
legal eight hours' day, on the ground that the proposal has not
yet been sufficiently considered by the country at large, and
especially by the classes immediately interested. Under these
circumstances he thinks that the question would not be seriously
discussed by Parliament ; nor, he implies, is it deserving of such

discussion.

The victory of the Progressives and the election of a fair
number of labor members to the London County Council have
begun to bear fruit. A resolution has been passed that all con-
tractors who do work of any kind for the council shall be
compelled to sign a declaration that they will pay the trades-
union rates of wages, and observe the hours of labor and condi-
tions recognized by the trades-unions in the places where the
contract is to be executed. Moreover, the hours and wages are
to be inserted in and form part of the contract by way of
schedule, and penalties are to be enforced for any breach of the
agreement. This resolution not only secures to all working-men
who do work for the council a fair rate of wages and reason-
able hours of labor, but also makes the trades-unions the arbi-
ters in every case. A similar policy has been adopted in deal-
ing with the tramways. The council proposed to become the
owners of a certain line, and to lease it out to a company to
work. It was made a condition, however, of such lease that
the men should not be employed for more than ten hours a day.
To this the company would not agree, and therefore the council
proposes to carry on the business themselves, and are promot-
ing a bill in Parliament which embodies this limitation of the
hours as a permanent feature of the scheme. The example set
by the governing body of the largest city in the world will

592 THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. [July,

doubtless lead to the adoption of similar methods in other parts.
At all events, the results of the experiment will be looked for
with considerable interest.

The question of protection has all of a sudden come to oc-
cupy a prominent position in Great Britain. The resolutions
passed by the Canadian House of Commons, in which expression
was given to the desire that Great Britain should admit Cana-
dian products on more favorable terms than it admits the pro-
ducts of foreign countries that, in short, discrimination against
all outsiders should be adopted has been pronounced by the
Times an out-and-out defender of free trade to be entitled
to serious consideration in the event of one condition being
fulfilled. That condition is that the other colonies should con-
cur in a similar policy. Even greater prominence, however, has
been given to the matter by certain surprising utterances of
Lord Salisbury in a speech recently delivered by him. In this
speech the premier pointed out the disappointments which have
befallen those who expected to see the universal adoption of
that system, and insisted strongly on the defenceless condition in
which England had been placed by her own adoption of it. He
proceeded to intimate that it would be necessary to adopt retali-
atory measures to refuse, that is, to the nations which had
hostile tariffs access to the markets of Great Britain, so far, at
all events, as regarded articles of luxury. Many protests have
been made by supporters of the general policy of Lord Salisbury,
but the promoters of the Imperial Trade League, by his words
and by Canadian action, have been animated to new efforts, and

inspired with new hopes.

While the London County Council is directing its efforts to
the securing for the working-man fair hours of labor and fair
wages, the London School Board is equally energetic in en-
deavoring to promote and foster the morals of the children of
the laboring class. This it seeks to do by providing Readers
which, in addition to the ordinary narratives, and poetical and
literary extracts, are to contain lessons illustrating and enforcing
the importance of thrift and temperance, and the relation of
conduct to well-being and to success and usefulness in life.
Moreover, the use of the schools, both during and after school
hours, is to be granted for lectures in support of temperance. To
the objection that these lecturers generally confound temper-
ance with abstinence, and try to prove that the use of alcohol is

1892.] THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. 593

always hurtful, it was answered that even though this teaching
might be untrue and unscientific, it had been proved by expe-
rience to be useful. This consideration carried the day, and
should the next generation of Londoners be as addicted to drink
as the present it will have only itself to blame.

The new Archbishop of Westminster, it is clear, will not de-
part from the line of social activity adopted by his predecessor.
In the address delivered by him to the clergy and laity on the
occasion of his installation he spoke of the conviction which is
gradually being brought home to the minds of Englishmen, that
the Catholic Church is no stranger and alien moving about fur-
tively on English soil, but an institution than which none is
more deeply interested in the welfare, both temporal and spirit-
ual, of the people. With reference to the social question, es-
pecially as it exists in London, while recognizing that Catholics
formed but a small fraction of the population, his grace declared
that they were bound to contribute their quota of zeal and ex-
ertion to the solution of this, as of all other national questions.
Legislation, political economy, philanthropy, he declared, have
each of them their place in the scheme of social regenera-
tion. Of course the primary and essential work of the
church is spiritual, and its main object is to direct men to an-
other world. This the archbishop, it is needless to say, insisted
upon. But the truth that piety is profitable for this life also,
that the amelioration of the present condition of man's lot falls
within the scope of the church's activity and is a matter of
which she takes care a truth which is too often lost sight of
formed a distinctive feature of what we may perhaps call Dr.
Vaughan's programme.

After hearing evidence for nearly two sessions of Parliament,
the House of Commons Select Committee on the Hours of La-
bor of Railway Servants, which was appointed in consequence
of the strike on the Scottish railways, has presented its report.
From this it appears that excessive hours are more frequent on
lines with a heavy freight or mineral traffic than on lines of
which the carrying of passengers constitutes the chief business.
There are, however, exceptions, and certain lines are mentioned
by the committee to the " mismanagement of which the exces-
sive hours are obviously due." Certain other lines, among which
are included the largest railway systems in England, are praised
for the great improvement which has been effected by constant

594 THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. [July,

attention to the subject, and by a carefully organized system of
reliefs, and the provision of comfortable quarters for the men
when off duty and absent from home. But, on the whole, the
committee is forced to the conclusion that there are still too
many cases in which excessive hours are habitually worked with-
out adequate reason, and that no sufficient effort has been made
by the companies generally to deal earnestly and thoroughly

with the matter.

The committee recognizes the fact that it is much more
easy to make definite regulations as to hours for the signal-men
and shunters than for the engineers, firemen, and guards of
freight trains. Still it thinks that more should be done for the
latter class to confine the hours within reasonable limits than
has yet been done. They suggest that matters should be so
arranged as to prevent their booked time from exceeding six-
ty-six hours per week, or twelve hours in any one day.

With reference to the much-debated question as to whether
the hours should be determined either directly or indirectly by
act of Parliament, and enforced by the government, the com-
mittee has come to an almost unanimous decision in the nega-
tive. This course is judged to be impracticable on various
grounds, and chiefly because it would relieve the companies from
responsibility. But, in the view of the committee, there is room
and even necessity for government supervision ; the companies
cannot be left to do exactly as they please. It is recommended
that they should be required to make periodical returns of over-
time to the Board of Trade ; that the attention of any company
making an exceptionally bad return should be called to the mat-
ter with a view to the hours being shortened by the company ;
and that the correspondence should be published by the Board
of Trade. Especially whenever an accident occurs the company
should be required to state the hours of work of every railway
servant concerned in the matter. In every case, also, in which
the Board of Trade has reason to think that the hours of work are
habitually excessive, a regular inquiry should be held by an in-
spector into the general hours of labor of the servants concerned,-
and the inquiry should be followed up until the Board of Trade
were satisfied that the hours had been reduced to a reasonable

basis.

The committee considers that the Board of Trade has al-
ready sufficient powers, without fresh legislation, to enforce such

1892.] THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. 595

changes as may be necessary. Should a company, however,
prove recalcitrant and not listen to the admonitions of the
board, or the voice of public opinion elicited by its action, the
committee recommends that power should be sought from Par-
liament to enable the board to call upon any such company to
submit a satisfactory schedule of booked time ; and in case of
its neglecting to do so within a reasonable period, to bring the
matter before the Railway Commissioners, who should have
power to order the company to put a reasonable schedule in
force on their line under the penalty of a fine of 20 per day
for every day during which they should refuse or neglect to
comply with such order, or evade it by making an unreason-
able difference between the booked and the actual time. By
this method the committee hopes both to find a remedy for the
evils disclosed, and to preserve the responsibility of the railway
companies. We fear, however, the approaching general election
will drive all other cares out of the minds of politicians, and
consequently that, for a time at all events, things will pursue their
wonted course.

An active movement has been in progress for some time for
the organization of working-women, and has had a fair measure
of success. The most novel of these organizations, however, is
the Union of the London Domestic Servants, which has just cele-
brated the anniversary of its formation by a meeting held in
Hyde Park. They undoubtedly have many grievances which ur-
gently call for a remedy. Among these long hours holds the
first place. Many servants are obliged to rise at about seven in
the morning and to work until one or two the following morn-
ing, nor does Sunday give them any relief from their toil. An-
other matter of complaint is, that while every employer demands
a character, no employer is bound by law to give one to a ser-
vant who is leaving. As the recent census proves that the class
of domestic servants is very large, numbering no less than
1,803,997, f which as many as 1,230,406 are females employed
in house-work, there is evidently sufficient material to form a
powerful union, if only, on the one hand, master minds can be
found to weld the units into cohesion, and, on the other, docility
and good sense to submit to the process. If we may believe
the speeches made at the Hyde Park meeting, good hopes of at-
taining this end may with confidence be entertained.

In the space at our disposal in these notes we cannot pre-

596 THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. [July,

tend to give an adequate account of the recent occurrences in
France, and of the action of the Holy See towards the French
government and the French bishops. All that we can say is
that in what has lately taken place the clearest light has been
thrown upon the attitude of the church towards modern politi-
cal movements, and upon the ability of the church to rise above
local prejudices, and to set aside long standing alliances when
they stand in the way of greater good. Meanwhile the French
government is figuring before the world, although not for the
first time, as the protector of the Catholic Church in her for-
eign missions. The British East Africa Company, if the accounts
which have been published can be trusted, has gravely com-
promised the good name of Great Britain by unwarrantable ac-
tion towards the Catholics of Uganda, and as the missionaries
are French citizens, France has called England to account for
the proceedings of the company, to which she has granted a
charter, indeed, but for the actions of which there is doubt as
to how far her accountability extends.

Italy presents to the world the somewhat ignominious specta-
cle of a country which, after having robbed right and left, re-
mains in the direst straits, while the men who have been ap-
plauded as patriots by the whole of Europe are unwilling to
sacrifice any part of their ill-gotten pelf to save their country
from disgrace. In vain efforts to make both ends meet, the
Marquis di Rudini's ministry after its reconstruction has fallen,
and its successor has within a few weeks been so discredited by

an adverse vote that an appeal to the country is necessary. In

Germany the government has a hard task to perform, having
lost its old friends and failed to secure new ones. Its work is
not rendered more easy by the emperor, who by indiscreet ac-
tions and utterances seems to be doing his best to destroy the
respect for authority which Germans in general are ready enough

to feel. No event worthy of mention has taken place in the rest

of Europe, except that the foreign affairs of Portugal are now
entrusted to the management of a bishop, thus calling into ex-
istence again arrangements which we are wont to associate with
bygone days.

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 597

TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS.

THE dainty volume containing the poems' 5 " of Susan Marr
Spalding will prove a welcome gift to those who love pure and
refined sentiment best when it is clothed in delicate and expres-
sive verse. The sonnet is the form most frequently chosen by
the author, and she manages it with a skill that justifies her
daring choice. Had she omitted that called "After the Fall,"
her volume would have been as faultless, or nearly so, in thought
and aspiration as it is in expression. A certain reserved and
disciplined strength seems to speak of long practice, but Miss
Spalding's name and her work are alike new to us. We quote
the opening sonnet, which gives its name to the collection. The
italics are not ours :

" He flew too near the sun, and evermore

His futile wings in mockery we name.

A type of fallen vanity became
The torn and scattered pinions that he wore.
Ah, is it wiser all the dull earth o'er

To crawl, unlured by heights of love or fame?

Nay, though our souls be wax unto the flame
Of Destiny, he that hath wings must soar!

Like Icarus, I deemed my pinions strong
To bear me to the heaven of my desire ;

Like him, from skies too glowing, I am hurled.

Now, for a day, these broken plumes of song,
Faded and scorched by love's divinest fire,

The winds of Fate shall blow about the world."

Another, which we must think characteristic of a personality
the volume has from end to end, for that matter, a persistent
yet faint and elusive autobiographic flavor is called

EQUINOCTIAL.

" I said, ' September days are clear and fair,

And sweet with scents of ripening fruits, and free
From the fierce heats that sweep across the sea

And break in tempests on the summer air.

For one storm-beaten life, blown here and there
By summer gusts of passion, there will be
A short, sweet season of serenity

A refuge pain and peril may not share.'

* The Wings of Icarus. By Susan Marr Spalding. Boston : Roberts Brothers.

598 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. i [July,

How should I know that one September blast
Would out-wreck all the tempests of the year ?

O treacherous heart, smiling at dangers past,
So wilfully secure, how should I fear

That all thy vaunted strength could not avail

Against one passionate autumnal gale ?"

The following stanzas seem hardly modern, so strongly do
their tripping measure and quaint elegance recall certain poets
of the second Charles's day :

" At the hearth where Love doth sit,

Though but scanty fires are lit,
Though the freezing winter wind
Everywhere may entrance find,

There doth gather sweet content,

Hope and peace and merriment.
Throngeth music, mirth, and wit
At the hearth where Love doth sit.

" At the board where Love doth wait,
Though the beggar at the gate

Scorns the meagre crust we share,

Find we ever sweetest fare,
All things good for every need ;
Penance days nor fasts we heed.

Banquet we in royal state

At the board where Love doth wait."

The entertainment provided by Mr. Robert Grant's new story*
is doubtless of a prosaic order, but it remains entertainment
none the less. If his " Married Man " does not reflect on very
profound subjects, he makes very pat reflections on those that
lie to hand in the experience of average married couples enjoying
a moderate competence. The ordinary joys of such a life are
his theme ; the common sorrows are not trenched on. Why hap-
pily married people cannot expect to enjoy " society " as they
did when yet unwedded furnishes the theme for several chapters.
The reason, conclude the " Fred and Josephine " whose uneventful
happiness is commemorated, is that the pleasing uncertainty and
mild excitement of flirtation is now eliminated from life, " society"
in its best estate being little more than the hunting-ground of
the unattached of both sexes. What it might be in its worst es-
tate, were not domestic happiness a safeguard, is sufficiently in-

* The Reflections of a Married Man. By Robert Grant. New York : Charles Scrib-
ner's Sons.

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 599

dicated in the connubial confidences in which Fred and Jose-
phine mutually avow the vanity of their attempts to relapse into
the bud estate after having once successfully blossomed. Fred's
reflections on the aspirations quenched by marriage, expressed
in the first chapter, and renewed in the last in the guise of a de-
sire for some portion in the world to come for " pretty good
people," have an odd tendency to remind one of St. Teresa's
criticism on the " hen's pace " at which, says she, married wo-
men must travel toward perfection. On the whole, the book will
be found a good one by people who can dispense with the
flavor of excitement in their light reading, and who do not de-
sire to have the grounds of either thought or emotion stirred too
deeply. It will just meet the requirements of the "pretty good,"
moderately worldly, mildly sceptical, comfortable, " progressive
Protestants " for whose delectation it was written.

Mr. Edgar Fawcett is more ambitious in his delineation* of a
New York family than Mr. Grant. He has never, to our knowl-
edge, written so seriously and so well as in his present story.
It is hardly exact to call him sentimental, even when he aims
at sentiment. He is melo-dramatic and sensational, if you will,
but the truly effective sentimentalist needs a touch of genuine-
ness in his sympathies which Mr. Fawcett seldom inclines the
reader to credit him with. The study of Bill Tweed, enormously
aided by Mr. Nast's drawings, is carefully and, we suppose,
thoroughly made. It is certainly very effective. Everard, with
his unfortunate brood of children, strikes us as furnishing a very
good example of what we mean in saying that Mr. Fawcett's
sentimentality is unreal. The good-natured " Dutchy," who
starts life as a grocer in Hoboken and does his love-making in
the Elysian Fields, who makes a fortune and lives on Fifth
Avenue, whose children all go astray in various fashions, one
of them narrowly escaping a prison, another committing suicide,
one daughter abandoning her husband and the other caught just

time to prevent her elopement with a married man, is
painted with Mr. Fawcett's most elaborate touches, and in-
tended as " a lovely personality," in the highest degree a manty
man, an almost perfect husband and father. He has, in fact, a
great many good points, but where his children are concerned
he is what Emerson called " a mush of concession," and largely
responsible for the failure they make of life. Mary Everard is
better done. On the whole, the book is much better worth read-
ing than any of its author's previous efforts. Its style, too, is

* A New York Family. By Edgar Fawcett. New York : Cassell Publishing Co.

6oo TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [July,

far more unaffected than usual, though he has not yet quite
shaken off his fondness for employing common words in re-
mote and unaccustomed senses. Thus he says of Everard, on
one occasion, that his "lovely personality disarrayed" another
man, and that without the slightest intention on his own part to
dismay the reader's imagination.

Jules Verne, always entertaining, is not less so than usual in
this story * of the travelling showman and his family, who, being
robbed of their savings and invincibly determined nevertheless
to get back to Normandy, went round from Sacramento to
Behring Strait by land, crossed the Strait with their team when
it was frozen, and finally arrived at their destination. His usual
mixture of science and imagination is served up by this inge-
nious inventor of things vrai and vraisemb table, *and the reader
embarks on board icebergs with him, or camps out in the com-
pany of spies and murderers, with a foregone conclusion of safe-
ty which somehow interferes little with his interest and amuse-
ment. So far as we know Verne, there is not an ounce of harm
in all the mass of his productions. Caesar Cascabel, with his
adoration of the great Napoleon and his grotesque hatred of
England and all things English, which will not permit him even
to smile, much less to give a performance while in British Co-
lumbia, is one of those characteristic caricatures in which he is
most successful. The book is extremely well illustrated by
George Roux.

A Younger Sister, \ by the author of " Mademoiselle Mori,"
is a very quiet, uneventful tale, whose interest is mainly psycho-
logical, and which holds out small promise of entertainment save
to the thoughtful. While each character is portrayed with
extreme cleverness and verisimilitude, perhaps none of them is
deeply interesting in itself. And yet Mr. Hayes is a triumph of
observation in his way. The little touches that describe a
self-absorbed, narrow-minded man, full of small prejudices, highly
cultivated within a limited range, completely insensible to all
that does not feed his vanity, and yet not wholly selfish, are
wonderfully well laid on. Marcia, the elder daughter, is another
specimen of the same genus. Amiable, gentle, narrow, her very
selfishness is hidden under a veil of self-sacrifice, impenetrable
even to herself, and almost so to the loving but quick-sighted
eyes of Guenola, the heroine of the tale. There is nothing

* Ccesar Cascabel. By Jules Verne. New York : Cassell Publishing Company.
f A Younger Sister. By the author of " The Atelier du Lys," etc. London and New
York : Longmans, Green & Co.

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 601

harsh in the trait itself as it appears in the elder sister, nor, for
that matter, in that criticism of her which seems so enlighten-
ing to the mother's apprehension. Marcia has been betrothed
and lost her lover by death, and by common verdict of her
family and herself has been condemned to a life of elegantly
plaintive sorrow. But after three years of mourning have
brought her to twenty-four, Marcia's interest in ordinary life
revives with the advent of a new suitor. Her father, whose
affections are chiefly centred on this daughter, is hopelessly
broken up by her acceptance of Harold and the consequent dis-
ruption of his own schemes for the future. As for Guen, who
is equally surprised, her comment is characteristic :

" ' Well ! ' she says, ' I cannot imagine myself caring enough
for any one to marry him ; but if I ever did, I should care a
great deal too much to be able to marry any one else, just be-
cause the first one was dead.'

'" Well, do not put it so to Marcia,' said her mother, perhaps
sympathizing more with her view of the matter than she cared
to own.

" ' Mamma ! I am not an utter brute,' was Guenola's reply,
and then she was silent, shaking her thoughts into order, while
Mrs. Hayes made the coffee. ' I expect it was a good deal
because she was sick of being unhappy,' she said suddenly, and
Mrs. Hayes exclaimed :

" ' My dear, what makes you think Marcia was unhappy ? '

" She went on with a kind of calm certainty ' She would never
be in love, you know ; but she cares a great deal for Harold, and
she was tired of being sad, and of everybody expecting her to be
sad, and so when Harold came, and gave her a chance of being
like other girls, of course she was glad. And she will make a
good wife, and like his family very much.'

" ' I cannot think how it is that such a headlong creature as
you are, Guen, sometimes has such intuitions,' said Mrs. Hayes,
suspending her operations and looking at Guenola in surprise, as
she felt that a flood of light had been let in on Marcia, ' I be-
lieve you are right.'

" ' I am sure of it, though I dare say Marcia does not know
it herself.'"

It is in such touches that this writer shows insight, and it is
they, and the frequently recurring and wonderfully vivid bits of
description of outdoor nature which give distinction to her
pages. Guenola and her mother, as near akin spiritually as
Marcia and her father, are exceedingly well understood and de-
lineated. But the rank and file of novel-readers would be likely
to find the book, as a whole, but moderately entertaining.

A less distinguished but more amusing story, issued by the
VOL. LV. 39

602 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [July,

same publishers, is Mrs. Walford's One Good Guest* To be sure
Mrs. Walford, to whose clever pen we owe " Mr. Smith " and
" The Baby's Grandmother," is not at her best in her latest
novel. Still, the four young people, who elect to entertain
guests at their country-house, in the orthodox English gentry
style, and whose haps and mishaps are here recounted, will be
found pleasant as well as innocent and helpful acquaintances.
Tom Barnet is a very good fellow indeed, in spite of a certain
tendency to priggishness or, perhaps, in consequence of it,
priggishness approaching to an ideal virtue in his actual circum-
stances and Jenny a very delightfully managed little girl. As
for Ida, she is all that a well-bred girl, emancipating herself from
a chaperon, and trusting only to her brother's watchfulness and her
own sense of the becoming to steer her safe between the Scylla
and Charybdis of social proprieties should be. And that is a
good deal to say of a girl in a modern novel.

Don Braulio,\ by the much-praised, and, as we think, much
over-praised Juan Valera, is a clever but unpleasant tale, which
no one would be the better or wiser for reading. The hero, who
commits suicide because he thinks he has the evidence of his own
eyes that his wife is unfaithful ; the wife, who is imprudent but inno-
cent, and who loves her husband ; the unmarried sister, whose illicit
love is made to assume the aspect of a virtue and crowned by
marriage ; the author himself, who could hardly preach pessimism
more convincingly by his arrangement of circumstances and dis-
position of events if he were a professed disciple of Von Hart-
mann, are all nearly equally unpleasant to contemplate. The
chapter in which Inesita makes the avowal of her shame to Dofia
Beatriz is a master-piece of devilish casuistry.

Another bad book is a translation \ from the writer who
calls himself or herself Ossip Schubin, and who has proved so
capable of better things that this extravaganza of clap-trap and
sensationalism, coming after Boris Lensky, is a harsh surprise.
There was a delicacy about the workmanship of that story in
which the present one is almost wholly lacking. We say almost,
because in Elsa and her husband there is a certain offset to the
essential vulgarity of all else that goes to make up the novel.
Breaking stones on the high-road might easily be a more refin-
ing and elevating occupation for mind and body than either
the writing or the reading of novels of which this and Don

*The One Good Guest. By L. B. Walford. New York : Longmans, Green & Co.

f Don Braulio. By Juan Valera. New York : D. Appleton & Co.

\ Felix Lanzberg's Expiation. By Ossip Schubin. New York : Worthington Co.

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 603

Braulio are specimens specimens taken, it is true, from the two
poles of undesirability, but linked, none the less, by substantial
offensiveness.

With becoming humility, Mr. Birrell modifies the airy brag
of his title * by a motto signifying that such sentences as his
" do not any more than the records of the superior courts con-
clude as to matters which may or may not have been contro-
verted." They are certainly judgments worth considering, and
the more sure to obtain consideration seeing how delightfully
they are pronounced, and with what fair and just deliberation.
One is pretty certain to find him admiring to the full all that
one's self admires, even when unable to go with him all the way
in every one of his admirations. To begin with to begin, in
fact, at Mr. Birrell's own beginning it is pleasant to find him a
hearty friend of Samuel Richardson ; friendly even to the point
of so far violating traditions and disturbing people's notions
as to think that it is he and not Dr. Johnson, " our great mor-
alist," who shines most from the moral point of view r in one of
the latter's reminiscences of the sponging-house where he was
confined for debt, and from whence he was liberated by the gen-
erosity of " the little printer." Pleasant too, because so true, is
his verdict that Richardson's authorship makes him a "more
remarkable and really interesting man " than Fielding, spite of
the latter's superiority when the two are measured by a purely
literary standard, " merely as writers." Richardson, he says,

" had his quiver full of new ideas ; he had his face to the east ;
he was no mere inheritor, he was a progenitor. He is, in short,
as has been often said, our Rousseau ; his characters were not
stock characters. Think of Fielding's characters, his Tom
Joneses and Booths, his Amelias and Sophias. They are stage
properties as old as the Plantagenets. They are quite unidea'd,
if 1 may use a word which, as applied to girls, has the authority
of Dr. Johnson. Fielding's men are either good fellows with
large appetites, which they gratify openly, or sneaks with equally
large appetites, which they gratify on the sly ; whilst the charac-
ters of his women are made* to hinge solely upon their willing-
ness or unwillingness to turn a blind eye. If they are ready to
do this, they are angels ; . . . but if they are not willing to
play this role, why then they are unsexed and held up to the
ridicule and reprobation of all good fellows and pretty women.
This sort of thing was abhorrent to the soul of the little printer ;
he hated Fielding's boisterous drunkards with an entire hatred.
I believe he would have hated them almost as much if Fielding
had not been a rival of his fame."

* Res fudicatce. Papers and Essays by Augustine Birrell. New York : Charles Scrib-
.ner's Sons.

604 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. I7 ul y

Richardson did, in fact, mark an epoch ; the appearance of
Clarissa was the beginning of woman's emancipation from mere
femininity from the purely sexual attitude she occupied in Eng-
lish literature and life. Any one who chooses may convince
himself of this who likes to read even his Jane Austen over
again, or to go back to Richardson's own Pamela. There is
room for an essay, by any one capable of writing it, on
the wide difference between the modern estimate and valu-
ation of female virtue, what constitutes its wreck and how its
reparation may be wrought, and that formerly prevalent among
English-speaking people as reflected in their novelists. A case
in point, illustrative of the merely social view of morality, the
brutal indifference to sin as sin, the comfortable belief in a wed-
ding-ring as an ex post facto remedy, a retrospective plaster for
female virtue, which prevailed even among good women in Pro-
testant England in the eighteenth century, may be found in one
of Jane Austen's novels, Sense and Sensibility, if a memory not
too retentive where Miss Austen is concerned does not betray us.
But the same view was current in all literature intended to
amuse, until Clarissa Harloive came to open a new era and claim
a higher standard of virtue for women than the grossly conventional
one. There are only two kinds of readers, hints Mr. Birrell " those
who can read Richardson's novels and those who cannot." For
our part, the years are too many to count which lie between
to-day and the time when we read Sir Charles Grandison all
through aloud, following it with Clarissa, our auditor a mother
as ready to laugh and cry and be indignant as the reader. Not
so long ago, we came across, in a foreign land, one of the two
translations of the latter book of which Mr. Birrell speaks in
this essay, and found it had lost little in vigor, and nothing in
interest by being rendered into French. Richardson has been
and remains the great English novelist to the French ; if his
English readers are diminishing in number it is, say their neigh-
bors across the Channel, because he is too good for them. There
is something in that verdict. One of our New York publishers
got out a very much compressed, though still a four-volume,
edition of Clarissa some twenty years since, but we believe he
reaped no great rewards from his well-intended venture.

But we are wandering from Mr. Birrell. Fortunately he is
like a Normandy highway, always good to go back to, though
tempting one to follow the enchanting byways which open into it
at every turn. There is not any paper of the dozen which make
up his new volume which does not invite quotation and com-

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 605

ment and commendation. As examples of fair and enlightening
criticism nothing could be better, considering that the critic is
pretty evidently not a Catholic, than the essay on Cardinal New-
man, and that on the Reformation. Another note, equally wel-
come to Mr. Birrell's present admirer, is struck in the paper on
Nationality one gets much the same flavor from a biting re-
mark in that on Matthew Arnold, to the effect that " one of the
tasks of this militant man " was to " make us understand why no-
body who is not an Englishman wants to be one." We said just
now, though purely as an inference, that Mr. Birrell is pretty evi-
dently not Catholic. But that he thinks, and seriously, and has
his eyes open to the probable goal of fair investigation, is almost
equally evident in various passages throughout this volume. For
example, he is free to express his conviction that some day or
another

" the old questions will have to be gone into again, and the
Anglican claim to be a Church, Visible, Continuous, Catholic,
and Gifted, investigated probably for the last time."

This is in alluding, as he does more than once, and with ap-
parent content, to the fact that the damage done by Newman " to
the Church of this island " was caused by his

u settled conviction that England is not a Catholic country, and
that John Bull is not a member of the Catholic Church. This
may not matter much to the British electorate ; but to those
who care about such things, who rely upon the validity of or-
ders and the efficacy of sacraments, who need a pedigree for
their faith, who do not agree with Emerson that if a man would
be great he must be a Nonconformist over these people it
would be rash to assume that Newman's influence is spent. . . .
It is far too early in the day to leave Newman out of sight."

In the same spirit, commenting on the newspaper critics who,
after pointing out the dead cardinal's superiority as a thinker,
went on to prove that his thinking had after all amounted to noth-
ing and would produce no permanent result on others, even as
it had resulted in no very great good for himself, Mr. Birrell re-
marks that " a cardinal of the Roman Church is not, to say the
least of it, more obviously a shipwreck than a dean or even a
bishop of the English Establishment." Mr. Birrell, to put our
own verdict on him in a sentence, while eminently literary, is
something more than a literary man pure and simple; he has a
moral as well as an artistic rule of measurement, and seems to

606 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [July,

be capable of convictions, and not merely sensitive to impres-
sions.

Mr. Weyman is one of the younger generation of English
novelists who seem bound to make a substantial reputation.
The tale* we have before us is a historical novel, purporting to
be written in the first person by its hero, toward the close of
the reign of Elizabeth. The action of the story, however, takes
place in the early years of Mary Tudor's reign. The hero is a
Protestant, not so much from conviction as through a sort of
perverse instinct and early training ; but as the story is not in
any sense controversial, that need interfere little with the Catho-
lic reader's pleasure. The scenes are laid mainly in the Nether-
lands, where Francis Cludde, flying as a youth of twenty to es-
cape employment as a spy in the pay of Stephen Gardiner, the
great Bishop of Winchester, has many stirring adventures. It is
a very full book, compact and close-knit, abounding in incident
and cleverly managed as to plot. Its action ends with Elizabeth's
accession.

Judge Tourgee's new bookf is a very strong one. The Ne-
gro question, as it confronts civilization and Christianity in this
country ; has never before, to our thinking, been put into so tell-
ing and compact a shape. The author, not a Catholic by the
way, is careful to make his indictment of Christianity, " the wor-
ship of the White Christ," applicable to Protestantism only.
And his heroine, if the book can fairly claim one, which is doubt-
ful, Pactolus Prime himself occupying nearly the whole stage,
but she, at all events, who comes nearest to that role, disap-
pears at the close into a convent of Sisters of Mercy, there to
devote herself to work among the colored people. Judge Tour-
gee's point, made with reiteration and enforced in many and
most cogent ways, is that in dealing with the Negro, it is white
sentiment, white civilization, white Christianity that needs to be
modified. If equality of right, privilege, and opportunity is se-
cured to the colored people, they desire nothing more. They
ask for no special privileges, no peculiar consideration, no dis-
tinctive favor. For concise and convincing expression and illus-
tration of this view the five chapters beginning with that styled
"An Assessment of Damages," and ending with "A Basis of
Composition," have no parallel that we know of. They consist
of a series of talks, passing on Christmas morning, at Prime's

* The Story of Francis Cludde. By Stanley J. Weyman. New York: Cassell Publish-
ing Company.

t Pactolus Prime. By Albion W. Tourgee. New York : Cassell Publishing Co.

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 607

boot-blacking " stand," between him and certain of his customers'.-
Among these are a senator, a lawyer, a reporter, a drummer, a-
Union soldier, a not-quite reconstructed Southerner, and a min-
ister. In so far as the book is a story we find it a trifle ob-
scure in places. But as an indictment, a plea, a warning, and y
especially in the chapter where Dr. Holbrook expounds the
" Law of Progress," as a menace, it lacks neither definiteness nor
convincing power. The chapter just alluded to is full of sugges-
tion and especially worthy of serious consideration. We con-
gratulate the writer on this book. His colored fellow-citizens
should owe him an immense debt of gratitude for it. As for
white Christians, it behooves all of us, even though Judge Tour-
gee explicitly exempts Catholics from his sweeping censure, to<
consider how we may mend our ways, and by act and prayer
and penance help to expiate and repair a national crime whose
consequences were too far reaching to be obliterated by a civil
war and an emancipation proclamation. Christianity, in a word,
needs to permeate our minds, to mould our convictions, to get
hold of our prejudices, if it is to be a working force in our civ-
ilization. If he can succeed in planting that fruitful germ in the
minds of his white readers, Judge Tourgee will have done a work
than which we can think of none more important or more time-
ly. But he is ploughing a desperately stubborn soil.

I. A DICTIONARY OF HYMNOLOGY.*

When the scheme of this very important work was made
known in 1880 coincident with the announcement that its matter
was then going to press, its learned editor was soon made aware,
through numerous communications to him from many other per-
sons more or less versed in hymnological studies, of the existence
of a large number of valuable MSS., notable hymnals, hymn-
writers and their sacred poems which had hitherto escaped the
painstaking investigation of himself and his collaborators. New
information continuing to come in, and it being desirable that
the work should be sent out as complete as might be, its final
publication has been delayed until the present date. As it is,
it was found necessary to add a double appendix, with supple-

* A Dictionary of Hymnology; setting forth the Origin and History of Christian Hymns
of all Ages and Nations, with special reference to those contained in the Hymn Books of
English-speaking countries and now in common use. Edited by John Julian, M.A., Vicar of
Wincobank, Sheffield. New York : Charles Scribner's Sons.

608 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [July,

mental indices of hymn-titles and names of authors. It makes a
bulky volume of 1,616 pages.

The Rev. John Julian, vicar of an Anglican parish church, is
not only its chief editor, and, as such, deserving of the credit of
originating the plan of so huge a literary enterprise, and of
revising the work of his aids, but is also its chief writer. We
find his initials appended to thousands of articles. Among the
list df its thirty-seven contributing writers the name of the Rev.
James Mearns appears as next in importance to that of Mr.
Julian, and for his extensive, varied, and continued assistance
has the honor of recognition as its assistant editor.

An approximate estimate of the number of hymns whose
titles are given in the indices of this volume shows that over
thirty thousand have received some definite notice, both as to
authorship and history.

The spirit in which it has been compiled is most noteworthy,
showing a sincere desire to recognize every known hymn of any
value, quite apart from the consideration of its peculiar doctrine.
From a non-Catholic point of view this is likely to be regarded
as also highly commendable, since many a hymn or some such
sacred song often commends itself to the notice of the litterateur
solely for its poetic style and unction, and to the Protestant
church choir or preacher from its having secured popularity
among the vulgar, irrespective of any literary merit. That such
hymns may sing false or erroneous doctrine is not deemed a rea-
son for excluding them from a work like this, projected and
supervised by Episcopalians. In the eyes of non-Catholics gen-
erally this freedom from ecclesiastical, theological, or what is
termed sectarian, bias will no doubt be regarded as one of its
most laudable qualities. Hence there has been admitted a vast
amount of biographical, historical, and critical notice which can
in no way interest Catholics.

But this does not mean that we are or should be indifferent
to all hymns accredited to Protestant writers. How very many
truly worthy and famous hymns commonly supposed to be the
wholly original works of Protestants which are, in fact, mainly
translations or paraphrases of hymns from Catholic sources, the
pages of this dictionary abundantly show. Of these, more mod-
ern hymn-writers have largely sent out numberless imitations
and alterations in which the original thoughts are spread out
and extended even to the third or fourth dilution. A glance at
the frequent long lists of hymns with English titles following as
translations, variations, etc., of some original Catholic Church

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 609

Latin hymn will surprise many a reader to whom some of the
English forms have been familiar as the hymns of this or that
Methodist, Presbyterian, Anglican, or even Unitarian writer.

Except what seems to us as an inexcusable omission of the
names of American Catholic hymn-writers and their publications,
pretty full justice has been done to hymns from professedly
Catholic sources. Twenty-two pages are devoted to Latin hym-
nody, eleven pages to church sequences, ten to breviaries, eight
to hymnals, and two to antiphons, with long and scholarly arti-
cles on the " Te Deum," " Dies Irae," " Stabat Mater," " Veni
Creator," " Veni Sancte Spiritus," and the " Vexilla Regis."
Then there are special articles devoted to early English and Ro-
man Catholic hymnody.

Altogether it is a work which will take its place as the most
complete of its kind, and, as we should judge from present ex-
amination, also as the most reliable for authoritative reference,
especially for English scholars, for whose use the compilers have
chiefly prepared it.

2. ADVICE TO YOUNG WOMEN.*

This admirable book was published for the first time some
twenty years ago. - Since then it has met with very remarkable
success. It received very flattering words of praise from many
of the best critics, particularly Archbishop Vaughan, of West-
minster. It has gone through some twenty-five editions. Written
at a time when among Catholic young women the class of do-
mestics was a very large one, it was prepared more or less with
a view to their spiritual wants. Since then the sphere of the work-
ing-woman has been very much widened. She has gone into
many other employments, and year by year new avenues to a
livelihood are opened to her. To-day there are over four thou-
sand pursuits in which women wage-earners are employed. To
meet the needs of this constantly increasing class, Father Deshon
has revised his book and thus enlarged its sphere of usefulness.

The book is written with a charming simplicity and straight-
forwardness. The author displays a remarkable knowledge of
the ins and outs of a young woman's life, which a long and
varied missionary career alone could have given him ; so much
so that an intelligent woman recently remarked, on reading the

* Guide for Catholic Young Women; especially for those who earn their own living. By
the Rev. George Deshon, C.S.P. Twenty-fifth edition, revised and enlarged. New York :
The Columbus Publishing Co., 120 West Sixtieth Street.

6io , TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [July,

book, that if the author's name were not on the title-page, she
would readily have believed that it was written by a
woman wage-earner herself. There is running through the book
the kindliest interest in the young working-woman's welfare, and
the deepest sympathy for her sometimes very hard position.

The book will be found of very great use to Sisters, who by
their special work are thrown in contact with hard-working girls r
and to directors of sodalities, whose position makes them their
special counsellors.

3. A HAND-BOOK FOR TEACHERS.*

A handy volume containing practical suggestions for teachers
in primary schools is Professor MacCabe's recent production.
The author was led to the publication of the work by repeated
solicitations of many who have studied his methods of teaching
higher branches. None deny the difficult task of training a
young mind to retain what it perceives or hears, and in no case
is this more evident than in teaching English grammar ; and
Professor MacCabe modestly asserts that " it is not claimed for
these plans that they are the best which can be made for the
respective lessons ; but they are at least suggestive, and make a
starting point or rough sketch from which the intelligent teacher
may develop better ones."

In the hands of an ordinarily intelligent man or woman Hints
for Language Lessons will prove a valuable instrument for im-
pressing on the minds of young pupils the principles of thought
expression, with the relations to each other of combined words
and sentences, and that too in a way which the child may be
easily led to understand. In brief, the work is a good system of
teaching grammar in object-lesson form, and well worthy of con-
sideration by those upon whom the education of children de-
volves.

4. MARGARET BRERETON.f

Extracts from the diary of Margaret Brereton open the tale
which relates the trials of a Christian mother, the father of whose
children is not of the fold. Her rural home to outward ap-
pearances contains all that can be desired, but the tempter comes

* Hints for Language Lessons, and Plans for Grammar Lessons. By John A. Mac-
Cabe, M.A., LL.D., Principal Ottawa (Canada) Normal School. Boston : Ginn & Co.

f The Trial of Margaret Brereton. By Pleydell North. New York : Benziger Brothers,

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 611

and the father fails in his promise. Between himself and the
heir to his father's title and estate correspondence has long
ceased on account of his having married one " imbued with the
errors of Rome, etc." But after twenty years of married life a
letter comes from the older brother, who is childless, proposing
to make Margaret's youngest son successor to his title and pro-
perty on condition of adoption, with all that word implies. The
temptation is too strong for Margaret Brereton's husband, and
Cyril is taken from the broken-hearted mother. The author tells,
in a smooth way, the consequent pain of the now widowed
mother at seeing her son grow up a leader among " free-think-
ers," and the jealous quarrels which spring up between Cyril and
his older brother. The latter suddenly disappears ; Cyril marries,
and Francis returns but to become a fratricide. The mother
perils her own life by her silence. Another son, Father
Adrian, traces Francis, and, finding him apparently at the
point of death, hears a confession of the crime. The story
of the trial is well told ; the prosecution ascribes the mo-
tive for the deed to " the very uprightness and fervor of her
soul, [which] strengthened her abhorrence [of his atheistic ten-
dencies]. It is not difficult to follow the workings of that soul
until faith became bigotry, and zeal fanaticism." Francis mean-
while secretly leaves his bed, and, returning, openly confesses his
guilt.

Apart from the foregoing material, interwoven with incidents
which make a very interesting narrative, the author has succeeded
in setting forth mildly, but with none the less force, two moral
points the evils of mixed marriages and the beneficent results
of confession. Conspicuous in its pages is the absence of sen-
sationalism and overdrawn heroism ; the virtues abounding in the
household are such as may be seen in every-day life, yet depicted
with a touch that must carry lessons of Christian charity into
the heart of the reader. The story is told with a simplicity which
will readily interest old and young.

612 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [July,

THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION.

ALL COMMUNICATIONS RELATING TO READING CIRCLES, LISTS OF BOOKS,
ETC., SHOULD BE ADDRESSED TO THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION,
415 WEST FIFTY-NINTH STREET, NEW YORK CITY.

THE Catholic Summer School will begin its first session at
New London, Conn., on Sunday, July 31. A prospectus has
been issued in which these words from Cardinal Newman are
quoted : " Truth is the object of knowledge, of whatever kind ;
and truth means facts and their relations. Religious truth is not
only a portion, but a condition of general knowledge. To blot
it out is nothing short of unravelling the web of university
teaching." Speaking of the church, in connection with literature
and science, Cardinal Newman says : " She fears no knowledge,
but she purifies all ; she represses no elements of our nature, but
cultivates the whole."

On this line of principle and of thought the Catholic Summer
School proposes to offer to its students, young and old, abundant
instruction in various departments of knowledge, on a broad
basis of information, by competent teachers and lecturers who
are " quite up with the times," being able to throw upon their
subjects the higher and still broader light of central principles,
of spiritual truth and of coherent faith.

Our readers will find Mr. John A. Mooney's scholarly article
in this number of THE CATHOLIC WORLD worthy of profound
consideration. It sets forth clearly the dominant thoughts of
those who have undertaken the formation of the Catholic Sum-
mer School. Intellectual culture is to be fostered in harmony
with the true Christian faith by the most enlightened represen-
tatives of the Catholic Church.

# # *

The course of study appointed for this year will embrace
ten lectures on ethics, ten on English literature, ten on general
history, five on science and revealed religion, ten on miscellane-
ous topics. The lectures will be given in the Lyceum Theatre,
New London a beautiful and spacious building capable of seat-
ing comfortably five or six hundred persons. Three lectures
will be delivered on each week-day. Saturdays will be devoted
to rest and recreation. The fee for the whole series of lectures
will be $5. The fee for ten lectures will be $2. Tuition fees

1892.] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 613

may be sent directly to the Secretary, Mr. Warren E. Mosher,
Youngstown, Ohio. A membership card will be issued to
every subscriber. This card will not be transferable, but will
entitle the member to admission if presented in person. In
order that suitable accommodations may be provided, applica-
tions for membership tickets for the whole series should be sent
in before July 15.

Applications for prospectus and printed syllabi of lectures
may be made to any of the following officers :

Rev. Morgan M. Sheedy, President, 48 Third Avenue, Pitts-
burgh, Pa. ; Rev. P. A. Halpin, S.J., First Vice-President, 30
West Sixteenth Street, New York City ; Mr. John H. Haaren,
Second Vice-President, 541 McDonough Street, Brooklyn, N. Y. ;
Mrs. A. T. Toomey, Third Vice-President, Washington, D. C. ;
Mr. Warren E. Mosher, Secretary and Treasurer, Youngstown,
Ohio; Rev. Thomas McMillan, 415 West Fifty-ninth Street,
New York City, chairman of General Council ; Rev. Joseph H.
McMahon, 460 Madison Avenue, New York City, chairman of
Board of Studies ; Mr. George E. Hardy, Seventieth Street and
First Avenue, New York City, chairman Committee on Enter-
tainment ; Mr. William J. Moran, 20 Nassau Street, New York
City, chairman Committee on Arrangements ; Rev. John F.
Mullaney, Syracuse, N. Y., Financial Committee for Northern and
Western New York ; Professor John P. Brophy, 224 West Fifty-
eighth Street, New York City, Financial Committee; Mr. G. P.
Lathrop, New London, Conn., chairman Local Committee.

5f * #

A local committee of Catholics has been formed in New Lon-
don, which will answer all inquiries as to terms for board and
lodging, and will do its best to make arrangements for appli-
cants having small means as well as for those of larger resources.
Letters on this subject should be addressed to Mr. William J.
Brennan, 52 State Street, New London, Conn.

Excursions will be planned for members of the school, and
other amusements devised for their enjoyment. New London,
although on a main line of rail and steamboat travel between
New York and Boston, and connected with the interior by the
New London Northern and the Boston and Albany Railroads,
is a semi-rural city in character. It is full of gardens and im-
mense shade-trees, and situated in a well-wooded, rolling country
which extends along the banks of the Thames River, and to the
very edge of Long Island Sound. The scenery is charming,
and the facilities for bathing, boating, driving, and fishing are

6 14 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [July,

ample. This statement answers the question whether women can
find suitable accommodations while attending the Summer School.
It is expected that many small parties of friends can be pro-
vided for in private families as well as in the hotels.

* * *

An out-of-door sketching class is to be formed this summer
at New Hartford, Conn., under the management of Messrs.
Willard L. Metcalf and Robert Reid. Terms for instruction are
$25 per month, or $40 for eight weeks, payable in advance.
Four days in the week instruction will be given in landscape,
the figure, and still life. The scenery of the Farmington Valley
is very charming ; it is at New Hartford that Mrs. Clara Kel-
logg Strakosch has recently built a country-house. Evidently
the artists are awake to the advantages of combined effort in
summer, when the beauties of nature are most conspicuous.
This is another proof of the desire to utilize vacation for profit-
able study.

* * *

The Fenelon Reading Circle of Brooklyn, N. Y., has been
highly honored by a visit from the Right Rev. Charles E.
McDonnell, D.D. Miss C. F. Hennessy, the secretary of the
Circle, writes this account of the closing meeting:

" The bishop, accompanied by Rev. John T. Barry, the spiritual
director of the Circle, was met at the entrance of the Prach
gallery by the acting president and the secretary, who conducted
him to the committee-room, where the officers and members of
the advisory committee were introduced to him. As a souvenir
of his first visit to the society, and as a token of their appreci-
ation of his kindness in coming to them so soon and so infor-
mally, a set of books was presented to him by the officers in the
name of the Circle. The bishop was then escorted by the com-
mittee to the room where the members and the guests had al-
ready assembled to the number of about three hundred and
fifty. Here, after a few remarks from Father Barry, the presen-
tation of the members and their friends began. This ceremony
lasted for an hour and a half, with short intervals for excellent
vocal music under the direction of Mr. Bernard O'Donnell.

"At the close of the reception the bishop made a short but
very effective address, stating the great satisfaction he felt in
being present at such a representative gathering, and his heart-
felt interest in the work of the Circle ; he hoped to be with
them on many future occasions. He was then presented with a
poem, written for the occasion by a member of the society.
The bishop took his leave about six o'clock, evidently well .
pleased with what he had seen and learned of the Fenelon Read-
ing Circle.

1892.] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 615

" The general feeling among the members was one of entire
gratification and they were warmly congratulated by their guests
on the great success of the meeting."

With the object of organizing the Perboyre Reading Circle
a meeting was held at the residence of Miss Elizabeth L. Rogers,
Brooklyn, N. Y., May 5. The Circle is intended to afford am-
ple opportunity for the literary and musical improvement of
young Catholics of both sexes who may prove acceptable for
membership.

The meeting was a success in every way. Rev. J. A. Hart-
nett presided, and delivered an address to the members urging
them to continued efforts for their self-improvement. Mr. John
A. Hamilton read an ably written paper on the necessity of
Reading Circles. Mr. O. Maune and Counsellor James J. Rogers
also made speeches. After discussing plans for future work the
meeting adjourned. A reception followed the meeting.
* # #

We have been favored with a copy of the report submitted
to the Educational Committee of the Catholic Union, Albany,
N. Y., on behalf of the St. Scholastica Reading Circle, which
was formed October 6, 1891. The ladies belonging to the Read-
ing Circle are auxiliary members of the Catholic Union, entitled
to the use of the library, and pay two dollars each to defray
the general expense of the organization. At a book reception
held recently about five hundred volumes were added to the.
library. Over two hundred members have engaged in the work
of the Reading Circle, under the guidance of Mrs. M. S.
Mooney.

Particular attention has been given to Grecian history, litera-
ture, and mythology.

" The Story of Greece, by Professor James A. Harrison, and
The Story of Alexander s Empire, by Professor J. P. Mahaffy,
have formed the historical basis of our reading. These books
have furnished the required home work of each member of the
Circle, but every chapter of these two books has been reviewed
and discussed at the weekly meetings by members appointed to
do so in advance from week to week. The twenty-four books
of Homer's Iliad (Bryant's translation) have been reviewed and
discussed, with copious quotations, in the same way. The stories
of the most famous of the Greek tragedies have been told, to-
gether with the history of the Greek stage and the purpose of
the Greek drama as a religious ceremony. Twenty-five of the
Greek myths, that seem to have been the favorites of modern

616 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [July,

as well as of ancient writers, have been told from Bulfinch's Age
of Fable, Edwards's Hand-Book of Mythology, Hawthorne's Wonder-
Book and Tanglewood Tales. Many charming poems founded on
these myths have helped to make up the miscellaneous part of
each week's programme. These poems may be found in the
works of Longfellow, Lowell, Saxe, Holmes, Moore, Milton, Ben
Jonson, Tennyson, and many others. In addition to the above
regular work we have had selections read appropriate to the
great festivals of the 8th of December, Christmas and New Year ;
and for each of the last seven meetings we have had a selection
from the writings of Cardinal Newman, either prose or. poetry.
It is our intention to continue this feature of the Columbian
Reading Union, recommended by Father McMillan, of the Paul-
ist Fathers, New York to have at each meeting at least one
number on the programme by a Catholic author."

The Ozanam Reading Circle, of New York City, held a pub-
lic meeting June 3, at Columbus Hall. Mr. Alfred Young pre-
sided. The programme was opened with a piano solo by Miss
Gallagher, followed by an essay on Cardinal Manning by Miss
Sweeney. Father McMillan spoke of the life and work of John
Gilmary Shea. Miss Dolan recited the story of Herve Riel from
Browning.

Right Rev. Mgr. Bernard O'Reilly was then introduced. He
thanked the members for the kind invitation to be present at
such an intellectual feast, and in the course of his excellent
address spoke highly of the late Cardinal Manning being him-
self personally acquainted with him as " a devoted priest " and
"a perfect Christian." At the close of his remarks he wished
every blessing to fall upon the Paulist Fathers and their good
work. As a souvenir of his visit he presented to the Circle a
beautiful bronze medal struck in honor of Cesare Cantu, the
great Catholic writer on universal history.

Shakespearean reading from " As You Like It " was next on
the programme. An opening song was sung by Miss Clifton,
after which the reading took place. After the meeting a recep-
tion was held, at which the invited guests were introduced to

the members.

* # *

We quote from the Boston Pilot some notices showing the
excellent work accomplished by the Reading Circles. Our
friends in the rural districts will read with interest the account
of what Catholics at Boston can do for literary advancement :

" The Brookline Reading Circle held an important meeting

1892.] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 617

June 8. The book under discussion was Cine as ; or, Rome under
Nero. The work was planned by Miss Mary Geary as follows :
Synopsis of the book, Miss Mary Geary ; * Who was Queen
Boadicea ? ' Miss Mary McCarty ; ' The circumstances which led
to the conversion of Helen,' Miss Mary Dee ; ' What did Plato
and Socrates believe with regard to a Supreme Being, and how
near did they come to the knowledge of the true God ? ' Miss
Mary Carey ; ' What did Cicero and Seneca believe of a Su-
preme Being, and how near did they come to the knowledge of
the true God ? ' Miss Margaret Carey ; ' The Mamertine Prison
and the Apostles who were confined there,' Miss Annie Hennes-
sey."

* * *

" The closing exercises of the Catholic Union Reading Circle
before the summer vacation were held at the Catholic Union
Rooms on Tremont Street on May 21. Miss Louise Imogen
Guiney and Mr. Oscar Fay Adams contributed the literary part
of the programme and Miss Nellie McLaughlin the musical por-
tion, while remarks on the importance and usefulness of the
Reading Club movement were made by Miss Katherine Conway,
president of the Boyle O'Reilly Reading Club.

" Meetings were resumed last October. Forty-four members
were present at the first meeting. Since then the .meetings have
been held regularly twice a month, on the second and fourth
Thursdays, and though the attendance has not always been as
large as on the first evening, still the lack of numbers has been
fully compensated for by the enthusiasm and industry displayed
by those who attended regularly.

" The plan of work for the year, arranged by Mrs. Mary
Elizabeth Blake, was wide and interesting, and has been fully
and satisfactorily carried out.

"The books read and discussed comprised those of Brown-
son, his Convert receiving special attention ; the essays of Arch-
bishop Spalding and Bishop England ; the writings of John Gil-
mary Shea, Maurice F. Egan, Marion Crawford, Mrs. James Sad-
lier, Christian Reid, and Mrs. Margaret Sullivan, together with a
number of magazine articles on topics of current interest.
Papers have been prepared and read in connection with reading
assigned for each meeting, biographical sketches of the author's
life and incidents connected with it being always included. The
number of papers prepared has been large, there being an ave-
rage of three or four each evening.

" One of the pleasant incidents of the year was the reception
tendered by the Catholic Union to the Rev. Thomas McMillan,
whom we were invited to meet and welcome as the original pro-
jector of reading clubs."

" The Newman Reading Circle of South Boston held its last
regular meeting for the year on June I, when an election of
officers for the ensuing year was held. During the past year
VOL. LV. 40

618 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [July>

the members have studied and discussed Gregory VII.; the Cru-
sades, their origin, causes, and number; St. Dominic; the first
Crusade ; St. Francis of Assisi ; the eighth Crusade ; results of
these expeditions, and the benefits obtained for the different
nations ; St. Thomas Aquinas ; the orders of knighthood ;
Thomas a Kempis ; Joan of Arc ; and the fall of Constantinople.
The attendance has been very regular, and the meetings highly
successful. At the last meeting, in accordance with the custom
of previous years, the books used during the year were distribut-
ed to the members by lot. It was decided at this meeting to
close the year by a social gathering.

" The Circle will take up at the beginning of next year a
study of the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, with early Ameri-
can history, and on October 12, when the first meeting will be
held in honor of the day, the programme will consist wholly of
matters relating to the discovery of America."

x- # #

"The third year of the John Boyle O'Reilly Reading Circle
closed with a promising list of active members, whose earnest
and interested work throughout the winter has made this year the
most successful in the life of the Circle. Studies in church his-
tory, suggested by the contents of the question box ; the biog-
raphy and novels of Kathleen O'Meara, and related work, as the
life of St. Vincent de Paul, and the local and general work of
St. Vincent de Paul Conferences, in connection with Frederic
Ozanam ; St. Dominic and the Dominicans, in connection with
Lacordaire, have furnished the chief work of the season. The
Circle had also a Manning night, at the first meeting following
the death of the great cardinal ; and towards the close of the
season devoted an evening to the works of Maurice F. Egan.

" The twelve papers written by the members of the Circle
have been of a much higher order than those of previous years.
In addition to this the routine work of the Circle Miss Kathe-
rine E. Conway has, by request, twice read papers.

"The discussions have gained in interest and spirit. Those
upon the life and influence of Savonarola, and the Greek schism,
were probably the most important.

"The literary gleanings prove that the everyday reading is
gradually reaching a higher standard, and the selections from
poetry, history, and biography indicate that the Reading Circle
is helping more and more every year to render enjoyable only
the highest and best in all literature."

x- * *

" The Catholic Reading Circle of Lawrence, Mass., closed its
season's work, June 10, with a charming entertainment at the
Franklin House, the chief feature of which was a paper by Miss
Louise Imogen Guiney, entitled 'A Ride through Ireland.'

" An extremely appreciative audience completely filled the
dining-hall of the hotel. Miss Katharine A. O'Keeffe presided,
and after a few words descriptive of the aim of the Reading

1892.] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 619

Circle, and the work it has accomplished, presented Miss Gui-
ney.

" The paper by Miss Guiney was a most delightful story of
a trip taken by herself and her mother, in the summer of 1890,
over the roads through some of the most interesting and roman-
tic parts of the Green Isle. It was poetic, pathetic, and humor-
ous by turns, and was a most delightfully original description of
a journey out of the beaten track of travel, where objects were
seen by keen, discerning eyes, and jotted down with a poet's
pen. The pranks of ' Eileen,' a near relative of the donkey
family, the whimsical little animal which drew the ' trap ' and
its occupants over Irish roads, were described in a most laugha-
ble manner. Everybody was delighted with the paper, and no
less so with the reader."

A traveller from America visiting London for the first time
was surprised to find such a large Irish colony in the chief city
of the British Empire. He was informed that fully three-fourths
of the Catholic people in London are of Irish extraction. In
various departments of trade and in professional life he found
representatives of the exiled Irish race making themselves quite
at home in the den of the British lion. Now the information
comes to us that an Irish Literary Society has been formally es-
tablished at London, The first meeting was held at the Caledo-
nian Hotel, and was largely attended by ladies and gentlemen,
poets, novelists, and workers in literature and journalism.

The large number of letters from eminent Irish men and
women, expressing sympathy, encouragement, and support, read
by the hardworking secretary (Mr. T. W. Rolleston) augured well
for the success of the movement. All shades of Irish political
thought and belief were represented in the correspondence. The
objects of the society are (i) to afford a centre of social and
literary intercourse for persons of Irish nationality living, either
permanently or occasionally, in London ; (2) to promote the
study of Irish history, literature, and art. Central premises will
be taken for the purposes of the society. An excellent working
committee was elected, with Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, K.C.B., as
president. It is arranged that a lecture on the Celtic influence
on English literature will be delivered by the Rev. Stopford
Brooke, a member of the society. The roll of members includes
the names of Mr. Justin McCarthy, M.P. ; Mr. John Redmond,
M.P.; Mr. Michael Davitt ; the Rev. Stopford t Brooke ; The
O'Clery; Mr. John O'Leary ; Mr. William O'Brien, M.P.; Mr.
Thomas Lough; Mr. T. D. Sullivan, M.P.; Mr. R. Barry
O'Brien ; Mr. Bram Stoker (of the Lyceum Theatre) ; Mr. Fitz-

620 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [July,

gerald Molloy ; Miss Katherine Tynan ; Mr. Sexton, M.P.; Mr.
W. B. Yeats ; Lady Wilde, Oscar Wilde, Miss Sharman-Craw-

ford.

x- * *

Publishers deserve praise when they justly compensate au-
thors and push the sale of good books. The Literary World
published this statement :

" To beget and stimulate a taste for reading in rural districts
Messrs. Cassell & Co. are offering, as a nucleus for forming vil-
lage libraries, a set of their National Library, which consists of
upwards of two hundred volumes, at half the usual price. The
only conditions are that there is no resident bookseller in the
place supplied and that a responsible person is appointed to
take charge of the books."

Our correspondence enables us to know that there is a great
demand in rural districts for good cheap literature. Libraries
are beyond the reach of country boys working on farms. The
vile trash of the American book market often penetrates to re-
mote districts, where good books are never seen. Here is a
wide field for philanthropy.

* * *

None of the premiums given at the academies this year has
proved more acceptable than the book entitled The Life and
Times of Kateri Tekakwitha, the Lily of the Mohawks, 1656-1680,
by Miss Ellen H. Walworth, illustrated with maps and original
drawings. The work treats of matters of historical and even ro-
mantic interest attaching to our Mohawk and Hudson valleys.
The first edition, issued last summer, was exhausted almost im-
mediately. The publishers (Peter Paul & Brother, Buffalo, N. Y.)
had not a copy left at the close of the year. A new and much
larger edition is now published and can be ordered at once.
The price at retail is $1.25 ; packages of ten or more at $i per
copy, if ordered directly from the publishers by schools or Read-
ing Circles.

M. C. M.

1892.] WITH THE PUBLISHER. 621

WITH THE PUBLISHER.

" LIVING requires but little life : doing requires much " the
motto of THE CATHOLIC WORLD for the month, an uncomfort-
able motto in July's heats, when simply living is all human na-
ture cares for. And yet it is necessary in a periodical publica-
tion. Father Time gives all who contribute to our work no
respite. Temperature cannot be a consideration in any of the
departments of the " make-up " of our magazine, and the doing
that requires not little but much life is always the necessity.
Labor on a magazine is incessant the completion of one issue
means the beginning of another, and when these pages reach
the reader the greater part of the August issue will have been
planned out and much of it will be in type. THE CATHOLIC
WORLD cannot merely live, it demands the activity of many
hands and brains, and each number is the product of this com-
bined activity. The selection and arrangement of the matter is
in itself a study, and is the result of 1 plans that may require
many changes before the " reader " puts his fiat " Press " upon
the sheet.

So a magazine office is a hot-bed of plans even after manu-
scripts have been accepted. And when our readers are told that
from the office of the magazine are issued no fewer than six
regular monthly publications (all in one form or another direct-
ed to serve the same ends as THE CATHOLIC WORLD), they can
readily understand the necessity for such a motto as the Pub-
lisher puts at the head of his department.

But this activity should extend beyond the makers of the
magazine to those who use it. And the Publisher tells them
something of the activity necessary in all the departments of the
magazine that it may serve as a spur to their own activity in
behalf of the cause for which THE CATHOLIC WORLD is a cham-
pion. Perhaps the reader is beyond the reach of any such spur
just now. But at least he can lay out a plan of campaign when
old Sol's ardor is diminished, and when crisp, bright days give
a zest to life and make activity a blessing. Let him do the
part that requires much life ; he cannot put activity to better
and worthier use than in behalf of the Apostolate of the Press.

622 WITH THE PUBLISHER. [July,

The Apostolate of the Press reminds us that the report of
the proceedings at the meeting in last January is still on sale at
this office, though there are not many copies left. The Publisher's
remarks in a former issue urging the necessity of securing a copy
before the limited edition was exhausted, have apparently led
some of our readers to believe that there are no copies left.
This is a mistake. We have but few left and cannot place them
with the booksellers. Order direct from this office and you will
receive a book worth many times its price. But don't delay
about the matter. Send your order at once with twenty-five
cents in whatever form is most convenient ; if you send stamps
we prefer the amount in one-cent or five-cent stamps.

It gives us pleasure to note that another great Catholic cause,
that of Total Abstinence, is about to invoke the aid of the Press
in behalf of its mission to our people. The necessity and feasi-
bility of such an Apostolate through the agency of Printer's Ink
is now under discussion. There can be no doubt of the out-
come among men who watch the signs of the times. In these
days the printed page is the greatest preacher, it has the widest
audience, it is a voice that is ever living, never silent ; and as a
result of the adoption of this great power for clinching argument
and riveting conviction, we look to see yet greater progress and
triumph in the cause of sobriety.

Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., the agents for Methuen &
Co., of London, for their series of " English Leaders of Religion,"
have issued the Life of Cardinal Manning referred to in these
pages some time ago and while the great cardinal was still living.
The work is from the pen of Mr. A. W. Hutton, who, it was
then said, had written the volume with the cardinal's consent
sand assistance. The Publisher has since learned that this rumor
is not trustworthy, and although it is even now claimed that Mr.
Hutton has given an impartial account of Manning's life while
in the Anglican Church and also in the Catholic Church, still
the treatment the author gave to his Reminiscences of Cardinal
Newman in the pages of the Expositor which some of our read-
ers may recall will make the Catholic reader disinclined to
easily credit Mr. Hutton's impartiality. In connection with this
subject it may be well to remind our readers that there are two
authors of the name and both have addressed themselves to the
task of writing of Cardinal Newman. Mr. R. H. Hutton,
though not a Catholic, has written a brief life of Cardinal New-

1892.] WITH THE PUBLISHER. 623

man (New York : Houghton, Mifflin & Co.), in a far different
temper and spirit from that which characterized Mr. A. W. Hut-
ton's Reminiscences, and far more acceptable to the Catholic
reader, though the greater portion of the book is taken up with
the cardinal's career in the Anglican Church. Mr. A. W. Hut-
ton, it will be remembered, was at one time thought to be
the coming light in the High Church body, but was received
into the Catholic Church while at Oxford, if we mistake not,
and joined the community at the Birmingham Oratory. This
gave him his intimate acquaintance with Newman. He subse-
quently apostatized, and is now, we believe, committed to no de-
finite form of religious belief.

There are men who will write and publishers who will sell
the most noxious filth that can be put between the covers of a
book. But blameworthy as such men are, they would not, on
mere business principles, write or publish such degrading books,
if they did not find a ready market and meet a steady demand
for their wares from a certain class of readers. That this class
is a very large one is unhappily too evident. The Publisher saw
a recent announcement in a journal for the bookselling trade,
which chronicled the issue and sale on the same day of the one-
hundreth edition of five thousand copies each of one of the vilest
of the many vile publications of the day so vile, indeed, that
it cannot be sent through the mails. The fact that at least half
a million readers can have an appetite for such filth and can
find means of satisfying so depraved a taste is too deplorable to
require any comment.

In gracious contrast to facts such as these is the remem-
brance of Lady Burton's action in burning the MSS. of her
husband's translation from the Arabic of The Scented Garden,
which had been entrusted to her on his death. Though Lady
Burton was far from being wealthy, and though publishers held
out tempting prices for the MSS., she was too loyal a Catholic,
too true a woman, to co-operate with the evil that might come
to many because of the erotic character of the work, and burned
the pages to put an end for ever to the temptation that her
needs might bring her. Whereat there was a great clamor among
" scholars " because of a "woman's piece of wanton vandalism," and
urging every plea in behalf of scholarship against this " outrage."
But the loss to scholarship is a gain in much that is far above
and beyond scholarship. For the one man who would read the

624 WITH THE PUBLISHER. [July,

work from the stand-point and motive of the student, how many
more would read it for the vileness it suggested ? how many
might date their soul's corruption from the day they first took
it up ? The pure woman, the demands of conscience, are before
and above the claims of scholarship, and of course above tempo-
ral necessities, and it was because of these demands that Lady
Burton acted as she did.

So her critics may rave and tell us, as Mr. Eugene Field
does in writing on the subject, that " woman is by nature wholly,
irredeemably and irreparably disqualified for the offices of liter-
ary executor," and that " a woman and a kitchen stove will do
more damage in five minutes than a horde of hungry savages
in five years," but until these critics understand the paramount
claims of conscience they cannot understand Lady Burton's action.
She had had experience of the harm that such books can do,
even had her woman's instinct against vileness failed her, from
the action of the English authorities forbidding the publication
and sale of Captain Burton's unexpurgated translation of the
Arabian Nights Entertainment. This prohibition, the Publisher sup-
poses, would have also been regarded by the daily press as a
" blow to scholarship " were it not for the fact that, though the
sale of the work is forbidden in England, it may be purchased
in the open market in this country, though, happily, at a price
which is practically prohibitive.

Despite the large sale of immoral books we are comforted
with the thought that here and there evidences of a better
spirit prevail, and the disciples of the so-called Realism are met
with rebukes that cannot be ignored. Whatever good or evil is
found, for instance, in the French Academy, whether or not it
is deserving of all that Daudet lays at its doors in One of the
Immortals, certainly every lover of decency in literature will ap-
plaud its recent repeated refusal to admit M. Zola within the
circle of the Immortal Forty. It is much to their credit that
they will not make an associate of this high-priest of nastiness,
and their action is a rebuke that carries weight.

Even in the Flowery Kingdom the publisher finds evidence
of much that is of comfort to those who would war against an
immoral press. And though the " Heathen Chinee " is not
counted worthy of a place among the citizens of this " land of
the free," there is much that is a rebuke to our people in the
public spirit of these same heathen.

1892.] WITH THE PUBLISHER. 625

Chinese works of fiction, as the Publisher learns from the
North China Herald, of Shanghai, are generally speaking most
licentious and demoralizing. They have been shown to be the
direct causes in many cases of public evil, and the best among
the Chinese felt that they had abundant ground for believing
that immoral books were a distinct menace to public safety, and
exerted an influence for evil greater by far than the precepts of
their great teachers of natural virtue made for good.

The evil was met by those who had the triumph of at least
natural virtue at heart in a very summary manner, and the crusade
among these upright souls against immoral books still continues.
These men put aside a certain amount, and by no means an in-
considerable part of their income, yearly, which is devoted to
the purchase not only of all kinds of vicious literature they can
lay their hands on, but even of the blocks from which these
books are printed. All such books and blocks are burned. One
merchant went so far in this crusade that he devoted all his
spare funds, and even sold all his wife's ornaments, in order to
make the work of destruction more complete. A strong public
opinion against immoral books is steadily growing, one result of
which was exhibited at Soochow, where sixty-five of the leading
merchants publicly pledged themselves not to engage in, or in
any way countenance, the trade in vile literature. And the evil
had grown to be so fruitful in crime that the power of the gov-
ernment was invoked against all immoral publications.

Verily, we can learn from the heathen. What are we doing
against the evil as it is found here ? Are we doing all we can
do ? And is it likely that we could find among our mer-
chants the spirit and the self-sacrifice of these benighted

Chinese ?

As a " straw " illustrating the tendency of the general reader,
it is refreshing to note that in the recently issued report of the
Richmond (England) Free Library, there was a marked and
steady increase in the readers of the more serious classes of lit-
erature, viz., Theology and Philosophy, Law and Politics, while
the demand for works of fiction and the lighter periodicals just
as steadily decreased. That this is the general experience it is
not for the Publisher to say, but it is an experience that was
repeated last year in the Tokyo Free Library in far-off Japan,
where of the 36,000 volumes issued, 7,500 were works on History
and Biography, 7,000 on Law and Politics, 6,600 on Literature and
Language, and 6,000 on Natural Philosophy. In France Jules

626 WITH THE PUBLISHED. [July,

Claretie shows from actual experience with the booksellers that
the sale of works of fiction is decreasing; and that the French
public are reading historical works. The same tendency is shown
in a digested list of the new works published in English during
the past year. Though fiction still leads, it is losing ground to
history and biography.

A place that will not be easily filled has been left vacant in
the ranks of Catholic men of letters by the sudden death of
Father William Lockhart, of the Order of Charity, on May 15
last. Among his best-known works are The Old Religion (Burns
& Gates) and a Life of Rosmini. Father Lockhart was also
closely connected with the Lamp and founded a paper called
Catholic Opinion, now incorporated with the Catholic Times. He
was a frequent contributor to Catholic periodicals, and the current
number of the Dublin Review contains some most interesting
" Personal Reminiscences of Cardinal Manning " from his pen.

From 1798 to 1815 Wordsworth put forth in his various edi-
tions his views on the nature of the poetic art. These prefaces
attracted the attention of the literary world, and were of the
nature of a challenge to the critical gladiators of the time. Mr.
A. J. George has collected and edited these prefaces and essays,
adding such notes as are necessary. The volume is published
by Heath & Co., of Boston, and ought to be of interest to all
students of the poetic principle.

Charles Scribner's Sons announce an additional contribution
to the already numerous studies of Carlyle. The volume is from
the pen of the aged Sir Charles Gavan Duffy and is entitled
Conversations and Correspondence with Thomas Carlyle.

The Appletons also announce The Last Words of Thomas
Carlyle, writings and lectures hitherto unpublished.

Professor McMaster is said to be hard at work on the fourth
volume of his History of the American People (Appleton), which
will be published probably in 1894. This volume will deal alto-
gether with the literary side of our national life, with accounts
of long-forgotten novels, magazines, etc., and will also include a
study of the religious condition of the people from 1783 to 1820.

What " fad " or theory is there nowadays which does not
invoke Printer's Ink for its propaganda? Among the latest of
new publications we chronicle The Urn, a monthly devoted to
the interests of cremation, " from the philosophical as well as
the sanitary point of view," to quote from its prospectus.

A new edition of the Dukesborough Tales of Richard Mal-
colm Johnston has been published by the Appletons. The " Bill

1892.] WITH THE PUBLISHER. 627

Williams" of these tales is one of the most characteristic pro-
ducts of Southern literature, and the tales themselves have been
called classic by those who are competent to judge. Mr. John-
ston has selected from the tales six stories which describe the
career of " Bill Williams." These form a continuous narrative
and are published under the title of The Chronicles of Mr. Bill
Williams.

In these days when there is so much flimsy and slipshod
book-making, it gives one genuine pleasure to examine the large
and sumptuous 8xio edition of the Horce Diurna published by
Fr. Pustet. The binding, press-work, " register," type, and
paper make it one of the best specimens of the bookmaker's
art. We have looked through it with care and find in it noth-
ing faulty in any respect. It contains all the offices to date, is
most conveniently arranged, has far less of troublesome back-refer-
ences than any other edition we have seen, and can be read
with such ease from a book-rest that it is practically the acme
of comfort for a priest, especially if his sight is poor.

If any one who reads these lines means to make a present to
one of the clergy and is in doubt about what is most appropri-
ate (now that the day of the embroidered slipper is happily past),
let us suggest (and we ought to know what a priest would best
appreciate) this magnificent edition of the Horce Diurncz ; noth-
ing could be more beautiful and more serviceable.

The Catholic Publication Society Co. has issued :

History of the Church in England from the beginning of
the Christian Era to the accession of Henry VIII. By
Mary H. Allies.

The Hail Mary ; or, Popular Instructions and Considera-
tions on the Angelical Salutation. By J. P. Val D'Ere-
mao, D.D.

The Church; or, The Society of Divine Praise. A man-
ual for the use of the Oblates of St. Benedict. From the
French of Dom Prosper Gueranger, abbot of Solesmes.
The same firm announces :

The Conversion of the Teutonic Race. By Mrs. Hope.
Edited by Rev. J. B. Dalgairns, of the Oratory. A new
and popular edition, in two volumes, each volume com-
plete in itself. Vol. I. Conversion of the Franks and
English. Vol. II. St. Boniface and the Conversion of
Germany.

Menology of England and Wales. Compiled by Rev. R.
Stanton, of the Oratory. A supplement, containing notes
and other additions, together with enlarged appendices,
and a new index.

628 BOOKS RECEIVED. [July, 1892.

BOOKS RECEIVED.

CONSTITUTIONAL AND POLITICAL HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. By

Dr. H. von Hoist, professor at the University of Freiburg. Translated from

the German by John J. Lalor. Chicago : Callaghan & Co.
SERMONS ON THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY. By the Very Rev. D. I. McDer-

mott, rector of St. Mary's Church, Philadelphia. Philadelphia : William J.

Carey.

MEDITATIONS FOR EVERY DAY IN THE YEAR. Collected from different spiri-
tual writers. Edited by Rev. Roger Baxter, S.J., of Georgetown Co ege.

Second edition. New York : Benziger Bros.
TALES AND LEGENDS OF THE MIDDLE AGES. From the Spanish of F. de P.

Capella. Edited by Henry Wilson. New York, Cincinnati, ana Chicago :

Benziger Bros.
PRINCIPLES AND PURPOSES OF OUR FORM OF GOVERNMENT. As set forth

in public papers of Grover Cleveland. Compiled by Francis Gottsberger.

New York : George G. Peck.
MODERN INDUSTRIES AND COMMERCE. The Information Readers Series.

No. 4. By Robert Lewis, Ph.D. Boston : School Supply Company.
RITUS ORDINATIONUM JUXTA PONTIFICALS ROMANUM. Latin and English.

By the Very Rev. J. S. M. Lynch, D.D., LL.D., formerly professor of Sacred

Liturgy in St. Joseph's Provincial Seminary, Troy, N. Y. Second Edition.

New York : The Cathedral Library Association.
HIERARCHY OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH IN THE UNITED STATES.

By Maurice Francis Egan, LL.D. Parts 11 to 15 (inclusive). Philadelphia:

George Barrie.
THEOLOGIA MORALIS PER MODUM CONFERENTIARUM. Auctore clarissimo

P. Benjamin Elbel, O.S.F. Novis curis edidit, P. F. Irenseus Bierbaum,

O.S.F. Pars VII. et VIII. Paderbornse : Ex Typographia Bonifaciana

(J. W. Schroeder); Neo Eboraci : Benziger Fratres.
MY WATER CURE. By Rev. Sebastian Kneipp, parish priest of Worishofen

(Bavaria). Translated from the thirty-sixth German edition. Kempton

(Bavaria) : Joseph Koesel ; St. Louis, Mo.: B. Herder, agent.
PHASES OF THOUGHT AND CRITICISM. By Brother Azarias, of the Brothers of

the Christian Schools. Boston and New York : Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
GOLDEN RULES. For directing religious communities, seminaries, colleges,

schools, families, etc. By Rev. Michael Miiller, C.SS.R. New and revised

edition. New York and Cincinnati : Fr. Pustet & Co.
VERSES ON DOCTRINAL AND DEVOTIONAL SUBJECTS. By the Rev. James

Casey, P.P. Dublin: James Duffy & Co. (limited).
A SCHOOL HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. Abridged and compiled from

reliable sources. With maps and illustrations. New York : Benziger Bros.

PAMPHLETS RECEIVED.

OUR DANGER SIGNAL. Evils of intemperance reviewed. By J. E. R. Ashe-
ville, N. C. : Asheville Printing Company.

JESUS CHRIST is GOD. By Rev. Walter Elliott, C.S.P. Pamphlet No. 1 8. St.
Paul : Catholic Truth Society of America.

CATECHISM ON POPE LEO'S GREAT ENCYCLICAL ON THE CONDITION OF LA-
BOR. Translated from the French of Monsignor Lecot, Archbishop of Bor- '
deaux, by Rev. William F. Grace. Worcester, Mass. : The Messenger
Print.

THE ETHICS OF LITERATURE. Fanatical Philosophy's Failure as an element
of Apologetics. By John A. Kersey, Marion, Ind.

COLUMBUS: A Drama in Five Acts. By an Ursuline Nun. New York: Benzi-
ger Brothers.

THE

CATHOLIC WORLD,

VOL. LV. AUGUST, 1892. No. 329.

THE SHEPHERDESS OF DOMREMY.

IN the year 1328 the crown of France passed from the direct
line of Hugues Capet, which had become extinct, to the branch
line of Valois. The only surviving member of the former was a
woman, whom the Salic law debarred from reigning in France.
She was Isabella, daughter of Philip the Fair, and wife of Ed-
ward II., King of England. However, she claimed the throne
of France, not for herself, but for her son, Edward III. as if
she could transmit to him a right she did not have herself. At
any rate, out of this claim grew a war that lasted one hundred
years. Crecy and Agincourt were battles of this period as dis-
astrous to France as Waterloo and Sedan in our own century.
Through the reigns of John II. and Charles V. of France the
struggle lasted, until we come, in the beginning of 1400, to
Charles VI., whose life was one long spell of insanity, with a
few lucid intervals. During his reign the regency was in the hands
of two royal princes his uncle, the Duke of Burgundy, and his
brother, the Duke of Orleans. Burgundy murdered Orleans, and
Burgundy in turn was murdered by Armagnac, the partisan and
heir of Orleans. Hence, civil war between the two houses, in
addition to the war on hand between France and England.

Orleans took up the cause of the French king, and Burgundy
stood by the fortunes of the English claimant. The English
claimant in 1421 was Henry VI., a mere child, whose uncle,
Bedford, ruled for him in France. The French king was Charles
VII., weak in character, poor in troops, and poorer in means.
His kingdom was confined to a few southern provinces, of which
the city of Orleans was the key. The whole northern portion of

630 THE SHEPHERDESS OF DOMREMY. [Aug.,

France, with Paris the capital, was in the hands of the English
and their French allies, the Burgundians. To the city of Or-
leans .the English laid siege. It seemed only a question of some
months when it must yield ; and when that came all France
would be under English rule, and the French, as an independ-
ent nation, had ceased to exist. It was at this crisis that an
unexpected and strange saviour came, that saviour a woman, and
her name Joan of Arc.

The story of Joan is not legend. It rests on the highest
kind of evidence. The best writers of her time in France and
elsewhere have given in their writings the facts of her life. And
since her time every succeeding century has furnished a large
number of historians, orators, and poets who have made her the
subject of their researches or theme of their songs : some to re-
vile her, as Shakspere and Voltaire ; many more to exalt her.
Our century has been especially busy with the Maid of Orleans.
Libraries have been ransacked for every manuscript concerning
her. The bibliography of the subject has grown to proportions
rivaling that of Mary, Queen of Scots, the Templars, the au-
thorship of the Imitation of Christ, and other celebrated histori-
cal causes. Statues have been raised to her, poems written on
her, art has reproduced her deeds on canvas, and the highest
dramatic talent of the day acts out her wonderful life on the
stage to large and enthusiastic audiences. However, the main
sources of the history of the Maid of Orleans are the two trials
which she underwent ; the first at Rouen that issued in her
burning, the latter at Paris (some twenty-five years after her
death) that issued in the cassation of the former verdict and the
rehabilitation of the calumniated heroine. In the first trial a
most searching and cruel examination draws from her own lips
the story of her short life she was burned at the age of twen-
ty. In the second trial the surviving companions of her life,
who had known, heard, seen, fought with her, were made to
narrate her life from childhood to the tragic end. The official
and authenticated records of those two trials are extant to-day
and in print. These are the sources of her history, and they
give a certitude which is incontestable judicial certitude.

Therefore, the facts I am about to narrate cannot be denied
on the ground of lack of evidence. If they are denied on such
ground, we may as well make a bonfire of all history, and say
that there never was anything or anybody in this world before
you and I came into it. After hearing my recital, only one
question can arise in the reader's mind, and that is : Are these

1892.] THE SHEPHERDESS OF DOMREMY. 631

things possible ? Now, that question takes the matter from his-
torical to other ground. If one is of an agnostic turn of mind,
he may answer, impossible : but then, remember, you thrust
aside facts for which there is the best of evidence. If you are
a believer in God and providence, you must answer, Such things
are not impossible, and, if there be evidence, I cannot resist the
conviction that they really did happen I must accept them as
historical facts.

There is a providence ruling the world. God is the God of
nations as well as of individuals. National life and prosperity
are his gift. He preserves and guides, rewards and chastises
states as well as persons.

In the glorious hour of victory this nation, with Washington
in Philadelphia and New York, or with Jackson in New Orleans,
has gone into the temples of religion to bow its laurel-crowned
head before the altar of the Lord God of Hosts. In the gloomy
days of threatening storm and ruin this nation has called on the
name of the God of courage through the great heart of that
chief magistrate who led the nation through the red sea of frat-
ricidal war, and who spoke its fears, faith, hope, in language no
less Christian than patriotic. In the dark night of sorrow and
weeping, while the widowed nation kept wake around the re-
mains of the chief taken from her by murder, she turned for
solace to the Master of life and death, and gathered her or-
phaned wards within the churches of God. In all the solemn
crises of its history this people has remembered that the power
of the earth is in the hand of God. His Holy Name is written
on the important state papers of our rulers ; our solemn assem-
blies and great works are preceded and blessed by prayer to
him. Not thus does a nation act that disbelieves in God's
providence.

Now, this action of God in the world may show itself in two
ways : first, by his letting secondary causes interact and result
in events and issues under his unseen guidance, of course, but
without any sign of action on his part and this we call God's
ordinary providence ; second, by discarding for a time and for a
purpose the interaction of the usual secondary causes which in
our experience produce and make up the human drama called
history, and putting to work unusual causes and even inadequate
ones in such a way as to mark a striking emphasis in our
reading of the world's course this we call God's extraordinary
providence. As an instance of ordinary providence, I name
George Washington ; as an instance of extraordinary providence,

632 THE SHEPHERDESS OF DOMREMY. [Aug.,

I name Joan of Arc. To the reader of Scripture many more in-
stances of the same kind, and of women specially chosen, will
come readily to mind.

In the valley of the Meuse, on the borders of Lorraine and
Champagne, nestles the village of Domremy (Domnus Remigius)
close to the town of Vaucouleurs (Vallis Colorum). There, on
the 6th of January, 1412, was born Joan. Her parents were
tillers of the soil, of good life and repute, having no other
wealth than their little field and cottage, and their three sons
and two daughters. Joan, the eldest of the daughters, grew un-
der the care of her mother in the knowledge of the first ele-
ments of religion, in the exercise of piety, and in habits of
household thrift and diligence. She was a good, simple, sweet
girl, and worked cheerfully, spinning far into the night by her
mother's side, or taking the mother's place in the cares of the
cottage, or at times sharing the father's ruder labor, putting
hand to plow or sickle, or herding on the commons the cattle of
the village when came the turn of the family to do that duty.
The little garden of her home touched on the graveyard, the
garden of the parish church ; and thither Joan frequently went
for prayer before the great crucifix, or the Madonna's statue.
Every morning she was at Mass, and at eve, when the bell rang
the Angelus, she knelt wherever she might be at home or a-field ;
and, if at times the bell-ringer forgot or grew careless, she would
gently chide or coax him to better remembrance or care by the
promise of her home-made cakes. Two miles from Domremy, on
the side of one of the hills that overlook the valley and waters
of the Meuse, was a chapel dedicated to the Blessed Virgin.
Thither on Saturdays Joan would repair with other girls of the
village to pray and burn candles. The bolder boys of the vil-
lage smiled at her devotion, and some of her girl companions
laughingly chaffed her. But, like the maiden of sense that she
was, she went her way undisturbed. Her piety was not mere show.
The little money she got was spent on those poorer than her-
self. To them she always gave a welcome, the best corner by
her fireside, and frequently her own 'warm cot to sleep in. She
did not seek to be odd, or stand aloof from other children, but
willingly joined them in the village feasts of the various seasons,
danced the merry round about the great beech tree the aged
monarch of the neighboring woodland, the scene of all the fairy
tales of the village.

From these peaceful scenes she was suddenly called to war.
The mission of Joan of Arc produced such a rapid and com-

1892.] THE SHEPHERDESS OF DOMREMY. 633

plete revolution in the destinies of France and Europe that no
serious historian can dismiss it without trying to account for it.
When the historian meets some great effect in the course of
human events he must look for its cause. Whence came this
mission of Joan ? She said it came from God, and backed her
assertion with proof ; the proof was her marvellous victories in
the very face of impossibilities. No one to-day dares to say
that she knowingly and willingly deceived the world, or that she
was the tool of political fraud, and lent herself to accredit a
scheme gotten up to delude the nation. In fact, as will be seen
later on, every one was against her : her parents, the court,
the king, the knights, the church, the very ones interested
in her mission ; yet she, an illiterate peasant girl, fought her
way to success in spite of the indifference and the opposition of
all. It is pretended that she was unwittingly under an illusion
that originated in a false mysticism combined with ardent patri-
otism. But, I ask, can these causes account for her marvellous
deeds, her victories on the field of battle, for the fulfillment of
her promises in which originally no one trusted because they were
humanly impossible of realization ? Mysticism is vague and
dreamy, and not given to action ; nothing is more precise and
defined and active than Joan's life. Mysticism finds lodging in
sickly natures and nervous temperaments ; Joan was a sturdy, sen-
sible girl, tall, robust, with all the graces of young womanhood,
with a voice sweet and musical. Hers was a healthy mind in a
perfectly knit frame that enabled her to bear the hardships of war
with the toughest of France's warriors, to their great wonder-
ment. Whence, then, came her mission ? Her contemporaries
had no doubt whatever that its origin was beyond the sphere of
any known natural causes. The French patriots saw in it the
finger of God. The English and their Burgundian allies saw in
it the cloven foot of the devil. " She is a divinely guided maid,"
say the former ; " She is a witch and an imp of evil," say the
latter, and these backed their conviction with the burning of her.
The mission of Joan is no article of faith. The church does
not impose it, has decided nothing about it, leaves me perfectly
free to deal with the question according to my best judgment.
I am confronted on the one hand by a peasant girl suddenly
launched into camp and battle, on the other hand by victories
which all contemporaries pronounce to be beyond the means at
the disposal of Charles VII., beyond the expectations of friend
and foe victories so marvellous that friends attribute them
to God, and foes to the devil. Well, then, I will take her

634 THE SHEPHERDESS OF DOMREMY. [Aug.,

account of herself. And I will add to the narrative of her life
already given material drawn from the report of the two trials.

When thirteen years old this would be in 1425 she heard a
voice from heaven calling her. It was a summer day, the hour
of noon, in the garden of her home. The voice came from the
direction of the church, and at the spot whence it issued she
saw a great light. In the second chapter of St. Luke's gospel
we find described just such an apparition, and how could St.
Luke know it unless from the shepherds who had seen it ? The
first time this marvel happened to Joan she was afraid ; but soon
she grew trustful, for she found the voice worthy of trust ; to
her judges she declared it came from heaven. It was St. Mi-
chael the Archangel who appeared, with a retinue of angelic spirits.
"I saw them," she declared to her judges, "just as I see you,
and when they left me I wept and wished they would take me
with them." At first the apparitions did not speak of her mission;
they told her only to behave well, to frequent the church and
the sacraments, to be a good girl, and God would help her. By
and by hints of some work she had to do were given, and other
apparitions more intimate and familiar were promised ; St. Cath-
arine and St. Margaret were to come to her frequently; she was
to put full trust in their counsel : such was the will of God.
Thenceforward the angelic apparitions ceased, she was left to the
care of the two saints I have named, and lived in frequent and
familiar communion with them. Outwardly nothing was changed
in her manner of life ; she remained the same simple, good, sen-
sible peasant girl, and kept to herself the marvels amid which
she lived. But finally the day came when she was positively or-
dered to go to Vaucouleurs to Sieur Robert de Baudricourt,
captain of the Royalist forces, to ask for an escort to lead her
to the king and to war. To leave her parenrs, her friends, her
peaceful labors, and plunge into a warrior's life was a prospect
that troubled this simple soul. She answered her saints that she
was only a peasant girl who knew not how to ride or make
war. But they insisted she must go, and she dare not resist the
positive order of heaven. Her uncle lived in a neighboring ham-
let. To him she went as if for a short visit, revealed all, and
begged he would take her to the king's captain in Vaucou-
leurs. Great was the wonder of the good man. He yielded,
however, to her instances, and the I3th of May, 1428, beheld
the two strange visitors in the presence of Sieur de Baudricourt.
She came, she said, on behalf of her Lord, and in order to lead
the king to Rheims to receive consecration. " Who is thy Lord?"

1892.] THE SHEPHERDESS OF DOMREMY. 635

asked Baudricourt. " The King of Heaven," answered Joan. The
officer thought the girl insane, and advised the uncle to take
her back to her father to be chastised. Her saints had foretold
her this affront. She was not cast down, but went back to her
home and her ordinary occupations. Her father had a dream
that she was to go off with soldiers. The dream left an impres-
sion on his mind he could not shake off. He watched her care-
fully, and said often to his sons : " If I thought such a thing
should come to pass, I would bid you to drown her, and should
do it myself, if you did not." To prevent the realization of his
fears, he resolved to marry her off, and chose a suitor. She
steadfastly refused the offer. To cut off retreat the candidate
for her hand traduced her before the ecclesiastical tribunal as
having engaged herself to him by promise. Her saints bade her
go boldly to court. She easily refuted her strange adversary,
and that was the end of the episode. Shortly after her saints
repeated the injunction to go to the king's captain, this time pro-
mising success. Again she had recourse to her uncle's intervention.

Once more the village girl, in her coarse, red gown, stood
before the Sieur de Baudricourt. The second welcome was no
more propitious than the first. But she did not return to Domremy,
she went to the house of a wheelwright in Vaucouleurs, and re-
mained there three weeks, sharing the work and the daily
prayers of the household. The motive of her presence in the
place was no longer a secret ; she told it to many. " I have
come here to the Sieur de Baudricourt," she said to one of his
lieutenants who called to see her at the wheelwright's house,
"that he may send me to the king; he does not heed my
words. Yet before Lent is over I must be in the king's presence,
had I to wear off my legs to the knee, for no one in the
world can help and save France but myself. Certes, I'd much
rather sit at my mother's spinning wheel, for war is not my con-
dition ; but I must go and do battle, for such is the will of the
Lord." The brave officer swore by his faith he would lead her
to the king. Other soldiers made similar promises ; the people
of Vaucouleurs were becoming interested and excited. De Bau-
dricourt must take some action. He sent the parish priest to
examine her, for it would never do for a hard-headed trooper
to be caught by a visionary girl. With book and stole the
priest prayed over her to exorcise the evil spirit, if such were in
her. Joan was all humility and obedience, but remained firm in
her assertions.

This trial did not dissipate the doubts of Baudricourt. Yet

636 THE SHEPHERDESS OF DOMREMY. [Aug.,

what could he do ? Soldiers and people were with the girl ;
were collecting among themselves the expenses of her intended
journey ; had got her a military costume, a lance, a horse. De
Baudricourt could resist no longer, and Joan was sent on to the
king under escort.

The court of Charles VII. (called the Dauphin as long as he
was not consecrated and crowned in the primatial church of
Rheims) was at the little town of Chinon. When Joan neared
that place she wrote, or rather dictated, a letter to the Dauphin
for permission to come into his presence and announce her mis-
sion, and assured him that she would know him at sight among
his attendants, disguise himself as he might. The court was
divided as to the welcome that should be given her. There
was one man who stood out against any recognition of the
strange girl, La Tremouille, the head of a powerful party, the
favorite minister, the brains and the right hand of the helpless,
inactive, and pleasure-loving monarch who forgot the loss of his
kingdom in the smiles of Agnes de Sorel. Should the King of
France compromise his dignity and expose himself to the laugh-
ter of Europe by admitting to an interview on grave affairs of
state a peasant-girl who might be a fool or worse ? Was this
silly weakness to be indulged, though she was sent by the hard-
headed Sieur de Baudricourt ? though Orleans, with Talbot out-
side and famine inside clutching at its throat, was clamoring for
the heaven-sent maid ? for the rumor of her coming had some-
how been wafted through the English lines to the ears of the
beleagured inhabitants. On the other hand, it was argued that
the crisis was desperate. God might have in reserve some won-
derful favor for France, now at death's door. How could the
king refuse to see one who came in such strange guise, with
such strange promises ? Military leaders, serious magistrates,
grave ecclesiastics, gained the day ; and Joan came. Through
the brilliant gathering of courtiers she made her way past him
who in richest dress personated the king to the presence of
Charles, lost amid the crowd, and with a noble simplicity and
grace that a life-breeding at court could not have improved, sa-
luted him : " Gentle Dauphin, God give you life. I am Joan of
Arc." " But I am not the king ; there he is." " Nay, sweet
prince, king you are and no one else." Then she told him God
had sent her ; let him give her troops, she would raise the siege
of Orleans and lead him to Rheims.

Strange, surely, all this was ; but, after all, what proof had
she given that her mission is from heaven, as she says ? Her

1892.] THE SHEPHERDESS OF DOMREMY. 637

journey through the enemy's country may have been simply
good luck ; her recognition of the king, a clever piece of cun-
ning worked through confederates. True, some days later she
revealed to the king a secret known only to himself and God,
and henceforth he believed in her and believed in himself. But
where are grounds sufficient on which he might accept her
services ? To act on his personal conviction in a matter of pub-
lic interest would have been to leave himself without the intel-
ligent and hearty concurrence of those around him. They must
be convinced, and surely if she was able to convince him, she
would succeed in convincing them. In Poitiers hard by sat the
States General Council, composed of the nobles, the magistrates,
the higher clergy of that portion of the realm that had re-
mained faithful to the Dauphin. He sent her thither to be ex-
amined as to the source and character of her mission.

The minutes of that committee of inquiry are not at the
present time in existence or rather, have not yet been discov-
ered though hopes are still entertained of their coming some
day to light from the dusty recesses of some unexplored library.
But we have an account of it written by one of the members
of the committee, Seguin, a Dominican friar ; and we have,
what is still more important, the official verdict of the com-
mittee drawn up for the king. The inquiry lasted three weeks.
No means of getting at the truth were neglected : information
taken in her native place ; interrogations put to herself ; minute
observation of her private life ; report of the three greatest
ladies in France Yolande of Aragon, queen of Sicily ; the
Countess of Gaucourt, wife of the governor of Orleans ; the
Baroness of Treves ; as to Joan's spotless innocence of body and
soul. Three years after, Joan, standing before her infamous
judges at Rouen, will often appeal to this examination at Poitiers
to call the minutes of it in evidence. The verdict of Poitiers
annuls in advance the verdict of Rouen. Its authenticity is in-
contestable, and it states that the committee found in her no
evil, but on the contrary, goodness, humility, virginity, devotion,
honesty, simplicity. As to the sign or proof of her mission she
promises to give it at Orleans. The king, therefore, should not
hinder her from going to that city, but should lead her thither,
hoping honestly in God. To reject the maid, when there is no
appearance of evil in her, would be to show himself unworthy
of God's aid.

Such is Joan's diploma from State and Church. Who can
say that superstition dictated and signed it ? Superstition' does

638 THE SHEPHERDESS OF DOMREMY. [Aug.,

not act with such slow deliberation and such wise examination.
Who will say that the best men and women in France, in the
presence of the opposition of the court, headed by the favorite
minister, were the dupes of an impostor, or willing impostors
themselves ?

Look at the facts ; look at the evidence. Here is a pure,
truthful, blameless girl of seventeen. She says she has a mission.
She will give the proof at Orleans and Rheims. Give her
weapons, put her at the head of troops, let her ride to Orleans
and give the promised sign. Let the peasant-girl of Domremy
put to flight the armies on whose banners are written Crcy,
Agincourt ; let her raise the siege, lead the gentle Dauphin to
Rheims for consecration and what shall you say? Superstition?
Imposture? An easy way of constructing the philosophy of his-
tory. To cry out superstition and imposture requires neither
study nor thought. Meanwhile, facts remain and evidence
stands to convict such historical treatment of folly.

And now behold the maid on her proud, black steed, which
she sits with the ease and grace of a born knight. At her belt
hangs a sword found for her in St. Catherine's Chapel, which
she never drew on foe, but which she broke by beating some
lewd women with the flat of it out of the camp broke in ser-
vice of that virtue which was her shining gem. See her ride on,
holding in her right hand her banner, a field of silver strewn
with lilies, blazoning the n#mes JESU, MARIA the banner with
which she charged the enemy, and led her devoted soldiers to
victory. Ride on, warrior maiden, and God speed thee, to Or-
leans and Rheims and the freedom of thy France. But, alas!
thou ridest also to Rouen, to the accursed fire of the market-
place ! Behind thee forever are the peace of infancy and girl-
hood, the innocent sports around the village beech-tree, the calm
hours of the evening bells, the loved ones in the far-away home
by the silent Meuse.

THOMAS O'GORMAN.

Catholic L/niversity of America.

1892.] COLUMBUS AND LA RABIDA. 639

COLUMBUS AND LA RABIDA.*

NOT the least interesting among the many works appertain-
ing to the history of the discoverer of America which, in this
quater-centennial year vie with each other in point of merit, is
the book bearing the title given above. Written in the beauti-
ful and sweetly-flowing language of Castile, it is, like many other
fruits of the Spanish pen, but little known to the English world
at large.

In his preface, the author, Fray Jose Coll, tells us that the
task of writing the book had been imposed upon him by the
general of his order, and that the work is nothing more than a
simple exposition of the part taken by the Franciscans in the
great work of the discovery of America, together with an
account of the first members of the order who labored in the
New World.

It is just, he says, that the brethren of Juan Perez and An-
tonio Marchena, who took such an active part in the work of
Columbus, should co-operate in rescuing their names from obli-
vion. It is the duty of members of the same order to proclaim
the glories of Columbus, who himself was a Franciscan tertiary,
and to pay a tribute to La Rabida a name intimately associat-
ed with the history of the discovery of America. The author
regrets the scarcity of authentic documents calculated to throw
light upon the days spent by the immortal Genoese at the con-
vent of that name, in the company of the sons of St. Francis
who inhabited that peaceful abode of virtue. The little con-
vent of La Rabida is situated in the province of Huelva, at the
western extremity 'of Andalusia, at a distance of half a league
from the ancient city of Palos, whence the daring navigator
with whose memory the present year is redolent set sail to cross
the Mare Tenebrosum, the dark ocean, in quest of a passage to
the Indies. Leaving Palos, the traveller passes over an almost
level but woody country, across which the fresh breezes from
the Atlantic are unceasingly wafted. Whoever has read the life
of Columbus and the description of the convent as it was when,
as a weary traveller, he first knocked at its hospitable gates, is

* Colon y La Rabida : con un estudio Ascerca de Los Franciscanos en el Nuevo Mundo,

por el M. R. P. Fr. Jose Coll, Definidor General de la Orden de San Francisco. Madrid,
1891.

640 COLUMBUS AND LA RABID A. [Aug. r

doomed to disappointment. The luxuriant vegetation which
once surrounded it and covered its very walls, the tropical
plants, the palm trees and orange trees which added their fra-
grance to the loveliness of the landscape, have entirely disap-
peared ; and in their stead naught is to be seen save a few vines,
and here and there a bush or solitary tree.

One object, however, meets your gaze which cannot fail to
interest the lover of Columbian relics, and which carries the mind
back through a space of four hundred years to the memorable
day which became the turning point in the history of Columbus.
It is the large iron cross, raised on a stone pedestal, at the
foot of which, as tradition asserts, the great Christopher, with
his little Diego weary, hungry, and heartsore sat down to
rest. It was one of those moments in which the soul, even of
a hero, seems to sink into the abyss of despondency. Years of
untiring labor had seemingly ended in failure ; the hopes of an
ardent heart, raised to the highest pitch of enthusiasm in Portu-
gal, had been dashed to pieces against the rock of disappoint-
ment, and the future, like the mysterious Atlantic that washed
the shores at his feet, must have seemed to Columbus a blank.
All was dark ; but it was the darkness that precedes the dawn.
Within those walls, at a distance of but fifty yards, the star of
hope was shining, and its first rays fell upon Columbus when he
met Fray Juan Perez, the guardian of the convent.

If to-day, dear reader, you enter within those same walls, you
will find that the convent consists of two cloisters, the first of
which opens upon a court entirely covered with flowers, contain-
ing four cells, and the entrance to the church and sacristy. In
the story above there are four other rooms which served as an
infirmary to the ancient community. In the second cloister a
large apartment called the hall of the De Profundis, the spacious
and well-lighted refectory, and several cells 'attract your atten-
tion. Ascending by a double staircase to the upper story, your
interest increases, for it was here that the discoverer of America
spent many of his days, meditated, prayed, and laid his plans
for the future. Here you behold, among ten or eleven Francis-
can cells, the one occupied by Columbus himself, and that of
his friend, Fray Perez. It was in this identical room of Colum-
bus that Fray Jos Coll, of the Order of St. Francis, penned a
portion of the work now lying before us certainly a fitting
spot in which to derive inspiration for a work on the great
mariner. Here, as the author remarks, were held those confer-
ences, whence proceeded the rays which, crossing the ocean,

1892.] COLUMBUS AND LA RABIDA. 641

illumined half of the globe, thus far covered by impenetrable
darkness.

The persons who met here were Columbus himself, Fray
Juan Perez, the physician Garcia Hernandez, and probably Fray
Antonio Marchena, and the mariner, Martin Alonzo Pinzon.
Here the imagination beholds Columbus expounding his system
according to which the shortest way to India lay towards the
west, while his companions listened to him with rapt atten-
tion.

If you ascend to the observatory where Fray Marchena is
said to have pursued his astronomical studies, your eye will wan-
der over well nigh the entire province of Huelva. Towards the
east a vast horizon will arise before you, and in the west your
vision will stre'tch to the borders of Portugal, while the blue
waters of the Atlantic to the south will melt into the skies.

For this history of La Rabida we are indebted to a monas-
tic chronicle, composed, in 1714, by religious of the Order of St.
Francis. The first temple on the spot, it states, was built dur-
ing the reign of the Roman Emperor, Trajan, in the beginning
of the second century, to the memory of Proserpine, a deceased
daughter of that monarch,* divine honors having been decreed
to her. Hardly had this worship been inaugurated when num-
berless calamities, especially the frightful malady of hydrophobia,
befell the inhabitants of the neighborhood, so that Proserpine,
who had at first borne the title of Goddess of Candles, received
that of Goddess of Madness. Hence was probably derived the
name of La Rabida.

A Christian sanctuary was erected on the spot at the close of
the third or in the beginning of the fourth century, and an ancient
statue of the Blessed Virgin which had been venerated on Mount
Sion was presented to it by St. Macarius, Bishop of Jerusalem.
The title under which the Mother of God had thus far been honored
in this image had been that of Our Lady of Remedies, but it
was now changed to that of Our Lady of La Rabida. This
veneration of the Blessed Virgin at La Rabida was continued
until A.D. 719, when, to shield the statue from the fury of the
Mussulmans, the faithful cast it into the sea, not far from the
coast. After this the Mahometans took possession of the sanctu-
ary of Mary and placed the symbols of their worship upon its altar.
These were, however, cast off by an invisible hand, as often as

* Not to be confounded with the Goddess Proserpine of Grecian and Roman mytholo-
gy. We must here remark that the historical value of the manuscript in question is not be-
yond the pale of doubt.

642 COLUMBUS AND LA RABID A. [Aug.,

they were replaced, but the Mussulmans attributed this to the
humility of their prophet.

The manuscript before mentioned states that, at the begin-
ning of the thirteenth century, the sanctuary of La Rabida
came into possession of the Knights Templar. These did not,
however, remain there long, for, in 1221, it passed into the
hands of the Franciscans.

According to an oral tradition, the place was visited by St.
Francis himself on the occasion of his journey through Spain
and Portugal ; but, says our author, this statement appears
doubtful, as no mention is made of it by the historians of the
Order.

When the Franciscan Order became divided into the two
branches of Observantines and Conventuals the sanctuary of La
Rabida remained in possession of the latter until the year 1445,
when, by order of Eugenius IV., it went over to the Observan-
tines. While the convent was subject to the Conventuals it be-
came greatly enriched by the munificence of the faithful who
flocked thither to honor the Blessed Virgin.

On December 8th, 1472, twenty years before the discovery of
America, and twelve before the visit of Columbus to La Rabida,
the ancient miraculous statue which had been cast into the sea
more than seven hundred years before was, according to tradi-
tion, providentially recovered by some fishermen of the coast,
and restored to the veneration of the faithful.

It is at present kept the greater part of the time in the
Church of St. George at Palos, and sometimes venerated on one
of the altars of La Rabida.

Tradition asserts that Christopher Columbus prayed before
this image. And how could it have been otherwise? Could
this man, whose heart was filled with such sentiments of
piety, have spent any length of time in the sanctuary of Mary
without pouring out the desire of his soul at the feet of her
who is called " Star of the Sea ? " Does it not seem provi-
dential that the statue was recovered at this particular epoch, as
though the Blessed Virgin wished that the discovery of the New
World should be effected under the auspices of the Queen of
Heaven, as it was under those of an earthly queen, Isabella of
Castile ? This much is certain, that, on August 3d, 1492, the
officers and crew of the three caravels, the Santa Maria, the
Pinta, and the Nifta, went in procession to La Rabida to implore
the assistance of heaven and place themselves under the protec-
tion of Our Lady of Miracles, the title by which the Blessed

1892.] COLUMBUS AND LA RABID A. 643

Virgin was there invoked. On the same day Columbus made
his confession to Fray Perez and received the Bread of Angels,
his example being followed by the men under his command.

Columbus first arrived at La Rabida, on his return from
Portugal, as the physician Garcia Hernandez testified, in 1515,
in the case instituted against Diego Columbus. This overthrows
the authority of those authors who would deny the visit paid,
in 1484, to the Franciscan convent by the illustrious cosmog-
rapher.

This testimony of Hernandez is confirmed by Ferdinand
Columbus, who relates that his father, returning from Portugal
in 1484, left his son Diego at Rabida, whence he himself went
to Cordova, where the court then resided. The same thing is
asserted by Antonio de Herrera, and confirmed by Bartolome de
Las Casas and the licentiate Villalobos. In two chapters, the author
proves against Navarrete that Columbus visited La Rabida in 1484,
and adds that he went there on three other occasions, namely, in
1491, in 1492, before starting on this perilous voyage, and, in
1493, on his return from the New World. The incidents of the
first arrival of Columbus with his son Diego at the quiet abode
of the friars have been so frequently related by his biographers
that we need not dwell upon them here.

Treating of the chronological sequence of the events connect-
ed with the sojourn of Columbus in Spain, our author admits
that historians find herein their greatest difficulty. Nevertheless,
he endeavors to bring order out of chaos. He accepts as a cer-
tainty that the flight from Portugal took place either at the end
of 1484 or in the beginning of 1485, and cites in his favor Las
Casas, Prescott and Rodriguez Pinilla. In 1485, according to
Las Casas, in 1486, as other authors assert, Columbus arrived in
Cordova. This latter date is the most probable one. But where
was he from 1484 to 1486? The answer is given in a letter
written to Cardinal Pedro Gonzalez de Mendoza by Don Luis de
la Cerda, Duke of Medina Celi, who positively asserts that Colum-
bus, coming from Portugal, had spent much time, amounting to
two years, in his house. He thus arrived at La Rabida in 1484,
thence went to Sevilla in quest of the Duke de Medina Sidonia,
and spent the remainder of the time with the Duke of Medina
Celi, until January 1486, when he arrived at Cordova. In the
winter of 1486-87 he made a journey to Salamanca. In 1488
we find him again at Sevilla ; in the following year he took part
in the campaign of Baza ; and in 1490 he was probably once
more with the Duke of Medina Celi. In 1491 he directed his

644 COLUMBUS AND LA RABIDA. [Aug.,

steps to La Rabida, where he met his friend Father Perez, and
whence he proceeded to Granada. On May 12, 1492, having
made satisfactory arrangements at the court of Isabella, he left
Granada and proceeded once more to La Rabida to await the
time of his departure from Spain for the voyage that has ren-
dered his name immortal.

Biographers of the great man to whom we owe the Discovery
of America frequently speak of Fray Juan Perez de Marchena,
his friend and protector. Not the least of the services rendered
to history by the work now under our consideration lies in the
fact that its author, Fray Jos Coll, endeavors to prove that, un-
der this name, two distinct individuals have been confounded.
Garcia Hernandez, in the document already cited, says that there
lived at La Rabida a friar named Juan Perez, confessor of
Queen Isabella. The same name is given to the guardian of the
convent by Ferdinand Columbus in the life of his father. Bar-
tolom de Las Casas and Ovieda also call the friar simply by
the name of Perez.

The former author tells us also that a friar named Antonio
de Marchena was the one who aided Columbus by persuading
the queen to undertake the expedition, and Columbus himself,
writing to the sovereign, says that no one, beside God, had
ever helped him except Fray Antonio de Marchena. In a let-
ter of the Catholic sovereigns to Columbus, Fray Antonio de
Marchena is recommended to him as a suitable companion on
his voyage, he being a good astronomer. That which is of
still greater significance is that a document in the general
archives of the Indies in Sevilla makes a distinction between
a friar, an astronomer in the convent of La Rabida, and an-
other friar who is called Juan.

All who were acquainted with Father Perez, as Ferdinand
Columbus, Garcia Hernandez, Las Casas, and others, speak of
him simply as Fray Juan Perez. Lopez de Gomera, who wrote
his Historia General de las Indias in 1552, was the first to
confound the two names and apply them to the same person,
and his example has been imitated by many who came after
him.*

Although our author seems to have made a profound study
of the history of these two men, whose names are so closely
linked to the discovery of the New World, and has ran-

* We think that the sifting of the arguments of Fray Coll would prove an interesting oc-
cupation for lovers of Columbian history. In this paper we merely present the author's
opinions.

1892.] COLUMBUS AND LA RABID A. 645

sacked various archives in quest of information, he confesses
that a mist of obscurity envelops them and that he is able
to tell us little concerning their lives. According to him it
was Antonio de Marchena, not Juan Perez, who was the dis-
tinguished astronomer of La Rabida, versed in the natural
sciences. Fray Perez was the one who offered the hospi-
tality of the monastery to Columbus and was confessor to
Queen Isabella.

Fray Perez appears to have belonged to a noble family
and to have entered at an early age the service of his sov-
ereigns, which he exchanged for that of his heavenly king by
becoming a member of the Order of St. Francis. His merit
was such that Queen Isabella chose him for her confessor, an
office he held for some time, until, tired of the distractions of
the court, he obtained permission to return to the solitude of
La Rabida, where he was soon elected guardian.

Fray Marchena is said to have been born in the town of Mar-
chena, of the province of Sevilla, but Father Coll tells us that
he took personally the trouble to thoroughly search the archives
of the town, without finding any mention of him. This, however,
he adds, does not prove that he was not born there, for he must
have come into the world about the year 1430, while the docu-
ments found at Marchena go no farther back than 1535. We
know, says the author, that Fray Marchena was a wise, virtuous,
and highly modest religious, who constantly, and in the most
active manner, cooperated with Columbus, with whom, according
to the testimony of Queen Isabella, he was always in accord,
and a man eminent for his knowledge of the natural sciences.

Fray Perez, on the other hand, was a man who possessed a
profound knowledge of the human heart, and was gifted with a
spirit of incomparable zeal for the propagation of the religion
of Christ, together with an ardent patriotism. He understood
thoroughly the plan of Columbus, entered into his views and
used all his influence to induce Isabella to accept the offer
made to her by the intrepid mariner. He wrote to the Queen
on the subject, from whom he received an answer in fourteen
days, inviting him to a personal interview. Columbus, tired of
long waiting, was about leaving Spain to turn towards France ;
there was no time to be lost. That very night Fray Perez
sprang into the saddle, and, without companion or guide, riding
off to scenes of fire and war, arrived at Santa Fe, the camp-city
before Granada, saw the queen, and did not return to his convent
until he had obtained her promise to enter into negotiations
VOL. LV. 42

646 COLUMBUS AND LA RABID A. [Aug.,

with Columbus, who soon after repaired to Granada, which had
just capitulated. The result is known to history, and American
civilization serves to-day as a constant reminder of the long
and solitary ride of Fray Perez from La Rabida to Santa
Fe.

The author cites a fragment of a letter of Fray Perez which,
he says (probably by some oversight), was addressed to Isabella,
but which the text shows could have been written to no one but
Columbus. It sounds thus :

" Our Lord God has heard the supplications of his servant ;
the wise and virtuous Isabella, touched by the grace of heaven,
received kindly the words of this poor little man. All has turned
out well ; far from rejecting our project she immediately accept-
ed it, and now summons you to the court to propose to you the
means which you deem most adapted to put into execution the
designs of Providence. My heart is swimming in a sea of con-
solation and my spirit exults with joy in the Lord. Leave as
soon as you can, for the queen awaits you, and I do much more
than she. Recommend me to the prayers of my dear sons and of
your little Diego. May the grace of God be with you, and may
our Lady of La Rabida accompany you."

This letter, says the author, which he believes to be authentic,
ought to be written in letters of gold on plates of silver, for on
it depended the success of the greatest event that the history
of humanity registers. Without Juan Perez and Antonio de
Marchena, he adds, it is doubtful whether Spain would have
had the glory of discovering the New World ; for these two
men were the first and most decided protectors of Columbus.

Having read the preceding pages, the reader will naturally
inquire : What is the condition to-day of the convent of La Ra-
bida and of the city of Palos ? As regards the latter, when
Columbus first visited it, it contained about 1900 inhabitants ; to-
day this population has dwindled down to about 500. The har-
bor of Palos has entirely disappeared, as though the earth had
opened and swallowed it, and the road which led to La Rabida
has been neglected and is now deserted.

The convent was abandoned at the period when religious were
driven away from their monasteries in Spain, and the church, the
archives, the library and the entire building, to the very trees
that surrounded the edifice, were exposed to the wanton reckless-
ness of a mob which left ruin, wreck, and desolation behind it. In
1846 a royal decree set aside the old convent to be used as
an asylum for disabled sailors of the Spanish navy, but this has

1892.] COLUMBUS AND LA RABIDA. 647

never been carried into effect. Soon afterwards the number of
visitors to La Rabida greatly increased, and loud murmurings
began to be heard on account of the state of decadence into
which the venerable relic of a glorious past had fallen. The at-
tention of the government was attracted, and the consequence
was that an order emanated from the throne, on August 5, 1851,
decreeing the destruction of the most ruined portion of the
building and the erection of a monument on the spot. This de-
cree, too, remained a dead-letter. Three years later the place
was visited by the Duke de Montpensier and his mother, Queen
Amelia, who, touched by the sight of the venerable ruins, began
a subscription for the restoration of the building. The princi-
pal portion being restored, it was solemnly opened in presence
of the Dukes de Montpensier and de Nemours, and with a re-
ligious ceremony in the church.

On February 23, 1856, the convent of la Rabida was, by
royal decree, declared a national monument. Among the many
persons who have since visited it were King Alfonso XII. who
arrived there on March 2, 1882, and the Infantas Isabella and
Paz, who came on the 2/th of the same month.

Our author asks : What shall the future of this venerable
monument be ? The reply is an appeal to the justice and sense
of equity of the Spanish people for a restitution of the convent
to its former and legitimate owners, the Sons of St. Francis.

It may be of interest to our readers to know that one of the
illustrious families which aided Columbus still exists. Martin
Alonzo Pinzon, the senior partner of the Pinzon Brothers, ship-
builders at Palos in the days of Columbus, commanded one of
the three caravels which sailed in search of land in the west,
namely, the Pinta, and died the year after the discovery of
America. He had his residence in the Calle de la Ribera at
Palos. This family afterwards left that city and removed to
Moguer, where they still abide, the present chief representative
being Sefior Don Luis Hernandez Pinzon, admiral of the navy

We may also rejoice in the fact that the name of Colon is
still borne by the descendants of the man to whom America
owes so much. The present .Duke de Veraguas is a lineal de-
scendant of Christopher Columbus. He will be the centre of
attraction at the coming celebration.

For several years Spain has been preparing for the four-
hundredth commemoration of the discovery of America, and, of
course, one of the principal objects of its solicitude are the
spots rendered illustrious by the events of 1492, La Rabida and

648 COLUMBUS AND LA RABID A. [Aug.,

and Palos. Sefior Don Canovas del Castillo, president of the In-
ternational Congress of Americanists, has distinguished himself
by his energy in pushing forward the work. In the beginning
of last year, Don Santos Isaasa, minister of the interior, Don
Mariano Catalina, general director of public works, the Marquis
de Aguilar, minister of agriculture, Sefior Sanz, chief of the su-
perintendence of harbors, and Sefior Velasquez, architect, pro-
ceeded to the Province of Huelva to make arrangements for the
complete restoration of the Convent of La Rabida, in which the
International Congress of Americanists will meet on October 7.
A monument will also be erected on a convenient site to per-
petuate the memory of Columbus.

One of the acts by which the Spanish government will cele-
brate the quater centennial will be the holding of a Historico-
American Exhibition in the city of Madrid, in which the state of
pre-Columbian civilization in the New World, and that which fol-
lowed its discovery, up to the middle of the eighteenth century,
will be set forth. The attention of our country has been called
to the fact, and it has thus far generously responded, especially
through its National Museum, at Washington. Committees have
been formed in the various consulates of the United States,
under the direction of Sefior Don A. G. del Campillo, general
delegate for this country. Several men distinguished in Ameri-
can history and archaeology have accepted the nomination.
Right Rev. Bishop Keane, and two Catholic priests, Rev.
Thomas Hughes, of Washington, D.C., and the writer, were also
appointed members of local committees. We doubt not that
all our countrymen will take an interest in the exhibition, as it
promises to contribute greatly to the intelligent study of Ameri-
can history.

We end this article with the words of our author : " May
heaven enlighten the minds of our rulers, that the memory of
Columbus, together with that of his inseparable friends and
protectors, Perez and Marchena, may remain from henceforward
more indelibly sculptured on marble and bronze, and still more
on the hearts of their fellow-citizens. And God grant that the
Spanish people and all the nations across the sea who have been
civilized by the Cross may emulate the wishes of those three
and always show themselves their worthy descendants, great heroes
disposed to sacrifice all for their God, their country, and their
religion."

CHARLES WARREN CURRIER.

Waldorf, Md.

1892.] THE JEWS IN SPAIN DURING THE MIDDLE AGES. 649

THE JEWS IN SPAIN DURING THE MIDDLE AGES.

THE readers of THE CATHOLIC WORLD have been enabled,
though only by a brief account, to appreciate the part taken by
the Jews in the Arabic invasion in the beginning of the eighth
century. Impelled by a spirit of revenge against the Catholic
Visigoths, they opened the gates of the defensive bulwarks of
Spain to the African hordes who spread ruin throughout the
land, thereby setting back, during prolonged centuries, the pro-
gress of Iberian civilization. It is obvious that for a considerable
period after this the Jews would be in high esteem with the
Arabs, and that they would use these advantages to the utmost
of their ability. On the other hand, the fugitive Christians who
had sought in the mountains of Asturias and Navarre refuge
and defense against the paynim invaders, were very far from be-
ing disposed to welcome the admission into their community of
the perfidious race through whose craft and treason their country
had been brought under subjection to the Saracens.

During the first years following the Conquest the Jewish
population reached great importance among the Arabs. But the
acme of their preponderance was attained after the establishment
in Cordova of the caliphate of the Omeyas, their elevation being
due to the extension of trade brought about by them and by
their cultivation of letters and science. As merchants, manufac-
turers, students of Arabic literature and of the sciences, they
promoted the wealth and glory of the caliphate of the Beni-Ome-
yas, but more particularly of the city of Cordova. Here they
finally reached a state of prosperity never enjoyed by their fore-
fathers in Western Europe.*

Abderhaman I., in order to efface the traces of the conquest,
undertook to convert the Christians to his own belief, and the
Jews helped him in his proselytism. They did not disguise their
hatred of Christianity, nor their hopes of exterminating those
Christians who refused to apostatize. In fact they took part in
causing the death of the victims of Moorish tyranny known as
" the martyrs of Cordova," prominent among whom were such
illustrious men as Alvaro, Eulageo, Samson, and others no less

*Amador de los Rios (vol. i., p. 125), who, in support of this assertion, quotes from a
work entitled Mozaim written by the celebrated Abraham-ben-Meir-Aben-Hezra.

650 THE JEWS IN SPAIN DURING THE MIDDLE AGES. [Aug.,

celebrated for their profound learning than their heroic defense
of the Mozarabic flock. The Jews, having been convoked by
Caliph Mohammed I. to a council convened for the purpose of
trying and condemning the remaining defenders of Christianity,
made no difficulty of accepting the places of the Catholic bishops
driven from Cordova by Mussulman persecution. On that occa-
sion, and by this singular assembly, Bishop Valencio was deposed
and the Mozarabs were mulcted of one hundred thousand sueldos,
an exaction which was designed to hasten their destruction.*

" Behold here," exclaims Amador de los Rios, " the alien, ille-
gal, and imprudent part taken by the Hebrew race in the terrific
drama by which, in the latter half of the ninth century, Cordova
was imbrued with blood. "f " The caliphs of Cordova," adds the
same author, " recompensed these services with new tokens of their
appreciation, and the prosperity of the Hebrew race grew apace
under their sceptre." This aggrandizement reached its culmination
under Caliph Abderhaman III., for he, less attached than his pre-
decessors to the Arab nobility, entrusted the highest government
positions to men of low extraction, among whom was the Jew
Aben Hasalai, who, as practical minister of state of that caliph,
became supreme ruler of the country. Even before coming into
possession of that office he had been able to injure the Chris-
tians by sowing discord between their sovereigns, at one time
forming an alliance with Ordofto III. against Sancho I., at an-
other taking advantage of an illness of " Don Sancho the Fat,"
and bringing him to Cordova and making him a tributary of the
caliph, so implacable was the hatred ever manifested by the
Hebrews against the Christian community.

After the downfall of the caliphate, the predominance of the
Jews among the Arabs began to wane. Ungrateful and disloyal
as they had always proved themselves .to be, they had abused
their power, and had fomented dissensions, which, in course of time
and by the operation of civil wars, were bound to produce very
bitter fruits. But, before proceeding further in our impeachment
of the Hebrew race for what they have done in Spain, let us see
how they made their way into the Christian realm, and what re-
suits followed.

II.

Of course,' when the Spaniards, flying from the torrent of in-
vasion, were hurrying for safety to the mountains of Asturias,

* Espana Sagrada, vol. xi., p. 385. Samson Apologet, book II.
t Amador, vol. i., p. 133.

1892.] THE JEWS IN SPAIN DURING THE MIDDLE AGES. 651

they had no Jews in their company, for these were, at that time,
in union with the Arabs and were busied in pillaging the con-
quered Christian populations. The heroic pioneers of the Recon-
quest soon raised up a new state in the Asturias, which, though
at first small, went on enlarging its boundaries with amazing
rapidity, so that before forty years had gone by they reached
from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pyrenees, and from the Canta-
brian Sea (Bay of Biscay) to the Guadarramas mountains. Is it
strange that under these circumstances the Christians treated the
Jews and Saracens alike? This was unavoidable in order to safe-
guard the territory which, step by step, and at the cost of im-
mense labors and great perils, was being gradually recovered.
It was, moreover, necessary for the conquerors to leave behind
them no other population than their own friends and relations.
This exclusion of the Jews was also forcibly suggested by the
example of the Jews themselves when the downfall of Spain's
nationality was consummated.*

In consequence, the Jews, being looked 'upon as foes, fared
no better than the Saracens at the hands of Christians. They
were sold into slavery, often put to death, and their books,
houses of worship, and property were burned. These were un-
avoidable accomplishments of the fierce contest then going on,
as well as consequences of the keen recollection of the havoc
made by the infidels during their desolating invasion, when, in a
short space of time, they reduced to ashes all the monuments of
Visigoth civilization.

As long as the Jews found prosperity and wealth among the
Arabs they made no attempt to settle in the restored Christian
states. But when the star of the caliphate began to be eclipsed
and civil wars broke out among the Arabs, the Jews, often
harassed, persecuted, and even assassinated by their former allies,
turned to the Christians, offering them what at that time they
sorely needed namely: money for their war-like undertakings,
for the revival of trade, both indispensable for the rapid aggran-
dizement of the Christian states.

The Jews in this way succeeded in obtaining refuge in the
Christian communities, towards which result, as Amador observes,
the noble disposition of the Hispano-Gothic race cooperated to
no small extent. By the beginning of the eleventh century, the
very one in which the fall of the caliphate of Cordova took

* Amador, vol. i., p. 165. It should be mentioned here that Amador de los Rios' history
has been accepted by the Jews, and by them declared to be impartial and even benevolent in
their regard. On this account we have quoted him several times as an authority in no wise to
be mistrusted.

652 THE JEWS IN SPAIN DURING THE MIDDLE AGES. [Aug.,

place, the Hebrew population had considerably increased in the
Christian kingdoms of Spain and acquired privileges, riches, and
favors which, in view of their antecedent disloyalty to their adopt-
ed country, they never could have dreamt of obtaining. This
was the epoch in which the cartas pueblas and the fueros origi-
nated, forming a new fountain of Spanish law. In these venerable
charters, which served the royal grantors for consolidating their
conquests and re-peopling their desolated realms, the privileges,
immunities, and franchises first appear, which, contrary to the
spirit of feudalism, raised up municipalities independent of all
authority but that of the sovereigns, the constituted defenders
of all the legitimate liberties of their subjects.

" The Jewish population," relates Amador de los Rios, " from the
very outset, came in for a good share of these liberties. They
took advantage of every measure favorable to their situation,
every movement of the Christian armies likely to gain for them
increased consideration or bring them profitable returns." * In
nearly all the cartas pueblas the Jews were placed on an equality
with the Christians, f and the Council of Leon, in 1020, during
the reign of Alphonso V., extended these rights to all the inhab-
itants of that kingdom. What return did the Jews make for
this benignity of the Christian monarchs ? This is a point deserv-
ing to be treated separately.

III.

If in the annals of our monarchies of the middle ages there
appears any point on which our sovereigns acted contrary to
national tendencies, it is the consideration with which they treated
the Jews. From political motives they often accepted the ser-
vices of their subjects of that race, and as a just compensation,
therefore, conceded them new franchises and protected them in
their rights. But the people, by the powerful instinct of self-pre-
servation inherent in the masses, always showed themselves mis-
trustful of Jewish perfidy, and turned every opportunity to ac-
count to persecute and try to exterminate the detested Hebrew
race.

Christians, though constantly fighting the Arabs, were never
averse, when the circumstances allowed, to treat their enemy with
proper benevolence. But with the Jews they would consent to no
compromise ; indeed, it may be asserted that upon these all the
hatred stored up during eight centuries of wars was ever ready

* Vol. i., p. 173.

t Carta pueblo, of Castrojeriz, granted in 974 by Garei Fernandez, Count of Castile.

1892.] THE JEWS IN SPAIN DURING THE MIDDLE AGES. 653

to be poured out. In that same fuero of Castrojeriz, already
mentioned, there appeared the amendments made during the
reign of Don Fernando I., which were, so to speak, soaked with
Hebrew blood. These had hardly acquired legal force in the
realm when the wrath of the Christian population was aroused
against them ; and the Castilian sovereign, despite his broad and
tolerant policy, was forced to re-enact in regard to the Jews the or-
dinance of separate habitation and the other restrictions decreed by
the councils of Toledo. No sooner had the Hebrews gained admit-
tance among the Christian people than public order demanded
that the new-comers should live apart by themselves, in their own
quarter. This separation continued to be necessary on account
of subsequent events. Only in the reign of Ferdinand and Isa-
bella, usually called los reyes Catolicos, " the Catholic sovereigns,"
was it finally abolished.

The Spanish church took no small part in the work of re-
straining the animosity of the Christian public against the Jews,
and its exertions was so meritorious as to call forth, in 1066,
from Pope Alexander II., a brief, in which he praised the chari-
table conduct of the Spanish episcopacy, and encouraged them
to keep on with evangelical zeal in so praiseworthy a task.;f

Nevertheless, though the kings and the bishops continued to
protect the Hebrews, granting them greater franchises almost
daily, and putting them on a footing of equality with Christian
subjects, whether nobles or commoners, their condition and char-
acter were such that they never ceased to be a nation within a
nation, a people exclusive and independent of the one in the
midst of whom they were settled, and a permanent germ of dis-
cord and intestine struggles. The Christians watched this do-
mestic foe, and closely observed its crafty policy and its notori-
ous untruthfulness, and, though restrained by governmental au-
thority, longed for an opportunity to manifest by bloody deeds
its well-founded and deep-rooted antipathy.

In 1 108 Spain was invaded by the Almoravides, who advanced
as far as Ucles. The Castilian sovereign sent against them his
son Don Sancho, under the guidance of Count Garcia Ordoftez.
The battle which resulted was lost ; the prince, the flower of the
nobility, and over thirty thousand fighting men were left dead
on the field. " The tidings of this most distressing disaster,"
says the historian, " quickly reached Toledo, and was accom-

\ " Pleasing has been to us," wrote the Sovereign Pontiff, "the news which has recently
reached our ears that you have saved the Jews, dwellers in the midst of you, from being mas-
sacred by those who are fighting in Spain against the Mahometans." Epistola, Placuit nobis
Sermo, written in the fifth year of the pontificate of Alexander II.

654 THE JEWS IN SPAIN DURING THE MIDDLE AGES. [Aug.,

panied with the suspicion that the left wing of the army, almost
entirely made up of Jews, had weakened in its attack at a de-
cisive moment. The wrath of the multitude broke out against
the Hebrews, and the streets of Toledo became the scene of
horrible slaughter. The example set at the capital spread to
other cities of Castile, and the blood of the Israelites was shed
abundantly, the bishops and nobility being unable to repress these
disorders. Barely fifty years had elapsed after this bloody mas-
sacre when history had to record a new and no less disastrous
onslaught on the Hebrews. It was caused by the invasion of
the Almohades, and the sad defeat at Alarcos. The Christians,
as usual, vented their fury on the Jews, whom they always looked
upon as traitors to their adopted country, and the old policy of
extermination having been revived, many Jewries were burned,
accompanied by loss of life."

After this destructive hurricane had blown over, the Jews
again began to lift up their heads, being protected by royal au-
thority and the charity of the bishops. Their boldness could
only be compared to their misfortunes, their covetousness was
equal to their losses ; like the fabled hydra, seven heads grew in
place of every one cut off.

IV.

Amid such checkered fortunes, the Jewish population in a Chris-
tian kingdom lived through the twelfth century, and it is to be
noted that the favor and even preponderance which they enjoyed
among the Arabs during the first centuries of the era of the Re-
conquest often changed into persecution. The Jewries in Mus-
sulman territories were often scenes of bloodshed. This antipathy
on the part of the Arabs went so far that, first Yussef, next Ali,
and afterwards Abd-el-Mumen, drove the Jews out of their re-
spective dominions. Three centuries before the Catholic sover-
eigns had, in the interests of political and religious unity and
for the sake of peace among their subjects, decreed the expul-
sion of the Jews, the Mussulman princes had carried out a like
measure ; thus demonstrating, that between both governments,
otherwise so opposed to each other, there was perfect harmony
of view in rjgard to Jewish perfidy.

A narrative of the persecution undergone by the Hebrews
at the hands of the Arabs, their former allies, does not come
within the scope of this article. We cannot, however, pass over
in silence a fact which historical criticism should place on record.
We mean the impassioned prejudice and injustice of those his-

1892.] THE JEWS IN SPAIN DURING THE MIDDLE AGES. 655

torians who inveigh with great harshness against the expulsion
of the Jews from Christian Spain. * In every instance, when
these writers treat of the Arabs, their tolerant spirit is in every
instance exhaustively dwelt upon ; but per contra, when treating
of Spanish Christians, the most unsparing censure is visited upon
their intolerance and fanaticism. We are led to ask, why
charge the Catholic sovereigns with intolerance and fanaticism
for having expelled the Hebrews, and yet ignore the expulsion
decreed three centuries before by the Mussulman Ameers ?

We admit that the fact of the Arab expulsion of the Jews
does not of itself constitute an argument justifying that de-
creed by the Catholic sovereigns, but it discredits those his-
torians who, while denouncing on the one hand the intolerance
of the Christians, on the other, praise the tolerance of the Sara-
cens. Having thus called attention to this signal historical in-
consistency, we resume the thread of our narrative, at that point
when the Jews, having been compelled to leave the Mussulman
dominions, were given refuge by Christian princes.

The thirteenth century was truly the golden age for Jewish
residents in the Christian realms of the Spanish peninsula.
Whether from a spirit of uprightness and justice, or from inter-
ested motives, it is at all events certain that in Castile Don Fer-
dinand the Saint and Don Alphonso the Wise, in Aragon Don
Jayme the Conqueror, both the Theobolds in Navarre, and Don
Dionis in Portugal, all favored the Jews as far as feasible, at the
same time that the latter, by their wealth and haughtiness, were
continually exciting the jealousies and antipathies of their ever-
mistrustful Christian neighbors. How could they help being mis-
trustful of men again and again detected in disloyal and treach-
erous conduct ? In the chronicles of Catalonia it is narrated with
much lamentation that about the middle of the ninth century
Barcelona became a victim of Jewish ingratitude. While that
city was still under the dominion of the kings of France and
was governed by the feudatory Count Aledran, it was blockaded
by the Arabs commanded by Abd-el-Kairim. In so good a con-
dition of defense was the city that it was fairly impregnable.
" Abd-el-Kairim," relates the chronicler, "could only accomplish his
purpose by an unlocked for coup de main, which in fact he car-
ried out by Hebrew assistance. Relying 01* their numbers, the

* This allusion is principally directed against Duruy.

656 THE JEWS IN SPAIN DURING THE MJDDLE AGES. [Aug.,

Jews of Barcelona were powerful enough to betray their Chris-
tian fellow-townsmen and deliver up the place to the Moors."*
Such things happened repeatedly in succeeding centuries, and the
facility with which treasonable acts were forgotten and the Jews
permitted to recover their prosperity and preponderance are
greatly to the honor of the generous Spanish character.

The insatiable and ever-growing greed of the Jews led them
to devote themselves to usury, always an odious way of making
money, and became one of the most efficacious causes of their
final ruin. And let it not be imagined that wrongful and oppres-
sive money-lending was confined to only a few of the race ; it
prevailed among all, and its terrible effects were felt not alone in
Castile, but throughout all the other states of the peninsula.
This is shown by the legal enactments, of which we shall give an
account, directed against an evil which at last created an impassi-
ble abyss between Christians and Hebrews.

Don Jayme el Conquistador (the conqueror), one of the Chris-
tian princes who was most favorable to the Hebrews, dictated, in
the Cortes convened in Barcelona in 1228, special enactments
against the usurious practices of the Jews in such terms as to
show to what degree the Christian population had been preyed
upon and devoured. He decrees that the maximum rate of in-
terest was not to be higher than 20 per cent, per annum.
That the legal rate should be fixed at so high a figure discloses
how oppressive usury had at that time become ; at the present
day it would be considered frightful. He enacted further that,
if the Jewish money-lender failed to require payment of his loans
during the space of two years, he lost the right to claim inter-
est equal to twice the amount of the principal. This reveals an-
other abuse then in vogue with Jewish money-lenders, who, not
content with getting such enormous rates of interest, had a way
of increasing the percentage from year to year, so that after the
loan had run two years it reached 200 per cent.f

Don Alphonso X. of Castile, deservedly called El Sabio
(the Wise), was no less prominent in extending protection to
his Jewish subjects. Moved, however, by the scandals to which
usurious extortions gave rise, he established in the Fuero Real
statutory provisions which would astound the most rapacious
usurer of the present day. He debarred the lender from exer-
cising any restraint on the person of the Christian borrower
as security for the money lent ; but, whether induced by mo-

* Harden, Historia Critica de Espafla, vol. xiii., p. 157.
t Pragmatic letter of March 10, 1253.

1892.] THE JEWS IN SPAIN DURING THE MIDDLE AGES. 657

tives of lenity or because Jewish usury was more exorbitant
in Castile than in Aragon and Catalonia, he limited the legal
rate of interest to "three for four per annum." What does
this wording in the Fuero Real mean ? Is it to be under-
stood as the equivalent of 75 per cent.? That interpretation
seems implied by the wording of the statute; but such a figure
sounds so absurd as a legal rate fixed to prevent usury that
some authors think that the lender was to receive, as a yearly
usance, an amount equal to one-third of the principal, equiva-
lent to 33 Y^ per cent. But what enormous exactions must
Jewish usurers have practised, when the legislator, in order to
restrain them, settles on so exorbitant a figure as the maxi-
mum legal rate.

These facts, resting on such undeniable authority, will be
our excuse for not dwelling further on the subject, except to
add that the Jews managed to find ways to evade the law,
as is shown by the frequent remedial measures decreed by
the monarchs and also by the constant complaints of the
proctors of the Cortes. The exactions of Jewish money-lenders
impoverished the Christian population and, of course, fomented
the traditional antagonism and hatred existing between the
races. Jewish usury must have been one of the causes which,
at the close of the fourteenth century, provoked such dread-
ful persecutions and slaughters. For nothing could have been
more difficult to repress than the feelings of resentment and
revenge on the part of the usurers' victims who, in their des-
titution, saw the opulence and haughtiness of their despoilers.

VI.

At the close of the thirteenth century the antagonism be-
tween Christians and Jews had reached its greatest height. Only
a spark was needed to start a conflagration ; and truth, to which
history ever owes strict loyalty, discloses the fact that that spark
came from north of the Pyrenees. Without entering here upon
an investigation which would lead us away from our subject, it
suffices to say that it is certain that in other European countries
the Jews were the objects of no less antipathy than that which
they had deservedly earned for themselves in the hospitable land
of Spain.

At the beginning of the thirteenth century, when Philip Au-
gustus was on the throne of France, the Jews owned a third part

658 THE JEWS IN SPAIN DURING THE MIDDLE AGES. [Aug.,

of the territory of his kingdom. He suddenly ordered them to
leave the realm, giving them three months to do so, and he con-
fiscated their property and cancelled all debts due them. This
led to bloodshed and the sacrifice of hundreds of lives. The
Jews fared no better in England and Germany, whence they
were also expelled, and where their blood was made to flow in
streams.* Spain was at that time the promised land for them,
to which they fled for refuge from all quarters, with the effect
of increasing the ancient detestation felt for the race by the
Spaniards. It is related that these later Jewish immigrants, ar-
riving poor and full of wrath against the Christians, sought by
every possible means to make good their losses, and, availing
themselves of the laws which protected their race, put in play
their evil artifices to win the royal favor and to satisfy their in-
satiate greed for money. In consequence, at the close of the
thirteenth century, the fiercest persecution against them was set
on foot in Catalonia, spread to Aragon and Valencia, and, later
on, reached Castile.

The spark which kindled so devouring a conflagration came,
as we have said, from abroad, and arose upon occasion of the
dreadful plague which in the middle of the fourteenth century
decimated Europe. The hounding of the Jews, supposed to have
poisoned the springs and wells, was begun in Germany, "where
most cruel butchery took place, surpassing that of which any
race had previously been the victim."f "This furious flame,"
says Amador, " spread through all other countries and threatened
to involve the proscribed race in general destruction." An au-
gust voice, that of the Sovereign Pontiff, Clement VI., was raised
in protest against this cruel violence. He persistently urged up-
on Christendom to exercise charity, and ordered, under penalty
of excommunication, that the Jews should be spared, and declared
that they were innocent of causing the plague, which was a
punishment inflicted on the human race by Divine Providence.
The wrath of the masses of the people, however, would not
brook restraint ; as Spain was one of the countries in which the
plague made its greatest ravages, a furious persecution broke out
there also, and the Jewish synagogues were subjected to a dread-
ful visitation. "Barcelona and Gerona," says Amador, "being
nearest to the scenes of violence in other countries, were the first
cities to vent their wrath on the Jews. Thence the popular fury

*Cesare Cantu, Universal History, vol. xi., chap. 14.

t Stobbe. The Jews in Germany During the Middle Ages.

1892.] THE JEWS IN SPAIN DURING THE MIDDLE AGES. 659

spread into Castile, but at no time, .and in no part of Spain, did
it attain the degree of exterminating violence reached in other
countries. Nevertheless, the disturbances that did occur were very
lamentable, blood was spilled abundantly, old grudges and per-
sonal revenge were gratified, and the leading synagogues in Spain
shaken to their foundations.

These deplorable events occurred during the civil wars which
made great havoc in the Christian monarchies of the peninsula,
and which form the epoch between the reign of Don Pedro I.
and the glorious and recuperative one of Ferdinand and Isabella.
During that period the reigning sovereigns, having urgent need
of money, had recourse to the Jews more eagerly than ever be-
fore, and confided in them the collection of the royal revenue.
The Jews, of course, made the most of their favor with their
royal patrons at the very time that their exactions made them
more than ever detested by the king's subjects with whom they
dealt.

For this reason, every time that the Cortes were assembled
during the fourteenth century, the proctors invariably preferred
complaints against the Jews and petitioned the kings to take
away their privileges. In the Cortes of Burgos, held in 1367,
they represented to the king that " the many evils, deaths and
banishments of past times were the effect of their having followed
the advice of Jews, whether as private citizens or government
officials." And they prayed that they be dismissed from the
service of the crown. The Cortes of Toro, held in 1371, still
more implacable in spirit, formulated against the Jews a long
list of accusations, and affirmed that their predominance, not
only in the general public, but also in the municipal councils of
cities and towns, was good cause for alarm ; they were accused
of scoffing at and harassing the Christians, being actuated by
unconcealed scorn for the Catholic faith, all to the great detri-
ment of the commonwealth ; and of perpetrating crimes and
giving scandals of all kinds. The petitioners further prayed that
they be compelled to dwell apart from Christians, and to wear
distinctive badges and marks for recognition, as required of them
in other countries. Six years later the Cortes of Burgos renewed
the same petition ; the Cortes of Soria in 1380, and of Vallado-
lid in 1385, followed suit, each of them in more persistent lan-
guage, so that they wrung from Don Juan I. their anxiously-de-
sired purpose, in virtue of which Jews were debarred, under se-
vere penalties, from taking charge of private income or public

66o THE JEWS IN SPAIN DURING THE MIDDLE AGES. [Aug.,

revenue. But the abhorrence of the people for the Jews could
not be assuaged by these restrictions. After having carried the
point of entire disqualification for taking charge of private or
public business, the Cortes next applied to the crown for new
( measures of repression, the popular proctors alleging that they
ruined the Christians and impoverished the soil.*

The kings went on, though quite reluctantly, assenting by
degrees to the demands laid before them, and the Hebrew pop-
ulation saw the gradual disappearance of the accumulated privi-
leges and franchises hitherto enjoyed by them. And let it not
be imagined that the grudge against them prevailed only among
the lower classes of society; so general was it at the close of
the fourteenth century that a man of such consequence as Chan-
cellor Pero Lopez of Ayala expressed himself as follows about
the Jews :

Alii vienen Judios, que estdn aparejados
Para beber la sangre de los pueblos cuytados*

That is, " There come the Jews prepared to drink the blood
of the wretched inhabitants."

Might it not be naturally expected from such a state of
things, that popular fury would break out on almost any pre-
text and bring about a bloody catastrophe ? Let us cast a veil
over the mournful events of violence which took place in 1391.
Just then the royal authority was weak and lacking in efficacy.
On account of the civil wars the passions of the people had be-
come impatient of control, and the poor were exasperated by
famine. The opulence of the Jews was a constant provocation ;
all the wounds of rancorous recollection against them were
opened afresh. The rising came like the sudden freshet of a
large river overflowing its banks, and the slaughter, begun in
Seville, did not cease until after it had extended into the king-
doms of Aragon and Castile. In this dreadful tragedy men of
very distinguished position and character took prominent parts
and led the multitudes by widely different paths. There was a
Ferran Martinez, Archdeacon of Ecija, who, disregarding the
commands both of his sovereign and the Pope, and carried
away by a hatred bordering on fanaticism, incited the populace
against the Hebrews of Seville ; and, in contrast to him, there
was a St. Vincent Ferrer, who, overwhelmed with grief and in-

* Cortes of Burgos, of \yn. f Rimado de Palacio.

1892.] GLENDALOUGH. 66 1

dignation at such a wicked persecution, and burning with evan-
gelical charity, kept back the people of Valencia, and saved the
lives and property of the Jews in that kingdom.

The sanguinary events above referred to were indeed dread-
ful, "but were not so bad as afterwards claimed by the Jewish
historians. It may be affirmed, however, that from thenceforth
it became impossible for the Jews to remain permanently in
Spain. Nevertheless, an entire century passed before the decree
of expulsion took place, during which time the Jews thanks to
the uprightness of our sovereigns and the generous disposition
of our nation applied themselves anew to repair the losses suf-
fered through the immense disasters of which they had been
victims.

With that century the historical questions which we are ex-
amining assume a new aspect. The convert from Judaism, the
crypto-Jew, appeared as a new factor, to prepare the utter ruin
of the incorrigible Hebrew race in Spain.

So interesting a study deserves to be specially treated in a
separate article.

MANUEL PEREZ VILLAMIL,

Member of the Royal Academy of History.
Madrid.

GLENDALOUGH.

I STOOD in Glendalough just when the sun,
Tinging with gold the purple heather bloom,
Sank in the west and left soft twilight gloom,

To solace weary hearts whose work was done.

The hills and vale were calm as heart of nun :
Above the lake where Kathleen's life sank down,

Saint Kevin's bed still kept its sullen frown,
Approving the harsh triumph he had won.

The solitary Round Tower raised its head
Austere and looked upon the solemn scene:

Around lay graves of the forgotten dead
And ruins in their sad decay serene :

Then memory whispered of the glories fled

And spirits hovered earth and heaven between.

J. L. SPALDING.
VOL. LV. 43

662 REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS, [Aug.,

REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS, FIRST
BISHOP OF OGDENSBURG.

III.

1845.

ON the thirteenth of February, 1845, a convocation of the
University of Oxford condemned William George Ward's Ideal
of a Christian Church, as containing passages inconsistent with
the Thirty-nine Articles, and deprived him of his degrees in the
university. Mr. Ward was not only a clergyman in priest's or-
ders, but a fellow of Balliol College, and had been professor of
mathematics at that college. Of course, this blow, aggressive
and decisive as it was, fell not only upon him, but upon a large
number of others who stood in the same position with him.
When the convocation broke up and passed out into the street,
Mr. Ward was cheered by the under-graduates, and the vice-
chancellor was saluted with hisses and snowballs from the same
quarter. To borrow a most truthful and forcible expression al-
ready applied to these proceedings, " the university was ostra-
cising half its most promising sons."

It must, however, be acknowledged that the Anglican Church,
notwithstanding her enormous latitude of doctrine, was too
thoroughly Protestant in spirit to hold such men as Ward.
And on the other hand, a large number of Puseyites were too
much puffed up with the fancy of being Catholic for him to
sympathize any longer with them.

"A Catholic priest at Old Hall College was put somewhat
out of countenance when, in answer to his rather sneering re-
mark, * I suppose you call yourself a Catholic, Mr. Ward,' he
received the reply, ' Oh dear no ! You are a Catholic, I am a
Puseyite.' He did not believe himself to be a priest, or to have
the power of forgiving sins. . . . And when once a friend
said to him, ' Bear in mind that you are, on our principles, real-
ly a priest of God,' Ward broke off the discourse by saying, ' If
that is the case, the whole thing is infernal humbug.' "

The University of Oxford is a far more ancient and venera-
ble institution than the Church of England, and far more vigor-
ous with real English life. It has more of a mind of its own,
it has more liberty to speak, and its word goes farther amongst
English churchmen. This it is that made Ward's condemnation

1892.] FIRST BISHOP OF OGDENSBURG. 663

so crushing a blow to all would-be Catholics. It was still possi-
ble for men belonging to the " movement " to remain in the
university and in the church on condition of keeping their
mouths shut ; but these men said in their hearts, to use the
words of McMaster's letter already quoted, " If we stay, as we
want to, in our church, we stay to work and to talk, not to be
quiet." By keeping this in mind the reader will easily under-
stand that by the above act of convocation the Oxford move-
ment had practically come to a collapse. What was true of the
Church of England was also true of her affectionate little
daughter on this side of the water. Ward retired from Balliol
and from Oxford, Oakeley resigned his charge at Margaret Chap-
el, London, in the following summer, and Newman did not
hesitate to intimate to his friends that he was no longer at
peace in the church of his birth. In this country also a crisis
had come. Several seminarians were, upon complaint, subjected
to an informal trial at the Twentieth Street Seminary.

What interested Wadhams in a very special manner was that
Henry McVickar, a prospective member of our little monastery,
feeling crowded out by the result, withdrew to rooms at Colum-
bia College. The Protestant Episcopal Church was no longer a
home for many earnest souls. The test contained in McVickar's
letter of November 6, 1844, already given, for " reforming a bad
system," had been applied and failed. Her framework would
not bear that load " of all possible good," which they had at-
tempted to put upon it. Enthusiastic young men might still' be
allowed to play Catholic, but they must not presume to mean
anything by it. McVickar, though much discouraged, still seemed
to hope something from the monastic idea, though he gradually
grew more non-committal until finally he withdrew. His next
letter to the prior of St. Mary's, dated at Columbia College,
February 23, 1845, reads as follows:

"Mv DEAR WADHAMS : I received your welcome letter a few
days back and have sent a bundle as directed. You cannot tell
how I regret not being able to send you Ward's book, but when
Adams left here I promised that a copy should be sent to Na-
shotah, and if I could not get any one else to send it I would
send my own, which I soon expect to have an opportunity of
doing. I shall, however, try and get you a sight of the book
before long. As to its being published I can only say I hope
for it. Mr. Johnson of Brooklyn offers, I understand, to take
twenty-five copies if the Appletons will put out an edition.

" Speaking of Mr. J , some of the students whom I have

seen tell me that about fifteen of them were over there yester-

664 REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS, [Aug.,

day (Saturday) to chant the Psalter for him and are to go again
on Easter eve.

" In a letter to Walworth I have mentioned some of the rea-
sons that led me to take the step I took at the seminary. At
the time I felt very much the need of advice, but those upon
whose judgment I would have placed the most confidence were
absent ; and what I did had to be done quickly, and some pro-
test seemed necessary. And, indeed, I was more restricted by
the action which was taken than you seem to suppose ; perhaps
I made too great concessions I allowed that I was not the
judge of what was injurious to the seminary, but I conceded
that the faculty were, and that if they would point out how
they thought I had injured it I would avoid it for the future.
This they did in a general way, but so as to restrict me more
than I thought right ; but if I had remained at the seminary I
should have submitted to it and thought it my duty to do so.
But 1 was free to leave the institution, and I did so.

". . . No. 8 of the Lives of the Saints is one of the most
thorough of the series. McMaster supposes it to be Mr. New-
man, and he is a good judge of style.

" McMaster has not been very well this winter. When last
I heard from him he was cogitating a successor for Bishop

o : . . .

" I have had a long letter from Johnson, who has advanced
astonishingly developed, perhaps I had better say. I wish you
or Walworth would write to him, and urge him to come into
this diocese. I regard him as a most valuable man.

" Mr. Kneeland is my room-mate at present, and is studying
theology with an energy that would shame most students. He
has just finished Ward and Moehler [on " Symbolism "], and is
delighted with them.

" I saw Mr. Carey the other evening. His accounts from his
son Henry (Arthur Carey's brother), who is in Madeira, are far
from encouraging ; his heart appears very much affected. Give
my best love to Walworth, and believe me,

" Very truly and sincerely yours,

" HENRY MCVICKAR."

The letter that follows needs no introduction.

" NEW YORK, Maunday Thursday, 1845.

" MY DEAR WADHAMS : ... To begin with the ques-
tion which concerns me most intimately, you ask : When and
whether I will join you ? To this I reply, it depends upon my
obtaining orders. If I do, with the bishop's permission, I will
join you as deacon immediately afterwards. To join you as a lay-
man is a question I have never considered. My present judg-
ment is against it. Now, I wish to be very explicit in this mat-
ter with you.

" I am extremely doubtful whether I can obtain orders without
exciting new commotions and troubles ; and if I think so when

1892.] FIRST BISHOP OF OGDENSBURG. 66$

the time comes 7 shall not apply for them. You must therefore
act without counting upon or regarding me in this matter.

" My three year's candidateship (till the expiration of which
the bishop tells me I cannot be ordained) does not expire till
some time towards the end of November next.

" Under these circumstances I do not think it right that I
should control in the least your movements. In order, therefore,
to render your action as free as possible and that you may
act for the best / accept the release you have given me so far
as to avoid the trust under your will, and desire you to revoke
it, or destroy the will as soon as convenient. This does not in
the slightest interfere in the establishment of the house, if you
wish to do so, and at the same time simplifies matters and ren-
ders you freer to choose the best course.

" With this statement as to myself I must leave you and
Walworth to decide the other questions, and upon your own
course. I am glad Walworth has been engaged in so useful a
work as preparing a book of devotions, and hereby offer my
subscription for half a dozen copies at the least, or as many
more as he sets me down for. The warmest inquiries are made
after him by the students that I meet at the Annunciation.*

" The news from England is important. Ward is deprived of
his degree and fellowship. . . . Remember me affectionately

to W , and if he is harassed with doubts, believe me there

are many who sympathize with him. With a deep interest
in all that concerns you, I remain, ever yours faithfully,

" HENRY McVickAR."

It ought to be easy for the reader to understand that this
period was to Wadhams one of great mental anxiety and some-
times anguish of heart. This, however, did not keep the young
deacon from faithful and hard labor in the field of his mission.
I was eye-witness only to a small part of this, as I remained in
Wadhams Mills during his frequent absences, officiating as lay-
reader and catechist there on Sundays when he held service at
Ticonderoga and Port Henry. I can say little, therefore, of his
work and way of working, except what I saw him do at Wad-
hams Mills. I do not tfiink any of his people at the Mills were
sick that winter. He had opportunities, however, to show kind-
ness to sick people not of his fold. I left him once at the
village inn to keep night watch over a man suddenly taken ill,
under circumstances which caused great alarm. I left him
stretched out on three chairs beside the sick bed. His weight
rested chiefly upon a central chair ; his feet reposed upon an-
other, and his head was supported on a third, which was tilted
upon two legs. He was accustomed to this way of couching

* Dr. Seabury's old church, where Carey had been assistant, situated at the corner of
Prince and Thompson Streets. C. A. W.

666 REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS, [Aug.,

and always said he never slept better than in that fashion. I
heard the sick man whisper to a friend who happened in, " Isn't
he a good fellow ! " A young man whose apartments were right
over the village store was taken with the small-pox. The vil-
lagers were filled with alarm and would none of them come
near him. Even the village doctor came only once, and then
covered from neck to foot with a long bag, something like a
night-gown, made expressly for the purpose. The young man's
family, only four miles distant, kept away from him, except his
step-mother, who came to carry him home as soon as he was
well enough to be moved. The village store beneath him was
closed up, and a farmer who lived across the street, was so fright-
ened that I saw him once shaking his fist at the house when he
saw the door opened opposite to him. Wadhams, however, was
in and out frequently, and so was his good mother, who brought
food for the patient. She took no precaution for herself, only
she was careful to send two grandchildren home. It was de-
cided by the villagers that for the public safety the young man
should be removed to a deserted and delapidated hut in the
neighborhood ; but, it being the dead of winter, neither Wadhams
nor his mother would listen to this; and, since the authorities
could find no one willing to undertake the job of removal, the
project was abandoned.

Wadhams preached every Sunday afternoon, alternating be-
tween Ticonderoga, Port Henry, and Wadhams Mills. The
reader may be interested to know what his sermons were like at
this time and how he delivered them. I recall one occasion when
he preached in the school-house at Ticonderoga. He inveighed
against lazy postures in devotion, and spoke of men who would
not kneel for fear of getting dust on their knees, etc. The only
person of this kind present was the leading gentleman of his con-
gregation, who sat directly under the preacher's desk, and saw
the commanding form of our friend looking down upon him, not
more than six feet distant, and emphasizing him most earnestly
with his eyes. This gentleman's respect for the young apostle
was, nevertheless, too great to allow him to take offence. We
both took supper with him that evening, and the conversation
was as cordial on all sides as if nothing but abstract truth had
been uttered in the morning sermon.

It is well to remark here that Wadhams took no pride in his
own utterances. In the commencement he wrote out all his
sermons, and that carefully. Still he was ready to read from
printed books any sermon that pleased him, or anything that

1892.] FIRST BISHOP OF OGDENSBURG. 667

would serve his purpose when short of matter. In one same
day at Ticonderoga he used manuscript sermons of mine and
McMaster's, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. They
were exercise sermons which we had written in New York and
preached before the class. Both of us were in the audience, and
we were astonished and delighted to see how much he made of
them with his strong emphasis and earnest manner. He had
read the sermons carefully beforehand, and prepared himself well
to do justice to them. He was less cautious on another occa-
sion at Wadhams Mills, and felt himself caught in a trap. His
repertoire of sermons was exhausted, and hard work during the
week had prevented him from making any preparation. "Wai-
worth," said he, " I want one of your seminary sermons ; I'm
short."

"All right," I said, " I'll lend you one; but I never preached
it at the seminary, and you may not like it."

"I've no time to read it," said he, "and I'll take it on
trust."

The sermon was on the " Infallibility of the Church." It was
rather a heavy gun, and would have excited much astonishment
if used in Twentieth Street before the professor in class. I
watched my friend as he delivered it, and not without some fear
of the consequences. The audience showed no signs of agita-
tion or dissatisfaction. Wadhams himself, however, grew red in
the face as he proceeded, and I noticed that whenever he came
to some terrible words about " the Rock of Peter," which often
occurred, he braced himself up, and pounded the desk with un-
usual energy. After the morning service was over, and the
Sunday-school exercises also for which all the audience remained
I conducted his mother, widow Wadhams, to her house, where
our rooms were, and waited with some apprehension for my
friend's return. When he entered the room he glared at me for
a little while, and then said, with a remarkable mildness : " I tell
you what, my very dear Christian friend, if I had known what
was in that sermon I wouldn't have preached it." "Well," I
said, " if you are satisfied, I am sure the congregation is. No-
body here will take any exception to anything you preach."

In this, however, I was mistaken. In the evening we visited
a cousin of his, an Episcopalian, whose husband, however, was a
Baptist. He said to me : " I liked the sermon this morning very
much, but there was one thing in it which I couldn't exactly
take in. I don't see how you Episcopalians can prove the in-
fallibility of the Pope." The sermon, of course, was not intended

668 REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS, [Aug.,

to carry the point of infallibility so far. Nevertheless, I let this
odd mistake pass, not being altogether unpleased with it.

" You cannot ? " said I, " why the thing is not so very diffi-
cult ! Just look at the Scriptures," and I proceeded to present
some arguments drawn from Scripture and from reason, argu-
ments which at this very time were leading me rapidly to the
Catholic faith. The preacher of the morning said nothing, but
looked amazed.

The objector still objected, but the good lady, his wife, k was
disposed to stand firmly by any doctrine that seemed to come
from the pulpit or the general seminary.

" Hush ! " said she to her husband, " don't talk so much ; you
only show your ignorance." It is hard to say precisely how
much of the confiding simplicity of Wadhams' flock was owing
to anything else than his own magnetic sincerity.

Following these events and the communications from Mc-
Vickar already given, there came a correspondence between him
and myself which led to a distinct abandonment by him of our
monastic scheme, a consequent termination of my residence with
Wadhams, and to a termination, also, of my connection with
the Protestant Episcopal Church. In truth, my state of mind
was very much like that of Ward and Oakeley in England.

I had little confidence in the validity of Anglican orders. I
felt myself to be in a state of schism, separated from the
ancient and true Church of Christ. Moreover, whatever toleration
was given by Anglicanism to Catholic ideas, rank heresy received
far more efficient toleration ; and I saw little hope of reviving
a breathless corpse by our weak efforts to blow a little wind
into its nostrils. I began to realize that, whatever of supernatural
life there was in individual Anglicans, they did not derive it
from Anglicanism. The condition of Wadhams' mind was very
similar to my own. Even the fragmentary correspondence of
that time now in my possession contains warnings from his
friends which, if my remembrance serves, were never communi-
cated to me. I think he was afraid of adding to my uneasiness,
and his own soul was not in a mood that made him capable of
reassuring friends. At one time, when there was some reason to
apprehend serious danger from sickness, I said to him ; " My
dear old fellow, if this thing should turn out badly I shall
want better help than you can give me." " Never fear," he an-
swered ; " in that case you shall have a priest, and it shall be
some one that is a priest for certain."

The correspondence between McVickar and myself above re-

1892.] FIAST BISHOP OF OGDENSBURG. 669

ferred to contained expressions on my part of distrust in Epis-
copalianism and longing aspirations after unity with Rome
which alarmed my friend in New York. These expressions drew
from him declarations of a determination to abide in the church
where he was at all hazards, and of an inability to cooperate
practically with any whose hearts were already in another fold.
The crisis had come. Sindbad's island whale was unmistakably in
motion. She would not endure any more hot coals. The pre-
sumptuous sailors who had been dancing on her back, were now
obliged to look out for their own safety. It had become neces-
sary either to go under with the whale or to strike out for a
safer refuge. To particularize: St. Mary's Monastery in the
North Woods had turned out to be a vision. That vision had
vanished, and in its place was left nothing but a roofless log
house on the Wadhams farm. The following note will now speak
for itself :

"YOUR STUDY, May 5, 1845.

" DEAR WADHAMS : In a few minutes I shall be gone and oh,
as I lean my breast against your stand, how wildly something
beats within. It seems as if I were about to separate from
everything I love, and my poor heart, faithless and unconscientious,
wants to be left behind among the Protestants. I am not manly
enough to make a stout Catholic ; but it is a great privilege to
be a weak one. Well, do not you forget me. Indeed you can-
not you have been such a good, kind, elder brother to me, you
would not be able if you tried to forget me. When hereafter
you speak of me, speak freely of me for truth's sake, with all my
faults ; but when you think of me alone, try to forget all that is
bad for love's sake, and although your imagination should in this
way create a different person, no matter, so you call it by my

name. We have stormy times before us, dear W ; but may

God grant us the privilege to ride the storm together. Farewell
until we meet again, and when and where shall that be ?

" ' Lead Thou us on ! '

In close connection with the above note is the copy of a
letter from Wadhams to McVickar. The original was carried to
New York City by McMaster. He had come up to visit us at
Ticonderoga, and we had arranged together, McMaster and I, to
enter the Catholic Church, and for this purpose to apply to the
Redemptorist Fathers at their house in Third Street, New York.
I went on first, leaving him to follow me after finishing his visit
at Ticonderoga.

It is a noticeable fact that Wadhams should have made and

6/o REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS, [Aug.,

preserved a copy of this one letter among so many which he
wrote. No doubt, he felt that it marked the turn of a great tide
in his life. The letter reads as follows :

"CHURCH OF THE CROSS, TlCONDEROGA,
"Tuesday in Whitsun Week, 1845.

" MY DEAR McVlCKAR : Conscious of great neglect to you, I
now sit down after again returning to this place to answer your
last kind letter.

" I cannot well describe to you the feelings that Walworth's
note written after I left him and left upon my table has ex-
cited. Of him, his worth and advantage to me for the past
months I need not speak to you who know him better than I,
and consequently know what they must have been. Every one
regrets that he has left these mountains, particularly Judge and

Mrs. B , and the Hammonds at the Falls. Poor fellow ! he

suffered very much from his eyes during the winter and spring,
and, after it was finally settled that we were not to have your
company up here, became discontented. What step he has now
taken you, doubtless, know better than I do. Though sorry that
he has left me alone among these mountains I am not sorry that
I have a friend among the Roman Catholics. On the contrary,
I am glad, for there is no knowing how soon we all may be
obliged to leave our present communion ' that dispensation of
God which has been to all of us so great a blessing ' and go
to the church which is Catholic. I say this, not expecting to
abuse the kindness which he and other friends may extend to
me there, but to express my thankfulness to them for their man-
liness and straightforwardness. We are certainly under obliga-
tions to them for opening and showing the way for those Amer-
icans that may follow. It seems to be a conceded point now
among those who are leading the way in our church that the
Church of Rome has all the wisdom, and it must follow that,
while some are striving to gain that wisdom, some will, as a
matter of course, remain unquiet until they can gain the reli-
gious graces which she alone bestows with that wisdom. Wai-
worth is one of these, and, partly of his own accord and partly
from necessity, he crosses. There are others who will have more
difficulty in leaving friends and undoing a work which they had
trusted was good.

" I am under many obligations to you for Oakeley's letter and
the Lives of the Saints, which I return by McMaster.

" Please write to me and inform me how and when I shall
send you the Breviary and the Lives of the Saints (Butler's) and
also what I shall do with the tools. I have lost the bill of the
latter, but if you wish to have them sold please say (if you rec-
ollect) what they cost.

" Will it not be your pleasure to .come and see me this sum-
mer? I shall be here and at Wadhams Mill alternately. But
will manage to have my time entirely at your disposal if I can

1892.] FIRST BISHOP OF OGDENSBURG. 671

receive so great a pleasure as your company. Please write to
me soon, addressing me at this place.

" Very sincerely your friend,

" E. P. WADHAMS.
" Monday, May 19.

" P.S. Agreeably to your request, I have destroyed my will
this morning; and must beg of you to be set free of the trust
committed to me in your own. Ever yours,

"E. P. WADHAMS.

The next letter which I give the reader is one from myself
to Wadhams, detailing after some sort the circumstances which
attended my reception into that great motherly bosom which I
had sought for so earnestly, but had been so timid to recognize.
The mail which bore it to Ticonderoga must have passed McMas-
ter as he brought down to New York the letter just given
above.

" IN FESTO CORPORIS CHRISTI, May, 1845.

" DEAR WADHAMS : You have not, of course, forgotten your
poor crazy friend, who used to get so wild when you left him
alone, and talked of going over. Well, he has gone over now,
and his soul is as quiet and happy as if it had a right to be
happy instead of mourning in sackcloth and ashes. For fear I
should not have room afterwards, I will begin by telling you
statistically and methodically what I have done. I arrived here
(New York) in due time on Wednesday morning, and the same
day made my way to Father Rumpler. I found him all that I
wished a wise, kind, earnest, spiritually-minded man, and put
myself immediately into his hands. Last Friday (May 16) I
made my profession the form you have probably seen in the
Roman Ritual. Three or four witnesses only were present, as I
wished the matter to be secret, for tranquillity's sake, until I
had received the sacraments. The creed of Pius IV. sounded
most musically in my ears, and I took pleasure in repeating it
very slowly and distinctly. I was then freed from the curse and
excommunication which you remember used so to trouble us.
On Thursday, the day before, I had made my confession, and
on Saturday came again to the confessional and was absolved,
and on Sunday morning communicated, after which I had no longer
any motive to make the thing a secret. It is well known at the
seminary, and, of course, therefore, in other quarters; but, as I
have kept very much at home, I do not know what is said
about it. None of those to whom I have spoken before my
profession used the least expostulation, but seemed to regard it
as a thing of course, and an honest step. McVickar is silent
and reserved in the extreme, but very kind. I do not know
what to infer from this, but am unwilling to trouble him. I
have made application through Father Rumpler to be admitted as
novice at Baltimore, and shall probably hear next week. I have
as yet had no intercommunication with my immediate relatives

672 REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS, [Aug.,

in this matter. This, my severest trial, will come on next week.
And now I have told you all that relates to myself externally.
My inward joy and satisfaction at being in the very church of
God and communion of the saints, I cannot express. Should

Judge B express any interest in my movements, make no

secret with him. I feel much attached to him, not only on ac-
count of his friendliness to me, but from strong personal esteem.

Remember me gratefully to Mrs. B , also to Clarence, and

the other children. Alas ! dear Wadhams, what shall I say to
you, of your kindness, gentleness, and thousand favors to me ?
I will just say nothing, for I will not have my feelings belied by
an attempt to convey them by letter.

"Well, what have you and Mac been doing in Essex County?
Has he been raising any commotion in your extensive diocese ?
If he is with you still, give my warm love to him, although
that is not very necessary, as I shall most probably be here
when he comes down, and can do it for myself. I earnestly
hope he will be cautious in the extreme in his method of abjur-
ing his Protestant connections, for his own sake and that of
others, and especially of the great cause. I do not mean he
ought to do it precisely in the same, still way as I for, of
course, every one must in some sort act according to his own
natural method but I mean he ought to say and do nothing
without premeditation. So far as I have learned, Puseyism is
still alive at the seminary, and wearing its own colors. It is
scouring away at the outside of the cup and platter very brave-
ly, as you remember it in our day there. The young Anglo-
Catholics are acquiring the dyspepsia by fasting, buying up rosa-
ries and crucifixes, which, nevertheless, they have no idea of
using, and enjoy the satisfaction of knowing how frightened
their mothers would be if they knew what their darlings were
about. Perhaps this may seem to you somewhat cross, but in-
deed I am out of all conceit with Puseyism, whether ornamen-
tal, sentimental, or antiquarian. Christ is one and undivided, and
must be sought for in his undivided church, which he inhabits
and inspires. God grant that you and I may soon meet upon
that Rock which rests itself upon the Rock of Ages !

" Give my sincere Jove to your mother I shall not soon for-
get her, I assure you. Also to Mrs. Hammond and the doctor,
Mrs. and Miss Hay, Mrs. Atherton, and all others who have
been kind to me. If you will answer me immediately, I shall
get your letter before I leave New York. With all my heart,
most sincerely yours for ever,

" CLARENCE WALWORTH.

" Direct to me at New York, care of Edgar Jenkins, Esquire,
78 Eleventh Street. I visit often the brethren of St. Alphonse,
but will tell you more hereafter. C. W."

The words in the above letter which speak of our anxiety at
the thought of living in a state of 'excommunication may re-
quire some explanation. To furnish this I give the following

1892] FIRST BISHOP OF OGDENSBURG. 673

reminiscence : In Sterne's Tristram Shandy is a story, given there
as a joke, but often repeated among Protestants as a reality. It
represents that every Friday in Holy Week the Pope publicly
curses all heretics and infidels from the altar. The curse is
given word for word, and is really something very horrible. It
is, in fact, just so near the truth as this : that on that day, in all
Catholic churches throughout the world, public prayers are offered
for their conversion, in order that God may bless them. We
did not either of us give much credit to such a tale, but still
we were ignorant in regard to the real facts. Wadhams, I re-
member, had been more struck by the awful nature of anathe-
mas from such a source than moved to a feeling of resentment.
" It's a foolish story," said he, " It can't be true. But, I tell
you what! I. don't want that old man to curse me."

The next letter connects itself sufficiently with the preceding
one, and is here given without comment :

"SARATOGA SPA, June 26, 1845.

"DEAR WADHAMS : What can I write to you ? I know you
must be anxious to hear all the news ; but, in such an ocean of
things I have to tell you, what can one do with a sheet of
paper? I wish I had you here hung up fast by a hook in some
corner where you could not get away. I would talk to you
from sunrise to bed-time, and you would need to say nothing
but ' no! no! did? did?' all the while. You will be surprised
perhaps to find me writing from Saratoga. I came up about
two weeks since, at mother's request and to try to comfort her,
for she takes my conversion very much to heart, thinking me
quite ruined by becoming a Catholic. I shall return in a very few
days. By the by, the priest at the Springs is a Cistercian, or
monk of St. Bernard (only think, a genuine live Cistercian), a very
learned and, I think, a very good man. When Bishop Hughes
travelled in Belgium this monk became much interested for this
poor, infidelity-ridden country, and obtained leave to come and
help the good cause on this side the water. You asked me
in your last letter to describe to you the ways and customs
of the brethren of St. Alphonse at New York. Indeed, I can
tell you nothing beyond what M. has told you.

" In the first place, there are scarcely enough of them to con-
stitute a ' house,' being only three, and sometimes four, Fathers,
and a few lay-brethren. Then, again, I go in and out without
ceremony and the Father Superior is almost always ready to see
^me, and as I am not put under rule, I know very little about
their rule. McM., who stays with them all the while and is be-
sides much more observing than I, is better able to inform you.
But this will, of course, be entirely unnecessary, for you will
soon come down to see us off (of course, you have learned
from Mac that we are to go to Europe Belgium) and make
your profession before we go. Then you will see them all, and

674 REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS, [Aug.,

love them all as we do. We shall embark, probably, about the
first of August with the Father Provincial from Belgium.

" Oh ! what shall I say to you of the joys of Catholic com-
munion, the frequent and the real Sacraments, the privilege of
daily Mass, and constant access to a confidential director? How
miserable do all the unrealities of Puseyite speculation appear
to one who is a Catholic in fact and not in dreams! I cannot
bear to think of you all alone among those godless hills, an ex-
ile from the church into which you were baptized and conduct-
ing unauthorized conventicles. Do not, I beg of you for Christ's
sake, delay making your profession long. At least discontinue
your meetings. Forgive me for speaking so, my dearest friend
and kind benefactor, but I speak earnestly, believing that noth-
ing is so expedient for us as to do God's will promptly. I have
had a letter from Platt, who * thanks God ' for my sake, and
says he told the bishop he did not blame me for escaping from
the torturing embrace of the Episcopal church, but he cannot yet
make up his mind to follow my example. I have urged him to
come to New York and see me before I go, and told him he
would meet you there. I presumed you would not let us leave
without seeing us, and Mac said he would urge you to come
down. Indeed, you should make your profession and confession
before Father Rumpler by all means, and you will gain much
by coming and spending a while before, as we have already be-
come familiar with the brethren and others. Although I have
been in the habit of attending daily Mass, I doubt if I have
forgotten you once in the presence of the Holy Victim. May
the good Mother shield and bless you also, for I owe you very
much, and, although I have always behaved more like a saucy
companion, I assure you I look up to you as a father, not in
years, but in care and kindness.

" Do not forget to remember me to your mother, whom I

remember daily in my prayers ; to Judge B , also Clarence,

and others whom I am bound to love. My eyes are constantly
improving, yet I confess I feel the effects of this writing. Tell
Mrs. Hammond, although our farm of St. Mary's is abandoned,
in which she took such a kind interest, I hope she may live to
bring many a rose and lily to the altar of our dear Lady. In
the hope of giving you soon a right good Catholic embrace,
" Your affectionate friend and brother,

" CLARENCE <ALBAN ALPHONSE.'"

" The two names you see in my signature are the names by
which I was confirmed. You will, of course, not use them as
yet in directing letters."

The preceding two letters show that I had applied for ad-
mission into the Redemptorist Order and that I had been
accepted by the Very Rev. Father De Held, Provincial, then on
a visit to America, accompanied by Father Bernard, who after-
ward succeeded to his office here. Father De Held was head
of the Province of Belgium, which then included Holland, Eng-

1892.] FIRST BISHOP OF OGDENSBURG. 675

land, and the United States. These letters show also that I had
been destined to make my novitiate, not at Baltimore, but at
St. Trend, in Belgium. In the meanwhile, McMaster had decided
to join the same order, and so also had Isaac Hecker, now well
known as first Superior of the Paulist Fathers of Fifty-ninth
Street, New York City. The Provincial had decided not to
keep us in waiting until his own return to Europe, but to send
us on beforehand, and at once. Father Hecker was not one of
our seminary set and had never been an Episcopalian. McMas-
ter and I met him for the first time at the Redemptorist Con-
vent in Third Street, after our reception there. He was himself
only a year-old Catholic. He had had nothing to do with Pusey-
ism, and knew very little about it. His chief experience lay in
the New England school of Transcendentalism.

We little understood at first the full value that lay concealed
under the long yellow locks that hung down over his broad
shoulders and behind the bright eyes, which shone with an open-
ness of enthusiasm which made us smile. On concluding to join
us he had just sufficient time to hurry off to Baltimore, where
Father De Held then was, get accepted, and hurry back again
before the ship left port.

We considered it as contrary to holy poverty to go as first-
class passengers ; Hecker's brothers, however, took care to have
a special room built up for all three in the second cabin.
While these hurried preparations were in progress, the following
letter was written :

"NEW YORK CITY, July 25, 1845.

" DEAR WADHAMS : I intended to have given you earlier
notice of the time of our departure, that you might have ample
time to come and see us off at your leisure, but circumstances
have turned up which oblige us to set off almost immediately,
viz.: on Friday, the ist of August. We shall cross in the Lon-
don packet Prince Albert. I fear even now you will scarcely
have time to come, there are so many chances of this letter
being delayed. Most likely the packet will not get off until
Saturday, the 2d, as I am told it is very common to delay a day
or so, and sailors do not like to go out of port on a Friday. If
I were going alone it would be great presumption to think you
would come so far to see me, to whom you have no reason to
be attached, except that you have shown me so much kindness
and have given me so much reason to love you ; but you and
McMaster are older friends, and you will certainly wish to bid
him ' farewell, and God speed,' before he sails. We shall both
almost hold our breaths in expectation of you. It makes me
very sad to think over our last winter's life. McM. tells me I
am much in the habit of saying unpleasant things in a thought-

s way to my friends, and I doubt not it is true, although I

676 REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS, [Aug.,

was not aware of it before. How often I may have wounded
your feelings last winter in this manner, for I know I talked
very much and very thoughtlessly ; but you who was always so
patient with me then, will not, I am sure, find it difficult to for-
get all these things now the time has gone by. As happy as I
am to breathe the holy atmosphere of the Catholic Church, it is
a bitter thing to leave my country which I love all the more
dearly for its pitiable religious destitution and so many kind
friends whom I may never see again in life. But it is very self-
ish to speak of myself now. Come down, dear Wadhams, at
once, if you possibly can, and let me see your face again. We
will talk over in one day more than a thousand letters can con-
tain. What an age of awful responsibility we live in ! How ir-
resistable the impression that God has vast designs for the good
of his church upon the very eve of accomplishment ! Oh ! what
if he should call upon us at important and critical moments,
and we should be found wanting! Let us -cry out to God with
groans and tears that we may be permitted to do and to suffer
something in the good and holy cause. What have we to do
with the enjoyment of the world, or even of the most tender
family relations, which is all the same thing, while Christ is plead-
ing with us : ' What, can ye not watch with me one hour ? ' It
needs but a little time in the Roman Catholic Church to feel
the depth and tenderness of her motherly love and care, and
how blessed it is to labor in her cause, and to die in her arms.
How can one 'fight the good fight and finish the faith ' when join-
ed to the abominations and covered with the trappings of heresy?

" How can one hope for the benediction of Jesus upon him-
self or his doings while he will not listen to the voice, ' Come,
and follow Me.'

" Do come down at once and see us. Four -years is a long
time. Yesterday evening was the first we knew of the exact
time of our departure, or I should have written before. God
bless you, speed my letter, and bring you hither in time.
" Your faithful and grateful friend,

" CLARENCE WALWORTH.

" P.S. I am living now all alone at my brother-in-law's, Mr.
Jenkins, 78 Eleventh Street ; but it would be more sure, to
come at once to McMaster's quarters in the house attached to
the rear of the Catholic Church on Third Street, between Ave-
nues A and B."

The above letter was mailed to Ticonderoga, whence it was
forwarded to Wadhams Mills. An endorsement on the back of
the sheet of paper upon which it is written, shows that Wad-
hams did not receive it until the day we sailed. Did not this
fact add an additional pang to the reading of it ? In any case
it shows why he did not come to see us off.

C. A. WALWORTH.

St. Mary's Church, Albany.

(TO BE CONTINUED.)

1892.] THE STORY OF A DIAMOND ORNAMENT. 677

THE STORY OF A DIAMOND ORNAMENT.

Ay di me ! how strange seems the quiet of this peaceful
England after the stormy scenes in which my youth was passed.
Often in my dreams I live over again that old stirring time, and,
waking, wonder for a moment which is the dream and which
the reality. But wlien my eyes fall on my Humphrey's face, a
stern, determined face perchance in the judgment of many, but
which hath never yet been without a smile for me, I feel that
if this is the dream I would fain it lasted for ever. There lin-
gereth yet a little stiffness betwixt my mother-in-law and me,
for she hath never quite forgiven her son's choice of a foreigner
and a Catholic. But Dolly, my sweet sister-in-law, and I are sis-
ters indeed, and it is for her pleasure that I sit me down this
afternoon to recall some of those memories that to her are only
stories more marvellous than any romance, but that to me are
replete with a keenness of joy and pain which it can scarce be
my lot to feel again.

I was only a child when I came to France in the train of
Anne of Austria " the Little Queen," as they used to call her
to distinguish her from the haughty queen-mother. We had been
brought up together, and I alone of all her following was per-
mitted to remain with her at her own earnest request. The rest
of her ladies were dismissed at the frontier, not over courteously.
They parted from her in tears, for already, young as she was,
she had begun to exercise that charm which in after years ren-
dered her irresistible to all who approached her. To all, that is
to say, save one ; and that one, alas ! the most important of all,
the king her husband.

When they had left her she stood for a while without speak-
ing, biting her lips to restrain the tears which her pride would
not suffer to fall. Then suddenly she turned to me and held
out her hand.

" You at least are left to me, Dolores ! " she exclaimed. " I
am not without a friend."

I kissed it in silence. But from that moment, chilcl though
I was, my soul was knit to hers with a love such as Jonathan
of old had for David, a blind, unquestioning devotion which ren-
dered it almost impossible for me to resist her will, even when
mv judgment and sense of right were against it.
VOL. LV. 44

678 THE STORY OF A DIAMOND ORNAMENT. [Aug.,

We grew up together in that court, which for her as well as for
me was a lonely place enough. But my humbler lot was happily
free from the dangers and temptations that beset her on every side.
Alas ! my poor mistress, so young and so friendless, each day devel-
oping into more dazzling beauty, with a sullen, neglectful husband,
and flatterers enow to tell you what a different fate your charms
deserved, was it wonderful that you were at times imprudent?
Was it not more sad than strange that with a heart and mind
formed for love and happiness you were tempted to stoop
for admiration from those who should only have ventured on
homage and respect ? Yet still, though there was no lack of spy-
ing eyes and spiteful tongues to comment on her conduct, there
had never been anvthing for scandal to lay hold of till, in an evil
hour for her, the Duke of Buckingham was sent by the court of
England to treat for the marriage of the Prince of Wales with
with the king's sister, Madame Henriette.

'Twere hard to describe the excitement that prevailed at
court at the news. Buckingham, the prince's favorite, his com-
panion on that romantic journey of which all Europe was talk-
ing, and which had captivated the youthful fancy of the Princess
Henriette ! Buckingham, the embodiment in every woman's eyes
of the days of chivalry and romance, whose splendor and mag-
nificence threw even his royal master into the shade !

The men were wild with jealousy, and the women would
talk of nothing else. Even I, little as I had in common with
my companions as a rule, caught the infection, and felt my heart
beat higher than its wont as I took up my stand behind my
mistress's chair on the night when he was to make his first for-
mal appearance at court.

The queen, looking lovelier than I had ever seen her, stood for-
ward among her ladies, outshining them all. Her pale, auburn
hair was rolled back from her face, which looked fairer than
ever with the flush of excitement staining her cheek and lending
unwonted brightness to her soft, emerald eyes. Every eye was
bent on the English ambassador as he advanced up the hall,
magnificently attired, his white satin doublet embroidered with
gold, and the mantle of silver-gray velvet which depended from
his shoulders literally covered with pearls. How shall I confess
it? My. first sight of the renowned George Villiers, Duke of
Buckingham, was fraught with disappointment. Perhaps my
expectations had been unduly raised ; perhaps no reality could
have come up to the ideal I had formed in my mind. Yet, I
think it was more than this, and that beneath that handsome,

1892.] THE STORY OF A DIAMOND ORNAMENT. 679

chivalrous exterior my woman's instinct divined the lack of moral
strength that marred his character and wrecked his life. Be this
as it may, mine was, methinks, the only eye in that vast assem-
bly that wandered beyond the splendid figure of the duke and
rested with a sudden sense of restored satisfaction on a face that
could not for mere beauty of feature have compared for a mo-
ment with his. Truth and honesty were stamped on it for all
the world to read, and, though I chided myself for the thought
concerning so utter a stranger, it crossed my mind in that in-
stant that in the hour of peril I would choose him out of all the
world to stand by my side.

Lost in my meditations I was unconscious how fixed was my
gaze till the stranger suddenly looked up and our eyes met. I
colored and dropped my own. It was some moments before I
ventured to raise them. Thus I lost sight of the meeting be-
tween Buckingham and the queen, and only learnt afterwards
by hearsay how their instant mutual attraction made itself so
evident as to arouse the suspicion, not merely of the king, but,
what was far worse, of Richelieu, the bitterest enemy my mis-
tress possessed.

The usual compliments were interchanged, and then I heard
the duke presenting " Master Humphrey Castleton," to the queen,
" a true and faithful friend, for whom I venture to crave your
majesty's favor," and I felt rather than saw the causer of my em- ,
barrassment making his bow before her. The queen responded
to the appeal with that gracious sweetness that even her enemies
found hard to resist. Then, as the music began and she gave
her hand as a matter of course to the English ambassador for
the dance, she turned to the young cavalier with one of her be-
wildering smiles.

"As you are a stranger here, Master Castleton," she said,
" I will myself choose you a partner. Dolores," beckoning
me forward with her fan, " I commit this gentleman's enter-
tainment to you."

At first I felt rather confused, but his frank, pleasant manner,
so different to the half-impertinent gallantry of" the French cour-
tiers, soon set me at my ease, and I found myself listening with
interest while he spoke to me of my own land, the country I
scarcely hoped to see again ; praised the beauty of the women
and the courtesy of the men. My eyes glistened with pleasure ;
an exile, far from home, rny only friend the queen if, indeed,
that could be called friendship between two so unequal in station,
where everything was given on one side and graciously re-

68o THE STORY OF A DIAMOND ORNAMENT. [Aug.,

ceived on the other I felt my heart go out to the speaker, and
answered him with a frankness and unreserve that surprised my-
self. We were soon on the road to friendship. The evening
passed quickly too quickly, methought for once and the time
came for the queen to withdraw. I followed with my compan-
ions in her train, lost in dreamy abstraction that would have ex-
posed me to their raillery on any other occasion. But to-night
it passed unnoticed ; no one had eyes or thoughts for any but
the duke, and I should have been laughed at indeed if I had
ventured to express my preference for his squire.

I went mechanically through the tedious ceremonies of the
queen's coucher, anxious for the moment when I should find my-
self alone, free to analyze this strange, new feeling that possessed
my breast. But to my disappointment the queen detained me,
as indeed she often did when she felt wakeful, that . I might read
her to sleep with some favorite Spanish book. To-night, how-
ever, this proved to be a mere pretext, for after listening to
me for a few minutes with a distracted attention she suddenly
exclaimed :

"Throw that dull book aside, Lola, and talk to me. Tell
me, child, didst ever behold a more gallant caballero ? Me-
thought I saw the Cid himself before me. But thou art silent !
Did he not take thy fancy? Nay, then, thou art duller than I
gave thee credit for ! "

" Methinks, madame," I suggested diffidently, " there was
more goodness in the face of his squire."

II Thou art but a prude, Dolores ! " said the queen, impatiently.
" Though how thou earnest by it in this court I know not, verily.
Goodness, forsooth ! We are not talking of a monk or a hermit,
but of a noble cavalier."

I said nothing, and my mistress, who seemed provoked by
my want of sympathy, presently dismissed me. Yet, in spite of
her words, I failed to see that goodness was any disqualification
to a cavalier, and I sought my couch to dream of a steadfast,
manly face, a pair of blue eyes full of kindliness and truth.

That was a happy time that followed, both for my royal mis-
tress and myself. Happy for her in her ignorance of where it
it would tend. A neglected wife, a powerless queen, she found
herself suddenly the object of a devotion such as she had read
of and dreamt of, but never yet met with in actual life. Buck-
ingham had come prepared to admire, but the reality surpassed
his anticipations. So I afterwards heard. His ardent fancy was
caught at once and he took little pains to hide it. Yet, there

1892.] THE STORY OF A DIAMOND ORNAMENT. 68 1

was nothing in those early days to set the queen on her guard.
His passion was so mingled with respect, he hid the audacity of
his advances so skillfully under the outward forms of a homage
such as any subject might justly offer to his sovereign, that she
never even dreamt of danger. It did not strike her that such
homage would be more fittingly rendered by him to the Princess
Henriette, his future queen. The days went by in festivity and
pleasure, the English ambassador ever by the queen's side, obe-
dient to her slightest wish, while the king grew daily more
gloomy, and the cardinal's brow more stern, and every one felt
that we were on the verge of an explosion.

And I, who loved her so devotedly, for once was strangely
blind. I had wandered into that wonderful Arcadia of youth,
whose freshness and sweetness is revealed to us but once in our
lives. We may live again, perchance more deeply, but that
boundless trust, that certainty of happiness, belong only to that
first period of enchantment when everything is glorified for us
in the glow of our own hearts.

Just at that time the Duchesse de Chevreuse, the queen's
friend. and sworn ally, gave a grand ball, to which all the court
was bidden, to celebrate the approaching nuptials of madame.
It was to be a masquerade, and I, in common with my com-
panions, was busy preparing my dress for the occasion. I had
chosen to appear in my national costume, all in white, like a
peasant bride. Two days before the ball her majesty summoned
me to her presence. I found her standing before the glass, hold-
ing in her hand an open casket containing a magnificent shoulder-
knot from which depended twelve tags, each one a splendid
diamond.

" O madame ! " I exclaimed, involuntarily, dazzled by the
sight. " How beautiful ! "

The queen turned round, a moody expression on her fair
face.

" 'Tis the king's gift," she said, briefly.

" A right royal one," I could not help remarking.

" Ay," she answered, rather bitterly. " A gift from the king
to the queen not from Louis to Anne " in a lower voice.
" 'Tis to do himself credit before the English nobles."

She closed the casket carelessly and said in a lighter tone :

"But come, Lola, 'twas not toishowthee this I sent for thee,
child. Thou wearest the dress of a Spanish bride at the duch-
esse's ball ? "

" Ay, madame, if it please your majesty."

682 THE STORY OF A DIAMOND ORNAMENT. [Aug.,

" Then wear this with it for the sake of thy friend the
queen."

She put into my hands a white lace veil so rare arid costly
that it would have given richness to the most insignificant dress.
Surprised and delighted I faltered out my thanks, and bent to
kiss her hand, but she stooped down and put her lips to my
forehead with a sudden emotion.

" Nay, thank me not, child. Tis but a trifle, yet it rejoiceth
me to give pleasure to one of the few who love me for myself
a l one as \ we ll believe thou dost, Dolores?" looking keenly in-
to my face.

" Indeed, madame, you do me but justice, " I answered, earn
estly. " There is nothing I would not do for your service."

" I believe it, child," she answered. " And it may be that
the time is not far distant when I shall need more than the pro-
fession of that service."

"Come when it may, it shall find me ready," was my reply.
And with a low reverence I withdrew.

The night so eagerly anticipated arrived, and as I donned my
pretty dress, and marked how soft a shade the queen's gift threw
over my face, I felt loth to put on the little white satin mask
that would hide it from the eyes in which I would fain have
looked my best. But it had to be done, and I adjusted it with
a sigh ; then pinned to my dress the yellow favor which was
to distinguish me in case, unlikely as it seemed, any one else
should have chosen the same costume as myself. My heart was
beating wildly; I felt that to-night would be in some way the
crisis of my fate, and little guessed how much it meant to those
far above me in station, yet whose fortunes were destined to be
strangely interwoven with mine own.

It was a dazzling scene that night in the beautiful Hotel de
Chevreuse. Conspicuous amongst all was the queen, in spite of
her disguise, by her height, her stately bearing, above all by the
splendid ornament that hung from her left shoulder and threw
out rays of sparkling light with every step she took. The king's
brow was clearer than it had been for many a day, for etiquette
demanded that on this occasion the envoy of England should
lead out his future mistress, and dressed in his bravest attire,
glittering all over with diamonds, he had already made his way
to her side. The king had given his hand to his fair hostess,
but many a guess was hazarded in vain as to who was the

queen's cavalier. Some pronounced it to be Monsieur ; others

the Comte de G . As for me, my eye was seeking in vain

1892.] THE STORY OF A DIAMOND ORNAMENT. 683

for one, who, methought, would have been long ere this at my
side. Time passed on ; I had rejected more than one aspirant
for my hand, and the brilliant pageant was beginning to lose all
its radiance for me in the bitterness of my disappointment when
a note was suddenly thrust into my hand. I turned round
quickly, but saw no one near. It was bound with a yellow rib-
bon. I opened it and read :

" Judge me not too hastily, sweet Dolores. I am not my own
master to-night and have a part to play that I like but ill. But
trust me still, though appearances be against me."

What did it mean ? I stood, turning it over, sorely perplexed,
when a mocking voice spoke in my ear :

" So, fair sefiorita, your cavalier has deserted you. He hath
nobler game in view to-night, though it would seem that the
favor of the queen's loveliest maid of honor might have satisfied
the ambition of the boorish islander."

" I do not understand you, sir," I answered haughtily.

"Yet, jealousy, they say, hath sharpened women's eyes ere
now. Who, think you, is dancing with madame?"

"The Duke of Buckingham."

" The Duke of Buckingham's squire" was the emphatic reply.
" Fine feathers make fine birds, but it needs something more
than his master's diamonds to transform the servant into his
lord."

My heart stood still not with foolish jealousy, but with a
deadly fear. If that was Humphrey Castleton, the queen's cava-
lier could be no other than Buckingham. I realized in an in-
stant the danger in which my mistress stood. The words of the
note recurred to my mind. Was this the explanation ? Oh, no !
they could not be so rash, so mad ! Even as I strove to frame
a reply the music stopped. A trumpet sounded through the
rooms and the master of ceremonies proclaimed in a loud
voice it was the king's pleasure that every one should un-
mask.

I felt ready to swoon with terror. But managing at last to
raise my eyes I saw with bewilderment the real duke standing
by madame's side. It was a mistake, then, after all. But as the
thought passed through my mind the same sarcastic voice I had
heard a while ago murmured beside me :

" Cleverly done ! They have escaped for this time, but it will
be all the same in the end."

684 THE STORY OF A DIAMOND ORNAMENT. [Aug.,

I turned round, determined this time to find out who the
speaker was. But he had moved away and was lost to sight in
the crowd, and I, looking up, beheld my Humphrey standing
before me, his face alight with tenderness and love.

"At last, Dolores!" he exclaimed.

And leading me on one side he poured forth into my ear the
tale I so longed to hear. I listened with feelings too sweet for
speech, until at last he grew alarmed at my silence and craved
for one word only one word of reply, to assure him he had
not been mistaken. I raised my eyes, and he needed no other
assurance than he read there, for he seized my hand and cov-
ered it with kisses.

" Sweetest !" he cried. " This moment makes up for all this
weary evening and all besides."

"Ah, yes!" I murmured. "Humphrey, where wast thou
when I looked for thee in vain ? "

"Ask me not now, Dolores. My word is passed. One day
I will tell thee all."

" And what if I know it already ?" fixing my eyes on his
face ; " that to please thy lord thou didst take his place ? "

He started and changed color.

"Dolores! Was it marked, thinkest thou, by any eye save
thine ? "

"It is true then? I almost doubted. Nay, fear not, Hum-
phrey. If they suspect, they have no proof."

But his brow remained overcast.

" This must to my lord," he muttered. " I warned him, but
he would not heed."

Two or three days passed without affording us any fresh
chance of meeting. One night I had gone up to my chamber
a mean little place enough, though beneath a palace roof; but
the quarters assigned to the maids of honor were not ever luxu-
rious, and I was fortunate in having one all to myself. I stood
by the casement, dreamily contemplating the moonlit scene be-
neath, and following it in my thoughts to the sea. I hoped one
day to cross with my true love by my side to his distant home,
when there came a timid knock at my door and a young girl
entered a newly-joined maid of honor, fresh from the convent
in which she had been brought up, and who had attached her-
self to me half in fear, half in disapproval of the giddy ways of
the rest.

" Dear seftorita," she began, " you are so kind so brave.
I have lost a trinket that I dearly prize. It is a locket contain-

1892.] THE STORY OF A DIAMOND ORNAMENT. 685

ing the portrait of my parents. I dropped it, as I remember, in
the long corridor. Will you come with me to seek it ? I dare
not go alone."

" Willingly," I answered. " But what is there to fear ?"

" The White Lady, they say, hath been seen to walk of late."

" You do not credit such idle tales ? "

" Nay, I know not. But I should die of fright if I met her
alone."

We groped our way through the dark passages till we reached
the long corridor, where the light of the moon shone through
the tall windows with a clear but ghostly radiance. My com-
panion's fears, joined to the silence that reigned around us, and
the deep mysterious shadows had infected me somewhat, and it
was with a sigh of relief that, having found the locket at the
further end of the corridor, I turned to retrace my steps.

A start, a shrill cry from the girl beside me.

"Seftorita! The White Lady!"

And looking up I saw a figure all draped in white advancing
towards me with outstretched arms. My companion had disap-
peared. I stood rooted to the spot, unable to speak or move.
As the figure approached, my limbs gave way under me, and
with a faint cry I sank, half-unconscious, to the ground. Some
one rushed out from behind a pillar and caught me in his arms,
and a well-known, indignant voice exclaimed :

" My lord, my lord, you have killed her !"

" Tush ! 'tis but a swoon," came in unmistakable, manly ac-
cents from the White Lady. " Leave the girl alone, Humphrey,
and look to thyself. There be hawks abroad."

As he spoke lights appeared at the other end of the corridor.
The White Lady vanished how or where I was too bewildered
to see the lights drew near, and I, recovering a little from my
alarm, looked up and beheld, the hard, stern face of the Cardi-
nal de Richelieu, my mistress's unrelenting foe.

" What means this unseemly disturbance ? " he demanded.
" So-ho !" as his eye fell on the queen's colors which I, in com-
mon with all her household, wore. " A midnight meeting with
one of the queen's ladies ! These are pretty doings. Like mis-
tress, like maid."

" You are mistaken, sir," cried my protector, starting for-
ward. " This lady was affrighted and swooned. I chanced to be
in the way, and rendered her what slight service I could."

" A likely story ! " scoffed the cardinal. " Affrighted ? Of
what ?"

686 THE STORY OF A DIAMOND ORNAMENT. [Aug.,

" The White Lady," I faltered, still unable to decide if my
eyes or my ears had deceived me.

" Tis true, my lord," respectfully interposed an attendant
who was standing by. " She hath been seen to walk of late."

" Pshaw !" contemptuously. " Tell me not these old woman's
tales ! It is a mere blind, I tell you. Ha !" with a sudden start
as he recognized Humphrey. " There is more in this than meets
the eye. You are of the Duke of Buckingham's household, sir.
How come you here ? "

Humphrey hesitated.

"You had some message to the queen?"

" On my honor, no ! " answered Humphrey, with such evi-
dent sincerity that the cardinal's suspicions fell.

"Then what ? Explain your presence."

" I lost my way coming out this lady's screams drew me
to the spot."

He broke down at this point, but the cardinal, unheeding
the lame excuse, had turned away with a baffled expression,
muttering :

" Too late ! I see it all. The White Lady ! Tis Bucking-
ham himself."

The lights receded, and we were left alone.

" Humphrey !" I exclaimed. " Is this sooth ? Was it indeed
the duke I beheld anon?"

" It would avail nothing to deny it," he answered, gloomily.

" And you, what make you here ? To aid and abet him ?"

" No, on my soul, Dolores ! To defend my lord in case of
need to save him from the consequences of his folly to pre-
vent, perchance," in a lower voice and half to himself, " some
greater evil."

I stood aghast. An abyss seemed opening at my feet.

" The queen ! " I uttered at length. " Knows she aught of
this?"

" No more than the babe unborn."

I breathed a sigh of relief. One half of my fears had van-
ished with that assurance. But what remained were grave enough.
I regained my chamber with a heavy heart. I had distrusted
Buckingham from the first, though for Humphrey's sake I had
tried to think better of him. I felt now that I had judged him
truly. Selfish and unprincipled, he would scruple at nothing to
attain his purpose.

The morning, however, brought tidings that relieved my
anxiety on the queen's account. The vexatious delays, created

1892.] THE STORY OF A DIAMOND ORNAMENT. 687

for the most part by Buckingham to serve his own ends, were
ended at last, and madame was to set forth at once on her
journey. The king and queen were to accompany her as far as
the coast. I was among those chosen to attend my mistress on
this occasion. It occurred to me that the queen had guessed a
little how matters stood, and wished to give me an opportunity
of seeing the last of the man I loved. She herself was not over
cheerful. She had grown accustomed to Buckingham's devotion
and was loth to give it up. Where should she find another
cavalier so respectful, so obedient, so ready, as it seemed, to
give up everything to her lightest wish.

At the last moment the king fell ill, and was forced to re-
main behind. The two queens, my mistress and the queen-
mother, Marie de Medicis, accompanied the youthful princess as
far as Amiens.

There the queen-mother, overcome with grief at losing her
favorite child, fell sick in -her turn, and was unable to proceed.
Messengers were despatched to the King of England, craving
him to excuse the delay, the princess being unwilling to leave
her mother till she was somewhat restored to health. Mean-
while, we remained at Amiens, and I, for one, enjoyed the un-
looked-for respite for I knew not when or where I should see
Humphrey again. He had promised to return and claim me as
soon as it lay in his power; but the times were uncertain and
he was not his own master. A fortnight elapsed before Queen
Marie recovered sufficiently to permit of madame's departure.
We made the most of our time. The strict etiquette and for-
mality of the Louvre were relaxed, and we enjoyed all unwonted
liberty, of which we did not fail to take advantage. But all
good things must end, and at length the last evening arrived.
I was standing by a window in one of the galleries waiting for
my lover, who had craved me to meet him there and bid him
farewell, when a cloaked and hooded form approached me, and
would have passed me, but with a sudden movement I threw
myself in the way. It was the queen ; I had recognized her by
her walk.

" Madame," I exclaimed, obeying an irresistible impulse, and
disregarding the rules of etiquette that forbade me to address
her first, " whither go you ?"

" To meet Buckingham, and bid him farewell," she answered,
like one in a dream.

She had put my fear into words. I threw myself at her
feet.

688 THE STORY OF A DIAMOND ORNAMENT. [Aug.,

" Oh, mi regna \ " I cried, clinging to her skirts, and effect-
ually impeding her progress. " Be advised ! Consider what advan-
tage may be taken ! Remember who you are ! "

I had gone too far. She drew herself up to her full
height.

" Methinks it is you that forget," she answered, haughtily.
" Anne of Austria is not wont to be dictated to by her de-
pendents."

Then relenting suddenly, as she caught sight of my pale
and stricken face :

" Nay, Lola, take it not to heart. ' Twas unkindly said, and
I know thou meanest well. Thou foolish wench, dost thou think
I cannot guard my own dignity ? Come then and judge for
thyself. Twere better, perchance, after all. I can trust thee to
hold thy tongue. Take thy mantle and follow me."

I obeyed, and, wrapped in a long, dark cloak that effectually
screened me from observation, I followed my mistress into the
pleasance. She turned aside into a shaded path, at the end of
which I beheld two cavaliers awaiting us. By the beating of
my heart I knew that one of them was Humphrey, and that had
I stayed behind, I should have kept my tryst in vain.

The foremost of the two figures advanced, and uncovering
his head disclosed the bold, handsome features of the duke.

" Ah, madame," he ardently exclaimed, how can I thank
you !"

" Nay, my lord duke," the queen replied, " you make too
much of it. ' Tis a small favor to grant a friend to bid him
farewell."

" But here at this hour alone ! "

The queen grew red.

" Speak not thus," she exclaimed, " or you will make me
repent my condescension."

" ' Twas wrong," he answered, humbly. " I meant but to show
your majesty I was not ungrateful."

Appeased by his words, she made me a sign to draw
back a little. I obeyed, but kept within sight within hearing
even, if she chose to raise her voice. Presently I heard a hur-
ried step behind me, and a hand was laid on my arm.

" Sweetheart," came Humphrey's voice, in an agitated whisper,
" canst thou forgive me ? I had no choice."

" Nay," I answered, " if there is blame I must needs share
it too. It were scarce possible to do otherwise."

" If thou deemest thus, I am content. ' Twas hard to give

1892.] THE STORY OF A DIAMOND ORNAMENT. 689

up the hope of seeing thee. Faith hath been kinder than I
dared to look for."

He took my hand, and for a brief space I forgot all else
in the joy of his presence. Then suddenly a cry rang out a
cry of fear and anger.

"A moi! la reine /"

It was the queen's voice. I broke from Humphrey and hur-
ried forward to find my mistress flushed, trembling, with tears
of indignation in her eyes, and Buckingham standing at a little
distance, looking sullen and discomfited.

The gardens suddenly woke into life. Lights flashed hither
and thither, and several gentlemen appeared on the scene with
drawn swords. The queen by this time had regained some
measure of self-control, but her bosom still heaved with her re-
cent emotion.

" It is nought," she said, in answer to the eager inquiries
that beset her on every side. " I was affrighted, and cried out-
I came forth to take the air with my waiting woman, and in
the darkness I mistook my lord of Buckingham for I know not
what. I thank you, gentlemen, but I need not detain you;"

She inclined her head with a gesture of dismissal, and taking
my arm hurried away without looking to see what effect her
speech produced. But I, less pre-occupied, noticed not a few
meaning glances and covert smiles.

The queen never opened her lips till she regained her own
apartments ; then she threw herself into my arms and burst into
tears.

" He insulted me ! " she sobbed. " Me, a daughter of Spain !
Fool that I was to trust him ! Thou wert right, Dolores. I will
never forgive him ! "

I was silent, not daring to question her, yet wondering greatly
what could have chanced to move her to such passion. And
presently she dried her tears.

" I will not weep. 'Tis doing the insolent islander too much
honor. Tell no one, Dolores, what I have let fall."

And that night, at the farewell banquet, it seemed to me that
I had never seen her look more brilliant or more stately. The
duke on the contrary looked like a man who had received a re-
buff when he least expected it. His mortification was plainly
legible in his face.

The queen soon felt the effects of her imprudence. The re-
port of what had happened had flown like wildfire through the
court and had lost nothing in the telling. On her return to

690 THE STORY OF A DIAMOND ORNAMENT. [Aug.,

Paris her liberty was curtailed, and the restraints with which she
had always been surrounded increased. The king, who had never
loved her, was greatly incensed against her. Several of her at-
tendants were dismissed, and others, known to be inimical to her
interests, appointed in their stead. I, by some miracle, escaped
unnoticed, and in spite of my known devotion to her was per-
mitted to retain my post, one which brought me into constant
communication with her. She clung to me more than ever, as
to her only friend, and my heart ached for her in her loneliness
and humiliation.

One morning I was sent for to her presence and found her
walking up and down her chamber looking flushed and excited.

" Dolores," she said, " I need thy help." And, lowering her
voice, " Buckingham is here. I must see him."

I was silent for a moment, stricken dumb.

" Ah, madame ! " I exclaimed, when my speech returned to
me. " Have you not perilled enough on his account ? "

" Nay," eagerly, " 'tis but for an instant, to tell him that I
forgive him. Tis all he craves. He cannot live, he says, with-
out my pardon."

" Let him die then," was my first thought, for my heart was
hot within me. The queen was watching my face.

"Thou wouldst not have me drive him to desperation?"

" I would have your majesty consider your own safety before
his selfish gratification. The past hath shown he is over-apt to
forget it."

" Nay, there is no danger if thou wilt do as I wish. Tis
for the last time, Dolores. I would fain leave him with a kindly
remembrance. What, after all, is his crime but to care too much
for one who hath over few to love her ? "

I was moved, in spite of myself, by her pleading. It was
hard, truly, that she must stoop to entreat where she was born
to command, and the pity of it overcame my better judgment.

" What is your majesty's will ? " I asked.

" This is his plan : to come here disguised as his squire to
see thee once more. That thou favorest Master Castleton is well
known, and, even if the visit were discovered, suspicion would
be averted. Wilt thou lend thyself to this, Lola, for the sake
of thy friend thy queen?"

I yielded, for I could not do otherwise. I had ever been
like wax in her hands.

Evening came, and my seeming lover was ushered into my
presence. The attendant withdrew, but ere we had time to in-

1892.] THE STORY OF A DIAMOND ORNAMENT. 691

terchange a word the queen appeared. The duke stood by the
doorway not daring to advance, his eyes fixed on the ground,
his handsome face flushed with shame and anxiety. And as the
queen gazed on him her expression gradually softened.

" Buckingham !" she said, in a low, tremulous voice, and at
the sound the duke sprang forward and threw himself at her
feet.

" Ah, madame ! " he cried, " can you ever forgive me ? I
was mad. I knew not what I did. Yet a man might well be
pardoned for losing his wits before such dazzling beauty."

" Hush ! " she said, gently, " or I may not listen. Yes, I for-
give thee ; though 'twas ill done to take advantage of one so
friendless."

" Not friendless," he exclaimed, " while Buckingham lives ! "

" And what can you do for me ? Your very presence is a
source of danger."

He cast down his eyes. It was but too true.

" Madame," he said, after a pause, " will you not bestow on
me somewhat by which to remember you ? I need it not in-
deed for that, but 'twould be sweet to have a pledge of your
pardon."

She considered a moment, then quitted the room, and re-
turned presently, bearing in her hand the casket containing the
diamond ornament given her by the king.

" Wear this," she said, " in remembrance of Anne of Austria.
And now, farewell ! "

She extended her hand. He kissed it passionately, and with
one last, lingering look turned away. The door closed behind
him, and the queen, throwing herself into a chair, covered her
face with her hands.

" Madame," I said, " was this gift wise ? Tis certain to be
missed and traced."

" Thou art a fool, Dolores," she answered, impatiently.
" Wouldst thou have me bestow a common fairing like a vil-
lage maiden as a parting gift on the Duke of Buckingham ? 'Tis
a matter that concerns my pride."

I said no more, for indeed it was useless. The deed was
done. But my heart misgave me that we should hear of it
again. And I was right.

A few weeks later it began to be hinted about the court
that the Duke of Buckingham, during the festivities lately held
at Whitehall in honor of the royal marriage, had been seen to
wear a magnificent diamond shoulder knot, the very fac simile

692 ITHE STORY OF A DIAMOND ORNAMENT. [Aug.,

of the one lately worn by the queen at the Duchesse de Chev-
reuse's ball. It was some time before the report reached my
ears. I hastened at once to warn the queen, and found her
with an agitated visage, perusing a missive from the king.

" Read that, Dolores," she said.

It was a request say rather a command that she should
appear at a grand state banquet to be given the following week,
and wear the diamond ornament. I looked aghast. Refusal
meant discovery. What was to be done?

" It was thoughtless of him," quoth the queen, " to wear it in
public."

Thoughtless ! It was criminal imprudence the gratification
of his selfish vanity at her expense. But how to mend it ?

" Madame," I suggested, " what if we were to let the duke
know how the matter stands ? He might perhaps devise a
means "

" Of sending the jewel ? " she interrupted. " Thou art right,
Dolores, so that it arrive in time ! "

A trusty messenger was dispatched and bidden to hasten as
though on an errand of life and death. Then there was nothing
for it but to wait ; and what weary waiting that was, how filled
with anxiety, and hope deferred, methinks I shall ne'er forget.
The last day arrived, and the queen, sick with apprehension, was
preparing to feign a sudden illness as an excuse for her non-
attendance, when I was told that a gentleman craved instant
speech with me. I hastened forth, and in the ante-chamber,
splashed up to the eyes, weary, and travel-worn, beheld my
Humphrey.

" Thou ! " I exclaimed, and would have sprung towards him,
but he stepped backwards.

" I am not fit to touch thee, sweetheart, but I could not rest
till I had delivered this into thy safe-keeping."

And he placed in my hands the diamond ornament.

The relief was so great I could scarcely speak. Making him
a sign to wait, I hastened to tell the queen. In a few moments
I returned.

" Follow me, Humphrey," I exclaimed ; " her majesty would
thank thee herself."

"In this guise?" hanging back.

" Nay, what matters the guise ? 'Tis her deliverer she would
fain behold."

The queen's eyes were swimming with tears as she held out
her hand for him to kiss.

1892.] THE MYSTICAL ROSE. 693

" Master Castleton," she exclaimed, " I know not how to
thank you ! Is there no boon, no guerdon I can bestow .to
show my gratitude in some slight measure ? "

"There is, indeed, madame," he replied, "yet I scarce know
how to ask it."

" What if I have guessed it already ? " smiling. And, taking
my hand, " Have I thy leave, Lola ? "

But I, in my turn, hung back.

"Oh, madame!" I exclaimed, "how can I leave you!"

" Tis hard to part with thee," she replied ; " but it seems
'twould be well to give some color to this gentleman's journey;
and I would fain see thy happiness assured, my Lola, while it
is yet in my power."

So almost against my will the matter was settled. I had
small time for preparation. The next day the queen's chaplain
performed the ceremony. And a week later, with tears and
many forebodings, I parted from my queen. I received a kindly
welcome from the Queen Henriette on my first appearance at
court, and was given a post about her person. But on the
murder of the Duke of Buckingham, three years later, my hus-
band retired to live on his own estate, since which time I have
had little of note to relate. They say that the happiest nations
are those that have no history and so it is with me.

EDITH STAMFORTH.

London, England.

THE MYSTICAL ROSE.

SWEETEST mystery of the ages! Chalice of creative light!

Heart of fragrance of all blossoms! Type of universes bright!

Folded in and in with beauty Nature's lamp for virgin shrine ;

Breathing out and out pure, loving, incensed breath of the Di-
vine ;

All the days of God's creation count thee symbol of God's
grace ;

All the chanting of the Seraphim the roses bear through space.
VOL. LV. 45

694 THE MYSTICAL ROSE. [Aug.,

Through the spaces flecked with color roseate fires flash and
burn

(Beacon lights Christ-hearts of worship that in rapturous prais-
es yearn),

Fold on fold of petaled beauty, waves of sweetness rise and
fall,

Veiling in a sea of splendor one sweet Heart the heart of all.

Mystic Rose ! O Rose of Glory ! Rose of Life ! O Radiant Rose !

Winged angels veil their faces Silence ! None thy secret
knows.

Far below the ocean's crystal, where the voice of all is stilled,
Still as all, pale mystic roses ope their petals, music-thrilled ;
God-vibrations shape each folding till they rise above the sea,
Flowering forth among the meadows in a fair earth-mystery.
Neither man nor angel knoweth whence they come, nor whither

go;

Virgin-born they, God-transmuted, into silence silent flow.

Mystic Rose, the Virgin bore thee ! In her bosom, as a shrine
Thou wilt burn through eons of roses, Heart of Jesus, all-divine !
Linked to earth through rosary's garland, Aves, Aves stir thy

breath,

And each Ave upward winging, addeth rose to Virgin's wreath,
Till an ocean of love's roses bloometh at the Saviour's feet
Mighty censer of prayer-incense, offering of the Virgin sweet.

Bloom, O Rosary! Thread of patience, through fate's fingers

swiftly run ;

Each small bead doth hide a blossom mystic roses every one.
Smiles the Virgin o'er creation, she who formed the perfect

man ;
Rose of Life ! O Rose Immortal ! Crowning flower of God's pure

plan.

Aves! Aves! Lo, the fragrance-rising to the veiled throne!
This the mystery of the roses seed of love, and love alone.

MARIE LOYOLA LE BARON.

1892.] LATEST WORD OF SCIENCE ON VENOMOUS SNAKES. 695

THE LATEST WORD OF SCIENCE ON VENOMOUS

SNAKES.

THERE is no living creature which inspires man with such
horror and loathing as the snake. Even when we know that the
one which we meet belongs to an innocent species we shrink
from it. Having no legs, the snake glides along by means of
its ribs, which articulate with rudimentary transverse processes
of the vertebrae. As it is also without organs of mastication, it
swallows its prey (always a living animal) entire; and it is curi-
ous to see how it does it. A snake's mouth can open cross-
wise as well as vertically, and, what is more, each side of the
mouth has the power of working separately and independently.
Once in the reptile's jaws the prey cannot escape, owing to the
snake's teeth, which are arched backwards. One side of the
movable jaw is now thrust forward and the teeth of this side
are implanted further on ; then the other side of the jaw per-
forms the same movement, and slowly but surely the prey is
drawn in. And let us add that, owing to this peculiar structure of
its mouth, a snake can swallow an object bigger in size than itself.

The snake's sharp, recurved teeth are generally conical and
are immovably united to the maxillary bone, while in the venom-
ous species the poison fangs are covered by a fold of mucous
membrane, underneath which lie also several reserve poison teeth,
ready to take the place of the others when they are lost. The
poison glands are situated behind the eye, under the temporal
muscle, so as to be compressed by its contraction. They are
oval bodies, sometimes as big as an almond. The color and vis-
cosity of the virus differs very much in different snakes ; but it
may be generally described as a transparent, slightly viscid fluid
looking not unlike glycerine, and when dried it forms a substance
resembling gum-arabic. Although snake poison acts even on the
lowest forms of invertebrate life, its action is most powerful on
warm-blooded animals, and it may prove deadly to the cold-
blooded. It is incorrect to speak of the poison fangs as being
perforated; during its development the tooth folds on itself,
and it thus takes the form of a tube through which the poison
is hypodermically injected. But in some sea snakes and all sea
snakes are venomous the fang remains an open groove.

The snake which is the most highly specialized, and which

696 LATEST WORD OF SCIENCE ON VENOMOUS SNAKES. [Aug.,

stands at the head of the order Ophidia, is the rattlesnake (cro-
tolus). /This reptile is peculiar to America. Its tail ends in a
number of buttons, which form what is commonly called the
rattle, and the rattle serves the very useful purpose of warning
away its enemies. Here let us observe that at the end of the
tail of harmless snakes is a horny cap covering the terminal
vertebrae, and this is no doubt the first button, which in the
rattlesnake is developed into several buttons or joints.

The majority of innocent snakes when they are alarmed vio-
lently shake the end of their tail, and we are told by good au-
thorities that this frequent vibration induces a greater flow of
the nutritive fluid to this part of the body, which in the per-
fected rattlesnake [finally results in new grade-structure, in a re-
petition of the original button found in non-venomous snakes.

The rattlesnake sometimes grows to be eight feet long and is
of various colors. But the exact tint of a reptile is a matter of
little specific importance, as reptiles especially snakes are capa-
ble of a certain range of variation in colors, so as to harmonize
with their surroundings, and this renders them less conspicuous.
Thus, in a desert snakes will be of a sandy hue ; and Profes-
sor Cope, speaking of mimetic analogy, tells us that in Arizona
and New Mexico, where vegetation is very liable to produce
spines and thorns, the rattlesnake is provided with two thorn-
like growths on its head, and hence its name the horned rattle-
snake. In the Northern States of America this reptile is
sluggish and not very venomous ; but in the South it becomes
more dangerous, and the diamond-back variety (crotolus Adaman-
teus), which is mostly found in Florida, and grows to the length
of eight feet, is greatly dreaded. Its bite is often fatal.

The smallest rattlesnake is the crotolus Oregonus, found west
of the Rocky Mountains, and whose length does not exceed
fifteen inches. It is a mistake to suppose that the age of a rat-
tlesnake can be determined by the number of its rattles, for it
has been certainly known to gain more than one rattle in a year.
Rattlesnakes have been killed which had as many as twenty-one
rattles.

The moccasin snake, or water viper, of our Southern States
is even more dreaded than the rattlesnake by the negroes on
the rice plantations ; for it does not wait until it is irritated to
bite, but springs boldly at whatever comes toward it. The
moccasin is not properly a crotolus, the ra'ttles of the latter
being replaced in the moccasin by a horny point about half an
inch long.

1892.] LATEST WORD OF SCIENCE ON VENOMOUS SNAKES. 697

But if in the South and Southwest of the United States the
rattlesnake and moccasin may inflict fatal wounds, they do not
equal in deadliness four serpents of India, viz.: the cobra, the
ophiophagus elaps, the bungarus, and Russell's viper. The bite
of any one of these is certain death. Dr. J. Fayrer in his mon-
umental work, The Venomous Snakes of India, says : " I believe
that more than twenty thousand persons die annually in India
from snake-bite alone." Of the four snakes above mentioned
the cobra is by far the most numerous, and it may almost be
called a sociable, friendly reptile, so often is it found in houses,
on shelves, under pillows. It is not aggressive ; if you let it
alone it will let you alone. But if by chance you touch it, in
an instant its hood expands and, with a lightning dart, it gives
you your quietus. It may be laid down as a rule that the
larger the animal bitten (and this applies to all snake-bites), the
greater is the power of resistance. Thus, while a cobra can kill
a chicken in a few seconds, a full-grown, healthy man may live
an hour; although if fairly struck in a large vein, death may
follow in half an hour. The cobra's poison does not destroy the
coagulability of the blood, as does the poison of Russell's viper,
which produces perfect fluidity. But, like that of Russell's viper,
the cobra's poison may be kept many years and still retain all
its virulence. It is an interesting fact that a cobra can be
made to bite itself and be none the worse for it; nor will an-
other cobra suffer in the least when bitten by one of its own
kind. It sometimes grows to the length of six feet, and although
essentially a ground snake, it climbs well and swims well. But
while the cobra is so deadly, it is astonishing with what ease a
professional snake-catcher captures it. The snake-catcher grasps
the cobra's tail with his right hand and quickly lifts it off the
ground at arm's length. He then with his left hand places a
stick midway across the reptile's body. The cobra immediately
coils round the stick and at the same time tries to reach the
man. The latter now begins an oscillating motion with one
knee. This attracts the snake's attention, and he also seems to
exert an influence over it, for presently the cobra begins to
keep time and sways its head to and fro at the same rate as
the man's knee. In a couple of minutes the snake-catcher
lowers the cobra to the ground, draws it gently backwards
until its body is well stretched out, then suddenly pins it down
with the stick just behind the head. He now places his naked
foot on the tail, after which he firmly grasps the reptile back of
the head in the very spot where the stick had pinioned it.

698 LATEST WORD OF SCIENCE ON VENOMOUS SNAKES. [Aug.,

Thus caught, the cobra is powerless to do him any harm, and
now by giving its jaws a squeeze they are made to open, and
the poison fangs can be plainly seen. If any of the virus is
wanted for experiment, the snake may be excited to strike at a
leaf stretched across a mussel-shell, and the virus, like so much
syrup, is seen trickling out of the tube-like teeth. From a full-
grown cobra a half a drachm may be procured in this way, for
the snake-catcher knows how to make it strike again and again
at the leaf. Nothing can better show the deadliness of cobra
poison than the case of a native woman mentioned by Dr.
Fayrer. She was bitten on the finger while asleep, and of course
died ; but what is more, her infant, poisoned through her milk,
died two hours after it had taken the breast.

To many Hindoos the cobra is an object of veneration ; it is
to them the emblem of evil. When they discover one in the
house they are filled with awe, and, instead of killing it, they
feed it and shelter it, lest by doing otherwise they might bring
misfortune on their family. And if while the snake is thus ten-
derly treated it should bite and destroy anybody, it is merely
taken out into the fields and allowed to go its way.

Some writers maintain that death from cobra poison is due
to organic changes in the blood-cells. But Dr. Fayrer, than
whom there is no higher authority, says that death is caused by
the direct influence of the virus on the centres of nerve force.
The bite produces general paralysis, and death comes on with
frightful convulsions. The cobra is called a hooded snake because
when it is excited its neck spreads into an oval disc, which
gives the reptile a singularly horrible appearance.

The bungarus, like the cobra, is fond of entering houses and
hiding on shelves and bookcases. But while its bite is always
fatal, the poison is somewhat slower to act, and the victim has
a little more time to prepare for death. Dr. Fayrer knew a
lady who journeyed a whole night in her palanquin with a bun-
garus snugly coiled up under the pillow. Had she thrust her
hand under the pillow she would have been dead by sunrise.
Next to the cobra, this is the most destructive serpent in India.

Russell's viper (the Daboia) is an exceedingly beautiful snake,
but, while its bite is certain death, it is not near so plentiful as
the bungarus and cobra. It is also very sluggish, and shows
great reluctance to use its fangs. But no snake is more hardy,
and it can live a whole twelve-month without food or water.

The ophiophagus elaps (the Hamadryad) is a hooded snake
like the cobra, and its bite is equally fatal. But it is much

1892.] LATEST WORD OF SCIENCE ON VENOMOUS SNAKES. 699

longer than the cobra, bungarus, and Russell's viper, sometimes
growing to the length of fourteen feet. As its name implies, it
feeds on other snakes, but it is comparatively rare and is seldom
found in the vicinity of dwellings. In one respect the ophiopha-
gus is the most terrible snake known : it is so fierce and aggres-
sive that woe to him who ventures even within a moderate dis-
tance of it. Dr. Fayrer, quoting Dr. Cantor, tells of an ophio-
phagus which pursued a man with the rage of a tiger : " The
man fled with all speed, and terror added wings to his flight, till,
reaching a small river, he plunged in, hoping he had thus escaped
his enemy, but on reaching the opposite bank up reared the fu-
rious hamadryad ready to bury its fangs in his trembling body.
In utter despair, he bethought himself of his turban, and in a
moment dashed it on the serpent, which darted at it like light-
ning, and for some moments wreaked its vengeance in furious
bites, after which it returned quietly to its former haunts."

The salt-water snakes of India are extremely poisonous ; other
snakes and fish die from their bite in less than an hour, while
a man dies in about four hours. In some parts of the Bay of
Bengal they are most abundant, and sometimes grow to be five
feet long. Their fangs are smaller than the fangs of land snakes,
and they give such a gentle bite, seemingly little more than the
prick of a pin, that the person bitten can hardly believe he has
got his death wound. In the water they swim with rapidity,
for their tail is flat like the fin of a fish, but it is only in the
water that they are dangerous. When left on the shore by the
waves, they are helpless and blind, and in captivity soon die.

It is believed by ignorant people that the pig and the mon-
goose do not suffer when bitten by venomous snakes. The truth
is the mongoose is so very active that the most agile cobra can
do little more than scratch it ; while the pig is protected by its
fat. When fairly struck, however, near an artery, it has been
proved that the pig and the mongoose die as surely as other
animals.

In Africa and Australia the most deadly snakes are the vi-
pers, and let us add that the viper is more widely distributed
than any other snake. But in no part of the world is the mor-
tality from snake-bite so great as in India, where in 1887 re-
wards were paid for the killing of 562,221 venomous snakes,
while in the same year, according to government report, 19,740
human beings succumbed to snake-bites, and of these deaths
nine-tenths were due to the cobra.

WILLIAM SETON.

700 ARE WE WORTHY OF OUR INHERITANCE. [Aug.,

ARE WE WORTHY OF OUR INHERITANCE ?

" SEE the old man at the table ; what is he doing ?"

" I don't know ; is'nt he horrid ?"

I turned from the picture of " Louis XI. at Prayer," hang-
ing in the Metropolitan Museum, and glanced at the speakers.
Types of the people, and echoes of the remarks frequent in art-
galleries. An art critic once said that the Italian peasants, igno-
rant though they are, have more true culture than many rich
Americans. The full significance of the fact now dawned upon
me for the first time. Centuries of religious and artistic senti-
ment have touched the poorest class in Italy ; in America the
people have just awakened to the knowledge of such an ideal.
As the speakers passed, a quaint, sweet-faced old lady came in
view. She paused before the picture of a portly priest, a cari-
cature by Vibert. A shocked expression flitted over the gentle
face, her hand was quickly lifted, and the sign of the cross was
reverently made. Her criticism had been silently expressed.
No picture can be great that outrages truth, as no book deserves
approval that violates morality the corner-stone of all true
greatness. A crowd of school-girls next fluttered by ; one, a
much-bejewelled young woman of their number, saying she thought
" the old masters a horrid bore." People came and went ; but
the murmur of meaningless remarks continued until the guard
called : " All out ! "

It is time that we who are Catholics and Americans awoke
to the glory of our art inheritance. A pictorial wealth has been
'bequeathed to humanity; old churches abroad are adorned with
carvings that are the wonder of modern wood-workers ; the curio-
shops display, as their choicest treasures, metal-work and embroid-
eries that have been taken from old cathedrals. Let us learn the
beauty of our inheritance, and the value of our treasures. The
artist is a man not unlike the common run of humanity ; but he
has been trained to see the beauty lying all about this world of
ours, and his mission is to point it out to us. His riches are
not in money and stock, but in truth and beauty. Yet even
our art schools are filled with students who learn the letter, but
who miss the spirit of the law. Pupils who receive excellent
technical training, but who fail to realize that the artist in mu-
sic, in literature, as in painting should be the humble interpre-

1892.] ARE WE WORTHY OF OUR INHERITANCE. 701

ter of nature, who should " lead from nature up to nature's God."
Meanwhile, Catholics, who have had bequeathed to them the no-
blest art that this world has ever known, still more, the germ
and inspiration of all art, are ignorant of the grandeur of their
birth-right. Let us have a more universal knowledge of the un-
derlying principles of art, and therein will be a remedy for the
fatal eruption of painted plaques and dustpans that has spread
throughout the land.

A recent display of canvases, the result of a year's work in
a representative " ladies' college," was an exhibition of the grav-
est errors to be committed in the pictorial world. How does
the art work of our convent schools bear the comparison ? We
do not ask the standard to be commensurate ; we demand it
more exalted. Noblesse oblige.

Let no false art be taught, and from the germ of the true
great results will develop. No mere technical training of the
eyes and the fingers will suffice, although there is little more to
be acquired in even the best art schools. Thackeray says : " A
skillful hand is only a second artistical quality, worthless without
the first, which is a great heart." The severe and necessary
training for music, literature, or painting, must be subsequent to
a convent course of studies ; no more than a mere foundation
can be expected from " our graduates." That the pupils should
have sufficient impetus to continue their studies is what is de-
sirable.

Why are the Catholics not more fully represented in our art
schools ? Are they satisfied with superficialities ? Neither means
nor ability seem to be lacking. They ought to have the vital
spark of all true greatness, which is religious enthusiasm. Why
should it be that the voice of the Catholic is so seldom heard
in the management of our art schools ? Are we indifferent to
our best interests ?

From the earliest pre-historic rude carvings mankind has
stammered out his attempts in expressing his higher life. An
ideal has haunted him that he has ever failed to grasp. Like
the voice of St. John the Baptist, the mission of art through
the centuries has been to make straight the pathway of the
Lord. Shut out from the service of its ideal, of its religion, the
spirit of art wanders in sorrow, like Dante, the exile, to and fro
without the gates of Florence.

All sincere expression demands respect. The rudest Indian
carving is valuable. The simplest article may be artistic, while
the yards of canvas spoiled by young lady graduates are neither

702 ARE WE WORTHY OF OUR INHERITANCE. [Aug,,

desirable nor valuable. It is better to learn the difference be-
tween good and bad work, than to do the latter.

Art has ever been deeply devout. The Greeks believed,
therefore they sculptured. Gothic architecture materialized the
soaring faith of northern Europe. The Italian's religion was a
vital part of his existence ; painting in Italy sang a glorious " Te
Deum " from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, a period
characterized by the deepest religious ferver, and which encir-
cled the corporal existences of St. Francis of Assisi, St. Domi-
nic, St. Catherine, St. Bernardino, and other saints. Of distinctly
Christian art we find the germs in the catacombs, where re-
markable examples have been recently unearthed, and where the
art treasures of many tombs are still unknown. The Byzantine
school has left sufficient evidences to tell us of the hopes and
limitations of its time. In the tenth century we find a noble
Saxon priest, Bernward, tutor to Otho III., who later as bishop
of Hildesheim " tried to bring to greater perfection the arts of
painting, metal, and mosaic work." In the twelfth century we
meet with reproofs from St. Bernard to the monks for introduc-
ing hunting scenes into their " solemn pictures." We cannot
imagine a monastery of the early times lacking its " scriptorium "
and the faithful illuminators of the sacred page. With the dawn
of the fourteenth century the soul began to glimmer through
the stiff figures, and heralded the fullest awakening. The devel-
opment of architecture having preceded painting, the artists found
the cathedrals awaiting them.

Since the so-called Reformation, the ideal has fled from men's
minds, and they have seen but the real, the body without the
the spirit. Now, in the nineteenth century, we are upon the
dawn of a revival, in many respects resembling the opening of
the fourteenth. Ruskin says of the great schism in art : " On
the one side we find those versed in the knowledge of the
human form, intent on studying and imitating effects in color,
and in light and in shade, without any other aspiration than the
representation of beauty for its own sake, and the pleasure and
triumphs of difficulties overcome. On the other hand, we
find a race of painters, to whom the cultivation of art was a
sacred vocation, the representation of beauty as a means, not an
end." These two theories hold good to-day, but only a Christian
recognizes a vocation.

In the development of painting we see portraits and land-
scapes leading up to pictures that tell a story, which in turn
give place to historical and religious compositions. The highest

1892.] ARE WE WORTHY OF OUR INHERITANCE. 703

ideal expressed with the clearest execution is the greatest pic-
ture. Thus the crown of all art is in its source, the Uncreated
Author of all truth.

A noble nation produces unusual men, who in turn stamp
their individuality upon their generation. The most important
element of a race is its religious ideal ; and the expression of a
great people is in its highest form of art. The fullest knowledge
of truth engenders the noblest men, while the highest art of a
nation is its religious art. Hence, the men and women who are
civilizing humanity to-day are placing the foundation of Amer-
ica's future art.

The dawn is full of promise. Religion and art together are
seeking a home in this continent, and the people are giving both
a cordial welcome. Each year the exhibitions of artistic work
show improvement. The art schools are crowded with earnest
students, and we may hope the coming generation will not need
to send to Europe for pictures to adorn its churches. Al-
though most of the large American cities support art schools,
the art of the continent is focused in New York. Here, four
principal schools, each distinct in character, all aim at one ob-
jective. The oldest of these is the stately Academy of Design,
in the upper rooms of which are held the semi-annual exhibi-
tions. Long ago in this school were trained the youths who are
now the old academicians. An energetic band of students left
the academy some years ago to found the Art Student's League,
the members of which bear about the same relation to the older
school as does America to England. The League is considered
the leading school of this country, as most of the representative
artists have at some time been associated with it as students or
critics. It will always be a popular institution, as the manage-
ment lies directly within the hands of the pupils. Cooper Insti-
tute is a free school, which aims at making the students self-
supporting, although the same course of work is followed in all
the art schools of New York as is adopted in Paris. Finally,
there are the art schools of the Metropolitan Museum, conduct-
ed in the Museum Building in Central Park. These classes have
been more recently established than the others, and will, without
doubt, become the national school of America. The managers
of the Metropolitan Museum have charge of the school depart-
ment, united with the appointed critics or instructors. Commo-
dious rooms are to be devoted to the students within the new ad-
dition now in process of erection. Many advantages are offered
through the connection of the students with the gallery, especial

704 ARE WE WORTHY OF OUR INHERITANCE. [Aug.,

favors being granted them during the past winter by the kind-
ness of General di Cesnola.

Other institutions for the training of artist artisans are well
patronized in New York, as indeed all these schools are, for ap-
plicants have become numerous during the past few years. The
tuition fees vary from twenty-five dollars a year to the same
amount per month, according to the institution and depart-
ment to which a student gains admission. A careful training of
about two years in drawing in charcoal from plaster casts, be-
ginning with block hands and feet, and reaching to full-length
figures of ancient Grecian athletes, will usually gain an earnest
student admittance into the life-class, by which time he has
grown surprisingly humble. A few years of severe training have
taught him the distance between his limitations and his ambi-
tion. Entrance into the life-class seems a great advance,
but ere long the hopeful student learns that he has made
but his first step into the realm of art and that his future de-
pends greatly upon his capacity for hard work. He continues
drawing in black and white from models for a couple of years
more, when his critic may permit him to take up the palette.
Here comes in a special gift, for a sense of color and of form
are quite distinct. As the student, who now begins to call him-
self an artist, blushing as he does so at his presumption, gains
control over his fingers and his eyes, his ideality may come into
play, and he composes pictures ; in other words, he gives his
message to the world, if he sees the soul in things, or contents
himself with reproducing the mere appearances.

A mistaken notion is prevalent about the European art
schools being the best for all aspiring students. As a matter of
fact, the training of eyes and fingers during the earliest two or
three years of an artist's career, can be carried out with better
advantage in America. The instructors, who, by the way, come
twice a week to criticize, are more attentive to beginners in
New York than they are in Paris. The professors there have
neither time nor patience to devote to strugglers over block
hands. The advantages also here of a familiar tongue and climate
are not insignificant to students, who in most cases are board-
ing away from home. The benefits of European study are great-
est to advanced workers, who have acquired the necessary tech-
nique, and who consequently are more capable of profiting by
their opportunities. Americans, as a rule, are not aware of the
excellent work done in many local studios, possibly because the
advance has been so rapid during the past few years. The

1892.] ARE WE WORTHY OF OUR INHERITANCE. 705

spring and fall exhibitions evidence improvement year after year,
while the recent collection shown by the Society of American
Artists, the representative work of our country, displayed excel-
lent technique and execution, but lacked in ideality.

The art of a country reflects its national characteristics. In
Europe, France, Germany, and Holland, are now the centres of
art life. The English are an intensely practical people; their
expressions, therefore, lack the higher imaginative qualities. The
Salon mirrors the republic of France, vivacious, audacious, impul-
sive. German art is sincere, reverent, sympathetic. America but
hints of her possibilities. The brilliancy of the French school is
slowly giving way before the deep earnestness of the Munich
students. Our finest modern Catholic art comes from the Ger-
man studios. The religious art of America begins to take a
more hopeful stand, although we cannot insist too strongly that
the artist but reflects the man, and to have Christian art we
must first have Christian men.

In all collections we find canvases painted for various ends.
First, the " pot-boilers," which fulfil their object when they bring
the dollars into their owner's pockets. Then the triumph over
technical difficulties gains admission for many paintings into col-
lections. These become the text books of the profession, and
are sometimes falsely considered the acme of excellence. At the
exhibits are represented those artists who catch and fix upon
canvas a bit of God's joyous heaven and earth, and are called
the landscape painters. One of such, and the leader of his school,
was the simple-minded Corot, who knew and loved nature much
as Wordsworth did. Finally, we see the wondrous ideal and re-
ligious paintings in which an embodied poem starts into being
from the master touch and the noble heart.

The test of a picture, as well as of all literary or musical ex-
pression, is its elevating qualities. It is greatest when it gives
us highest life. The painting, the poem, the harmony, that speaks
to us in immortal tones, is the one that helps us bear our daily
burdens, and is the masterpiece.

What are the evils which menace our national art ? The most
formidable is the spirit of materialism, which threatens to strangle
all higher development. As the welfare of the individual is the
safety of society, so upon the peace and culture of the individual
men and women of the masses depend all future art expression.
The Columbian Reading Union is telling our Catholics what
literature they possess; we may depend upon that medium to
teach them their artistic inheritance. It is gratifying to note the

706 ARE WE WORTHY OF OUR INHERITANCE. [Aug.,

continual improvement perceptible in our Catholic illustrated
magazines, and the frequency with which they reproduce the
best Christian- paintings. In the general picture exhibitions in
America we may trace the modern materialistic tendency, where
the aim of art is lost in the technical part of the work, and in
literature where our novelists forget their message to humanity in
the skill of their delivery. We must avoid becoming clever me-
chanics whose fingers are wiser than their heads. Humility, alas !
is a virtue that is sadly out of fashion, but which is necessary to
make all truly great men, and thereby great artists. Let us
remedy the mistaken principles of art inculcated in nearly all
boarding schools, and be pitiless in our condemnation of all
wretched altar decoration. Statues that are beautiful in them-
selves are too frequently hidden beneath muslin veils and tinsel
crowns. Let us have natural, and therefore beautiful, field flow-
ers to replace the gauze and paper roses upon our altars. Sim-
plicity, truth, and beauty, are within the means of all.

The artist who translates into the visible God's world of
beauty has a glorious mission to fulfil. He is Nature's translator,
a worshiper of the Supreme Artist, who tints the clouds and
tapestries the trees. Great artists, as all noble men, must be
deeply reverent, exquisitely sympathetic. Remember that all no-
ble expression, be it through the medium of poem, sonata, or
painting, retains something of a human soul.

Thackeray among the novelists, and Browning among the poets,
had each a keen appreciation of art. The latter seems to lose
himself in the heart of Andrea del Sarto, " The faultless paint-
er," and rightly condemns the materialistic school of to-day.
He says :

" And indeed the arm is wrong
I hardly dare . . . yet, only you to see,
Give the chalk here quick, thus the line should go ;
Ay, but the soul ? he's Raphael's ; rub it out ! "

To understand nature we must study her, and love her vary-
ing moods. If the beauty of the clouds pass over us unnoted, if
the exquisite lace, like tracery of our winter trees, never win from
us a glance of admiration, how dare we expect to understand
the artist who reproduces them for our delight? Let us live
simpler, more earnest lives, winning heavenly joys from the con-
templation of nature on this fair earth, loaned to us for a little
time, and we shall be more capable of understanding the poet
and the painter when they deliver their message to the human
race. JOSEPHINE LEWIS.

Buffalo, N. Y.

1892.] 'THE WRATH OF MOTHER NATURE. 707

THE WRATH OF MOTHER NATURE.

A FAIRY TALE OF TO-DAY.

ONCE upon a time there lived a poet, gentle, brave, and
true. His lute, though oft it sang a merry strain, both sweet and
gay, had minor chords to speak his heart's complaint.

As is a poet's wont, he loitered through the woods, and
sang of Nature, building verses tuneful in her praise ; and, as
such poets often do, he builded better than he knew. He some-
times sang of Nature's grandeur in the ocean wild, the forests
old, in furious storms, in mountain passes, and in dark ravines.

In gentler mood he sang of Nature hand in hand with hon-
est toil ; of plowman homeward plodding, of lowing kine, of
harvest days, and rural ways, of winter nights beside the blaz-
ing hearth, of haying time and Maying time, and many other
themes that fit without demur to graceful rhyme and measure.

But most he loved to sing of Nature hand in hand with
faith : of holy joys, of village bells that called to prayer, of An-
gelus said in the field, of fair procession, priest and people mov-
ing slow through flowering vale and grove, beneath the listening
sky. He sang of way-side shrines, of pious peasants praying
while they plowed.

He told of all the ways that rural folk employ to gain the
dews of heaven : the blessing of the barn, the benediction
poured with holy water on the pasture and the well, the sheep-
fold and the hives.

He loved to fit his verses to those prayers that Mother
Church has planned for asking special favors on the flax and on
the wine, on the orchard and the vine, on the meadow and the
kine.

One day, and 'twas not long ago, the poet, on a summer
morn, was strolling near a lake whose limpid ways like netted
sunbeams ceaseless played. A morn for brightest fancies, pure
and calm. But rudely were his thoughts undone. He heard a
thunderous murmuring from a cliff o'erhead. He looked and
saw a woman's mantled form ! She beckoned him with gesture
queenly, and he followed, while the muffled, distant thunder now
he knew was only her deep sighing. She turned her eyes full
on him. They lurid burned with rage and grief. She spoke,
and hardly any music sounded in her voice, she was so wrath.

708 THE WRATH OF MOTHER NATURE. [Aug.,

"Their impudence I've borne full long," she said; "I'll bear it
now no longer."

He could not speak for wondering.

" Their only fondness is for money, and they've no fondness
left for me. 'Tis factories and mines, and cash accounts they
care for nothing else. They only seek my haunts to find some
market value for their pains. For nothing now is beautiful un-
less it is for sale. The sunrise on the mountain, the star-light
on the sea, the verdure rich of hill or dale have charms no
more, except in trade to summer tourist."

" If thou art Mother Nature," the poet said, " thou knowest
well that I, at least, have loved thee."

" Yes, poet-heart. Thou lovest what other men despise. See,
now ! The sun is just about to lift his forehead from behind
the far horizon. This is the hour when I am fairest."

And though her eyes were wet with tears she turned a face
all smiling toward the sun. That sparkling smile ! The poet
knelt and gazed with rapture on its radiance. The fields around
grew fairer still. A thousand melodies from twittering birds
arose. The dew, like globes of colored light, seemed turning
round and round in every blade of grass.

"Am I not fairest now?" said Nature. "And yet a hun-
dred thousand sleepers lie in sluggish slumber. They have not
known the morning. E'en were they now to wake and venture
forth they scarce could see me so dull their eyes from dissi-
pated hours of yester night. For when I tell them to lie down
and let my slumber, curtain soft of soothing blackness, close
their eyelids drowsily, they laugh me then to scorn. They kill
the mercy of the blessed darkness with manufactured Hghts ;
and when my light of day-time has arrived they know it not.

Most carefully I weave that web of velvet gloom, with
threads of happy dreams and floss of ebon shadows full of
balm for weary eye and brain. But when at eve I gently let it
down, they tear it with their garish lights and noise, and horrid
ways of midnight toil or revelry. 'Tis thus they treat my every
tenderness, repulsing rude my fondest cares. Well I will let
them have their way. They have refused me homage due. I
ne'er again shall ask it."

She ceased. The poet, asked, with apprehensions sad :
"What is thy meaning?"

" I mean," she said, and wrathfully the lightnings darted from
her glance " I mean that men no more shall cast their insults
in my face. My veil of night they shall not tear again ; nor

1892.] THE WRATH OF MOTHER NATURE. 709

shall my dewy dawn come up unheeded. I shall beseech the
sun to burn away all vestige of the greenness I had spread to
please their sight. The clouds I shall withdraw. I shall com-
mand the birds, the flowers, the aromatic spices of the woods
and fields to die forever. Arid I upon some desert waste I
shall lie down. The white, dry sand will cover me. I'll wither
there and mingle with the dust, and be no more."

" Oh, mother ! queen ! my first love and my best, unsay thy
words. If thou diest, I too must pine away and die ; I could
not, would not live without thee. Bear with the world a little
while. Perhaps some better days will come, when men, repent-
ing their ingratitude, will turn to thee again with love and fealty."

" It cannot be ! " she said. " Yet am I loath to leave thee,
or to bring thee unto death. Thee I would spare but only
thee."

" Thou canst not spare me if thou sparest not thyself," the
the poet cried. " My heartstrings each must snap asunder if I
see thee die."

" Must I then live for thee ? " she queried, pensively. " Shall
we two go in search of other sphere more true than this? So
shall it be. But I will leave this world a withered stretch,
without one charm of all those charms they have despised. Nor
will I brook their patronizing ways their chaining me a petted
plaything in their city parks or summer haunts. Their patron-
age is more insulting than their scorn. I'll have no more of it.
No blade of grass shall grow among their bricks ; no caged
bird shall sing; no flower shall bloom beneath their smoke-stain-
ed sky. And, as for you and me, a summer storm shall come
now at my beck, and on its wings we'll float away. We'll pass
the barren moon. Once it was lush and green, like this same
earth, and like this earth it recreant proved. ' Tis doomed to
everlasting dryness. And barren like its moon shall this same
earth become. Let us depart."

She raised her arm to beckon to the storm. The poet
sought to stay her ; 'twas too late. Swift came the sudden wind,
and, in a chariot cloud, upbore the poet and his angry queen.

They travelled o'er a city where a maiden dwelt the poet
loved.

"Give me," he t said to Nature, "of thy bounty just one
flower, that I might write my name and drop it down to her
who should have been my bride."

A blue forget-me-not she handed him, and when she saw a
look of anguish cross his face the while he wrote, she said:
VOL. LV. 46

710 THE WRATH OF MOTHER NATURE. [Aug.,

" Thou grievest for thy other love. Thou couldst not bear
to part. Go tell her come. I will await you in a valley toward
the south. And do thou hasten thither with thy bride."

He, kneeling, thanked her fervently.

Ere long he reached his lady love. " Oh ! come with me !"
he said; " I bring you kindly word from Mother Nature. She
bids us hasten hence and live with her in fields delightful, and
in beauteous groves, where bird and beast shall willing service
lend. And we will joyous dwell beneath our own fair vine and
fig-tree, in a land of milk and honey. On grassy hillsides shall
our children play and gather flowers from the heath ; and
pluck the crimson berry and the grape, to drink unharmed of
Nature's wines. At night-fall they will come to kneel with us,
and thank the God of Nature and our God for all his generous
gifts. No need to dread the sirens false that woo men here
the gambling den, the drunken bout, the play lascivious, and the
sensual dance. Nor need we fear dire poverty, nor see in future
years our children's children housed in loathsome tenements like
those we know. But, clean in body, heart, and mind, they'll live
in that clean country of our choice, and dying go unto that
country fairer still that waits the blessed dead. Come, dearest
love. Make preparation brief, and let us go."

She gave him scornful answer :

" I am not pleased with such foolhardy plans. I will not go.
What charm have lonely fields for me ? I much prefer the mad-
ding crowd, and gay delights of fashion. I long for diamonds
rare, and dwelling fine, and sumptuous wealth, so that my neigh-
bors shall repine with envy at my greater pomp than theirs."

In vain he told of better joys that waited them afar. She
would not hear. She mocked him heartlessly. "You'd have me
wed a country clown ! " she said. " A target for the jest of all
the town ! 'Tis wondrous kind to wish me such derision."

Of no avail his pleading. She drove him from her, and she
laughed at how absurd his craze had made him.

Heartsore, he turned him southward, journeying toward the
valley. Soon he saw the verdure withering. Terrific clouds of
dust went whirling by. Birds and cattle, trees and vines were
perishing as though from long protracted drought. He saw the
farmers sad and worried, and from his heart he pitied them.
And when a farmer's daughter gave him from their scanty store
a cooling drink, he firm resolved to use his best entreaty, asking
Mother Nature to relent, and spare, at least, these toiling sons
of earth.

1892.] THE WRATH OF MOTHER NATURE. 711

This he did, and Nature listened smiling. For Nature hath
a kindly heart, and is not angry long. "Yes, I've been wonder-
ing," thus she spoke, " if room enough might yet be found upon
this globe for those who love me, and for those who scorn."
The poet seized her thought.

"We'll build a wondrous Eden here, a kingdom favored, and
exempt from that dread curse thou hast pronounced on those who
love thee not."

She gave assent.

" Permit me then," he said, " to roam again, and spread the
tidings everywhere, and guide those here whom thou wouldst
spare."

" But see thou keep the secret of my curse," she warning
said. " Reveal to none the fate that hangs o'er them who heed
thee not."

He went as bard, and sang as he had never sung before of
Nature fond, and wise, and beautiful ! He told of how en-
trancing fair she smiles, when in the morning she bedecks her-
self with silver veil of mist, and fixes here and there a star to
glimmer pale amid her diadem of sunrise clouds resplendent. And
how her girdle, like a censer, breathes aroma, incense sweet, of
flowers from field and forest, and from far morass, a perfume
not exhaled at any other hour. And how her robe of atmos-
pheric blue, diaphanous and fine, is tinted soft with hues auroral ;
and her slippers grassy green are spangled bright with dew.
He told of prizes that she offers those who cultivate with care
the seeds she sows, and, filial, heed the lessons she bestows.
Such prizes excellent of health, content, long life, and plenteous
freedom !

His lyre quivered with the yearning of his touch. He felt
wild thrillings of delight at thought of how each heart would
quick respond with winged desire to meet the mother fond who
called them to her kingdom.

And was it so ? Did Nature's children rise and follow Na-
ture's poet ?

Ah ! bitter was the answer to his plea ! They laughed, they
sneered ; they taunted him, and jeered.

The rich were wedded to their greed. The poor were wedded
to their love of drink. The middle class were wedded to the
dry-dust of conventionalities. The scribes and pedagogues were
prisoned fast, and chained to musty books that scarce contained
one leaf from Nature. The poet's voice they could not under-
stand.

712 THE WRATH OF MOTHER NATURE. [Aug.,

But when at length he left the cities, and betook himself un-
to the farms, he found the rural folk had listened to his songs,
and traveled to that southland valley whence they heard his
joy-notes sound in echo.

They had assembled there, and waited his return.

Glad Nature gave him welcome when he came, and then she
sat upon her summer throne and spoke unto her people.

" You have come here," she said, " far from the city's snares.
You have believed my poet and my prophet, so now 'tis meet
that I should tell you my designs. I have withdrawn all fresh-
ness from those men who scorn me. Tormented by privation of
those gifts they did not value, they will strive to leave their
haunts unblessed and seek an entrance here. I bid you, there-
fore, swiftly build a formidable hedge to keep them out. 'Twixt
them and us must no communication be. Indignities they've
heaped too oft on you and me. Permit them ne'er again."

Her subjects willing set to work to build that wall. The
poet too worked lustily. He called a griffin to his aid, and
put him sentinel. The griffin's name was Manual Labor.

" There's hardly anything they dread so much as Manual
Labor. So stay you here, good griffin mine, and keep them off.
Scarce any man, in many scores, would dare to brave your hor-
rid front."

A dreadful dragon next he found, and put him too on
guard. Simplicity his name, or sometimes called Unfashionable
Dress.

" There's scarce one woman in the world could pass this
monster grim. He'll prove a guard unequalled, to prevent all
vain and silly dames from entering here."

A hydra-headed sentry next was placed beside the gate of
grain. His name was Agriculture, a power shunned by craven
men in every generation more and more. Economy his largest
head ; and other heads were Temperance, Self-Reliance, Love of
Home. A very hideous hydra.

The eager workers made their hedge to bristle with a thous-
and horrid things, like spades, and hoes, and plows, and rakes.
Some living pests were added too, some reptiles and some
horned cows, and even bears, and foxes numerous, and hares, and
squawking ducks, and croaking frogs, and tree-toads musical.

" Twill take the bravest of the brave," they said, " to pass
our rampart now."

The wall was soon complete. Within, the kingdom grew and
flourished. So, when the harvest moon arose, it shone upon a
gladder scene than e'er before. The harvesters were full of

1892.] THE WRATH OF MOTHER NATURE. 713

mirth and prosperous content. They had not lent themselves as
prey unto those hungry sharks who ceaselessly devour the
country's produce nothing offering in return.

A year or so had passed. The poet said to Nature : " If
thou command me I will go unto the cities once again to see
how they are faring."

She granted this ungrudgingly.

From out the land of bloom unto the barren land he went
with many anxious fears of all the misery he must see.

" What tears, what cries of agony must rend the air of those
distressful cities." Thus he sighed. But when he reached them,
what amaze ! For stranger sights were there than those he
dreamed of.

He did not tarry long. But seven days had passed, when
those who waited his return beheld him homeward bound.

" Oh ! tell us what thou'st seen and heard," they eager cried.
" Have any lived ? Or have they all succumbed ? And if some
live, are any there not crazed with woe ? "

And Nature too gave curious attention.

" Thy curse, O Nature ! " he began, " has fallen on them
heavily ; and yet not heavily ! They mind it not."

" They mind it not ? " she cried. " What canst thou mean ?
Their sky is like a brazen bowl. They have no night, nor morn,
nor eve ; no clouds in scattered flecks, nor fleecy banks ; no
dawn delicious, and no twilight hour."

" 'Tis true," he said, " and yet it hurts them not. For they
had never gazed upon the sky. They did not know it once was
blue ! How should they pine for things they hardly knew ? "

"They do not miss the stars, nor moon, nor milky way.
Their city lamps had made them long ago forget there was a
starry dome o'erhead. Nor is there one regrets the pearl and
azure glories of the dawn ; nor e'en the gold and silver gleam-
ings of the west, the purple, green, and crimson folds that once
wreathed their setting sun."

And as he spoke he upward glanced, and every face in that
vast multitude looked upward too, and every eye a mirror was
reflecting lovingly the opal splendors of their sunset sky.

"Thank God!" he said. And every heart was lifted rever-
ently.

"They've not one flower, nor tree, nor bird, nor drop of
dew."

"What do they drink?" the farmer's daughter asked.

" Oh ! they've no lack of drink," he said. " Refreshments

THE WRATH OF MOTHER NATURE. [Aug.,

artificial, beer and whiskey, gin and rum, all made from chem-
icals."

" Have they no milk? " a rosy milk-maid asked. " Are all the
cattle dead ? "

The poet answered, with a bitter laugh: "All dead, save one;
and that's a calf a golden calf they passionately worship.
With breweries on every hand, what need have they for milk?
With manufactured foods they nothing care for Nature's gifts ;
nor pine they for her beauty. They have their imitation wares,
their games, their museums cheap, their actors and their clowns,
their papered walls, their gaslit halls what can they wish for
more ? They fretted for a time, indeed, because there was no
birds to slaughter and be stuffed for women's bonnets."

Just then a humming-bird came close, and hovered, like a
winged gem, above a fragrant rose. The poet held his breath,
and all were silent, watching speechlessly the irridescence of its
twinkling wings, until, its visit done, it flew away.

" To think," he said, " of hearts so black, they joy to murder
gentlest things like those ; and for no higher purpose than to
pin its feathers to the cap of vanity."

" Now tell us of the very poor, " a country doctor said.
" Their health, methinks, must dreadful be."

" No worse than 'twas before. They have no sky, no air,
no cleanly food, no perfume, and no joy, and ne'er a sight of
beauteous lands, nor seas, nor woods, nor mountain streams, nor
dells."

And here his voice grew full of tears, for to his poet soul it
seemed that death were better far than such a life.

" Why didst thou not take pity, then, and guide them here,
where there is sky, and air, and cleanly food, and perfume plen-
tiful, and joy to spare, and many a leisure hour in which to
view the seas, the lakes, the dells, and worship God in thankful-
ness ? " Thus queried the sharp and kindly doctor.

" Because they could not if they would ; nor would they, if
they could. That is the worst of poverty unnatural ! It makes
them sordid like the rich, and hopelessly content. They do not
voice a bitter cry. They have forgotten how to sigh. They
nothing know of wishes high. They can not even long to die.
When curfew sounds our poorest poor go plodding home to rest ;
the city's poor are sweating o'er their tasks. What time have
they to think, or hope, or yearn, or even pray ? "

Sweet and faint and far the Angelus was ringing.

" The angel of the Lord to Mary spoke."

1892.] THE WRATH OF MOTHER NATURE. 715

Each head was bowed, and while the air was tremulous with
chiming notes, and glowed the sunset like a golden shell, they
said the prayer ; and gave unwonted thanks, and pitying prayed
for all the city poor who have not time to pray.

Then turned they homeward.

But Nature called again unto the bard :

" I'd speak with thee apart," and angry flashed her eyes as on
that summer morning in the past. "Thou lovest me not," she
said (he trembled at the word), " unless thou'rt willing to avenge
my wrongs."

" Speak but thy wish," he cried ; " my nights, my days, shall
consecrated be to do thy will."

" If, then, thou'dst give me sweet revenge, this be thy task :
to strike the rich by calling forth the poor. For what incenseth
me the most is that they seem content, those toiling slaves.
'Tis this enrageth me. That they've been robbed of bread is
not so ill as that they've e'en been robbed of power to wish
for beauty or for joy, in this world or the next. 'Tis thine the
task to make them wish. 'Tis thou canst free them from their
tyrant kings and masters. My fallow fields are beckoning them ;
my over-arching sky so vast ; my lake-sides fertile, and my thou-
sand acres, all untilled, await their plows. 'Tis thou canst tell
it coaxingly. And so, with all the sweet persuadings of thy lute,
go singing on and on. Nor must thou grow disheartened, for
truly do I tell thee that the day will dawn, when, hearing thee,
those toilers shall come forth to taste with thee the joys thou
quaffest daily. Ah ! what a greeting shall be theirs ; and, as
for thee, a glory will be thine that ne'er can die. For well we
know that he who leads his kind to love me, leads them nearer
heaven ; and he who gives to Nature praise, gives praise to Na-
ture's God.

Beneath the myriad stars he dreaming lay, his canopy, the
boundless sky. And in prophetic visions bright he sees her
words come true. He sees a countless throng awaken at his
song and hasten forth to seek for liberty in Nature's kingdom.
Behind them, wailing loud, they leave the coward few (their
whilom lords), who dare not brave the terrors of the wall.

Then he, her poet-knight, exulting, shares with Nature all
her joy, when greeting fond the newly-come, her gladsome love
forgets the past, and, listening to the wails of those without, her
wrath maternal is appeased at last.

M. T. ELDER.

New Orleans, La,

716 A CATHOLIC VIEW OF SHAKSPERE. . [Aug.,

A CATHOLIC VIEW OF SHAKSPERE.

A PLEASING sign of the health of our times is the fact that
the proof-reader of history is abroad. The steam engine, elec-
tric wire, and the printing press, have brought the ends of the
earth together, and have put all of its nations into one great
city through which facts and ideas fly from man to man upon
wings as swift as thought. Rome when she was the city of the
Caesars was less easily patrolled by the guardians of her peace
than is now the great spread of the globe by our companion
truth-seekers. The shadows of old errors slip away as the news-
gatherer, attended by the click of the electro-magnet, goes to
and fro upon land and sea. He does his work well, and smiles
at the futile opposition of oppression and falsehood.

It is pleasant to see that amongst the errors which have
fallen into a fair way towards correction is one which has
affected an important part of our English literature.

Perhaps nothing affecting literature has of late years excited
more discussion than the so-called mystery of the life of William
Shakspere, the greatest of dramatists, as well as of English poets.
It grew to be acknowledged that his leaving no record of his
private life was strong presumptive evidence against his fair
fame. Not a few have been led to doubt his authorship of the
plays attributed to his pen, and to charge him with shameful
duplicity and an infamous literary fraud. This impression is
now being fast dispelled by the recognition of one most impor-
tant factor in the lives of men of his time, their Catholicity.
The world is beginning to see that there is a reason for the
meagre-recorded details of Shakspere's life in the possibility of
his having been of the proscribed religion. During his time, and
ever since, until a period within the lives of men who are not
now old, it was a dangerous, if not a fatal, thing for one living
under English law to admit, or for his friends to do so for him,
that he followed the religion which acknowledged the Bishop of
Rome. Most of the best-known memoirs of the poet ignore his
religion, leaving it to be presumed that he followed the fashion-
able order in such affairs. The possibility of his having been a
Catholic has, however, occasionally suggested itself to some fear-
ful minds. Mr. Colley Cibber re-wrote " King John," and called
his work " Papal Tyranny," because Shakspere's play was not

1892.] A CATHOLIC VIEW OF SHAKSPERE. 717

sufficiently anti-popish, and in the preface to his play this self-
complacent critic broadly intimates his fear that Avon's bard
was a " papist." Some writers have suppressed without com-
ment the brief record of Shakspere's having received the rites of
the Church at his death, and others have attempted even to en-
courage a belief that that must be forgery.

But the subject is one which forces itself upon the attention
of every sincere Shaksperean student, and I have been greatly
pleased to find that it begins to receive fair treatment. In the
first (January, 1892) number of a new American magazine, the
Beacon Light, published in Boston, the religious faith of Shaks-
pere forms the motive for a very interesting and fair-minded
article by Mr. Beverley E. Warner. The writer makes the ad-
mission, without reserve, that the poet's parents and immediate
ancestors were Catholic, and that it was most likely that he
himself had been educated under Catholic direction. In this
admission he was long ago preceded by that best of Shaks-
perean scholars, James O. Halliwell-Phillipps.

Mr. Warner, near the close of his article, uses these words :
" But, after all is said that can be said, there can be no reasona-
ble doubt that William Shakspere held the true Catholic faith
in a truly Catholic way." He then goes on to limit somewhat
the meaning of his words, but the statement is a pretty state-
ment as it stands. I wish all who have written of the poet and
his work, from the seventeenth century Archdeacon Davies, of
Sapperton, who tells us that Shakspere " dyed a papiste," down
to the nineteenth century writers who would make him party to
the most impudent and unnecessary literary trick, had bestowed
as much charity upon the memory of " gentle Will Shakspere."

It may be truly said that up to the present time no evidence
has been found of Shakspere's Catholicity beyond past inference,
such as may be drawn from the tone of his writings, the circum-
stances of his life, and the admitted fact that his father was a
stubborn recusant up to the poet's twenty-eighth year. We may
well believe that from some "old religious uncle," who had been
unhoused by the confiscations under Henry VIII., he received
the education which gave him to know all qualities with a learned
spirit of human dealing. We may, in fancy, follow him and
Anne Hathaway to the cell of some proscribed Catholic friar
hidden in the recesses of Arden forest and breathe a fervent
Amen to the Church's blessing on their union.

We may stand beside the sturdy boy in Squire Lucy's hall,
and hear an unjust sentence passed upon him, not so much

;i8 A CATHOLIC VIEW OF SHAKSPERE. [Aug.,

because of stolen deer, as because he is vehemently suspected of
conveying and sheltering hunted priests. We may follow him to
London, to the house of his cousin, Lawyer Arden Waferer,
when the inquisitorial committee from the Privy Council goes
to Charlecote House to examine and commit to jail all persons
who have relation to Edward Arden and John Somerville. We
may imagine him there meeting one Henry Garnett, a former
proof-reader for Richard Tottel, and comrade of Richard Field,
Shakspere's first printer, who is a distinguished Jesuit and is to
be a martyr. We may think that the attraction which drew him
into friendship with Ben Jonson was formed in Jonson's prison
conversion to the Catholic Church. We may see him join the
throng about " the new gallows by the theatre," when Father
Hartley suffered, to dip his napkin in his sacred blood. We
may imagine him giving letter's for his family to Father Green-
way when the latter is about to go down to Father Garnett at
Hendlip House. All these are conclusions which do not lack
strong enough inference to support them, but we want some-
thing more ; nor it is difficult to point out how and where that
something may be found.

In all investigations of the story of Shakspere's life, the
sources of information open to general scrutiny, such as public
depositories of wills or deeds, and such papers of private record
as the owners chose to give out for print, have been pretty
thoroughly overhauled. A jealousy due on the part of the
State to political causes, and on the part of family to interest
and self-protection, prevented free access to all records. In both
cases that restriction is now removed. There exist in England
thousands of documents, both in public and private custody,
which have not been examined for two or three centuries. Oc-
casionally we hear of one being opened, and of a wonderful
light thrown upon some question of historical importance. This
is particularly true of the records and correspondence of old
Catholic families. Compelled as they were by the penal-laws to
practice their religion in the utmost secrecy, all communications
concerning that religion were of the most guarded kind, and
when it was proper that they should be preserved amongst the
family muniments, the greatest care was taken that they should
not be seen by any but the trustiest eyes. Only within the
second quarter of the present century did these cautions cease,
and now from their unsuspected hiding places priceless treasures
of historical truth are daily coming forth to the eyes and ears of
the world.

1892.] A CATHOLIC VIEW OF SHAKSPERE. 719

The establishment of the English Historical Commission has
brought into one safe place, open to the inspection of the peo-
ple at large, a vast heap of very important manuscripts affecting
England and her neighbors. Amongst these papers students have
found abundance of material for the correction of false statements
which have wandered about the wide earth as history for the
past three hundred years or more. The opening of the Public
Record Office has caused many a serious and important change
of regard for men and manners of the past, and every day the
good work goes on.

A short time before his death that amiable and most learned
Shaksperean scholar, Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps, sent out from his
study at Hollingbury Copse, near Brighton, England, a little pri-
vately printed pamphlet in which he adjured Shakspereans not
to neglect the field of research which the Record Office had
opened. He lamented his own inability, on account of his age
and infirmity, to carry on the search amongst the mass of papers
there remaining yet unexamined. He took pains too to say
that it must not be imagined that he had found out all about
Shakspere that could be found out, and declared that the Record
Office contained material as yet unnoticed which would occupy
the attention of one hundred men working ten hours a day for
one hundred years. I have myself been able from a short per-
sonal survey of the papers in the Record Office to verify not
only the truth of these statements, but to convince myself that,
from the manuscripts already examined and indexed from the
calendars of the Historical Commission, a valuable fund of in-
formation affecting the life of Shakspere will be yielded up to a
study of his time and works from a Catholic point of view.
With but the limited time of a summer vacation at my disposal
I spent some days in reading and copying a few of the original
papers affecting the case of Edward Arden of Parkhall in War-
wickshire. He was the acknowledged head of the family to
which Mary Arden, Shakspere's mother, belonged. He was ar-
rested at his home in November, 1583, and, with his wife and
household, sent up to London. The charge against him was
the usual one of imagining the queen's death. The real cause
of his trouble was the desire of the Earl of Leicester to be rid of
an object of envy and dislike. Mr. Arden had for a son-in-law
John Somerville of Edston, a country place near Stratford-upon-
Avon. This young man, who was commonly said to be a suffer-
er from mid-summer madness, had been overheard to use some
violent language about Queen Elizabeth. Both families, and one

A CATHOLIC VIEW OF SHAKSPERE. [Aug.,

who was called the family priest, were arrested and speedily con-
demned to death Arden, his wife, Somerville and his wife, and
the priest. Somerville died in prison not without suspicion of
foul play and Arden was hung at Tyburn, where upon the ladder
he proclaimed that his only crime had been fidelity to the Cath-
olic faith of his fathers. There is strong reason to believe that
young Will Shakspere was included in the proceedings which
attended the harrying of the Arden kindred. A kind of Star
Chambers Court was held at Charlecote House by Sir Thomas
Lucy and Thomas Wylkes, and every person who bore any re-
lationship to the Ardens or the Somervilles was arrested and
haled before it, in most cases to be sent off to jail in London.
The deer-stealing story is, plainly, a subterfuge invented by Shaks-
pere's friends and companions to gloss over some more deeply
struck wrong, a wrong so bitter to the soul of the gentle poet
that its doer is the only person of his knowing who wears
the brand of his awful ridicule. There was more than a mere
neighborly association between the Shaksperes and the Somer-
villes, at this time. One John Somerville, probably the father
of him who died so tragically in 1583, was witness, in 1560,
to a lease of the farm upon which Shakspere's grandfather then
lived. As late as 1818 we have been told by an illustrious sur-
vivor of the Somerville family, Sir James Bland-Burges, that it
was a tradition handed down to him that there existed the
closest intimacy between the poet and his ancestor, Somer-
ville of Edston. This ancestor must have been William, only
brother of the hapless John, and who, it seems, succeeded to
his estates. In a list of those of Mrs. Somerville's household
who were brought up with her to London in November, 1583,
is the name of one who is called " William Thacker " in the
printed index, but whose name on the original paper may have
been written "William Chaxber."

Out of the attempt to sequestrate the Arden estates to the
crown grew a long litigation, by which Robert, the heir, finally
succeeded in saving two farms from the effect of the attainder
of his father's blood. An examination of the entries made and
the papers filed in the course of this legal struggle has never,
so far as I can discover, been made. The industry of Shaks-
perean scholars has been rewarded by much valuable information
from the examination of legal papers in such suits as bore the
name of any of the poet's immediate family, but any moment
may bring to light from some dusty record-box an affidavit in
the case of some one of his friends, written or at least signed

1892.] A CATHOLIC VIEW OF SHAKSPERE. 721

by William Shakspere. When it is remembered that his fellow-
players were engaged in litigation with each other for an appor-
tioning of shares in the two theatres of the Globe and Black-
friars in the year 1634, it is not impossible that the manuscripts
of some of his plays may lie hidden in the packages which
contain trial exhibits in the Record Office.

If the search resulted only in the finding of one phrase re-
ferring to the great poet, the discovery of that hitherto lost
mention of him would be hailed with delight by thousands in
every corner of the world. The prosecution of a search for ad-
ditional information regarding our poet does not want abundant
incentive, aside from finding confirmation of his Catholicity, and
should that result be gained, honor and a part of the poet's im-
mortality awaits the happy discoverer. But should no such proof
be made we may well rest content, for Shakspere's word has
helped to make the world familiar with Catholic thought and
conduct. It has not been merely a pleasant sound of music, a
jingle of pretty words. The children of his brain live and move
before us. They persuade us to the good of which they are ex-
emplars or warn us from the evil into which we see them fall.
Our sympathy and our pity are active, and own implicitly the
power of a genius who is master of nature's ways. Of other
poets we may remember the words they have written ; of Shaks-
pere we remember the glorious and the unfortunate men and
women with which his fancy has peopled all time. As genera-
tions increase the wonderful power of his work will not wane ;
but, as it has in the past been a teacher of Catholic truth, so
will it continue, fair and deathless as is that truth.

JOHN MALONE.

722 Miss LANIER. [Aug.,

MISS LANIER.

" THANK the Lord, we are out of that thicket at last."

" Wonder if it guards an enchanted palace with a sleeping
beauty inside ? "

" Hardly the door is open. We can go in and find out."

"We had better knock first. She's there, but not asleep. I
hear a voice inside."

" Even if I did not, I'd make use of this delicious old lion-
headed knocker. Who says America has no ruins. This whole
place is the very model of picturesque desolation. Let's put up
here for a month if we can by any means prevail on the
owners to take us in."

" What ? You would dare fate thus at a venture ? Suppose
the enchanted princess turns out to be fat and forty, with an
equal weakness for snuff, and rummaging through One's private
and personal belongings ? "

" Even in that case which is, however, impossible this de-
cay is noble, without a trace of vulgarity. Mark the cleanliness
of everything. The piazza, floor is speckless, in spite of being
half rotten. The big cool, empty hall has no litter, no rags and
jags, as it must have if the occupants had not gentle instincts
and a regard for the humanities."

" Bother your reasoning ! What's the good of it, when a
knock would settle everything? I'm beginning to feel, as the
natives say, ' hanted.' This must be the far end of nowhere, we
have heard of so long, but never before found out."

Rat-tat-rat-tat-tat-tat, the big knocker sounded through the
dim inner spaces ; twice, thrice it fell, still nobody came. The
would-be visitors stood somewhat amazed, for over and beyond
the summoning knocker, a clear, high-pitched voice came con-
tinuously to the ear.

Involuntarily the two men turned to look one at the other.
Truly there was something we thought uncanny in this vocal soli-
tude. Both were strangers, men just fairly coming into their prime.
One was short and sturdy, with a merry mouth, and volcanic
blue eyes set well under a bulging forehead that hardly needed
the reinforcement of a square, dogmatic jaw. The other had
blue eyes, too, but shaded by lashes so long, so darkly silken,
you would never guess their color unless seen in the open day-

1892.] Miss LANIER. 723

light. Their owner was tall and spare, well-made and so free of
motion as to proclaim him of excellent muscle. His face was a
longish oval, but saved from taint of effeminacy by the fine,
firm modeling of nose and brow. Their pale olive skin and
thready scarlet lips, bore out the impress of the upper face.
Here, they said, is one quick to feel, keen to do, to dare, but
one who will never put impulse above judgment, or stay his
hand from his will through regard or a weaker thing.

Some such thought was in the other man's mind, when after
five minutes of waiting he broke silence to say:

" Really, Fanning, we had as well move on. After all, the
aborigines are not bound to receive us. Let's see if we cannot
some way stumble on a house of call."

" I have found one very much to my mind," Fanning said,
sending a still more vigorous rat-tat sounding through the hall.
His comrade heard it with the suspicion of a frown, saying :

" Newspaper men are supposed to have phenomenal cheek ;
but commend me to that of an artist the brotherhood of the
brush beat the pencillers out of sight. How long, may I ask,
do you mean to keep up that performance?"

" Oh ! five minutes or so, unless some one comes sooner to
answer it."

" If they do not ? "

" I shall go in and establish myself by right of discovery."

" You would dare? "

" My dear Bertram, it is not a matter of daring solely a
question of necessity. We are strangers missionaries of culture
and progress, to this benighted region. If the inhabitants do
not welcome us for our own sakes, it is none the less our duty
to save them from their own sloth."

" Shut up, Fanning ! suppose they heard you ? We hear plain
enough, that droning back there. What do you suppose it can
be?"

" I am going to find out."

"Not really? Don't!"

" Really, I must. Remember, its near twelve o'clock. We
have been tramping since sunrise, when we left the railway sta-
tion, except for the half hour for breakfast, with the old black
auntie, who gave us ash-cake, buttermilk, and bacon broiled on
the coals. The memory of it is substantial, but not satisfying.
Unless that voice is an illusion, I shall certainly consult the
owner of it as to the chance of dinner."

" Wait a little longer ; maybe it is a ghost we hear. A dozen

724 Miss LANIER. [Aug.,

could be safely ambushed in this big overgrown plantation. It's
a perfect labyrinth ; cannot have felt plow, or hoe, or axe, these
last twenty years. The fields were a jungle, the orchard, with its
gnarled, twisted, half-dead trees, worse than a graveyard, and
the garden did you ever see anything more pathetic than those
big rose-bushes sprawling their yards of bloom flat on the ground,
with clove pinks and sweet-williams straggling through the
weeds?"

" H-m ! When did you take to floriculture ? thought you
came here to look into the region's mineral resources."

" That means, I suppose, I must leave its picturesque points
to my artist friend, Hamilton Fanning, Esq."

" Oh, no ! I am not selfish but, if you are going in for that
sort of thing, don't forget the big red poppies, the tiger lilies
aflaunt in this August sun, the mat of white honeysuckle there
over that fallen gate-post, or the mate to it rotted off yet still
upright in the sturdy arms of that stout red trumpet vine."

"Your eyes see everything."

" Why not ? it is their business. You would do well to men-
tion likewise that the yard is tufted over with coarse, tussocky
grass, that it has a big magnolia tree for ornament, also an
abortive privet hedge, that it is set in squares with black locust
trees and much beaten with shod hoofs hence must be used
as grazing ground."

" Really, Fanning "

" Really, Bertram, those are the most salient points, so far.
Now for the rest of it. Come on and fear not."

" Try one more knock. I find it hard to disregard the ap-
peal of this so confidently open door."

"There seems to be nothing except the house as it is not
portable, the owner has probably nothing to fear."

" That is what puzzles me. The house is so big and wide,
with such deep rooms ; and this handsome hall. I cannot recon-
cile the build of it with its utter emptiness."

" We shall soon solve its riddle. Here goes for a last
knock."

The sound was unanswered, yet not quite without fruit.
The dreamy voice grew louder loud enough in fact for the lis-
teners to catch here and there a word of one of Patrick Henry's
famous revolutionary orations.

" My faith ! we have stumbled on a rural Demosthenes in
training for Congress. Think how he will welcome an audience,"
Fanning said, stepping inside and moving toward the sound.

1892.] Miss LANIER. 725

His comrade held up a warning hand. " Wait that is a
woman's voice," he said, speaking low. Fanning went on as
though he had not heard. His comrade, reluctantly following at
his heels, was more and more impressed with the clean empti-
ness of all the wide, dusk interior. There was no stick of furni-
ture in the hall's length, or the big rooms opening out from it ;
footsteps echoed vaultwise on the bare, polished floor. Nowhere
a hint or trace of human occupancy relieved the sombre deso-
lation.

Presently, at the hall's southern extremity, the two men found
themselves at an open door, through which came the reader's
voice. At sight of her, both started were near to crying out.
Surely human eyes seldom rested upon aught so pitiful. The
room had two occupants. It was light and lofty, windowed to
south, with a high walnut wainscot, and big, open fireplace. An
old, much-worn Turkey carpet covered the floor. In one corner
a huge mahogany bedstead was heaped high with big soft pil-
lows. A claw-foot table, black and shining with age, stood out
in the clear space, sparsely laden with very massive old silver.
On one hand there was a tall secretary, on the other a book-case
very nearly empty. Two or three worn easy-chairs stood about.
There was neither blind nor drapery to break up the strong
light that fell full upon the two figures in the middle of the
room.

One, a man, old, blind, helpless, half sat, half reclined in a
big wheel-chair, his white hair shining like floss-silk against the
dark cushion pillowing his head. He was clothed in gray the
worn, threadbare uniform of a major in the Confederate service.
From an upright staff fast to the back of his chair, a magnifi-
cent Confederate flag fell down in soft folds that his white-
shrunken fingers now and again threaded with soft, caressing
touch. A major's commission, framed in ebony, hung over the
mantle, with two crossed swords above it. Sword-belt and spurs
hung just below, with a flattened bullet pendant from a silver
curb-chain dropping lower still. Half way to the ceiling another
flag-staff was upreared one that had come out of the hell of
fire and steel with colors triumphantly in ribbons.

Against the back ground, close at the old man's ear, a wo-
man stood shouting out the periods of the great commoner.
There was a book in her hand ; now and again she turned a leaf
as though reading, but Fanning's trained vision saw easily that
it was upside down. Evidently she had no need of it. Doubt-
VOL. LV. 47

726 Miss LANIER. [Aug.,

less her lesson had been too long and painfully learned for her
to miss word or syllable of it.

She was tall and slim even pathetically meagre of outline
her face, if careworn, had a soft transparence. It was lit with
deep, dark eyes, set under arched brows above which masses of
nearly white hair made a rippling crown. The features were not
regular, but well-cut and fine of line. If the lips were a thought
tremulous, there was strength to endure writ plain in the poise
of head and shoulder, the firm forward planting of the small, ill-
shod foot.

All in silk attire she stood, a pitiful figure indeed. The gown
seemed to have been made for her a child of ten and as it
was outgrown to have been pieced out with whatever was at
hand. The original skirt of pink and green brocade had eight
inches of gray moire below it, and that was in turn supplemented
by a deep flounce of black. Waist and sleeves were even more
a matter of contrivance, their shreds and patches made yet more
glaring by ruffles and tucks of old much-mended lace.

A strong race-likeness said the pair were father and daughter.
The man, as you might learn from a glance at his commission,
was Darragh Lanier, Esq. This, his one child, was also his
namesake. The intruders, passing outside his door, heard him
say : " Darragh, I have surely heard knocking at the front door
these last ten minutes. Step out into the hall, please, and see if
Isaac is awake or if he, like the rest, has run away from his
duty."

" Very well, father, I will go," the daughter said, turning obedi-
ently to the door. At sight of the two men, she flushed a hot red,
but signed them in swift pantomime to go back whence they came.
Then she laid hold of the wheel-chair, saying : " But first let me
put you at the window. There is a little breeze now, and you
are over-spent with the heat."

Under cover of the movement Fanning and Bertram got
away undiscovered. As Miss Lanier came out to them, the ar-
tist was saying: "Heavens! What a picture! I'd give a thousand
dollars if I could paint it, just as we saw it."

" I hope you would not call it ' In silk attire,' " Bertram said,
a little anxiously.

" What an idea ! No ; if paint it I do and certainly I mean
to the world will see it as 'The Lost Cause.' The most vi-
vid imagination could not evolve so perfect a type for it as this
woman, who seemed to have been blighted before it was fairly
spring."

1892.] Miss LANIER. 727

" Sh-sh ! Here she is, with her familias spirit at her elbow.
Now may the good God protect us. I am sure we are in a land
of sorcery."

The familias did not look dangerous. He was very black,
small, and somewhat withered, but still upright and sinewy. He
came hurriedly forward, dropping his brimless straw hat as he
set foot in the door, and said with eager courtesy, " Sarvent,
gentemens sarvent, suhs. Tek seats dar on de porch benches,
an' res' while I fetches ye some cool water."

Darragh came timidly forward, the red still pulsing in her
thin, withered cheek. The old negro stepped in front of her,
and said entreatingly : " Go back ter yo' pappy, Miss Darragh,
honey ; yo' kin trus' old Isaac ter ten' ter things right."

Darragh answered him steadily : " I know that, daddy ; I will
go in a minute. Perhaps these gentlemen have business I re-
present my father, and must hear it, if they have."

Fanning stepped forward, to say with his finest courtesy :
" Our business is to find rest and quiet for a few summer weeks.
Here you seem shut quite away from the world of noise and
bustle. If you will let us share for a brief while your paradise,
you will earn our everlasting gratitude."

" Dar now, lit'l mistes, you run 'long erway ; let Isaac ten' to
de gentemens. He knowed dey warn't none er dem lan'-hunters
minit he sot eyes on 'em. Here you stays, gentemens, an' wel-
come, while you chooses. Darraghsmount do' ain't nebber yet
been shot ter folks whar gut de right ter come through it an'
lit'l company will chirk up Marse Darragh, and lit'l mistes des
wonderful, wonderful. Des lem me show um de way roun' ter
waush der faces, den I'll fetch 'em in, and you two mus' retain
'um till dinner done get ready," Isaac said, advancing hospitably
to possess himself of the knapsack and sheltering outfit lyinp-
upon the piazza, floor.

Darragh said, with a face full of doubt, " Isaac, are you
sure ? "

" Yes, yes ! lit'l mistes, certain, sho," the old man broke in,
then going close and half-whispering : " Miss Darragh, honey, for
de land's sake, let 'um stay. Dey means' pay money; an' whar
else we's ter get it f'um maybe de good Lawd knows but po'
ole Isaac don't. I been tryin to wuk ter plow but the weeds
is gut the best of all the truck, an' de hot sun des is twis'in'
het all up to nuthin'. We wo'ent make seed, much less bread ;
an' you know you said las' winter der warn't nuthin' mo' in de
house ter sell, as would pay for carryin' erway."

728 Miss LANIER. [Aug.,

" I know," Darragh said, quietly ; " but but to open our
doors for money! I never thought Darraghsmount would come
to that."

" Honey, but's fer him, Marse Darragh." Isaac said, nod-
ding toward the back, whence now came a querrulous calling.

At sound of it Miss Lanier got very white, but walked
bravely to her visitors, who had withdrawn to the piazza's
furthest angle, and said, trying to speak steadily: " If if you
stay, sirs, I can promise you only the very simplest fare, and
no attention save what Isaac can give you. Indeed, you will
have to depend on him for everything."

" He looks dependable ; we will be but too glad to risk it,"
Bertram said, cheerily. Fanning looked his hostess full in the eyes
till her cheeks grew damask roses; then, without a word, followed
his comrade at Isaac's heels to the wide, bare upper-chamber the
two were to share.

Though not directly over Major Lanier's apartment, doors and
windows all stood so wide that the new-comers could not choose
but to hear the blind man rating Isaac for his negligence, " leaving
strange gentlemen to stand for so long unanswered at the door."
The negro answered with the humblest patience:

" 'Deed, Marse Darragh, I never thunk nobody was comin'; I
des went out ter de stable 'count er seein' 'bout dem mules.
Late hoen' done got so big an' heavy down in dem bottems I'se
plum 'feared some triflin* nigger will get one er de critters ober-
het, else gi' 'im too much feed an' founder 'im."

" Ah ! then, the crop is heavy, if we did have high water."

" Des er bulgin' an' er boomin', Marse Darragh, even ter kill
an' ter cripple "

" Never mind it, man. About these strangers, be sure they
have every attention."

" I will, Marse Darragh. Dey comes frem up Norf

"That makes no difference, Isaac, while they are under the
roof of Darraghsmount. Away from it, of course "

" Co'se, of co'es, Marse Darragh, dey mought not be much ob
nobody, but while dey here nebber you min', dey gwine fin'
out what 'tis ter be company."

" Pray heaven that we do." Bertram said soto voce. " I was
* company ' once for six weeks down in Virginia. I remember
them as a long delicious dream of waffles, broiled chicken, fresh
berries, real cream, and coffee fit for the gods."

Fanning held up a finger of silence. The voice below went
on : " Darragh, my daughter, we have in some way unaccount-

1892.] Miss LANIER. 729

able fallen out of our habit of hospitality. It must be a year
since we have had dinner company; but I hope you have not,
on that account, neglected your wardrobe. Put on your newest
gown something simple, yet elegant, as becomes a Southern lady
offering hospitality to her hereditary enemies. A cheap or old-
fashioned gown might seem the manifestation of clownish resent-
ment something more than impossible to a Lanier under her
own roof. Do these strangers, by the way, seem men of facts
and breeding ? "

" I hardly noticed they are different, though, to some
most Northerners, that I have seen," the daughter answered, in
the high key necessary to reach her father's dulled ear.

" Ah, yes ! those impertinently persistent speculators who want
to spoil Darraghsmount's fair face with their dirty mines and
furnaces. I shall be glad to find out that there is a better sort
among our conquerors. It would take away half the bitterness
of defeat to know that we surrendered to gentlemen."

Bertram looked at Fanning to say with a laugh : " Listen-
ers are not entitled to hear even good wishes of themselves ; but
do you know, in my mind we have stumbled upon a conspiracy
as pathetic as it is picturesque ? Clearly, this fine old Bourbon
is made to believe that wealth and state surround him as of old."

Fanning nodded, with still a finger upon his lip. High and
ready came Darragh's words. " Why, father dear ! you don't
think I would leave you dine with two princes in disguise. Of
course, they shall have every attention but Isaac can see to that.
I shall stay here with you."

" Not for the world, my daughter. Honor forbids. Fate has
made you the active head of our house. A friend, a relative
even, you might leave to the care of servants ; the stranger with-
in our gate is another matter all the more when he comes of
alien or hostile race. So put on your brightest face, your new-
est plumage, and let these two see what I doubt not will be a
new experience for them how perfectly the obligation of nobili-
ty can mask and put aside the natural human resentment of all
their fanaticism has made us suffer."

Involuntarily, Bertram bowed low to the invisible speaker.
Fanning laughed low and clear, saying half under his breath :
" Evidently we have hit upon a sprig of the chivalry, full-blown,
if sadly the worse for wear. Really, it is better than comic
opera such mouthings in contrast to this," looking about at the
big, bare room, each of whose four curtainless windows framed
a separate picture of tangled desolation.

730 Miss LANIER. [Aug.,

" I should say tragedy, full of most infinite pathos; this blind
man is kept by loving subterfuge in a fool's paradise," Bertram
said, a thought sharply. Fanning went on unruffled :

"I like his attitude. The high and mighty condescension of
it is delicious. No doubt it will be charged in the bill not ex-
plicitly, of course. Poor wretches ! I shall not grudge the money
the need of it is so patent but it certainly does not speak
well for blood and family that these exemplars of it should let
themselves thus supinely starve, owning a principality land
enough to make fortunes for a whole Northern community."

" Dont judge till we know the story ; I am sure there is one
behind all this," Bertram said, sitting down at the small table
and beginning to sharpen a pencil.

Fanning laughed again, saying : " What it must be to have
the newspaper imagination ! Take my word for it : when so
much that is picturesque lies on the surface there is seldom any-
thing below it."

The other looked at him keenly. "Maybe you are right,"
he said ; then, after a little pause : " If if we find that poor
woman without a history, I hope we are men enough to leave
her the same way."

"What do you mean?" asked Fanning, with a languid lift
of brows. The other burst out impetuously:

" Hang it all ! you know well enough. Understand, old man,
I don't mean to preach or be impertinent God knows I've little
enough room but somehow I can't forget who and what you
are, what a habit you have of looking and acting unutterable
things, nor how women's hearts seem to flutter to you as the
bird to the bough. I know you are not a deliberate trifler, ex-
cept where the party of the other part is well able to take
care of herself "

" Excuse me," Fanning broke in, " I think I see your drift.
My morals my immorals even I do not defend ; but in point
of taste I confess myself a trifle tetchy. While in this sapless,
white-haired creature in the harlequin robe I see tremendous
possibilities as a model, for anything else ' a shrug finished
the sentence as no words could have done.

" Fastidiousness is a good thing once in a way," Bertram
said, sententiously.

A low tap fell on the open door. Isaac stood framed in it,
saying with his best bow : " Marster's compliments tu de gente-
mens, an' he be pleased fer ter see 'um in his own room down
staars."

1892.] Miss LANIER. 731

Six weeks of sojourning under the same roof brought equal
discoveries to the guests and their entertainers. In the veiy
briefest space, the freemasonry of gentle breeding set them at
ease one with the other. Even before that the intuition of sym-
pathy had made Bertram feel that the " harlequin robe " was
the outwork and visible sign of nameless martyrdom. With the
wearer of it he was soon on the friendliest footing. She was,
he found, full of delicate intelligence, of more delicate reticence.
She spoke little of anything; of herself, her family, her sur-
roundings, nothing at all. Yet, as a listener, was inspired, inspir-
ing ; her speaking eyes, her mobile lips, lightening, darkening, quiv-
ering, smiling, as the tale she heard was grave or gay.

It was much the same with Major Lanier, though the strangers
saw him more rarely. For days together the agony of old
wounds was such as to make heavy narcotic sleep his only refuge.
Through the time of it his daughter laid carefully aside her rot-
ting silk gown, and went about in cotton worn and faded, but
of pristine freshness compared with that woful attire. So, more
wraith than woman-like, she wrought at household tasks, away
from, yet within call of, her sleeping charge.

At first she had sat painfully attentive to each word of the
new-comers, with always a sort of dumb question in her eyes.
By and by, hearing from their casual speech that Bertram had
come thither to find out for a great metropolitan newspaper the
mineral riches or poverty of the land, that Fanning came wholly
of his own vagrant impulse, her fear, whatever its source, seemed
to vanish quite away. She smiled easily laughed even some-
times, at quips and cranks of table-talk, or lost herself with pa-
thetic delight in the summer story-books that the new-comers
flung in her way.

" I have never before seen one printed since the war," she
said to Bertram one day, then blushed deep over such revelation.
Long before he had noted that the book-case held only Shaks-
pere, Milton, the " Spectator," and a few well-thumbed volumes of
earlier political heroes. Each of them Darragh knew by heart
from cover to cover, she had read them through, how many
times ! for how many years ! to the blind man, whose heart,
mind, life, lay wholly with what was past. These, his sparse
favorites she had kept the feeble remnant of a library dis-
poiled. The wherefore of the despoiling or rather the necessity
of it was to Bertram a tempting mystery, one to whose solu-
tion he was vowed.

It was certainly not greed of money. Fanning, the skeptic,

732 Miss LANIER. [Aug.,

was simply appalled at the ridiculously small payment they were
allowed to make. When both guests sought to double it, Dar-
ragh said, a fine red flushing into her face :

" I cannot take more and feel honest, since you receive so
little at my hands."

Against the taking she made no feint of protest or excuse,
though the lines of eye and mouth showed it hurt her cruelly.
Bred as she was to the religion of hospitality, the taking of
money in exchange for it seemed to her a sort of sacrilege.

Through the long, bright summer days the strangers spied
out the secrets of the land.

How they rode far out over the undulent brier-set swells
that had once been fertile fields, on to the cultivated country
beyond. Now, facing the other way, they climbed mountainous
hills, peered sharply at dips, spurs, angles, lodes, and veins,
bathed them in clear, trembling brooks, fished the deep pools,
shot squirrels, wild turkeys, and hoped even for deer.

Darraghsmount, they found, stretched a wide debatable land
betwixt the hill country and the smiling lowland. Once it must
have been the country's pride, a model estate, a princely posses-
sion. Such folk as the strangers encountered spoke of it with
sighing and head-shakings over its decadence, whose reason cer-
tainly lay deeper than the rathe and ruin of war. What it was
might doubtless have been heard for the asking, but somehow
the memory of Darragh, her fine unworldliness, her quality of
endurance, kept silent alike. Bertram, full of manly compassion
for her fate ; Fanning, whose complex soul held an interest more
subtle.

At moonrise, Bertram said to him, " Have you thought of it,
old man ? time's up day after to-morrow ? Shall you be sorry to
leave Arcadia for civilization ? "

For a minute the other was silent, puffing furiously at his
cigar. Then he said slowly, his eyes on the blue clouds eddying
above his head : " I shall stay a month longer. Miss Lanier
has agreed to be my model. It has been too hot for painting;
since we have been here."

Somehow the picture grew but slowly. Maybe the painter
was hypercritical. Certainly he would work only when the light,
his mood, everything suited. Oddly enough, Bertram's absence,
instead of throwing him more into companionship with his mod-
el, put a curious constraint between the two. With Major La-
nier, though, he grew exceedingly friendly ; read, talked to him

1892.] Miss LANIER. 735

by the hour, or listened with vividly unfeigned interest to tales
of march and seige and battle, of hair-breadth scrapes, and deeds
of desparate daring never any, though, whereof the relator was
the hero. Clearly the daughter's objection to speech of herself
was an hereditary trait. Thinking of it in contrast to the
maimed wreck of battle, Fanning told himself over and over
again that men of deeds are little given to words.

One mid-October day a fury of work fell upon him. Some-
thing was stirring within something undreamed of, incredible.
He drove himself hard, dashing in sharp blues of color, fine, faint
touches, broad effects, too intent to note the weariness stealing
over his model, sharpening the lines of the thin face, shadowing
more' deeply the patient eyes. One big, empty front room had
been set apart for his use. Doors and windows stood wide open, a
warm, gray autumn light filled every nook and corner. Darragh
stood facing the door that gave entrance upon the hall, her hair
rippling over her shoulders, one hand held hard about the tat-
ered battle-flag's staff, the other drooping nerveless and empty
at her side.

A step a shadow, came through the door. She started,
gave a little cry, tottered, would have fallen, but the new-comer
caught and 1 held her upright.

"Joe! How you startled me!" she said, half reproachfully.
" I did not dream you were within a hundred miles."

" I reckon not, from the looks o' things hereabout ; but you
go an' lay -down ; you looked fit ter drap as I come in."

Darragh looked half appealingly at him, then said to Fan-
ning, who stood, brush in hand, the picture of frowning amaze-
ment : " Mr. Fanning, this is my cousin, Joe Reid, just home
from Nashville. I am sure you will like to see some one from
the world outside, so I shall leave him to entertain you while I
rest a little."

" Certainly ; delighted to know Mr. Mr. Reid ; excuse me for
keeping you so long," Fanning muttered, daubing away at his
canvas. As Darragh vanished he became conscious that some-
body was looking over his shoulder, somebody who very shortly
laid a hand on his arm, saying, with a tinge of authority : " Cain't
that wait a minute, Mr. Fanning ? I want to talk to you."

" About what ? "

" Darragh Lanier."

"Why?"

" Because as she told you, I'm her cousin my mother was
a Lanier once removed and Darragh herself is, is the best wo-

734 Miss LANIER. [Aug.,

man, the poorest, the biggest fool, in the whole state of Ten-
nessee."

"What's that to me?"

"Don't you want to marry her?"

" Why should I ? "

" Don't you really know ? "

"Know what?"

" Why, about Darraghsmount her history, the fortune she
is worse than throwing away."

" On my honor, no ; though I am sensible just now of a
lively inclination to thrash you for such inquisition into my pri-
vate affairs."

" Come outside if ye'd like to try it on," the other said,
clinching a sinewy fist. " But I'd rather ye didn't. Darragh
wouldn't like it. She's full of all them old, high-strung notions.
I'm the new South, I am. Ten years younger'n she ; I mayn't
have so much polish, but, when it comes to rustling and getting
thar, I ain't afraid to risk myself with the best o' you North-
erners."

Fanning looked slowly over the six-foot-two of wiry strength,,
and said languidly : " No ; I think from my experience you would
let few things stand in your way. Now, if you are through with
your questions, I should really like to go on with my work. I
am anxious to finish it and be off."

Joe Reid looked at him doubtfully. " Ef I thought you
wouldn't come back " he began, stopped short, took a turn of
the room that ended squarely in front of the painter, and said r
half apologetically. " Ef I'm barkin' up the wrong tree, please

excuse me, Mister ; but, ye see, things are this way : I've

equitable rights here that I cain't git, except one way, that is : marry
my cousin. This place is all her's ; entailed, ye know, by her
grandfather that was my mother's uncle. Thar's just only us
two left o' the old stock, and in the course o' nature the prop-
erty'd come ter me. When the war begun, with the niggers an"
money an' all, it wus worth a million dollars all Darragh's
then just ten years old. Major Lanier was her guardian had a
pile o' money of his own, too. He was the first man in the
country to enlist as a soldier soon as there was a company he
armed and equipped 'em at his own expense. On top o' that
he put all his an' Darragh's money in the Cotton Loan. Oh, he
ain't one that ever did things by halves, I tell ye."

" Evidently not," Fanning said, setting his teeth hard. The
other went on : "An' as if that warn't enough, after the Yankees

1892.] Miss LANIER. 735

come in these parts, through a lawyer here, he mortgaged Dar-
raghsmount every acre and sent the money to England to buy
quinine and gunpowder for his men, sick and well. He's a
fighter from way back, let me tell ye. Enlisted 'for the war/
and stayed always where the fight was hottest. Nothin' ever
tetched him till the last month of the shindy. In some o' them
fights before Petersburg he got so shot and cut to pieces that
nobody thought he'd live a week. But somehow he did pull
through more's the pity, I can't help saying. Darragh and old
Isaac managed somehow to get him home. Of all his fortune
nothing was left but the plate and furniture, and books he had
fine ones if he didn't read carpets and blankets and linen had
mostly gone to the soldiers and the hospitals. Here he has
been ever since, blind, helpless, as you see him, but saved from
every care. You don't need to be told that whatever is, is for
him the other two do without. Now for twenty odd years a
woman who by rights ought to roll in gold has had never a
decent frock and barely enough to eat, has pieced and patched,
and turned and contrived, sold all that was salable outside her
father's room plate, furniture, books, curios and spent what-
ever they fetched in, keeping fair weather for him.

Of course, the mortgage wasn't worth the paper it was writ-
ten on unless she'd sign it after coming of age. But, bless you,
nobody could make her see that she wasn't bound by her father's
doing. In her eyes he could never do wrong. She went straight
to the bank that held it, and said : " You shall have the land ;
only let me live on it till my father dies." They were, mighty
willin' to that the major, they thought, couldn't live a year but
for all that, they made Darragh promise not to work or develop
the land, except what old Isaac could tend. He's just about
made bread and chicken-feed every year, with corn enough over
to winter old Sultan, the major's war horse, who lives on as as-
tonishingly as his master. You've seen him, no doubt, in the
yard all summer; he brought the major out through the hottest
sort of fire, when he was so hurt they thought him dead there
in the saddle so Darragh would go hungry herself sooner than
stint his corn. She has taken good pains the major shall not
know what she has given up. He was awfully cut up, thinking
he had beggared her ; so she makes him believe the land is her's,
free and clear, and that she simply won't sell her coal "and iron
rights because she has already more money than she knows what
to do with. Believing that, he wants her always to wear silk, dress
for dinner, and all that. I reckon, though, you know all about

736 Miss LANIER. [Aug.

that poor old man ! so he has the feel of silk about her, he
believes her fine as a fiddle. It's the same way about old Isaac
he is supposed to be valet and butler, with a dozen servants
under him, when really what time he can spare from waiting,
on old Eppy, his wife, who is cook, he is out in the field, work-
ing for dear life.

Now just look at things! The place is worth two fortunes
still ; coal in one hill, iron in another, wood, water, lime-stone,
all about five thousand acres in it, too ! Ain't it more than a
shame that the rightful owner and heir should be chuseled out
o' it in this fashion ? All for a whim, too. Ever since I came
of age I've been at Darragh to let me open the case and fight
those bank sharks. She jest wont hear of it ; says she gave her
word of honor for her father's debt and that's worth more than
a hundred million, let alone one or two."

Fanning half turned away to say : " H-m-m ! I suppose, then,
there is no record of her promise?"

" Not a scratch ? That's one reason she's so set ; says them
people trusted her, and she ain't goin' back on 'em. Ef once I
could get her to marry me, they'd dance to a different tune ? "

" Ah ! you are fond of her ? "

" Oh, yes ! in a way. She's a right good sort but, man
alive ! just look at it. I'm heir to this property, if she don't fool
it away, or marry you ? "

" Has she had no other chance ? "

" More'n you could shake a stick at. We ain't the only ones
not by a jugful. Fact is, she could have took her pick of the
country long ago, if she'd ever left the major long enough to
talk to a man. One time she did have a right smart notion of
a feller I forget his name, but he was a soldier one that helped
do something for the major when he was so bad off I can just
remember him he came to see her off and on for three fo'
years, when I was a brat. We always said Darragh loved him a
heap. I reckon 'twas the major the keer of him, you know
that kep' 'em apart. Anyway, he went off somewhere New
York, I b'leeve an' she's here, wearin' her life away."

" Why do you tell me all this ? "

" Well ! you see, ma wrote about you two strangers bein'
here ; first off Darragh was afraid the bank had sent you to buy
and take possession. When she found out better ma's over
here every little spell why, we concluded one of you must be
after her. Oh ! I can tell you that speculation's been tried be-
fore. I'd a-been back to see about it six weeks ago, only I was

1892.] Miss LANIER. 737

out drummin' for our house Wheelock & Co. an' didn't get
word of things till just yesterday. Now I'm a square man ; I've
showed you all my hand. If you mean anything, say so, and do
your best to win. Ef you don't why, it's no more'n fair, I
should ask you to get out. I ain't vain you're a heap better to
look at, and I don't want Darragh to have too much chance to
compare us."

"So! you have no thought of giving up your suit?"
" Not till death or matrimony. But say ! is it go or stay with
you ? "

Fanning yawned, though his eyes were blazing. " Really, Mr.
Reid ! you must excuse me until to-morrow," he said, turning up-
on his heel and vanishing through an open window.

Night fell ere he came back, and all day through there raged
in him the battle of love and pride. Love ! At last he aimed it
squarely. Hamilton Fanning rich, fastidious, distinguished, mas-
ter of arts and hearts found himself captive to this dull, quiet
woman whose life had been one long sacrifice, who had no claim
of youth, of wit, of wealth, to excuse his enthrallment. How he
would have laughed to even have thought nay, how had he re-
pelled Bertram's insinuation of such a possibility the day he
first set eyes on her. Now, he told himself over and over, he
had come to the parting of the ways. On one hand lay the
great world his world of fame and riches, and freedom, and
the highest place among his fellows. Art, he held a jealous mis-
tress, brooking no rivalry of wife or child. She could give him
much so much all that hitherto had seemed to him worth win-
ning ; now it looked poor and tawdry, lacking the illumination of
Darragh Lanier's eyes, of her thinking smile, her tender, patient
face. If only life could go on to the end at the pace of these
last weeks he would know well which to choose. In the wide,
bare house, amid the silence of leaves and sky, she could never
lose her charm. How would it be, though, if she were borne
away transplanted to the flaunting garden of his world set over
against the brilliant beauties, trained from birth to all the fine
arts of fascination, and masking in wreathed smiles whatever of
dark or bitter fate might set in their hearts ?

He could never dare such a contrast. Choosing her, he
must choose also the way of life she led. And could he en-
dure that, year in and year out ? Now it seemed easy, the
one thing worth living for. Yet, he had an inner sense thafy

738 Miss LANIER. [Aug.,

after use had dimmed the glamors of her presence, he might
find him bitterly discontent with his choice.

As he set foot on the piazza, her voice came out of its
gloom. Evidently she was awaiting him, a proceeding alto-
gether strange. As he went toward her she stood up, saying
with a little undertone of tremor, "Please forgive me, Mr. Fan-
ning, for for what you were forced to endure to-day."

" What do you know about it ? " Fanning asked, letting
his hand steal through the dark to the two clasped so meekly
in front of her.

For a minute she made no answer beyond the nervous
tremor of her fingers. Then she drew them gently away and
said, half under her breath : " Nothing that is, only that Joe
came with the purpose to be disagreeable. I ought not to
have left you at the mercy of his tongue."

" Do you know what he asked me ? "

" No ; I am afraid"

" Have no fear ; it was only what I have been asking my-
self inarticulately these ten days past ; that is, dare I ask you to
trust yourself in my keeping ? "

Through the sweet, still dark, he heard a low half-sobbing
sigh, felt her sway and shrink away from him into the doorways
deeper murk. Again he put out his hand, seized, held her's
hard and fast, saying thickly : " I do dare. The rest is as you
will." '

She drew him impetuously within, down the long hall on to
the door-way through which she had first dawned upon his vision.
The room within was garishly alight with big, home-made wax
candles. In the yellow flickering of them the old man's sleep-
ing face took on the hue of death itself. He sat with head
thrown back, propped easily among his cushions, one wasted
waxen hand grasping, even in slumber, the folds of his dear
flag.

For a long minute the two outside looked at him in si-
lence ; then Darragh said, paling to the lips : " You must see
where my place is. If if it were possible that I should Cleave
it, the temptation passed me by twenty years ago when I
had a heart, not the husk of one, for everything but him."

"And you have been faithful to a memory all that time?"
Fanning said, bending to look into her eyes. Half shyly, half
proudly, she drew a little away and answered : " No, I have been
faithful to a necessity one that claimed both love and duty."

Lightly, swiftly she crossed the lighted space, dropped to her

1892.] Miss LANIER. 739

knees, and laicfher cheek softly against her father's hand. The
next breath saw her rigidly upright, staring hard at him with
wide eyes full of heart-break. Fanning sprang to her side, flung
an arm about her. Instantly she writhed from his hold, clasped
the dead face to her breast, and sobbed aloud : " Father, father,
take me with you. I did not leave you, it was only a wicked
thought. Surely you have not gone away from me forever?"

Fanning began to say, " God knows you did all a daughter
could do." But she shrank shuddering from his words, to bury
her face, with heavy sobbing, on the poor breast eased now for-
ever of racking pain. For a minute he looked at her with ten-
der, pitiful eyes, then silently touching her bowed head, went
away to summon help for this hour of extremity.

Ofcce again in life he saw her, twenty-four hours later, stand-
ing at the head of a deep, open grave, whereinto a long, narrow,
black coffin was being lowered with reverent hands. Mrs. Reid
stood one side of her, all in decorous black ; Joe upon the other
hand, spick and span in city-cut clothes. Betwixt them Darragh,
in her gown of state the pitiful threadbare finery that had
helped to trick her dead out of his self-reproach. Evidently
she was long past weeping. There was no hint of tear-stain in
all her cameo-face. The pain of terror had left her shadowed
eyes. They were listless, hopeless, as was the quivering mouth.

Across the grave her eyes travelled to Fanning's own in a
long, searching gaze. As they fell softly away she raised her
hand in a faint, mute gesture of farewell.

" The Lost Cause " (Fanning pinxit) was among the academy
sensations of two years later. One spectator of it a tall, dis-
tinguished, military-looking man, with very dark eyes, and very
white hair started so at sight of it as to make the pretty
young woman upon his arm tremble.

" Why, Richard ! What is the matter ? Surely you are not
going to faint over just seeing your old flag again ? "

The tall man did not answer. Instead, he stood looking,
looking, his soul in his eyes, who knows what crowding memories
surging in heart and soul. His rapt gaze drew the attention of
the artist, whom chance sent along at that minute. Fanning
lounged forward with his best society air, to say nonchalantly:
" Have I done your cause injustice, general ? "

Before the general could answer, the pretty lady gave a little,
delighted scream. " O Richard ! is that really, truly Mr. Fan-

740 Miss LANIER. [Aug.,

ning, whom I am dying to know ? Do please present him before
some one spirits him away."

" There is not much left to say after that speech ; but, Fan-
ning, this is the rash young woman who has just dared to marry
me. She admires you, I think, even more than your work," the
general said, trying to speak lightly.

As Fanning murmured his thanks Bertram lounged up to the
group, viewed the picture critically, and turned away, saying with
a half shrug : " You hardly do justice, Fanning, to either your-
self or your subject. You have caught form and substance per-
fectly, but the spirit is lacking."

Fanning looked at him steadily, saying : " I never paint por-
traits, from even the finest model."

" Oh, do tell us where you found her ! that is, if the* ever
was a woman like this," the pretty woman said eagerly. "She
must have been perfectly delicious in that queer gown, with such
eyes, such hair, such everything?"

Fanning shot a glance of appeal at Bertram, who answered

it with the words: " There was such a woman, Mrs. ; I

myself saw her, and she lived in Tennessee. By-the-way, gen-
eral, that is your State, is it not?"

"Yes," said the general, with white lips; "but it is twenty
years since I have set foot in it. You say this woman lived
there ? where is she now ? "

" In heaven, I hope. Poor Miss Lanier ! they buried her just
a month after her father."

" Ah ! I recall the name. Yes, we were comrades. Poor
fellow ! life for him meant martyrdom. I am glad to know it is

ended," General said, hurrying his wife away. Fanning

and Bertram, below the peaceful picture, looked after him with
comprehending eyes.

One said low to the other : " He loved her, and lost her
loye. Truly, there are more martyrdoms than one."

M. C. WILLIAMS.

1892.] LEGENDS OF THE CID. 741

LEGENDS OF THE CID.
INTRODUCTORY.

The Cid was born A.D. 1026 and died A.D. 1099. His original name was
Rodrigo di Bivar. In him Spain gave birth to the most entirely characteristic
representative of mediaeval chivalry. He embodied its happiest as well as its most
heroic spirit. His military ardor was free alike from barbaric ruthlessness, and from
the ambition of a Caesar or an Alexander. He had not a touch either of that ex-
aggerated love of praise which, at a later time, vulgarized the instinct of Honor,
or of that selfishness and sentimentality which has infected modern times. For
him all self-consciousness seems to have been lost in a light-hearted yet impas-
sioned loyalty to just, generous, patriotic, and religious ends. These were to him
the realities of life. The rest was sport. He was the great type of the poet's
" Men of Old "

" They went about their gravest deeds
As noble boys at play."

THE CID'S MARRIAGE.

WITHIN Valencia's streets were dole and woe ;

Among the thoughtful, silence long, and then

Sharp question and brief answer; sobs and tears

Where women gathered ; something strange concealed

From children ; rapid step of priest gray-grown

As though his mission were to beds of death.

The cause ? Nine days before, the sea had swarmed

With ships continuous like the locust cloud

Full sail from far Morocco ; six days later

Strange tents had crowded all the coasts as thick

As spots on corpse plague-stricken. The Cid lay dead,

Valencia's bulwark, but her sire much more.

Who else had made her Spain's ; Spain's Mother-City

Frowning defiance on the Prophet's coasts,

Minarets enskied, gold domes, huge palaces

With ivory fretwork washed by azure waves,

Even to the fabulous East?

Day passed : night came :
Within Valencia's chiefest church the monks
Knelt round their Great One. He had sat since death
Throned near the Eastern altar. At the West
The many-columned aisles nigh lost in gloom
VOL. LV. 48

74 2 LEGENDS OF THE CID. [Aug.,

Changed to a fortress pile with massive walls

Lost in the mother rock, since Faith and War

That time were brethren vowed. Beneath its vault

Good knights kept watch, that stronghold's guard at need :

Glimmerings from distant altar lights, though faint,

Made way to them, oft crossed by shadowy forms

Gliding in silence o'er the pavements dim

With bosom-beating hand : the music strain

Reached them at times; less oft the voice of prayer.

Compline long past, the eldest of those knights,
By name Don Raymond, Lord of Barcelona,
Not rising from his seat, addressed his mates :
With great desire the nations will desire
To know our Cid in ages yet to come,
And yet will know him not. He was not one
Who builds a history up, complete and whole,
A century's blazon crying, "That was I!"
The day's work ever was the work he worked,
And laughingly he wrought it. Spake another:
Aye, 'twas no single act that made his greatness :
Yet greatness flashed from all his acts the least ;
A peasant cried one day, " God sent that man ";
A realm made answer, " God."

Don Sambro next :

I witnessed 'twas in youth his earliest deed ;
Gladsome it was, and gladdening when remembered,
Yet nowise alien 'mid these vaults of death :
His sire, Don Diego, was an aged man ;
Between him and Count Gomez, Gormaz' lord,
A strife arose. Gomez had flourished long
A warrior prime : whene'er the Cortes met
He spake the earliest word. Among the hills
A thousand watched his hand, and wrought his will.
One day, inflamed by wine, he struck Diego :
Diego, warrior once, then weak from age,
Was all unmeet for combat in the lists :
Daily he sat, grief-worn, beside his hearth
And shrank from friend like one who fears to infect
Sound man by hand diseased. He spake but once,
"Till that black hour dishonor none defiled
Layn Calvo's blood ! " His son, our Cid, Rodrigo,
Then twelve years old, leaped up ! u Mudarra's sword !

1892.] LEGENDS OF THE Cw. 743

That and your blessing !" Clad with both he rode,

Nor stayed until his horse, foam-flecked, stood up

At Gormaz' gate. Gomez refused his challenge :

Rodrigo smote him : soon the lists were formed :

Not long the strife : sole standing o'er the dead

Thus 'mid that knightly concourse spake the boy,

" Had he but struck my cheek, and not my sire's,

Far liefer had I lopped mine own left hand

Than yon sage head ! " Count Gomez' orphaned daughter,

Child of ten years, hearing that word, replied,

" He also had a Father."

August's sun

Westering had tinged the castle hall with red :
There sat Diego at the supper-board
But eating not. A horse's foot was heard :
In rushed, all glowing like that sun, the boy :
He knelt ; then rising, laughed. Aloud he cried,
" Father, your fare hath scanty been of late
As spider's when long frosts have killed his flies :
Haply this herb may sharpen appetite!"
His mantle fell : he lifted by the locks
The unjust aggressor's head. Diego rose :
First with raised eyes he tendered thanks to Heaven ;
Then added : " Son, my sentence ever stood,
The hand that battles best is hand to rule :
Henceforth live thou master in this house ;"
He pointed, and the seneschal kneeling laid
The castle's keys before the young man's feet.
Then clamor rose, " O'er yon portcullis fix
That traitor's head, that all may gaze upon it
And hate it as a true man knows to hate ! "
Not thus Rodrigo willed. He sent that head
To Gormaz with a stately retinue
Ten knights, and priests entoning " Miserere."
This solaced Gomez' child. Then rose that saying,
" He strikes from love, not hate."

Don Martin next

Don Martin of Castile : Witness was I
Not less of wonders by Rodrigo wrought.
Eight years went by : his father died. The Moors
Swarmed forth o'er many a region of Castile,
Domingo, La Calzada, Vilforado,
Capturing whole herds, white flocks, and brood-mares many:

744 LEGENDS OF THE Cw. [Aug.,

Rodrigo of Bivar to battle rushed ;

Smote them where Oca's mountains closed them round,

Retook their spoil. Five Moorish kings, their best,

He haled in triumph home to Bivar's gate

And bade them kneel chain-bound before his mother.

That homage tendered, thus he spake : " Depart ! "

That holy Lady still had taught her son

Reverence for sufferers, and the Poor of Christ,

And courtesy 'mid wildest storms of war.

On her he looked, later on them, and spake :

" I scorn to hold you captive ! from this hour

My vassals ye. I want nor slaves nor serfs."

The Five made answer "Yea," and called him " Cid,"

Their term for " Lord " : he bore it from that hour.

Don Garcia next : A fairer sight by far

And fitter to beguile our sorrowful watch,

I saw his marriage. Our great King Ferrando,

Who made one realm of Leon and Castile,

Beside that new-built bridge Zimara called

Was standing 'mid his nobles on a day

What time that name, " The Cid," rang first o'er Spain :

Then drew to him a maiden clothed in black,

A sister at each side. She spake : " Sir King,

I come your suitor, child of Gomez, once

Your counsellor and your friend, but come not less

The claimant of my right. Betwixt my sire

And Diego, father of that Cid world-famed

This hour for valor and for justice both,

Unhappy feud arose : my father smote him :

Aggrieved by that mischance the Cid, then young,

Challenged my sire and in the tourney slew him,

To me great grief albeit, on wars intent,

My father seldom saw me, Since that day

Tumult perpetual shakes our vassal realm :

Who wills breaks down the bridge ; who wills diverts

The river from our mill-wheel to his own :

Daily the insurgent commons toss their heads,

Clamoring " No tax." I fear for these, my sisters,

Fear more the downfall of our House and Name,

And, motherless, have none with whom to counsel.

King ! some strong hand and just should quell this wrong !

What hand but his who caused it ? 'Twas his right

1892.] LEGENDS OF THE CID. 745

To smite his Father's smiter. "Pis my right

To choose for champion him who wrought the woe.

Command him to espouse me ! That implies

Privilege and Duty both to ward our House,

And these my sisters young." Level and clear

She fixed upon the King her eyes like one

Who knows her cause is just.

Fernando mused,

Then answered, smiling, " Damsel, have your will !
You are wealthier than you know ! Rodrigo's Wife !
Of him you wot as little as of marriage !
Yon Cid will prove the greatest man in Spain."
Then with a royal frankness added thus :
" Moreover, maid, your lands are broad : another
Conjoining them with his might plot and scheme:
Not so the Cid : that man was loyal born ;
My kinsman. He shall wed you ! "

Straight he wrote :

" Cid, at Palencia seek me at your earliest,
There to confer on things that touch the State,
Likewise God's glory, and your weal besides,"

Incontinent to Palencia rode my Cid
With kinsfolk companied and many a knight ;
The King received him in his palace chapel,
Vespers concluded but the aisles still thronged ;
Embraced him ; then stepped back, and, gazing on him,
Exclaimed, " Not knighted yet ! My fault, my sin !
I must redeem the offence ! Good kinsman, kneel !"
High up the chapel bells renewed their chime;
Ferrando knighted him : Ferrando's Queen
Led to the gate his charger : the Infanta
Girt him with spurs. Then gave the King command
Like bishop missioning priest but late ordained,
" That gift now thine communicate to others !"
Straight to the chapel's altar moved the Cid
And lifted thence the sword of state. Before him
Three youthful nobles knelt. He with that sword
Their knighthood laid upon them.

Masque and dance

Lasted three days : then spake to him the King,
" Cid for that name by which all Spain reveres you,
Albeit a title not by me conferred,

746 LEGENDS OF THE CID. [Aug.,

I recognize well pleased Donna Ximena,
Heiress of Gomez slain by you of old,
Warrior and counsellor dear to me and mine,
Stands sore imperilled through that righteous deed,
Her subjects in revolt and every knave
Flouting her princely right. Revolts spread fast ;
Ere long my kingdom may lie meshed in such :
I see the hand that best can deal with treason !
My royal honor stands to her impledged
That you first wedding her her lands your own
Should, in the embraces of your name and glory
Foster the tender weakness of her greatness.
Wilt thou redeem that pledge ? "

The youth, " This maid,
King, is good and fair?"

Ferrando smiled ;

" Glad am I that, as in my youthful days,
Goodness and grace still reign ; kings rule not all !
Good she must needs be since her sire was good ;
Majestical she is : her suit she made
As one who gives command ; but you shall see her.
Seek we the Presence Chamber ! "

From a throng

Of courtly ladies in the glory clad
Of silver cloudland when a moon sea-born
Their dimness turns to pearl, Ximena moved
Calmly, not quickly, without summoning sign,
A sister at each hand in weeds night-black
And stood before the King. No gems she wore
And dark yet star-like shone her large, strong eyes,
A queenly presence. All Castile that day
Held naught beside so noble. Reverently
The young man glanced upon her ; glanced again :
At last he gazed : then, smiling, thus he spake :
" Forfend it, Heaven, Sir King, that vassal knight
Should break his monarch's pledge ! " Ferrando next,
" Maid, thou hast heard him : he demands thy hand."
To whom, unchanged, Ximena made reply :
"King! better far the whole truth than the half!
That youth should know it, I demanded his :
I deemed his hand my right. My rights have ceased ;
Now wife, not maid, my rights are two alone,
Henceforth to love my Husband and obey."

She knelt, and, lifting, kissed her Husband's hand,

1892.] LEGENDS OF THE CID. 747

And after that the King's; then rose and stood.

Ferrando spake : " The day's a youngling yet,
And I must see its golden promise crowned :
Your bridesmaids and your bridal robes await you :
Kings lack not foresight : all things are prepared.''
Ximena next : " So soon ! Then be it so ! "
An hour and she returned in bridal white
With countenance unshaken as before,
Yet brightened by a glad expectancy.

The King gave sign : that company august
In long procession to the chapel passed ;
Therein 'mid anthems sung, and incense cloud,
The nuptial Mass was solemnized. Ferrando,
Lowering his sceptre, gave the Bride away;
Her little sisters smiled and wept by turns ;
The Cid adown her finger slipped the ring;
The Bishop blessed them, showering upon both
The Holy Water. From their knees they rose
Husband and Wife thenceforth. Leaving that church
Largess they showered on all.

At once they rode

To Bivar, where from age to age had dwelt
The Cid's great race. Behind them rode their knights,
Two hundred men. Before the castle's gate,
High on its topmost step, his mother stood
Girt by the stateliest ladies of that land,
In festive garb arrayed. Her daughter new
Before her knelt ; then, to her bosom clasped,
Looked up, and, smiling, spake not. Spake my Cid :
" Mother, if less than this had been my Bride
Here had I tarried many a month and year ;
This is God's gift, the greatest He could give,
A maid taught nobleness in sorrow's school,
Unmatched for courage, simpleness, and truth.
Yea all her words have in them strength and sweetness.
Now therefore, since God's gifts must first be earned,
Not till five victories on five battle-fields j
Against Christ's foes have made her justly mine
Inhabit I with her in castle or waste.
Cherish her thou as thou didst cherish me ;
The laws of Honor and of Faith to her
Teach as thou taughtest to me. Farewell to both ! "
He turned, he lingered not, he looked not back ;
Westward he rode to combat with the Moors.

748 LEGENDS OF THE CID. [Aug.,

Then .spake another of those watchers sad,
Count Gaspar of the Douro : " Love is good ;
But good things live beside. That knew the Cid ;
That lesson learned I riding at his left
Beneath his standard named " Ximena's Veil."
Three days we rode o'er hill and dale ; the fourth,
The daylight slowly dying o'er the moor,
A shrill voice reached us from the neighboring fen,
A drowning man's. Down leaped our Cid to the earth
And, ere another foot had left the stirrup,
Forth from the watef drew him ; held him next
On his own horse before him. 'Twas a Leper !
The knights stared round them ! Supper ranged that eve,
He placed that Leper at his side. The knights
Forth strode. At night one bed received them both.
Sirs, learn the marvel! As Rodrigo slept
Betwixt his shoulders twain that Leper blew
Breath of strong virtue, piercing to his heart.
A cry was heard the Cid's the knights rushed in
Sworded : they searched the room : they searched the house :
The Cid slept well : but Leper none was found :
Sudden that chamber brightened like the sun
New risen o'er waves, and in its splendor stood
A Man in snowy raiment speaking thus :
" Sleepest thou, Rodrigo ? " Thus my Cid replied,
" My Lord, I slept ; but sleep not ; who art thou ? "
He spake, and, rising, in that splendor knelt :
And answer came : " Thy Brother-man am I,
In heaven thy Patron, though the least in heaven,
Lazarus, thy brother, who unhonored lay
At Dives' gate. To-day thou honored'st me :
Therefore thy Jesus this to thee accords,
That whensoe'er in time of peril or pain,
Or dread temptations dealing with the soul,
Again that strong Breath blows upon thy heart,
Nor angel's breath that Breath shall be, nor man's,
But Breath immortal arming thy resolve,
So long as Humbleness and Love are thine,
With strength as though the total Hosts of Heaven
Leaned on thy single sword. The work thou workest
That hour shall prosper. Moor and Christian, both,
Shall fear thee and thy death be glorified."
Slowly that splendor waned away : not less
Hour after hour the Cid prayed on. At morn

1892.] LEGENDS OF THE CID. 749

Forth from that village forest-girt we rode
Ere flashed a dew-drop on its lightest spray
Or woke its earliest bird.

Thenceforward knights

Flocked daily to the Cid. Each month, each week
The Impostor's hosts, with all their banners green
Moon-blazoned, fled before him like the wind.
Now champaign broad, now fortress eyeing hard
From beetling cliff the horizon's utmost bound
Witnessed well pleased the overthrow of each :
Merida fell, Evora, Badajoz,
Bega in turn ; more late Estramadura.
Fiercest of those great conflicts was the fifth :
From that red battle-field my Cid despatched
Unbounded spoil that raised a mighty tower
O'er Burgos' church wherein he was baptized.
Moreover, after every conquering march
Huge doles he sent to Christian and to Moor;
For thus he said. "Though war be sport to knights
The tears of poor men and their breadless babes
Bedew the trampled soil." His vow fulfilled,
Five victories won, five months gone by, with joy
Once more to Bivar's towers the Cid returned.
There, at its gate, they stood who loved him best :
On the third step as when he saw them last
His Mother and Ximena.

Musing sat,

The legend of that Bridal at an end,
Long time those watchers. Lastly rose a knight,
The youngest of that company elect,
Silent till then, as slender as a maid ;
With countenance innocent as childhood's self
Yet venerable as a priest's gray-haired :
He spake : " A bridal then, and now a death,
A short glad space between them ! Such is life !
That -means our earthly life is but betrothal;
The marriage is where marriage vows are none.
Lo there ! once more the altar lights flash forth :
Ere long that Widow- Wife will kneel before them<
Join we the Ritual." Eastward moved the knights,
And, kneeling near the altar, with the monks
Entoned the Miserere.

AUBREY DE VERE.

(TO BE CONTINUED.)

750 THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. [Aug.,

THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW.

THE last session of the Parliament which has just been dis-
solved was too short, and its members were too much engrossed
in personal political questions to effect any very marked pro-
gress with measures for the amelioration of social evils. One
measure, however, of which much is hoped has become a law,
and that is the Small Holdings Bill, of which we have given an
account, and which went through both Houses substantially un-
changed. It now remains to be seen whether the object for
which it was passed will be effected the prevention of the mi-
gration to the towns of the rural population. There are those
who are sceptical upon this point, and among them persons
of great experience and impartiality. Some point to France,
where, by the Napoleonic legislation, for many years the land
has necessarily been sub-divided into small holdings, and yet
the migration to the towns is said to be as marked in
France as it is in England. But, as is well known, the compul-
sory division of land by law in France has been carried so far
that it is impossible for the small proprietors to secure a living
from the cultivation of their infinitesimal holdings. The failure
of this extreme of sub-division need not prove the failure of the
moderate measure recently adopted in England, and to us the
action of the House of Lords seems on this account to have
been wise when it rejected an amendment made in the Small
Holdings Bill by the House of Commons which provided that,
in the event of the death of the owner of one of these holdings
intestate, the property should be divided among the children in
equal shares.

The government has adopted another expedient for remedy-
ing the over-population, not of the large cities, but of the High-
lands of Scotland an expedient, however, which meets with
somewhat severe criticism. The British Columbian government
has made itself entirely responsible for the well-being of as large
a number of crofters as may wish to leave their own congested
homes. The government hopes to find in these immigrants per-
sons fitted to develop not only the agricultural industry, but
also the fisheries of British Columbia. The only obstacle is the
want of ready money, and to remove this an appeal has been

1892.] THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. 751

made to the British Government. One of the last acts of the
late Parliament was to sanction a loan to British Columbia of
150,000 for the purpose of carrying out this scheme of coloniza-
tion. The opponents of the proposal maintained that there
would be plenty of room for the crofters in their own country,
if the land devoted to deer forests by the wealthy were applied
to more useful objects. They were unable, however, to convince
the promoters of the measure, and the gain of British Columbia
will indeed be brought about, but at a loss to Scotland.

For the first time for many years no proposal for regulating
the liquor traffic was introduced into either House of Parliament.
The reason, of course, was that the dissolution was known to be
so near that it was not worth while to discuss the question over
again. Moreover, previous discussions have secured for the projects
of the United Kingdom Alliance definite acceptance by the
party which recognizes Mr. Gladstone as its head, and the fate
of future legislation depends upon the action of this party now
placed in power by the general election. While it would not be true
to say that every Conservative candidate is against local option
and every Liberal in its favor, it cannot be denied that the Con-
servative party as a body will resist the suppression of public
houses should this suppression be made without due compensa-

tion.

- -

The Old Age Pension plan has, by the labors of the com-
mittee which took upon itself the task of dealing with the mat-
ter, received a final shape. We have already given the main
outlines, and the details are of somewhat too technical a char-
acter to be interesting. No progress was, of course, made with
the measure in the late session of Parliament, its attention
having been occupied by other subjects. But it is meeting with
somewhat severe criticism throughout the country, especially at
the annual meetings of the Friendly societies which have lately
been held. The grand master of the Manchester Unity of Odd-
fellows, the strongest of these societies, spoke of its authors as
" well-meaning people, whose scheme was but another form of
providing that out-door relief which has proved so pauperizing
in its effects." He contended that, if it were recognized by the
state that an industrious man could not, by his own exertions,
save sufficient to provide for his old age, such recognition would
have a demoralizing effect. But what if such is a fact ? It
would be still more demoralizing, he maintained, to provide by

752 THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. [Aug.,

state help for the lazy and the intemperate. But Mr. Chamber-
lain's scheme only provides for those who are able and willing
to help themselves to a certain extent. Other objections were
made by the grand master, but not, as it seems to us, of such
strength as to form a serious obstacle to its acceptance by im-
partial, disinterested minds. In one point, however, the Friendly
societies give proof of a wisdom of conduct which might be imi-
tated with profit by others ; they will not accept a state sub-
sidy, for they see that such acceptance will involve state con-
trol, and it has been by means of absolute independence that
they have attained the success which has been so remarkable.
Moreover, the Friendly societies are not going to try to act
the part of the dog in the manger, but propose, and have even
prepared plans for, providing a superannuation fund for all who
attain the age of sixty-five, and even for making it obligatory
upon all who wish to share the benefits of the societies. These
proposals have not, however, been finally adopted as yet.

The Free Education Act has now been in force for nearly one
year ; and although it is too soon to be able to form an accur-
ate judgment of the full effects of the act the following re-
sults of its action may be mentioned : There has been a large
increase, not only in the number of children upon the books, but
also in the average attendance of the children. This has been
most marked in the case of infants, and this fact gives special
satisfaction, as it is found by experience that, when children have
once begun to attend school in early years, that attendance is
more easily secured afterwards. A second result of the Free
Education Act, coupled with the special efforts made upon its
introduction by the Post Office Savings Banks to afford facilities
for the working of these banks in connection with the schools,
has been the large increase in the amount of deposits made by
the children. In the year 1891-92, after the passing of the act,
the number of penny banks which had come into operation had.
risen from 230 to 2,806, and the number of , depositors from
151,500 to 610,050. From this it appears that a part, at least,
of the money which has been saved by the parents through the
grant made by the government is being laid by for future use,
and for the children's well being.

There are two other items of educational intelligence which
are of importance, and both of which go to show how the state
is extending its influence in this matter. The minister who was

1892.] THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. 753

in charge of the department of education during the last Parlia-
ment announced that he had changed the opinion he formerly held
that secondary education ought to be left free and uncontrolled
by the state, and expressed the hope that the new Parliament
will bring the control of education of all kinds under one de-
partment. Proceeding to a more detailed explanation of what
he considered desirable, he advocated a complete inspection by
the state of all endowed schools, coupled with a registration of
schools and teachers. We cannot say that this means that
every teacher, even in private schools, must receive a state
license as a condition of being permitted to exercise his
profession, but it is a step in that direction, advocated too by
the minister of the party which is the most opposed to the ex-
tension of state control. - The second item is that the Free Edu-
cation Act has been extended to Ireland, and, along with the
gift of money, compulsory education in the larger towns has
been enacted. The Irish members fought a good battle on
behalf of the Christian Brothers, and secured from the govern-
ment a promise of such a modification of the conscience clause
as would obviate the objections which the Brothers entertain to
the present clause. At feast, we suppose that it amounts to this
in fact, although in form it was only an undertaking to re-
fer the matter to the Education Commissioners for their con-
ideration. But, as the Irish members were satisfied with this
ndertaking, it is doubtless a substantial concession of the
Brothers' claims.

The dissolution of Parliament in a somewhat early period of
the session did not afford much opportunity for the enactment
of laws for the benefit of the people at large. The session was
not, however, altogether fruitless. The Small Holdings Act, to
which we have already referred, an act for securing to sailors
better food and more suitable accommodations ; a measure to
prevent betting and borrowing money by persons under age, as
rell as an act to render more easy the punishment of the im-
moral clergymen of the Established church, do not indeed con-
stitute a long list of social ameliorative measures, but are at
least steps in the right direction. A law restricting to seventy-
two per week the number of hours for which it is lawful to em-
ploy women in stores forms the most notable step in the exten-
sion of Parliamentary protection to the working classes, the
Eight Hours Bill for miners having been rejected by a majority
of 272 against 160. The Salvation Army has proved itself

754 THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. [Aug.,

strong enough in Parliament to secure the repeal of the obnox-
ious clauses in the Eastbourne Act, in virtue of which its mem-
bers have been so much harassed. For a bill empowering local
authorities Town Councils and similar bodies not only to pur-
chase land, but to ear-mark it and to claim the unearned incre-
ment, as many as one hundred and twenty-two supporters were
found. This seems to show that the voices in favor of the pub-
lic ownership or control of land in one form or another are
meeting with an increasing degree of support.

While it is too soon to form a judgment with reference to
the character and extent of the social and industrial legislation of
the new Parliament for this depends upon what place the Home
Rule question will take it may not be without interest and im-
portance to point out the attitude of the various leaders
towards these questions, and the practical proposals made by
them. Upon one point there is unlimited agreement that it is
the duty of Parliament to give to labor and social matters a
large share of attention. In this Lord Salisbury agrees with
Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Chamberlain with Sir William Harcourt.
The diminution of poverty, the prevention of ruinous disputes
in trade, the amendment of the Poor Law, the protection of the
lives and healths of the industrial community are, according to
Lord Salisbury, matters of which it is not easy to exaggerate the
momentous interest. In Mr. Gladstone's eyes the chief recom-
mendation of the avowed aims of the Liberal party is that their
attainment will enable the workingmen to secure for themselves
the legislation which they see to be desirable. And one of the
reasons which animates him to struggle so earnestly for Home
Rule, he declares to be the fact that Ireland may be described
as a nation of laborers.

But every reader of the speeches and addresses of the candi-
dates of the various parties will see that the line of cleavage with
reference to legislative interference with industrial questions is
not identical with the line which divides the parties. For exam-
ple: Mr. John Morley voted against the Eight Hours Bill for
miners, and Mr. Gladstone did not support it, while Mr. Cham-
berlain and several Conservatives, with a large number of Glad-
stonians, voted for the second reading. It seems probable, there-
fore, that the much to be desired exclusion of questions of this
kind from the sphere of party conflict will be brought about, and
that like questions in which the honor and interest of the

1892.] THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. 755

whole country are at stake, all parties setting aside jealousy and
cupidity, will unite to find the best solutions. Should this be the
case, the outlook for the future will be bright indeed, for there
will be placed at the service of the workingmen the trained in-
telligence of the country unperverted by the corrupting bias of

partisan strife.

. *

Mr. Chamberlain has perhaps entered into fuller details than
any other leader as to the course which legislation should take
in dealing with industry. As a remedy for strikes he proposes
the establishment of courts of arbitration to decide all cases
that may be brought to them. To preside over these courts a
judge of character and distinction should be appointed, and he
should have the assistance of assessors acquainted with the par-
ticular trade under consideration on every occasion. Mr. Cham-
berlain does not propose to confer on these courts power to com-
pel adherence to their decrees, being of opinion that a court
so constituted would absolutely carry with it the sympathies
and support of the public, and that without public support no
strike and no resistance to a strike would be successful. Another
point which Mr. Chamberlain would amend is the manner of
compensating for injuries done to workmen. Under the law as
it at present stands, a workman who has been injured without
his own fault, but by that of a fellow-workman, can obtain no
compensation. Mr. Chamberlain thinks that the loss in a case
of this kind should be part of the cost of production, and ought
to fall on the consumer. He would have the first liability fall

pon the employer, so that the workman and his family should
compensated by him. The employer is to protect himself by

nsurance, and a very small insurance would be sufficient to es-
tablish a fund from which all compensations could be made. As
we have already seen, Mr. Chamberlain is a supporter of legisla-
tive action for the purpose of obtaining the restriction of labor
to eight hours. To his pension scheme for the aged we have so
often referred that we need not say more now than that he is
not to be deterred from his efforts to pass it into law by the
opposition which it is receiving from the Friendly societies. He
professes, however, that should a more feasible plan be found he
will readily relinquish his own in its favor.

up<

in'*

There is a general agreement that there must be in the im-
mediate future a modification of the established system of Poor
Law reliefs The unduly lax system which existed sixty years

756 THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. [Aug.,

ago was superceded by the unduly rigid system still in existence.
Many working men, although through long lives they have been
industrious, honest, and sober, but whose industry, honesty, and
sobriety have not such are the conditions of life in England-
enabled them to provide for their old age, are compelled to go to
the workhouse in the end, and when there they are treated in
the same way as the tramp, the drunkard, and the vicious who
have been brought to poverty through their own fault. It is now
generally recognized that should more ambitious projects fail
there must be a change in this respect at least, and that some
means must be found for discriminating between the two classes
of the poor, and for granting different treatment to the deserving.
In another way, too, the present system is faulty and directly en-
courages thriftlessness, for if a man has been able to obtain for him-
self a small annuity but one insufficient for his support, he can
obtain no relief unless he relinquishes this fruit of his toil and
forethought. The removal of these and other defects is recog-
nized by leading members of all parties as a matter which calls
for immediate attention.

Another attack has been made upon the Free Trade policy
of Great Britain, and although it has not, as could not have
been expected, been successful, it indicates the existence of a
by no means contemptible opposition to this article of commer-
cial faith. A congress has lately been held in London of all
the Chambers of Commerce of Great Britain and her colonies
and dependencies. At this congress Sir Charles Tupper ex-
pounded the policy which Canadians and many other colonists
would like to see adopted by the mother country. It is not
a very magnanimous policy, nor does it show that there is in ex-
istence any great willingness on the part of the colonists to make
sacrifices. While wishing England, of course, to maintain the
entire freedom of trade towards the colonies which already ex-
ists, he does not wish that she should continue this freedom of
trade towards other countries, but that a differential duty should
be put upon imports from these countries, so far as these im-
ports compete with colonial products. In return for this, it might
have been expected that the colonies would at least have offered
freedom of trade for some English products. But no ; all that
is proposed is a slight reduction in duties on a few articles. It
clearly seems to be a very one-sided proposal, and yet it found
in the congress thirty-four supporters as against seventy-nine op-
ponents, and when the Chambers voted as units there were thirty-

1892.] THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. 757

three in favor and only fifty-five against. This congress of
course was a body fully representative of the business of the
empire, and it certainly seems to show a marked growth of pro-
tectionist conviction when a proposition of this kind could receive
so much support.

It is interesting to note the changes of opinion among work-
ingmen with respect to the reforms demanded by them. It may
even be important, for it will teach caution, so that undue haste
may not be shown in accepting proposals which after all may
not afford a permanent solution may not be really demanded
by those most interested. In 1890 the first International Miners'
Conference was held in Belgium. At this conference the Belgium
and the French representatives were anxious that an internation-
al miners' strike should be declared organized for the forthcom-
ing first of May, with a view to securing an eight-hours day.
To this proposal a strenuous and a successful opposition was
offered by the English delegates. At the second congress held
in 1891 in France, a change of opinion had taken place among
the French miners, who now opposed an international strike,
while the Belgians, formerly most ardent advocates, were divided
in opinion, and the strongest opponents in the previous year
the English delegates showed themselves much more disposed
to entertain the proposal. Ninety-five per cent, of the miners in
Derbyshire had given their adhesion to the plan, and the Fife-
shire miners were willing to support the demand of the Conti-
nental miners for an eight-hours day by going out on strike, al-
though they had themselves already secured this limitation of
hours. The matter was, however, deferred to the next congress,
which has lately been held in London. In this congress, how-
ever, very little has been done, and the movement in favor of
a general strike seems to be in complete abeyance. The greater
part of the proceedings was devoted to questions concerning the
manner of voting, which, although they may be of great impor-
tance to the members of the congress, do not interest to any
very great extent the outside world.

The difficulties which are involved in the attempt to render
education undenominational without at the same time completely
secularizing it, have been illustrated lately in a case which came
before the London School Board. In the schools which are un-
der the care of this board, the Bible is read and taught and ex-
amination made as to its contents. It is treated as a true, his-
VOL. LV. 49

758 THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. [Aug.,

torical work. One of the examiners in the Scripture knowledge
thus given reported that he had only one regret in reading the
examination papers sent in by the children, and that was that
he found that many of the children gave great prominence to
the idea that the Deity was an avenging one, and that one was
to do right from the fear of eternal punishment. He, therefore,
submitted to the board the proposal that the children should be
taught that " God is Love." This report led one of the mem-
bers of the School Board to move " that the teachers be instruc-
ted to teach the doctrine of the Universal Fatherhood of God."
After a long and interesting discussion, the proposal was put on
one side ; but what cannot be put on one side is the proof it
affords of the impossibility of teaching Holy Scripture without
explanation of some kind or other, and that the attempt to do
without all explanations only leaves it to the immature minds of
children to make a religion out of the Bible for themselves.
With what success, may be judged from the words of one of the
speakers during the discussion, who said that a large number of
the children who had received their education in the Board
Schools were in the same condition, from a religious point of
view, as he had found them when working under Lord Shaftes-
bury thirty years ago in the Field Lane Mission. They were, he
said, densely ignorant on all subjects, and profoundly ignorant
on religious matters. If this is the result of a system in which
at least some knowledge of the Holy Scriptures forms a part of
the course, what will follow should every kind of religious in-
struction be excluded ?

The old saying that no man's career can be pronounced suc-
cessful until its end has come, is well illustrated by recent events
in connection with Prince Bismarck's visit to Vienna. In Prussia,
which owes to his genius the commanding position which it at
present holds, he was coldly treated as he passed through, and
this by order of the court which he had served so well. In
Saxony his welcome was enthusiastic, while in Austria, which
owes to him its humiliation and defeat, he was warmly welcomed
by the populace. The Emperor's doors were, however, closed to
him on account of the opposition of his own sovereign. This is
a wonderful change, for Prince Bismarck's hardest fights through
his whole life have been against popular rights and in support of
the aristocracy, and now he is honored, so far as he is honored
at all, by those whom he has injured, and slighted by those
whom he has befriended. For it is said that none of the nobility

1892.] THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. 759

maintain social intercourse with him, for fear of offending the
Emperor. In the bitterness of his spirit he was led to criticise
the policy of the government in a way which seems to have
given great scandal to the Germans, and has brought upon him-
self threats of an official prosecution. Whether anything will
come of it, remains to be seen. But the outcome of it all is
that the reconciliation with the Emperor which many desire is
farther off than ever.

The French, having expelled the teaching of religion from
their schools, are compelled to listen to harangues in favor of
anarchy in their courts of justice ; and juries which have lost the
fear of God are filled with so great a fear of man that they
make this very declaration of the most revolting principles an
extenuating circumstance to mitigate the punishment of the worst
of crimes. However, for the time being there has been a cessa-
tion of outrages, and France is already beginning to prepare for a

great Exposition with which to close this nineteenth century.

The Belgian elections for the Constituent Assembly, upon which
the task of revising the Constitution will devolve, have rendered
it very doubtful what the result will be. A two-thirds majority
is necessary in order to effect any change, and the elections have
so far been successful to the Liberals as to deprive the Conserva-
tives of this majority, without securing for the opposed party
the requisite strength. Possibly, therefore, there may be no re-
vision at all. All the sacrifices which the Portuguese were prom-
ising to make in order to pay their debts have either not been
made at all or have proved insufficient, and this kingdom must

now be ranked amongst the defaulting states of the world. To

all her other calamities Russia has to add a visitation of the
cholera. Were it not for the pity which the sufferings of in-
dividuals (who are themselves guiltless) inspire, we could look on
with equanimity at the spectacle of Russia's woes. We do not
in many things agree with Mr. Herbert Spencer ; but in this we
do agree : that any misfortune which would break up this semi-
barbarous, overgrown empire would be a blessing to the world
at large.

760 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Aug.,

TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS.

A NOVEL in form, Calmire* may be more truly described as
a sort of bulky agnostic tract ; or, better, as the " Sanford and
Merton " of benevolent anti-Christianity wherein the part of Mr.
Barlow is taken by the elder Calmire, and that of Tommy Mer-
ton, the spoiled child of crass infidelity, is played to the life by
his nephew Muriel. It is hardly fair, perhaps, to see a Harry
Sanford in Nina, although she has many unsophisticated virtues,
and, under the inspiration of Muriel and the tutelage of the
broad-minded Legrand, finally broadens out of a dilettante Episco-
palianism into earnest and soul-filling (!) agnosticism. The process-
es by which Muriel is so far ameliorated that he ceases to describe
Christian doctrine in general as " an awful lot of rot," its teach-
ers as " blasted fools," are chiefly carried on in the form of dia-
logues between him and his uncle, whose aim is to make the
youth see that there is a core of truth even in Christianity, as
in all religions, and that " science," while getting rid of dogma,
is safe to "add support to all the really important features of"
old-fashioned orthodoxy. Muriel's moral education is accomplish-
ed by his relations with two young girls Nina, his equal in social
station and natural and acquired endowments, and Minerva, the
sister of one of Legrand Calmire's factory hands. With the latter
Muriel has a guilty "affair " in which his heart is not at all interest-
ed and concerning which his emancipated conscience seems never
to have reproached him until its natural consequences were about
to appear in the shape of a child. Then he banishes himself
from Nina, whom he has learned to love, and wanders abroad
trying to solve various questions, among them whether marriage
without love or suitability would repair the evil he has wrought
and whether his crime was as great as his punishment. He de-
cides negatively in both cases, and is backed up in his decision
by his philosophic Mentor. Muriel writes to his uncle :

"Are men's punishments in any way proportioned to the evil
they intend ? It's not remorse I'm suffering most from, at least
as I've always imagined remorse, nor even realization of the con-
sequences of my crime or fault or misfortune : for I'm not al-
ways quite ready to admit it a crime. Yet sometimes, when I
judge it from its consequences, it seems as if it must be the
blackest crime that man ever committed."

* Calmire. New York : Macmillan & Co.

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 761

To this Legrand replies :

" As far as the consequences of man's acts are regulated by
nature outside of man's will there is no room for justice. It
is a purely anthropomorphic conception ; we read it from our-
selves into Nature. Thousands of men do just as you did and
go scot-free. If Nature is just to them, she is unjust to you ;
if she is just to you, she is unjust to them. The fact is : she is
neither just nor unjust. Justice regards motives, but Nature out-
side of man knows nothing of them : she is as merciless to ig-
norance as to crime. Our only safe guide, then, is the absolute
hard experience that the race has had of Nature's ways, and
that is embraced in the standard morality in the religions and
out. Yet never forget that Nature, in the social sanctions, in
conscience, and in the hopes and fears of the religions, has
evolved agencies which do reward and punish motive. But, out-
side of man, Nature has simply her laws and forces. Anything
we do sets them all in motion. . . . Yet, unless we absolutely
know that they are in position to crush us, we start them on
some slight temptation, hoping they will miss us just that once ;
and all the time we know (or would know, if it were not for our
pestilent anthropomorphism) that Nature has no intelligence, no
pity, no justice, to turn her forces to the right or left. Those
qualities are man's, and make him ineffably Nature's superior,
except as you think of Nature including him."

Anthropomorphism is Calmire's bete noire as, indeed, it would
be ours if the God revealed in Jesus Christ were rightly includ-
ed under such a conception of Him as haunts this author. But
we are not concerned to defend the existence of any God who
can be imagined as wholly absent from and extraneous to, the
universe. " In Him we live and move and have our being,"
said St Paul to the heathen concerning the God and Father of
our Lord Jesus Christ. Or, as Father Hecker puts it in one of
his letters : " Let the immanence and the transcendence of God
be the two poles of all your thinking.'.' But this conception, as
held by Christians, who are, indeed, forbidden to think of God
under the belittling terms drawn from mere humanity, seems to
this author inseparably bound up with another conception of
" Nature" and "Law" with which revealed Christianity is in-
compatible. Perhaps it is enough to say in answer that it has
not seemed so to minds as subtle as an Augustine's or a New-
man's. This is the place, moreover, to say that although he
lumps every variety of sect and schism together with Catholicity
and calls it all " the church " when he has anything favorable to
say concerning the past or present benefits conferred on humanity
by Christianity, yet he cherishes that sort of petty spite toward

762 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Aug.,

Catholicity which may always be traced to ignorance in other-
wise fair-minded men. Very severe on " dogma," he has so
singular a lack of knowledge of both dogmatic theology and
Christian philosophy as to be unaware that a large proportion
of the speculative talk addressed to Nina by Legrand Calmire,
and accepted by her as undermining Christianity itself, would
pass muster in the schools of Christian thought. The talk is
mixed, indeed, with irrelevancies and follies, and it suffers by be-
ing addressed to a listener who has, as she expresses it, " sup-
posed that what we see is all of Nature; and that God was a
man sitting off somewhere away." Nina professes to have " really
grown beyond that," under Calmire's teaching, but the author
plainly believes that the Christian world is yet sitting in a simi-
lar darkness. Perhaps the Christians he knows most about are
really doing so, but to the rest of us the many true things in
this book are by no means new. For that matter, neither are
the false ones. On the whole, the absolute falsities it contains
are pretty well balanced by undoubted verities, and we take it
that the author has written in good faith. And yet his book is
one that only conceit and ignorance could have fathered in its
present shape. That shape, by the way, is -such an immensely
ponderous one that, for one reader whom its errors will repel, a
hundred will be sure to reject it on the ground of its unmiti-
gated dullness. Of its lax morality, as evinced in the affair of
Minerva Granzine, and the convenient disposition of her in mar-
riage to a " gentle giant " of a factory hand in Calmire's employ
whose scruples were naturally less delicate than Muriel's, we
have only to say that, although it fits with extraodinary aptness
into the agnostic, evolutionary aristocratic order of things toward
which the universe as beheld by Calmire appears to move, it
will prove abhorrent enough to those who have not " advanced "
beyond democracy and Christianity.

The question of man's moral responsibility, discussed in the
book just noticed, from the agnostic and "scientific" standpoint
how oddly those two epithets go together, yet with what persis-
tence they are coupled comes up again in the next story on our
list,* and is, on the whole, more satisfactorily treated. Miss Ser-
geant expresses herself wonderfully well ; her style has distinction
and a quiet charm which gives her a niche apart among contempor-
ary novelists. Her present tale is cast into the form of an au-
tobiography that of a dissenting minister, the tragedy of whose

* The Story of a Penitent Soul. By Adeline Sergeant. New York : Lovell, Coryell ,
& Co.

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 763

life is enacted in a dismal little town in the midst of the Lin-
colnshire fens, where every external surrounding is of a sort to
deepen the gloom of a nature already overshadowed by hered-
ity and circumstance. The child of shame, although ignorant of
the fact until he verges upon manhood, Stephen Dart had been
brought up by his uncle, a Methodist minister, and passes
through many phases of religious experience while yet a boy.
These were not such as greatly affected his outer life, since they
tended to cultivate a morbid introspection rather than to pre-
serve him from small deceits, dishonesties and disobediences such
as flourish in the soil of most children's lives, and especially in
that of those who hear a great deal about religious feeling but
are given very little direct religious instruction of a practical
kind. Stephen thought less of "goodness" in those days, he
says, than of various experiences which he knew under the
names of " conviction," " conversion," and " justification," culmi-
nating in a state called " entire sanctification," which he never
reached. He is not represented as scoffing at such words as
these, but merely as expressing his belief that they were put too
readily into the mouths of the young and ignorant. He found
the whole thing terribly puzzling.

u I had been * converted ' surely, and had ' gained peace/
but what was the good of it when I lost my peace and grew
deadly tired of prayer and Bible-reading in a week's time? I
had for years a habit of being ' converted,' as I called it, every
other Sunday, and of backsliding in the course of the week,
always comforting myself with the reflection that I should be
sure to return to the narrow way on the following Sabbath.
These were the mere natural ups and downs of a susceptible
temperament ; but I was then fully persuaded that if I died on
the Saturday (say) before the day of conversion had come round
again, I should assuredly go to hell. I conceived God as lying
in wait for my soul, like a hungry cat for a mouse."

With a firm hand the steps are traced by which Stephen's
childish beliefs, never wholly outgrown, are gradually modified ;
first by an admixture of Universalism taught by the first of his
senior's to whom he has been able to look up with blended
reverence and affection, and afterwards, just as he is about to
assume his ministerial " charge," by a dose of science adminis-
tered by a materialistic physician of his own age, and fortified
by the works of " Spencer, Darwin, Huxley, Galton, and some
of those German fellows." It is the Robert Elsmere process on a
smaller scale, the end being different because of the entirely dif-

764 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Aug.,

ferent aim Miss Sergeant has in view in telling the sjory of
Stephen Dart. In certain respects her book is strongly remin-
iscent of Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter. Nor does it suffer by
the comparison. There is an element of ghastliness in the retri-
bution demanded by Angus Fleming, which rivals, if it does not
excel, the self-imposed, never-completed penance of Arthur in
the older story. Its moral lesson, too, is higher as well as more
definitely given. One, truth, however, which is thrown into strong
relief by the interblending of the Flemings with Stephen's life
probably does so by natural sequence, not by intention on the
author's part ; the utter inefficacy, that is, of an absolutely in-
terior and personal religion, resting on no fixed dogma, and des-
titute of sacramental aids, in the case of supersensitive and
morbidly introspective souls such as she has delineated in Steph-
en Dart. What a boon sacramental confession would have been
to a soul like his, repentant, anxious to atone, and willing to
suffer, yet forced into a predicament where every act must have
the savor of hypocrisy, and something, too, of its reality. Lack-
ing that boon, Stephen wins his way at last, though barely,
through sin and suffering to a half-questioning reliance on the
grace of God and the cross of Jesus Christ as the only refuge
from the horrors of the doctrine of heredity. In a fine passage
of the closing chapter, a pathetic, beautiful, powerful chapter,
from which the reader turns with moistened eyes, he says :

" If there is no supplementary force no God, if we choose to
name it so in all this universe to help us, then we are lost in-
deed. We are mere captives, tied and bound with the chain of
our fathers' sins. ... If there is no purely spiritual aid to
be got or given, then most of us may as well give up trying
after goodness. Very few men, if any, can rise above them-
selves. Nearly every one has a legacy of evil tendency left
him by his progenitors; to many an almost intolerable burden.
The doctrine of heredity, as laid down by some writers of our
time, and assimilated vaguely by innumerable readers, is a stum-
bling-block to many ; and I believe that there is no way of sur-
mounting it but by a firm grasp on the supernatural. That is
the last word I have to say, and if I were a preacher still this
would be the teaching I would try to impress upon my hearers :
that, strong as temperament, hereditary tendency, and environ-
ment may be, there is something outside us that may be strong-
er still the grace of God. . . . There may be hope for
others, for great and noble souls with an inheritance of virtue ;
they may be able to dispense with conscious appeal to the God
who leads them though they know it not ; but for the meaner
of men, for the weak and the sinful, the foolish, and mean,

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 765

and base for men, my brother, like you and me, with iron
weights at our feet, and shackles on our limbs what hope for
us but in the great divine Ideal of the God Man who walked
the earth some nineteen centuries ago, whose hands, with the
marks of the nails in them, still draw us to himself, whose
brow is still surmounted with its crown of thorns ? "

Books like this of Miss Sergeant's and those of Edna Lyall
mark a tendency as powerful as that of which Mrs. Humphrey
Ward's novels are a product and infinitely more healthy. Not
written by Catholics or for them, and failing by defect where
Catholic readers are concerned, they have, nevertheless, a lesson
for intelligent and earnest non-Catholics which may be all the
more powerful on that account. Such writers are pointers to a
goal which they consciously do not attain. They look toward a
land of promise, but their sight is avowedly dim. They hope,
but they are not certain. The taint of heresy has weakened
their grasp on revelation, and the mirage of " science " bewilders
them. What a message has yet to be delivered by some heaven-
sent apostle to souls like these ! And what a harvest might be
gathered were they once made free of all the gifts of God, and
then set to work on their own lives in his vineyard !

The lady who writes curiously feminine novels under the pen
name of John Strange Winter has produced a very breezy and
amusing one, to which she has given a rather misleading title.*
At all events, no one need look into it hoping to find brooms
and dusters, or that " high life below stairs," which the original
ventors of " the lady help " presumably had in mind when pro-
cting that curious product of decaying gentility in English life.
Girls who occupy such posts as Audrey fills in this story are
common enough in life and literature, but they go by other ap-
pellations. It is the airy, unaffected style, the easy wit and bril-
liancy with which Audrey's very amusing adventures are told
which make this novel a pleasant successor to Booties Baby.
There is no harm in it and there is plenty of entertainment.

As much may fairly be said of Mrs. John Sherwood's New
York society novel, A Transplanted Rose.^ There is an overdose
of etiquette in it, however. If its purpose were social in the
larger sense, or religious in any sense, and so much direct teach-
ing were given on either head as is here inculcated on table
manners, modes of dress, and the arbitrary inventions of society
decorum, the author would be accused of preaching. As it is,

* Experiences of a Lady Help. New York : Hovendon Co.

\A Transplanted Rose. By Mrs. John Sherwood. New York : Harper & Brothers.

766 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Aug.,

her story skillfully combines amusement of a popular sort with
other matters usually confined to handbooks of deportment. It
will probably be all the more successful on that account.

The Cassells have brought out a new cheap edition of Mrs,
Burton Harrison's pretty Virginia story, Flower de Hundred* It
is pre-eminently one of those American novels of which we once
heard an English woman say that they always made her hungry.
Perhaps the feasting in the earlier half of the book was meant
by way of provision for the fasting in the latter half, when the
civil war had pretty much emptied Southern larders. It is a
clever piece of work in several ways, sufficiently complicated in
plot, agreeable in its presentation of character and manners, and,
we suppose, faithful in its local color. Patriotic, too, in its way,
and Union in its prevailing sentiment, even though its male Vir-
ginians all battle under the Confederate flag until Lee's surren-
der at Appomattox. The half-dozen pages devoted to the " pa-
triot chief Garibaldi " and his doings at Palermo in 1860 are so
much sheer pad, neither advancing the story, developing the
character of Miles, nor otherwise of any use except to create a
diversion and afford occasion for a letter to the heroine which
might as well have been written from any other spot on the two
continents as from Garibaldi's camp. But apart from this the
book has no serious artistic blemish.

Whether it be the result of art or the gift of nature, Mr,
Morley Roberts has a very direct and simple style which is in
excellent keeping with the storyf he has to tell. His hero has a
blunt straightforwardness of diction and spins out his yarn of a
sailor's year ashore, spent in winning his love and conquering his
deadly enemy, in a very taking way. The action passes partly
on shipboard, where a drunken captain, a mutinous Malay, and
three pretty women make things lively ; and partly in British
Columbia, in farming, gold-mining, and lastly in some deadly
fighting between the hero and the revengeful Malay, who has
tracked him with the aid of another disreputable, but picturesque,
rascal named Siwash Jim. Mr. Roberts shows evidence of other
qualities that go to make a writer than the mere ability to tell
a story well. His book shows observation and a shrewd knowl-
edge of human nature.

When we have said that Ernst Eckstein's new romance^ is

* Flower de Hundred. The Story of a Virginia Plantation. By Mrs. Burton Harrison,
New York : Cassell Publishing Co.

t The Mate of the Vancouver. By Morley Roberts. New York: Cassell Publishing Co.

| Hertha : A Romance. By Ernst Eckstein. Translated by Mrs. Edward Hamilton Bell.
New York : George Gottsberger Peck.

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 767

well written and has been agreeably translated, we have exhausted
all the praise we are able to give it. It is a painful and pernicious
story of love misplaced and conjugal infidelity, and it has appar-
ently no better reason for being than is supplied by the exi-
gencies of a novelist by profession who must work at his calling
if he would earn his bread. Hertha is a beautiful young girl
who marries for love, or what she takes to be that feeling, a
man some forty odd years her senior. After a period of great
happiness, and the birth of their child, she meets an erratic ar-
tist between whom, and herself a sympathy springs up which
would have led to nothing had her husband been animated by
anything higher than sentimental folly. Hertha is high-minded
and naturally virtuous, and would never have been betrayed into
misconduct. But Otto von Auzendorff, who has always felt that
the disparity was too great between him and his wife, and who
reads her nature very correctly, resolves to take himself out of
her way by a suicide so managed that it shall seem an accidental
death. Then, after a year or so, Hertha marries her artist, who
turns out to be an uncommon scoundrel, who finally drives her
into insanity by his infidelities and his cruelty to her boy. This
is the gist of a story in which the scenes and characters are de-
scribed with a somewhat heavy, Germanic attempt at vivacity,
and considerable artistic skill. But as a whole it is a leaden,

holly earthly mass, unleavened by religious motives in any form
d destitute of true conceptions of duty even on the merely
man plane. It falls far beneath the level of the same author's

istorical romance, Nero, reviewed in this magazine some two

cars since.

I. THE RECTOR OF THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY ON
EDUCATION.*

Ii
Bishop Keane has been for many years one of the foremost
our prelates in promoting the cause of Catholic education,
hile Bishop of Richmond he provided that every parish in his
)cese should have a parochial school. Since he resigned his
bishopric to become Rector of the Catholic University, he has
done more than any other man to place this important institute
of the highest education on a solid foundation and to inaugurate
successfully its curriculum of studies.

* Christian Education in America. A Lecture by Right Rev. John J. Keane, Bishop of
Ajasso, Rector of the Catholic University of America. Washington, D. C.: The Church
News Publishing Company.

768 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Aug.,

The present Lecture is a brief synopsis of several able and
eloquent lectures delivered in various parts of our country during
the past three years.

At his starting point, the Right Reverend Rector advances
the proposition which is indisputable, that education, which means
intellectual and moral development, is inseparable from civiliza-
tion. The nature of the civilization determines that of the edu-
cation. Heathen civilization was incurably vicious, and it abused
education for the perpetuation of its false system. It was sup-
planted by Christian civilization. Stateolatry and Caesarism, in
which the individual is sacrificed to the political society, and the
people enslaved to the sovereign power concentrated in the
hands of one or a few.

The opposite error in heathenism was an extreme indivi-
dualism.

The first principles of Christian civilization avoid both ex-
tremes. They recognize the worth of the individual, his rights
derived from God and sacred before the state ; but also his con-
dition as a social being, having duties toward his fellow-beings,
toward the state, and toward God. Christian civilization needs
and produces Christian education. As the tendency of Christian
civilization is toward the elevation of the great mass of the peo-
ple, it demands a continual extension and improvement of popu-
lar education. As in our own republic popular institutions have
attained their fullest development, popular education ought to be
brought up to the highest mark. In order to be genuine and
to fulfil its end, civilization must be Christian, and therefore
education must be likewise Christian.

In our peculiar circumstances, the great practical problem to
be solved is : How can the State do full justice to herself and
her citizens, by doing full justice to Christianity in the schools ?
Another question of still greater and more pressing consequence
is their duty. We conclude this brief notice by quoting the
words of Bishop Keane at the end of his Lecture :

" That America will one day do this we cannot for a moment
doubt. We have the fullest confidence in the fulfillment of her
providential mission as a great Christian power in the world's
future. We have fullest confidence in the good sense of the
American people, and in their love of fair play. Therefore, we
cannot but feel certain that America will yet make sure the
foundations of her Christian civilization by providing for the
youth of the land a system of Christian education. For that day
we pray and we wait in patient hope.

" Meantime the duty of Christian parents, who love their

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 769

children and their country as they ought, is manifest. They are
bound to procure for their children, by their own exertions and
with their own means, that greatest of all earthly blessings, the
priceless boon of an education which, while thoroughly sound
and thoroughly American, will also be thoroughly Christian. To
this they are called by the voice of the Church, whose councils
have repeatedly and emphatically declared that the spread of
Christian education is the great work of the age, and that no
parish is complete without a Christian school. To this they are
called by the voice of nature, by the heaven-imposed obligations
of parental duty and parental affection. Let them win their
children's everlasting gratitude by giving them that best of all
inheritances, an education fully fitting them for all their career,
for all their duties to time and to eternity. To this they are
likewise called by the voice of patriotism. For a while their
country may misunderstand their action and misjudge their mo-
tives. This we profoundly regret ; but it cannot deter us from do-
ing our duty. We will push on in our glorious work, on towards
the noble aim of placing the advantages of an excellent Chris-
tian education within the reach of every Catholic child in the
land. And the day will surely come when, all prejudices and
misunderstandings being dispelled, our country will do us
justice, and recognize that we have indeed been her best
friends.

" Brethren, the only sure foundation of both the Christian
Church and the Christian State is Christian education. In God's
name, let us redouble our energies, and make that foundation
broad and solid and everlasting."

2. A PROTESTANT VIEW OF CHRISTIANITY.*
We shall be a little curious to see how orthodox Protestants
will attempt to treat Dr. Abbott's new philosophical views of
religion, and more especially the application of his theory of
evolution to the rise and progress of Christianity. Probably the
majority of his critics will deny his theory as being fanciful,
and, as applied to religion, an assumption wholly unwarranted.
We think they will find it no easy task to refute him, and yet
hold a secure vantage ground from which to reasonably defend
the right of Protestantism to have come into existence at all.
The theory is absurd enough, but it is based upon the Protes-
tant postulate that man himself is the supreme judge of his right
and due relations with God. He has simply pushed the Protes-
tant right of private judgment to its logical consequences.

If man be the ultimate judge of religion, both of the as-
sumed truths he is to hold and of the moral duties they impose,
then, of course, all such truths and duties must be fully within

* The Evolution of Christianity, By Rev. Lyman Abbott, Boston and New York :
Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

7/0 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Aug.,

his scientific grasp, and subject to the investigation of reason
alone. Hence, Dr. Abbott rightly concludes that there never
was a supernatural revelation of divine truth or of the divine
will, neither could be. Revelation, in a sense, there may be ;
but it is nothing more than an unfolding of self-consciousness.

He has to acknowledge, and, indeed, with singular oversight
of the inexorable "laws" which the scientific and religious evo-
lutionist appear to suppose both God and nature are equally
subject to, claims that this development of self-consciousness
reached, shall we say, an abnormal height in the persons of the
patriarchs, the prophets, Christ, and the apostles. How or why
they came to be thus suddenly enlightened to a degree far
above their fellows in contravention to the orderly and uniform
working of the " laws " of intellectual and moral evolution our
nineteenth century prophet does not offer to explain. It looks a
little as if he ought to feel himself to be one among those whom
a sudden burst of self-consciousness had elevated to a higher
plane of view than priest or prophet, or even Christ himself, ever
attained. He has, if his theory be true ; and he evidently sin-
cerely believes in, and most diligently sets to work to substantiate
its truth. He preaches to the world a new theory of religion
which denies, as it must, all that mankind has hitherto believed
and held as divinely true the original constitution of man in
integrity of nature ; endowed with supernatural gifts and destiny ;
his fall, and its consequences ; the redemption ; the divinity of
Christ ; his sacrificial atonement ; the supernatural merit of
Christian suffering; the saved Christian's heaven and the lost
Christian's hell.

With Dr. Abbott, therefore, Christianity does not place man-
kind in an order of regeneration, of restitution to primitive holi-
ness and union with God. All men being " dead in Adam "
means that they all began as barbarians, little removed from the
physical, mental and spiritual attainments of the brute. Darwin,
he assures us, has settled that beyond all question. When he
comes to the consideration of the distinction between the human
and divine nature he is driven to the conclusion that they are
" essentially " identical. But, as his doctrine of evolution makes
human nature " essentially " identical with material nature, it is
plain that he is logically a Pantheist.

We feel it hardly worth our while to bring under review all
his special points on the evolution of the Bible, of theology, of
the church, of Christian society, of the soul. A few are note-
worthy. Of the Protestant claim of infallibility for the Bible

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 771

he says [page 29 ] : " As the battle between the Roman
Catholic and the Protestant churches went on, the Protestant
theologians, for polemical reasons, laid more and more stress on
the authority of Scripture, and the doctrine of infallible inspira-
tion crept into the church ; with it came the general claim
for the Bible that it is an infallible authority upon all subjects."
He is wrong. It was not " for polemical reasons " alone. It
was because common sense demanded for a divine revelation an
infallible medium, and rejecting the infallible Church they were
compelled to find an infallible authority somewhere else.

The Church was truly a living, infallible moral personality.
The reformers gave a quasi personality to the Bible and claim-
ed, as they were forced to do, infallibility for it. Dr. Abbott
destroys the whole foundation of Protestantism when he says
[page 36] : " An infallible book is an impossible conception."

On the evolution of theology he says that Protestantism was
" a revolt against authority. It threw humanity back upon its
own resources" [page 97]. Truly. It was a revolt against the
authority of God as conveyed to man through the Church, and
man repeated the sin of Adam, falling back upon unassisted
nature and the authority of " self-consciousness," i. e., upon hu-
man self-conceit, self-will and self-love. Protestantism is only
one of the several revivals and repetitions of the sin in Eden,
[e acknowledges that the logical outcome of Protestantism
fas to incline man to fully trust his own spiritual consciousness,
which is, in the last analysis, the seat of authority in religion."
Discussing the evolution of the church he concludes that Pro-
stantism has failed in producing unity, and " for a planetary
>tem has substituted a universe of wandering comets," conclud-
ig with the usual Protestant wailing cry, " the problem of
lurch unity remains still unsolved." What we are to think
his knowledge of the Catholic Church may be gained from
le following bit of unmitigated bosh : " Take it for all in
11, the Christian evolutionist sees in the Church of Rome,
not an anti-Christ, but a specimen of arrested Christian develop-
ment, the remedy for which is not war, but education ; not theo-
logical polemics, but the school-house."

The implied calumny that the Catholic Church is inimical to
education is unworthy of Dr. Abbott. The apostle declares that
the Church is the spotless Bride of the Lamb. Dr. Abbott quali-
fies this by asserting that the Bride will be spotless sometime
hence, but is not now. Certainly Protestantism is not ; for he
says " the Apostle had not a Solomon's harem in mind. When he

772 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Aug. r

declares that the church is the body in which God tabernacles
he is not thinking of a number of disjecta membra. The river
of God is not meant to separate into multitudinous streams as
it nears the sea, like the Nile at the Delta. We do not come
into the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of
God, by splitting up into warring sects with polemical creeds
and pugilistic piety. The glory of God in his church is not best
seen by breaking it up into bits, each with its own peculiar shape
and peculiar color, tumbled promiscuously together, and showing
a new pattern with every turn of the kaleidoscope." If a Catho-
lic had written that it would be counted as a railing accusation.

We commend the perusal of this remarkable work to those
who wish to know what Protestantism is coming to, or rather
what it has already come to, in the minds of its best and most
intelligent representatives. Faith, as the evidence of things not
seen, the substance of things hoped for, no longer exists among
them. As a virtue uniting the soul, lost in Adam, to God through
Christ revealed to man, faith has become a meaningless term.
The whole creed, and its every separate article, is to be wiped
off the slate. If the doctrine of religious evolution, as Dr. Abbott
presents it, should prevail, one would need a glossary of ob-
solete terms to understand the meaning once given to this index
of an effete superstition.

To call their proposed new religion, founded upon self-con-
sciousness as ultimate authority, Christianity a Christianity as
it would be without the divine Christ as ultimate authority is a
palpable spiritual fraud.

We have no fears for true Christianity. We have for that
Christianity which calls itself Protestantism. A better evidence
of the impending ruin of the whole system could not be given
than this book affords.

3. GUIDES FOR CONVERTS.*

To clergymen having converts to instruct, especially mission-
aries who are called upon to give the first general instruction to
those seeking admission to the Church before they are placed
under systematic instruction by the clergy of the parish, these
booklets of Father Burke will prove invaluable. They are ad-
mirable for their brevity and clearness. They will serve as the
text of oral instruction which converts so much need, and from
which they derive so much profit.

* I. The Reasonableness of the Practices of the Catholic Church. II. The Reasonableness
of the Ceremonies of the Catholic Church. By Rev. J. J. Burke. New York, Cincinnati, and
Chicago : Benziger Brothers. 1892.

1892.] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 773

THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION.

ALL COMMUNICATIONS RELATING TO READING CIRCLES, LISTS OF BOOKS,
ETC., SHOULD BE ADDRESSED TO THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION, NO.
415 WEST FIFTY-NINTH STREET, NEW YORK CITY.

THE Catholic Summer Assembly or Summer School, as it is
usually called has had a goodly share of encouragement since
its formation last May. Mr. Hugh F. Gillon, writing in the
Lowell Sun, has given a very excellent statement of the work
which has been planned for the present month at New London.
He declares that it will be conceded that for the first session of
the school the committee has been very wise in its selection of
topics and lecturers. Those who do not intend to remain for
the entire period will be able to proceed on the eclectic plan,
and choose the lectures which they feel will be of the most profit.

The only difficulty will be to choose when all are so full of
promise of interest and value. Probably the average attendant
will be most attracted by the course on literature, as that will
give opportunity to hear the greatest number of eminent literary
men. But the other courses are equally fascinating, and all are
on the very highest ground of timeliness and practical worth.
The natural attractions of New London are many and varied,
*and the students, between lectures, will have leisure to wander
among the trees and on the shore and ponder upon the great
truths presented by distinguished thinkers. Accommodations for
all who will attend, at prices suited to all purses, have been ar-
ranged for, and the practical portion of the school wants have
been provided for.

So much for the scheme of the Summer School, so far as it
has been formulated. But a word for the institution itself and
what it signifies. It is exceedingly gratifying to see the ready
pproval it has met with from the ablest Catholics, clerical and
lay ; and it is no less pleasing to note the frank utterances that
it has called forth. Earnest, conservative men and women have
not hesitated to say that the Catholics of the United States
should take in intellectual affairs the prominence that is theirs
by right of inheritance and capacitv. The Catholics of this day
are the true heirs of the cultivation and civilization of the ages,
the legatees of the men and women of earlier days who de-
veloped literature and the arts. That they have, so to speak,
VOL. LV. 50

1
!

774 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [Aug.,

allowed themselves to be side-tracked by the later comers is a
fault no longer to be tolerated. And it is evident that from
the present time they are determined to be no longer in the back-
ground. This age is one of immense intellectual activity. By
every reason under the sun Catholics are bound to be foremost
in it ; if they are not they are false to their traditions, disloyal
to the teachings of religion, and, in a large sense, indifferent to
the well-being of themselves and those within their influence.

It is refreshing to see men like Maurice Francis Egan tell-
ing plain truths about the past indifference of Catholics to work
that involved using the minds that God has given them. He in-
timates, with force and truth, that Catholics have too long culti-
vated their heels at the expense of their heads ; that they were
past masters in the art of dancing while their intellectual achieve-
ments were nil. There are enough of Catholics who smart un-
der this kind of reproach to make the effort to earn better
judgments a success. Enough of them realize that dancing and
frivolous amusements are pretty poor substitutes for the real
pleasure which intellectual pursuits give, to afford encourage-
ment to all interested in the development of Catholic America.
Writers and publishers have reason to rejoice at the awakening
that is going on. It means for them not only a larger share of
material prosperity, but a wider and more cultivated public to
address.

The fact that such an enterprise as the Summer School can
be inaugurated without provoking sneers is, as Mr. Egan sug-
gests, another proof of the progress the Catholic people are mak-
ing. Not many years ago it would have been laughed down,
and pronounced chimerical, if not uncatholic. Nobody thinks of
doing that now. The Catholic Congress, and the Convention of
the Apostolate of the Press, too clearly showed the material and
capacity of the Catholic body to make it prudent for any one
to scoff at any honest movement for Catholic advancement. Un-
doubtedly there are some good souls who inwardly doubt where
all this sort of thing will end, and who fear the worst ; but the
guiding minds of the Church in the United States, the far-seeing
prelates who are working in the present for the future, and al-
lowing the past to take care of itself, these men are heart and
soul responsive to every impulse of Catholic progress. They, in
common with the lay people concerned in these endeavors, wish
to see Catholics occupying positions of mental and intellectual
prominence, not merely political, as too many Catholics have in
the past sought to achieve. Whatever makes for the benefit of

1892.] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 775

the Church and the faithful has their sanction and co-operation,
and the mere incident that it has no precedent is not a fatal bar
to approval. The Church in this country is becoming every day
more and more the brightest jewel in the Papal crown, and this
is because the work of Catholic intellectual development goes hand
in hand with the moral and material progress of the people.
It is in order to build up the Church in America into a great
and commanding structure that our ablest leaders and laymen
are so enthusiastic about such affairs as this Summer School.

In the years to come, and not so very far in the future either,
the Catholic Church will have great problems to solve for the
American people. Every such step as the Summer School is a
step in preparation for that task, and when the time comes Cath-
olics will be prepared to deal with the difficulties which those
outside the Church may expect to encounter.

Let every Catholic, then, hope for abounding success for this
latest venture. While there is no reason to fear that it will
fail, let us hope that it will, like the two Conventions already
alluded to, exceed the expectations of its founders in the same
degree as they did. It should have the prayers and good wishes
of every loyal Catholic, and the attendance and patronage of all
who can find the necessary time to be present. Such a school
will be, while a seeming innovation, in reality a revival of the
old university system inaugurated by the Church long before
Protestantism was thought of. It should be, if all goes well,
such a success from the outset that the multitudinous schools
supported during the summer by non-Catholics shall be unable
to name one to compare with it. That it will be of immense
value to all who hear and discuss the lectures is assured in ad-
vance. That it will also be for them an occasion for the forma-
tion of many delightful associations is also true. Its full success
as its projectors desire will mean the establishment of other
such schools throughout the country, and consequently an ad-
vance all along the line for the Church in the United States,
x- * -K

To secure and retain the confidence of leading thinkers of
educational prominence, the officers of the Catholic Summer
School must keep in view the main object of the movement,
which is to foster intellectual culture in harmony with true faith.
To concentrate attention exclusively upon this main object it may
be necessary to decline many invitations to provide for the
demands of mere pleasure-seekers. All matters relating to the
future development of the movement should be judged by the

776 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [Aug.,

standard of excellence which will command respect from the
earnest workers in the cause of Christian education. The offic-
ers who stand responsible to the Catholic public for this first
session are well qualified by personal experience in various de-
partments of public instruction to decide on the ways and
means of furthering the work which they have undertaken. In-
telligent suggestions in writing will no doubt be made by many
of those who attend the Summer School, and will receive care-
ful consideration. %
x- * *

SYLLABUS OF LECTURES ON ETHICS.

By the Rev. P. A. Halpin, S.J., Vice-President of St. Francis
Xavier's College, New York City.

August i. The science of morality; elementary notions; rise;
progress ; divisions of the science ; constituents and condi-
tions of human action.

August 2. The end of human action ; the nature and pursuit
of happiness.

August 3. The human will and man's activity ; characteristics
of free action ; human action and its modifiers ; the pas-
sions.

August 4. Morality: its concept and foundation; right and
wrong ; systems.

August 5. Law in general ; the eternal, the natural law.

August 8. Chief characteristics of natural law.

August 9. Positive law ; whence it derives its origin and force.

August 10. Conscience ; virtue ; vice.

August II. Nature of right; domestic society; marriage; family.

August 12. Rights and duties of parents.

SYLLABUS OF LECTURES ON LITERATURE.
Three lectures on Shakspere, by Maurice Francis Egan,
LL. D., of Notre Dame University, Notre Dame, Ind.:
August 2. " The Influence of Shakspere's *Y~outh."

The predecessors of Shakspere and the Catholic tendency of
those predecessors ; their influence on Spenser ; the dis-
crepancy between the fifth act of Henry VIII. and the
rest of the play ; the contrast between Shakspere and
Spenser ; <z, Spencer's subservience to Elizabeth, b, his
sneers at Mary Stuart, c, Shakspere's reverence for Cath-
olic traditions, d, his avoiding of temptations to please
Elizabeth's politicians; the school-boy of the time (A.D.
1571); Stratford in Shakspere's boyhood; the pictures of
these early days found in his plays ; the school-room and
the Stratford Guild ; Shakspere's early life in London ;

1892.] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 777

Southwell ; Shakspere and Marlowe ; Shakspere's life as
shown in his plays ; his religious spirit as compared with
Ben Jonson and Webster.

August 3. "A New Reading of 'Hamlet.'"

Miss Gilchrist's theory of punctuation ; her view of the char-
acter of Ophelia ; the influences that moulded Laertes and
Ophelia ; Polonius, servile, selfish, worldly ; his famous
speech interpreted ; the question of expurgation ; the
critic who finds the meaning of " Hamlet " elusive does
not understand the play as the Elizabethans understood it ;
Shakspere always an Elizabethan ; the manners of the time ;
Shakspere a realist in " Hamlet "; Hamlet never insane ;
the ethics of Hamlet the result of Catholic teaching;
Shakspere and Sir Walter Scott ; the supernatural in ''Ham-
let " ; justice, not revenge ; Hamlet errs by putting ven-
geance above justice; the meaning of the play.

August 4. " Analysis of the ' Merchant of Venice.' "

Womanhood in Dante, Shakspere and Goethe ; Portia, Cor-
delia, Ophelia ; the philosophy of the " Merchant "; Portia
the central character ; the " Merchant " not a comedy, but
a tragedy ; the position of the Jews in Europe (see Mgr.
Seton's Essays, chiefly Roman) ; Shakspere's humanity com-
pared with the brutality of Marlowe and Webster ; Anto-
nio a good man, with the faults of his time ; Jessica, true
to life ; Lorenzo's future ; the clown in Shakspere ; old and
young Gobbo ; Touchstone ; note of sadness in Antonio
repeated in' Jaques and culminating in Hamlet ; Henry
Giles' opinion of Shakspere's gravity; the womanliness of
Portia ; Bassanio's future ; the dramatic qualities of the
play ; the " Merchant " one of the strongest of the dramas ;
if it can be called a comedy, the best of the comedies;
the touches of sentiment in Shylock ; the ethics of the
play not the result of the Renaissance spirit, so far as it
was pagan, but of that spirit, as far as it was Christian ;
the art of the dramatic part ; an analysis of the contents
in the " Merchant " ; the effect of character on character ;
a few words on the study of the " Merchant."

Five lectures by Richard Malcolm Johnson, Esq., of Balti-
more, Md.:

August 8. " The Ancient Drama, Drama of the Middle Age,

and the Modern English Drama."
August 9. " English Dramatists before Shakspere."
August 10. " Shakspere's Sonnets."
August ii. "Shakspere's Comedies."
August 12. "Shakspere's Tragedies."

778 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [Aug.,

Two Lectures by Professor Ernest Lagarde, of Mt. St. Mary's,

Emmittsburg, Md.:
August 16. "The Elizabethan Drama."

Shakspere's origin ; glance at his plays ; their number and
various editions ; Shakspere's religion ; his father's frequent
absence from church ; opinions of various writers regard-
ing Shakpere's Catholicity; the learning of Shakspere.

August 17. Shakspere's faults and merits; his vocabulary, its
proportions and extent ; figures of speech ; character of the
play, " Henry V." ; analysis of " Hamlet."

August 1 8. Synopsis of Lecture on "The Pole-Star of American
Literature," by George Parsons Lathrop, LL.D., of New
London, Conn.:

Early literature of the Colonies ; Puritan thought ; the power
of conscience ; development of American literature after
establishment of the Republic ; Benjamin Franklin and the
common sense philosophy; later development in fiction,
history, poetry, and philosophy ; the religious element in
Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Emerson, Hawthorne, and
others ; philosophy of Emerson and Brownson ; future of
American literature.

August 19. A lecture on "Our Catholic Heritage in Literature,"
by Brother Azarias, of De La Salle Institute, New York
City.

SYLLABUS OF LECTURES ON HISTORY.

August I. "Philosophy of History as Applied to the Church,"
by C. M. O'Leary, LL.D., of Manhattan College, New
York City.

Synopsis : Definition ; illustrations from ancient and modern
historians ; the search for the ultimate cause ; ecclesiasti-
cal history ; rise and spread of Christianity ; the persecu-
tions ; mediaeval times ; the Crusades ; attitude of the
Church towards the French and American Revolutions ;
the temporal power and existing governments.

August 20. "The Early Days of the Papacy," by the Rev. J.

F. Loughlin, D.D., of Philadelphia, Pa.

Synopsis : Growth of Papacy not due to Papal aggression,
but to intrinsic necessity ; the Papacy ab initio the rock
on which the Church was founded ; its legitimate power
develops with growth of Church.

August 8." The Great Schism of the West," by the Rev. H.

A. Brann, D.D., of New York City:
August 9 and 10. " The Vatican Council and Papal Infallibility,"

by the Rev. Thomas L. Kelly, M.A., of Mt. St. Mary's

College, Emmittsburg, Md.

1892.] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 779

August 16. " Columbus and the New World," by Richard

Clarke, LL.D., of New York City.
August 17. " Early Catholic Missions" (illustrated), by Marc F.

Vallette, LL.D., of Brooklyn, N. Y.:

Synopsis : I. Ante-Colonial and Early Colonial Missions
St. Brendin ; Spanish missionaries of the Columbian
period ; Franciscans and Dominicans in the South.

August 1 8. II. Colonial Period Jesuit Missions in the North
and Northwest ; general review ; historical inaccuracies cor-
rected.

August 19. "Did the Norsemen Discover America?" by
Charles G. Herbermann, LL.D., of the College of the
City of New York, New York City:

Synopsis : Discoveries of the Norsemen do not affect the
glory of Columbus ; Who were the Norsemen ? condition
of Norway, A.D. 1000 ; settlement of Iceland ; settlement
of Greenland by Eric the Red ; discovery of land to the
West ; his return ; voyage of Thurston Ericsson ; voyage
of Karl Safne ; last voyage of the Norsemen ; Was the
land discovered America? (Consult Reeve's History of
Wineland the Good; Hrafit's Antiquitates Americana;
Fiske's Discovery of America).

SYLLABUS OF LECTURES ON CHRISTIAN AHTHROPOLOGY, by
the Rev. Thomas Hughes, S.J., of St. Louis University,
St. Louis, Mo.:
ugust 15. I. "The Prehistoric Difficulty."

The history of civilization and of barbarism ; the geogra-
phical outlines of the prehistoric ; lands and nations that
were never out of the light of documentary history ; the
effort to interpret the prehistoric difficulty by means of
geology.

August 1 6. II. Archaeology :

tAges of metal ; ages of stone, polished stone, chipped
stone ; epochs, periods and formations as bearing on the
history of man ; the civilization of the prehistoric man.
ugust 17. III. Palaeontology:
Extinct animal life, once contemporaneous with man ; the
time it must have taken for that life to be extinguished ;
the positive result of these observations.
August 1 8. IV. Anthropology (strictly so-called):

The charactersitics of the prehistoric man ; the possibility
of his existence in the tertiary age ; the idea of species ;
of race : Are all human remains to be referred to one
species, under the varieties of many races? indirect argu-
ment, the analogies of the lower orders ; physical varia-
tions.

780 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [Aug.,

August 1 8. V. Results of Direct Observations:

All human varieties referable to the modifications of one
species ; physically and physiologically ; the community
of intellectual qualities of speech ; of moral qualities ; the
unity and variety conspicuous in the arguments urged
against these results of observation.

August 19. VI. " How Races Come to Be Formed : "

Conditions of life, or environment ; some conditions of ex-
istence vitiated ; the racial nature common to all men ;
the racial nature as differentiated ; migrations, hunters,
shepherds, farmers. Acclimatization and the cost thereof ;
the blending again of races once formed ; the man of the
past, the present, and the future, as seen in the light of
the prehistoric, of history, and of natural science.

SYLLABUS OF LECTURES ON MISCELLANEOUS TOPICS.

August ii. "The Discoveries of Astronomy no Argument
Against Revelation," by the Rev. G. M. Searle, C.S.P., of
the Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C.
Theme : The size of the universe and the probability of
other habitable worlds do not conflict with the revealed
doctrines of the Incarnation and Redemption ; discussion
of the question of a plurality of worlds.

August 4. " The Catholic Church and Socialism," by Conde" B.
Fallen, Ph.D., of St. Louis, Mo.

August 5. " The Science of Comparative Religion ; Its Methods
Scope and Value," by Merwin-Marie Snell, of the Catho-
lic University of America, Washington, D.C.

August i. "The Church and Civil Liberty," by Professor John

Brophy, of St. Louis College, New York City :
Charges made against the Church ; those charges refuted by
an examination of the necessity of society and of civil
government ; the divine origin and divine right of civil
government ; how and in whom the divine right of civil
government is vested.

August 12. "Some Principles of Political Economy, with Their
Application," by Charles W. Sloan, Esq., of New York
City:

Growth in England of the study of political economy ; lead-
ing principles of the English economists ; applications to
social science of economic theories ; the unearned incre-
ment ; theories of George, Proudhon, Marx ; growth of
capital and present economic conditions ; the Papal Ency-
clical on the Condition of Labor.

August 5. "Science and Revealed Religion," by the Rev. D. J.
O'Sullivan, S.J., of Woodstock, Md.

1892.] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 781

August 3. " The Relations of Capital and Labor," by the Rev.
Rene J. Holaind, S.J., of Woodstock, Md.

SYLLABUS OF EVENING LECTURES.
August 2. " The Literature of Moral Loveliness," by Miss

Katherine E. Conway, of Boston, Mass.

August 4. " John Boyle O'Reilly " (illustrated), by Miss Katha-
rine A. O'Keeffe, of Lawrence, Mass.
August 9, 10, ii. "Egyptology and the Bible," by the Rev.

John Walsh, of St. Joseph's Seminary, Troy, N. Y.:
These lectures will be illustrated with stereopticon views.

August 9. Egypt and Egyptology in General.

August 10. Points of Contact (ancient).

August ii. Points of Contact (modern).
August 15. "Mexico; Religious and Progressive," by Mrs. Mary

Elizabeth Blake, of Boston, Mass.
August 18. " Our Obligations to Catholic Authors," by the Rev.

Thomas McMillan, C.S.P., of New York City.
The first session of the Catholic Summer School will open
with an informal reception under the auspices of St. John's
Literary Society, of New London, Conn., Saturday evening, July
30. The formal opening will take place at St. Mary's Church,
on Sunday, July 31, at 10:30 A.M., when Solemn Pontifical Mass
will be sung by the Right Rev. Lawrence S. McMahon, D.D.,
Bishop of Hartford.

The sermon at the Pontifical Mass, July 31, will be delivered
by the Rev. W. O'B. Pardow, S.J. Subject: " The Catholic Church
and Reason ; " and the preacher at the evening service on the
same date will be the Rev. Morgan M. Sheedy, of Pittsburgh,
Pa. Subject : " The Church and Intellectual Development ;" on
Sunday, August 7, the Rev. Walter Elliott, C.S.P., of the Church
of St. Paul, the Apostle, New York City, will preach on "The
Apostolate of the Press ;" and on Sunday, August 14, the Rev.
M. J. Lavelle, rector of St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York City,
will discuss the subject of " The Church and Education."

782 WITH THE PUBLISHER. [Aug.,

WITH THE PUBLISHER.

ALL that the Publisher had to say of the hot weather in the
last issue of the magazine holds good for the present. He is
well aware that the standing of the mercury for the past month,
added to what the weather wise-acres predict of the future, make
it difficult for him to rouse his readers to anything like enthusi-
asm : the heat being in inverse ratio to effort.

But there are some people in the world to whom this does
not seem to apply, even when they dwell in Southern latitudes.
Let the Publisher show this by the extremely peppery letter
which follows:

" , Miss., July 5, 1892.

" REV. DEAR SIR :

" Please discontinue sending me THE WORLD from this date,
and kindly send it, until expiration of my subscription, to some
New England negro-phil [I beg pardon, I should have said
friend of the * Affo-American '] who will be better able than
I am to appreciate the beauties of ' Judge ' Albion W. Tour-
gee's Nigger-Equality, atheistical literature, like that which is the
subject of the enclosed eulogy. I shall confidently expect THE
WORLD to march with the progress of that species of modern
transcendental drivel denominated ' thought,' and to gradually
develop into a genuine admirer of Harriet B. Stowe, John
Brown, and Garibaldi.

" Still, though Archbishop Ireland, with the aid of THE WORLD,
may succeed in de-Christianizing our Catholic schools in the in-
terests of the Republican party, nevertheless, the doctrine of ad-
vanced miscegenation as promulgated by him two years ago at
Washington, and as vehemently advocated by the admired
* Judge ' Tourgee, G. W. Cable, and others, will meet from all
Southern Catholics at least, and I believe from the overwhelming
majority of Northern Catholics, with an emphatic ' Tolerari NON
Potest ' !

"The great overshadowing issue of the age, the question of
questions, dwarfing into insignificance all other issues, religious,
social, and political, the preservation of race purity, the salva-
tion of our country from mongrelization, is, thank God, our ques-
tion to solve, and we will solve the problem in our own way,
regardless of such hideous teaching as those of ' Judge ' Tourgee
and his admirers, both Catholic and atheistic, even though in the
solution of the problem we may occasionally have to be guilty
of the ' National Crime ' of forcibly depriving the poor innocent
' Afro-American ' of his ' privilege ' of ravishing our Southern
white women !

1892.] WITH THE PUBLISHER. 783

" It is to be hoped that THE CATHOLIC WORLD in this, as in
many other respects, does not reflect the views of the Church in
New York or any where else except, possibly, the archdiocese
of St. Paul. Very respectfully,

The passage that called forth this letter is found in the July
issue of THE CATHOLIC WORLD. We reproduce it here that
our readers may see both, side by side, to give the whole mat-
ter something of the " deadly parallel " effect, and to assist the
reader in his comments. The Publisher will not himself make any
comment : he is quite satisfied to let the matter rest with the
jury of his readers. He thinks that they will be the best judges
of the justice of the charges made in this letter against THE
CATHOLIC WORLD:

" Judge Tourgee's new book is a very strong one. The Negro
question, as it confronts civilization and Christianity in this
country, has never before to our thinking, been put into so tell-
ing and compact a shape. The author, not a Catholic by the
way, is careful to make his indictment of Christianity, ' the wor-
ship of the White Christ,' applicable to Protestantism only.
And his heroine, if the book can fairly claim one, which is doubt-
ful, Pactolus Prime himself occupying nearly the whole stage,
but she, at all events, who come nearest to that role, disap-
pears at the close into a convent of Sisters of Mercy, there to
devote herself to work among the colored people. Judge Tour-
gee's point, made with reiteration and enforced in many and
most cogent ways, is that in dealing with the Negro, it is white
sentiment, white civilization, white Christianity that needs to be
modified. If equality of right, privilege, and opportunity is se-
cured to the colored people, they desire nothing more. They
ask for no special privileges, no peculiar consideration, no dis-
tinctive favor. For concise and convincing expression and illus-
tration of this view the five chapters beginning with that styled
'An Assessment of Damages,' arid ending with 'A Basis of
Composition,' have no parallel that we know of. They consist
of a series of talks, passing on Christmas morning, at Prime's
boot-blacking ' stand,' between him and certain of his customers.
Among these are a senator, a lawyer, a reporter, a drummer, a
Union soldier, a not-quite reconstructed Southerner, and a min-
ister. In so far as the book is a story we find it a trifle ob-
scure in places. But as an indictment, a plea, a warning, and
especially in the chapter where Dr. Holbrook expounds the
' Law of Progress,' as a menace, it lacks neither definiteness nor
convincing power. The chapter just alluded to is full of sugges-
tion and especially worthy of serious consideration. We con-
gratulate the writer on this book. His colored fellow-citizens
should owe him an immense debt of gratitude for it. As for
white Christians, it behooves all of us, even though Judge Tour-
gee explicitly exempts Catholics from his sweeping censure, to
consider how we may mend our ways, and by act and prayer

784 BOOKS RECEIVED. [Aug., 1892.

and penance help to expiate and repair a national crime whose
consequences were too far-reaching to be obliterated by a civil-
war and an emancipation proclamation. Christianity, in a word,
needs to permeate our minds, to mould our convictions, to get
hold of our prejudices, if it is to be a working force in our civ-
ilization. If he can succeed in planting that fruitful germ in the
minds of his white readers, Judge Tourgee will have done a work
than which we can think of none more important or more time-
ly. But he is ploughing a desperately stubborn soil."

Quite in marked contrast to the letter above quoted is the
postscript of another subscriber:

" I am more than pleased with THE WORLD. I look anx-
iously for its coming every month, with its feasts of essays,
book-reviews, etc. I am sure to find in it the freshest thought
of the times."

BOOKS RECEIVED.

POETICAL WORKS OF J. C. HEYWOOD. Second revised edition.

Vols. I. and II. London and New York : Burns & Oates

(Limited).
FAITH. By Don Armando Palacio Valdes. Translated from

the Spanish by Isabel F. Hapgood. New York : Cassell

Publishing Co.
THE WRECKER. By Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Os-

bourne. Illustrated by William Hole and W. L. Metcalf.

New York : Charles Scribner's Sons.
THE BULL CALF AND OTHER TALES. By A. B. Frost. New

York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
FASTI MARIANI sive calendarium festorum Sanctse Mariae Vir-

ginis Deiparae. Memoriis historicis illustratum. Auctore F.

G. Holweck, sacerdote archidioecesis Sancti Ludovici (Mo.),

U. S. Americanae. Cum approbatione Revmi. Archiep. Fri-

burg. St. Louis, Mo., U. S. A.: B. Herder.
ALL FOR THE SACRED HEART. Exercises and prayers of saints

and pious authors. Translated from the French, and edited

by Mrs. T. F. Meagher and Miss A. G. de Blossieres. New

York: P. J. Kenedy.
THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA BY CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. By

Harry Hakes, M.D., Wilkes-Barre, Pa.: Robert Baur & Son.
THE CONFESSOR AFTER GOD'S OWN HEART. From the French

of the third edition of Rev. Father L. J. M. Cros, SJ.

Dublin : Browne & Nolan, 1892.
A BRIEF TEXT BOOK OF LOGIC AND MENTAL PHILOSOPHY.

By Rev. Charles Coppens, SJ. New York: The Catholic

Publication Society Co.

PAMPHLETS RECEIVED.

CATHOLICITY AND THE AMERICAN MIND. By George Parsons
Lathrop. Pamphlet No. 19. St. Paul, Minn.: Catholic Truth
Society of America.

THE

CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. LV. SEPTEMBER, 1892. No. 330.

HOME RULE OR EGOTISM?

THE American people have all along watched the struggle in
Ireland with interest. Their sympathies were with the weaker
side. They themselves had given proofs of their devotion to the
principles of liberty and reason ; and, therefore, they could not ap-
prove of a policy of violence and injustice in Ireland. They knew
much of her history. They had seen a people, endowed with
many excellent qualities, denied the power of making their country
prosperous, and compelled to seek elsewhere the means of per-
sonal advancement. But, in common with the rest of the world,
they had been led to believe that the troubles of Ireland were in
some degree due to the faults of her own children.

It was, therefore, with supreme satisfaction that they witnessed
the rise of the Irish National Party. They saw that, since the
Home Rule movement began, the electors of Ireland had cast
aside all distracting influences, and concentrated their attention
upon sending a band of representatives to Parliament who would
speak with one voice. The solemn pledge to be taken by each
member of the Parliamentary party was a guarantee that the old
sin of dissension should be allowed no place in their counsels or
their actions. The consistency, earnestness, and discipline with
which for years the party acted, afforded an assurance that when
Irishmen should have obtained this freedom they would prove
worthy of it.

The unhappy division in the Irish party gave a shock to this
confidence. Men asked themselves, could such a people ever at-
tain a considerable object? The greatest statesman of modern
times had sacrificed power for them ; but, regardless of this, they
seemed determined to play the game of his enemies and their

786 HOME RULE OR EGOTISM? [Sept.,

own. They acted as though their adversaries were right in re-
garding them as a nation of children gifted children, perhaps
but capable of nothing unless moulded, guided, ruled by stronger
wills than their own.

The result of the general election has, to some extent, re-
stored confidence in the strength and steadiness of the national
character. But it must be kept in mind that, in 1886, Ireland sent
eighty-five Home Rule members out of a Parliamentary repre-
sentation of one hundred and three. There are now but seventy-
one members to maintain the old policy, together with nine mem-
bers who may maintain it or not as each one of these last, in his in-
fallible judgment, thinks proper. This is a perfectly fair statement
of the case. On the most favorable view this means that Home
Rule has lost five seats, equal to ten on a division ; on any other
view that it has lost fourteen seats, equal to twenty-eight on a
division a change that would justify the Tories in asserting that
there is a reaction towards imperialism in Ireland. In other
words, that those who are responsible for the disastrous result
of the last election have declared, in act if not in word, that Ire-
land must still be ruled as a conquered country. The Times and
the Tories could not ask more from them.

There is only one way out of this difficulty and that is for
those nine gentlemen to throw in their lot with the majority.
There can be no excuse now for two parties. As long as those
who are called Parnellites could say that they had a large sup-
port in the country they might be pardoned for not surrender-
ing their pretensions to represent the national will. Judicious
men might, even then, hold that they and their supporters were
utterly mistaken as to the true policy, but that they were honestly
mistaken. But they are annihilated as a party now. They have
no power except that of mischief; and it has never yet been
held that the power of doing mischief is alone a sufficient reason
for the existence of a political party.

Some plan surely can be devised by the patriotism of all to
end these unhappy differences. In the heat of controversy things
have been said on both sides that it were better had been left
unsaid. But such enmities are not unappeasable. All worked
together once in harmony, encountered the same opponents, and
were subjected to the same slanders. They were dragged before
those petty star chambers where the law and constitution were
borne down, and together they were arraigned before the inquisi-
tors of the Parnell Commission. Against them the government
of Mr. Balfour employed the disused instruments of old English

1892.] HOME RULE OR EGOTISM? 787

and continental despotism. They were rewarded for what they
endured by the gratitude of their country.

And to obtain such a reward no sacrifice is too great. What
is a pique, a petty resentment, a mortified vanity, in face of the
love and gratitude of one's people ? Who in the history of any
country was so slighted, outraged, and humiliated as our own
Sarsfield ? His experience was undervalued, his advice scorned,
his great services derided. These insults must have burned into
his heart and brain ; but he thought only of Ireland, labored
only for her, and her name was the last upon his lips.

There is a story told of Henry Grattan. From the first he
was the champion of the Catholic claims. Every one under-
stands how a young man is tempted to appropriate the glory of
a great political reform ; he is almost jealous of assistance, lest
it should rob him of some part of the renown. But Grattan
was superior to such weakness ; and, in order to secure the sup-
port of the Volunteer delegates on the question, he played a
trick upon Lord Charlemont by which the latter became the un-
conscious exponent of the Catholics and obtained the credit of
a liberality to which he had no title. Whoever takes into ac-
count the austere and lofty disposition of Grattan in so many
respects like the elder Pitt, but surpassing Pitt in those com-
manding elements which make fame imperishable will see in this
incident a most striking proof of his fidelity to the principles to
which his life was consecrated. He slipped a resolution in favor
of Catholic relief into Charlemont's pocket, which that very re-
spectable but bigoted statesman afterwards produced among
others that were to be adopted by the Volunteer Convention.
If Grattan were merely a popularity-hunter or a time-server he
would not have done this. If he had not done it, the great influ-
ence of Charlemont would have been cast against the Catholics.
What do Mr. Redmond and Mr. Harrington say to this ?

The story of Ireland is full of instances of such silent and
unostentatious devotion. How few names have come down to
us of the Irish officers in the different European armies who,
during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, saved
part of their scanty pay to provide a military chest for the free-
dom of their country ? Some names we know, but we are in-
formed that all, or almost all, denied themselves comforts for this
object. Of the millions of Irish birth or race in America or
elsewhere in exile, there is hardly a man, woman, or child who
has not offered something on that altar, whether freedom was to
be obtained by war or policy ; and shall we be told that the

788 HOME RULE OR EGOTISM? [Sept.,

nine Parnellite members and those who follow them alone shall
make no sacrifice for their country's good ?

How far the Parnellites consider that they are entitled to
take their own course in consequence of the election I don't
pretend to judge. I assume that they were returned as Nation-
alists and Home Rulers ; and that they did not dare to ask the
suffrages of the electors on the ground that Mr. Balfour governed
Ireland well and wisely ; and that those who, under his minia-
ture " Reign of Terror," were imprisoned, starved to death, jail-
ruled to death or shot dead at public meetings only got their
deserts. Therefore, they must have been elected substantially to
support Mr. Gladstone's policy, even if the electors did not
expressly require them to unite with the rest of the Irish mem-
bers. But this at least is clear: they were returned in 1886 to
support Mr. Gladstone's policy.

Now, these gentlemen, as well as the majority, should recol-
lect what gave them authority to speak in the name of Ireland
or now gives them a right to speak in the name of any part of
the people, be it great or small. It was not their commanding
talents, their high social position, their wealth, or any recognized
title to distinction. They owe all to accidental circumstances
by which they were brought from obscurity into prominence.
As long as in a compact body and as the delegates of the
people they expressed the national demand, they spoke with the
voice of Ireland and the influence of her great traditions. They
have no claim to the status of legislators in the accepted sense,
much less to that of dictators of a new policy. As I have al-
ready said, the whole weight of the Irish people was flung for-
ward in sustainment of Mr. Gladstone's policy, and the members
were sent only as delegates to assert it. It seems, therefore,
clear that the assumption of independence is a betrayal or for-
getfulness of this trust by these gentlemen.

When Mr. Sadlier accepted a lordship of the treasury, Mr.
Keogh the solicitor-generalship, and Mr. O'Flaherty a com-
missionership of income tax, in 1852, the general feeling of the
Tenant League was that they did not keep within the lines of
duty. Some persons those in the habit of using strong lan-
guage said they were traitors ; that they ruined the cause of
Tenant Right ; that they were responsible for the notices to
quit which fell like snow-flakes over the country ; responsible
for the wide-spread breaking up of homes which followed that
election, when voters were evicted by the thousand in every
county in Ireland. I don't care who may be found among the

1892.] HOME RULE OR EGOTISM? 789

supporters of these infamous ruffians, their treason was not justi-
fied by such support. It is enough that they blasted the peo-
ple's hopes for many a year. Their own was the infamy and
the reward.

The point here is that these men were elected to carry on
a policy of independent opposition, as it was called, and not to
take place. They were limited to that duty. If covenants be-
tween man and man have one scintilla of obligation, they were
bound to observe that to which they had pledged themselves.
It is not supposed that any of the Irish members have -de-
liberately adopted a policy hostile to the national movement.
Present circumstances would hardly favor it in any case. At
least it would be wise to keep such an intention as secret as
the treason of those whose names were so long hidden in the
list of secret pensions and rewards.

But friends in the wrong may be more dangerous than ene-
mies. An honest purpose does not make a blunder useful ; but
a series of disastrous blunders cannot well be distinguished from
a settled purpose of betrayal. If a man throws sixes every
time he takes the dice-box in his hand, he has something more
than mere good luck upon his side.

The opinion of a man's adversaries upon his public conduct
is sometimes a good test of his fidelity to party obligations.
Who are the members from among those accused before the
Parnell Commission who now receive most approval from the
Times and the Tories? Which section of the National Party
relied upon Tory support at the election? If public men sud-
denly obtain praise from those who used to vilify them, they
should search their hearts for the motives of the conduct that
produced the change of opinion.

The praise of the Times has been always deemed the worst
judgment that could be pronounced upon an Irish patriot. The
Irish Tories describe the majority of their countrymen as their
ancient and irreconcilable enemies. They use the Blenner-
hassets and the Maguires, the Flanagans and the Pigotts, as their
instruments, but they do not respect them. They would take
the aid of better men as the occasion answered, and fling them
aside like broken tools when it had passed. It is sad in the ex-
treme that what is at the best but a wild and unreasoning loy-
alty to a great memory (which, unfortunately, set in darkness)
should be allowed to work madness in minds that could be so
well employed in the service of their country.

What is it to the "loyal minority" if the cause of Home

790 HOME RULE OR EGOTISM? [Sept.,

Rule be wrecked through a fanatical devotion to the name of
Parnell or to a baser motive? The first is even cheaper to
them. Their new allies, as the Scotch proverb would express it,
" are going to the devil in a dish-clout." They have not even
the sense to put money in their purse. One is amazed that
men with the history of their country open before them would
play the game of the enemy by their dissensions. Their crafty
and able opponents can turn about as the game goes on, play
Tory or Liberal, Orange or Green, as either serves their turn
and fools accept the counterfeit for genuine coin. The Parnell-
ites boast that they can get a better measure of Home Rule
from the Tories than from Mr. Gladstone. Even if they ob-
tained half of the Irish representation instead of nine members
amenable to no authority the Tories of Ireland, practiced in the
game of deceit, would use them like pawns until the hour was
ripe to sweep them from the chess-board.

It must never be forgotten that the Tories started the Home
Rule movement to be revenged on Mr. Gladstone for disestab-
lishing the church. It is not so long ago since they threatened
to join the national movement, even with their own party in
power, because an order of council struck a blow at the Irish
cattle trade. By the aid of the Nationalists the blow was avert-
ed and the Tories made up for their politic exhibition of
patriotism by increased zeal against it. In the present state of
Ireland no honest Nationalist can act with them no matter
what may be the inducement. They possess the subtle and over-
mastering insight of an oligarchy long experienced in the devi-
ous ways of government. Strong, confident, fierce, and inscruta-
ble, they have made all the power of England, and all the re-
sources of Ireland, for two centuries subject to their will.

With great respect, then, for the earthenware pots, they are
reminded that they cannot safely go down the stream with the
iron vessels. The potsherds had better keep the others at arm's
length, for these are Turkish pachas, man-eaters, ogres. They
have been eating the people like bread since Swift wrote his
Modest Proposal as they did before it. They will eat ye up, if
they get the chance, O most inharmonious Nine !

It is only just to give those who forget their duty to the
country in the present crisis a gentle reminder, from the report
of the Parnell Commission, of the manner in which the Tories
with whom they desire to be thought in alliance treated them.
I quote from page four of the Daily News Report. It reports
Sir Richard Webster's reference to two Irish members of Parlia-

1892.] HOME RULE OR EGOTISM? 791

ment, one of them an Irish barrister, as follows : " As Mr. Har-
ris was the Parliamentary hero in Galway, so Mr. Harrington
was the hero in Kerry. It was Mr. Harrington who said that
land-grabbers should be shunned as if they had the small-pox.
That was a specimen of a kind of oratory of which it was im-
possible to exaggerate the wickedness." Does Mr. Harrington
forget the indignity put upon him by the whole Tory party
through their counsel?

He is charged with inciting to every species of crime and
outrage during that unhappy period. Professional courtesy is
flung aside in order to involve him in a charge of conspiracy
with the lowest and most illiterate, the most reckless and
criminal of those whose acts shocked the public conscience of
the time. He is made one with the orators who described the
land-grabber as " a louse," as a " rapacious beast," " low-life
cur," " a reptile," " a putrid companion." He is associated
with the village vehme-Gericht in decreeing the death of Lord
Mountmorres ; and is made one of the revelers in the witches
Sabbath at the mock funeral of the process-server Finlay.

There is at page thirty-five the incident so deeply humilia-
ting which arose out of the attorney-general's question to a wit-
ness named Sullivan. " Had any one spoken to him during the
adjournment for luncheon ? Had the two Mr. Harringtons seen
him? In an instant Mr. T. Harrington was on his legs, protest-
ing warmly. 'An impudent suggestion on -the attorney-general's
part,' exclaimed Mr. E. Harrington. * This is irregular, and, as a
member of the bar, you know it,' the president interposed
sharply." Then we have the flight of the commissioners, and we
are informed that, amidst the hubbub and laughter, Mr. Harring-
ton " packed up his blue bag, as if, like the philosophic 'coon in
the Yankee's story, he anticipated the worst."

I offer no comment on this account from a friendly paper ;
but I suggest that Mr. Harrington must have brought the virtue
of forgiveness of insult where his enemies are concerned to an
incredible height of perfection ; while retaining the most impla-
caple resentment against those who, by ties of common country,
the bonds of party honor, and of community of service and of
suffering, should be bound to him in the strongest links of
friendship. In connection with this matter, I may add that Mr.
Harrington behaved with manliness and dignity, when the resolu-
tion to censure Sir Richard Webster was proposed in the House
of Commons. A man capable of acting as he then did from that
feeling of self-respect which I hope shall always animate the

792 HOME RULE OR EGOTISM? [Sept.,

bar of Ireland, should find no difficulty in allowing friends to
pave the way for union with the majority; or, better still, in
himself proposing to let the dead past bury its dead.

In selecting Mr. Harrington from those who were made tar-
gets for the malignant attacks of the enemies of the national
organization, I bear in mind the administrative talent he dis-
played in controling it. It seemed clear enough that he was
the true chief secretary at the time. He kept in hand the loose
and impetuous elements of society which Mr. Balfour's policy
was driving to disorder. The country should not be deprived of
the services of a man so capable, and I trust that he will realize
what he owes to the country and his own character.

It is with a feeling akin to nightmare, that one recognizes
the phase of the recent revolt which aims at turning the peo-
ple against their oldest and truest friends. At the Parnell Com-
mission, if anything was demonstrated at all, it was that the
priesthood of Ireland were one in heart and soul with their peo-
ple. It is no light thing that the Parnellites should themselves
weaken the effective force of the national will ; but it is simply
monstrous that, under any pretense whatever, they should seek to
deprive the people of the aid and guidance of a large body of men
especially capable of encouraging, animating, and controling them.

Take up the evidence of his grace the Archbishop of Dublin
before the Commission, and in it blazes clear as the sun at noon
proof of the unconquerable fidelity and profound wisdom with
which the Irish priesthood clung to the fortunes and sustained
the courage of their flocks. To his testimony, in an incompara-
bly greater degree than to anything else, the breakdown of that
vast conspiracy against the Irish people must be attributed. But
in his spirit he is one of those pastors whose teaching and ex-
ample kept up the people's hopes amid the terrors of the penal
times. Akin to an alliance with the Orangemen is the cry of
" no priests in politics."

But where would the national cause be but for the priests?
The people, robbed by the law, starved by the law, condemned
to ignorance by the law, were at the mercy of men re-
sponsible to no one. They were born into a degrading servi-
tude, and passed their lives in fear. They saw their goods seized,
their hovels leveled, the sanctity of their affections violated by
a power which would have brutalized their minds to the level of
their bondage were it not that the visits of the priest, the
words of the priest, the courage of the priest, kept alive the
light of a life which tyrants could not extinguish.

1892.] ALL IN WHITE. 793

Gentlemen should recall these things to memory. They can
point to no such services what they have done for the people is
as a water-drop to the ocean in comparison to what the priests
of Ireland have done and dared. " To the lamp-posts with
the priests ! " cries every village Robespierre. And so we are to
enter on a new era of reason, when liberty, like a harlot, shall sit
in the seat of the dethroned church of Ireland, and present the
chalice of her abominations to an apostate people.

It is time that this frenzy should terminate.

GEORGE MCDERMOT.

ALL IN WHITE.

Alone by the marge of the river

A tall flower clothed in white,
Girdled round with a silver cincture

Of hale celestial light ;
The black of her deep raven tresses

Is wrapped in veils of mist,
The white of her chaste, snowy forehead

With bridal pearls is kissed.

Fair virgin, make haste to the Mountain

For fear the serpent's breath
Pollute thy immaculate bosom

And clasp thee coiled to death.
Bloom, far from the thorns and the briars

Where cloister-lilies grow ;
Breathe, far from the poisoned miasma

Where incensed zephyrs blow.

There drink of the Fountain of Crystal

That flows beneath the Throne,
There rest in the shade of the Bridegroom

Who waits for thee alone.

HENRY EDWARD O'KKEFFE.

794 CATHOLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM OF GREAT BRITAIN. [Sept.,

CATHOLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM OF GREAT BRITAIN.

VERY few exceptional cases are to be found where the man-
agers of Catholic schools are free from vexatious financial pro-
blems. The clergy generally find it necessary to assume the bur-
den of providing ways and means, and are assiduous in urging
upon the laity their duty in assisting Catholic education. No-
thing is more exasperating to an overworked priest, than to see
among his people fathers and mothers of intelligence and of so-
cial standing who never volunteer to personally assist in raising
funds for the improvement of school buildings, or to pay Catho-
lic teachers salaries equal to those of the other teachers of the
country.

A division of labor and responsibility is secured by the plan
adopted for elementary education among the Catholics ,of Great
Britain. The Bishops established, in the year 1847, the* Catholic
School Committee, composed of one clerical and two lay dele-
gates for each diocese. During forty-five years this committee
has rendered most valuable service to Catholic education by
large donations of time, energy, and money. They have suc-
ceeded in establishing training schools for teachers, and have
maintained a high standard of excellence among the scholars by
examinations and rewards. Yet they have had their vicissitudes,
For the year 1872 the income of the committee, from voluntary
subscriptions, was 4,750 ; last year it was only 3,712. In
thirty-two missions of the diocese of Westminster the return
made last year to this important annual collection was under
one pound ; in some it did not amount even to five shillings.

Archbishop Vaughan, successor to Cardinal Manning, has
written a powerful letter on this matter, and plainly tells his
people that they ought to contribute more generously than they
have done in the past to carry on the great national work of
the Catholic School Committee for the benefit of the whole
church in England. The feast of the Sacred Heart is the day
appointed for the annual collection, which is specially announced
by each bishop in his own diocese. Archbishop Vaughan's let-
ter shows a practical mind, familiar with the troublesome com-
plications of getting pounds, shillings, and pence, and guided by
a lofty view of the common good. He says:

" If Catholic education is to be maintained and recognized

1892.] CATHOLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM OF GREAT BRITAIN. 795

by the state, properly trained Catholic teachers must be forth-
coming. Hence, the necessity of Catholic training colleges,
equipped with a staff of competent Catholic teachers, and pro-
vided with all the necessary modern appliances. We possess
three such colleges one for masters at Hammersmith,* and two
for mistresses in Liverpool and Wandsworth. Over 700 trained
masters, and nearly 2,000 trained mistresses, have been sent out
from these institutions, and the supply is kept up regularly year
by year. The training of teachers is no question of choice. It
is no matter of luxury which might be dispensed with under
certain emergencies because, for instance, it is costly, or be-
cause money is needed for other purposes. The training of
Catholic teachers is simply a question of life or death of the
continued existence of Catholic public elementary schools, or of
their speedy extinction. The condition on which our elemen-
tary schools exist is, that they be efficiently taught and this by
teachers who have passed the government examination. Train-
ing colleges have become an absolute necessity ; we might as
well talk of shutting up our schools as of closing our training
colleges. They exist for the benefit of the people and of the
church spread throughout Great Britain. No single diocese is
large enough to support or to absorb the services of a single
college. It is to the advantage of each and all that the colleges
should be limited in number, and should be common to all, sub-
ject to a government and direction in which all the dioceses
have a due and proportionate influence. An educational estab-
lishment, moreover, requires a large number of scholars as a
condition of its efficiency and of its healthy life. Hence, few
colleges are better than many, from both the intellectual and
the economic standpoints.

" The bishops have long since placed the training colleges un-
der the general oversight and inspection of the Catholic School
Committee. That portion of the cost of these colleges which
the government throws upon voluntary contribution is defrayed
by the school committee. We are called upon by the state to
provide the sites, the buildings, the plant, the staff of professors
required, and one-fourth of the cost of each scholar. Upon
these conditions the government undertakes to pay the remain-
ing three-fourths of the annual income for current expenditure.
During the last year the amount which the Catholic School
Committee had to pay towards the annual expenditure of the
three colleges was 2,200. This sum will probably have to be
augmented in the future, for increasing demands require in-

* The following is an analysis of the students trained at Hammersmith since 1854 :

Teaching- in Catholic Elementary Schools 346 In Board Schools 32

Teaching in Industrial Schools, Reforma- In Private Schools, etc 31

lories, and Government Prisons . 23 In Holy Orders n

Teaching in Training Colleges ... 3 Emigrated 28

Inspectors' Assistants 5 Lost sight of 68

Dead 104

Total 377

Mr. Oakeley, H. M. Inspector of Training Colleges, writes : " My opinion is, that the
proportion of your former students now at work in elementary schools is a very good one."

796 CATHOLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM OF GREAT BRITAIN. [Sept.,

creased expenditure. Here, then, is the first head under which
the Catholic School Committee puts forth its claim to your gen-
erosity. No one can be so obtuse as not to perceive at once
that the whole future efficiency, and even the existence of our
schools, must depend upon our training colleges.

" The next great reason for contributing generously to the
present collection is because the Catholic School Committee sup-
ports our national system of diocesan religious inspection. Re-
ligious inspection is vital to Catholic schools. Of what use to
have training colleges and Catholic schools if the Catholic faith,
the Catholic spirit, the Catholic system of life and conduct, were
banished from their midst? Now, here would be a danger in
this direction were there no officers set apart to watch over and
secure these most sacred interests. It is fitting and necessary
that such officers should exist. The government appoints its in-
spectors, and they take up a formidable position in the eyes of
managers, teachers, and scholars. Upon their report depends
the credit of the school before the country, and also its income.
They occupy, therefore, a post of influence and control which
might easily become dominant and irresistible. There is, for
this reason, a not unnatural corresponding tendency on the part
of teachers to subordinate everything to the necessity of passing
a successful secular examination. Thus religion might be easily
dethroned from her post of honor, and put into a secondary
place through the exacting tyranny of the money consideration.
To counteract this tendency and pressure, it has been found
necessary everywhere to appoint diocesan inspectors, whose busi-
ness it is to maintain the divine claims of religion to the place
of honor and prominence in the schools. This has been found
necessary not merely in Catholic, but also in Church of Eng-
land schools to this extent, that there is not a Protestant dio-
cese which is not provided with its religious inspectors. If this
be found necessary in schools of the Church of England, with
its diminutive catechism and its undefined system, how much
more necessary must it be in Catholic schools. The doctrines
of the Catholic Church are numerous, and precisely defined ; and
her catechism is a popular text book of theology. The duties
she imposes, the practices she inculcates, govern and pervade the
whole life of her children. They are not fetiches and charms
appealing to ignorance and superstition ; but logical consequences
flowing from the great mystery of the Incarnation, in varied ap-
plication to the lives of men. Hence, the need of bringing them
home to the reason as well as to the heart of the young. This
religious training of the intellect and affections demands time,
attention, skill, and devotion on the part of the teachers, who
need to be sustained in their accomplishment of this sacred por-
tion of their work.

"We all know that even religion may be made distasteful and
repulsive if it be always turned into a dry matter of lessons,
and that it will never captivate the mind and head of the youth

1892.] CATHOLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM OF GREAT BRITAIN. 797

who has finished his schooling if it has never won the admira-
tion, the reverence, and the love of the child. Here, then, is
the difficult task of the diocesan inspector to direct the teachers,
to examine or encourage the scholars in such wise and tactful
ways that the whole soul of the child intellect and affection
may become deeply and lastingly influenced by the reign of
religion. Of course, this is the work of the parochial clergy
also, who ought to be continually in their schools ; but their
work is wonderfully aided and sustained by a good system of
diocesan inspection. In addition to the inspection of the schools,
the diocesan inspectors have their hand upon the training
colleges ; for they take charge of the religious examination of
all the Catholic pupil teachers throughout the country. They
also meet regularly in conference, take the religious interests
generally of teachers and scholars into consideration, and thus
form, under the bishops, a most valuable permanent board for
the furtherance of religious education in our public elementary
schools. The Catholic School Committee has, therefore, ren-
dered excellent service by devoting 800 or 900 a year of
its income to the part payment of diocesan inspectors."

Before concluding his instructive letter, Archbishop Vaughan
reminds his people that the general election will provide them
an opportunity to serve the interests of Christian education, and
to urge its claims upon the legislature. He uses these words:

" We are not inviting you either to confound or to weaken
the issues which may be placed before you in the coming elec-
tions. But we say that, be these what they may, you must re-
member that you are Christians. No matter who may be the
candidate of your choice, press upon him your desire to main-
tain Christianity as the basis and form of public elementary edu-
cation. Send no man to Parliament without having distinctly
informed him of this desire. If for some reason or other you
consider it right to vote for a man who is indifferent to religious
education, it will do him no harm to know that the elector who
has returned him to Parliament is opposed to him on the issue
of liberty and justice for Catholic schools."

In the city of London, and elsewhere in England, it was
found impossible to supply the number of teachers required for
Catholic schools from the religious communities. Under peculiar
difficulties and at great expense the College of St. Mary, at
Hammersmith, was established for the training of lay teachers,
which sent forth to the end of the year 1887, into various dio-
ceses, 639 trained masters. The Sisters of Notre Dame at Na-
mur, Belgium, accepted, in 1855, an invitation from the Catholic
School Committee to make their house at Liverpool a training

798 CATHOLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM OF GREAT BRITAIN. [Sept.,

college for female teachers. From that institution 1375 trained
teachers have been graduated. The reverend mother of the
Sisters of the Holy Child, at St. Leonard's, also agreed to make
her house a second female training college. Some years later
the Ladies of the Sacred Heart responded to a call of the com-
mittee, and a similar college was located in their house at
Wandsvvorth, and had to its credit, at the end of the year 1887,
no less than 296 trained teachers.

One of the most distinguished of the Oxford converts, Mr. T.
W. Allies, besides writing his masterly historical works, devoted
himself to Catholic primary education, especially in the poor
schools. For a period of nearly forty years his great ability
and experience enabled him to render most efficient co-operation
to the work of the Catholic School Committee. He was re-
tired from his position as secretary a short time ago, on a pen-
sion of ,400 a year. In the course of an interview with Mr.
Allies, the present writer obtained many facts of great value
bearing on the history of Catholic education in England from
1848 to 1888.

The Committee of Council on Education passed, December
1 8th, 1847, a resolution defining the conditions of aid to Catho-
lic schools. This resolution was formally sanctioned by Parlia-
ment in the following year ; and Catholics were for the first time
admitted to participation in the benefits of the national educa-
tional grant. It was computed at that time that one-fifteenth
part of the population of Great Britain belonged to the Catho-
lic Church, and it was expected that Catholics would get as
their share from the government 10,000 towards building and
supporting schools. The arrangement of the terms on which the
state agreed to give this assistance was entrusted to the honor-
able Charles Langdale, chairman of the Catholic School Commit-
tee, acting at every step under the instruction of the bishops.
On April I9th, 1849, Dr. Wiseman, writing in the name of the
bishops, said : " They renew their expression of full and perfect
confidence in the committee, and feel that, judging from the
past, they possess in it the most useful and trustworthy organi-
zation ever yet possessed by the English Catholics for this truly
Christian object, and they augur from past success still greater
results."

From 1848 to 1886, inclusive, the whole amount received
from the public funds for Catholic schools in England was
2,189,186, and to Catholic schools in Scotland 343,901.
During these years public grants for the building of Catholic

1892.] CATHOLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM OF GREAT BRITAIN. 799

schools and grants for support of pupil teachers were largely
applied for ; but, in a number of cases, government aid was
not accepted without much hesitation. Considerable opposition
arose in 1857, to the accepting of support grants, and still more
to grants for building. The bishops deemed it requisite to
again consider the whole subject. As a result, Cardinal Wise-
man, in the name of the bishops, reaffirmed the former deci-
sion as to the propriety of receiving building and annual grants
from the Committee of Council. On this occasion, as before, the
common centre of operations was the Catholic School Com-
mittee. The members were highly praised by Cardinal Wiseman
for their work " in combining and concentrating in a uniform
plan and a definite action the multiplied relations between them-
selves, the state, and the Catholic public in the growing cause
of education." The following words are taken from an address
of the committee to the pope : *

"The decision of the bishops to establish a single organiza-
tion [the Catholic School Committee] for the end in view, cer-
tainly secured for the common welfare these advantages : that
in this work the clergy and the laity might properly co-operate
with each other ; that the education of the poor of each parish
should be incumbent on the whole congregation as an obligation
of charity ; that the work might progress equally and definitely
throughout the whole kingdom ; that the young generation might
be imbued simultaneously with divine and human training ; that
the combined work might be done at the joint expense of the
state as well as the church."

The portion of the public money given to Catholic schools
reached in the year 1870 before the new education act had
.been introduced by Mr. Forster the sum of 37,283 for Eng-
land, and 4,243 for Scotland. Lord Howard, of Glossop, on
behalf of the Catholic School Committee, vigilantly watched the
progress of the new act in Parliament, and, though the bishops
were absent in Rome at the general council of the Vatican, he
was in constant communication with them, and acted upon their
instructions. It is to be observed that the hierarchy of Great
Britain, after mature deliberation on three separate occasions, in
1847, m J 857, and again in 1870, agreed to accept state aid for

"* Haec sunt profecto quas communi utilitati comparavit unius ad hunc finem societafcis
construendae consilium illud episcopale ; ut clerici et laici in hoc opere partes suas debite
conferrent, ut pauperum instructio tanquam onus caritatis cuncto castui incumberet ; ut per
totum regnum parili cursu et mensura se insinuaret ; ut tarn divina quam humana disciplina
tenera progenies simul imbueretur ; ut reipublicae pariter et Ecclesias ope conserta labor perfi-
ceretur."

8oo CATHOLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM OF GREAT BRITAIN. [Sept.,

Catholic schools conditioned on state supervision in the secular
branches of study. The bishops of Ireland likewise consented
to the conditions proposed for giving a share of the public funds
to Catholic schools, while vigorously opposing unfair discrimina-
tions in favor of institutions patronized by the government.
Similar arrangements have been made with the clergy in charge
of schools in many of the colonies of the British empire. The pro-
gressive workers of the church of England by law established
have availed themselves of every opportunity to secure gov-
ernment aid for their missionary schools, notwithstanding the
senseless protests of non-conformists.

To the united efforts of the Catholic clergy and laity, con-
ducted on the lines of existing law, are due the results shown
in the report of the council for 1886, by which it appears that
1,720 Catholic schools were receiving the annual grant; that
these schools had accommodation for 364,492 scholars, and that
215,809 scholars were in average attendance. The lay teachers
employed numbered about three thousand, less than one-third
being males. Certificates for teachers are given after a strict
examination by the royal inspectors appointed by the govern-
ment.

The late Cardinal Manning was most anxious to maintain a
high standard of personal religious devotion among the lay
teachers. A short time before his death he exhorted them to
attend Mass with their scholars every Sunday, and as far as
possible to assist in preparing them for the Sacraments regularly.
He was unwilling even to allow a teacher to play the organ, if
the scholars were thereby deprived of religious instruction. The
duty resting upon the teacher was set forth by Cardinal Man-
ning in these words :

"The first great responsibility in education rests upon the
parents. And it is the will of the parents that has created the
voluntary system of England, and more than that it is the will
of the English people that has created our empire all over the
world. It is the will of the Irish people that has spread St.
Patrick's faith wherever the name of England is to be found.
That, then, is the voluntary system no government ever did that ;
it is not in the power of the treasury or of an education de-
partment to create a system of voluntary education. Nothing
can create that but the will of the parents, aided by the will of
all who care for their faith and have a love of souls, and wish
to preserve their poor children within the light of the truth.
That is the voluntary system. If that is so, I will tell you,
as I have told you over and over again, I look upon you as,

1892.] CATHOLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM OF GREAT BRITAIN. 801

next to the priest, sharing in the pastoral office, and if any child
in the parish grows up without the knowledge of the faith, the
priest is first responsible, and you next; I believe you are Cath-
olics and will gladly accept that responsibility. What is the
office, then, of a teacher? Remember, he is picked out from
boyhood, trained, and brought up, and after his education is
complete is sent out to be the master of a school. We pick
out our boys, train them, bring them up, and in time ordain
them to be priests. You go through a long and careful prepa-
ration ; so do we and the two offices are morally united to-
gether. There can be no difficulty in defining a true Catholic
teacher. No man ought to be a teacher who is not a true Cath-
olic in his faith ; secondly, he ought to be a good Catholic in
his life, not only in the practice of his religion and in going to
the Sacraments, but also in the graces of a Christian life which
make him an example to the children around him. Why was
the voluntary system the Christian system ever formed, but
that the parents might have their children taught their faith and
religion according to their conscience ? We are the first respon-
sible teachers, and you by delegation share our responsibility ;
therefore, you are not only the secular teachers in the four gov-
ernment hours ; you are also the religious teachers not only in
the two half-hours or one full hour, but always and everywhere.
But you are the teachers also of the pupil teachers ; and here I
have one word to say. In 1871 we had 31 boy pupil teachers;
in 1872, 33, and they continued rising until 1876, when they
were 43. In 1877 they were 53, and in 1878 they were 55. In
1879 we begin to go down to 45, then 42,^ 30, 19, 23, 32, 15, 27,
and 21. In 1891, in the diocese of Westminster, there are 21 boy
pupil teachers that is, it has gone down one-third below what
it was in 1871, and it is not half what it was at its better times.
I am not going into that matter now, except to say that we
must go up again, because if we are to have really good mas-
ters it can only be by picking them out as we pick out boys
for the priesthood. The royal commission on education had a
long debate on the matter. The majority of the commission
was of opinion that the true way to find teachers that could be
trusted intellectually and morally, is to pick them out early, and
train them carefully."

THOMAS MCMILLAN.

VOL. LV. 52

8o2 THE MAID OF ORLEANS. [Sept.,

THE MAID OF ORLEANS.

II.

ORLEANS, the key of the southern provinces of France, was
invested by the English. Joan had promised to raise the siege.
Such was to be the sign of her mission.

The march to Orleans began on the 2/th of April, 1429.
The army was ten thousand strong, having in charge a convoy
of provisions sorely needed by the half-famished people and gar-
rison of the besieged city. Joan's first care was for the spiritual
and moral condition of the troops. She recommended them to
repent and confess. She frequently received Communion at
Mass in the open air before their eyes ; she used her personal
influence against blasphemy, especially among the officers, whom
she was not afraid to upbraid gently, yet firmly, on this head.
She ordered the removal of women of bad character who were
in the wake of the army. On this point she was inexorable.
So far went her zeal that one day she broke her sword on the
back of one of these creatures. It was " the sword of St. Cathe-
rine with the five crosses." It was the only use to which she
ever put her drawn sword. The king was very sorry on
hearing of the accident to the sword, and said a stick would have
done as well. But she held more to the honor of her sex than
to her favorite sword. There is something supremely noble in
the fact that she drew and wielded it not to shed the blood of
the enemy, but to strike for that virtue which is her shining gem.

All this was a novelty and surprise to the men who for gen-
erations had lived in the disorders of war. But respect got the
better of habit ; even the coarsest considered themselves bound
to restraint under such a leader. On the 29th of April they
arrived before Orleans. But, to Joan's great astonishment, the
river was between them and the city. She had ordered such a
line of march as would have brought them on the other side,
under the walls of the place. But the officers, fearing to thrust
themselves in among the enemy who held all approaches on
that side, had deceived her in carrying out the order. This
showed lack of confidence in her mission, and pained her.
Dunois, the valiant defender of Orleans, came over to urge her
to enter the city that very evening, and leave the army behind
to feel its way across the river below the enemy's lines. To him

1892.] THE MAID OF ORLEANS. 803

she expressed her discontent : " In the name of God, the counsel
of my Lord is wiser than yours ; you thought to deceive me and
you have deceived yourselves, for I am bringing you the best
succor that ever had town or city, and that is the good will of
God and succor from the King of Heaven."

She was loath to separate even for a few days from her
troops, lest they should lose the courage and enthusiasm that
animated them ; but Dunois was urgent. " Orleans would count
it naught," he said, " to receive the provisions without the maid."
And so she returned with him. Her entrance was a triumph.
The people thronged about her, carrying torches, greeting her
arrival with wild acclamations. In their mad rushes to apprpach
and touch her and kiss her horse, her foot, the stock of her
standard, they almost set her banner on fire. To the church the
joyful procession rolled on, where the thanksgiving for her safe-
coming was expressed in prayer and chanting of the Te Deum.
The troops left behind made the crossing safely beyond reach
of the enemy. Joan went a few miles out to meet them, and
led them into the city, passing right under and through the ene-
my's works. The English did not move ; in fact, fear of her
seemed to paralyze them. " That is she yonder," said they to
one another, as she boldly rode within earshot. Joan had sent a
letter to the English commander before setting out from Chinon,
>idding him in God's name to retreat from Orleans and go back
to England. Before taking the offensive she sent them sum-
ions, for she desired to avoid the shedding of blood. They
-eplied with coarse insults and threats to burn her alive if they
:aught her. " I have had news from the Lord," said Joan on
tearing the answer ; " let Talbot arm, and show himself in front
)f the city. If he can take me, let him burn me ; but if he is
defeated, let him raise the siege, and let the English go back to
their own country." For two days the French assaulted the
English forts. On the third day the strongest of them all was
stormed. The resistance was rude. For a while the French
seemed to waver. Joan seized a scaling ladder, set it against
the rampart, and banner in hand sprang upward. Just then an
arrow struck her between the neck and shoulder ; pierced through
and through, she fell. There was a moment of faintness ; there
were even tears of pain ; but she rallied, pulled the arrow out
with her own hands, and had the wound bound up. While she
rested and prayed, the French again fell back, and the captains
were ordering the retreat to be sounded. Joan sprang to her
feet. " My God ! " she cried, " we shall soon be inside the fort.
Let the men have a breathing spell, and then at them again."

804 THE MAID OF ORLEANS. [Sept.,

She remounted her horse, seized her banner, struck the rampart
with it and cried out : " Now they are yours. Forward !" The
dash was irresistible ; the English broke from their works into a
disastrous retreat and rushed pell-mell across the river. Orleans
was saved. There was frenzy of joy in the city when she rode
back from the assault. Bells rang throughout the night. Te
Deums were chanted in the churches, while the heroine was
sleepless from the fever of her wound. At daybreak, on the
morrow (the 8th of May, a Sunday) the English, who had rallied,
drew up in battle line on the plains outside the walls, as if to
give battle. The French commanders were anxious to accept
the .challenge, flushed as they were by the victory of the day
before. News is brought to Joan. She arises, still suffering ;
hastens outside the gates. " For the love of God and holy Sun-
day, be not the first to attack. It is God's good will and
pleasure that they go, if they be minded to do so. If they at-
tack you, defend yourselves boldly ; you will be the masters."
Then she had an altar raised, and there, in the presence of the
troops in order of battle, Mass was celebrated. Half way in the
Mass the cry was raised, "They are retreating! " So it was. The
English drew off in good order ; the siege was raised within one
week after Joan's arrival. Ever since the day has been held in
great solemnity every year in Orleans.

The deliverance of Orleans produced a deep impression. The
maid had given the sign promised at Poitiers. " Truly she is
sent by God /" was now the cry of the people and the verdict of
the learned. Gerson and Gelu hasten to warn the king and the
nation not to frustrate by ingratitude and sin the further mis-
sion of Joan and the gracious plan of God. The advise was
needed. The king's favorites had been willing enough to let her go
and fight the English at Orleans. But, now that she wished to push
on to Rheims through the enemy's strongholds, they opposed
her bitterly. Was the king to be drawn from his life of lazy
inaction and set in movement ? Were they expected to expose
themselves to danger ? The cowards resolved to oppose her
moving northward by every means. From Orleans Joan went
back to the king. He came out as far as Tours to welcome
her. She met him, banner in hand, head uncovered, bending
down over her charger's neck. Charles doffed his cap, held out
his hand. " And," adds the naive chronicler, " as it seemed to
many, he would fain have kissed her for the joy he felt." Great
were the festivities in her honor, but Joan was not come for
honors, she was come to urge the finishing of her work. " I shall
hardly last more than a year," she said to the king; "we must

1892.] THE MAID OF ORLEANS. 805

think of working right well this year, for there is much to do."
To her impatience the only answer was delay, and still more de-
lay. One day, vexed beyond measure by the court's inaction,
she went without previous notice into the king's presence, fell
upon her knees, and said : " Gentle dauphin, hold not so many
and such long counsels; come to Rheims, and there take your
crown. I am sorely urged to take you thither ; my voices leave
me no rest."

Joan was not alone in her eagerness to go forward. Lords
and people, warriors old and young, were anxious to join her,
and troops were found willing to serve with no expense to the
king. It was amidst this outburst of patriotism that she began
the campaign. Before letting her go on to Rheims, she was
persuaded to reduce the places held by the English on the Loire,
and they quickly yielded one after another. An English army
was hurrying up under Sir John Falstaff to the help of the be-
sieged places, but it came too late to save them. On the plain
of Patay it drew up, ready to meet the Maid of Orleans. For
many years the French had been defeated in open engagements.
They were loath to try fortunes with their hereditary victors
and stake all on one pitched battle. " Have you good spurs ? "
said Joan to the Duke d'Alengon, who expressed to her the
fears of the army. " Ha ! shall we then be put to flight ? " was
the response. " No surely, but there will be need to ride boldly.
We shall give a good account of the English, and our spurs shall
serve us famously in pursuing them. We must fight. Though
the English were suspended from the clouds, we should have
them, for God has sent us to punish them." The battle, fought
on the 1 8th of June, was short, the victory brilliant. Talbot and
most of the English captains were made prisoners. Half of the
English army remained, dead or wounded, on the field. The
spell of Crecy and Agincourt was broken.

What obstacle could there be now to prevent the crowning
and consecration of the king in Rheims? None, indeed, but the
unaccountable opposition of the king's evil advisers and the
more unaccountable weakness of the king himself. Joan, losing
all patience at their hesitation, took upon herself to act. She
left Gien, where the court resided, and started off northward
with all the troops. There was nothing for it but to follow her.
The king, the court, La Tremouille, much against his will, set
out, or rather were dragged on in the wake of the army, which
was twelve thousand strong. Of the cities on the way some
opened their gates at once ; others, fearing the possible return of
the English, tried to compromise. At Troyes there was a gar-

806 THE MAID OF ORLEANS. [Sept.,

rison of six hundred English and Burgundians, who held the in-
habitants in terror. All attempts on the part of the king to
bring them to submission failed. There was, in consequence,
great perplexity in the royal camp ; for there were neither pro-
visions enough for a long stay before the town, nor guns and
siege trains to carry it by force. There was talk of turning
back, for so important a place could not be left a menace in
their rear, but Joan made her way into the king's council, and
turning to him asked if he would believe her. " Speak ; if you
say what is reasonable and tends to profit, readily will you be
believed." " Gentle King of France," she answered, " if you be
willing to abide here, the city will be at your disposal within
two days/' It was decided to wait. Joan mounted her horse,
and with her banner in her hand rode through the camp, giving
orders to prepare for the assault. She had her own tent pitched
close to the ditch, "doing more," says a contemporary, "than
two of the ablest captains could have done." On the next day
all was ready, the ditches were bridged, and Joan had just
shouted the command : " Forward ! assault ! " when the citizens
capitulated. Thence to Rheims was a bloodless journey. On
the i6th of July Charles entered that city, the religious capital
of his kingdom, and the ceremony of his coronation was fixed
for the morrow.

The solemn national event was rendered highly emotional by
the unusual circumstances that surrounded it. In the procession to
the cathedral, the maid rode next to the king, her victorious ban-
ner in hand. She was the cynosure of all eyes, as much as he the
object of all acclamations. " In God's name," said she to Dunois
riding by her side, " here is a good people and a devout. When
I die I should much like to be in these parts." " Joan," said he,
" know you when you will die and in what place ? " "I know
not, for I am at the will of God." Within the cathedral, while
the king, surrounded by the highest nobility of the realm, knelt
under the unction of the archbishop, Joan was at his side, ban-
ner in hand, France's Guardian Angel. The ceremony over, she
knelt to him, kissed his feet, and weeping great tears said : " Gen-
tle king, now is executed God's good pleasure that you should
come to Rheims to receive consecration and thus show that you
are the true king to whom belongs the kingdom." The lords
about her wept. " For," says the chronicler, " when they heard
these words of Joan, they believed the more that she was sent
from God, and not otherwise." Shortly after, in a chance con-
versation, she said : " I would that it pleased God, my Creator,
that I could return now and go back to serve my father and

1892.] THE MAID OF ORLEANS. 807

mother in taking care of their flocks, with my sister and my
brothers, who would be very glad to see me."

On these two sentences has been founded the theory that
the coronation of Rheims was the end of Joan's mission. But
they may be very easily understood otherwise, the former as ex-
pressing so much of her God-given task fulfilled, the latter as
expressing a mere wish of her own, not as stating positively that
her mission had come to a close.

Let us dwell for a moment on this topic, before narrating
the military events which followed the coronation.

I am persuaded that the coronation was not the sole end for
which she was sent. It was rather a means to an end. The
end was the complete expulsion of the English from the kingdom
of France, and the restoration of peace to that country by the ces-
sation of its civil broils between the two houses of Burgundy and
Orleans. These purposes were effected, but only after her death.

If Joan knew that she had done all the work for which she
was commissioned, and wished to withdraw from her military
career, no one would have hindered her going back to her home.
Certainly, the politics of the court did not prevent her. On the
contrary, the two men who managed these politics, La Tre-
mouille and Regnault, the archbishop of Rheims, would have been
very glad to get rid of her after the ceremony. It had been a
great effort for them to come to Rheims, and, the coronation
successfully achieved, they could not regret it. Bu^ they were
not willing to go any further, and all their efforts henceforth
were to keep Joan from doing anything more. Therefore, if she
remained at her post, it must have been out of a sense of obe-
dience to her mission.

Joan did by no means think her mission ended at Rheims.
Her letters written after the coronation, notably that to the Duke
of Burgundy, her answers in the Rouen trial, her refusal to leave
off her male dress even in prison, the continued intercourse with
her heavenly visitants, advising her in the military operations
that followed the ceremony, prove that her mission was not
ended. When asked by her judges at her trial how it came
that she had not accomplished all that she had promised, she
answered that she had been thwarted, not by the English that
were a nonsensical reason but by the French themselves. When
the news of her capture became known there was consternation
among the nationalists. Jacques Gelu, the foremost ecclesiastic
of the land, wrote a letter to the king, bidding him reflect upon
his conduct, and see if some offence on his part had not pro-
voked the anger of God, exhorting him to spare no sacrifice for

8o8 THE MAID OF ORLEANS. [Sept.,

her deliverance, if he would not incur the eternal stigma of in-
gratitude. He asks that prayers be ordered in the kingdom for
her liberation, that, if by fault of the king or the people this
misfortune had fallen on France, God might forgive them. The
prayers were ordered, a Collect, a Secret, a Post-Communion, to
be said at every Mass. They were to the intent that Joan may
be freed to execute fully the work prescribed to her by heaven.
If the rule of prayer determines the rule of belief, then France
did not believe that the mission of Joan was closed at Rheims.
What then had happened ? France, through the king and the
court, had been unfaithful to the grace God had bestowed upon
the nation in the person of Joan.

Her work had been thwarted. Like Jonas' mission to Niniveh,
Joan's mission to France was conditioned, as to its complete ex-
ecution, by the dispositions and faithfulness of those to whom
she was sent. Not her infidelity, but the king's came athwart
her endeavors, and in God's mysterious ways she became the
victim of that infidelity. Gerson, immediately after the victory
of Orleans, had given the warning. " A first miracle," he wrote,
"does not always bring on what men expect therefrom. Hence,
even if which God forbid the expectations of Joan and ours
should be frustated of full realization, we should not conclude
that what has been done is not from God. Our ingratitude, our
blasphemies, or other crimes might effect that by a just judg-
ment we stamld not see the realization of all that we hope. Let
the king, then, beware lest he arrest by unfaithfulness the course
of divine goodness of which such marvelous signs have been
given." The warning was prophetic.

The French did not prove themselves worthy of this signal
favor, and the statement I will shortly make of Joan's course
from Rheims to Rouen proves it. If they had, they would not
have suffered their heroine to be burned by her and their enemy
in hatred of her and of themselves. Oh, where was the spirit of
chivalry, that the sword of every Frenchman did not leap from
its scabbard and flash around the Pucelle an impregnable fortress
of steel? They ignobly abandoned her; saw her sold, tried,
and burned. And when French historians pretend that her mis-
sion to them was ended at Rheims they seek to save themselves
from dishonor by throwing her overboard. Let France own her
disgrace, kneel in penitence, strike her breast and say " mea culpa"

After the fire at Rouen died out, leaving of Joan but ashes,
the church of France demanded of the people public penance
and expiation, thereby acknowledging that the French nation
was in fault. Only one bishop, Regnault de Chartres, the bosom

1892.] THE MAID OF ORLEANS. 809

friend of La Tremouille, dared to advance a theory that has left
an eternal stain on his memory. " She had deserved capture,"
he wrote to his archiepiscopal city of Rheims, "because of her
excessive confidence in her own power and judgment." And
after her death he wrote that God had permitted it because she
dressed too richly, and attributed to herself not to God the
glory of her deeds. This man was more a courtier than a bishop.
He resided in the court, not in his see. For four years Rheims
was left without even holy oils for the administration of the
sacraments, without the usual coadjutor to do his work. He, so
faithless to his diocese, to accuse Joan of unfaithfulness to her
heavenly mission ! Joan asked nothing, received nothing, in pay-
ment of her services. Regnault de Chartres drew the revenues
of his see, though an absentee, and gave as dower to one of his
nieces the county of Vierzou that he had purchased for sixty
thousand pounds. He to accuse Joan of deserving her death be-
cause she dressed richly !

A short statement of Joan's career after the ceremony of
coronation will show how the weak king, Charles VII., proved
unworthy of God's blessing. If there is more of failure than suc-
cess in that career, it was not that she was not guided by her
saints or knew not what to do and how to do it, but that she
was not obeyed, and was thwarted by those in power at every
step. Her advice was to march from Rheims to Paris at once.
Nothing of the sort was done. Charles and La Tremouille re-
turned to their course of hesitation, tergiversation, change of tac-
tics and residence, without doing themselves, or letting her do,
anything of a decisive character. They secretly negotiated with
the Duke of Burgundy, in the hope of detaching him from the
English cause. He entered into their project and concluded a
temporary truce simply to gain time and enable the English to
marshal their forces for the defence of the capital. Joan followed
the king in his aimless wanderings, hoping ever he would listen
to her. Meanwhile Bedford threw five thousand men into Paris.
One division of this army had a white standard, on which was
depicted a distaff full of cotton, a half-filled spindle was hanging
from the distaff, and beneath was the inscription, " Now, fair one,
come on." This was meant as an insult to Joan. Impatient at
both the sloth of the king and the activity of the enemy, she
took a bold step. She set out from Compiegne with her troops,
dashed into St. Denis, and occupied it with a view to an attack
on Paris. She had forced Charles' hand before ; she now com-
pelled him to leave Compiegne and come to her within protec-
tion of the troops. She assaulted Paris with all the vigor and

8 io THE MAID OF ORLEANS. [Sept.,

dash of former days, was severely wounded, but insisted on re-
maining in the position she had gained. La Tremouille sent or-
ders to retreat ; she would not obey them. A knight seized her,
set her on her horse, and led her back to St. Denis by force.
The king commanded the army to move off. Before leaving St.
Denis she laid her armor on the saint's tomb ; it was her pro-
test against the king's conduct. The next nine months were
spent in complete inaction, with a few spasmodic efforts only
partly successful. The heavenly voices were not wanting to direct
and urge her on, but her appeals were not listened to. The
conduct of Charles during this period is one of the most unac-
countable phenomena in all history.

The city of Compiegne was an important point in the north.
The authority of Charles was recognized by the inhabitants. La
Tremouille was lord of the city, and Guillaume de Flavy was his
lieutenant there. The Duke of Burgundy wanted the place, and
entered into negotiations with La Tremouille for its surrender.
The courtier was willing enough to hand it over to the king's
enemy for a handsome price, but the loyal citizens would rather
suffer destruction. The only way left the Duke of Burgundy to en-
ter into possession was to reduce the city by siege. Joan, attracted
by the noble example of the city's loyalty, threw herself into the
place with a handful of men to defend it. She had often been
warned of late by her saints of some danger impending over her.
She expected to be taken prisoner, in what time and place she did
not know. One day, after hearing Mass and receiving Communion,
she said to those who surrounded her: "My children and dear
friends, I notify you that I am sold and betrayed and that I
shall shortly be delivered over to death ; I beseech you pray
God for me." That very day she made a sortie with five hun-
dred men ; it was unsuccessful. They were driven back only to
find the gates of the city closed upon them. Twenty enemies
surrounded Joan, one seized her and flung her to the ground.
She was a prisoner, the prisoner of John of Luxembourg. Was
she betrayed and delivered up as she had predicted ? Did Guil-
laume de Flavy deliberately shut the gates in her face and leave
her to the foe ? He was suspected of it at the time, and his-
torians have indorsed the suspicion. It is very sure that his
master, La Tremouille, who had wanted to sell the place, and
Regnault de Chartres, were glad to see her a prisoner.

For six months Joan remained the prisoner of John of Lux-
embourg. To make his possession of her secure, for she had at-
tempted escape and gave her captors to understand she would
use every opportunity to regain freedom and there was fear

1892.] THE MAID OF ORLEANS. 8n

that the French might possibly make a sudden dash to rescue
her her captor sent her under strong escort to his castle of
Beaurevoir, situated beyond the theatre of war near Cambrai.
Her cell was on the upper floor of the building, sixty feet above
the ground.

The wife and the aunt of John of Luxembourg were inmates
of the castle; they left nothing undone to mitigate the annoy-
ances of her prison life. These kind women tried to persuade
her to give up her military dress and don the habit of her sex.
Joan answered that she had not leave from the Lord and the
time was not yet come. In fact her military costume was no
less necessary to her in prison than in camp, and for the same
obvious reasons.

It was at Beaurevoir that she did a deed that was made
much of against her in the trial at Rouen. She feared that she
should be given over to the English, and she dreaded the fate
that awaited her at their hands. She knew that the loyal city
of Compiegne was hard pressed and that all its inhabitants above
the age of seven were doomed to the sword. This latter knowl-
edge well-nigh distracted her. " How can God," she cried out,
" allow these good people, who have been so loyal to their king,
to perish?" She resolved to go to their defence at any cost.
But how make her way to them ? The tower was sixty feet
high, and the ground at the bottom was hard ; her saints for-
bade the thought of the leap. She argued with them, struggled
with them, could no longer resist her wild desire, and, improvis-
ing a rope, she trusted herself to it. It broke, she fell to the
earth, bruised, stunned, and insensible.

Asked during her trial if she thought she had done well to
take the leap, she answered : " I think I did wrong Was it a
mortal sin? I know not. I leave it to our Lord. After the
leap I confessed and asked God's pardon." Her saints assured
her she was pardoned. Granted she sinned, a sin does not
prove that she did not have a divine mission and that her revel-
ations were false. Such a mode of arguing would clear the
calendar pretty bare of inspired, divinely-sent, holy men and
women. Moses, David, St. Peter, are not thought impostors for
their sin. Pity for the noble maid lying insensible at the base
of the dungeon-castle of Beaurevoir with the shadow of martyr-
dom hovering over her !

THOMAS O'GORMAN.

Catholic University of America,

(TO BE CONCLUDED.)

812 THE MATCHBOX-MAKERS OF EAST LONDON. [Sept.,

THE MATCHBOX-MAKERS OF EAST LONDON.

AT HOME.

THE matchbox-makers of Shoreditch are among the poorest
of the working poor ; they are women, and they work in their
homes ; but, nevertheless, they were last year organized into a
trade-union. On New Year's night the "tea" was given to the
union. This "tea" and the distribution of the tickets for it are
my materials for a sketch of life only too much out-of-the-way
for most of us. The tickets had to be distributed personally,
for these poor people move from house to house and street to
street so constantly that the post would secure a very moderate
attendance indeed. Two of us, accordingly, set ourselves to
track them out. These are the first three rooms we visited :

Room No. I was up a little court that in the gloom I first
took for a stable-yard. Having bumped ourselves up a flight of
semi-perpendicular and twisting stairs, we entered a room about
twelve feet by ten ; ceiling low. The furniture was one large
bed, a small cupboard, and a smaller table. The fire-place was
opposite to the' bed, and there was a straight passage, along
which one person might walk between it and the foot of the bed
to the wall. The only other standing room was round the little
table, space for one at each side. A paper Christmas text was
fixed on one of the bare walls. Somehow the words did not
read to me quite as they were spelled. They were at work when
we went in, the mother and one child ; but the father sat idly
by the fire. He had paralysis of the hands. The meaning of
that was that the support of the family six, I think was thrown
upon the mother. There was, of course, a wretched baby,
puny, sickly, yet the one manifestation to them of the common
human joy. They apologized for the disorder as if it could be
otherwise and their poverty, explaining that the baby was ill,
and that the little boy, who was watching us with great eyes,
was just recovering from bronchitis. As soon as we could we
fell to business ; the less eleemosynary you are the better they
will like you, the working poor. As I came out into the lighter
gloom of the street, in a confused way, I tried to argue the
whole life from what I had seen ; the father helpless, though
they starve ; the haggard mother, with sunken, hopeless eyes, and

1892.] THE MATCHBOX-MAKERS OF EAST LONDON. 813

the pale children returning from school (if the school inspectors
have found them) not to play, but to work into the night :

" But the young, young children, O my brothers,

They are weeping bitterly!
They are weeping in the playtime of others,
In the country of the free."

They never get rid of the work ; they rise to gather it up
from its drying on the floor; they lay it out to dry before go-
ing to bed. You see, the matchbox-makers are bound to supply
the paste and fire themselves ; there must be no waste, unless
waste of life. The wage out of which this paste and blessing-
curse, a good fire, comes is almost exactly one and a half pence
an hour. That is to say that, working ten hours a day for five
days and six and a half hours on Saturday (about an hour each
day is lost in tying up, etc.), an average worker would make
seven shillings a week. When the family is large, you can im-
agine how many hours they work, or how much the little cup-
board holds.

Room No. 2 was on the ground floor ; but not in this case,
unless for the stairs, anything the better for that. It was by
this time dusk outside, and almost quite dark inside ; but the
woman was working still. And she kept on working while she
talked, whether from confusion or against time, I could not say.
Again the man sat by the fire idle. He was a young man, ex-
cept for his face, twisted and distorted by rheumatism out of
all likeness of youth. I did not notice how many children there
were ; I was thinking that the only really live thing in that room
was the fire.

Now that I come to write about it, I remember that there
was nothing unusual about the third room we visited, if it be
not that there was no one sick in it. It was not unusual, I feel
sure, to have the washing (it being a wet day) as well as the
boxes drying there. It was the fourth I was thinking of. It
was at the top of a " model lodgings." Certainly it was easier
to get up the stairs, but the room seemed smaller even than the
other three. Oh ! what a breath of pent-up fetidness ! The
neighbor of the woman we wished to see had lighted us up the
stairs, and her children came streaming forth at the stir. They
had whooping-cough, but they did not seem to mind it much.
However, the children of the woman we were visiting were
quite bright and healthy. Undoubtedly, if children get a good
start, and some open air occasionally, it is very hard to kill
them. A fine little girl carried a child not very much smaller

8 14 THE MATCHBOX-MAKERS OF EAST LONDON. [Sept.,

than herself; and we were cheerfully explaining hours and places
and nodding to the child, who alternately laughed at us and hid
his head, when suddenly from behind the drawn curtains of the
bed came a voice, hoarse and with a peculiar, shrill, and broken
note in it: "Ah! don't bother us with your rubbish. Get me
up out o' this. I've been lying here for three months with in-
flammation of the lungs, and no one" "It's all right, it's all

right," said his wife, " you don't understand." The children did
not seem to mind the interruption in the least. I suppose they
were entirely used to it after three months.

The husband of the matchbox-maker is usually a dock-laborer ;
often maimed, or ill like those three, or out of work, for there is
no employment more precarious than his. There were some
comparatively prosperous cases, where the husband, or father, or
brother, had constant and paying work; and there were many
gradations and forms of misery ; but, taken as a whole, it was
with soul-sickness that I turned from these homes of the work-
ers. Of course many of the evils were worse to me than they
are to those born in them the gloom, the crowding, the bare-
ness, all the minor privations. There is only one horror that
they get really indifferent to dirt. The children of the poor
when they are taken to Homes and Hospitals often cannot sleep
at first in the clean beds they miss the vermin ! And to the
primary ills of life no one gets accustomed ; to thirst and hun-
ger ; to cold and fever ; to weakness and pain ; to death and the
cry of the children. And if there is no love between them, and
they do not mind the cry of the children ; and if in their vice
and misery they gnaw at one another, and beat the children for
reminding them of their pain or because the unknowing child
laughs when they are miserable, they are hardly the less misera-
ble for that. And if they drink I will let a few of Mr. Jerome's
" Idle Thoughts " speak for me : " I can understand the ignorant
masses loving to soak themselves in drink Oh, yes ! it's very
shocking that they should, of course very shocking to us who
live in cosy homes, with all the graces and pleasures of life
around us, that the dwellers in damp cellars and windy attics
should creep from their dens of misery into the warmth and
glare of the public-house bar, and seek to float for a brief space
away from their own world upon a lethe stream of gin. But
think, before you hold up your hands in horror at their ill-living,
what ' life ' for those wretched creatures really means. Picture
the squalid misery of their brutish existence, dragged on from
year to year in the narrow, noisome room, where, huddled like

1892.] THE MATCHBOX-MAKERS OF EAST LONDON. 815

vermin in sewers, they swelter, and sicken, and sleep ; where dirt-
begrimed children scream and fight, and sluttish, shrill-voiced wo-
men cuff, and curse, and nag ; where the street outside teems
with roaring filth, and the house around is a bedlam of riot and
stench. ... In the name of the God of mercy, let them pour
the maddening liquor down their throats, and feel for one brief
moment that they live ! " We know what Mr. Jerome means
let us blame ourselves, not them for the direr poverty, the direr
disease, the murderous violence that drink is to most of them
a few hours savage joy, a few hours oblivion, and burning behind
them the long day's hell.

A prey in careless establishments to the unutterable horrors of
necrosis, or rotting of the lower jawbone, and only less miserably
paid, the match-makers are only less miserable than the match-
box-makers. No wonder matches are so cheap, when human life
is no dearer !

ABROAD.

The scene of our festivities was a well-known East End tea-
house rejoicing (I am sure) in the name " Teetotum ;" though it
certainly ought not to rejoice in a title so little felicitous for an
establishment particularly devoted to the cup that " not inebri-
ates." We had a large room with a platform, upon which stood
the piano. The room was bare enough in itself ; still, it looked
hospitable, with its white table-cloths, its long rows of cups and
saucers, and plates of bread and butter and cake, and well-mean-
ing greenery.

A large number arrived in a body punctually. We just let
them take their places as they would, each one to sit by her
friend, and be surrounded by faces she knew. As soon as they
had finally subsided, tea began. We left them to themselves
cept for occasionally seeing that a late-comer got a seat where
he wished, and that there were no empty cups or cakeless plates
made them feel more at ease. In a few minutes we were
rewarded by the free hum of voices, and here and there a
sudden clamor of joke and laughter, and the quick clatter of
the cups and saucers and jingling of the spoons. The hum grew
quicker and quicker, and the clamor louder and louder, the
magical disappearance of tea and cake must have been exceed-
ingly trying to mine host of the Teetotum. Whenever I could
do so without observation, I cast a glance round the tables. It
was profoundly interesting to recognize the old under the new
circumstances. Some of the faces I looked for I could not
find ; perhaps, they were unrecognizably clean. Most, I was re-

8i6 THE MATCHBOX-MAKERS OF EAST LONDON. [Sept.,

joiced to see, eager with excitement and pleasure, but in a few
it smote me to perceive the old apathy the spring of misery
had been strained too far ; there was no longer any recoil. Or,
perhaps there was that at home which might not be forgotten
even for an hour. However, none of them but at least ate, and
had enough for at least once. I passed from these, perhaps, to a
group bending to hear a neighborly story, or a knot of girls
laughing with noisy raillery marking the easy laughter of the crowd
at any little mishap ; or a mother feeding her little one ; or the
sublime satisfaction of ten years when it has a big piece of
cake in either hand. We made the children ex-officio members
of the union for the occasion. There were babies in arms,
children, young women, middle-aged women, and old women ;
pale faces and rosy, round and wrinkled ; rags and ribbons ; but
they all (nearly all ! ) obviously enjoyed themselves at least, I
wont vouch for the babies !

How fond of music the people are ; and how dearly they
love a comic song! We were fortunate enough to have a really
funny man among our performers ; one whose seriousness was
even more exquisitely humorous than his grimaces. It was de-
lightful to hear him sing the " Coster's Serenade," and still
more delightful to hear his audience applaud him. What a storm
of delight it was ; and how the stray cups that had been for-
gotten danced on the board, and jingled imploringly and not
in vain for the landlord ! How they recognized the true bits ;
how the Coster tickled them ; and how the man who went for
the double-barrelled gun " to vaccinate his mother-in-law " how
he roused their enthusiasm !

By and by some had to leave for the sick-bed or the
match-boxes. It was hard not to let them forget their
miserable homes for once ; but if ever they were to be less miser-
able there must be business. It was necessary to teach them
their misery, what it was that it was not in the natural,
inevitable order of things ; the question of the children ; the work
in a workroom instead of in their own homes ; the importance
of business habits and of recruiting. But it was all relieved by
the sure hope, if they worked together with energy and some
patience, that, as one of the speakers said, " it was not here and
once that they should have a happy evening, but many times,
and in their own homes." With repeated cheers they left ; some
of them coming to shake hands with us, and wish us good
wishes.

HENRY ABRAHAM.

Lon don , Englan d.

1892.] POLLY'S TRUE BOY. 817

POLLY'S- TRUE BOY.

ALONG the front of Dory Fludd's saloon ran a sort of ledge
that served for a bench. This ledge was nearly always full, es-
pecially in times of slack work, when, from morning to night, a
line of men sat there with feet upon the side-walk, resting their
elbows upon their knees ; some of them from sheer force of
habit holding empty pipes in their mouths. Dory called them
his plants, professing great pride in such a window-garden ; but
just now the plants wore a neglected appearance, as if allowed
to get too dry.

That was the awkward thing about suspensions : you couldn't
run up a bill at the saloon as you could at the store.

But the sense of smell may have satisfaction without price,
and even in cold weather Dory Fludd's door never remained
shut very long. Then the street was lively to look upon ; sight
save in circuses being also untaxable. Dory's plants found it
interesting to watch people go into the company-store opposite,
and they wagered drinks to be paid when times should be good
again as to who would get trusted and who would come out
empty-handed.

The sensation of the afternoon was John Boylan out for a
walk with his six children, even to the youngest, who was trun-
dled along in a fast-decaying baby-carriage. Dory, the wit of
Rum-Ridge, standing on his door-step, made jokes about this
baby-carriage which shall not be set down here.

The loungers at Fludd's commented upon " Jack Boylan an'
his kids " with an undertone of suspicion, as if nothing short of
a hidden pot of gold could account for all those shoe-strings and
well-brushed heads. They had much against him, in that none
of his wages ever went to swell Dory's coffers, thus adding one
more to the chances of treats. But Jack Boylan had nothing
against anybody, and he nodded kindly to his acquaintances as
he passed them by. His arm was in a sling ; it had been brok-
en on his last working day.

" Hello, Jack ! Out o' the 'ospital, are ye ? " called out Pete
Manus.

" Yes," said Boylan. " I stuck it out a week ; then she come
with the little ones, an' that broke me down."
VOL. LV. 53

8i8 POLLY'S TRUE BOY. [Sept.,

"Ah, ye're a mush, Jack," sang out Jim Towle ; " goin' to
give the kids a lark ? '!

And John sang back: "All the lark they can get lookin' in
windies."

As the little flock went straggling out of sight down the
winding street toward town, Pete said : " Hello, there's Polly
Boylan a-goin' to the store ! I'll set ye all up at once boys, if
she don't come out agin an' nothin' but her book."

" What ails ye for a fool !" said Nick Freeman ; " I bet Jack's
credit 'ill last him through purgatory. Why man, he don't
drink ; where does his money go ? tell me that."

" Well, there's nine on 'em wants feedin', wid Old Mother
Deery, what he keeps for nothin'."

" What does he keep her for ? she ain't no kin to him," growled
Jim Towle, who had turned his own grandmother out of the
house.

" He says she's no place to go."

"He's a mush," said Jim.

"Say, look there," shouted Pete, excitedly; "what did I tell
you ? Poll's a-comin' out widout her supper."

The line stared, asserting in chorus their assurance of being
smashed, hanged, and otherwise put to confusion " if she ain't."

They watched her as she picked her way across the muddy
street, holding up her clean gown. It was hard to walk empty-
handed and look calm under the fire of all those eyes. Polly's
fresh face grew red and troubled and she slipped as fast as she
could out of sight down Fludd's Lane.

Jack Boylan's " kids " had much more of a lark than could
be gained by merely looking in windows. The big busy town
was full of sights and sounds and inexpressible odors. John
was a kind father. His indulgences came rather from sympathy
than from condescension ; he was the big boy of the party, and
stared about as curiously as did the youngsters. He had not
forgotten that sugar is sweet in the mouth, and, discovering in
one of his pockets a few unexpected pennies, he planned a sur-
prise for them when sight-seeing should be exhausted.

Small Jacky y who was only half a size larger than the baby,
tottered along in breeches which he had assumed on the day
when he took his first unaided step. Both tiny arms were con-
stantly in the air, his index fingers busily pointing out the mar-
vels on every side. He kept up a running comment in his own
language, and apparently for his own sole benefit, upon all that
he saw.

1892.] POLLY'S TRUE BOY. 819

It was a lucky day for sights. There was a runaway, result-
ing in a smash-up ; a combat between two gutter urchins, both
of whom came off covered with mud and victory, though each
evidently thought himself beaten and snarled in the face of the
other: "I'll lick ye next time." Also there was a bellowing
brass band, the men dressed in green and gold.

Maggie, the eldest, whose morbid soul hungered after the un-
usual, heard a man say : " The Black Maria '11 soon be along,
Let's go to the court-house back door an' have a look at the
murderers."

" O pop ! " cried Maggie, " mayn't we go too ? " a proposi-
tion not unpleasing to Mr. Boylan. So they all went and peeped
through the railings surrounding the court-house yard. Maggie
had two disappointments : the Black Maria was green and the
murderers did not look terribly wicked, but very much frightened
and meek, as if they would not kill a fly.

Nevertheless, murderers they were, and they would proba-
bly die on the " gallerses." Ugh ! Maggie hoped she would
live to go to a hanging.

When the court-house door was shut, the world suddenly be-
came tame. Mr. Boylan skillfully took advantage of this mo-
ment to provide the crowning treat of the day. Leaving the
children in Maggie's charge under a tree, he went away, but
>on returned with a large paper of molasses candy. Then were
>ix little souls in bliss. When this god-like repast was finished
they started for home. Jacky and the baby had so disposed
their candy upon cheeks and fingers that the removal of it with
their tongues occupied the entire homeward trip. The whole
>arty smelled of molasses too strongly for concealment had con-
:ealment been thought necessary. In fact Polly, detected it as
>on as the door opened. She was stirring some cornmeal mush,
>ut stopped long enough to give John a reproachful look which
le did not comprehend.

Old Mrs. Deery sat in her corner behind the stove, quiet and
sad. John went and stood by his wife. He felt like a guilty
child, though he did not know what he had done.

" Ain't you putting too much water in the mush, Polly ? " he
asked.

John rarely criticized anything that Polly chose to do, but
just now it seemed necessary to reverse their positions if possible.

Polly did not reply, but went on stirring in water. Presently
she stirred in a tear.

" What's up, darling ? " John was no longer naughty boy,

820 POLLY'S TRUE BOY. [Sept.,

nor fault-finding husband ; he was comforter and consoler. Polly
gave a quick glance towards Mrs. Deery, then, under cover of
the hubbub caused by six small throats and twice as many feet,
she said : " I've got to make it go ' round."

"An' can't ye put some more meal to it?" asked innocent
John, with raised voice. Polly ran out of doors, beckoning John
to follow. Mrs. Deery sat with downcast eyes, apparently dream-
ing.

" John," gasped Polly, trying her best to keep back a flood
of tears, " she'll hear you if you talk so loud. We mustn't let
her know, but there's no more meal. I went to the store an'
they told me our credit was closed up. Oh, how could you go
and buy the children candy when there's no bread to put in
their mouths ?"

John looked very grave.

" I didn't know our credit was so near out. Come to think,
it's been three months that we're livin' on it. But, Polly, them
few pennies I spent on the little ones wouldn't 'a' bought much
bread. Maybe it's the last treat they'll ever get ; I'll not re-
pent I give it to 'em."

The little Boylans' appetites were not cloyed by their molas-
ses candy, and the pot of thin mush did not more than suffice
for their supper. John ate sparingly, and rose before the rest
had done, saying : " I'm goin' out for a bit."

He came back after Mrs. Deery and the children had said
their prayers and had gone to bed.

Polly was sitting alone without a light. He spoke in low
tones.

" I've been to see my brother Jim, an' we're after talking
about me goin' somewhere to look up steady work. Could you
get along, you an' the little ones, Polly, an' me away?"

A sob came out of the darkness.

" If I can get work an' send you some money, you'd do bet-
ter without me than with me. But hadn't Mrs. Deery better go ? "

" Where'd she go ? She's no folks to take her in, you know
well. No, I can't turn her off, John."

" Well, Polly, do's you think best ; but it's hard you should
have an extra burden on you "

" Sh-sh," whispered Polly ; "she's that sharp she'll hear you.
I'm afeared she knows a'ready how we're off. She wouldn't ate
any supper to-night."

After a long pause : "Where are we to get our breakfast,
John?"

1892.] POLLY'S TRUE BOY. 821

" Polly, darlin', I had to do it it's the first time I borrowed
money o' Jim ; some to start me off, an' some to leave with you.
It's only a bit, but soon I'll, be hopin' to send you more."

"Are ye goin' soon, John?"

"I'll be takin' the night train. The sooner I'm off the bet-
ter ; besides I never could take leave o' the little ones, an' them
awake an' hangin' onto me. It'll be hard enough to say good-
bye to you, Polly."

"Will you be goin' far?" asked Polly, trying to be brave.

" I can't say that. I'll go till I find work, if it's to the
jumpin' off place."

After John's little bundle was made up, he and Polly sat a
long time in the dark talking. Then she lighted a candle
and they went up stairs. Maggie and the baby were in one bed,
and the three elder boys in another. Jacky, who would kick
and roll off onto the floor, was by himself in a curious, com-
fortable little nest made out of a high packing box. John did
not kiss the children, but he hung over them, touching them ten-
derly, patting their little bodies, and pushing the hair back from
their pretty sleeping faces.

He did not break down until he came to Jacky, his pet,
cuddled in the depths of the big box, and evidently dreaming
of the afternoon orgies, for he was mumbling something about
"tanny." Then the man fell upon his knees and wept. Polly
sat the candle on the floor and put her arms around him.

When John had gone, Polly went down into the cellar and
sat on the lowest step. Putting her head between her knees
she cried aloud, and then she knelt down and poured out her
soul to God in prayer.

It was almost daylight when she dragged herself to bed.
Coming down late in the morning, she found Mrs. Deery sitting
close by the stove with her feet in the oven. As Polly began
to poke the fire the old woman said : " Ye forgot the doo-r last
night, poor child, didn't ye ? "

Polly looked up.

"The door?" she asked.

" The key wasn't turned in it."

" I know," said Polly, " John's gone off, an' I couldn't bear
to think of lockin' him out."

Presently Mrs. Deery said : " The cellar ain't a good place
for ye, dear. Ye'll get your death a-sittin' there so long. Ye
needn't be mindin' me if ye want to cry."

Polly burst into tears, but went on raking the ashes.

822 POLLY'S TRUE BOY. [Sept.,

" I don't know how I'll live, an' John away," she sobbed.

" Ye can live wid everybody away what's near to ye," said
Mrs. Deery calmly, " if ye call it livin'."

The next few weeks Polly worked like a fiend. She cleaned
the house from top to bottom, then began over again. She
would fall into a dream over the wash-board, rubbing one piece
of clothing until she rubbed holes in it. One day Mrs. Deery
said : " Ye'll be hurtin' yourself, child."

" No I'll not," said Polly.

" Then ye'll do harm to the one what's comin'. "

Polly looked troubled.

" What do you know about it ? " she asked. Mrs. Deery's
eyes were indeed sharp. Polly had not even told John. What
need of giving him worse anxiety than he had already?

It was a cold winter and a long one. Distress was every-
where. But the poor are kind among themselves, and if a com-
mon ill assails them will accept help from one another when
they would resent the advances of organized charity.

For her children's sakes, Polly took the pitiful contributions
brought her by her less destitute neighbors, and, although she
would have died sooner than beg for herself, yet she actually
asked for clothing for Mrs. Deery.

There was an understanding between these two now. The
poor old creature, fully aware of the sacrifices that had been
made for her, offered to go to the poor-house, where, indeed,
she would have been much better off. But Polly said : " You'll
not go there till I go myself to take care of you."

So Mrs. Deery stayed and repaid the kindness shown her,
with comforting words and counsel drawn from a little experi-
ence.

On the first of April the mines began work. Polly had gone
to town in the afternoon, to carry home some washing. Return-
ing, she met the miners coming cheerily from their labor. Mrs.
Deery was startled by her rushing in weeping hysterically.

" It 'most kilt me," gasped Polly, " to see 'em all black an'
dirty agin, an' they so happy a-gettin' wages. An' when I seen
Mis' Rainy a-lookin' out for her man an' the tub standin' ready
for him by the stove, an' me not lookin' out for anybody, I
jist couldn't bear it."

But Polly was all the while looking out for somebody. No
word had come from John. He had said : " I'll write if I find
work." As he had not written, she knew he had not found
work. Why should he write to tell only of disappointment?

1892.] POLLY'S TRUE BOY. 823

Her neighbors, whose sympathies were not behind their charir
ties, told her interesting tales of the failure of men to turn up
again in their homes which they had left ostensibly to find em-
ployment.

Mrs. Evan Evans, whose own husband had deserted her sev-
eral years before at a time of depression in the coal trade, was
especially consolatory in an I-know-how-it-is-myself way.

" 'E told me 'e'd be back in two month, work or no work,"
said she, "an' 'e never came in these two years, sure. An' my
daughter's man 'e went away at the same time, an' she 'as 'card
that he took another woman, so she took mother man, but I will
never take another man, sure," and so rattled on that ancient
Briton in her deep, ancient British voice.

But Polly's heart was not shaken by these tales. "John is a
true boy," she would say; "he will come back to me."

Yet summer came, and he had not returned nor sent any
message.

When huckleberries were ripe Polly went almost daily to the
mountain, going out with the berrying parties at two in the
morning, and afterward trudging about town to sell them. Some-
times Maggie accompanied her to help carry the pail. The pail
was very heavy nowadays.

One August morning, coming up the hill after disposing of
her berries, happy with almost two dollars in her pocket, she
felt suddenly overpowered by the heat and stopped at a house to
rest. She was obliged to stay there all night.

The next day she walked the remainder of the way home,
carrying a very little bundle. In twenty-four hours more the
little bundle was carried out again and Polly lay delirious. The
neighbors were kinder than ever, and so was the priest, but doc-
tors and medicines are expenses that one cannot look to one's
friends to defray.

On a certain day, when Mrs. Boylan's physician had ordered
a costly prescription, a lady coming out of a shop in the town
observed a little girl standing near, with an empty baby-car-
riage. The carriage appeared to be in the last stages of disin-
tegration.

"Where is the baby?" the lady asked.

"The baby's dead, ma'am, an' we're glad it is, 'cause there's
enough on us already, but " and the little one began to cry.

"Who are you, and where do you live?"

" I'm Maggie Boylan, ma'am, an' I live out on Rum-Ridge.
My mother she's sick' an' my father's went away, an' it's medi-

824 POLLY'S TRUE BOY. [Sept.,

cine I want to get. If you'd be so kind, ma'am, as to buy the
carriage ; it ain't a very good one "

Many such stories had this good lady listened to ; many had
she investigated, only to lose faith in humanity ; but never be-
fore had she seen such a baby-carriage as this one, nor more
honest sorrow and anxiety than were in Maggie's blue eyes.

" I don't need the carriage," she said gently, "but here's some
money for the medicine."

As Maggie hastened home, trundling the bottle precariously
in the bottom of the carriage, she felt glad that her mother was
still out of her head. " I'll not have to tell her that I took the
money for nothin';" she thought, "she'd say it was every bit as
bad as beggin'."

Mrs. Boylan did not take the costly prescription. When
Maggie reached the house she found it full of women moaning
tragically. They all said " poor child," when they saw her, and
sighed, and used their aprons. Her mother had died, so they
told her, half an hour ago.

"An* just a minute after," said Mrs. Evan Evans, "come
your huncle Jim with a letter from your pappy. An 'e 'as sent
money enough to bury her. It is time that the money came."

John's letter was dated from a Western town where he had
found a good, permanent position, and secured a house. The
money was " for Polly and the little ones " to go to him. James
Boylan wrote at once to his brother, telling him of Polly's death
and bidding him come back to look after the children.

Meanwhile Mrs. Deery would not permit anything to be done
in the way of funeral arrangements.

" Polly is not dead," she insisted, and incessantly did she toil,
this aged woman who had not in years done active work, to re-
store vitality to that irresponsive form ; by turns rubbing violent-
ly, or breathing her own almost wasted breath between Polly's
parted lips.

"She shared wid me when she'd but half a mouthful," said
Mrs. Deery to those who reproved her for her folly; "I've
naught but me life, an' little o' that, but she's welcome to it if
it '11 do her any good."

Giving and receiving were one. Exertions in which both soul
and body thus shared, brought increase of vigor to the enfeebled
system and renewed the wasting tissues of lung and muscle.

But three days and three nights of this loving labor failed to
bring Polly back to consciousness.

James Boylan grew angry. " It's unhealthy," he said, " to

1892.] POLLY'S TRUE BOY. 825

keep her so long in this hot weather," and he went to order a
coffin. The health officer made several visits, at length leav-
ing peremptory commands that interment should take place im-
mediately. The whole neighborhood was thirsting for a wake.

Still Mrs. Deery refused the undertaker's offices and ceased
not her rubbing.

At the end of the fourth day Polly opened her eyes. " O
thank God ! I ain't dead," she said to the frightened group of
children and friends gathered about her bed, who screamed at
her return to life as if a ghost had appeared. They began to
tell her what had happened.

" I know all about it," said she ; " I wasn't dead one bit o'
the time; I heard everything what went on."

A few days later Polly was up and sitting in the kitchen.
The children were all about her ; Mrs. Deery, quiet as usual, but
looking strangely young and happy, sat opposite.

" Do you know," said Polly, " that when Jim come in that
last time an' said he was goin' for the coffin, an' I knowed for
sure I was to be buried an' John alive an' comin' back, I jist
thought it would kill me. But then I says to myself : no matter,
the little ones '11 be cared for, an' Mrs. Deery, an' I'll die aisy
thinkin' John was true to me, which I knowed he was anyway."

A terrible thump on the floor of the porch. Some one burst
hrough the door, taking off the lock by main force. It was
ohn he had no time to turn the latch.

He made one leap to Polly's side. After embracing all the
children and Mrs. Deery, he began anew, going from one to the
other, occasionally bounding away like a joyous dog to perform
gleeful antics about the room.

As soon as Polly could speak, she said:

" I knowed you'd come back, John ; I said you was a true
oy."

EDITH BROWER.

Wilkes-Barre, Pa.

826 REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS, [Sept.,

REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS, FIRST
BISHOP OF OGDENSBURG.

IV.
184.5-1850.

WADHAMS was now almost entirely alone. His loneliness was
not like that of Robinson Crusoe on his solitary island. He had
neighbors around him. They knew him and loved him well,
and were as much disposed to be sociable as ever. He was in
the midst of family friends and to a man like him these family
ties were very dear. He would never lack for any sympathy
which they could give him. But the kind of sympathy which
he needed most they had not to give. They were Protestants,
and all of them perfectly satisfied with that religion to which
they were accustomed. His own mind, on the contrary, was
filled with religious doubts, practical and pressing doubts, which
called for a quick solution. His heart, therefore, was straitened
by a deep anguish, the cause of which they could not under-
stand. The kind of sympathy which they could give him was
not that which could bring relief. Those to whom he had been
accustomed to open his heart, because they stood on the same
ground with him and could understand him, were now gone.
The broad Atlantic lay between him and them. They were
happy and he was not. They could have sympathized with him
and shown their sympathy if they had remained with him, but
they were gone. They had gone forward and so left him. Others
had recoiled backward and anchored their hearts behind him.
He was thus quite alone, with none, to share his anguish. Where
was there a sympathizing heart to whom he could open his
own ?

Of course, there is one friend above all others, and by that
friend the just man is never forsaken. Sympathy with Him is
never broken by any circumstances ; but only converts who have
passed through the deep waters in which Wadhams was now
struggling know how clouds of darkness gather about the soul at
times, and make it participate in some measure in that desola-
tion which caused the Lord-Christ on his cross to cry out :
" My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me ? " I know of

1892.] FIXST BISHOP OF OGDENSBURG. 827

one who once, in a moment of desolation of this kind, which
came in the middle of the night, could only find relief by rising
from his bed, and on his bare knees protesting that, if God
would only show him what to do, he would do it, let the cost
be what it might. " Surely," he said, " God cannot damn me
while I say this, and mean it." Those who have passed through
similar trials are best able to understand the deep meaning which
lies in those words of Cardinal Newman, now so familiar to the
public :

" Lead kindly light, amid the encircling gloom,
Lead thou me on."

Of course in these cases, when a young churchman is thought
to be in danger of going over to Rome, friends are not wanting
who are ready to offer sympathy, such as it is, and there are
spiritual doctors among them to prescribe infallible remedies.
These remedies generally consist in urging the patient to do
precisely what his conscience will not let him do. They succeed
in curing only those whose consciences are not thoroughly
aroused, or who are weak in the knees. These various remedies
are in substance reducible to three or four such, for instance, as :
"Take advice," "Take orders," "Take a parish," "Take a

ife."

The first letter from Wadhams' correspondence which be-
longs to this period of spiritual desolation covering something
ess than a year, is from a seminarian of his own class, the Rev.

dwin A. Nichols. It dates from "New York, June 2, 1845;"
and contains prescriptions for Wadhams' spiritual malady, begin-
ning with the first in the order given above namely, to take ad-
vice. After a brief introduction, he says :

" I proceed in medias res, and perhaps you anticipate what is
:oming. We have not been much surprised to hear that Mc-
Taster has joined the Roman Catholic community in this coun-
try ; but Mr. Walworth's move has rather taken me aback, al-
though I knew little of him personally. Of course we are ready
to conclude that you and he consulted on this matter together
before he left you, and I suppose you will not be surprised if
your old friends ask ' Will Wadhams go next ? ' Now, will you
allow me the privilege of an old friend, to take you (as it were)
by the hand and say to you 'Think before you leap.' I well
recollect one of McMaster's rash expressions, that he was going
'to take a leap in the dark.' However, I believe you would not
do that. . . . We were ordained together : I should be sorry
to think you have ever found any grounds for doubting the valid-

828 REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WAD HAMS, [Sept.,

ity of that ordination. If Carey, with all his great learning
and devoted piety, believed those orders valid, it should counter-
balance the weight of a good many Walworths, etc., the other
way. Besides, it is no news to you that their validity has been
admitted by many Roman Catholics themselves. Courayer you
have perhaps read, also Bishop England of Charleston, a promi-
nent Roman Catholic divine lately deceased. However, it seems
to me hardly possible that your mind has been altered on this
point, and that all the treasures of ancient and modern English
theology, with which your common-place books are stored, have
become to you so much dross. Here then, I hope, you will act
differently from Walworth. He (I understand) took the advice
of none of our learned divines, but went * on his own hook,'
adopting the sectarian plan of neglecting reason and argument,
and seeking from prayer alone that guidance which sober piety
would hardly expect without faithfully using all the means which
providence has placed within our reach. . . . Supposing, then,
that you may have been troubled with doubts, would it not be
your duty to consult with some of your respected brethren and
fathers in the church before allowing your mind to become
changed, or even unsettled, with regard to any of the church's doc-
trines or principles ? Doubtless you will agree with me on this
point. Allow me, then, to hope that you will not suffer your
mind to be imperceptibly warped and weaned from the church
of your first love until you have had free and full intercourse
with some of our clergy whom you know and respect as ' pillars
in the church of Christ.' "

The above citation of Courayer and Bishop England for the
validity of English orders is rather unfortunate. Courayer was
an apostate Catholic. He first embraced Jansenism and after-
wards Anglicanism. It will be news to Catholics that Bishop
England made any such admission. Moreover, the fact is well
known that, when Anglicans in orders become Catholics, they
have to be re-ordained. This practice rests upon a very early
decision made at Rome in the case of a converted English cler-
gyman. It was certain that Wadhams' own mind was so far un-
settled in this matter at the time of receiving this letter that he
had no confidence in his own ordination as deacon, and persist-
ently refused to go on and take priest's orders.

To urge either Wadhams or myself, or McMaster, McVickar,
Whicher, Platt, Donally, or many others who might be named
in the same category, to take advice from living " pillars " of the
Episcopal church was simply nonsense. What had we been do-
ing during our seminary course but studying the very questions
on which we were asked to seek light? The necessity of ordi-
nation to constitute a priest, the apostolical succession, and the
validity of Anglican orders, the nature and characteristic notes

1892.] FIRST BISHOP OF OGDENSBURG. 829

of a true church, the essential doctrines and sacraments neces-
sary to constitute and furnish the true Christian church these
were the very subjects which we had studied most anxiously, in
class and out of class, with the aid of all the eminent " pillars "
which Anglicanism could afford. The longer we studied, and
the deeper our application to these questions, the more we felt
the want of foundation beneath our feet ; and what other founda-
tion could these wonderful " pillars" have, and why should we
risk our salvation on their dictamina ? Among Anglican clergy,
men there were not a few that we knew well and respected
much as gentlemen, as scholars, and as sincere Christians ; but
how could they be " pillars of the church " to us, or add any-
thing to our security ? To take advice of such as they in our
position did not mean humility, nor docility, nor that prudence
which comes from heaven. It meant to dose our consciences
with morphine, committing ourselves to men who were already
committed. It could only mean, in our case, a cowardly sur-
render of conscience, with a hypocritical expedient to back up
the surrender. I am willing and glad to admit that there are
some rare men who know how to give advice with a regard solely
to the state of an honest conscience which seeks it. Dr. Alonzo
Potter, formerly bishop of Pennsylvania, was a man of this kind.
An acquaintance and friend of mine was once a clergyman in
lis diocese and with a conscience struggling and hesitating like
:hat of Wadhams. In a moment of feebleness he went to his
>ishop, opened his mind to him, and put himself under his direc-
:ion, not doubting what that direction would be. He was as-
:onished at the answer he got. " If," said the bishop, " the
state of your mind is such as you represent, I am sorry for it ;

>ut there is only one course conscientiously open to you. It is
to join the Roman Catholic Church. In any case," he added,

I can no longer consent to your officiating in my diocese."

>uch advice is very rare, but such men as Dr. Potter are also
rery rare. It is scarcely necessary to say that the young cleric
in question took this advice immediately. He has been for these

lany long years a most talented and estimable priest in the

'atholic Church.

I had occasion once to give a very different advice. A

[ethodist minister, whose name I did not ask, once came to me
it St. Mary's, representing that he had strong inclinations to
become a Catholic and a priest. He had many questions to ask,
but his questions were not of a character to do him much
credit. His chief anxiety was to know what salary a priest

830 REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS, [Sept.,

could command, and what other means he had to make his way
through the world. I told him that nothing less than a bishop
could attend to a case like his. He asked if I would recom-
mend him to apply to the bishop. I said, " You may go to him
if you like, but if you should you will probably find that I have
been there before you, and advised him to have nothing to do
with you." This was not a case of uneasy conscience, but of
dilapidated finance. Any of the usual prescriptions adminis-
tered to perplexed converts would have suited his case orders,
or a parish, or a wife, or any other profitable advice.

Nichols was not satisfied in his letter with urging Wadhams
to take advice. He had another remedy in reserve, which was
to keep him as busily employed as possible in the church where
he found himself. This, with a glowing description of his own
work, and the happiness he found in it, occupies nearly all the
rest of the letter. Nichols was pastor of the " Emmanuel Church"
in New York. His location and special relations with McVickar
and others, appear from the following passage :

" Our members have increased in number, and apparently in
zeal also. Our singing is very spirited and good. Sunday-school
is somewhat the worse from want of efficient teachers. H.
McVickar has been teaching a class through the winter, but has
recently left, as he is about going out of town for the season.
More than this, we have concluded the bargain for the purchase
of a church, and where do you think it is ? Corner of Prince
and Thompson Streets in other words, the one in which Dr.
Seabury now officiates, a place well known to us both of old.
The Annunciation people are going to build a new church up
town, and in the meanwhile are to go in the chapel of the uni-
versity, and then we take possession of their church building as
a Free Church."

Wadhams' correspondence during the winter of 1845
1846 contains three letters from his friend McVickar, the greater
part of which would not be very interesting to the reader.
They show him still remaining at Columbia College without hav-
ing taken orders. Although he had abandoned his project of
engaging in a monastic life with Wadhams in Essex County, he
continued to interchange books with him and matters of intelli-
gence, especially matters regarding the Oxford Movement, both
in England and America. They show a constant diminution of
his own active interest in that movement. In one he says :
" Experience teaches me that to trust in myself or any man
is to lean upon a broken reed. Therefore, look up to Dr. Pusey
or any other man as a leader, I will not."

1892.] FIRST BISHOP OF OGDENSBURG. 831

In a letter dated January 30, he intimates a certain shifting
of the scenery in the Puseyism of New York which is not with-
out interest. After detailing several novelties of practice and
worship introduced in New York and Brooklyn, he instances St.
Luke's Church in Hudson Street, of whose rector he says : " I
think I told you Mr. Forbes has early communion every Sunday
except the second in the month, and recommends and hears con-
fessions. He is gaining the influence which Dr. Seabury is losing
at the seminary."

With the fading of that hope which once led him on, the
hope of engrafting something higher and better on the dead
branches of Anglicanism, comes the necessity of Wadhams doing
something else. Either one must go forward to Rome or settle
down to rest where one is. But, for a true man, there is no
rest without work. McVickar's letters show that he now began
to feel it necessary to take orders, and find for himself occupa-
tion in the Anglican ministry. At the same time he shows a
great desire to engage Wadhams to enter into some new and
larger field of ministerial 'labor which might serve to tranquilize
him. He suggests that Dr. Whittingham, bishop of Maryland,
was in search of clergymen. He writes : " Bishop McCoskey, I
understand, says he could fill twenty stations if he had the
en." He then adds : " Bishop Ives has just called here. I
entioned your name to him. He is in want, he says, of some
ergy of clear Catholic views and practice, to assist in establish-
g the tone of his diocese. Do you know him ? I am sure
u would like him."
The reader will readily recognize the name last mentioned,
r. Ives was then bishop of North Carolina ; he afterwards be-
me a convert to the ancient church, in which he lived as a
yman. He is well known to Catholics as the founder of the
tholic Protectory near New York City, and other charitable
enterprises. His wife was a daughter of the famous John Henry
obart, Protestant bishop of New York. She followed her hus-
nd into the church. McVickar was shortly afterwards ordained
an Episcopalian deacon, and died of consumption in a few
months.

Several other letters are found amongst Wadhams' papers,
written by his former fellow-seminarians, which belong to this
same period of anxious doubt and hesitation. One of these is
from Mr. Bostwick, a clergyman settled at Brandon, Vt. He
belonged to the same circle of seminarians with Carey and
others, and his name is found mentioned more than once in

832 REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS, [Sept.,

Wadhams' correspondence. His career in matters of religion no
longer ran parallel with that of our friend, for he had taken to
himself a wife. Children had begun to grow around his hearth.
These needed providing for, and his parishioners of Brandon owed
back salary to their last pastor, and under these embarrassing
circumstances they judged it to be imprudent to pay their pres-
ent pastor any at all. " The Vermont hills afforded a fine pros-
pect, but poor eating." The letter contains other things of a
more spiritual character, but no attempt is made to advise Wad-
hams or administer interior comfort.

Among the letters belonging to this period and preserved by
Wadhams is one of peculiar interest. This interest is derived
not merely from the fact that the writer was a fellow-seminarian,
and deeply involved in the new Oxford Movement, but because
in it he delineates so fully and clearly his own position of doubt,
anxiety, and distress, and gives also the motives which drew him
toward the Catholic Church and those which held him back.
His position was very much the same as that of Wadhams, al-
though, unlike Wadhams, he did not become a Catholic. We
omit the writer's name, because he is still living, and may have
the same or similar prudential reasons for reticence which, as he
himself intimates, existed at the time of writing. The letter is
dated March 3, 1846. After some preliminary excuses for not
writing sooner, it says :

" How great how very great changes have taken place
since we met ! how many friends have gone from us ! how many
among us have shrunk back! I must confess that when the 'se-
cession ' first took place, I felt very miserable, very desolate, and
unhappy ; and still at times I find myself giving way to such
feelings, but I have become, as a general thing, more reconciled
to it ; and, believing as I do most firmly that God is with us
still as a part of his holy church, and that there are holy
men among us to act as his instruments, I am becoming more
warmly attached to our holy, afflicted mother, and will pray
and strive that she may be lifted out of the dust. She cannot
now be invited to the centre of Catholic unity, but the time for
that union will come, and it seems to me my duty to labor in
and for her that she may be prepared for it. I do think that
changes in matters of practice, and in some matters of require-
ment, must take place in the Mother Church before the daugh-
ter can become reconciled to her, and God, who is all powerful,
will bring about those changes in his good time, and will bring
about that union, too, for which we so much long.

" But here I am writing on without being mindful, dear
Wadhams, that you differ with me on some of these points.

1892.] FIRST BISHOP OF OGDENSBURG. 833

We may see things alike yet ; and whichever of us may be wrong
I pray God to lead to the truth. I have gotten over that
dread, even for the truth itself, which I once felt, and am ready
and anxious to receive it now wherever and whatever it may be.

" Only, dear brother, if you can conscientiously stand by our
church in this her day of sorrow, do not forsake her; believe
me, though you are isolated in position, yet, there are more
hearts than you think beating in sympathy with yours.

" I see Mr. Hoyt has resigned his parish. Do you know what
he is going to do ? Tell me all you know about Bostwick ; I
have not heard from him for a long time

The Rev. Mr. Hoyt mentioned in the above letter was a
married clergyman of St. Albans, Vt., who soon after the above
writing, and about the same time as Wadhams, entered the
Catholic Church with all his family. After the death of his wife,
he took priest's orders. At his first Mass eight of his children
received communion from his hands. One of his daughters is
now a contemplative nun of the Dominican Order and of the strict-
est observance. Many other kinsmen of this family have become
Catholics. The recent death of Father Hoyt, although, of course,
on many accounts an affliction to his friends, occurred under
circumstances which lent a peculiar beauty to the event. The
death stroke fell upon him while celebrating Mass, and im-
lediately after his communion. In this way, by the provi-
lence of God, he received his Viaticum at the altar and ad-
linistered by himself. He neither spoke nor tasted anything
Liter this. His last words were the words of the Mass, and his

food was Food from heaven.

I am glad to find amongst the letters written to Wadhams
this period some from the Rev. Charles Platt. He was a
irst cousin of mine, and had an intimate acquaintance with
r adhams, dating from their seminary life together. He was a
lan of high scholarship and fine talents, and a clear, sound
idgment, with a most innocent and excellent boyhood behind
lim, like Wadhams' own. I cannot venture to omit his letters
altogether, because they represent so graphically the spirit of
the Oxford Movement in America, with all that young life which
filled the bosoms of our seminarians and fresh graduates from
the seminary. How near he was to the Catholic Church may
be learned from the opening sentence of a letter which he sent
to me near the close of July, 1845, J ust before my departure
for Europe. It was in answer to one of mine informing him
of my conversion, announcing my departure, and asking him to
come to New York and see me off. It ran thus :
VOL. LV. 54

834 REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS, [Sept.,

"DEAR COUSIN: I thank my God that your feet are at last
planted upon the ' Rock of Peter.' I cannot, however, close
with your invitation to come to New York and see you embark.
To accept that invitation would mean that I am ready to be-
come a Catholic; and I am not. I cannot break my mother's
heart. ..."

A letter from Whicher at the same time, and in answer to
a similar invitation, announced to me that he had decided to
come, but had changed his mind on learning that Platt would
not. Platt died out of the Fold many years later, leaving a
wife and children. Whicher also married, and twice, taking par-
ishes at Clayville and Whitesboro' in Oneida County. It was
ten years before he took the great step. He is still living in
Oneida County, a Catholic layman. His first wife is known to
literature as the " Widow Bedott." The second became a Catho-
lic shortly after himself. Platt's first letter to Wadhams runs as
follows :

"ROCHESTER, Dec. 31, 1845.

" MY DEAR FRIEND : It was not my intention to follow
your example of delay, but circumstances have placed my time
out of my own control. I have lately understood from Clar-
ence's friends that he had arrived at Belgium. His Protestant
connections cannot, of course, see any reason for his course, and
set it down as a vagary from which he will eventually return.
Sometimes, in view of the quiet and communion with the saint-
ed which he must now strongly experience, I have been tempted
to the wish, * Oh, that I had the wings of a dove ! ' but such
thirstings are only the signs of a struggle, and not really the
best relief for us. Poor Pollard ! He never crossed my sight ;
yet I cannot help feeling drawn toward him in the hour of his
oppression an oppression the more hateful under a system
which provides no remedy. If the mere breathing of Catholic
truth is thus to be choked out of one, what worth the day!
However, let them rue it that need ; it is not the sufferer's
part. . . .

"And now I beg you not to be so dilatory again, nor to
complain of my remissness. I hear nothing directly from Clar-
ence or ' Mac.' Believe me, yours in bonds,

"C. H. PLATT."

The news from Europe which Platt could not furnish came
directly to Wadhams in a letter from me, dated at St. Trond,
Belgium, February 7, 1846. It reads:

" DEAR WADHAMS : You are no doubt surprised that I have
not written to you long ago. I assure you it is a matter which
has disturbed me not a little. It is a debt I owe you, not only
of friendship, but of gratitude, and I have been very uneasy at

1892.] FIRST BISHOP OF OGDENSBURG. 835

my inability to discharge it. But the necessary duties of each
day have been a severe tax upon my eyes, and I had much
writing to do which it was impossible to neglect, so that I have
been debarred from letter-writing. Hitherto I have written only
three letters to America two of them to my parents, and one
to Preston."

I remember this letter to Preston (the late Mgr. T. S. Pres-
ton, Vicar-General of the Archdiocese of New York), then a
Protestant seminarian at Twentieth Street. John Henry New-
man had at last passed through the "encircling gloom," and
closed his sharp, short struggle with pain by openly and fully
professing the Catholic faith and joining the true Fold. In ad-
verting to this event, the news of which had just reached our
convent, I spoke of Dr. Pusey's comment upon it. It is stated
that he said, with an air of quiet resignation : " Well, it is all
right ; the Roman Catholics have prayed harder than we, and
so they have got him ! " When this was told to Father Oth-
mann, our novice-master, he was disgusted, and said : " This
language is neither rational nor manly. It is nothing but baby-
talk." I repeated this in my letter to Preston, who replied in-
dignantly that he did not agree with me at all ; that Dr. Pusey's
sentiment was that of a man both reasonable and spiritual.
There must have been hard praying on our side for Preston in
New York, for not very long after this the Catholics scored a
similar victory in his case. But to return to my letter to Wadhams :

" I have just been allowed a dispensation from all the com-
mon exercises of the novitiate except the daily conference, in
order to open my heart a little to some of my far-off friends in
America, and I begin with you. You cannot conceive how
much I want you here. I do not know how to excuse myself
for not having brought you away forcibly upon my back. Ah !
if the quondam abbot of Wadhams Mills were only here, where
the discipline of the religious life is found in all its wisdom, vigor,
and attractiveness, he would weep and laugh by turns with me at
our futile * monkery ' among the hills of Essex. He would be-
lieve readily what Father Rumpler told me at New York, that
the Puseyites have found only the carcass of Catholicism, while
the soul, the life, the breath of God, the spirit of holiness is
hidden from them. You remember our many conversations of
last winter, how we lamented the want of religious system, and
of guidance for the conscience, and how we magnified the hap-
piness of Catholics and especially the religious who live under
direction. I can answer for it we were both sincere and earn-
est. But for myself I confess 1 scarcely knew what I talked
about. Judge B - thought us not a little romantic. I wish
he might see the reality. Romance would seem tame. I deny

836 REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS, [Sept.,

that I had any romantic thoughts when I came here ; but, if I
had, a few months' routine would dissipate that. To get up at
half-past four every morning at the sound of bell, precisely,
neither before nor after; to go to bed at half-past nine of neces-
sity, and all day long in the meantime to sit or stand or move
at the sound of the convent clock, the remorseless clock which
makes no account of the particular inspirations you may have
at the moment ; to make recreation with the others whether
you feel like it or not, in short, to have your own way in nothing
this may be romance to Puseyites, who eat and sleep and
pray at their leisure, but here at St. Trond it is a sober, every-
day sort of business. No, there is no romance about it. For a
man who is not in earnest to save his soul, who has neither the
fear of hell, the love of God, nor the desire of holiness, it is dull
play. But for one who is disgusted with his sins, and mourns the
hardness of heart and sensuality which separates him from God,
who loves the character of Jesus Christ, and burns with desire
to imitate it, this Congregation of St. Alphonsus Liguori is a
' treasure-trove,' to which he will cling as a drowning man clings
to whatever will support him. I assure you I had no concep-
tion of the real value of spiritual direction, and especially such
direction as is found in the novitiate. Here there is no guile,
none of those constant little deceptions which even the most
honest in the world abound with. The whole heart is opened
to your superior. Prepared by the experience of years, he scru-
tinizes your character and temperament, and explains to you
your characteristic faults, and the means by which you must
seek to do away with them. He watches your daily progress
and teaches you to know yourself and watch yourself. Here we
find rigor, but the rigor is in the rule, and not in the manner.
Love is the presiding spirit, and even the rule must bend to charity.
We are a perfect family fathers, children, brothers. We know
each other well, and understand mutually the different peculiarities
of character, and thus distrust is altogether banished, while the
common life, the common interest, the common hopes, the
congregation which links us all together inseparably until we
shall be called to join the more perfect congregation of heaven
make harmony and mutual love unavoidable. Here, my dear
friend, is a home for you. I cannot doubt that you have a
vocation to such a life. Your past history, so much as I
know of it, your tastes and preferences, and the desire you have
so long had for a monastic life are proof of it. It is a mission-
ary order also, and in it better than anywhere else you can
discharge your duty to God and your country. Believe me,
the Redemptorists will raise a commotion yet in Essex County.
The sincere love I bear you, as well as the desire I have that
you and McMaster and I, with many others such as you, native
Americans and still Protestants, may go up together in the
cause of Christ against the devils which pervert the hearts of the
American people, and hinder their salvation, stimulate me to
write you in this manner. I know the difficulties in your way ;
but they are of the flesh human. They are opportunities which

1892.] FIRST BISHOP OF OGDENSBURG. 837

God affords you of beginning with a sacrifice as an earnest of
your fidelity. Certainly, how can one hope to gain heaven by
the way of the cross when he is cowed by the first difficulty
which presents itself? I also had my difficulty of the same na-
ture. I will not concede that I love my mother less than you
love yours. But now I am sure that, by becoming a Catholic, I
have created strong reasons for my parents and others to think
more tenderly of Catholics and Catholicism than before. But,
after all, this is not the great question it is enough that the
voice of God calls all men to his Church, and declares that he
who is not with him is against him. The sects of this day in
controversy with that Church, as well as the ancient sects, were
not created by God to gather in his elect ; and how can one
who knows the Catholic Church seek for salvation in them ? For-
give me all this, dear Wadhams ; it is on my heart and I must
needs out with it. I cannot rest content when I think how one
noble resolution would carry you to New York to make your
profession and then hither to this heaven on earth, for of your
vocation I cannot doubt. Do not, I beseech you, counsel with
those whom you know to be sunk in heresy up to the hair, or

guided by mere worldly motives, or, like H , paralyzed by

timidity. I desired to enclose a little billet in the letter McMas-
ter wrote you, but he sent it off without thinking of me. He
desires to be kindly remembered to you. He sets to work
now to humble himself in the spirit of obedience with the same
zeal as when a Puseyite he thought to erect dioceses and create
bishops. You would scarcely know him. The Catholic Church
has a gentle hand, but a nervous one.

" Indeed, now that I am living under her direct influence
there has grown up a feeling of her mysterious power which is
far more forcible than the arguments which convinced me before.
I have. a great deal that I want to say to you, but in so short
a compass what can I do? I would like to give you some de-
scription of our life here, which I know would so much interest
you. I wrote Preston a minute account of our daily exercises ;
but you cannot see that, as you are so far away from New
York. But I will give you some idea in brief : We have here
twelve Fathers, or missionaries, who are about half the time on
missions, and half in convent ; some fifteen lay-brothers ; besides
these our " Pere Maitre " of novices, and his associate the " Pere
Socius," with twenty novices. We rise at half-past four, break-
fast at half-past seven, dine at twelve, sup at seven, and go to
bed at half-past nine. We have an hour's recreation together
after dinner and another after supper, when we may converse
together. All the rest of the day is spent in silence. Friday and
Thursday are excepted, the first a day of constant silence and
retreat, the latter one of general recreation. We have nearly
two hours' time each day to spend in bodily exercise and man-
ual labor. All the rest of the day is occupied either in private
prayer and spiritual reading or in the various public exercises of
the novitiate. The perfect regularity of everything about the
convent would make you wonder. All is obedience, and obedi-

838 REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS, [Sept.,

ence makes order easy. No time is wasted. The whole day is
occupied. But I can give you no idea of our life here. It is so
entirely different from everything you find in the world. It
would require a book to describe it. A full insight into a con-
vent would be in itself an all-sufficient refutation of Protestant-
ism. It would show also how utterly impossible was our scheme
to establish the conventual life out of the Church, because out
of the Church no one can be found to whom monastic obedi-
ence is due. A number of persons may agree to obey Breck or
some other Protestant, but such obedience cannot be perfect nor
last long. The authority of the superior must come from God
through the sanction of his Church. The mere agreement of
men cannot create it. This Puseyite idea is in itself a thoroughly
Protestant notion. For my part I would shudder to submit the
welfare of my body and soul to any other authority than that of
God, and that authority we Catholic religious find in our supe-
riors. But I have made already a very long letter, and must
close. God knows how I long to see you, and see you safely
delivered from your perilous position. You have created by
your past kindness an obligation to love you, and I never forget
you, nor your excellent mother, at the Holy Sacrifice. Please
write me, or better yet, come yourself, and let us tread together
this dangerous road of life, and seek under the same rules and
the same guidance to wash white our garments and prepare to
meet our Lord at his coming. Give my love to your kind
mother, and my remembrance to Mrs. Hammond and family,

Judge B and family. God and our dear Lady defend

and guide you. Your faithful friend ever,

" CLARENCE WALWORTH.

" P.S. I cannot think of leaving so large a space unfilled
when we have so little opportunity of communication. I might
tell you of our voyage across the ocean to Portsmouth, of Win-
chester Cathedral (of which, however, we saw the outside only
from the cars), of London, Westminster Abbey, the tomb of St.
Edward the Confessor within it, etc. Splendid old Abbey! it
made me melancholy to see it, like an old giant bound and
helpless in a godless city. It presents a long history ; almost
from the time of the Conquest. Constant additions of chapels
were made to it until the Reformation and since then constant
decay. Here and there you see headless figures, broken by
Cromwell's soldiers and others, but no repairs. The Protestants
now do not know what to do with it. They use a large tran-
sept to bury play-actors and poets, and have set apart a kind of
meeting-house in the middle of it, which looks like a little Pro-
testant pill which the noble old abbey has been constrained to
swallow, but the greater part has been unused, and therefore is
the less abused. The Church of St. Saviour, by the London
Bridge, is also very ancient, and pleased McMaster better than
the abbey ; but it is unfortunately occupied. If I were with you
I should have a great deal to say of what we have seen and

1892.] FIRST BISHOP OF OGDENSBURG. 839

heard, but as it is I can do nothing. There are churches not far
from us which we have visited sometimes Thursdays, when on
promenade, which would make your heart rejoice could you see
them. I have thought of you more than once when looking at
them, because you enjoy such things more than I. For my part
I like better the architecture and ornaments of my little square
cell ; the table and crucifix hanging over it ; the wooden cross
lying on my bed, my bed-fellow at night ; the three-cornered
black hat hanging over the door, my companion in the prome-
nades ; a little many-tailed cord with which on Wednesdays and
Fridays we warm ourselves before going to bed ; the black habit
which covers me, and the Rosary at my belt, please my simple
Anglo-Saxon taste. They remind me of my resemblance in the
outward circumstances to so many glorious saints, cloister saints,
while they cover me with confusion, to think that this resem-
blance is all on the outside. But this is too much like twaddle.
I have but one idea when I think of you. I beg of you, my dear
friend, in the name of our Saviour, who made himself homeless
and a wanderer in the world for our sake, to surrender at once
to your conscience, and declare yourself openly on his side.
What advantage is it to read every day the lives of the saints,
and their self-sacrifices, and still remain, through human respect,
natural affection, or the dread of a transitory suffering of mind
in a church which has no more solidity of faith or practice than
a bag of wind is solid ? Forgive me if I am too rude. I do
not mean to be so. You know well that in my heart I have no
other sentiments toward you than love and esteem. Farewell !
May God bless you ! Do not neglect the Holy Mother of God,
who will not fail to help you if you pray to her. She is a
better friend and counselor than you will find in the Protestant
Episcopal church of the United States of America, which New-
man, Oakeley, Faber and others have left. Where do you find
your fellows now ? Nowhere, dear Wadhams, unless you con-
sent to fall back on those behind you, and if you commence
to fall back where will you stop? If you wish to learn any-
thing of our order or receive guidance for the conscience
from one who knows how to guide tenderly and well, consult
Father Rumpler at New York, either by visit or by letter.
(Rev. Gabriel Rumpler, C.SS.R., Third Street, New York.)"

The time had now come when Wadhams took his first posi-
tive step with reference to a possible union with the Roman
Catholic Church. He held an official position in the Protes-
tant Episcopal church, and was in charge of a missionary
field of labor therein. This fixed upon him a certain respon-
sibility towards that church. It gave him certain duties in it,
and so far abridged his independence. In case of deciding
to become a Catholic, he was not free to step from one church
into the other without a show, at least, of inconsistent conduct.
For instance, to become a Catholic on Thursday would make

840 REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS, [Sept.,

it difficult to preach in a Protestant pulpit on the Sunday be-
fore, or administer the rites of worship there. The doctrine and
the worship which would be suitable to his conscience on
Thursday would look like treachery in a Protestant church on
Sunday. The fact that unfavorable comments are actually made
in such cases shows that there are rules of honesty and pro-
priety to be observed by converts, which are nevertheless em-
barrassing, and which require caution and deliberation. Wad-
hams was both honest and wise ; and, therefore, to make him-
self independent, he began by resigning his charge in time. A
second letter, which we now give from the Rev. Charles Platt,
alludes to this resignation of Wadhams' mission in Essex
County.

" ST. PAUL'S, ROCHESTER, West N. Y.

" Monday in Holy Week, April 6, 1846.
" MY DEAR WADHAMS :

" I hasten to answer yours of the 2/th ult. After hope long
deferred, you have truly relieved me. I had grown quite anx-
ious about you, not knowing but your health had failed, or you
had lost confidence in my sympathy with you, or you had al-
ready taken a step which would, indeed, sever us widely. I am
glad to learn that you are yet holding fast to your contentment
as well as your confidence, but I must regret that any circum-
stances should have forced you to cease from your labors for
good. Forced you must have been, for no ruggedness of the field
would deter you, nor any common hardships have driven you
from your work.

"From your letter I hardly know what to make of your in-
tentions. You seem to have relinquished your connection with
the missionary operations of our church. Do you mean by that
to say that you disconnect yourself from any ministerial labor
in the church ? I rather surmised that you were inclined
to follow Clarence and McMaster. If so, we are outwardly
severed probably in your opinion altogether severed. I do not
doubt that they were both acting with a good conscience per-
haps with a clearer conscience than I shall ever know. But I
cannot in conscience follow them. Mr. Newman's Essay I have
not read. I began it, but had not time during Lent to finish
it deliberately. . . .

" Whicher is in priest's orders. He had a hard time winter
before the last. They passed him to the priesthood last fall ;
but he was plump with them, and kept nothing back. . . .

" I am surprised that you should leave your parish before
Easter. This is the season, if any, to labor in our church, and
to humble the Protestant pride. I have heard nothing from
Clarence directly. Should like to hear very much. Yours,

" C. H. PLATT."

1892.] FIRST BISHOP OF OGDENSBURG. 841

This is the last letter in my possession received by Wad-
hams while yet a Protestant. In less than three months he
had passed beyond those days of doubt and desolation. He
communicated the joyful intelligence to me in a letter which
found me in Belgium, still in my novitiate, and preparing to
make my vows. I am sorry not to have preserved it. It
would be a treasure now.

It is strange that when the long agony was at an end, and
Wadhams' resolution was taken to " cross over," the crossing
was not found to be easy. A priest was necessary to receive
him. And who should be that priest? Naturally the nearest
priest would answer the purpose. Why not go to him ? This
is just what he did, although that priest was a perfect stranger
to him. It is said that he entered a Catholic church or chapel
in his own native Adirondacks, but after a brief conference with
the priest he was allowed to depart without encouragement.
As Wadhams turned away the clergyman said to one of his
parishioners : " Look after that young man ; I wonder what he is
up to ! "

His second attempt was made at Albany. He rang the bell

at the door of St. Mary's rectory, then a bishop's residence.

He made known his state of mind and wishes to an ecclesiastic

>f the house, and was answered, so it is said : " We are very

usy here, and can't attend to you." Wonderful that this

should have occurred at the very door through which he so

ften afterwards passed on holy errands of duty and charity

r hen himself officiating there as a Catholic priest ! His third

tnd more successful application was made to the Sulpicians of

>t. Mary's Seminary, Baltimore. Here the future Bishop of Og-

lensburg was cordially received, duly prepared, and admitted to

that great Motherly Bosom so patiently sought for, so lovingly

:lung to.

Wadhams was received into the Church in June, 1846, by
Dr. Peter Fredet, then registrar of the Sulpician Seminary.
Father Deluol was president. Among the members of the fac-
ulty were Rev. Francois Lhomme, afterwards president, and Rev.
Augustin Verot, who died Bishop of St. Augustine, Florida. He
was admitted at once into the seminary, where he prosecuted a
two years' course of theology. He had there for fellow-students
the late Father Bernard McManus ; the late Thomas Foley,
Bishop of Chicago ; Father Walters, of St. Patrick's, Washington,
and the late Father Boyle, of the same city. All these were
among the most familiar friends of his later years.

842 REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS, [Sept.,

The life of Edgar P. Wadhams now enters upon a new
epoch. He dwells beneath a new sky. He breathes a new
air. All his surroundings are new. His old companions are
all still dear to him, but in one sense they are far away.
They no longer see by the same light ; they no longer look
at the same stars. Their religious intercourse is broken up ;
and yet, to a true Christian, that intercourse of soul with
soul is the best, holiest, sweetest that life affords. It fol-
lows, therefore, very naturally that almost all of Wadhams' cor-
respondence changes. The familiar friends of earlier days for
the most part cease to write letters, or at least such letters as
men love to lay by for re-perusal. I find among Wadhams' pa-
pers a letter from the Rev. Armand Charbonnel, dated August 6,
1846. Before he entered the seminary at Baltimore, Wadhams
must have visited Vermont, where he made or renewed an acquaint-
ance with Father Charbonnel. This French priest was a Sulpi-
cian, had been a professor at St. Mary's Seminary, Baltimore,
and afterwards at St. Sulpice, Montreal, and still later became
Bishop of Toronto. He had advised him to prepare for the
priesthood by entering the seminary at Montreal, or still better,
if possible, to make his studies at Rome or Paris.

In his letter Father Charbonnel communicates to Wadhams
the conversion of Rev. Mr. Hoyt, already referred to. This con-
nects naturally with the current of our reminiscences and is a
matter of interest. We give it in the words of the letter :

" Rev. Mr. Hoyt, of St. Albans, made his First Communion
on last Sunday week, after having been previously baptized and
absolved ; and he received again on last Sunday, when his wife
and four children were baptized and confirmed, as well as him-
self. He is a man of learning and property, but not settled as
yet about what he will do. His countenance is remarkably
sweet and noble ; as for his lordship, Bishop Hopkins, he is
mad with our new brother's change, or perversion. Requiescat in
dace. He went so far lately, speaking against Catholics on that
occasion, that one of his near relatives, a Protestant, left the
church crying out : ' I am sick with such a bitterness ! '

It will be remembered that this Bishop Hopkins of Vermont
had a public controversy with Archbishop Kendrick of Balti-
more, in which the principal question discussed was the validity
of Anglican orders. I recall to mind that Arthur Carey had at
one time lived in Vermont in familiar relations with Bishop
Hopkins, either as an inmate of his household or pupil in one of
his schools, and always spoke of him as a man of great intelli-
gence and learning.

1892.] FIRST BISHOP OF OGDENSBURG. 843

I fear the reader is already wearied with so many letters.
The narrative of events, personal recollections and anecdotes are
livelier and easier reading. But to historical minds that value
faithful reality more, who wish to see the past just as it existed
to the eyes of those who lived in the past, letters have a deep-
er interest. However, be this as it may, letters henceforth will
not figure much in these reminiscences. We give just one more.
It is a voice from across the sea, addressed to the abbot of St.
Mary's, now dethroned, and a student at the seminary in Balti-
more. It is a joyous and affectionate hail from the disbanded
community of one.

"WlTTEM, December I, 1846.

"MY DEAR WADHAMS: You see I date from another place,
because, having happily finished my novitiate at St. Trond, and
taken the vows, I am now busy like yourself in preparing for
the priesthood. You have some idea perhaps of the great joy I
felt on receiving your letter and finding you safely anchored in
the harbor of the Church. God be thanked, my dear friend,
that we have no longer to deal with the shuffling principles of
Puseyism, but with the firm, unchanging, and unshaken faith ! I
should have written you a reply long ago to testify my joy at the
happy step you have taken, but thought I would delay until I
had taken the vows ; and the new circumstances in which I find
myself have occasioned still further delay, for I am scarcely yet
omesticated in my new abode. The liberty I took to chatter
o you about your vocation was wholly on the supposition of
your being at Wadhams Mills all alone among Protestants. Of
course, you have now spiritual guides and every means of deter-
mining to what life God calls you. May our Blessed Lord grant
you a long and useful life and the souls of many of your coun-
men to testify in your favor at the day of judgment. I
ould love still to embrace you as a Redemptorist, but that is
matter with which I ought not to meddle too much. I will
ommend your vocation to our Blessed Lady, who knows what
s best for you and for the good cause. McMaster, you know
f course, has left us. He carries our good wishes and prayers
ith him. He made a long and careful trial of his vocation,
and though it was found that God did not call him to the re-
ligious state, still, his good will will find its reward. His de-
parture was much regretted by all his fellow-novices, who loved
him and speak always of him with much affection. Of course,
you can conceive the feelings of us two Americans [Isaac Heck-
er and myself]. Present him my good wishes and warm love
should you fall in his way.

" I have no idea of what is going on in America. Pray, does
the good cause make progress ? Do the Puseyites convert them-
selves, or do they take the back track, and swallow down again
all the great Catholic sentiments they have been accustomed to
utter? God have mercy on them, for it is a fearful thing to

844 REMINISCENCES OF EDGAR P. WADHAMS. [Sept.,

approach so near the Holy Ark and then turn their backs.
What is the state of the seminary? Is there still left a leaven
of holy mischief, some good seed of truth which gives hope of
fruit to the salvation of those poor Anglicans ?

"As for my future destiny, you know of course that the
vow of obedience leaves me no choice. I am at the disposal of
my superiors, thank God. I can say, however, that I have com-
menced a course of theology which will most likely last two
years. There is, therefore, little prospect of my returning to
America before that time, should I return at all.

"I send you this by means of some of our Fathers who leave
very soon for missions in America. My present address is ' Wit-
tem par Maestricht Limbourg Holland. Care of Rev. FF.
Redemptorists, etc.'

" The country in which I am resembles very much New
England in its scenery. The people are whole-souled Catholics
poor, but full of faith. The little children when they meet us
run up to touch our hands with their little hands, esteeming
it as a benediction no doubt. Close by us, on the summit of a
hill, is a large cross, or crucifix, which can be seen from a great
distance, with a * Way of the Cross ' leading up to it, where the
people may celebrate the different stations of our Lord's passion
in a manner exceedingly appropriate. I was much struck when
I first saw it, and thought of you, who love so much to see such
things by the wayside. And now, farewell, my dear friend and
brother in Christ ! Our sweet Lady guide and protect you al-
ways, and build in both our hearts a convent of retirement and
contemplation better contrived and better executed than our
quondam monastery at Wadhams Mills where she herself may
preside as our good Lady Abbess, with Jesus for the great
Head of our Order. Your faithful friend and brother in Christ,

" C. WALWORTH."

Wadhams' student life at St. Mary's Seminary, Baltimore,
ought to furnish much interesting material for these reminis-
cences. Unfortunately, however, that life is not now open to me,
nor have I any key to it. All that time I was far away, and
the companions I know of as sharing his life there are now
dead. He received tonsure and minor orders from Archbishop
Eccleston, September 2, 1847. Two years later he was made
deacon. He was ordained priest at St. Mary's Pro-Cathedral,
Albany, by Bishop McCloskey, January 15, 1850; and continued
to reside in that city, as assistant priest, rector of the Cathedral,
and later as vicar-general, until he became Bishop of Ogdens-
burg.

C. A. WALWORTH.

St. Marys Church, Albany, N. Y.

(TO BE CONTINUED.)

1892.] TOLUCA. 845

TOLUCA.

THE cleanest, trimmest, and most pleasing little city of its
size in the Mexican Republic is Toluca, the capital of the state
of Mexico. It is forty-five miles from the chief city of the
country, with which it is connected by the Mexican National
Railway. There are two trains either way daily, and the trip
is worth making for the glorious mountain scenery witnessed on
the road. Toluca is about a mile from the railway station, though
the houses straggle out to it ; the tram-car, if one be running,
should be taken ; otherwise, a hack will jolt one over the cobble-
stones for a moderate payment ; or the athletic, braced by the
keen air (for we are nigh on nine thousand feet above the sea),
may prefer to trudge through the dust.

The centre of the town is, of course, the main plaza, beauti-
ful even in midwinter, with lofty eucalyptus trees and well-or-
dered flower-beds, with fountains, bronze statues and urns, with
walks, convenient seats, and a band-stand. Around are various
palatial public buildings of stone, with Corinthian porticoes, one

f them the recast of an ancient convent ; whilst half the pri-
te houses are adorned with crosses and pious legends. Thus

e note the Hotel of St. Augustine, the Cereria (candle-shop) of
the Heart of Jesus, the School of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.
When it is completed the new parish church, which is arising
very slowly, will be not the least attraction to this dignified
square. It occupies the site of the ancient Franciscan church
and convent, of which a portion still remains, viz., the chapel
of the Third Order, now used as the parish church. A great
many antiquities statues, paintings, and altars are to be seen
here and also in its various ramifications and side chapels, a
part of the edifice being over three centuries old. It opens by
a curious old arched passage into one of the three sides of the
handsome portales or colonnades, a popular lounge filled with
shops and huckster's stalls. Opposite is the market, perhaps the
best in the country, distinguished chiefly by its tempting and di-
versified display of fruit. Numbers of Indians from the surround-
ing mountains, whose language and costume have suffered little
alteration from the Spanish occupation of the country, are to be
seen here, exposing their wares for sale, and themselves lending

846 To LUC A. [Sept.,

a picturesque effect to this very modern-looking little city. It
is not far to the alameda, or park. The word is from alamo, or
poplar. The trees, however, are mainly pines and willows, and
the place has recently been trimmed up and adorned in imita-
tion of the more pretentious pleasance in the capital, with
deer-pen and duck-pond, merry-go-round and aviary ; every attrac-
tion has been imitated with laudable exactitude, and if one is
to take the horrific notice board seriously, the irreverent wight
who should profane the emerald turf with unhallowed tread is
liable to be mulcted in five dollars, or to abide within the chill
shades of the penitenceria for as many days. Hard by is a pla-
zuela, or small square, with a monument to illustrious Mexicans
in general ; any citizen may regard himself as commemorated
here, and it resembles the popular toast, " To our noble selves."

Entering a courtyard we find the ancient church of " Nuestra
Sefiora de Merced " (Our Lady of Ransom). This was anciently
an establishment of the Spanish order founded in 1218, by San
Pedro Nolasco, for the redemption of Christians held captives
by the Moors ; the friars were sometimes called Trinitarians.
Afterwards it became a regular religious institution, and there
were various houses of the order in Mexico. The principal
monastery of this society still exists in Spain, and there is a
convent of Trinitarian nuns near London. [The guild of Our
Lady of Ransom, with its festival on the 24th of September, we
may say in passing, was founded in England several years ago
by two converts, a priest and a barrister, and now numbers many
thousands. The primary objects are : The conversion of Eng-
land and of individuals, the salvation of apostates, and prayers
and Masses for the forgotten dead. The obligations are a daily
prayer, and a nominal subscription, and the badge inscribed on
the guild's papers is the Host and Five Wounds, the standard
of the pilgrimage of grace. The practical work of the guild is
the delivery of lectures, attendance at Protestant and infidel lec-
tures of capable disputants, replying to calumnies against the
Church in the public press, the issue of a monthly magazine, or-
phanage work, the organization of pilgrimages, and other such
objects. This by way of digression.]

The Trinitarians have left behind them at Toluca a number
of curious paintings hanging on the walls of various apartments
adjoining the church, and in the nave of the sacred building
stand half a dozen life-size statues of holy men of the order,
habited in real robes, one of them, a Cardinal, having his mouth
secured by a small padlock passing through his upper and nether

I8Q2.J TO LUC A. 847

lips, most likely to symbolize one of his sufferings while a
prisoner among the Moors.

From this church we pass through some lanes of adobe
walls and hovels into plantations of maguey and maize, the fields
being as orderly and well cared for as the gardens in the city.
Ascending by some stone quarries we reach the hill of El Calva-
rio (so called from three crosses which stand here), and obtain a
charming view of the city and surrounding valleys, begirt with
pine-clad heights. We then enter the little Calvary chapel, stand-
ing in a court with gravestones and chaplain's dwelling. The adorn-
ments are very simple. There are white columns begirt with
red scrolls, whilst St. John the Evangelist, in green robe with
red blanket and white girdle, displays the national colors. There
is a picture of the scourging, such as is often seen in Mexico,
the flesh torn from the back so that every rib is exposed ; also
in a glass case a holy Child, resting on whose head is a crown
of silver thorns, whilst around in ranks hang from rows of slats
votive offerings, waxen legs, arms, and old Spanish coins. On
the walls are numerous little paintings on tin plates commemorat-
ing answers to prayer with a naive simplicity, which presumably
had nothing of the grotesque in them in the eyes of the artists
by whom they were executed, or of the pious souls who at-
tached them to the church walls.

Returning into the town we pass the church of San Juan de

s (St. John of God), a well-proportioned nave which is being
gloriously beautified with lavish but judicious use of gilding and
:olor, and we have hopes that the pious crudities (which could
lardly now inspire devotional sentiments even in an Indian), will
be withdrawn into the appropriate retirement of some darkened
rhapel. There sits the popular Holy Child of Acotlan, the
same singular figure that one sees throughout the Republic and
even (in pictures) in Texas. Amongst the votive pictures is one
of a man fallen into a caldron of boiling soap, his black hair
alone being visible. He invoked the Holy Child, a neighbor
pulled him out, and he experienced no harm.

Talking of soap and its uses reminds us of the following:
"My lord," once asked an artless damsel of the wily Samuel
Wilberforce, Anglican bishop of Winchester, " why does every-
one call you ' Soapy Sam ' ? " " It is, my dear," said the prelate
smiling, "because I'm always getting into hot water, and always
come out of it with clean hands." The worthy man would
have been a lusus naturce in Mexico.

After all, who likes to wash with inodorous masses of " soap "

848 TOLUCA. [Sept.,

purchased at the butcher's where they repose in vast pyramids
on the shelves, absorbing the aroma of fly-blown sirloins ?
Madame Calderon de la Barca, in her inimitable Mexican diary,
narrates that a singularly clever modeling artist brought her
husband a wax figure of a well-known dignitary of the govern-
ment. "It is just like the general," said the Spanish ambassa-
dor, " only his face is too fair." "Ah, but if you only saw the
gentleman after he has washed ; the resemblance is perfect," was
the reply. Ah, well ! varias poblaciones, varies costumbres, that is
why the "Church of the Divine Redeemer" opposite San Juan
de Dios has half its windows smashed and bears so forlorn an
aspect. Its gothic arches are singularly out of place in a Mexi-
can town, and its doors are securely barred. Oho ! it is una
cosa de gringo some sectarian meeting-house which evidently
wont go down at Toluca and the " missionary " too is invisible.
" Thou shalt look for his place and he shall be away." And long
may he remain so !

More pleasing it is to visit the handsome church which
stands near by the Central plaza. On the tower is inscribed
" Sanctus Deus, Sanctus Fortis, Sanctus Immortalis, Miserere Nobis"
In the court are trees and flowers, and a fountain with a model
of the church, and Our Lady of Lourdes, and the legend :
" Alles boire a la fontaine et vous y laver. Fevrier, 1858" In
the church are half a dozen large and effective oil paintings,
two on either side the nave, the others in the transepts. There
is a copy of the celebrated " Descent from the Cross," by Ru-
bens, which hangs in Antwerp Cathedral, a beautiful " Adoration
of the Shepherds," a "Resurrection," and a "Last Supper."
Then there is a " Madonna and Child " on a dwarf column, the
faces being lovely, and the apparition 01 Nuestra Sefiora de
Guadalupe to Juan Diego. The walls and roof are tastefully
colored, and a black crucifix over the gilded high altar arrests
the glance of the stranger. But the best church, that of the
Carmen, is left for last. This order was the richest in Mexico,
and its churches are invariably decorated in ornate fashion, but
in good taste, and worthy in design. High Mass was being sung,
hundreds of women and a sprinkling of men knelt around, and
a lovely voice from the choir-loft echoed through the encircling
chapels, whilst the deep mellow sounds from the organ pealed
forth in richest harmony, swelling and throbbing through the
saint-begirt fabric, and rising into the golden glories of the
vaulted roof. A false note was struck by the hats and bonnets
(the only ones seen all day) of a party of tourists from Mexico.

1892.] THE DEATH OP BJORN. 849

How vulgar and unseemly these monstrosities from Paris appear
by contrast with the graceful and modest mantilla, especially in
a church.

At the Hotel de la Gran Sociedad one can yet get an appe-
tizing meal suitably served, and may the day be long distant
(though, warned by experience elsewhere, we fear the worst),
when the Yankee sample dishes will be piled round one's plate,
once for all leaving one's food to cool at leisure and degenerate
in a nauseous and unctuous mass. The colored prints with
which the Comedor of the Gran Sociedad is adorned, highly sea-
soned with Parisian flavoring, are possibly a foil for the markedly
pious aspect of this daintiest of Mexican cities, for devout it is,
and notably so even in this religious country. And the question
would force itself on one, how long shall the most Christian na-
tions remain under Masonic rule ?

CHARLES E. HODSON.

THE DEATH OF BJORN.

WILD night and wailing winter blast,
Wierd phantoms by the firelight cast,
A shadowy room, a shadowy face,
No hint of love, no touch of grace,
And Bjorn dying.

The warriors kneeling round the bed,
Drew closer as he raised his head ;
" Men, men," he cried, "away, away!
And Asgard find ere break of day!

For I am dying."

Then stepped forth in the silent room,
Half hidden by the shadow's gloom,
A captive boy ; he held on high
A gleaming cross; it caught the eye

Of Bjorn dying.
VOL. LV. 55

850 THE DEATH OF BJORN. [Sept.,

" Oh, Christ ! " the captive murmured, " lead
This darkened soul in its great need
To the true Asgard, heaven and Thee,
And to Thy name the glory be."

But Bjorn dying

Caught but the words "Asgard" and 'Mead."
"Come hither, boy," he cried, "what deed
Of glorious battle hast thou done,
That thou art here the only one

Whom Bjorn dying
May follow with all-trustful eyes
To that far land where Asgard lies ? "

The boy replied : " Who follows this
Fails not to find that home of bliss;"

And Bjorn dying

Saw, like the morning's first bright beam,
The Cross amid the shadow's gleam.
The kneeling warriors scowled with rage.
What evil might not this presage?

But Bjorn dying

Smiled on the pure-faced captive boy
With something like a holy joy
" I go, oh, chieftains !" murmured he ;
"Where this Cross leads, there follow me."

Thus Bjorn dying,

Found Asgard at the gate of heaven,
The Cross the way by Christ's love given.

GERALDINE O'NEILL.

1892.] THE EXPULSION OF THE JEWS FROM SPAIN. 851

EXPULSION OF THE JEWS FROM SPAIN IN THE
FIFTEENTH CENTURY.

THE catastrophe of 1391, with its scenes of bloodshed, inev-
itably led to the dissolution of the Jewish community. Up to
that time, unity of design and aspiration had been maintained ;
they had faced persecution with a thoroughly perfect fellowship
resting on common interest, and on mutual assistance. From
close family ties they had derived great assistance for overcom-
ing danger and for elevating themselves to very high positions.
But now these ties had become loosened, and we are to find
them involved in the most dreadful discord imaginable, devouring
one another and irritating instead of appeasing the old resent-
ments and well-founded complaints of the Christians.

In consequence, at the opening of the fifteenth century, we
meet with a new condition of things of a highly complicated
nature. We are about to witness the ruin and annihilation of
the Hebrew population in Spain, brought about by their own
vices and errors, a logical result of the antecedent events which

have already set forth ; so that it will be seen that the
'atholic sovereigns cannot be justly accused of having dealt ar-
>itrarily with a population bearing in itself, as an immitigable
lathema, the germ of its dissolution and the root of its own
lisfortune.

We must quote once more from Amador de los Rios, whose
listory, if open to any suspicion, is certainly far from that of not
favoring the Jews. " The most imminent," he says, " and real
danger for the Israelitic race, fatallv conducing to their ruin,
had its rise in the very midst of themselves." And further on he
adds, with notable frankness : " No matter what might have been
the relations between the Hebrew race and the Christian popu-
lation of the Peninsula, no matter what might have been the
general policy and personal desires of its monarchs, the Israelitic
race on Iberian soil was fated not alone to sad decadence, but
also inevitably to extinction."* This statement, from so relia-
ble a witness, should alone suffice to demonstrate the injustice
of the charge made against Ferdinand and Isabella of having put
an end to the Jews, because in reality the decree of expulsion
was merely the fulfillment of a law of history, of inevitable ap-

*Amador de los Rios, Vol. III., p. 539.

852 THE EXPULSION OF THE JEWS FROM SPAIN [Sept.,

plication under the circumstances, and brought down by the
Hebrews on themselves. But in the picture which we are about
to sketch yet more evident testimony will be brought forward.

The characters in this drama, perhaps the most complicated
and intricate to be found in the mediaeval history of Spain, are
various, but all play important parts. In the first place there
were the converts, also called fudios fieles, or neo-Christians
(Cristianos nuevos.) This numerous body was made up of Jews
who, very soon after the catastrophe of 1391, applied for bap-
tism, and may be classed as of two kinds. The one, illuminated
by Divine revelation, sincerely embraced Christianity; the other
sought through baptism a means of placing their lives and prop-
erty in safety from persecution. Both kinds, under the common
designation of neo-Christians, overran the Spanish nation in the
beginning of the fifteenth century.

The Jews who adhered to their old belief took either of two
very different courses. Some decided to emigrate, and, to that
end, slowly and cautiously set to work to dispose of their real
estate and to export their treasures ; others, more attached to
their adopted country and having no wealth to protect, resolvec
to remain in order to go on conspiring, and cherished the hope of
ultimately having the power to retaliate. In the meantime
the population of Christian faith and descent, accustomed up to
that time to treat with Jews indiscriminately, were now forcec
to be more strictly on their guard than ever before ; and, while,
with noble and generous hearts, they cordially welcomed the con-
verts, they were fearful and jealous of others, whom they su<
pected, and not without grounds, of plottings of the darkest
kind.

We shall now show the course followed by the Jewish classes
just described. The genuine converts to Christianity were act
uated by the ardent zeal generally manifested by converts, and
were full of love for the newly-discovered truth which they hi
sincerely embraced. They believed that their profound studi<
of Talmudic doctrine, their knowledge of Hebrew, and the pre<
tige of their conversion, gave them a favorable stand for draw-
ing their separated brethren from the errors in which they stil
remained. They accordingly placed themselves at the head of
formidable propaganda against Judaism, and they carried it 01
by means of books, sermons, public controversy, and private a]
peals, their zeal even often going to extremes and leading them
into open warfare and extermination.

The pseudo-converts, adhering in their hearts to the faith of th<

1892.] IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 853

circumcision, had put on the profession and exterior of Christian-
ity. They were hypocrites ; and, dreading detection and its ter-
rible punishments, they cunningly and perfidiously took part in
the attacks against Judaism carried on by their sincere colleagues.
While publicly they showed themselves eager to go to even
greater lengths than these against Judaism, they secretly entered
into conspiracies, and allied themselves with Jews openly known
as such, and thus perpetrated their crimes and carried out their
revengeful purposes with impunity. This two-fold character of
the converts, as soon as it was fully understood, gave rise to a
marked mistrust, both among the old Christians and the uncon-
verted Jews. The former were in constant dread that every con-
vert they came in contact with might be only a pseudo-Christian ;
the latter were suspicious that the converts who secretly offered
to aid them might perhaps be real ones seeking to entrap them.

Another peculiar circumstance tended to increase this feverish
condition of mutual animosity and bad feeling. The converts,
owing to their undoubted activity and intelligence, their abun-
dant wealth, as well as the generous disposition of the old
Christians, insinuated themselves everywhere. All historians agree
that they found their way into the royal council chambers, into
monasteries, municipal corporations, episcopal chairs, into uni-
'ersities and colleges, into meetings of the nobility and mag-
tes in fine, everywhere ; and by every conceivable form of
activity secured power and prominence. They attained the
highest positions in the land, exercised an altogether decisive in-
fluence in public affairs, and gained a powerful ascendency
among all classes of society.

This advancement of the converts occasioned a greater com-
ication in the condition of things because the old Christians
naturally viewed with discontent, and perhaps with envy, such
rapid prosperity in which they had no share. They mistrusted
the future, because, as already stated, they knew that among
these successful men were numbers of Crypto-Jews. Meantime,
the neo-Christians, either to prove the sincerity of their conver-
sion or for interested motives, redoubled their attacks on the pro-
fessed Jews, bringing to light their vices, denouncing their trans-
gressions, giving publicity to the errors in their books, and to
the scandalous character of their maxims. The avowed Jews, or
" infidels," as the converts called them, became fewer in number
from year to year, and of constantly lower social condition. For
it is a perfectly proven fact that those of their co-religionists
who were persons of culture and wealth, and who remained in

854 THE EXPULSION OF THE JEWS FROM SPAIN [Sept.,

Spain, asked to be baptized ; some through motives of sincere
faith, others under such circumstances as to leave their sincerity
open to doubt. Those who were of any means or good educa-
tion and who still adhered to Judaism gradually emigrated, hav-
ing lost all hope of better times.

This explanatory statement is a refutation of those historians
who, in their condemnation of the decree of expulsion, have not
hesitated to assert that the body against which it was enforced
comprised large numbers of learned men and numerous capitalists,
whose departure from Spain left the nation overspread with ig-
norance and overwhelmed with calamity. No such consequences
followed. Though historic proof were wanting, common sense
alone would teach us the case was just the reverse. The Jewish
population of Spain which, at the close of the fifteenth century,
came under the decree of the Catholic sovereigns, was scanty,
of very humble social condition, and of trifling or no in-
fluence on Spanish culture. But, it will be urged, why expel
them if they were so insignificant? This is the point which we
shall now proceed to explain, taking up those threads of our
narrative which we have for a moment allowed to drop.

We have seen that the condition of the Spanish nation be-
came, during the fifteenth century, like that of the camp of Agra-
munt. Mistrust, lack of confidence, mutual fe^rs, hatred, envy,
hypocrisy, passions of all kinds were stirred up and became ac-
tive. The glorious work of the Reconquest was held in abey-
ance, and there seemed no other prospect for the Spanish race
except fratricidal wars and bloody revolutions. Every case of
personal resentment, every political conspiracy, every industrial
rivalry, every public calamity, afforded opportunity to bring out
religious differences. The Jews, the converts, and the old Chris-
tians were made victims of misdeeds which public feeling or
sympathy often allowed to go unpunished. Such a state of
things, as can well be conceived, was intolerable; it lasted by
favor of those wretched reigns which preceded the glorious and
restoring one of Ferdinand and Isabella. Nor could it fail to
last during that period, for the policy of intrigue and conspiracy
then prevailing found in the existing situation a means of per-
petuating itself.

Don Alvaro de Luna, who played so great a part during the
reign of Don Juan II., was enabled to rise and maintain himself
in the favor of that monarch by availing himself of the support
of the converts, who had become masters in the royal palace
and had attained the highest social positions. But, having sub-

1892.] IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 855

sequently shown an inclination to favor the professed Jews, he
estranged the sympathies of the converts, who, in union with his
other enemies, co-operated efficaciously for his downfall. Such
political intrigues opened new wounds in the social body, which,
when Don Enrique IV. ascended the throne, in 1454, presented
a sad and discouraging aspect. " Factions and civic disorder,"
says a historian, " reached their apogee in this reign."* The no-
bility, elated by the death of Don Alvaro de Luna, for them a
triumph, showed themselves firmly bent on exalting themselves
above their monarch and disputed his sovereignty, going even so
far as to depose him in effigy at the famous assembly at Avila.
The clergy, alarmed at the predominance achieved by the con-
verts, showed symptoms of distrust and disquiet, which weakened
all ecclesiastical institutions and provoked interior discord, a state
of things very detrimental to the state and to the faithful in
general. The commons, carried away by opposing currents, de-
moralized, and impoverished, were turned away from the useful
arts and remunerative labor and resorted to frequent uprisings,
following as partizans the most audacious and riotous leaders.
A Castilian saying may be quoted here in illustration : A rio re-
vuelto, ganancia de Pescadores (" a turbulent river brings gain to
the fishermen"). The Jews took advantage of the disturbed flow
of the social stream to fish for new favors, and so effectually
and with such success as to cause all the legislation of two cen-
:uries past to be forgotten, to recover all their old privileges, of
rhich not the least, nor the least significant, was the concession
of having judges of their own race, as instanced by the appoint-
ment to the judicial office of grand rabbi conferred on Jacob
Lben-Nufiez, the king's physician.

The publicly-avowed Jews were again allowed to undertake
the farming of the royal revenues ; usury again began to de-
vour the substance of the nobility and commons. Encouraged
by these favors, not a few of the converts laid aside their hypoc-
risy and, by declaring themselves apostates, provoked fresh dis-
trust of their entire class, increased the alarm of the old Chris-
tians, and provoked against themselves the indignation of the
genuine converts who had sincerely embraced the truths of the
Gospel.

Foremost in energetic protest was the Franciscan Monso Espi-
na, a man of extraordinary merit, confessor of the king, and rector
of the University of Salamanca. He published, in 1459, a book
entitled The Stronghold of Faith, having for its object to expose

* Sanchez Casado, p. 345.

856 THE EXPULSION OF THE JEWS FROM SPAIN [Sept.,

the errors and misdeeds of the Jews adhering, whether publicly
or in secret, to Judaism. This work, doubtless containing exag-
gerations, because it was difficult for the author to entirely free
himself from the public opinion prevailing in his day, abounds
in sound doctrines and includes a treasure of historical informa-
tion.* In it was proposed for the first time the expediency of es-
tablishing an Inquisition in the kingdoms of Castile in order to
winnow out the bad Jewish cockle sown in Christian society and
overgrowing it to its great injury.

The proposition did not seem absurd. It was approved by
the nation generally, which viewed it as advisable and as a means
towards quieting the restlessness of the public. The king sum-
moned to his court Father Alonzo de Oropesa, an evangelical
man, a defender of the unity of the faithful, " respected by all
for his virtues," as Amador testifies. " The subject was dis-
cussed and, after mature consideration and careful analysis of the
situation of things," adds the same historian, " the suggestion
was adopted, but upon the express condition that the carrying
of it out was to be confided to the bishops as proper judges in
matters of faith. Father Oropesa, to whom it had been given
in charge by the Archbishop of Toledo, Don Alfonso Carillo,
made a beginning by establishing the Inquisition in that city, and
incurred thereby much blame from one side or another, " for, if
the old Christians offended by their arrogance and rashness, the
neo-Christians were reprehensible for malice and inconstancy in
their adopted faith:' f

As a result of all this, the struggle between old and new
Christians reached the point of bloodshed. Previously, in the
lifetime of Don Alvaro de Luna, grave disorders had taken place
in Toledo, growing out of the collection (given in charge to the
converts) of an extra tax. The houses of some of these were
burned, many who took up arms to defend themselves were
killed and wounded. Eighteen years later, in that same imperial
city, very sad events took place, showing the intensity of the evil
which was rending Spanish society asunder. Under some trifling
pretext, a crowd of converts burst into the Cathedral to take
revenge for alleged wrongs done them by the municipality, killed
the porter before the altar of our Blessed Lady, and, after
having thus profaned the church, sallied forth, as followers of the
banner of the Count of Cifuentes, to capture the city. The

* Menendez Pelayo, Historia delos Heterodoxos Espanoles. Vol. I., p. 634.
t These words of the learned Father Siguenzaaie taken from his work La Historia de la
orden de San Gerontmo, Book III., chap, xviii.

1892.] IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 857

church bells sounded the alarm, the old Christians of the neigh-
borhood poured in to the rescue, and a bloody struggle took
place, which resulted in the destruction by fire of over three
thousand dwellings and the slaughter of over one hundred and
thirty-eight converts. The ground was now prepared, the inflam-
matory materials accumulated, needing only to be kindled by a
spark to produce a rapidly-spreading conflagration.

In 1473, in Cordova, the old Christians had founded a con-
fraternity into which there was no admission for any Jewish
converts whatever. On the day of the procession to inaugurate
the foundation of this society the converts, in order to resent
this (considered by them as an affront), kept the windows of their
dwellings closed, in contrast with all others, which were gaily
decorated for the occasion. This sowed a whirlwind of angry
passions, which broke into a storm when a vessel of water was
thrown upon the procession from the house of a convert. A riot
ensued, for three days the city was turned into a battle-field, and
numbers of victims perished, the spirit of religious contention
being inflamed by the ambition and discord of the magnates of
the old capital of the caliphate.*

The conflagration spread from Cordova to the principal cities
of Andalusia, penetrated into Castile, caused great disasters in
Valladolid and Segovia, and ended by establishing a permanent
state of disturbance and disorder. The Jewish race, even during
lis overturning and raging storm, was fated to give new proofs
>f its perversity and its purposes of domination, which were
:o form, as it were, the concluding chapter of the probation
receding its expulsion.

The rage and despair of the Crypto-Jews, upon seeing that not
ren baptism availed for their defence against the antipathies
which their forefathers had incurred, must have finally become
implacable. The precepts of the Talmud exhorting Hebrews to
curse Christians three times a day, to plunder them either by
fraud or violence whenever they could, to push over a preci-
pice any of them happening to be near enough for the purpose,
were now to be carried out with greater ease than ever before.
Already, in the time of Don Alfonso el Sabio, the Jews were
accused " of scoffingly commemorating on Good Friday the Pas-
sion of our Lord Jesus Christ by kidnapping and crucifying
children." f This charge continued to be reiterated from cen-

* Pavon, Tradiciones Cordobesas.

t Law No. 2 of Title XXIV. of the Partida (the laws of Castile compiled by King Al-
fonso X.)

858 THE EXPULSION OF THE JEWS FROM SPAIN [Sept.,

tury to century and, as stated by Amador, " got to figure as
the leading one in the indictments which drove the descendants
of Juda from Iberian soil." *

Without entering here into a narrative of incidents of the
cruel nature above referred to which history has recorded,f and
the truth of which has been so well established as, for instance,
the sacrifice of the little boy Dominito del Val, which occurred
in Saragossa in 1250^ we shall confine ourselves to a brief
account of an event which created a great sensation in the fif-
teenth century, and probably influenced very decidedly the
sentence which was to be the conclusion of the long process
against the Hebrew race in Spain. It occurred at Sepulveda
during the Christmas season 'of the year 1468. The Jews of the
synagogue there, incited by their rabbi, Salomon Picho, got
possession of a Christian boy and, having taken him to an out-
of-the-way spot, they subjected him to a series of violent out-
rages, and ended by nailing him to a cross and putting him to
death in the same manner as their ancestors did the Saviour of
Mankind.

The murder was discovered ; and the just resentment of the
Christians was so intense that they did not rest until they had
rooted out the entire synagogue and dispersed all its members,
who, having the stigma of their crime upon their brows, were re-
pelled wherever they went and spread everywhere the conta-
gion of persecution against all their co-religionists.

At this time an audacious and chimerical idea was set on
foot by the Jews. Taking advantage of the state of penury of
Don Enrique IV., they ventured to tempt him with an offer to pur-
chase Gibraltar for the purpose of establishing themselves there
and founding in so favorable a site an independent state. The
Castilian monarch manfully rejected the offer. He must' have
appreciated the danger to the nation's safety of having such a
race dwelling in its midst as an independent power. That their
intention was at bottom wholly perverse is manifest ; Gibraltar
is the key of the strait named after it, and is an advanced point
of communication with the African coast.

* Amador de los Rios, Vol. I., p. 483.

f Teatro Eclesiastico de Aragon, Vol. II., p. 246.

\ In our own day the Berlin newspapers relate that the German butcher Buschhoff has
been put on trial for having sacrificed a boy named Hermann according to alleged Jewish rites.
On this account, the sacrifices of infants by Hebrews have been the subject of discussion in the
Reichstag, and several cases have been cited as, for instance, those of Morris dejonge, Lieb-
mann, Bleichoder, and others showing that this Jewish rite, although not obligatory under
adherence to the Talmud, has never been forgotten by modern Israelites.

The perpetration of the crime is proven by the authority of respectable Christian histo-
rians, and the judicious Colmenares relates it in his History of Segovia.

1892.] iff THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 859

Seven centuries before, from that very same coast, the disas-
trous Mohammedan invasion, aided and abetted by the Jews,
had burst upon Spain ; its consequences were still subsisting,
and Spain was still lamenting over the calamities and trials of
the long period of the Reconquest. Was it at all strange that
this proposal should create uneasiness among Spaniards, and that
they should view it as a new stratagem inspired by most sinis-
ter designs? Many modern historians who have conscientiously
studied the facts in question judge that the proposition of the
Hebrews was made with the connivance of the African Mohamme-
dan princes, with a view to recover possession of Spain. " What
other meaning," writes the learned Hefele, " can be deduced
from the perfectly-established tact that in 1473 they attempted
with great eagerness to purchase, for an immense sum in gold,
the fortified town of Gibraltar, the master-key of the kingdom
of Spain ? "* Disappointed in their hopes many Jews emigrated,
and the number of their co-religionists in Spain was thus further
decreased.

A year after defeating the design of getting possession of
Gibraltar, the unfortunate monarch, Don Enrique, descended into
the grave. He died honored, because, while as weak as ever be-
fore in other matters, he had rejected, with all the integrity of a
Christian monarch, the proposition of the Jews. With him end-
ed a line of kings who, from Don Alfonso XL down, had seen
their rights of sovereignty contested by the magnates of the
realm, their states rent by civil wars, their coffers either reduced
or drained, the national undertaking of the Reconquest para-
lyzed, and their subjects a prey to the most alarming anarchy.
There was indeed need for Divine Providence to interfere with
powerful assistance in order to avert the ruin of so great and
Christian a nation. Had this condition of affairs continued un-
changed, the conquests made during ages preceding would have
come to naught, and Christian civilization might perhaps have
retrograded to the Pyrenees.

The fruitful and restoratory reign of Ferdinand and Isabella,
styled exceptionally the Catholic sovereigns, preserved Spain
from such dreadful ruin. And it further pleased God to bless
the Catholic sovereigns with the glory of enlarging the map of
the world by the discovery of a new continent.

MANUEL PEREZ VILLAMIL,

Member of the Royal Academy of History.
Madrid.

* Cisneros y la Jglesia Espanola, Chap, xviii.

86o Is THERE A COMPANION WORLD TO OUR OWN? [Sept.,

IS THERE A COMPANION WORLD TO OUR OWN?*

WE hear a great deal nowadays about the opposition, the so-
called conflict between religion and science. Articles and even
books are written about it, principally with the intention. of dis-
paraging religion, as it must be admitted ; for the authors of
these books or articles accept the lines followed by the investi-
gators of physical science (for that is what is usually meant
now by science) as correct methods of arriving at truth ; if, then,
there be in their minds a conflict between the duly-proved con-
clusions of these investigators and the teachings of religion, the
consequence necessarily follows to them that the teachings of a
religion must be wrong.

This is a result which the world in general is ready
enough to accept. The discordance between the religious creeds
with which it is familiar paves the way readily enough for such
an acceptance. In spite of all the vague talk which may be in-
dulged in about different aspects of truth, or about essentials and
non-essentials, the common sense of mankind sees, and has seen
for a long time clearly enough, from the very fact of this dis-
cordance, either that the great majority of the creeds, even of
those called Christian, must contain a good many important
errors, or that, if these errors are not important, the only impor-
tant truths of religion are the existence of God and of a life
for us beyond the -grave.

Religion, then understanding by the term anything beyond
mere deism, joined perhaps with a hope of immortality stands
apparently to the world as self-condemned by its own dissen-
sions. It is discounted in advance ; so much so that, even if
any of, the dogmas of any religious body are proclaimed to be
in conflict with science, it needs no especial examination of the
science which may be in question to give to the world at least
a high probability that the science is right and the religion
wrong.

We Catholics, however, are not inclined to look at matters
in this way. Our faith in our religion is apt to be pretty strong.
We are more likely to say, if there is a conflict between religion
and science, " so much the worse for science." We get in a way of
sneering at science, and trying to make a parallel between the

* A paper read before the Catholic Summer Assembly.

1892.] Ss THERE A COMPANION WORLD TO OUR OWN? 86 1

changes of opinion in the scientific' world on various points and
those in the Protestant world on religious matters. We say,
" Oh, these scientists teach one thing this year and another
next ; they will give up before long many of the opinions they
now so strongly hold."

Now, all this is very unwise and rests on no solid founda-
tion. For, though there are among what may be called scien-
tists some mere dreamers and speculators, the scientific world,
properly so-called, is by no means composed of such, and such
are hardly allowed a place in its inner circles. And the sup-
posed parallel between the diversities of scientific and of reli-
gious opinion is not a real or a fair one ; for in science the di-
vergencies are constantly diminishing, whereas among religious
sects they continually increase. Moreover, what we sometimes may
imagine to be a firmly held opinion, or even a dogma of science,
is very far from being such among those who have adopted and
are now, as I may say, using it. It is often what is called
merely a working hypothesis, a theory known almost certainly to
be more or less wrong, or at least, incomplete, but a necessary
step to the getting of something better. A good instance of
such a hypothesis would be the theory which must be assumed
about the dimensions and positions of the orbit of a new planet
or comet before an accurate determination can be made. The
computer who adopts this theory, who uses these provisional
elements of the orbit as they are called, knows that the chances
are millions to one that they are not quite right ; but unless he
adopts them, or some others equally liable to error for the time,
in order to compare them with actual observation, he will never
obtain the corrections which he knows all along are necessary.

Let us, then, be fair to science. The methods of the science
of the present day are really substantially right ; its conclusions,
if not absolutely and finally true, are at least steps on the way
to truth, and the temper and the aspirations of scientific men
are as a rule good and laudable. Let us not then try to prove
our religion by showing that science is substantially out of the
lines of truth and its methods radically wrong ; for in this we
shall take altogether too large a contract, and be crushed by the
power of truth itself, which we are ignorantly trying to defend.

Let us rather inquire if after all there is a real discord-
ance between our own very :definite and dogmatic religion and
the truth which science is discovering. We need not concern
ourselves with other creeds ; let them fight their own battles,
except so far as their adherents are willing to come under our

862 Is THERE A COMPANION WORLD TO OUR OWN? [Sept.,

standard, and take the views which we can take on the points at
issue. And the inquiry is one which must be made piecemeal ;
one science and one point at a time.

And let us have no fear for the result. Truth cannot con-
tradict truth.

It is well, however, to remark in starting on any such inquiry,
that after all, the points of contact, so to speak, between scien-
tific and religious truth are not so very numerous. The domains
of the two are different ; the methods of arriving at the two are
different, especially if by religious truth we mean the truths of
revealed religion. We arrive at scientific truths by observation
and experiment, aided by the use of our reasoning faculties; and
the reasoning is chiefly what is called a posteriori. The knowl-
edge of the most important truths of natural religion is mainly
a priori', those of revealed religion are known by the authority
of witnesses on whose veracity we can depend, ultimately on
that of God himself. But this is a less important distinction
for our present purpose than the other: that is, the difference
of the respective domains or provinces of the two. Religion is
not intended, and does not undertake, to teach as certain those
truths which can be attained only by scientific observation and
experiment ; and science, as a rule, frankly confesses its inability
to arrive at the truths which religion professes to teach ; it rele-
gates them to the region of what it sometimes calls (somewhat
arrogantly) the unknowable ; which really means what cannot be
known from scientific bases or by scientific methods I speak, of
course, of science throughout in the common meaning of physical
science, though properly the term should not be so restricted.

There are not, then, many points of contact on which we
have to receive light from both sources; still there are some, as,
for example, the testimony of the inspired writers to facts which
science is competent to investigate, such as the occurrence of the
deluge.

But, of course, we do not mean now to go over the whole
field of the harmony or the reconcilableness of these two great
sources of our knowledge. The subject, as has been said, is
one which must necessarily be taken piecemeal ; our special de-
partment just now is that of the science of astronomy ; we wish
to see if there is anything in it which ought in any way to in-
terfere with our faith in what we. accept as the Christian reve-
lation.

In reality we have not here so much difficulty to apprehend
as in the case of some other sciences ; and this for the simple rea-

1892.] fs THERE A COMPANION WORLD TO OUR OWN? 863

son that the science of astronomy, though far from being com-
plete, is more perfect, more settled, and hence more absolutely
true in its positive teachings than the others. It has less of the
working hypothesis, more of the ascertained truth, in what it
presents to the world. And, therefore, as it has approached
nearer to the final truth which is its aim, it is less in danger of
giving an apparent contradiction to any other truth.

Still it cannot be denied that it seems to many minds very
difficult to accept its conclusions, and at the same time to hold
on strongly and unhesitatingly to what our religion teaches. For
astronomy tells us and there is no truth taught by science
which is more unquestionable that the visible universe is of
such enormous and overwhelming dimensions that our earth, from
the material point of view, is, we may say, an absolutely insig-
nificant part of it. It is no mere guess when we say that the
sun is more than a million times as large as the earth, or that
the nearest of the stars that we know of is about twenty mil-
lions of millions of miles away. These facts rest on the same
kind of evidence that every man of common sense accepts in
the ordinary affairs of life. If we do not accept them we must
reject the testimony of the geographer who assures us that it is
some three thousand miles from here to ^Europe, or of the sur-
veyor who tells us that a certain estate contains so many acres
or square miles ; for the processes used by the astronomer, the
geographer, and the surveyor are all the same. The only differ-
ence is that the astronomer's results have a somewhat greater
margin of possible error, owing to the relative shortness of the
base lines from which he has to start ; but the results of all
three rest on the evidence of the senses, on ordinary measure-
ments, supplemented by unquestionable mathematical reasoning.
If we do not accept the conclusions of astronomy in the matters
which have been mentioned, we must reject the evidence of the
senses generally, and restrict our knowledge to self-evident meta-
physical truths and the conclusions which can logically be drawn
from them. We must even give up revealed religion itself ; for
re cannot arrive at a knowledge of that unless we trust our
eyes and ears.

And yet, without going any farther, we shall find some who
will say, " I could not believe that our earth was such a little
atom in space, and continue to keep firmly to the faith that the
Creator of this vast universe had become a man among us, to
save the inhabitants of this insignificant little speck of his great
creation."

864 Is THERE A COMPANION WORLD TO OUR OWN /[Sept.,

But another difficulty seems to come up while this is still
puzzling and disturbing us. It is that astronomy tells us, with al-
most unhesitating certainty, that at least a great proportion of
the stars which are scattered in such profusion over the sky,
which the naked eye sees by thousands and the telescope by
millions, are suns equaling or even largely exceeding our own
sun in brilliancy, size, and weight, and are indeed bodies as
closely resembling it as to be chiefly distinguishable from it in
the respects just named. And the conclusion seems to follow,
with at least a high degree of probability, that these other in-
numerable suns are attended by planets like those of our own solar
system ; and from this it is inferred by some that these planets,
if not the suns to which they belong, are, or ought at any rate
to be, inhabited by beings like ourselves ; and so as the earth,
man's habitation, becomes a mere speck in the material creation,
so man himself becomes apparently a mere drop in a great ocean
of life resembling in every respect his own. The questions then
arise, " If we have been redeemed by the Son of God, why not
all these others, too ? What right have we to claim, what possi-
bility is there that we can claim, to be the favored children of
a God who has so many others as worthy as, if not more wor-
thy than, ourselves ? "

These two are the principal, I think I may say the only, puz-
zles or perplexities which the science of astronomy, properly so-
called, presents to the Christian believer. Of course, some astron-
omers may hold that the universe is eternal and uncreated ; but
the science of astronomy has nothing, and never can have any-
thing, to say about that. It may, indeed, have a more or less
probable cosmogony ; that is, it may give probable, and to a great
extent demonstrable, theories of how our solar system, or others
like it or perhaps even how the great universe as a whole could
be developed, or has been developed, from mere inert matter, or
what may be called chaos. But here we find no difficulty ; for
cosmogony, as generally held by astronomers, is in no point in
clear opposition to the Mosaic record ; indeed, on the contrary,
it rather tends to confirm it.

The two difficulties which have been mentioned, (which really
I think include all others) are, however, sufficiently serious and
disturbing to most minds, and merit careful consideration.

The first, that of the great magnitudes and distances which
astronomy tells us of, is one which impresses the popular mind
much more than that of the professional astronomer himself.
Enormous dimensions, to him, lose the significance which they

1892.] Is THERE A COMPANION WORLD TO OUR OWN? 865

seem to have to those who are not accustomed to deal with
them. Dimensions become to him a merely relative matter.
The sun is a million times as big as the earth yes; that means
no more to him than to say that a cannon ball is a million
times as big as a grain of shot. He does not try to strain his
mind to imagine, to make a picture of the distances with which
he deals, other than the picture which is actually before him on
the sky itself ; the eye, the only sense we can use in the matter,
can actually take in the big distance as well as the small one,
and the small distance is in the concept, properly so-called, just
as incomprehensible as the big one.

But it is not easy to get at once into this professional way
of looking at the universe merely as a diagram made on an ar-
bitrary scale. .It seems to me, however, that we can all con-
vince ourselves without much trouble that mere size or vastness,
though it may continue to impress or appal us, is not in point
of fact such an important element in the relative value of creat-
ed things as it seems at first to be. We know, for instance,
that a whale is several thousand times as big and as heavy as a
man ; does that make him the more important 'animal ? Do we
not at once recognize that the man, even as a mere physical
organism, is the higher and more perfect? In fact, do we value
anything except mere pieces of inorganic matter, like gold, sil-
ver, or iron, merely by their size? And even with these, when
the material is different, is there not a great difference in value
according to its utility or rarity ? And when organism or con-
struction of any kind comes into the question, does not that
generally override other considerations? As the man, even as a
mere animal, is superior to the whale, and still more to a great
mass of rock or sand, is not a finely constructed chronometer
watch much more valuable than many a big clock, and still
more to an immensely superior mass of the materials of which
it is made?

Just such a comparison may be made between the earth and
the sun. The earth is a wonderful and complex structure, a
nicely adjusted masterpiece of well-balanced parts and forces.
The sun is pretty well known to be a mere seething, boiling
mass of chemical elements, having no permanent construction
except of a comparatively simple kind and under the control
of mere mechanical forces. It has in it the makings, if you please,
of a million earths as fine as ours ; so have the iron or brass in
a furnace the makings of the works of innumerable watches.
But there is no evidence that these watches will be made, and
VOL. LV. 56

866 Is THERE A COMPANION WORLD TO OUR OWN? [Sept.,

no certainty that the sun will ever be as perfect a body as the
earth ; at any rate it is not now, and its present utility in crea-
tion is simply as a source of light, heat, and energy in general
for our use and that of its other attendant planets, not for its
own sake.

If mere size is of controlling importance, the great desert
of Africa, or the frozen Arctic regions, are more important parts
of the earth than the cities of London, Paris, or New York. A
boulder of rock is more valuable than a diamond on this princi-
ple ; illustrations could, of course, be multiplied without end. I
must confess that to me any ordinary animal or even plant
seems a more wonderful, dignified, and important work of God
than a mass of mere crude and lifeless matter, however large.
And, if this can be said of any simply living thing, how much
more of the human soul, in which size or dimension ceases to
be a factor at all ?

But it may be said that the bulk or the surface of a body is
not in itself so important a condition, but that it is in another
way: that is, on account of the possibilities it implies. If this
little earth has so many inhabitants, how many more may the
heavens contain ?

This brings us right face to face with the second idea of
which I have spoken as a puzzle or perplexity resulting to the
Christian from the discoveries of astronomy. As has been re-
marked just now, it seems to many (perhaps we may say to
most minds) very nearly certain that, even if the almost innu-
merable suns which we see scattered through space are not
themselves inhabited, at least they must be attended by planets
like our own, and that these must be the abode of life like
ours. An argument to this effect seems to come from the very
wisdom of God ; it seems that he could not have built such a
vast universe except for the purpose of its being the dwelling of
life ; that to leave this inhabitable room or space wasted would
be a waste of his power, a work, as it were, without an adequate
or worthy purpose or object.

An answer to this, however, is immediately apparent. We
have no right, if we are going to reason in this way, to leave out
of the account the great suns themselves, incomparably the most
important bodies of the universe, and the only ones which we
know to exist outside of our own solar system except the ob-
viously uninhabitable nebulas. Let us, then, look at these, and
get our answer to the theory from the actual facts of the case.

In our own solar system we find that the surface of the- sun is
about fifty times that of all the planets put together. We have

1892.] Is THERE A COMPANION WORLD TO OUR OWN? 867

then, right here, as a really certain fact, that even if all the plan-
ets of our system are inhabited, only one-fiftieth part of the avail-
able surface for habitation in the system is utilized. Let us not
take refuge from this in the idea once held by some astronomers
that underneath the blazing surface of the solar orb there might
be a cooler inner layer where life would be possible ; for the
more recent investigations as to the source of the sun's heat,
and the way in which it has in all probability been produced
and is now sustained, have made this hypothesis scientifically un-
tenable.

But let us look farther into the details, and see if even this
idea that all the planets of our system are the abodes of life,
at least of highly organized life like ours, is not an extravagant
assumption.

And immediately, I think, we must be obliged to surrender
almost all the paltry fraction of one-fiftieth which we seem at
first to be able with some probability to claim ; for this one-
fiftieth is almost all found on the four grand planets which
guard the outside of the system, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and
Neptune (I do not include the rings of Saturn in this, for it is
really ascertained by mathematical considerations that these have,
in the sense in which we are speaking, no surface at all, as they
must necessarily, to remain stable as they do, be composed of
small incoherent masses, to be numbered by millions probably,
flying round the planet independently of each other). I say,
then, that this fiftieth of the solar surface which we have, not
counting the rings of Saturn, is almost all found on these four
great planets ; for the four smaller primary planets, Mercury,
Venus, the earth, and Mars, will hardly give together one ten-
ousandth part of the solar surface ; the satellites, including our
own moon, somewhat more, but still a very insignificant fraction ;
as to the asteroids, they hardly count at all.

But why must we surrender the four great exterior planets
as probable habitations for life like ours?

The answer is that we are practically certain that all the
planets were formed by a process of cooling from a mass origi-
nally in an intensely heated state, and in a liquid or even gase-
ous condition on account of this heat. In fact, we have only to
consider the evidences presented by our own planet, to look at
the evidences which it not unfrequently gives us of its interior,
to assure ourselves that we should only have to take off the thin-
nest kind of a skin or peel from its surface (speaking, of course,
relatively to its whole dimensions) to come to another surface
where life could not possibly be maintained.

th,

868 Is THERE A COMPANION WORLD TO OUR OWN? [Sept.,

Very well then, we have reason to believe that this thin crust
which has formed on the surface of the earth, possibly on that
of the other inner planets, .Mercury, Venus, probably on that of
Mars, and certainly on that of the moon, has not yet formed
on the great exterior ones. Why do we believe this ? First, be-
cause the size of the planets is itself an obstacle to their quick
cooling, the volume of heated matter being as the cube of the
dimension ; the surface, on the other hand, by which the heat can
be radiated into space only as its square. The volume or bulk
of Jupiter, for instance, is about 1,300 times that of the earth ;
but it has only about 120 times the earth's surface. This quick
cooling of relatively small bodies does not, indeed, need to be
proved ; it is a matter of common experience. If, then, the
earth has only just cooled, so to speak, can we expect that Ju-
piter has had time to do so ?

But we have more positive evidence than this that it has not
as yet cooled; for its surface presents no really permanent
features or markings, like those which the earth has, and which
we see on the moon and Mars ; it seems to be in a state of
flux, or overhung with the heavy vapors which would arise from
a molten mass. Moreover, it seems to shine of its own light,
though this is, of course, not certain ; but, if it does not, its sur-
face must be either of a very white color or of very uniform
smoothness. The first supposition seems improbable, the last
would itself suggest liquidity.

On the whole, therefore, the common (I may say universal)
opinion of astronomers is that Jupiter has not yet formed a
crust on its surface. To quote the words of Professor Young,
the celebrated astronomer of Princeton, " the rapidity of the
changes upon the visible surface of Jupiter implies the expendi-
ture of a considerable amount of heat ; and, since the heat re-
ceived from the sun is too small to account for the phenomena
which we see, Zollner, thirty years ago, suggested that it must
come from within the planet, and that in all probability Jupiter
is at a temperature not much short of incandescent hardly yet
solidified to any considerable extent. Since the investigations
of Zollner," Professor Young goes on to say, " this has become
an accepted item of scientific belief."

The appearance and the probabilities with regard to Saturn
are somewhat the same as for Jupiter. With regard to the outer
planets) Uranus and Neptune, the telescope has as yet furnished
no very definite information ; their size, somewhat smaller than
that of Jupiter and Saturn, and their older formation as usually

1892.] /5 THERE A COMPANION WORLD TO OUR OWN? 869

supposed (though this has lately been with good reason disputed)
would indicate that they were in an intermediate state between
that of Jupiter and our own ; the probability would be that they
are still hardly cooled enough for the processes of life to be
maintained.

It would seem, then, that if we accept the simple evidence in
in the case without prejudice, we shall have to acknowledge
that these four great planets, though of course far inferior in
heat than the sun, are still far too warm for ourselves, and prob-
ably for any of the other forms of life which we find on the
earth.

We have then left about one ten-thousandth part of the whole
surface of our solar system remaining as an admissible habita-
tion for life. Let us now turn to examine that.

The nearest part of it to us, outside our own planet, is that
of our own satellite, the moon. The interest felt by people in
general in examining that is shown by the hope that is always-
manifested on the announcement of the construction of any
telescope larger than those previously existing, that this tele-
scope will solve the question, and perhaps show us some signs
of beings like ourselves on the moon, or at least of some build-
ings or engineering works which they may have made. Only a
few days ago I saw a statement in a daily paper that such a
telescope was about to be constructed, which would make the
surface of our satellite appear as if it was only a mile away.
This implies, of course, a magnifying power of about 240,000
diameters. It is possible that such a telescope might be built ;
but is it equally possible that such a high magnifying power
could be used, if it was provided? The unprofessional will say,
why not ? But any astronomer knows that it is only under ex-
ceptional circumstances that the high powers, say of two or
three thousand, can be satisfactorily used on the telescope now
existing. The difficulty is not that the telescope is not big
enough to stand it, but that the tremulousness of the air through
which we x have to look is usually so great that all details which
might be gained by the high power are lost from this cause;
for disturbances of the air, unnoticeable with low powers, are
painfully conspicuous with high ones. Another difficulty, of
course, is the extreme perfection required of mirrors and lenses to
enable them to bear such great magnifying. Under such a trial,
the smallest imperfection shows. But, granting that this last diffi-
culty could be overcome, we are warranted on the first ground
alone to say that a power of 240,000 could not be used unless

870 Is THERE A COMPANION WORLD TO OUR OWN? [Sept.,

the observer could get practically entirely out of our atmosphere ;
but there is no such point of view that he can reach, and if he
could be transported to such a point, he could neither support
his telescope nor his own life there.

Moreover, there is very little, if any, use in making this
search of the surface of the moon, at least for the purpose of
discovering life. The question is practically decided already that
this surface consists of mere barren rock, without air or water,
or anything corresponding to them. There is much less chance
of life there than on the top of the Himalaya mountains, for the
conditions are far more unfavorable ; for on the mountains at
least there is water, though frozen, and a fair proportion of air,
and no worse conditions in any other way than those of the
moon. The alternating day and night of two weeks each in
length on the moon is of itself almost enough to settle the ques-
tion.

With regard to the other side of the moon, we have less posi-
tive information, as we cannot see it. It is barely possible that
there the conditions may be in some respects different ; but it is
very improbable.

Let us now look at Venus and Mercury. Here again infor-
mation is very scanty. These planets offer few recognizable
marks, and appear to be covered by clouds which veil their pre-
sumably solid surfaces. If it be true (as Professor Schiaparelli
maintains as discovered by his observations, not yet however
verified by astronomers in general) that these planets turn on
their axes once only during a revolution round the sun, as the
moon turns once only in going round the earth, thus turning al-
ways the same face to the sun, as the moon turns always the
same face to us, this continual baking of one side by the fierce
solar rays, while the other is constantly exposed to the cold of
space, would be a very unfavorable condition for habitation,
except for a small rim between the two sides.

We have one more chance to find a companion world to our
own, giving some signs of being a fit residence for beings like
ourselves. If we look at the planet Mars, now brilliantly visible
in our evening sky, those who hope to find such a place will
meet with some encouragement. Here we find what looks like
land, water, and air, with clouds in it like our own ; temporary
and also permanent markings such as one would see from a dis-
tance on the earth. Here we must concede that life is possible,
and even would seem to be probable ; and a highly varied and or-
ganized life. In every way, in the distribution of seasons, and the

1892.] fs THERE A COMPANION WORLD TO OUR OWN? 871

length of day and night, this very interesting planet closely re-
sembles our own ; and we are apt to jump at the conclusion and
people it at once.

But here we come to a question which the enthusiastic advo-
cates of. a plurality of worlds never seem to consider. It is this :
were there not, according to the geologists, vast ages, compared
with which even the longest period assigned by them or by any
of the scientific world to the life of the human race as yet on
earth, in which the earth looked from a distance just as habitable
as it does now? And will there not also be vast ages, according
to the same sciences of course, we are not now considering the
special destruction of this world revealed to us by faith during
which this earth of ours, from the gradual change of its condi-
tions, might very probably be no longer fit for us to live in, not
perhaps reduced to the absolutely barren state which the moon
itself has reached, but still practically uninhabitable by man ?
So far as we can judge by external indications, the state of
Venus and Mercury is that of the earth in its earlier ages ; Mars
rather seems to have reached the state to which this earth would
of itself come at some time in the future. In both of these
states, that in which the planet, so to speak, was now fully ripe, and
that in which it was, so to speak, decaying, it would look about
the same from a distance as in the day of its perfection ; and
yet that day would be a short time compared with whole periods
in which its general external appearance would be the same.

We must not forget that highly organized and very sensitive
life like our own is here and why not elsewhere ? a matter of
very delicate balance and adjustment. Even on the earth which
we inhabit there are vast tracts, to say nothing of the ocean
which covers three-quarters of its surface, where human life in
its highest forms can only exist with great difficulty, and some
places, by no means insignificant, where it is impossible in any
way. A few thousand feet up or down, some degrees north or
south, are sufficient to settle the question. Indeed, it does not
seem at all certain that a planet, following the general course of
development assumed by astronomy and the other sciences,
would ever reach a state in which everything would be just right
at the same time. According to chances, even on the views of
the most extreme evolutionist, there could be no surety that the
conditions could ever develop just what is needed to produce as
high a type of life as ours. The mere having land, water, and
air of some sort is not enough ; for such our earth had when ani-
mal life on it was of quite a low order.

872 Is THERE A COMPANION WOLLD TO OUR 6>w./v ? [Sept.,

So even out of the mouth of science itself we should have to
condemn it if it announced, as a conclusion from its observations
or theories, that the other worlds which we see circulating round
our own sun were now, or even ever in the past or future, the
abodes of anything like human life. All that science can say is
that there is a possibility, greater in some cases than in others ;
that is all. Things may turn out so ; but there is no guarantee
that such will be the case.

And, in point of fact, science actually does say no more than
this. I think I am quite justified in saying that the majority of
astronomers do not really believe in the existence of intelligent
inhabitants on the planets which we have passed in review. The
case looks a little better for Mars than for the rest ; that is
about all that they have to say.

Before leaving our own system to look at the universe gen-
erally, I must, however, acknowledge for the consolation of those
who wish to believe in other inhabited worlds in it, or who do
not wish to avoid any difficulty which may exist, that the satel-
lites of the great planets from Jupiter to Neptune appear to be
much more probable abodes of life than the planets themselves.
If any one wishes to hold that they are, nothing conclusive can
be urged against this view ; they are bodies fairly comparable in
size with the earth ; they are probably somewhat, and perhaps
quite adequately, warmed by their great primaries, and there is
no definite reason why even we could not be fairly comfortable
there. As for light, even supposing the sun had to be depended
on for it, there is no lack. The satellite of Neptune, the most
remote and the most poorly lighted, has a sunlight seven hun-
dred times as bright as the light of our full moon.

But after all, you see, we have only a possibility ; not much
more. Certainly no positive indications are at hand, or ever will
be. And after our disappointments (or reassurances, whichever
you please) in finding all but this very small fraction of our sys-
tem which even the four inner planets and the satellites would
make gone to waste for purposes of life, mere possibilities do
not amount to much.

But now, leaving the comparatively narrow limits of our own
system, let us transport ourselves into the vast fields of space,
and consider the innumerable worlds which, as we have seen, we
find there. And is it not here, after all, that the real difficulty
is to come? It is here that the enormous numbers of which I
have spoken begin to oppress us ; here that our little globe is as
it were lost in the immensity of God's creation.

1892.] Is THERE A COMPANION WORLD TO OUR OWN? 873

Yes, our difficulty will certainly come if we allow the imagina-
tion full play. We start from the fact that these stars, most
of them at least, are suns, fairly comparable or superior in bril-
liancy and magnitude to our own. But we at once conclude that
they are all like our own, attended by planets, and we imagine
these planets peopled with life like our own ; and then we have
all the rest.

But let us look at the facts of the case. Let us take, for
one thing, the double or multiple stars which we find in great
abundance in the heavens. There is no picture that those who
take the plurality of worlds like ours for granted 'are more fond
of than that of the wonderful vicissitudes which must be enjoyed
by the planets attached to these double stars. These double
stars, be it understood, are known to be suns circulating round
each other at distances say about like those which separate our sun
from its outer planets. They do not, however, as a rule, move in or-
bits so circular as those of the planets ; sometimes they approach
comparatively near, sometimes they recede. But they move reg-
ularly, in such a way as to show that they are under the influence
of the same law of gravitation which is the bond of our own sys-
tem, and in that way furnish a noble proof of that law and of the
unity of God's design. Their beauty is often added to by a contrast
of color ; sometimes, for instance, the larger of the two is yellow,
the smaller blue. On this point especially the imagination is apt,
if I may say so, to run wild. We picture to ourselves the splen-
dor and beauty of a planet illuminated by two such suns, some-
times alternating, sometimes both in the sky at once, mingling
their light, and enlightening the scene with a radiance of the
combined color. But do we stop to think fully what this means ?
The weather which we have had not long ago ought to convince
us that one sun in the sky at a time is quite enough. The vicis-
situdes would be of heat as well as light, and would they not be
unendurable ? And then again, as I have said, their orbits round
each other are by no means always circular; sometimes one sun
with its attendant planets, if it had any, would come uncomfor-
tably near to or far away from the other. But, in point of fact,
it would require special conditions to make any attendant planets
to either sun possible. The planets, if there were any in such a
system, would be likely to be attendant on both suns at once,
rushing about in curious and complicated curves, too difficult to
be investigated by any human mathematical powers, except that
we cay say with confidence that it would be hardly possible that
they would have any regular recurring periods, like those of

874 Is THERE A COMPANION WORLD TO OUR OWN? [Sept.,

days, nights, and years which make life here possible. Living
on them would be like living on a comet ; one year with the tem-
perature at 1000, the next 300 below zero.

There is another class of objects which we find in the sky
which are specially apt to overwhelm us with their splendor and
the possibilities which they suggest. These are the clusters of
stars which are scattered in profusion through the heavens ;
sometimes so closely associated that they look to the ordinary
powers of the telescope like mere nebulous balls, sometimes of a
comparatively loose structure. These were at one time considered
to be separate 'from the great system to which our sun and all
the stars in general which we see with the naked eye or the
telescope, lying outside its limits, and forming similar systems to
it. But it is pretty clear that such cannot be the case ; for
they are so small in appearance, that to have anything like the
dimensions of our own stellar system, they would have to be at
such an immense distance from us that the individual stars which
compose them could not, if like our own stars, appear anything
like as bright as they do. No, they probably lie at what we
may call ordinary distances from us, and the stars which com-
pose them are probably smaller, at any rate no bigger or brighter
than the average ; and they are probably much nearer to each
other than the average distance. They are, in short, what they
appear to be, real clusters or balls of stars ; like the double
stars, but immensely multiple instead of double. Now, if the *
hypothesis of habitable planets in a double star system meets
with so great difficulties, how much more do we find here?

But at least, we may say that the single or isolated stars, of
which there are so many, ought to have planets like our own
sun. Yes, it might seem so if we accept the nebular hypothesis
of their formation stated most fully by La Place ; but this hy-
pothesis has its difficulties, and, even if we accept it, it appears
by no means certain that, even according to it, the planets formed
would have the nearly circular orbits which characterize our own
system, and which give it its stability and to its planets one of
the necessary conditions of inhabitability.

"I have said that the ordinary nebular hypothesis has its diffi-
culties. The principal one is that the planets, if formed when a
tolerably dense and concentrated mass had collected in the
place of the sun should have moved round their own axes in the
contrary direction from what they actually do. In the modified
form of the hypothesis proposed by the celebrated M. Faye, in
which the earlier planets, among which the earth is to be reck-

1892.] fs THERE A COMPANION WORLD TO OUR OWN? 875

oned, take shape before the sun, these would turn in the same
direction as they revolve round the sun, the later ones showing
more and more of a tendency to the opposite way. This seems
to accord most with the facts of our own system, in which Ura-
nus and Neptune on this hypothesis are supposed to have been
formed last ; that is, if we can take for granted and, indeed, -it
seems theoretically that we must that these planets turn in the
same direction as their satellites move. But on this system, it
would be likely that several of the planets formed, as we may
say, at the transition period, would, like Uranus, turn at such a
considerable inclination to the plane of its orbit that the distri-
bution of climate would be very difficult for the maintenance of
life. So here again we have a difficulty.

The fact is that, if the earth's axis was inclined much more
than it is (say 45) to the plane of its orbit, life would be much
restricted on it, except near the equator, by the extreme varia-
tion and severity of the seasons. We should have, for instance,
at this latitude, practically no night at all in summer, and a
blazing sun passing nearly overhead every twenty-four hours;
whereas in winter we should similarly have practically the winter
of our present Arctic regions, if not worse. Now, we see that
this very important point of the inclinations of the axes of the
planets to their orbits seems in our system to be quite uncer-
tainly arranged, not corresponding strictly to any theory; how
can we tell that in other sytems as good results are to be
found even as we have here?

Add to all this, that the various hypotheses by which the for-
mation of our own system is accounted for are after all merely ex-
planations of what exists ; nothing more. We can account for
what we actually have, or know to exist, by means of them ;
but we cannot be sure that a result such as we can reasonably
suppose to have come out here from certain original conditions
of a nebulous mass would always come out from every nebulous
mass everywhere. A motion must be assumed in that mass to
start with, and rather a special kind of motion at that. Suppose
the matter in it, for instance, to be at rest in the beginning; it
would simply concentrate on itself and form a sun ; there would
be no reason why rings or rotation of any kind, circulating in
any definite direction, should be formed in it. In our own sys-
tem, indeed, it can be maintained that the heat is more than
would result from such concentration ; so that it can be argued,
that there must have have been an original motion too ; but
can we be sure that such is the case everywhere else? And is

876 Is THERE A COMPANION WORLD TO OUR OWN? [Sept.,

there any reason whatever why matter should have been created
cold, rather than in that state of molecular motion which we
call heat?

I think we can see pretty well by this time that, speaking
on simply scientific grounds, there is no positive basis, or at best
a. very weak one, for the imaginations of unnumbered solar sys-
tems which fill our minds when we first survey the heavens.
The true verdict resulting from our inquiry seems rather to be
that there may be one like ours here and there. The checks,
balances, and adjustments which we have are not the natural or
unavoidable result of the celestial mechanism ; they are an ex-
traordinary perhaps a very extraordinary or almost unique oc-
currence.

The most promising seats for life are in the mysterious dark
stars of which we are learning more and more every day just
now. If, for instance, the great dark companion of the variable
Algol is really completely cooled and crusted over, it might be
a place to live on ; but the bright star is much too near it to
make it habitable for ourselves, or for any animal of which we
can conceive. And if the dark object forms one of a triple or
multiple system, like the probable second companion of Algol,
or the fourth and invisible companion to the triple star z Can-
cri, we find again the same formidable difficulty with regard to
variations of temperature that we have found in the supposed
planets of double star systems.

Science, then, so far as we have it at present, has nothing in
it to force anyone who does not want to to believe in the plu-
rality of inhabited worlds. It merely says it may be so ; and,
of course, we must concede that it is more likely to be so at
some time in general in the long course of ages than at any
particular time. That time is more likely on the whole to be in
the future than in the present ; and if there are worlds prepar-
ing for future habitation, why may they not be intended for our
own habitation as well as for any other creatures of God ?

But suppose we grant at once that there are many worlds
even now inhabited. By whom, by what material creatures that
is, would they naturally be inhabited ? We should answer, on a
scientific basis, by animals the perfection of whose organism cor-
responds to the perfection of the conditions of life which may
be found in these worlds respectively. Does that mean by be-
ings with a rational soul, or by beings endowed with grace
from God and destined for a supernatural union with him like
ourselves? Scientifically, I say no. Science, that is to say some
scientists, would like to prove that all that makes man what he

1892.] Is THERE A COMPANION WORLD TO OUR OWN? 877

is has been naturally developed from lower forms of life. We
know better. We know that here science is going beyond its
limit ; that it will never evolve, or see evolved, a human soul
out of matter or out of the brute. We know that every hu-
man soul is a special creation of God.

So, on the Christian basis, from which science can never drive
us; we know that whatever capabilities for highly organized life
we might find on any of the bodies of the universe, they could
never prove that God had done on them, or that he ever would
do the special work that he has done here. We have only to
bear in mind that the creation of man was a special and extra-
ordinary work, out of the regular line of the formation of this
world ; something without which this world went on, according
to science itself, for far the greater part of its history, and with-
out which but for his special good will and pleasure, it would
have gone on to the end ; and we shall realize that we have no
need to dread anything that the telescope has to show us in
the heavens as in any way presenting a difficulty for our faith.

Far be it, however, from me to pronounce absolutely that
God has not done elsewhere a work in some respects similar to
to what he has done in creating man. There may be elsewhere
great, noble, and exalted intelligences made by him, and dwell-
ing in material bodies like ourselves and morally responsible to
him. But this does not mean that he has taken the nature of
these beings, if such exist, upon himself; it does not mean that
he has among them a mother like the Blessed Virgin ; it does
not mean that he has raised their nature, as he has ours, to the
highest heavens, and made it to reign forever on his eternal
throne. This is all superadded ; the making of a rational crea-
ture, however lofty, does not involve this. So far from it, that
we could not believe this to be even possible, if God himself
had not revealed it.

If any one says, why did he do this here, on this little insig-
nificant planet, I have the simple answer that we know that he
has done it, better and more certainly than we know any of the
facts of astronomy. We know that we have received at God's
hands a dignity, whatever may be our comparative lowliness in
the scale of his creation, which no other creature can claim.

But I must say that for myself I cannot see why this great
and unique work should not have been done here just as well as
anywhere else. Mere size, as I have said, is evidently nothing
important in God's sight ; and how can it be to him to whom
all creation is but as the dust of the balance? We have seen
indubitably that in this, to our eyes, great solar system, he lets

878 Is THERE A COMPANION WORLD TO OUR OWN? [Sept.,

almost the whole go without, we should call, any adequate use;
even of the rays of the sun, which it seems his principal func-
tion to dispense, all but an inconceivably small fraction are
wasted on empty space.

No, this idea that the earth must be insignificant because it
is small is entirely unreasonable, in the face of all we see of the
providence of God, and even in the light of our own better
reason. If there was any real basis to it, we should have to say
that he could not have been born in Bethlehem ; that Jerusalem,
or better, Rome, should have been the place; and, indeed, we
should be obliged to say that he could not have stooped to a
being of our petty stature at all. Surely we ought to know that
what is small in our eyes is not so in the sight of him who ex-
alts the humble.

But this really is not the point that troubles us most, if I judge
the matter right. It is not merely that the earth is a small place
to be the scene of God's greatest work ; it is that it seems to us
that there is as it were a great waste of material, if he does not
also do elsewhere what he has done here. And the real answer
to this is drawn, as I have shown, from science itself ; which
tells us unmistakably, so far as it has yet spoken, that the vast
mass of creation, in our own solar system, and most probably
also in the universe outside, is not utilized even for purposes of
the habitation of any kind of life, being utterly out of the ques-
tion for such purposes; far more so than the regions of empty
space themselves. For it is more conceivable that beings should
live in empty space than in fiery furnaces heated to the incon-
ceivable temperature that we know the suns, commonly called
stars, to be. There is, then, no need of speculation as to what
God's wisdom might seem to require, when we know in very
truth what it has actually decreed. We see that but a very small
part of the universe has been reserved for habitation ; why not
still a smaller part for the Incarnation, and the sacrifice of the
Cross? If we dwell on this sufficiently, I think the difficulty
which seems to come at first to faith from astronomy will cease
to disturb our minds ; and we shall not only readily admit what
religion teaches us, that man, on this poor little earth, is really
the favored child of the Creator of the great universe ; but as-
tronomy will even come to the aid of faith and make us also
feel all the more strongly the greatness of his gift to us, and be
all the more moved by it to his love, and feel all the more
keenly our responsibility to him.

G. M. SEARLE.

Catholic University, Washington, D. C.

1892.] A MARTYR TO TRUTH-TELLING. 879

A MARTYR TO TRUTH-TELLING.

EVEN those who maintain that war is in itself an unmitigated
evil must perceive that it often serves to bring into relief ex-
amples of heroism and self-sacrifice which would never otherwise
be given. Had it not been for the fatal blunder which sent our
soldiers down the " Valley of Death " at Balaklava, a great and
noble lesson of obedience and of selfless valor would have been
lost to the world. As it is there is not a single man enrolled
under the Queen's flag who does not experience a thrill of
pride as he remembers that he is the comrade-in-arms of those
who rode with steadfast calm behind the upright figure of Lord
Cardigan into the teeth of the Russian guns. Not only the
army, but the whole nation is the richer for such examples as
these. In the words of the gifted historian of the Crimea:
" Half forgotten already, the origin of the Light Cavalry charge
is fading away out of sight. Its splendor remains. And splen-
dor like this is something more than the mere outward adorn-
ment which graces the life of a nation. It is strength strength
other than of mere riches, and other than that of gross numbers ;
strength carried by proud descent from one generation to
another, strength awaiting the trials that are to come."

And happily these redeeming features of war are not con-
fined to any special country or age. They shine out amid the
horrors of civil strife just as they relieve the blackness and
misery of an invasion. There is scarcely a period of history
which does not abound with them.

Who that has read the chronicle of the French occupation
of the Austrian Tyrol, in the first years of the century, will ever
forget the name of Andreas Hofer? His death was enviable
indeed, and his memory is deservedly kept alive in the simple
annals of his countrymen. But there were at that time and
place other deaths, less widely celebrated, but not a whit less
noble or less enviable than his.

In the quaint old town of Bozen, in the heart of the Tyro-
lese Alps, there will shortly be erected a monument to a man
who deserves to be remembered. His example, indeed, still lives
in the hearts of his countrymen, but it is fitting that under the
shadow of the stately Gothic church in which he so often wor-
shipped, the visitor to Bozen, as he strolls along the picturesque

88o A MARTYR TO TRUTH-TELLING. [Sept.,

streets and catches the vistas of vine-covered trellises against the
deep blue of the sky, should be reminded of the simple life and
heroic death of Peter Mayr.

Before the tide of the French invasion had reached the
Tyrol, Mayr was nothing more than the landlord of a small
mountain inn, where the peasants of the neighborhood were ac-
customed to meet after their day's work, to smoke their long
porcelain pipes and sip the pure and harmless wine of the
country. It was, of course, long before anyone had dreamt about
railways, and, in the first years of this century, the Austrian
Tyrol, beyond all districts of Central Europe, was isolated and
out of reach of even those few tourists who were bold enough
to roam far from the haunts of men. Who could have guessed
that Peter Mayr, the simple, unlettered Tyrolese inn-keeper,
would leave a name which will be honored and loved wherever
truth and loyalty are held in veneration?

Peaceful and happy, like his fellow-countrymen, Mayr dwelt
with his wife and children until the fatal day when his home
and his safety were threatened ,by the armies of Napoleon.
Then, indeed, he made use of the influence which his honesty
and unaffected piety had gained for him over the farmers and
peasants aronnd. To defend their homes, to protect from the
invader's foot their beloved mountain passes, above all to guard
from rapine their churches, he bade them turn their scythes into
swords, to shoulder their guns, and, side by side, to meet the
ruthless and perfectly disciplined French. He appealed to them
to prove that undaunted courage and the consciousness of right
could hold their own against the mighty legions with their artil-
lery and muskets, led on though they were by some of the
ablest captains in Europe, and nerved, as they could not fail to
be, by a series of unbroken triumphs.

It was a combat against fearful odds. But the very nature
of the ground on which the battle was fought was in favor of
the scantily equipped and undisciplined peasants, to whom every
rock, every crag, and every mountain path had been familiar from
childhood. They possessed, too, another advantage in the intense
enthusiasm to which the invasion gave birth.

Next to his religion, and indeed akin to it, the Tyrolese re-
gards his home as the dearest object of his love. To outrage or
lay waste his homestead is to convert one of these gentle and
peace-loving mountaineers into a man of blood, with his whole
being on fire to wreak his revenge. In the campaign of which
we are speaking more than one Frenchman learned to his cost

1892.] A MARTYR TO TRUTH-TELLING. 88 1

what it meant to rouse in the Tyrolese this lust of vengeance.
Some of the invaders paid with hideous tortures the penalty for
acts of rapine which are forbidden by the code of civilized war-
fare. Some again owed their safety to the leader of the little
band which captured them. Nothing but the immense ascen-
dancy which Mayr had gained could have saved these prisoners
from the death which the peasants and farmers, whose hearths
had been laid desolate, were only too eager to inflict. That he
exercised his power in their favor showed that Mayr possessed
one of the greatest qualities of a commander, and it is scarcely
surprising that his valor and humanity should in due time have
caused his name to be respected and even loved in the ranks of
the French. The troops which had laid waste Europe at the
beginning of this century could not forget that they came from
the land which for ages past had been the very home of chivalry
and honor. However much they might feel exasperated at being
held in check by undisciplined peasants, there was still enough
of the true French nature left in the invaders to make them re-
spect a leader who was so brave and at the same time so hu-
mane. Perhaps it was this sentiment which actuated the French
general when he issued the proclamation which promised safety
and liberty to any of the Tyrolese peasants who laid down their
arms by a certain day. The ultimate issue of the war could be
no longer doubtful ; and, after the gallant resistance which they
had so long maintained, obedience to the terms of this proclama-
tion could bring upon them no discredit. To many of the
mountain men the offer of the invaders seemed an honorable
means by which further bloodshed could be prevented, and
an opportunity for the renewal of their peaceful and happy
lives.

But to Mayr all idea of submission to the yoke of France
was intolerable, and, with those more ardent of his followers who
shared his view, he considered it as a duty to keep up the
mountain war in defence of his fatherland and home. Little
did he care that the French proclamation threatened with death
any man who after the appointed day was taken with arms in
his hands. Such a man as Mayr would certainly prefer to die
by the enemy's bullets than to purchase life by submitting to
his terms.

So long as there seemed a chance of freeing his country from

the invader it appeared to him right to maintain the struggle.

In the valor of his sturdy mountaineers, therefore, and in those

rocky fastnesses which had so long stood them in good stead,

VOL. LV. 57

882 A MARTYR TO TRUTH-TELLING. [Sept.,

Mayr would still trust, and, strong in his sense of right, he re-
solved to ignore alike the Frenchman's promises and his threats
and to carry on the war to the bitter end.

The days passed on. Many of the mountain men, as we have
seen, conscious of the superior numbers and discipline of the
enemy, took advantage of the proclamation and purchased safety
by surrender. But some weeks after the date fixed by the French
commander Mayr was captured with arms in his possession.
According to the conqueror's terms he had forfeited his life ;
but, as we have just remarked, his captors were true soldiers
who were fully capable of admiring and appreciating this brave
man, and, to their lasting honor, they were most reluctant to
exact the penalty. They could scarcely, however, go behind their
own words without stultifying themselves. They therefore hit upon
the expedient of inducing Mayr to declare that, in disobeying
the proclamation, he had been ignorant of its existence.

" If you will say that the terms of my decree were unknown
to you," said the French general, when he visited the fallen
leader in his prison, "you shall go free."

" But I knew the terms perfectly well," replied Mayr, look-
ing his late enemy full in the face.

" Perhaps so," said the Frenchman ; " but tell me that you
did not know them, or at least that you did not fully realize
them, and the whole benefit of the amnesty shall be yours."

"But how can I say any such thing, general?" replied Mayr.
" I was fully aware of your terms, and to say that I was not
would be a lie."

" But a declaration such as I ask for is a form necessary to
save your life. You have but to say that you were ignorant
and you shall live. You have merely to say the words," per-
sisted the Frenchman, who seemed as eager to save his prison-
er from death as most captives are to escape it.

" If I could but say it with truth," replied Mayr, " I would
do so at once. But life saved by a lie would be of no value to
me. No, I knew of your decree, and nothing, not even the fear
of death, shall induce me to pretend that I was ignorant of it."

The Frenchman left the prison in despair, but with his heart
full of admiration for his prisoner.

There was, however, a still greater trial in store for the
hero's simple fortitude. In presence of the enemy himself, a
sense of pride might have helped him to resist temptation. But
Mayr's next visitors were those who in all the world were
dearest to him. His wife and children had, of course, heard the

1892.] A MARTYR TO TRUTH-TELLING. 883

state of affairs, and now they came to implore him with tears
to save his life.

" For my sake and our children's," pleaded the unhappy wo-
man, "say the words. That surely can be no lie in the sight
of God which deceives no one. It is simply a form which you
have to go through as the result of defeat."

It was a hard and bitter trial for the prisoner. Too often,
indeed, had he braved death in presence of the enemy to fear
even the ignominious doom which now threatened him. But
when he saw his wife's tears and the sad, wistful faces of his
children his heart was torn with a mighty sorrow. It must
have seemed at that moment so easy to utter those few words,
which would instantly restore him in honor to his family and
his home ; so easy just to brush aside the doubt that haunted
him as to whether what was not indeed literally true in word,
might not be spoken, just to satisfy, while it could not de-
ceive, his jailers. He had merely to utter those few words,
"/ did not know of the proclamation" and his prison-doors
would be flung open. As a hero who had fought and bled for
his fatherland, he would be led back to his home amid the
cheers and love of his fellow-countrymen. Upon his wife and
children, too, his triumph and honors would be reflected, and
they who now knelt at his feet, imploring him not to leave
them widowed and fatherless, would rejoice at his return to their
once happy home.

But to Mayr's simple and upright mind a lie was a lie, and'
truth was truth. Not even to save his life, not even for the
sake of those so dear to him, would he say what was false.
Calling to his aid all the fortitude that was in him, he once
more, and for the last time, gently but firmly refused to com-
ply with the French terms.

" God has told us to speak the truth ; and not even for you,
my own wife and little ones, will I tell a lie." And thus did
this simple peasant meet his death the death surely of a
martyr.

The ordeal had been a cruel one. Everything urged him to
speak those saving words; only his faith, strong and unswerv
ing, kept him pure and true in the hour of trial.

With his heart breaking with sorrow for his dear ones, Mayr
walked calmly to his death, and with unflinching courage faced
the muskets which were to still that brave heart forever.

And after all why should the firing party have inspired him
with fear? When once his resolution had been formed to die

884 THE CONVERSION OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. [Sept.,

rather than be dishonored, the bitterness of death was past.
The bullets which sang through the air made music which had
long been familiar to his ears ; and now they were to be the
means by which he was to be taken from a world of sorrow
and strife, to his home in the Kingdom of God whom he had
been so faithful in serving, and who, never outdone in gener-
osity, would for all eternity be faithful in rewarding.

WILFRID WILBERFORCE.

London, England.

THE CONVERSION OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.

THAT the deep abiding hope of many a pious soul for the
conversion of the American people has not yet been accom-
plished is a source of grief to many. It is a thing devoutly to
be desired, but how to bring it to fruition is a question troub-
ling many minds. There was a time when, with the same
means, it would, perhaps, have been easier to convince this peo-
ple of the necessity of examining the claims of the Catholic
Church, since this nation was, in its youthful age, a religious people.
Bigots some call our church-going fellow-countrymen, but it is
a grave question if honest bigotry be not preferable to the
devil of unbelief that is now stalking over the land. Indiffer-
ence is the hardest of all conditions of the soul to be exorcised ;
even in Holy Writ it is spoken of with disgust : " Because thou
art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will begin to vomit
thee out of my mouth." Apoc., iii., 16.

Under the old order of things there was a foundation on
which to build, and, if Catholic zeal had undertaken the con-
version of this people fifty years ago, it would have discovered
it much easier to remove a few rotten timbers than we shall
find it under present conditions to erect the entire structure ;
for there is, practically, little true knowledge of the supernatu-
ral life outside of the Catholic Church. No doubt there are
thousands who wish for some haven of spiritual rest, but they
become disheartened and ultimately drift into the same slough
of despondency that has mired their neighbors and friends.
Now and then some one finds a solid footing in the midst
of the morass, where he rests until he is rescued from the

1892.] THE CONVERSION OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. 885

quicksands of heresy ; but these are, we fear, but the exceptional
cases.

Now there is, in St. Matthew (xvii., 20), mention made of a
devil whom the apostles could not cast out, but Christ did.
When the apostles asked Jesus why they could not drive out
that devil, our Lord told them : " This kind is not cast out but by
prayer and fasting." Was this the devil of unbelief? It would
seem so, according to some commentators ; and one of the essen-
tials towards overcoming him is prayer. He is all powerful to-
day and needs casting out badly, lest he take possession of the land.
Zealous souls are again asking how it shall be done. Our Lord
was the best judge of what was necessary, and it will be well
to heed his advice.

The question about the American Apostolate is this : " Is it
our business?" Certainly it is. "Is it my business?" is the
word of the faint-hearted, and their name is legion. No one
reckons it his business to trouble himself about casting out this
devil of unbelief. Yet there is nothing more certain than
this : if the Catholics of America do not endeavor to cast this
devil out of their non-Catholic fellow-countrymen, he will ultimate-
ly take possession of themselves. Faith is of that nature that it
increases only with the increase of charity. The more its fire
is fed with love the brighter it burns. It is, indeed, kindred
to charity, which grows in force and beauty the more you ex-
pend it for your neighbor's benefit. But if you wrap up this
precious talent in a napkin you will not only fail of increase,
but you will lose that which you have. Not only the direct
command of God, but the innate relationship of faith and chari-
ty demands that you share with your neighbor that divine gift
of faith which God has bestowed upon you. Otherwise, Catholic
men and women and their families are in danger of losing the
true religion and sharing the unbelief everywhere around them.
Such is the lesson of history. Are we to repeat the calamitous
apostacy of other Catholic generations, or, corresponding with
the grace of God, shall we safeguard our religion by helping
our non-Catholic countrymen to the true faith?

Even amidst the ruins of past beliefs which are everywhere
about us, we are always meeting souls that have received glimpses
of the Light who have not the courage to repeat

" Lead, kindly Light ! lead Thou me on."

Every Catholic who has come in contact with his fellow-be-
ings has met with more than one soul, who, like Agrippa of

886 THE CONVERSION OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. [Sept.,

old, has said, "Thou almost persuadest me." Yet they lived
on in the gloom of doubt, despair, and hesitating timidity.
Knowledge they had, but not faith. Convinced they were,
but not persuaded. Catholics are apt to forget that faith is
a divine gift ; and, without that, you expect too much from
people reared beyond the pale of the Church if you ask them
to be converted ; and, because you do not find the courage
of the trained veteran in the raw recruit, you are inclined
to judge harshly. Yet, it may be asked, what aid have you
given to stiffen the back-bone of that would-be soldier in the
army of the Lord? The poorest and humblest Catholic may
lend a helping hand. WE MUST ESTABLISH THE APOSTOLATE
OF PRAYER FOR THE CONVERSION OF THE UNITED STATES.

Who prays for the conversion of America ? Alas ! too many
cry, "Am I my brother's keeper?" That cry was fatal once
shall it be repeated now? Shall it be heard unrebuked? What
answer shall you make before the judgment seat of God, when
your neighbor says, " I would have believed had this man helped
me with his prayers." " Faith cometh by hearing," but the
power of hearing unto conviction cometh by prayer; for were
not even the apostles spending their time in prayer until the
Holy Spirit came upon them and enlightened their minds. A
still more remarkable example is found in the case of Corne-
lius, the centurion, who was rewarded for his prayer by a
vision, and merited to have the prince of the apostles sent to
instruct [him in the faith. But those outside the Church may
well cry out to you and me, as did the apostles to our Lord,
" teach us how to pray," for they need it. Now, the best teach-
ing is done by example. The fact is, the conversion of the
American people is not possible without prayer. Even had we
the means and the men to adopt the apostolic mode of warfare
against unbelief by the preaching of the truth, prayer would
still be a necessity. It is, furthermore, the one method of aid-
ing conversion, in which the whole body of Catholics can join.
It is always timely, and it is a spiritual work of mercy in which
we have no choice but to engage at all times. It is directly
commanded by God and his Holy Church, so that no Catholic
can hope to be excused. Ignorance will not excuse you, for
the duty of prayer is a primary one.

Yet what has been done in this direction ? Almost nothing.
A few zealous souls here and there have contributed their mite,
but where has been the universal prayer for this country, like that
which for many years has been sent up before the throne of

1892.] THE CONVERSION OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. 887

grace for the conversion of England ? Yet we do not think the
people are, or would be, indifferent to an appeal of this kind.
In fact, in four or five congregations which have been requested
to offer a prayer for this purpose the people have been found
to be very willing to take up the work.

Dear reader, will you not ally yourself with the effort already
made ? You need not be afraid of getting yourself into any en-
tanglements ; " there is no money in it." It costs not one cent
to help along the endeavor ; any one can obtain a card with
the prayer printed on it, or a number of them, by simply apply-
ing to the writer of this article. There is no charge of any
kind. But for the benefit of those who do recite the prayer
daily there are offered up every year twenty-four Masses.

Neither is there any intention of forming any association or
sodality, or placing any one under any obligation. Whatever
you do is an entirely voluntary act. If you forget or neglect to
say the prayer for the purpose intended, there is no harm done.
If you offer up the prayer, you participate in the spiritual bene-
fits of the Masses, and receive as well the reward for your char-
ity in performing one of the spiritual works of mercy.

F. G. LENTZ.

Bement, III.

The following prayer, suggested for this devotion, has the
necessary approbations :

A PRA YER

For the Conversion of Unbelievers.

" O Holy Spirit of Truth, we beseech Thee to enlighten the
minds of unbelievers in the midst of us ; to incline their hearts
to love Thy word, and to believe the teachings of Thy Church ;
give them courage to accept the faith and profess it openly;
that they may come into union with Thee and the Father,
through Christ Our Lord. Amen.

Our Father, etc. ; Hail Mary, etc. ; Glory be to the Father, etc.

888 LEGENDS OF THE Cw. [Sept.,

LEGENDS OF THE CID.

II.
THE CID IN EXILE.

Next night once more in that Cathedral keep

Walled by its mother-rock the warriors watched.

After long silence, leaving not his seat,

At length there spake a noble knight and brave,

Don Aquilar of Gabra : low his voice :

His eyes oft resting on the altar lights,

At times on listener near :

" Sirs, all applaud the Conqueror : braver far

Our Cid that hour when he refused the battle :

I heard that tale in childhood." " Let us hear it,"

The others cried ; and thus that knight began :

Our king, Ferrando, nighing to his death,

Beckoned the Cid and spake ; " We two were friends ;

Attend my dying charge. My race is Goth,

And in the brain, and blood, and spirit of Goth

Tempest but sleeps to waken. I have portioned

My kingdom in three parts among my sons,

Don Sanchez, Don Garcia, Don Alphonso,

And throned my daughter in Zamora's towers:

When bickerings rise, sustain my testament."

He died ; his son, King Sanchez, was a churl :

One day he rode abroad : at set of sun

Zamora faced him : many-towered it stood

Crowning a rock and flinging far its shade

O'er Douro's crimsoned wave. He muttered low :

" Yon city mine, all Spain were mine." That night

Thus spake he, careless seeming, to the Cid :

" 111 judged my father dowering with yon fort

A woman-hand. At morn search out that woman ;

Accost her thus from me : ' My kingdom's flank

Lies bare : it needs for shield thy city's fortress.

I yield to thee Medina in its place

Tredra not less.' " 111 pleased, the Cid replied,

Though reverent, not concealing his displeasure :

" Send other herald on that errand, king !

1892.] LEGENDS OF THE CID. 889

Ofttimes, a boy I dwelt in yonder fort
When lodged therein Ferrando and Urraca,
And will not wrong your father's testament."
King Sanchez frowned. Unmoved, the Cid resumed :
" I take thy missive, king, and bring her answer,
But proffer service none." At morn he placed
That missive in Urraca's hand ; she rose
And raised her hands to heaven and answered fierce :
41 His brother, Don Garcia, he hath bound ;
His brother, Don Alphonso, driven to exile ;
Elvira, next, my sister and his own,
He mulct of half her lands ; he now mulcts me !
Swallow me, earth, if I obey his hest !
Cid ! thee I blame not, for I know thy heart !
Forth with my answer to my traitor brother !
Zamora's sons and I will die ere yet
I yield her meanest stone to force or fraud."
Then spake the Cid : " The answer of a queen,
And meet for King Ferrando's child ! Urraca,
This sword shall ne'er be raised against thy right !
My knighthood was in part through thee conferred."
The Cid returned: King Sanchez stormed and raged:
" This work is thine ! " Unmoved, my Cid replied,
" True vassal have I proved to thee, O king,
But sword against the daughter of thy sire
I will not lift." King Sanchez : " For his sake
I spare thy life ! Henceforth thou livest an exile ! "
Forth strode the Cid. Bivar he reached that night,
And summoning all his knights, twelve hundred men,
Rode thence and reached Toledo.

Sirs, ere long

God dealt with that bad man. Three days his host
Fought malcontent : grimly they scaled the walls ;
Zamora's sons hurled on them stones and rocks,
The battlements themselves, till ditch and moat
Thickened with corpses, and the Douro left
Daily a higher blood-line on those walls
While whispered man to man : " Our toil is lost,
He spurned our best ; what cares he for men's lives ? "
Then from Zamora sped a knight forsworn
By name Vellido Dolfos, crafty man,
Fearless in stratagem, in war a coward.
Like one pursued he galloped to the camp,

890 LEGENDS OF THE CID. [Sept.,

Checked rein at Sanchez* tent, and, breathless, cried :

" King, I had slain thee gladly yesternight ;

This day a wronged man sues thee. King, revenge

'Gainst thy false sister is the meed I claim,

Thy sister kind to caitiffs, false to friends !

I know a secret postern to yon fort ;

It shall be thine this night." " Who sees believes,"

Sanchez replied ; " That postern let me see it ! "

They rode to where the forest's branching skirt

A secret postern screened. The king dismounted,

And, companied by that traitor knight alone,

Peered through that postern's bars. With lightning speed

The traitor launched his javelin 'gainst the king;

It nailed him to that ivy-mantled wall.

Vellido through the woodland labyrinths scaped.

The king ere sunset died.

Don Sanchez dead,

Glorying, from exile King Alphonso burst :
The Cortes met : with haughty brow he claimed
Allegiance due, like one who knows his rights,
Full sovereignity, God-given, and not from man,
Of Leon and Castile. They gave consent ;
At Burgos in procession long and slow
The knights and nobles passed, and passing kissed
Each man his hand. Alone the Cid stood still.
Astonished sat the king. He spake : " The Cid
Alone no homage pays." The Cid replied :
" Sir, through your total realm a rumor flies
And kings, all know, must live above suspicion
That in your brother's death a part was yours
Sir, in his day your brother did me wrong :
I, for that wrong am none the less his vassal ;
Make oath, sir king, that rumor is a lie !
Till then from me no homage ! " Silent long
Alphonso sat : then " Be it so," he said.
Next day he rode to Burgos' chiefest church,
And there heard Mass. About him stood that hour
His nobles and hidalgos : Mass surceased,
Crowned, on a dais high, in sight of all
Alphonso sat : behind him stood twelve knights :
Slowly my Cid advanced, upon his breast
Clasping the Gospels open thrown. The king
Laid on them hands outspread. Then spake my Cid :

1892.] LEGENDS OF THE CID. 891

" I swear that in my brother's death no part

Was mine." Low-bowed, Alphonso said, "I swear";

Likewise his twelve hidalgos. Then the Cid :

"If false my oath, mine be my brother's fate."

Alphonso said " Amen "; but at that word

His color changed. With eye firm-fixed my Cid

Slowly that oath repeated ; and once more

The king and his hidalgos said " Amen! "

Three times he spake it ; thrice the monarch swore :

Then waved the standards, and the bells rang out:

And sea-like swayed the masses t'ward the gates.

Parting, Alphonso whispered to my Cid

None heard the words he spake.

It chanced one day

The king, from Burgos riding with his knights,
Met face to face whom most he loathed on earth.
With lifted hand he spake: " Depart my land ! "
The Cid his charger spurred ; o'er-leaped the wall ;
Then tossing back his head, loud laughing cried,
Sir king, 'tis done ! This land is land of mine ! "
Raging the king exclaimed : "Depart my realm
Ere the ninth day ! " My Cid : " Hidalgo's right
By old prescription yields him thirty days
If banished from the realm." Alphonso then :
" Ere the ninth eve, or else I take thy head !"
Low bowed Rodrigues to his saddle bow
And rode to Bivar. Summoning there his knights
Briefly he spake : " You see a banished man."
They answered naught. Then Alvar Fanez rose
And said : " With thee we live ; for thee we die."
And rising, all that concourse said : " Amen."

The eighth day dawned : My Cid from Bivar rode :
Whilst yet his charger pawed before its gate
He turned, and backward gazed. Beholding then
His hall deserted, open all its doors,
No cloaks hung up, within the porch no seat,
No hawk on perch, no mastiff on the mat,
No standard from the tower forth streaming free
Large tears were in his eyes ; but no tear fell ;
And distant seemed his voice distant though clear
Like voice from evening field, as thus he spake :
" Mine enemies did this : praise God for all things !
Mary, pray well that I, the banished man,

892 LEGENDS OF THE Cm. [Sept.,

May drive the Pagans from His holy Spain,

One day requite true friends." To Alvar next

He spake: "The poor have in this wrong no part;

See that they suffer none." Then spurred his horse.

Beside the gate there sat an aged crone

Who cried, " In fortunate hour ride forth, O Cid !

God give thee speed and spoil ! "

They reached old Burgos

At noontide, when for heat the dogs red-tongued
Slept in the streets. The king had given command,
" Let no man lodge the Cid, or give him bread ! "
As slowly on his sixty warriors rode
And gazed on bakers' shops, yet touched no loaf
The gentle townsmen wept. " A sorry sight ! "
Women were bolder: "Vassal good," they cried,
" To churlish Suzerain ! " The Posado's gate
He smote three times with spear-shaft : none replied.
At last beneath its bars there crept a child
Dark-eyed, red-lipped, a girl of nine years old, .
Clasping a crust. Sweet-toned she made accost :
" Great Cid, we dare not open window or door
The king would blind us else. Stretch down thy hand
That I may kiss it ! " At her word my Cid
Stretched down his hand. She kissed it, hiding next
Therein the crust, and closing one by one
O'er it the mail-clad fingers. Laughed my Cid :
" God's saints protect that shining head from hurt
And those small feet from ways unblest, and send
In fitting time fit mate." The sixty laughed :
Once more the child crept in beneath the bars :
They noted long the silver feet upturned
With crimson touches streaked. That night my Cid
Couched on a sand plain, with his company :
The palm-boughs rustling 'gainst their stems thick-scaled.
Half-sleeping thus he mused. " Could I, unworthy,
So all unlike that child in faith and love,
Have portioned out that crust among my knights
God might have changed it to a Sacrament,
And caused us in the strength thereof to walk
For forty days."

An hour before the cocks

In neighboring farms their earliest clarions rang
They mounted ; reached ere nones that holy haunt

1892.] LEGENDS OF THE CID. 893

Wherein his wife had taken sanctuary,

San Pedro de Cardena. At the gate

The Cid up-raised his horn. They knew it well!

Rushed forth Ximena and her ladies first :

what a weeping was there at his feet !

Then followed many a monk with large slow eyes :

The abbot long had wished to see the Cid ;

And now rejoiced : the feast was great that day

And great the poor man's share ; and chimed the bells

So loudly that the king, in Burgos throned,

Frowned but spake nought. Next day two hundred knights

Flocked to the Cid's white standard. On the third

Ere shone its sunrise, by that Abbey's gate

My Cid for blessing knelt, then spake : " Lord Abbot,

Be careful of my wife, Donna Ximena,

For princelier lady stands not on this earth

Of stouter courage or of sweeter life.

Likewise breed up my babes in sanctity ;

Thy convent shall not lack, and if I die

God is my banker and will pay my debts."

Next, to her lord, Ximena with slow steps

Made way, and knelt ; and weeping thus she spake :

" Sundered ere death ! I knew not that could be ! "

Their parting seemed like parting soul and body.

Last came two ladies with his daughters twain.

He took them in his arms : his tears fell on them

Because they wept not, but bewildered smiled ;

And thus he spake: "Please God, with Mary's prayers,

1 yet shall give these little maidens mine

With mine own hand to husbands worthy of them."
He said; and shook his rein, nor once looked back;
And the rising sun shone bright on many a face
Tear-wet in that dim porch.

Then spake a knight
Revered by all, Don Incar of Simancas,
With strenuous face, keen eyes, and hectic hand :
A stripling I, when first that war began ;
Rapturous it was as hunting of the stag
When blares the horn from echoing cliff and wood,
And wildly bound the coursers. Sport began
Nigh to Castregon; next, like wind it rushed
To Fita, Guadalgara, and Alcala,
Thence to Heneres, and Torancio's plain,

894 LEGENDS OF THE CID. [Sept.,

And the olive-shaded gorge of Bobierca.

We crossed its dark-bright stream. A Moorish maid

Sold us red apples, and from wells snow-cold

Drew water for our mules. Our later deeds

Fade from my memory. Castles twelve we took

And raised the cross upon them. Once dim mist

Lifted at morn shewed Moors uncounted nigh ;

Awe-struck we stood. Our standard-bearer cried :

" Sustain your standard, sirs ; or if it please you,

Consign it to the Moors ! " He galloped on ;

The dusky hordes closed round him. Torrent-like

We dashed upon them. Soon the morning shone

Through that black mass. The standard saved the host,

And not the host the standard. Likewise this

Clings to my memory, trivial as it seems :

At Imbra, when the Moors bewailed their kine

Snatched from its golden mead, my Cid replied :

" God save you, sirs ! My king and I are foes.

In exile gentlemen must live on spoil.

What ! would you set us spinning flax or wool ?

Not kine alone, but all your vales and plains

Are ours by ancient right ! To Afric back !

This land is Spain our Spain ! "

That warfare past,

My Cid addressed him thus to Alvar Fanez :
" Cousin, betake thee to that saintly place,
San Pedro, where abide my wife and babes :
Raise first our captured banners in its aisles,
Then noise abroad thy tidings. Greet with spoil
That abbot old. Seek last the king, Alphonso :
Give him his fifth : make no demand in turn ;
Much less request. I wait not on his humors."
Alvar went forth : In fair Valladolid
Ere long he met Alphonso with his train
Half way betwixt the palace and cathedral
Recent from Mass. Questioning, the monarch spake :
"What means yon train of horses trapped in gold,
And swords inwrought with gems ? " Alvar replied
" Sir king, my Cid bestows them on your highness,
The fifth part of his spoil : for battles still
He wins, and wide domains, and tower, and town.
King, if the Cid but kept the lands he conquers
Half Spain would be his realm. Content he is

1892.] LEGENDS OF THE CID. 895

To hold them but from you in vassalage.
Therefore restore him to your grace and favor ! "
Alphonso then: " Tis early in the morn
To take a banished man to grace and favor !
'Twere shame to stint my wrath so soon. For spoil,
Kings need not spoil! Not less, since thus the Moors
Are stripped, his work is work of God in part:
Let him send still my fifth ! "

Then laughing spake

A humorous knight, Don Leon of Toledo :
" Ay, ay, our king can jest when jest means gold !
Our Cid could jest with lions in his path !
A hundred tales attest it : this is one :
Here dwelt he long in royal state. One day
It chanced, the banquet o'er, asleep he fell
Still seated on the dais, for the noon
Was hot, while talked or laughed the noble guests
Ranged as their custom was, around his board ;
His palace held some guests beside hidalgos
That day, and one from Afric, not a Moor;
A lion's cage stood in the outer court ;
Its door was left ajar. Scenting the meat
That lion reached at last the banquet chamber:
The ladies screamed : the warriors drew their swords :
The Infantes twain of Carrion most were mazed ;
The elder backed into a wine-vat brimmed
Purpling the marble floors ; the youngest crept
Beneath the board to where the Cid was throned,
And quivering clasped his feet. The Cid awoke ;
Rubbed first his eyes ; gazed round him ; marked that lion ;
Advanced, though still half sleeping ; by the mane
Drew him obedient as a mastiff hound ;
Relodged him ; barred the cage ; enthroned once more
His stately bulk. The knights pushed back their swords :
The Infantes strove to laugh ; the ladies smiled ;
A priest gave thanks in Latin, first for meat,
Next that that beast had failed on them to banquet ;
Ere ceased that prayer my Cid again slept well ;
Sole time, men say, he ever slept at prayer,
Albeit at sermons oft."

Sir Incar de Simancas thus resumed :
" The boasters see not far." Fortune ere long
On King Alphonso cast a glance oblique,

896 LEGENDS OF THE CID. [Sept.,

For vassals weak and meek grew strong and haughty,

And when huge tracts were flooded now, now parched,

Men said " our king is bad." The king sent gifts

Suing the Cid's return. The Cid replied :

" To others gifts ! for me my lands suffice.

My king commands my sword ; my terms are these :

To each hidalgo thirty days, not nine,

Shall stand conceded ere his banishment,

And courts beside wherein to plead his cause.

Next, charters old shall have their reverence old

As though their seals were red with martyrs' blood.

Lastly the king shall nowhere levy tax

Warring on law. Such tax is royal treason :

Thus wronged the land is free to rise in arms."

Long time the king demurred : then frowned consent ;

And there was peace thenceforth. That day arose

This saying: "Happy exile he that home

Returning to his country, brings her gifts.

His rest shall be in Heaven."

No tale beside

Succeeded. Sweetly and slowly once again
From that remote high altar rose a hymn
Tender and sad : that female train once more
Approached it two by two, with steps as soft
As though they trod on graves Ximena last ;
And star by star the altar lights shone out.
The knights arose, and, moving t'ward the east
Knelt close behind those kneelers.

(TO BE CONTINUED.)

1892.] FINANCIAL RELATIONS OF THE FRENCH CLERGY. 897

FINANCIAL RELATIONS OF THE FRENCH CLERGY
TO THE STATE.*

In an interesting leaflet of only thirteen pages the writer has
completely refuted the claims of the French Republican Govern-
ment to consider the bishops and clergy of the Catholic Church
in France as mere governmental functionaries drawing salaries,
paid out of the annual appropriation for the Budget des Cultes,
who, therefore, are bound to obey whenever the government
thinks proper to command, and whose pay may therefore be
stopped or held in suspense whenever they give dissatisfaction.
This view of the position of the bishops in France was very con-
fidently and distinctly put forward lately by Mr. E. Masseras, a
former editor of the Courrier des Etdts-Unis of this city, in a
letter of his to the Sun, of which he is an occasional correspondent.

The present money relations of the Catholic Church in
France with the state have had a very different beginning and
rest on a different and special basis, as attested by the following
historical facts :

According to M. Th. Lavallee in his Histoire des Fran^ais
the property owned by the clergy in France prior to the Revo-
lution of 1789 may be estimated to amount, in aggregate, to
four thousand millions of livres. It would at the present day be
easily worth three times that amount. The livre was equal in
value to a franc, or twenty cents of our money. Taine estimates
that the annual income derived by the Church from its realty
amounted to from 80,000,000 to 100,000,000 of livres. M. de
Foville puts it at from 110,000,000 to 120,000,000. Tithes pro-
duced annually 123,000,000 livres. This realty was held by a
perfectly good title confirmed by centuries of undisturbed pos-
session. The present annual appropriation for the maintenance
of religious worship in France (Budget des Cultes} never exceeds
45,000,000 to 48,000,000 francs, which is the equivalent of a little
over one per cent, annual interest on the original value of the
church property spoliated.

The Assembled Constituante, by one fell swoop of arbitrary
legislation, abolished all tithes, dispossessed ecclesiastical owners
of all their property, which was taken for national purposes ; sold
to purchasers, and bought less than its real value because there

* La Suppression du Btidget des Cultes et la Separation de rEglise et de FEtdt. By
Count de la Barre de Nanteuil Morlaix.
VOL. LV. 58

898 FINANCIAL RELATIONS OF THE [Sept.,

was a moral cloud on the government's title which kept conscien-
tious buyers aloof. In consequence the clergy were thereby re-
duced to a state of great destitution.

In order to make some compensation for this spoliation, the
National Assembly promulgated on November 2, 1789, a decree
to this effect :

"All ecclesiastical property is at the disposal of the nation
which assumes the obligation of providing, in a suitable manner,
for the expenses of religious worship, for the maintenance of the
clergy, for the relief of the poor."*

All this work had been done in the past, free of cost to
the state. Mr. Anatole Leroy de Beaulieu estimates the indemnity
promised to be paid to the Church in France at 153,847,600 livres.

But the Assembled Constituante did not consider the above
enactment sufficiently binding, and thought it incumbent on them
to make it perfectly unassailable in the future, With this design
they inserted in the Constitution of 1781, article No. 2, which
read as follows :

" The funds requisite for meeting the obligations of the
national debt and for payments of the civil list can neither
be refused nor temporarily withheld. The salaries of the clergy
of the Catholic Church, whether pensioned, maintained in em-
ployment, elected or appointed in virtue of the decree of the
National Assembly, form part of the national debt." f

Later on, the Consular government, aware that the tenure of
property taken by the government from the Church was viewed
unfavorably and aroused conscientious scruples so that dealings
in it were few, and in consequence the receipts of taxes on
transfers of it were less than might be expected, sought to get
the Sovereign Pontiff, Pius VII., to release, in the name of the
clergy of France, the holders of confiscated ecclesiastical prop-
erty from all obligation whatsoever to the despoiled owner.
Pius VII. 's consent to do this, and his assurance that possession
of the property might be enjoyed with perfect tranquility of
conscience was settled by the Concordat with Napoleon in 1801 ;
but there was coupled with it the express condition that the
obligations to indemnify entered into a few years previous should
be scrupulously carried out. Accordingly, it was provided by

*The original text is as follows :

" Tons les biens eccllsiastiqties sont a la disposition de la nation, a la charge de pourvoir
d'une manitre convenable aux frais du culte, a Fentretien de ses ministres et au soulagcment
des pauvres."

\ "Les fonds necessaires a racquittement de la dette nationale et au paiement de la liste
civile ne pourront etre ni refusis ni suspendus"

" Le traitement des ministres du culte Catholique pensionnes, conserves, elus ou nomints
en vertu des decrets de I 'Assembled Nationale, fait partie de la dette nationale.

1892.] FRENCH CLERGY TO THE STATE. 899

article 14 of the Concordat that "the government will secure a
suitable salary to the bishops and curs, whose dioceses and
parishes will be included in the new districting," and by articles
12 and 16 it was settled "that all cathedrals and parish churches
and others not confiscated, needed for worship, are given over
to the bishops, and finally the' liberty to make foundations in
favor of the Church is accorded to Catholics."

All this was no more than fair and just. The restored mon-
archical government recognized, in 1824, the right of members of
the nobility to be indemnified for the loss of their confiscated
estates, and one thousand millions of francs was accordingly dis-
tributed among them in satisfaction of their claims. Now, as
the clergy had just as good a right to indemnification as the no-
bility, and settlement was made with the former, not in cash,
but in obligations to pay salaries the irrevocability and perpet-
uity of these follows of course as matter of justice. So that,
no matter how unfriendly relations between the government and
the Church may become in France, the former cannot stop pay-
ment under the obligations so solemnly assumed, without na-
tional dishonor and incurring the stigma of repudiation of a
part of the national debt.

The writer of the leaflet contends that, even on grounds other
than those above explained, the clergy cannot be considered to
be functionaries of the state. A functionary of the state dis-
charges some functions or other which, of their nature, devolve
upon the state ; now the functions of ministers of religion are
purely of a spiritual, not governmental, character.

A concluding chapter of the leaflet is devoted to the subject
of the separation of the Church from the state and to a demon-
stration that morally and materially, except as to the con-
nection subsisting through article 17 of the Concordat, that
separation exists de facto at the present day. Under the old
monarchical regime the king held from the Church the title of
eveque exterieur (outward bishop) ; Church and state were gen-
erally in harmony, and civil legislation conformed to the princi-
ples of the Church. The status of the clergy as an order then
in the body politic is thus described by Abbe Fayet :

" The bishops are invested with a two-fold character : as pastors
they belong to the Church ; as a political and administrative body
of the realm they belong to the state. It follows then that cur<s
and vicars are dependent as priests on the Church, and as civil
officers on the state. Dioceses are not mere spiritual communities,
they take the form of temporal governments. The administration
of the cure of souls participates in the authority of each.

900 FINANCIAL RELATIONS OF THE [Sept.,

" While pastors, in their character either of bishops or priests,
are amenable to the Church alone, they are amenable to the state
only in their character of public functionaries ; they obey two
different but equally lawful masters ; so long as each of these
views them in the proper relation with which it is concerned,
the fruit of the alliance will be peace."

But a century has brought about a great change. The old
order of things has been done away with, and the policy of the
French government of our day rests, in principle, on religious in-
differentism. The reminder that there is a God has been banish-
ed from civil legislation and from the teaching in schools; war has
been made on religious orders and congregations, bishops are ha-
rassed in the exercise of their functions and the government claims
the right to supervise their visits to Rome ; recently, as evidence
of the hostile feeling in the Legislature in which Masonic in-
fluences are so strong, the Department of Public Worship has
been confided to a Protestant, M. Ricard, and a Jew, Mr. Camille
Lyon, has been appointed his secretary.

The ties between Church and state referred to above, as de-
rived from the Concordat and as still existing, are these : By ar-
ticles 5 and 6 of that document, nominations to the new bis-
hoprics, then to be formed, were to be made by the first consul
within three months after promulgation of the papal bull. The
Pope was to confer canonical institution in accordance with regu-
lations in force before the change of government in France.
Future vacancies in bishoprics were to be filled in the same
manner. By article 17 "it was agreed, between the contract-
ing parties that in the event of any successor of the actual first
consul being a non-Catholic, the rights and Prerogatives mentioned
in the foregoing article and the nominations to bishoprics will,
so far as he is concerned, be regulated by a new agreement."

The Bishop of Valence seems to have thought the historical
information contained in this leaflet valuable, and a remainder
of the obligations assumed by the first Republic opportune, for he
has addressed a letter to several newspapers published in his dis-
trict, giving a summary of the leaflet's arguments, and the text of
the enactment on which they rest. He affirms the correctness of
the count's conclusions that the clergy are creditors, not function-
aries, of the state ; that, in consequence, the monies paid them
are virtually and intrinsically interest due, as much so as the in-
terest paid to a holder of government stock ; that to withhold
from any priest his share of the indemnity to which as a mem-
ber of the clergy he is entitled would be as unjust as not to
pay interest due on government stock ; that Mr. Ricard and cer-

1892.] FRENCH CLERGY TO THE STATE. 9 or

tain of his predecessors in office, who have taken upon them-
selves to withhold clerical salaries, have thereby repudiated the
action of the revolution of which they claim to be scions, and
have violated the pledged word of France.

The writer of this notice has thought it opportune to recall
three contrasting declarations indicatory of the progressive
estrangement between the Church and state in France. By the
charter of 1815, "the Catholic religion was declared to be the
religion of the state"; by the charter of 1830 it was amended
by declaring it to be " the religion of the majority of French-
men " ; these have been followed within twenty years past by
President Gambetta's declaration that " clericalism is the enemy
of the nation."

The June (1865) number of THE CATHOLIC WORLD contains
a notice of Cretineau Joly's memoirs of Cardinal Consalvi, giving
most interesting particulars of the trying ordeal that eminent
prelate went through in completing the negotiation of the Con-
cordat. The First Consul was to give a grand dinner on the
I4th of July, 1801, to foreigners of distinction, and to men of high
standing in the country, and he wished to be able to announce
to them, on that occasion, that the ecclesiastical treaty was an
accomplished fact. Accordingly, the day previous was appointed
for affixing the signatures of the contracting parties to the docu-
ment. Cardinal Consalvi took with him his own copy of the
Concordat, of which Bonaparte had formally promised to accept
every article as it had been agreed to at Rome. The signers
met towards four in the afternoon. When the document pro-
duced by Napoleon's representative was produced for formal
signature, Cardinal Consalvi compared it with his copy, and
discovered that it contained glaring discrepancies, and that an
attempt was being made to fraudulently palm it off on him for
his signature. He positively refused to sign. The First Consul's
representatives contended with him for nineteen hours " without in-
terruption, without rest, and without food" The debate begun
at four o'clock P.M., lasted until the same hour of the day fol-
lowing, four and twenty hours, and Consalvi had just time to
hurry off to the grand entertainment in the evening, there to be
subjected to an explosion of wrath and threats from Bonaparte,
who tried in vain to browbeat him, and not being able to sub-
due his firmness afterward gave in, and signed the treaty as
consented to by the Pope, who in the matter of concessions had
gone as far as his conscience and sense of duty would permit.

L. B. BlNSSE.

New York City.

902 THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. [Sept.,

THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW.

THE general election seems to have so absorbed the attention
of workingmen in Great Britain that their grievances against
their employers have for the time being been laid aside ; at
least there are no strikes of any moment to chronicle, although
the continued depression of trade is involving reduction of
wages in not a few important industries. In these notes we
take care not to intrude into the field of pure politics, and con-
sequently we are precluded from any discussion of the election
in its most interesting aspects. We shall not, however, depart
from our proper province by endeavoring to indicate the bearing
of the recent contest on labor and social questions. The first
point worthy of notice is that while in the last Parliament there
was a small band of labor members, these members were pri-
marily members of the Liberal party, and only secondarily repre-
sentatives of Jthe workingmen. With one important exception,
to which we shall refer presently, those members have retained
their seats. But in addition to them a small band of labor rep-
resentatives numbering four has been returned, who place the
interests of labor avowedly in the first place, and are quite
ready to oppose the Liberal party should those interests, in their
opinion, require it. In fact, the best known of this group has
already taken steps to prevent the return of Mr. John Morley,
should he on appointment to office be obliged .to appeal again
to the 'electors. What is technically called collectivism seems
to be the social ideal, which these four members have set before
themselves, and they are ready to act with either party, whether
Liberal or Conservative, in pursuit of this end, with supreme in-
difference to all other considerations.

The power of the workingmen made itself felt during the
course of the election in a manner which excited Mr. Glad-
stone's indignation. For, where there was no hope of securing
a victory, their disatisfaction with the recognized Liberal claim-
ant led them to bring forward candidates of their own. In this
way the Tories won a few seats in places where the majority of
the electors Bill was certainly Liberal. The question of
a Legal Eight Hours' Bill for minors in particular, exer-

1892.] THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. 903

cised an important influence in the polling. To his opposi-
tion to this proposal, one of the most respected and influential
workingmen in the House, the first, and in fact the only work-
ingman who has ever held a ministerial office Mr. Henry
Broadhurst lost his seat. To the same cause must be attrib-
uted the virtual defeat of Mr. John Morley, at Newcastle-on-
Tyne. Mr. Morley had from the first openly opposed the plan,
and both spoke and vote against it; whereas his Conservative
opponent took the other side, and had a majority of three thou-
sand in a purely working-class constituency. One clear result of
the election is that a large number of members of all parties in
the House are pledged to vote for the limitation by law of the
working hours in mines to eight, and the new Parliament will
in all probability signalize itself by being the first to directly
interfere with adult workingmen.

After the Legal Eight Hours' Bill for miners, the local option
proposals of the United Kingdom Alliance received the largest
amount for support. The Temperance Societies are congratulat-
ing themselves on the election of so many hearty supporters of
the movement. Not only this, but the rejection by their con-
stituencies of many warm and prominent defenders of the liquor
traffic gives cause for rejoicing. The incoming Cabinet is called
upon to take steps at once to give the people in their own lo-
calities a direct veto on the liquor traffic ; for considering the
explicit and solemn promises of the leaders of the Liberal party,
from Mr. Gladstone downwards, it is not easy to see how these
demands can be refused, even should there be a desire to do so.
The proposals of the Temperance party embrace the complete
closing of public houses on Sundays, and in view of the lament-
able amount of electoral corruption carried on, as they maintain,
during the recent struggle, they hope that a measure will be
passed closing public houses on election days.

While the success of the Liberal party in the general election
has* no doubt afforded great satisfaction to far the larger num-
ber of our readers, there is one consideration from a Catholic
standpoint which should mitigate their joy. This is the attitude of
the victorious party toward the voluntary schools. The Newcastle
programme is an authorized list of aims and projects of the Li-
berals, and one of the declarations contained in this programme

904 THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. [Sept.,

is that " no system of public elementary education can be re-
garded as satisfactory or final unless it secures that every family
shall have within reasonable reach, a Free School, and that all
schools supported by public money shall be subject to public
representative control." This means that the Catholic schools
which receive a grant from the state shall not merely be in-
spected by an official appointed by the government (this is al-
ready done, and the bishops have admitted its legitimacy), but
that the local rate-payers are to be endowed with the power
which they do not now possess of electing a sufficient number
of the managers to control these schools. The claim here made
is of the most extreme character, and possibly may not be per-
severed with, for there are members of the party who only claim
for the rate-payers representation on the Board of Management.
At all events, it will be the duty of the Irish members whose
support is absolutely necessary for the carrying into effect of any
such proposal to ally themselves, should efforts be made to
change the present law with the Conservative party, which in the
words of the former head of the Education Department " will
fight to the death against the subjection of the voluntary schools

to the rate-payers."

An earnest and powerfully written appeal has just been made
to the Liberal party, in order to induce it to recede from the
position with reference to religious education which it has as-
sumed. The author of this pamphlet (which well deserves peru-
sal) declares that he is fully convinced that the English Liberal
party is a powerful instrument for the social and moral progress
of the race, the purest and the most powerful purely human re-
generating instrument known. He describes Mr. Gladstone as
the political pride of this and of every age, and ranks himself
among those whose desire it is ever to be found faithfully and
humbly serving under Liberal leaders. He must admit, however,
the hostility of the Liberal party as a whole to the granting of
financial aid to religious schools, and has therefore issued this
" Liberal's appeal to Liberals for the toleration of Christian
morality and religion in some of the schools of the state." Un-
der the law as it exists at present, while voluntary schools receive
a grant from the government, none of them receive help from the
local rates, and this portion of their revenue has to be made
up by subscriptions. The author's appeal is directed to the ob-
taining of the consent of the Liberal party to the bestowal of

1892.] THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. 905

assistance from the rates upon voluntary schools ; at least that
this may be granted to " some of the schools." By this is meant
the Catholic schools, for the writer is a Catholic. His argument
is addressed, of course, to Liberals, and is not only powerful in it-
self, but interesting on account of the citations which he makes
from writers like John Morley, Matthew Arnold, Herbert Spencer,
and Dr. Martineau in support of his contention, that not only that
a purely secular education will not impart the moral principles
necessary for man's well-being in this life, but also that a knowl-
edge of religion is necessary for the securing and ennobling of
morality itself. Should this appeal be successful, the joy felt by
our readers at the recent success of the Liberal party will be

without the least alloy.

Among the many social evils which it is hoped may be sup-
pressed by legislative action, that of gambling and betting must
be reckoned. For many years these practices have been grow-
ing, and have extended from the noble and wealthy patrons of
the turf to errand boys and even to women. The newspapers
are the chief means through which the evil has taken its present
extreme development. In protest against excessive sporting ad-
vertising it is customary in several free libraries in the English
midland counties to black out the sporting news before placing
the papers on the tables of the reading rooms. The success of
the campaign against the Louisiana lottery in the United States
has induced certain social reformers in England to prepare a
bill to prohibit the insertion of news as to the odds on coming
events. Such a proposal is not altogether without precedent, for
the publication of discretionary advertisements has already been
made illegal. The bill has been circulated among persons of in-
fluence in order to call forth their criticisms. Among those who
have given their opinion, is the successor of Cardinal Manning,
Archbishop Vaughan, who says unhesitatingly "that it is to the
best interest of the country that the Legislature should interfere
as soon as possible to put down the evil of gambling before
overwhelms our population as a national vice." The archbishop
declares that he is convinced that gambling is threatening to be-
come a worse plague than drunkenness. The bill will be intro-
duced early in the proceedings of the new Parliament.

While the English Parliament has been passing a law for the
purpose of preventing the dangerous migration of the coun-

906 THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. [Sept.,

try people to the towns, it is very surprising to learn that the
same evil exists in Australia in, proportionally, an even greater
degree. The whole population of Victoria numbers 1,140,000.
The city of Melbourne and its suburbs absorb over two-fifths of
this number; the other cities include another fifth, thus leaving
only the small proportion of two-fifths in the rural districts.
Were London to draw to itself so large a proportion of the in-
habitants of the United Kingdom its population, instead of being
five millions, would be fifteen. It cannot be said that the evil
exists to the same degree in the other Australian colonies, al-
though all of them without exception have an urban population
entirely out of proportion to the rural population. This has hap-
pened notwithstanding the fact that from the beginning the laws
have facilitated the acquisition of the land of the country by in-
dividuals at a cheap rate, and that there are vast tracts well adap-
ted for agriculture which stand in need of cultivators. Nor are there
any artificial restrictions such as exist in England to the acquisi-
tion or the alienation of real properties. Conveyancing has been
reduced to its simplest forms. The only restrictions which exist
have for their object the prevention of the accumulation in single
hands of large estates.

Notwithstanding all this the necessity for relieving the con-
gestion of the population in Melbourne is declared to be para-
mount ; and in order to bring this about a bill has just been
introduced by the government for the creation of village settle,
ments. We have not learned the detailed provisions of this
bill, but doubtless the encouragements held out to leave the
city and go to the country will be substantial. As we have said
before, to the student the manner in which a purely democratic,
and not merely a democratic but an industrial community, deals
with the questions of political economy, Australia offers an inter-
esting and an instructive field of inquiry. It would seem that,
notwithstanding the complete predominance of the working-classes
in those colonies and the fact that they are unfettered by tradi-
tions derived from feudal times, they are far from having se-
cured material prosperity. The unemployed are very numerous
in Melbourne, and have to be supported by contributions from
the public funds and by private charity. Labor bureaus have been
established by the state as well as by the Salvation Army, and
within a week the names of 6,300 unemployed persons were en-
rolled at the State Bureau. The railways, too, belong to the

1892.] THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. 907

state, and public works often have for their main object the
giving of employment to the workingmen. Protection also pre-
vents external competition. And yet all these expedients seem
to have failed in securing the desired end peace and content-
ment.

The fact that the accumulation of the population in cities is
found in countries which are so different from each other in their
social, economical, and political aspects as Great Britain and Aus-
tralia, seems to point to the fact that for this common phenom-
enon a cause must be sought which is not to be found in these
differences, but in something which is common to the two com-
munities. What that cause is, we are not prepared to say with
complete confidence, but there seems to be good reason to think
that the education which is now given to the children of the
working-classes is just sufficient to render them discontented with
quiet and laborious life in the country and to make them desirous
of the excitement and amusements which are to be found in large
towns. A writer who is not very popular, but is a close student
of the social problems of our times, maintains that the evil in ques-
tion is largely due to the fact that the rich take up their abode
mainly in the cities. The poor necessarily follow them for the
sake of employment. And among the rich, it is the women who
are chiefly to be blamed. The men, as a rule, are ready to live
in the country, being satisfied with its quiet pleasures ; but the
women must have their balls and parties, and therefore drag the
men to the cities in order to gratify their own vanity and fri-
volity ,.and to relieve their emptiness of mind. If this is true, the
remedy for a great social evil may be found in giving to women
higher ideas of life's duties and responsibilities.

General Booth's social scheme has now well advanced into the
second year of its operation. Many things have been set a-going ;
but the question arises at the present juncture, Can^they be kept
a-going? Over 100,000 were raised in response to the general's
first appeal, but this was only, as then announced, a first instal-
ment. This year the subscriptions required for a continuance of
the work have not come in ; notwithstanding the fact that some
prominent persons such as Archdeacon Farrar, Mr. Arnold
White, and Sir Henry Peck have publicly testified to their be-
lief that the money hitherto received has been judiciously and
economically expended. The public enthusiasm has, it would

908 THE OLD WORLD SEEN FROM THE NEW. [Sept.,

seem, moderated. The Times calls for the appointment of a com-
mittee of business men to investigate the expenditures already
made and to make a report. To this General Booth has ac-
ceded ; whatever may be the faint-heartedness which has taken
possession of others, there is no diminution of his own enthusiasm.
He maintains that the public owes him 50,000, and that he is
sure to get it.

Does he deserve to get it ? . The work he has already done
is criticised in the July number of the Fortnightly and the Con-
temporary by two writers, one of whom is not likely, from his
religious or rather his irreligious standpoint, to have much sym-
pathy with the Salvation Army, and the other is a barrister
who was appointed to make an investigation by the Charity Or-
ganization Society, a body which has set itself against the
scheme from the beginning. Both of them concur in the opinion
that the money hitherto received has been well spent, and that
therefore more should be given in order that the work may go
on. In addition to these testimonies Sir John Gorst, who among
active politicians takes the most enlightened interest in labor
and social questions, after a visit to the farm colony at Hadleigh
to which he went, as he says, a somewhat prejudiced skeptic
as to the Salvation Army, came back delighted and astonished
at what he saw. " I have just witnessed," he said, " a marvel ;
the cultivation of the clay lands of Essex by the outcast la-
bor of London." He is convinced that this colony has gone
sufficiently far to justify a sanguine hope of its success. It
remains to be seen whether there is faith and confidence suffi-
cient in the public for continuous effort or whether last year's
support was a mere spasmodic homage of conscience.

I8 9 2 -] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 9 o 9

TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS.

THE realistic novel of contemporary life and manners, and
the newspaper as given over to reporters, resemble the deadly
microbe in more particulars than that of having come to stay.
Like it, they must be reckoned with as deteriorating but con-
stant factors in modern life. One way to avoid them, adopted
by many prudent people, is that of filtering the sources, of steri-
lizing what they admit into their minds as well as what they
take knowingly into their bodies. Another, perfectly feasible
only in the case of the two former, which, being direct and
visible products of the human will, may be directly avoided by
it, is to let them altogether alone ; it is one we decidedly recom-
mend and would be gladly free to practice.

But, even so, the atmosphere of current thought is so sur-
charged with certain deadly germs that not one's eyes alone,
but one's ears, would need to be closed in order to escape them
altogether. They are everywhere. The very babies imbibe them
before they leave the nursery. One is told of little girls in pin-
afores, discussing " fixed-fate, free-will, fore-knowledge absolute,"
in the spirit of Milton's devils on the famous " hill retired" in
hell. Or one may hear, as was our own recent misfortune, a
colored porter in a railway train, talking a medley of agnosticism
and evolutionary atheism with all the confidence, if not with the
polish, of Huxley or Romanes. Perhaps they are subserving a
purpose analogous to that of the malarial germs with which
Mother Earth has coast-guarded, so to say, certain of her terri-
tories from the subduing invasion of man ; killing off the weakly
by means of them, conforming the strong to a new environment,
and yielding up her fastnesses to her conqueror only when she has
established some ratio of understanding and accommodation. At
present, at all events, they are making a great slaughter among
the innocent, the ignorant, and the weakly.

Among the latter class we incline to rate certain novelists of
the day, Catholic by birth and training, in [whom the instincts
of faith and purity are evidently still active, although they are
working in a sort of miasmatic mental and moral mist. Their
faculty of discrimination seems half deadened already, so that
even when their will is good to attack some obvious evil, they
do so in ways that play directly into the hands of their great

9io TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Sept.,

adversary. As was remarked by one of the lecturers on literature
at the late Summer School, there is room for a chapter on the
debt which English literature owes to that of Spain. He was
thinking then of Richard Crashaw and the inspiration drawn
by him from the life and other writings of St. Teresa. That
was a time when the cultivated intellect of Spain was still en-
tirely Catholic, saturated with the traditions, informed with the
life-giving spirit of Christianity a time which possibly lasted
longer in Spain than elsewhere, and which has left indelible
traces even in the new growth which has sprung up under the
influence of " art for art's sake " and the modern " scientific " spirit,
dogmatizing against dogma, and observing in the interests of a
foregone atheistic conclusion. One finds such traces in nearly
all the recent Spanish novels ; one seldom finds more than the
traces, even in the case of Sefiora Pardo-Bazan, whose Christian
Woman, noticed at length in this magazine on its first appear-
ance, has just been brought out again in a cheaper form by
the Cassells. Respect for Christianity has been ingrained in her
soul ; its ministers, so far as we know, are still sacred from her
scalpel: the beauty of purity, the serene nobility of faith, the
unique force given to the soul by its communication with God
through the channels He has appointed, have not passed out of
her range of vision. But, beside them, the evil spirit of " real-
ism," of modern " culture " as known to its devotees in French
and Russian literature, has secured a niche for itself, and is
worshipped by Sefiora Bazan, in pages foul with suggestion, or
flat with irrelevant and crude detail.

So, too, with Valdes the author 01 Marta y Maria, and of
Maximina, the latter in many respects, a most beautiful novel.
Nothing could well be more charming than the heroine of the
story, and, but for the one-sided " realism " with which Miguel's
state of mind after losing her is described, and the blot of nas-
tiness which hardly one of the European novelists seems able or
willing to omit, though worthy models in plenty are supplied
to them by those of Great Britain, it would have been worthy of
all praise. Another story of his has just been translated and
not well translated, so far as English goes by Miss Hapgood,
who has performed the same service for some of Tolstoi's works.
It bears the significant title, Faith* It is the portrait of a good
priest, drawn by a man who has felt the force of the current of
irreligious thought, who has studied ;it in both its materialistic

* Faith. By Don Armando Palacio Valdes, Translated from the Spanish by Isabel F,
Hapgood. New York : Cassell Publishing Company.

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 911

and its metaphysical aspects, but who has preserved his reverence
for Christian morality, and, apparently, his acceptance of Christian
teaching. It is not improbable that his book is meant as a break-
water against the rising tide of anti-Christian thought, and that
his pictures of such priests as Don Miguel, the miser, whose
parishioners " found in him a shepherd very much resembling a
captain of highwaymen," and who " was accustomed to solve the
most difficult cases of conscience in an instarit, by means of a
half-dozen well-planted cuffs or kicks "; of Don Narciso, the
glutton and gallant, whose envy and jealousy hound Father Gil
to his downfall and ruin in the sight of men ; of Don Restituto,
the erudite theologian, stuffed with Latin texts, primed to the
muzzle with remembered and perfectly valid propositions, but
really alive and 'wholly interested in nothing but his farm and
live stock ; were drawn, partly at least, in the interest of reform.
He may look on the novel as a potent weapon in that interest.
It is certainly a dangerous one to handle, being apt to "kick,"
like a rusty gun, and to lay its holder flat without bringing down
any other game. Such portraits as those just alluded to are in
a measure balanced by that of Don Norberto, by the slight but
effective sketch of the bishop who discomfits the hypocrite Obdu-
lia, and especially by Father Gil, who is the hero. Misfortunes sur-
round the latter from his birth until the suicide of his mother brings
about his adoption by certain pious ladies, who have him edu-
cated for the priesthood. He has a vigorous intellect joined to
a mystic tendency, and, falling into the hands of a true mystic,
the rector of his seminary, who mentally is "a case of suicide
through mystic orthodoxy," he follows in his master's footsteps:

" He set to work, with systematic tenacity, to thwart the ex-
pansions of his nature; he began the slow suicide which his
master and all the mystics of the world had committed before
him. He penetrated his master's thought, he shared his gloomy
ideal of life, his rage for penitence, his disdain of pleasure
his horror both of sciences and the world. This conflict with
the flesh has its own poetry. Otherwise there would
mystics. When he finished his course he was the model which
was held up to the students. Equally humble, reserved, grave,
and sweet, he was indefatigable at his prayers, and received
mark meritissimus in all departments."

Gil is made assistant to Don Miguel, and goes to live with
him,

not from taste, but because the latter had insisted that
his assistants or vicars, as they were called here should live

912 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Sept.,

with him, perhaps, in order that he might be the better able to
tyrannize over them. . . . Don Miguel was as barbarous in
private as in public life. His despotic will made itself felt in
every detail, at every moment of existence. Now, if this will
had been rational, there would have been no objection to make ;
but the will of this formidable old man was as capricious as it
was malign. He took a delight in thwarting the wishes of those
about him, however trivial they might be. He kept his house-
keeper in a stew. . . . He fairly toasted his man-servant on
a gridiron. . . . He crucified the vicar. He had had a great
many vicars, and he had studied each of them in silence for a
few days, in order to discover their likings and tendencies.
Once thoroughly informed, he set about thwarting them with
special care. He had made the last vicar, an obese man, addict-
ed to the pleasures of the table, endure every extremity of hun-
ger, until it was a miracle that he did not die."

Gil is a new experience to his rector. Not only does his
studiousness surprise him, but his ardent piety and his unaffect-
ed devotion to his apostolic work. For a while, Don Miguel's
"malicious instincts" are appeased by Gil's innocence and good-
ness, and when he does begin to torment him, it is by way of
throwing obstacles in the way of performing his duties.

" Sometimes he forbade his preaching on certain days ; again
he prohibited his sitting so many hours in the confessional, or
forced him to say Mass later. There were occasions when,
feigning absent-mindedness, he left him locked up in the house,
so that he could not say it at any hour."

To trials of this kind, however, Gil is invincibly superior by
reason of his profound humility. So is he, through the mystical
purity of his soul, to such as tempt Don Narciso, and which
beset him in the person of his penitent, Obdulia, a pretended
devotee full of raptures and visions which Gil for a long time
believes in as veritable, but which leave him always as impene-
trable as a stone, save on the purely religious side. Altogether
too much space is given to Obdulia by the novelist ; even though
the final catastrophe of Gil's long imprisonment could not have
been brought about without her, yet she is after all in the na-
ture of an episode. It is not she who causes Gil's agony of
doubt, and it is that agony which is the gist of the novel. It
is the bane of it, likewise ; for whereas the struggles of a mind
confronted for the first time with materialistic science in its
most plausible forms are drawn out at full length, and then
supplemented by the anguish of a soul stripped of all founda-
tion for faith by Kantian metaphysics, reproduced essentially,

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 913

and in a thoroughly popularized mode of statement, the refuta-
tion of the latter, though attempted, is condensed into a page,
and Gil's final return to faith and peace, made in a single in-
stant, is given a too simply mystical appearance, as if it had
not as it most certainly has an unshakable foundation in
right reason. Atheistic science and atheistic metaphysics are
like the Kilkenny cats they may safely be left to destroy each
other. The underlying objective reality which the first must as-
sert in order to make its verifications carry any weight, ends
logically in the affirmation of God; while pure idealism ends
in flat absurdity, and gives every verdict of science and natural
reason a formal contradiction. Through some such process of
thought Gil finally passes but it is in a flash. On the other
hand, his journey through that valley of doubt and slough of
despond in which his friend Don Montesinos perishes, is de-
scribed at painful length. When we leave Don Gil, at its end,
he is entering a prison for a term of fourteen years, having
been convicted on the false testimony of Obdulia, as guilty of
the vilest of crimes. He enters, it is true, with peace in his mind
and profound satisfaction in his heart, his faith unassailable now,
and his happiness assured. But, as he has walked across the
reader's field of vision, he has been bowed down, almost contin-
uously, under the burden imposed by modern skepticism, now
materialistic, now metaphysical, and it is to be feared that the
weight of that burden is what will remain most indelibly in the
mind of the average reader of his story. It is a book to be
avoided by such readers.

From novels like this it is refreshing to be able to turn to
such robustly Catholic work as that of Mr. Edward Heneage
Dering, two numbers* of whose " Atherstone Series" have recently
been put into a second edition by the London Art and Book
Company, and may be had at Benziger's. The series comprises
three novels in all, some of the same personages reappearing in
each; and the earliest of them must have been brought out
nearly a score of years ago. They received high and deserved
praise at the time, but as the present is only the second edi-
tion, they seem to have met the fate which is apt to befall un-
equivocally Catholic fiction the fate which, as the chairman of
the Summer School was telling us but lately, is due, in a meas-
ure, anyway, to a boycott enforced by non-Catholic publishers,

*Freville Chase. By Edward Heneage Dering.

The Lady of Raven's Combe. By Edward Heneage Dering. London and Leamington :
Art and Book Company. New York : Benziger Bros.

VOL. LV. 59

914 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Sept.,

in deference, doubtless, to the prejudices, real or supposed, of
the non-Catholic reading public. It is quite certain that, if stories
as entertaining, as clearly told, and as interesting in point of plot,
incident, and character-presentation as these by Mr. Bering had
advocated atheism ; had denied hell from the standpoint of
either agnosticism or progressive orthodoxy ; had frankly presented
the claims of the world and the flesh in the interests of evolutionary
man, not too scornful of his arboreal ancestor so long as the
process of making out his genealogical tree is still under way ; or
had pleaded those of the devil in especial in those of theosophy
or Buddhism, they would have earned their author a very pretty
fortune. It is good to see them republished at last, though late.
For a confirmed novel reader to take them up, is to pass at
once into an unfamiliar atmosphere that of the sanely super-
natural. It is a bracing experience, from which one descends,
when he must, with a new sense of the lack of exhilarating
qualities in that which he breathes ordinarily. There is such
strength of conviction, such cogency of logic, such a simple,
unaffected, straight-forwardness of action on the part of charac-
ters like Everard in Freville Chase, or the stranger in the Lady
of Raven's Combe that it seems to bring back the days of primi-
tive Christianity, when the disciples held their lives in their
hands, ready to lay them down and assume better ones without
hesitation or delay.

Not that there is any martyrdom, save that of the social
sort, to be met with in Mr. Bering's stories. They are tales of
our own day and generation, when the headsman's block has
been shoved into the corner, and Christianity, for the nonce,
has to face foes armed with no weapons deadlier than a dulled
logic, the scalpel of the vivisectionist, the geologist's hammer, and
the gavel of the secret societies. Brute force is for the present
in abeyance, though none of us have as had yet time to forget
that the Man of Blood and Iron tried his 'prentice hand at it, in
the line of imprisonments for conscience sake, just as he set
out on his long road to Canossa, and thence into political
retirement. A sort of mitigated social ostracism is the heaviest
public penalty which Mr. Bering's characters have to pay,
whether they are Catholics by family prescription or by conver-
sion. But the private penalties entailed by this public one are
dealt with, especially in the case of Everard Freville, in a way
which has the pathetic passion of tragedy a heart-uplifting
tragedy as well as a heart-rending one. Freville Chase is our own
favorite among the tales in all respects. There is a sameness

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 915

about the plots, with their mysterious trap doors, false heirs,
and hidden wills, interesting and skilfully contrived as they are
in each separate instance. But the personages in them are alive.
They act in character, they really think, and they express their
thoughts in terse and perfectly lucid English. The novels do
not deal much in minor controversy, on the points disputed be-
tween Catholics and Protestants who are at one in holding the ex-
istence of God, the Divinity of Christ, and the fact of Revelation.
The points to which he confines himself are the foundation of a
Church by the Incarnate God, and the fact that this Church may
be found with certainty. It is true that in the Lady of Raven's
Combe, the hero sets out from a point beyond Protestantism
and, seeking God first as the satisfaction of his natural aspira-
tions, is afterwards led by reason into the Church. In this story,
the readers of both will be reminded somewhat of Father
Hecker's early struggles, as described in Father Elliott's Life.
Another point on which Mr. Bering is strong, and where he does
his most effective work from the novelist's point of view, is the
question of mixed marriages. His main lines coalesce naturally
enough. One might almost describe the Old Testament, on its
historical side, as an illustration of the evil they have not ceased
to entail since the days when the "sons of God saw the
daughters of men that they were fair, and took themselves wives
of all which they crfose." It is a very beautiful love that Mr.
Bering paints his heroes both as giving and inspiring, and it is
by his firm grasp on that feeling, in its natural and supernatural
aspects and capacities, that he best proves his vocation to novel
writing. He does not, however, confine his pen to that alone.
We have received from the same publishers a clever booklet by him,
discussing Esoteric Buddhism, as revealed by Mr. A. P. Sinnett
and his wife. He accepts some of the Blavatsky wonders, we
observe, as sufficiently attested by competent witnesses, and in-
clines to credit the devil with their production. But, if we do
not mistake, certain investigations conducted in India by the
London Psychical Society, somewhat later than the date of Mr.
Bering's essays, seemed to prove that simple fraud, carried out
by the aid of merely human accomplices, was not only an ade-
quate explanation of most of them, but one amply supported by
the testimony of such accomplices. Mr. Bering is also the ac-
complished translator of Liberatore's work on Universal*, and the
author of In the Light of the Twentieth Century, a volume
which has received high praise from both the religious and the
secular press.

916 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Sept.,

Speaking of reprints, we have also received from the Catho-
lic Publication Society a second revised edition of Mr. J. C. Hey-
wood's dramatic poems, including his tragedy of Sforza.* As a
still earlier edition, issued by Kegan Paul, & Trench, was noticed
at length in the CATHOLIC WORLD for May, 1888, we have only
to reiterate here our former most favorable estimate of their
poetic value, and to congratulate their author on the vigor
which has made them bloom again after a quasi death of a
quarter of a century or more.

The London publishers of Mr. Bering's novels have also brought
out two very pretty stories by Frances Noble, Madeline's Destiny,
and Gertrude Mannering.\ The latter is in its fourth edition.
Both of them are charmingly written, high in purpose, and ex-
tremely interesting as mere stories. Here again one breathes what
we just now spoke of as the atmosphere of the sanely super-
natural. Perhaps we should explain our meaning, which is not
that the authors introduce the miraculous in its more uncommon
form, but simply that the books are so penetrated with the spirit
of Christianity, which is essentially supernatural, that their char-
acters live and act and think from its motives, without either
stress or strain ; hardly, indeed, with a conscious reference to the
fact that the life around them is lived upon a distinctly lower
plane. These little stories by Miss Noble ought to be in all our
convent libraries. There is nothing like holding up a high ideal
before young girls who are to go out into the world and fight
their own battles there. It is true that their scenes are laid in
English high life. The setting, however, is of small importance.
"The field is the world," so far as the struggle for the posses-
sion of the soul is concerned, and the enemy is the same under
whatever flag he carries.

Again from the same publishers, we have received The Heir
of Liscarragh,\ and a translation of a portion of Sister Emmerich's
Meditations on the Journey of the Magi Kings. The former
is by no means as good as its predecessor, Bonnie Dunraven. It
is an Irish story ; at least, the scene is laid in Ireland, but the ac-
tion might have passed anywhere. It is melodramatic in concep-

* Poetical Works of J. C. Heywood. London and New York : Burns & Gates.

t Madeline's Destiny, and Gertrude Mannering. By Frances Noble. London : Art and
Book Company. New York : Benziger Brothers, agents.

\ The Heir of Liscarragh. By Victor O'D Power. London and Leamington : Art and
Book Company.

The Magi King. From The Life of the Blessed Virgin, after the Meditations of Sister
Anne Catherine Emmerich. Translated from the French by George Richardson. London
and Leamington : Art and Book Company.

l8 9 2 -] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS.

917

tion, and not wholly pleasant in treatment. Mr. Power has
shown himself capable of better things than this.

Concerning the Meditations there is no occasion to say any
thing. Sister Emmerich's wonderful life is already familiar to
many readers, and to those who are attracted by it, this little
volume may safely be commended. It is taken from her Life of
the Blessed Virgin, presumably compiled by Clement Brentano
from the meditations which he took down in writing from her
lips, while she was in ecstasy. It is to be observed that she did
not " attribute to her visions any historical authority."

Perhaps Mr. J. M. Barrie, whose reputation has been so solidly
established already on the firm foundation of The Little Minister,
and A Window in Thrums, will not greatly increase it by the lit-
tle book of more or less critical reminiscences just published un-
der the title of An Edinburg Eleven* There is not one of the
papers which is not eminently readable ; personal recollections
are almost invariably that, owing, we suppose, to that unfailing
love of gossip which is so long-lived in most of us. But none of
them is particularly well written until Mr. Barrie's flint strikes
fire against Mr. Stevenson. Then his critical instinct wakes up.
Friendship, personal admiration, hero worship, were what had
moved his pen before. He is less friendly now, and more criti-
cal ; his sentences, " subdued to what they work in," take a lite-
rary turn, and his judgment may be rated on its merits. The
first sentence of the paragraph we are about to quote, must un-
doubtedly be excepted from the general praise just given to the
literary quality of this essay. But as criticism of what lies un-
derneath the wonderfully clever, but seldom satisfactory work of
his fellow Scot, it seems to us full of insight :

" The key-note of all Mr. Stevenson's writings is his indiffer-
ence, so far as his books are concerned, to the affairs of life and
death on which their minds are chiefly set. Whether man has
an immortal soul interests him as an artist not a whit : what is
to come of man troubles him as little as where man came from.
He is a warm, genial writer, yet this is so strange as to seem
inhuman. His philosophy is that we are but as the light-hearted
birds. This is our moment of being ; let us play the intoxicat-
ing game of life beautifully, artistically, before we fall dead from
the tree. We all know it is only in his books that Mr. Steven
son can live this life. The cry is to arms ; spears glisten in the
sun ; see the brave bark riding joyously on the waves, the black
flag, the dash of red color twisting round a mountain-side. Alas !
the drummer lies on a couch beating his drum. It is a pathetic

* An Edinburg Eleven. By J. M. Barrie. New York : Lovell, Coryell & Co.

9i 8 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Sept.,

picture, less true to fact now, one rejoices to know, than it was
recently. A common theory is that Mr. Stevenson dreams an
ideal life to escape from his own sufferings. This sentimental
plea suits very well. The noticeable thing, however, is that the
grotesque, the uncanny, holds his soul; his brain will only follow
a colored clew. The result is that he is chiefly picturesque, and
to those who want more than art for art's sake, never satisfying.
Fascinating as his verses are, artless in the perfection of art,
they take no reader a step forward. The children of whom he
sings so sweetly are cherubs without souls. It is not in poetry
that Mr. Stevenson will give the great book to the world, nor
will it, I think, be in the form of essays. . . . The great
work, if we are not to be disappointed, will be fiction."

Mr. Barrie doubts, however, that this fiction, when it comes,
will be Scottish, and even that those critics are correct who
maintain that the best Mr. Stevenson has done has that character-
istic. As eminently religious as he is unmistakably Scotch in the
cast of his own mind, the verdict he pronounces on this point
takes color from both qualities :

" Scottish religion, I think, Mr. Stevenson has never under-
stood, except as the outsider misunderstands it. He thinks it
hard because there are no colored windows ; ' The color of Scot-
land has entered into him altogether,' says Mr. James, who, we
gather, conceives in Edinburg Castle a place where tartans
glisten in the sun, while rocks re-echo bagpipes. Mr. James is
right in a way. It is the tartan, the claymore, the cry that
the heather is on fire, that are Scotland to Mr. Stevenson.
But the Scotland of our day is not a country rich in color;
a sombre gray prevails. Thus, though Mr. Stevenson's best
romance is Scottish, that is only, I think, because of his ex-
traordinary aptitude for the picturesque. Give him any period
in any country that is romantic, and he will soon steep him-
self in the kind of knowledge he can best turn to account.
Adventures suit him best, the ladies being left behind ; and so
long as he is in fettle it matters little whether the scene be
Scotland or Spain. The great thing is that he should now give
to one ambitious book the time in which he has hitherto written
half a dozen small ones. He will have to take existence a little
more seriously to weave broadcloth instead of lace."

Mr. Barrie is plainly going to be disappointed in The Wrecker*
wherein, indeed, Mr. Stevenson has not wrought singlehanded.
It is a masterpiece in its own line, nevertheless, and has the old
entrancing spell, the old power to lure along the reader to the

Wrecker. By Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osborne. New York : Charles
Scribner's Sons.

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 919

very end, and to mitigate his final disappointment when that
end is reached and turns out, as always, to coalesce with the be-
ginning. It was good to go along the road whistling and sing-
ing, even though one brought nothing back in his pockets, and
had enjoyed but the empty exhilaration of fresh pure air and
innocent freedom. Considered as a man and a moralist, and
more particularly as a Scotchman and a descendant of the
Covenanters, Mr. Stevenson certainly leaves something to be de-
sired. But as an artist !

I. FATHER CHAIGNON'S MEDITATIONS.*

The venerable prelate of Burlington has been a bishop for
forty years, and is next in age to the Archbishop of St. Louis.
No one could be better fitted than he to instruct the clergy in
those sacerdotal virtues of which he has always been a living
example, which bishops and priests may profitably imitate.
Those who have the happiness of knowing him personally are
aware that he has that type of amiable sanctity which is charming
and attractive, and we must all hope that his life may be pro-
longed to the benediction of his diocese and of the American
Church.

It is not long since the bishop gave us a large and valuable
work on the Canon of the Old Testament, the fruit of great re-
search and labor. Now from the scholarly seclusion of his
study comes forth another work, in two dignified and stately
volumes which attest his persevering zeal and industry in the
service of the clergy.

The Jesuit Father who composed these Sacerdotal Medita-
tions in French, had the advantage of long and extensive exper-
ience in giving Clerical Retreats. Therefore, he was eminently
fitted for the task of preparing a book of Meditations. If he
were living, he would feel honored in having found such a trans-
lator.

These two volumes are a rich mine, where clergymen will
find an inexhaustible supply of the best matter for their medita-
tions and spiritual reading, for their whole life. No doubt the
labor expended upon them by the author and the translator will
be richly rewarded in the sanctification of a multitude of priests

Meditations for the Use of the Secular Clergy. Translated from the French of Father
Chaignon, S J. By L. De Goesbriand, Bishop of Burlington, Vt. Two volumes, Burling-
ton, Vt.: Free Press Association; 1892:

920 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Sept.,

for a century to come, and through them in the sanctification
and salvation of a greater multitude of the faithful. May God
bless our venerable senior bishop for his labor of love !

2. PHASES OF THOUGHT.*

The thoughtful reader will rise from the careful perusal of
this note-worthy book deeply impressed with the conviction of
having listened to the words of one who has well earned the
right to sit in the chair of literary judgment.

By his book shall you know the writer thereof, is what
Brother Azarias would tell us : and, by " the writer " he means,
not only the grace or force of the author's literary style, which he
justly ranks as being points of lesser merit inviting high criticism,
but rather that which gives true value to the book ; that is, the
principles which the author strives to inculcate, the inspiring and
all-pervading reason why he has written. It also properly falls
to the work of the critic to trace the influence of the author's
personality, as also of the special epoch of the world's history
in moulding the character of his work.

To rightly think out the central thought which a man has
chosen as the informing soul of his book supposes the critic to
have acquired habits of right thinking, and of acute and accu-
rate perception of the particular sense in which the writer
abounds.

Brother Azarias devotes seven chapters of his work to a lu-
cid treatment of the four-fold activity of the soul, of man as a
thinking being endowed with sense, now illative, now moral, now
aesthetic, now spiritual, followed by short essays upon the " Prin-
ciple and Habits of Thought," of the " Ideal in Thought," and
of the " Culture of the Spiritual Sense." In these chapters he
teaches us not only what thinking is, but how to think rightly ;
how to prepare the mind for making an intelligent and just
judgment upon what a writer or speaker may have to tell us.
" What do you think of such or such a writer, or, of such or
such a book ? " is an everyday question. We commend these
little essays to the study of those who would like to be able to
reply intelligently both as to the substance and as to the form
of what is under consideration.

One cannot fail to see that the chief lesson taught in every

* Phases of Thought and Criticism. By Brother Azarias, of the Brothers of the Chris-
tian Schools. Boston and New York : Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

1892.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS.

92 r

line of his own book by the learned and pious Brother, is that he
only can say what he thinks of a writer who has himself culti-
vated his own power of thought. How shall he, the reader, pre-
sume to hope to get at the force of the writer's reasonings, the
value of his moral teachings, his right to be ranked as an artist
as well as his special merit as one; the heavenly wisdom and
deep spiritual insight possessed by him if he himself be lacking
in all these things? Only he may hope to find the sense of the
author who himself possesses the like sense, or who, at least, has
striven to cultivate it with some success.

Brother Azarias would have us realize more deeply than this
superficial age is wont to, the necessity of referring our judg-
ments upon what is offered to us as true, good, or beautiful to
its correspondence with the divine ideal, the Supreme Exemplar
through and by whom all existence manifests these trinal divine
attributes. The affirmation of the " Ideal," argues the reality and
the superior rank of the supernatural, the spiritual. In man there
is a true superintelligence, a power of spiritual perception, as
there is a true sensibility to spiritual influences. The saint and
the poet are both seers because they have cultivated their spir-
itual senses to a high degree. Such apprehend with clear vision
mysteries quite beyond the ordinary power of human conception.
None so free as they from the bias of passion and illusion : to
none other is granted such an enlarged intellectual horizon.

As a practical illustration of his teaching our author subjoins
three elaborate criticisms : one of the Imitation, a second of the
Divina Comedia and the third of Tennyson's poem, "In Memo-
riam."

They are masterpieces of literary criticism, and amply prove
the right of 'Brother Azarias, as we have said, to sit in the chair
of literary judgment.

His book is a scholarly work of high order, and it enriches
our libraries with a volume which will not fail of attracting the
attention of every serious student of literature.

3. GOOD READING. *

A new and, let us add, welcome addition to our supply of
Catholic reading. In the fifty-two instructions of which the book
is composed the author has done what it is not always easy to

* Fifty-two Short Instructions on the Principal Truths of our Holy Religion. From
the French. By Rev. Thomas F. Ward, Rector of the Church of St. Charles Borromeo,
Brooklyn, N. Y. New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago : Benziger Brothers.

922 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Sept.,

do he has touched on the principal topics of our religion in a
brief yet interesting way.

It may seem to some, perhaps, that, like most books of ser-
mons, this will only appeal to a special class. It is true the au-
thor had in mind to help in some degree those priests whose
many duties do not allow a long preparation for their preaching.
We think he has attained this object well. At the same time
he wished to give a book that might be used by the laity in re-
treats or for ordinary reading. Here he has not been less for-
tunate. The sermons are not mere frameworks, but short, point-
ed discourses, each complete in itself, yet easily suggesting
greater development. The topics chosen are not new, but they
are interesting because of their relation to us, and because the
points are well taken and are developed in a clear, logical man-
ner, without being dry or uninteresting.

We know not whether it is to the French author or to
Father Ward that the style is due, for we have not the original
at hand ; but at any rate it is admirable and well chosen for
the work. The language is choice, the sentences are short and
pithy, and every word tells.

The sermons are full of unction ; they make interesting read-
ing and at the same time suggest thoughts that sink into the
mind, and cannot fail to produce a deep impression.

1892.] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 923

THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION.

ALL COMMUNICATIONS RELATING TO READING CIRCLES, LISTS OF BOOKS,
ETC., SHOULD BE ADDRESSED TO THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION, NO
415 WEST FIFTY-NINTH STREET, NEW YORK CITY.

AMONG the eager students at New London, Conn., attending
the lectures of the Catholic Summer School, the friends of the
Columbian Reading Union were well represented. Many of them
who have long been united in kindred pursuits, were brought
together there and exchanged greetings. Under the shade of the
majestic elm trees which abound in New London they had op-
portunities to discuss their various plans of home reading and
study. While on the steamer going to the beach, or in the
Pequot 'bus, they compared their note books containing the tell-
ing points of the lectures. A verbatim report of the bright
comments and brilliant conversations which were heard on the
verandas of the cottages and hotels would fill a volume. It was
surprising to find that many of the students had changed their
vacation plans in order to show their approval of the undertak-
ing. Not less than a thousand visitors, it was estimated, came
to New London on account of the Catholic Summer School,
though the average attendance was much below that number.
Great praise is due to the eminent professors and specialists for
the alacrity with which they undertook the self-imposed task of
working in mid-summer. It would be difficult to find an equal
number of men without Catholic zeal who would consent to give
such valuable services without a guarantee of professional pay-
ment.

* * *

Professor M. F. Egan of Notre Dame University said to a
reporter of the New York Herald that he considered "the Sum-
mer School an unqualified success." He is of the opinion that the
Catholics of America have made a long stride toward that ideal
about which sanguine men and women have been talking and
writing. If Catholics are to be what they ought to be in this
country something more is needed than torchlight processions
and magnificent displays of brick and mortar. Virtue and in-
tellectual force must be brought into prominence to secure for
the Church its rightful place among American non-Catholics and
to hold firmly the allegiance of intelligent young people. The

924 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [Sept.,

large number of women who were present at the Summer School
will be pleased to learn that Professor Egan was much impressed
with their superior attainments. He says: "the average young
woman was not there ;" and his reason for this statement is, that
no average young woman would have followed the lectures as-
siduously day after diy, with the sunlight, the sea, the boats,
and the attractions of a summer resort within easy reach.
* * *

In order to utilize every available opportunity the members
of the general council in charge of the first session of the Sum-
mer School appointed a time and place for the school teachers
present to consider the study of pedagogy and psychology from
a Catholic point of view. Sunday-school workers were also in-
vited to discuss practical methods of instruction in Christian doc-
trine, and the ways and means of providing healthful reading for
the scholars. The Reading Circles had the privilege of hearing
from the most successful organizers of the movement. -At this
meeting it was made clear by forcible arguments that the Read-
ing Circle properly managed cannot be a fad. It represents vital
intellectual growth in each locality ; it should represent the needs
of the members, and should have the most complete home rule.
No particular plan can be devised suitable to all places and to
all persons. What is universally needed is to have a leader com-
petent to decide on a plan adapted to the exigencies of the
members. For some it may be profitable to concentrate atten-
tion on text books of science and art, literature and history,
while others who have finished their studies in text books may
combine together to read the best works of fiction, and the best
articles on current topics in magazine literature,
x- * *

The question box was the appointed medium of communica-
tion between the students and the managers of the Catholic Sum-
mer School. No waste of time was permitted for rambling talk
at any of the lectures. Some of the questions submitted con-
cerning Reading Circles are here given in the hope of eliciting
answers from our readers :

How can we overcome the tendency of less educated members
of Circles to feel humiliated when their attention is called
to mistakes in grammar, pronunciation, etc.?

How can we overcome reluctancy of less educated members to
take active part in the workings of their Circle?

How can we reach Sisters (engaged in the cause of education)

1892.] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 925

that they may encourage their pupils to take a lively inter-
est in the advancement of young working women when they
(the pupils) have left school ?

How can we get the clergy interested in the Reading Circle
movement ?

How induce Catholics to work together in the interests of the
Church without regard to " class " ?

Why are some Catholic young men so indifferent to their own
intellectual improvement ?

Would you advise reading all the works of one author, or only
the best?

When meetings are held once a week would you think it advis-
able to hold a social meeting once a month ?

How far is it prudent to go in compelling members of Reading
Circles to perform the work assigned?

Should our reading be limited to Catholic authors ?
How increase membership ?

Which three secular magazines would you select ?
Should members be encouraged to take books from public libra-
ries?

We shall gladly publish the best answers to the questions
given above. The following suggestions were made for the con-
sideration of Reading Circles : That interest be aroused in those
who have a limited amount of time for reading by monthly
meetings, which would allow sociability together with something
instructive in the nature of a paper by a member, or a pleasant
talk by some invited guest.

An honorary membership might be established in connection
with the regular membership of the Circle. The honorary mem-
bers could contribute a nominal fee and take no part in the
work of the classes, but be admitted to the meeting that par-
takes of sociability mingled with instruction.

All Circles should not be moulded in the same lines with re-
gard to their reading. The previous reading and educational ad-
vantages of the members must determine these lines.

Do not oblige all to read just the same thing if the members
have judgment enough to know what they want. Arrange more
than one line of study and let a choice be made.

That the members of Circles be at liberty to invite their
friends to any of the meetings, so that they may see the practi-
cal workings of the society and be induced to join.

That invitations be extended by members of one Circle to

926 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [Sept.,

those of any neighboring Circle to exchange papers likely to in-
terest both.

That the closing meeting should provide some social enter-
tainment for the members and a limited number of their
friends.

In Circles where magizines are circulated, a member should
be appointed for each magazine. Said member to be held re-
sponsible for the magazine, and to take note of articles, which
would be a benefit to Circles or of those assertions, which are
untrue in regard to the Church and her teachings.
* * -x-

Since the year 1888, which marked the beginning of our ef-
forts to establish Catholic Reading Circles, we have had the kindly
sympathy and generous aid of the late Mrs. E. H. Jones, presi-
dent St. Monica's Reading Circle, of Cleveland, Ohio. Her zeal
in the good work was a powerful incentive to her devoted as-
sociates. At the urgent request of the Columbian Reading
Union, permission was given for the publication of the following
sketch of her beautiful life, written by one of her dearest friends

" The death of Mrs. Jeannie Clark Jones, of Cleveland, on the
1 6th of February last, removed from this world a woman so
remarkable in many ways, that to allow her strong, sweet pres
ence to pass in silence, seems almost a wrong. I have been
asked to give a sketch of her life. It was quiet and uneventful.
She was born in Fort Plain, N. Y., but removed early with her
parents to Wisconsin, where her youth was passed. Her family
was one to be justly proud of, numbering among its members,
some of the most honorable and celebrated characters of Amer-
ican history. ^During her childhood, however, she felt the reali-
ties of life in the somewhat reduced fortunes of her own family;
and desiring as she always did, to help herself and others she
fitted herself for a teacher : holding at the early age of seventeen
the highest certificate. She taught for some years with marked suc-
cess in the public schools, high school, and the German and En-
glish Academy of Milwaukee. She was married in 1876 to Mr.
Edward H. Jones, and removed with him to Cleveland, where
the remainder of her useful and happy life was passed. There
was in her personality a subtle and powerful charm and influ-
ence. Those who knew her slightly often felt it, warmly remem-
bering her, and treasuring the impression of her rare and at-
tractive individuality after many years of separation from her.
Those who knew her well felt it more deeply to them it was
as a fire to warm their hearts. The poor felt it ever, the un-

1892.] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 927

fortunate and the afflicted. The erring were often touched and
softened by it, and to that deep, steadfast, gentleness and charm
within her little children turned with confidence and love, her
charitable work among them being remarkably successful. Her
charities were widespread, her trusts and responsibilities many.
All were faithfully and steadily attended to, for she did all
things throughly, with great executive ability, tact, common-
sense and conscientious devotion. She possessed a strong, in-
dependent, and very quick and original mind : free from morbid-
ness, prejudice, or narrowness, and singularly well balanced.

Life was brightened, and zest added to the daily happenings
by her keen sense of humor and her ready wit. Though very
conscientious she was very scrupulous, having a clear and simple
view of her own duty, and doing it. " I pray earnestly for light
when I have a decision to make," she once said, " and then use
the best judgment I have at the time, and leave the rest to
God, and never worry about it." And this was most true. She
never criticised others nor offered advice, yet when her counsel
was sought it was so wise and fitting as to be sometimes start-
ling. With an uncommonly busy life, and never robust health,
she had stored up a wealth of knowledge, digesting and assimi-
lating it, till it became part of her. She was really a learned
though most modest women, and her intellectual power was
great. She was an inspiration and support to those about her
in their mental life, but she herself needed no stimulus. She
loved books, and loved knowledge.

When but nineteen years old she became a convert to the
Catholic Church, and remained a faithful member of it, winning
honor and respect for it wherever she went, by her consistent
and noble practice of its teachings. Though never a society
woman, she enjoyed social life, and loved to give pleasure, en-
tering with a genuine, hearty sympathy into the happiness
of others the amusements as well as the cares of her com-
panions. She was chiefly active, however, in promoting and la-
boring for literary or reading clubs in her own Church, and out
of it, for in these things she was a leader. She was a woman
of great ability and fine nature, rarely balanced and rounded to
perfection, not because of uncommon opportunities in life, but
because she had so gloriously profited by every opportunity that
was given her, so gloriously developed her own nature, so un-
waveringly followed the law of God. Long may her beautiful
memory remain with us, silently breathing, " Go thou and do like-
wise." KATE POMEROY MERRILL.

928 THE' COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [Sept.,

To those who are reading the list of books published by the
Columbian Reading Union on the Famous Women of the French
Court we commend Miss Guiney's recent work, Monsieur Henri
(Harper & Bros.) Professor Maurice F. Egan praises it as" a very
pretty piece of book-making."

" Monsieur Henri is, of course, the young De la Rochejac-
quelein, who fought so bravely for his God and king in La Ven-
de. Miss Guiney makes a fine picture of him. She makes him
more picturesque, more interesting than Carlyle could have
made him ; and one feels safer under Miss Guiney's direction
than under Carlyle's. We are sure that she is not distorting
anything for the sake of her picture. She tells us in a few
words why the revolution was successful in other parts of France,
but a failure in La Vendee. The Vendeans had no grudges
against superiors. There were no heartless landlords among
them, no prelates like Talleyrand, no frivolous abbes, vacillating
between the infidelity of the Encyclopaedists and the teachings
of the Church. Frenchmen could not have been roused to fury
by all the teachings of Voltaire, had there been no grievances
to redress. Miss Guiney's ' Monsieur Henri ' is a ' little picture
painted well.' It is charmingly dedicated to one of her former
teachers at the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Elmhurst. Both
the DiLchess of Angoulcme and Monsieur Henri have great in-
terest for Americans. The rising in the Colonies had great effect
on the temper of the French, burdened by exactions, false tra-
ditions, and a worthless privileged class. It is not so long since
the Duke of Orleans (Louis Philippe), his brother, the Count of
Beaujolais, Talleyrand himself, and that great master of cookery,
Brillat-Savarin, with other Emigres took refuge on our shores.
And, at Baltimore, Betsy Patterson, indomitable widow of Jer-
ome Bonaparte, lived until recently. Did not Prince Murat sell
very good milk at Bordentown, N. J., for a living ? And there
are some gentlewomen still who remember the balls given to De
la Fayette on his second visit.''

* * -x-

By one of our correspondents we are informed that some
Episcopalians are quite unwilling to accept a statement made in
this department last March, to the effect that conversions to the
Church have not ceased in England. The establishment known
as the Church of England is being slowly transformed, and its
members are endeavoring to persuade themselves that they are
not Protestants at all. Among the English people there is a
noticeable change of attitude towards the Church. No royal
mandate can now keep from them the luminous teaching of
Pope Leo XIII. They have learned to respect his utterances on
vital questions of the day. In the London Universe of a recent
date we find it announced that Archbishop Vaughan is arrang-
ing to confirm

1892.] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 929

a considerable number of notable converts from Anglicanism.
Amongst these may be mentioned Lady Somers, wife of Lord
Somers ; the Baroness Skcrborne ; Lady Edith Cecilia Howe,
daughter of Earl Howe, and sister of Lord Curzon, M.P. ; Miss
Evered, of Wadhurst Castle, Sussex ; Mr. J. L. Pearson, the ec-
clesiastical architect ; Mr. Paul Lawrence Huskisson, grandson of
the well-remembered economist and statesman of that name ; Mr.
Gilbert Firebrace Marshall, Furness Lodge, Southsea ; Major
Walter Cotton, R.A. ; Mr. John Long ; Mr. Neville Taylor, of
Rock Abbey ; Mr. Laurence Kip, grandson of a Protestant
bishop ; Mr. Waugh, son of the Rev. Benjamin Waugh ; Messrs.
Coleman and Durant, members of the Anglican brotherhood ;
and Mr. Donald Arbuthnot, son of the Hon. Donald Arbuthnot.

" The two great universities have recently contributed some
recruits to Rome, one of whom has left the Isis to enter the
novitiate of the learned order of St. Benedict. Seven or eight
clergymen of the Establishment, who have been received into the
Church, are now preparing for the priesthood, but amongst recent
accessions occur the names of the Rev. Howell Lloyd, M.A., a
gifted member of the Cambrian Archaeological Society ; Rev.
Howell Pattison Lewis Blood, M.A., rector of Bergholt, Colchester;
Rev. F. Besant, M.A., of St. Michael's, Shoreditch ; Rev. Hugh
Lean, M.A., a nephew of the Rev. Mr. Coles, chaplain of Pusey
House, Oxford; the Rev. Herbert Boothy, M.A.

" Members of High Church sisterhoods figure, as is frequently
the case, somewhat largely in the list. The Archbishop has re-
ceived an entire community of these ladies into the Church."
* * *

The American Library Association published in 1890 a classi-
fied and annotated catalogue, with alphabetical (author's) index,
of " Reading for the Young," compiled by John F. Sargent.
The work was begun in 1886 mainly as a help to librarians. It
includes the list of "Books for the Young" prepared by Miss
Hewins ; and a valuable index to periodicals containing material
for essays adapted to the comprehension of young people. Or-
ders for this useful book, containing 121 large pages, may be
sent to the Library Bureau, 146 Franklin St., Boston, Mass.,
price one dollar.

Messrs. Charles Scribner's sons have in press a list of five
hundred books for the young, graded and annotated, prepared
by Professor George E. Hardy, principal of Grammar School
No. 82, New York City. This list is intended to supply parents,
teachers, and others interested in directing the reading of the
young with a guide to some ' of the best books on history, geo-
graphy, travel, art, science, fiction, etc., suitable for children of
all ages. Price, 50 cents, net.

M. C. M.

VOL. LV. 60

930 WITH THE PUBLISHER. [Sept.,

WITH THE PUBLISHER.

WITH this issue of THE CATHOLIC WORLD we close its fifty-
fifth volume. And we feel a justifiable pride in regarding this
volume as worthy in every way of the fellowship of its honored
ancestors. We can look upon it as marking another mile-stone
in the progress of the magazine, another and still more de-
veloped evidence of the purpose for which it was founded. Its
progress is not counted by its years alone, but by the growth
of the sterling qualities that marked this pioneer among Ameri-
can Catholic monthly periodicals from it first issue. It possessed
a character and standing from the beginning that raised up hosts
of loyal friends, and it was soon evident that the venture was
more than an experiment ; in the hackneyed phrase of the day,
4< it had come to stay."

And hence it is that our contemporaries, secular and religious,
Protestant as well as Catholic, always find warm words of com-
mendation for each successive issue ; and though it would be a
long task to reproduce here all that is under the Publisher's
hand in praise of the magazine, he cannot forbear quoting a few,
especially the Protestant, flattering comments of our work and
purpose. Thus The Interior, a Presbyterian organ published in
Chicago : " Current questions are, of course, treated from a Cath-
olic point of view, but always with candor, and not seldom with
exceptional ability. It always maintains a high literary stand-
ard." The National Tribune of Washington, B.C.: " A magazine
that treats a wide range of subjects, particularly such as claim the
attention of the thoughtful man of this day, with a high stand-
ard of literary excellence, and from the pens of scholarly con-
tributors." The Pittsburgh Catholic-. "THE CATHOLIC WORLD
constantly -improves. There is no magazine which commends
itself so highly to our people, and none more deserving of their
patronage." The Golden State Catholic of San Francisco : " The
literary revolutions of the Paulist Fathers never go backwards.
THE CATHOLIC WORLD, since its first publication, is continually

1892.] WITH THE PUBLISHER. 93I

improving." The Methodist Protestant of Baltimore : " Ment-
ally it is always of the best, while in literary excellence it gives
evidence of advance even over the high standard of the past."
The Monitor of San Francisco : " THE CATHOLIC WORLD fully
maintains the high reputation it has won during the past twenty-
six years." The Messenger of Worcester, Mass : " THE CATHO-
LIC WORLD is in the very fore-front of current magazine litera-
ture. Its contents are admirably adapted to suit all cultured
tastes and moods whether they demand deep philosophical thought
or the pleasant, yet profitable, recreation of its lighter articles."
The Boston Herald'. "Admirable in its strength, its courage,
and its sincerity. The magazine was never better edited than it
is to-day." The Sentinel of Portland, Oregon : " It is a treasury
of bright, thoughtful, suggestive, and original matter. Its
managers, the Paulist Fathers, thoroughly understand the Amer-
ican spirit, and are alive to the needs of the Church in this re-
public, and the great future which awaits the one and the other.
It is thus THE CATHOLIC WORLD is the most ambitious and
progressive of Catholic periodical publications. It is owing to
this sympathetic and intelligent insight of its managers that,
without conscious effort, it leads and directs American Catholic
thought and opinion, and compels respectful recognition from
non-Catholic enemies. On account of its intrinsic worth, and the
value of its services to the Church in America it should be
found in every family that can appreciate a high-class periodical."

These are a few of the many good words that come to us
from our contemporaries. They give evidence of the esteem in
which the magazine is universally held, and show how clearly in-
dicated to all are the purposes, the aims which it is our en-
deavor to make characteristic of THE CATHOLIC WORLD. We
have never lost sight of these aims in conducting the magazine
in the many years it has addressed itself to the people of this
country. It has ever been the advocate of Truth, natural and re-
vealed. As was characteristic of its founder, demonstration, not
controversy, has been its sole weapon in behalf of this Truth,
and, as one of its secular contemporaries has justly said of it, its
pages are wholly free from the stain of offensive designation and
vituperation with which religious as well as other controversy is
apt to snare the pen of the heated writer. As a Champion of
the Truth, the magazine has ever been valiant and sturdy; it

932 WITH THE PUBLISHER. [Sept.,

has never been weak-kneed in its defense of right, but in all its
pages there is not one that is sullied with personalities, with
loss of temper or forgetfulness of what is due to the Truth we
seek to serve. We know that Truth needs no such weapons as
abuse or vituperation. In the conflict with error courtesy is ever
the chosen squire of Truth.

Looking backward into the history of THE CATHOLIC
WORLD gives its readers, no doubt, as it certainly gives all who
are and have been concerned with its career, not only the pleas-
ure that comes from the study of a well-conceived and well-
developed plan, but gives as well abundant tokens and ready
promise of continued success and higher development. Looking
forward is no less pleasurable. Unless he is in error, the Pub-
lisher believes he has already told his readers that the general
every-day motto in the office of THE CATHOLIC WORLD was
" The highest point of achievement yesterday is the starting-
point of to-day." This motto is the conscientious aim of all
connected with the work of the magazine, is an aim that is
always kept steadily in view. The highest point of excellence in
the volume now closed we mean to make the starting point of
the excellence of the new volume. We must of necessity move
slowly in this work of improvement : it means the discussion of
many plans, and the conquest of many obstacles and hindrances
in the way of fulfillment when a plan has been decided upon.
But let us direct the reader's attention to the opening issue of
the new volume, the number for October; we are sure a glance
will show him that we are justified in owning the motto chosen,
and that our aim is ad summa semper.

We have already given our readers a " Columbus Number,"
and throughout the past year have had one or more papers in
each issue devoted to the central figure in this quadri-centenary
of the discovery of the New World, or to subjects in a great
degree kindred with the celebration. In the coming October issue,
however, we will give our readers a study of the great explorer
from the eloquent and scholarly Bishop of Peoria. Father
Dutto will contribute a translation of the ' Narrative of the
Journey of Las Casas." This is the first complete translation of
the Narrative of Las Casas' Journey into English, while Father

I8 92-] WITH THE PUBLISHER. 933

Dutto's profound study of all that is embraced in the career
and contemporary history of Columbus will make his appreci-
ation and his notes on the Narrative of special value to the
student. Mrs. E. M. Blake will contribute a paper on Alonzo
the Wise, written in the style that has made her work so ac-
ceptable to our readers in the past. Christian Reid will give us
the opening chapters of a 'serial dealing largely with Mexican
life, the result of her study of the people during her recent so-
journ in the Sister Republic. Her name of itself is sufficient to
give zest to the literary palate. Rev. Thomas Hughes, S.J.,
will contribute a paper of much interest entitled The Jesuit
Ratio Studiorum. Dr. O'Gormon of the Catholic University of
America, will conclude his scholarly study of Joan of Arc, and
Father Walworth will continue the Reminiscences of Bishop
Wadhams, which from the first have proved of strong in-
terest even to the general reader.

This is certainly a dainty bill of fare to set before our rea-
ders, and we have no misgivings about their thorough enjoyment
of this literary feast. It surely is a substantial proof that we
are earnest in our labors to reach the highest and the best ; it
is indisputable evidence that we are ever striving towards im-
provement. There is much more to be done and it does not
wholly depend upon us. Once again let us exhort the reader to
remember that he is working with us ; that his dollars and his
voice and influence with others are necessary factors in all fur-
ther improvement. It was so in the past, and it must be so in
the future. The rate of our progress to higher and yet higher
excellence is not to be measured by our work alone. The length
of our subscription list is an all-important factor in our progress,
and upon this we cannot too often or too strongly insist. And
we, therefore, again urge our readers to renewed zeal in doing all
they can (and a word here and there will do much) in behalf of
the magazine.

Benziger Brothers' new publications are :

A German-English edition of Deharbe's large Catechism,
with the German and English version on opposite pages.

The Sacramentals of the Holy Catholic Church. By Rev. A.

934 BOOKS RECEIVED. [Sept.,

A. Lambing, LL.D., author of The Sunday-School Teachers
Manual, Mixed Marriages, etc.

Socialism. By Rev. Victor Cathrein, S.J., a chapter of the
author's Moral Philosophy. (From the German.) Edited
by Rev. James Conway, S.J.

They have in press :

Analysis of the Gospels of the Sundays of the Year. From
the Italian of Angelo Cagnola. By Rev. D. A. Lambert,
LL.D., author of Notes on Ingersoll, etc.

A new edition of Rev. Michael Muller's (C.SS.R.) Catholic

Priesthood.

A Primer for Converts. By Rev. J. T. Durward.
Meditations for Advent. By Rev. R. F. Clarke, S.J. 15 cents.

BOOKS RECEIVED.

THE CEREMONIES OF SOME ECCLESIASTICAL FUNCTIONS. By

the Rev. Daniel O'Loan, dean, Maynooth College. Dublin :

Browne & Nolan ; New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago.

Benziger Brothers.
LA BATAILLE DU HOME RULE (Parnell, sa vie et sa fin). Par

L. Memours Godre. Paris : P. Lethielleux.
PAPERS OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CHURCH HISTORY.

Vol. IV. Edited by Rev. Samuel McCauley Jackson, M.A.

New York and London : G. P. Putman's Sons.
THE ONE GOOD GUEST. By L. B. Walford. New York:

Longmans Green, & Co. 1892.
A YOUNGER SISTER. By the author of The Atelier du Lys,

etc. London and New York: Longmans, Green, & Co.

1892.
CHAPTERS TOWARDS A LIFE OF ST. PATRICK. By Very Rev.

Sylvester Malone, P.P., V.G., member R.I.A., and F.S.A.

Dublin: M. H. Gill & Son. 1892.

BOOKS RECEIVED. 935

THE FREE TRADE STRUGGLE IN ENGLAND. By M. M. Trum-
bull. Second edition, revised and enlarged. Chicago : The
Open Court Publishing Co. 1892.

THEOLOGIA MORALIS. PER MODUM CONFERENTIARUM AUCTORE
CLARISSIMO. P. Benjamin Elbel, O.S.F. Novis curis edidit
P. F. Irenaeus Bierbaum, O.S.F., Provinciae Saxonise S. Cru-
cis Lector Jubilatus. Cum approbatione superiorum. Par-
tes IX. et X. Paderbornae (1892): ex Typographia Bonifaci-
ana (J. W. Schroeder). Neo Eboraci (U. S. A.): Benziger
Fratres.

CONTINUITY OR COLLAPSE ? The Question of Church Defence.
By Canon McCave, D.D., and the Rev. J. D. Breen, O.S.B.
Edited by the Rev. J. B. Mackinlay, O.S.B. New Edition.
London and Leamington : Art and Book Company ; New
York : Benziger & Co.

THE LIFE OF THE BLESSED PETER ALOYSIUS MARY CHANEL,
Marist, first Martyr of Oceania and Apostle of Futuna.
From the French. Edited by Basil Tozer. London and
Leamington : Art and Book Company ; New York : Benzi-
ger & Co.

AQUINAS ETHICUS ; OR, THE MORAL TEACHING OF ST. THOMAS,
with notes. By Joseph Rickaby, S.J. Two Vols., Quarterly
Series. New York: Benziger Bros.

TRUE WAYSIDE TALES. By Lady Herbert. Fourth Series.
London : Burns, & Gates, Ld. New York : Benziger Bros.
'HE HAIL MARY ; OR, POPULAR INSTRUCTIONS AND CONSIDERA-
TIONS ON THE ANGELICAL SALUTATION. By J. P. Val
D'Eremao, D.D. London : Burns & Oates, Ld. New York :
Benziger Bros.

LECTURES ON SLAVERY AND SERFDOM IN EUROPE. By W. R.
Brownlow, M.A. Trinity College, Cambridge, Canon of
Plymouth. London : Burns & Oates, Ld. New York : Ben-
ziger Bros.

THE BIRTHDAY BOOK OF THE MADONNA. Compiled by Vin-
cent O'Brien. New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago: Benzi-
ger Bros.

'HE SPIRIT OF ST. IGNATIUS. Translated from the French of
Father Xavier De Franciosi, S.J. New York, Cincinnati,
and Chicago : Benziger. 1892.

936 BOOKS RECEIVED. [Sept., 1892-

DE L'ESPRIT ET DE L'ESPRIT PHILOSOPHIQUE. Par Claude-
Charles Charaux, Professeur de Philosophic a la Faculte" des
Lettres de Grenoble. Paris: Pedone-Lauriel, Editeur. 1892.

PAMPHLETS RECEIVED.

THE APOSTOLATE OF THE EDUCATED CATHOLIC LAYMEN. By
Rev. Francis P.. McNichol. Mt. Loretto, Staten Island, N. Y.:
Press of the Mission of the Immaculate Virgin.

CATHOLIC EDUCATIONAL EXHIBIT IN THE WORLD'S COLUMBIAN
Exposition. Circular of information and directions. Chica-
go, 111.: Donohue & Henneberry.

A TREATISE ON MORTGAGE INVESTMENTS. By Edward N. Dar-
row. Minneapolis, Minn.: W. A. Edward's Printing Co.

WERE THE MIDDLE AGES Dark? By the Right Rev. Thomas
Francis Brennan, D.D., Bishop of Dallas, Texas. Pamphlet
No. 20. The Catholic Truth Society of America. St. Paul,
Minn.

AP The Catholic world

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