Full text of "The Catholic world"

5- 



V<* 





THE 



to 



CATHOLIC WORLD. 



MONTHLY MAGAZINE 




GENERAL LITERATURE AND SCIENCE. 



. L.VIII. 
OCTOBER, 1893, TO MARCH, 1894. 



NEW YORK : 

THE OFFICE OF THE CATHOLIC WORLD, 
120 WEST 6oth STREET. 




Copyright, 1894, by 
VERY REV. A. F. HEWIT. 



THE COLUMBUS PRESS 120 WEST^OTH ST., NEW YORK. 



CONTENTS. 



Abraham Lincoln Myth, The. Bokar- 

do Bramantip, .... 254, ,352 

Adirondack Sketches. (Illustrated.} 

Walter Lecky, . . . 554, 773 

Althea's Christmas Gift, Miss. Marion 

Ames Taggart, . . . '. 341 

American Artist, An. (Illustrated.} 

Alfred Trumble, .... 65 

Ann Arbor Strike and the Law of Hir- 
ing, The. George McDermot, . 670 

Brahmanism does not ante-date the 
Mosaic Writings. Right Rev. 
Francis Silas Chatard, D.D., . 729 

Canada solves the Problem we shirk, 

How.tfon. T. IV. Ar.glin, . . 609 

Canonization of the Cure d'Ars. 
(Illustrated.} Rev. Edward Mc- 
Sweeny, 709 

Catholic Education at the World's Fair. 

(Illustrated.} John J. O'Shea, . 186 

Ccenaculum for New York, The New. 

(Illustrated.} John J. O'Shea, . 538 

Colonel Bonn Piatt. (Illustrated.} 

Rev. Samuel Bernard Hedges, . 99 

Columbian Reading Union, The, 148, 301, 
453. 607, 757, 9 2 

Coming Contest With a Retrospect, 

The. Rev. Alfred Young, . . 457 

Coming Contest Have Catholics a Po- 
litical Enemy ? The. Rev. Alfred 
Young, 694 

Contemporary Architecture of the Cath- 
olic Church, On the. Ralph Adams 
Cram, ...... 644 

Dawning of the Twentieth Century in 

Europe, The. Quasivates, . . 761 

Doctor's Story, The. Helen M. Swee- 
ney, 212 

Easter. (Frontispiece.} 

Editorial Notes, 141, 294, 450, 605, 755, 898 

Emmitsburgh The Vestibule of Hea- 
ven. (Illustrated.} Helen M. 
Sweeney, 325 

Epoch in Catholicism, An, . . . 126 

Essential Goodness of God, The. 
Very Rev. Augustine F. Hewit, 
D.D., . .... 1-54 

Experiences of a Missionary, The. 

Rev. Walter Elliott, . 264, 389, 578 

Father Livingston on Longfellow. 

/. Fairfax McLaughlin, LL.D., 528 

Father Ohrwalder's Narrative. (Illus- 
trated.} Henry Hayman, D.D., . 717 

Flowers that Spring in Desert Places. 

L. W. Reilly, 803 

Fossil Continent of Australia, The. 

William Set on 180 

Gladstone. (Illustrated. } Jeremiah 

MacVeagh, 81 



' Glimpse of the Autumn Woods, A. 

(Frontispiece.} 

Gothenburg System of Regulating the 

Liquor-Traffic, The, . . . 431 

Great Forward Movement, A. (Illus- 
trated.} Alice T. Toomy, . . 483 

Great Monument at Mount Loretto, 
The. (Illustrated.} John /. 
O'Shea, 19 

Her Last Stake. T. L. L. Teeling, . 815 

Holy Week in Spain. (Illustrated.} 

Alquien, 840 

Intemperance : The Evil and the Reme- 
dy. Rev. fames M. Cleary, . n 

Interesting Letter from Tarsus in Cili- 
cia, the Birthplace of St. Paul, An. 
Very Rev. Augustine F. Hewit, 
D.D., 91 

Interesting Report on Education (1889- 

90), An, 117 

James Cardinal Gibbons. (Frontispiece.} 

Like some impregnable Castle over- 
looking the Rhine. (Frontispiece.} 

Lisette. Harriet Agnes Anderson, . 655 

Love-Songs of the Tuscan Peasantry. 

Henrietta Channing Dana, . . 685 

Major, The. Lelia Hardin Bugg, . 34 

Matthew Arnold and the Celts. M. E. 

Henry-Ruffin, 884 

Miss Millionaire./^. C. Farinholt, . 168 

Mobile Summerville Spring Hill. 

(Illustrated. )M. E. Henry-Ruffin, 233 

Most Rev. Francis Satolli, D.D. (With 

portrait.} Rev. Thomas S.Duhigg, 305 

Needs of Humanity supplied by the 
Catholic Religion, The. -James 
Cardinal Gibbons, i 

Negro Race, The : Their Condition, 
Present and Future. Very Rev. 
John R. S lattery, . . . .219 

Paschale Gaudium. William L. Gil- 

dea, D.D., 808 

Plea for the Wage-earner, A. Rev. 

William I. Simmons, . . . 424 

Popular Use of the Bible, The. Rev. 

Kenelm Vaiighan, .... 587 

Religious Movement of the Century, 

The Greatest. (With portrait.} . 569 

Retreat at La Trappe, A. (Illustrat- 
ed.} W. L. Scott, . . . .862 

Sabbath of the Heart, A. John J. a 

Becket, 521 

Sacred Heart in the Mountains, The. 

(Illustrated.} Dorothy Gresham, 628 
Sanctuary. (Illustration.} John J. 

O'Shea, 368 

Skull, a Princess, and a Black Friar, A. 

(Illustrated.} V. C. Hansen, . 403 
Social and Industrial World, The. . 278 



iv 



CONTENTS. 



Solve One of the highest Problems of 
Science, How to. William Seton, 
LL.D 787 

Soul of a Book, The./*. /. MacCorry, 364 

Spirit of the Early Missionary, The. 

Rev. S. B. Hedges 794 

Starved Rock. (Illustrated.") Rev. 

Frank /. O'Reilly, . . -473 

Supreme End and Office of Religion, 

The. Rev. Walter Elliott, . . 57 

Talk about New Books, 133, 282, 436, 597, 

744,891 



Theory and Practice of Profit-Sharing, in 

Truth about the Jews in Spain, The. 

Manuel Perez Villamil, ... 49 

Under the Ti-Trees, .... 855 

Where God and Man Meet. Rev. Tho- 
mas O' Gorman, D.D., . . . 204 

William Hazlitt. (With portrait.} 

Louise Imogen Guiney, ... 489 

Woman's Work in Religious Communi- 
ties. F. M. Edselas, ... 509 

Works of Supererogation. Rev. Clar- 
ence A. Walworth, . . . .416 



POETRY. 



Death of St. John, the Beloved. Veri- 

tas, 56 

Death of the Old Year. John M. 

Cooney, 577 

Easter Carol. Henry H. Neville, . 861 

Lame at the Beautiful Gate. (Illus- 
tration.} John J. O'Sfiea, . . 783 

Lords and the Home-Rule Bill, The. 

fohn Jerome Rooney, . . .124 

Maria Immaculata. (Illustration.} 

Alba 321 

North, In the. Emma Playter Seabury, 232 



November Feasts. Rev. A. B. O'Neill, 

C.S.C., 277 

October. Alba, 80 

October Rosary, An.Af. /. M alloy, 10 

Oro Supplex. Rev. M. G. Flannery, . 218 

Pange Lingua. Rev. C. A. Walworth, 814 
Plea of the Autumn Leaves, The. E. 

O'Connor, 153 

St. Columban and the Wolves./*. /. 

Higgins, M.D., . . . .640 
Two Cities, The. <(IlIustrated.)John 

Jerome Rooney, .... 413 



NEW PUBLICATIONS. 



Angelus Domini, 894 

Birthday Book of the Madonna, The, . 443 
Bog of Stars, and other Stories of Eliza- 
bethan Ireland, The, .... 748 
Brendaniana : St. Brendan the Voyager, 

in Story and Legend, .... 288 
Breviarium Romanum, . . . .139 
Catholic Science and Catholic Scien- 

139 

Claude Lightfoot ; or, How the Problem 

was Solved, 438 

Communion of Saints, The, . . . 894 

:ing from on High, The, . . 448 

f Samuel Pepys, M.A., F.R.S., 747 
Divine Armory of Holy Scripture, . 752 
Elementary Course of Christian Philos- 
ophy, 445 

Elements of Ecclesiastical Law, . . 293 

nt Ship, The, .... 892 

English History for American Readers, 282 

Life, 892 

Kx.imination of Weismannism, An, . 445 

Minute Sermons for Low Masses 

on all Sundays of the Year, . . 602 

Flight into Kgypt, The, .... 442 

( i 1 i in pses of the Brotherhood of Charity , 444 

ih and Influence of Classical 

K Poetry 597 

m Angel, The, .... 286 
the Crane, and other Poems 

Home, 443 

292 

Series : Fisher Ames, Hen- 

iy, etc. 443 

Hyinn.t 447 

Ivar the Viking 441 

i hop and General, . 744 

Letters and Writings of Marie Lataste, 138 



Life and Letters of M. P. O'Connor, . 602 
Life of the Venerable Joseph Benedict 

Cottolengo, The, .... 136 
Manuel du Pretre aux Etats-Unis, en 

Anglais et en Francais, . . . 895 

Mediaeval Records and Sonnets, . . 749 

My Septuagint, 442 

Niagara Book, The, . . . .287 

New Bible and its New Uses, The, . 138 

Patriot Parliament of 1689, The, . . 439 

Physical System of St. Thomas, The, . 137 

Pictorial Lives of the Saints, Little, . 893 

Poetical Works of Lageniensis, . . 891 

Practical Sermons, 139 

Priest in the Pulpit, The, . . . 896 
Prince of India, The ; or, Why Constan- 
tinople Fell, .... . . 133 

Problems of the Nineteenth Century, . 447 

Purgatory, 604 

Roadside Harp, A, .... 436 

Sephora ; or, Rome and Jerusalem, . 599 

Seventy Years of Irish Life, . . . 750 

Son of a Prophet, The, .... 600 

St. Peter Claver, Apostle of the Negroes, 291 

Symphony of the Spirit, A, . . . 893 

Text-Book of Domestic Economy, A, . 603 
Thousand and one Objections to Secret 

Societies, . . . . . . 444 

Three Introductory Lectures on the Sci- 
ence of Thought, .... 289 

Through Evangeline's Country, . . 601 

Treatise of Spiritual Life, A, . . 896 

True Stories for Boys, .... 601 

Twilight Songs 752 

Why, When, How, and What We ought 

to Read, 287 

Wonderful Operations of the Divine 

Spirit in the Sinner's Heart, . . 293 



Columbian * lEyposition, 

Section 1R, Blocfc 1, 
Cbicago. 




would respectfully call your attention to the ex- 
hibition of ECCLESIASTICAL METAL WORK which 
is now being shown in the Manufactures and Liberal 
Arts Building of the World's Fair in connection with 
our other departments. 

(Sorbam . flfoTa 

Silversmiths, 



Broadway and igtJi St., 



New York City. 




uiik\Kiii\ ..i mi ROMAN cArmn.ii: em-Ren IN 1111: I-NITKD STATKS.' 

It \UKII-. .<v CO.| I'llII.ADI.I.l'HIA. 



THE 



CATHOLIC WORLD. 



VOL. LVIII. 



OCTOBER, 1893. 



No. 343. 



THE NEEDS OF HUMANITY SUPPLIED BY THE 
CATHOLIC RELIGION. 

E live and move and have our being 
in the midst of a civilization which 
is the legitimate offspring of the 
Catholic religion. The blessings re- 
sulting from our Christian civiliza- 
tion are poured out so regularly 
and so abundantly on the intel- 
lectual, moral, and social world, 
like the sunlight and the air of 
heaven and the fruits of the earth, 
that they have ceased to excite 
any surprise except to those who 
visit lands where the religion of 
In order to realize adequately our 
favored situation, we should transport ourselves in spirit to 
ante-Christian times and contrast the condition of the pagan 
world with our own. 

Before the advent of Christ, the whole world, with the excep- 
tion of the secluded Roman province of Palestine, was buried 
in idolatry. Every striking object in nature had its tutelary 
divinities. Men worshipped the sun and moon and stars of 
heaven. They worshipped their very passions. They worshipped 
everything except God only, to whom alone divine homage is due. 
In the words of the Apostle of the Gentiles, " They changed the 
glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of the corrupti- 
ble man, and of birds and beasts and creeping things. They 

VOL. LVIII. I 

Copyright. VERY REV. A. P. HEWIT. 1893. 




Christ is little known. 



2 THE NEEDS OF HUMANITY [Oct., 

worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator who 
is blessed for ever." 

But at last the great light for which the prophets of Israel 
had sighed and prayed, and toward which even the pagan sages 
had stretched forth their hands with eager longing, arose and 
shone unto them "that sat in darkness and the shadow of 
death." The truth concerning our Creator, which had hitherto 
been hidden in Judaea, that there it might be sheltered from the 
world-wide idolatry, was now proclaimed, and in far greater 
clearness and fulness, unto the whole world. Jesus Christ taught 
all mankind to know the one, true God : a God existing from 
eternity unto eternity, a God who created all things by his 
power, who governs all things by his wisdom, and whose superin- 
tending providence watches over the affairs of nations as well 
as of men, " without whom not even a bird falls to the ground." 
He proclaimed a God infinitely holy, just, and merciful. This 
idea of the Deity, so consonant to our rational conceptions, was in 
striking contrast with the low and sensual notions which the 
pagan world had formed of its divinities. 

The religion of Christ imparts to us, not only a sublime con- 
ception of God, but also a rational idea of man and of his 
relations to his Creator. Before the coming of Christ, man was 
a riddle and a mystery to himself. He knew not whence he 
came or whither he was going. He was groping in the dark. 
All he knew for certain was, that he was passing through a 
brief phase of existence. The past and the future were envel- 
oped in a mist which the light of philosophy was unable to 
penetrate. Our Redeemer has dispelled the cloud, and enlight- 
ened us regarding our origin and destiny and the means of 
attaining it. He has rescued man from the frightful labyrinth 
of error in which paganism had involved him. 

The Gospel of Christ as propounded by the Catholic Church 
has brought not only light to the intellect, but comfort also to 
the heart. It has given us " that peace of God which surpass- 
eth all understanding "; the peace which springs from the con- 
scious possession of truth. It has taught us how to enjoy that 
triple peace which constitutes true happiness as far as it is at- 
tainable in this life : peace with God by the observance of his 
commandments, peace with our neighbor by the exercise of 
charity and justice toward him, and peace with ourselves by 
repressing our inordinate appetites, and keeping our passions 
subject to the law of reason and our reason illumined and 
controlled by the law of God. 



1893-] SUPPLIED BY THE CATHOLIC RELIGION. 3 

All other religious systems prior to the advent of Christ 
were national like Judaism, or state-religions like paganism. 
The Catholic religion alone is world-wide and cosmopolitan, em- 
bracing all races and nations and peoples and tongues. 

Christ alone of all religious founders had the courage to say 
to his disciples : " Go, teach all nations." " Preach the Gospel to 
every creature." " You shall be witnesses to me in Judaea and 
Samaria, and even to the uttermost bounds of the earth." Be 
not restrained in your mission by national or State lines. Let 
my Gospel be as free and universal as the air of heaven. " The 
earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof." All mankind are 
the children of my Father and my brethren. I have diecl for 
all, and embrace all in my charity. Let the whole human race 
be your audience, and the world be the theatre of your labors. 

It is this recognition of the fatherhood of God and the 
brotherhood of Christ that has inspired the Catholic Church in 
her mission of lave and benevolence. That is the secret of her 
all-pervading charity. This idea has been her impelling motive 
in her work of the social regeneration of mankind. I behold, 
she says, in every human creature a child of God and a 
brother or sister of Christ, and therefore I will protect helpless 
infancy and decrepit old age. I will feed the orphan' and nurse 
the sick. I will strike the shackles from the feet of the slave, 
and will rescue degraded woman from the moral bondage and 
degradation to which her own frailty and the passions of the 
stronger sex had consigned her. 

Montesquieu has well said that the religion of Christ, which 
was instituted to lead men to eternal life, has contributed more 
than any other institution to promote the temporal and social 
happiness of mankind. The object of this Parliament of Reli- 
gions is to present to thoughtful, earnest, and inquiring minds 
the respective claims of the various religions, with the view 
that they would " prove all things, and hold that which is good," 
by embracing that religion which above all others commends it- 
self to their judgment and conscience. I am not engaged in 
this search for the truth ; for, by the grace of God, I am conscious 
that I have found it, and instead of hiding this treasure in my 
own breast, I long to share it with others, especially as I am 
none the poorer in making others the richer. 

But for my part, were I occupied in this investigation, much 
as I would be drawn towards the Catholic Church by her admir- 
able unity of faith, which binds together in a common worship 
two hundred and fifty millions of souls; much as I would be 



4 THE NEEDS OF HUMANITY [Oct., 

attracted towards her by her sublime moral code, by her world- 
wide catholicity, and by that unbroken chain of apostolic sue- 
cession which connects her indissolubly with apostolic times, 
would be drawn still more forcibly towards her by that wonder- 
ful system of organized benevolence which she has established 
for the alleviation and comfort of suffering humanity. 

Let us briefly review what the Catholic Church has done for 
the elevation and betterment of society. 

1. The Catholic Church has purified society in its very foun- 
tain, which is the marriage bond. She has invariably pro- 
claimed the unity and sanctity and indissolubility of the mar- 
riage tie by saying, with her Founder, that " what God hath 
joined together let no man put asunder." Wives and mothers, 
never forget that the inviolability of the marriage contract is 
the palladium of your womanly dignity and of your Christian 
liberty. And if you are no longer the slaves of man and the 
toy of his caprice, like the wives of Asiatic countries, but the 
peers and partners of your husbands ; if you are no longer 
tenants at will, like the wives of pagan Greece and Rome, but 
the mistresses of your household ; if you are no longer confront- 
ed by usurping rivals, like Mohammedan and Mormon wives, 
but the queens of the domestic kingdom, you are indebted for 
this priceless boon to the ancient church, and particularly to 
the Roman pontiffs, who inflexibly upheld the sacredness of the 
nuptial bond against the arbitrary power of kings, the lust of 
nobles, and the lax and pernicious legislation of civil governments. 

2. The Catholic religion has proclaimed the sanctity of human 
life as soon as the body is animated by the vital spark. Infan- 
ticide was a dark stain on pagan civilization. It was universal in 
Greece, with the possible exception of Thebes. It was sanc- 
tioned, and even sometimes enjoined, by such eminent Greeks as 
Plato and Aristotle, Solon and Lycurgus. The destruction of 
infants was also very common among the Romans. Nor was 
there any legal check to this inhuman crime except at rare in- 
tervals. The father had the power of life and death over his 
child. And as an evidence that human nature does not im- 
prove with time, and is everywhere the same unless it is fer- 
mented with the leaven of Christianity, the wanton sacrifice of 
infant life is probably as general to-day in China and other 
heathen countries as it was in ancient Greece and Rome. The 
Catholic Church has sternly set her face against this exposure 
and murder of innocent babes. She has denounced it as a 
crime more revolting than that of Herod, because committed 



1893-] SUPPLIED BY THE CATHOLIC RELIGION. 5 

against one's own flesh and blood. She has condemned with 
equal energy the atrocious doctrine of Malthus, who suggested 
unnatural methods for diminishing the population of the human 
family. Were I not restrained by the fear of offending modesty, 
and of imparting knowledge where " ignorance is bliss," I would 
dwell more at length on the social plague of ante-natal infanti- 
cide which is insidiously and systematically spreading among 
us in defiance of civil penalties and of the divine law which 
says, " Thou shalt not kill." 

3. There is no phase of human misery for which the church 
does not provide some remedy or alleviation. She has estab- 
lished infant asylums for the shelter of helpless babes who have 
been cruelly abandoned by their own parents, or bereft of them 
in the mysterious dispensations of Providence before they could 
know and feel a mother's love. These little waifs, like the in- 
fant Moses drifting in the turbid Nile, are rescued from an un- 
timely death and are tenderly raised by the daughters of the 
great King, those consecrated virgins who become nursing 
mothers to them. And I have known more than one such 
motherless babe who, like Israel's lawgiver, in after years be- 
came a leader among his people. 

4. As the church provides homes for those yet on the thres- 
hold of life, so too does she secure retreats for those on the 
threshold of death. She has asylums in which the aged, men 
and women, find at one and the same time a refuge in their 
old age from the storms of life, and a novitiate to prepare them 
for eternity. Thus from the cradle to the grave she is a nurs- 
ing mother. She rocks her children in the cradle of infancy, 
and she soothes them to rest on the couch of death. 

Louis XIV. erected in Paris the famous Hotel des Invalides 
for the veteran soldiers of France who had fought in the ser- 
vice of their country. And so has the Catholic religion provid- 
ed for those who have been disabled in the battle of life a 
home in which they are tenderly nursed to their declining years 
by devoted sisters. 

The Little Sisters of the Poor, whose congregation was 
founded in 1840, have now charge of two hundred and fifty es- 
tablishments in different parts of the globe ; the aged inmates 
of those houses numbering thirty thousand, upwards of seventy 
thousand having died under their care up to 1889. To these 
asylums are welcomed, not only the members of the Catholic 
religion, but those also of every form of Christian faith, and 
even those without any faith at all. The sisters make no dis- 



6 THE NEEDS OF HUMANITY [Oct., 

tinction of person or nationality or color or creed ; for true 
charity embraces all. The only question proposed by the sisters 
to the applicant for shelter is this: "Are you oppressed by age 
and penury? If so, come to us and we will provide for you." 

5. She has orphan asylums where children of both sexes are 
reared and taught to become useful and worthy members of 
society. 

6. Hospitals were unknown to the pagan world before the 
coming of Christ. The copious vocabularies of Greece and 
Rome had .no word even to express that term. 

The Catholic Church has hospitals for the treatment and 
cure of every form of disease. She sends her daughters of 
Charity and of Mercy to the battle-field and to the plague-strick- 
en city. During the Crimean War I remember to have read of 
a sister who was struck dead by a ball while she was in the 
act of stooping down and bandaging the wound of a fallen 
soldier. Much praise was then deservedly bestowed on Florence 
Nightingale for her devotion to the sick and wounded soldiers. 
Her name resounded in both hemispheres. But in every sister 
you have a Florence Nightingale with this difference, that like 
ministering angels they move without noise along the path of 
duty, and like the Angel Raphael, who concealed his name from 
Tobias, the sister hides her name from the world. 

Several years ago I accompanied to New Orleans eight 
Sisters of Charity who were sent from Baltimore to reinforce 
the ranks of their heroic companions, or to supply the places of 
their devoted associates who had fallen at the post of duty, in 
the fever-stricken cities of the South. Their departure for the 
scene of their labors was neither announced by the press nor 
heralded by public applause. They rushed calmly into the jaws 
of death, not bent on deeds of destruction like the famous six 
hundred, but on deeds of mercy. They had no Tennyson to 
sound their praises. Their only ambition was and how lofty 
is that ambition ! that the recording angel might be their biog- 
rapher, that their names might be inscribed in the Book of Life, 
and that they might receive their recompense from Him who 
has said : " I was sick, and ye visited me ; for as often as ye did 
it to one of the least of my brethren, ye did it to me." With- 
in a few months after their arrival six of the eight sisters died 
victims to the epidemic. 

These are a few of the many other instances of heroic charity 
that have fallen under my own observation. Here are examples 
of sublime heroism not culled from the musty pages of ancient 



1893-] SUPPLIED BY THE CATHOLIC RELIGION. / 

martyrologies, or books of chivalry, but happening in our own 
day and under our own eyes. Here is a heroism not aroused 
by the emulation of brave comrades on the battle-field, or by 
the clash of arms or the strains of martial hymns, or by the love 
for earthly fame, but inspired only by a sense of Christian duty, 
and by the- love of God and her fellow-beings. 

7. The Catholic religion labors not only to assuage the phy- 
sical distempers of humanity, but also to reclaim the victims of 
moral disease. The redemption of fallen women from a life of 
infamy was never included in the scope of heathen philanthropy, 
and man's unregenerate nature is the same now as before the 
birth of Christ. 

He worships woman as long as she has charms to fascinate ; 
but she is spurned and trampled upon as soon as she has ceased 
to please. It was reserved for Him who knew no sin to throw 
the mantle of protection over sinning woman. There is no page 
in the Gospel more touching than that which records our Saviour's 
merciful judgment on the adulterous woman. The Scribes and 
Pharisees, who had perhaps participated in her guilt, asked our 
Lord to pronounce sentence of death upon her in accordance 
with the Mosaic law. " Hath no one condemned thee?" asked 
our Saviour. " No one, Lord," she answered. " Then," said he, 
" neither will I condemn thee. Go, sin no more." 

Inspired by this divine example, the Catholic Church shelters 
erring females in homes not inappropriately called Magdalen 
Asylums and Houses of the Good Shepherd. Not to speak of 
other institutions established for the moral reformation of wo- 
men, the Congregation of the Good Shepherd at Angers, found- 
ed in 1836, has charge to-day of one hundred and fifty houses, 
in which upwards of four thousand sisters devote themselves to 
the care of over twenty thousand females who have yielded to 
temptation or were rescued from impending danger. 

8. The Christian religion has been the unvarying friend and 
advocate of the bondmen. Before the dawn of Christianity 
slavery was universal in civilized as well as in barbarous nations. 
The apostles were everywhere confronted by the children of 
oppression. Their first task was to mitigate the horrors and al- 
leviate the miseries of human bondage. They cheered the slave 
by holding up to him the example of Christ, who voluntarily 
became a slave that we might enjoy the glorious liberty of chil- 
dren of God. The bondman had an equal participation with his 
master in the Sacraments of the church, and in the priceless con- 
solation which religion affords. 



8 THE NEEDS OF HUMANITY [Oct., 

Slave-owners were admonished to be kind and humane to 
their slaves, by being reminded with apostolic freedom that they 
and their servants had the same Master in heaven, who had no 
respect of persons. The ministers of the Catholic religion down 
the ages sought to lighten the burden and improve the condi- 
tion of the slave, as far as social prejudices would permit, till 
at length the chains fell from their feet. 

Human slavery has at last, thank God ! melted away before 
the noon-day sun of the Gospel. No Christian country contains 
to-day a solitary slave. To paraphrase the words of a distin- 
guished Irish jurist : as soon as the bondman puts his foot on a 
Christian land he stands redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled 
on the sacred soil of Christendom. 

9. The Saviour of mankind never conferred a greater tempo- 
ral boon on mankind than by ennobling and sanctifying manual 
labor, and by rescuing it from the stigma of degradation which 
had been branded upon it. Before Christ appeared among men, 
manual and even mechanical work was regarded as servile and 
degrading to the freemen of pagan Rome, and was consequently 
relegated to slaves. Christ is ushered into the world, not amid 
the pomp and splendor of imperial majesty, but amid the envi- 
ronments of an humble child of toil. He is the reputed son of 
an artisan, and his early manhood is spent in a mechanic's shop. 
" Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary ? " The primeval 
curse attached to labor is obliterated by the toilsome life of 
Jesus Christ. Ever since he pursued his trade as a carpenter, 
he has lightened the mechanic's tools and has shed a halo around 
the workshop. 

If the profession of a general, a jurist, and a statesman is 
adorned by the example of a Washington, a Taney, and a Burke, 
how much more is the calling of a workman ennobled by the ex- 
ample of Christ ! What De Tocqueville said sixty years ago of 
the United States is true to-day, that with us every honest labor 
is laudable, thanks to the example and teaching of Jesus Christ. 

To sum up : The Catholic Church has taught man the know- 
ledge of God and of himself; she has brought comfort to his 
heart by instructing him to bear the ills of life with Christian 
philosophy ; she has sanctified the marriage bond ; she has pro- 
claimed the sanctity and inviolability of human life from the 
moment that the body is animated by the spark of life till its 
extinction ; she has founded asylums for the training of children 
of both sexes, and for the support of the aged poor ; she has 
established hospitals for the sick and homes for the redemption 



1893-] SUPPLIED BY THE CATHOLIC RELIGION. 9 

of fallen women; she has exerted her influence towards the 
mitigation and abolition of human slavery ; she has been the un- 
wavering friend of the sons of toil. These are some of the bless- 
ings which the Catholic Church has conferred on society. 

I will not deny, on the contrary I am happy to avow, that 
the various Christian bodies outside the Catholic Church have 
been and are to-day zealous promoters of most of those works 
of Christian benevolence which I have enumerated. Not to speak 
of the innumerable humanitarian houses established by our non- 
Catholic brethren throughout the land, I bear cheerful testi- 
mony to the philanthropic institutions founded by Wilson and 
Shepherd, by Johns Hopkins, Enoch Pratt, and George Peabody 
in the city of Baltimore. 

But will not our separated brethren have the candor to ac- 
knowledge that we had first possession of the field, that these 
beneficent movements have been inaugurated by us, and that the 
other Christian communities in their noble efforts for the moral 
and social regeneration of mankind, have in no small measure 
been stimulated by the example and emulation of the ancient 
church ? 

Let us do all we can in our day and generation in the cause 
of humanity. Every man has a mission from God to help his 
fellow-being. Though we differ in faith, thank God there is one 
platform on which we stand united, and that is the platform of 
charity and benevolence ! We cannot, indeed, like our Divine 
Master, give sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf and 
speech to the dumb and strength to the paralyzed limb ; but we 
can work miracles of grace and mercy by relieving the distress 
of our suffering brethren. And never do we approach nearer 
to our Heavenly Father than when we alleviate the sorrows of 
others. Never do we perform an act more God-like than when 
we bring sunshine to hearts that are dark and desolate. Never 
are we more like to God than when we cause the flowers of joy 
and of gladness to bloom in souls that were dry and barren be- 
fore. " Religion," says the Apostle, " pure and undefiled before 
God and the Father, is this to visit the fatherless and the wi- 
dow in their tribulation, and to keep one's self unspotted from 
this world." Or to borrow the words of the pagan Cicero : 
" Homines ad Deos nulla re propius accedunt quam salutem homini- 
bus dando " " There is no way by which men can approach 
nearer to the gods than by contributing to the welfare of their 
fellow-creatures." 

JAMES CARDINAL GIBBONS. 




io AN OCTOBER ROSARY. [Oct., 



AN OCTOBER ROSARY. 
7. JOY. 

HE waiting hours creep silently across the shin- 
ing skies ; 

Beneath their soft and dusky shade a deeper 
mystery lies : 

Beneath the stars of Bethlehem, lo ! other 
Lights arise. 

" Glory to God in heaven above ; on earth good-will to men ! " 
Hark ! all about the sleeping world the angels sing again. 
How joyful now the Mother kneels, heaven in her happy eyes, 
Under the stars on Bethlehem, beneath the open skies ! 

77. PAIN. 

If thou hadst known, when on thy heart the Babe of Bethlehem 

lay, 
How sharp the pang thou shouldst be called to bear one woeful 

day; 

For all thy blessedness gone by alas, O Mother true ! 
When on the cross His heart was pierced, thine own was riven 

too ! 

777. GLORY. 

The heavens beneath her feet are spread, the suns die dim be- 
fore ; 

Love hath been given to love again, and Grief hath died of its 
own pain : 

Above the starry skies 

The Mother, glorious, reigneth o'er the courts of Paradise. 





1 893.] INTEMPERANCE: THE EVIL AND THE REMEDY, u 



INTEMPERANCE: THE EVIL AND THE REMEDY. 

O congress of earnest men in our time and coun- 
try can justly consult the best interests of their 
fellow-men and ignore a thoughtful consideration 
of the drink evil. Many honest and conservative 
men hesitate to enter upon a discussion of the 
evils of intemperance, and to openly ally themselves with tem- 
perance workers, lest they be accused of fanaticism, or -misun- 
derstood by those whose good opinion they highly esteem. 

In the treatment of no social problem have graver mistakes, 
perhaps, been made than in dealing with this perplexing social evil. 
No doubt it is because of the errors committed by some honest 
and earnest advocates of temperance, or because of the insin- 
cerity of other temperance agitators, who found a popular 
cause a convenient shelter for their selfish ends, that many who 
hate the odious vice of intemperance, and who love the attrac- 
tive virtue of sobriety and temperance, have been deterred from 
publicly proclaiming their hearts' convictions and have not given 
their support and active encouragement to temperance work. 
But neither the indiscreet zeal of virtue's friends, nor the hypo- 
crisy of the champions of any good cause, should deter the 
honest man from doing an honest man's earnest duty. Every 
great and noble work in the history of human progress has 
suffered from the intemperate zeal of its friends and from the 
hypocrisy of its avowed advocates. But the temperance cause 
has suffered more, I imagine, from the apathy of timid friends 
than it has from either hypocrisy or fanaticism. It is a cause 
that in a special manner needs the support of honest, conserva- 
tive, and thoughtful men. 

Intemperance is a crying sin of our land, and with marvel- 
lous ingenuity has kept pace in its onward march with our un- 
rivalled prosperity and progress. Something over nine times as 
much intoxicating drink is consumed in the United States to- 
day as there was forty years ago, and we have only about three 
times as many people as we had then within our borders. 

No evil existing among us menaces so boldly the peace, 
prosperity, happiness, and moral and religious welfare of our 
people as the evil of excessive drinking. Like a river of fire 
it rolls through the land, destroying the vital air and extend- 
ing around an atmosphere of death. 



12 INTEMPERANCE: THE EVIL AND THE REMEDY. [Oct., 

The family is the corner-stone of our social fabric. Civil 
and social life springs from and is controlled by the domestic 
life of mankind. No other social evil disturbs the family rela- 
tion, and renders the domestic life of men, women, and chil- 
dren so inhuman and hopeless, as the evil of excessive and ha- 
bitual indulgence in strong drink. Intemperance unfits husband 
and wife for the duties of parentage, the most sacred and solemn 
in the entire catalogue of human obligations. It destroys the 
sense of decency and honor, silences conscience and deadens the 
best instincts of the human heart. There is no bright side to 
the picture of strong drink in the home. Wherever it touches 
human life it leaves the awful shadows of disease, crime, poverty, 
shame, wretchedness, and sorrow. We should not marvel, then, 
that heart-broken women, orphaned children, desolate mothers, 
sorrowing wives, and grief-burdened fathers, bending under a 
load of shame, of want and of sorrow, cry out in wild accents 
of bitterness against an evil that has so pitilessly blighted their 
hopes and mocked at their anguish. 

No wonder that harsh words have been spoken against strong 
drink, and those who invite weak and unfortunate men to con- 
sume it, when so much desolation and sorrow bear testimony to 
its cruel and fiendish work. This hideous and brutalizing vice 
cannot be condemned too severely, and those who have expe- 
rienced much suffering from its influence may be pardoned if 
they are unsparing against every effort that tends to widen the 
way for the spread of habitual drinking among us. 

Society has but little to fear from the fanaticism of those 
who oppose intemperance and all that causes it, but there is 
good ground for apprehension when we remember the frenzied 
and fanatical hatred of certain classes against all kinds of tem- 
perance legislation and temperance work. 

The intemperate words of the total abstainers are harmless 
when compared with the fanatical hatred of the friends of the 
liquor-traffic against total-abstinence work and restrictive legis- 
lation. 

There exists a lamentable apathy among our Catholic people, 
in our beloved country to-day, concerning this dreadful evil. 
Catholic public opinion is not as outspoken and vigorous as it 
should be against the saloon and the drink-curse. While great 
improvement has taken place, there is still a crying need for 
action among our Catholic people. During the past twenty-one 
years the Catholic Total Abstinence Union of America has done 
noble and heroic work in the cause of sobriety and public de- 



1 893.] INTEMPERANCE: THE EVIL AND THE REMEDY. 13 

cency. But with our ten millions of Catholics this grand asso- 
ciation should number, instead of sixty thousand, six hundred 
thousand members. If our church councils are to be heeded, 
if the utterances of the Sovereign Pontiff are to be respected, 
if we will not turn a deaf ear to the repeated appeals of our 
best and wisest prelates, there must be a new awakening among 
our Catholic people against the withering curse of drink. 

While the church does not rely for the success of its efforts 
in the cause of virtue on the strength or support of legal en- 
actments, but hopes to win its way by conquering the hearts of 
men, by appeals to their intelligence, and by arousing their 
consciences lead them to realize their own best interests, yet 
our Catholic people expect too much from the church if they 
entertain the delusive notion that the church can save weak 
men from ruin while her own children by their voices or their 
ballots do not aid in diminishing or in removing the occasions 
of sin. 

There is not much edifying consistency in applauding the 
decrees and admonitions of our church councils in theory, and 
in practical life withholding our support from the influences that 
make for the realization of what the church inculcates. 

The church, by the united voice of our bishops assembled 
in the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, warns its members 
against the dangers of the drink habit and the temptations of 
the saloon. 

The same council warns our Catholic people against the 
business of saloon-keeping as " an unbecoming way of making a 
living." A man cannot be a good Catholic, a loyal follower of 
the teachings of the church in this country, and be a good 
friend of the saloon. Much less can a Catholic be a saloon- 
keeper and a dutiful child of the church. We should have at 
least the courage to follow where our chief pastors lead, and 
our Catholic loyalty is not above suspicion if we are not as 
ready to condemn the drink evil as our bishops who have been 
placed over us "to rule the Church of God." Unless the 
mighty influence which the saloon exerts for evil upon the 
masses of the people in this country can be overcome, the 
church will lose a far greater number of her children through 
the debasing influence of drink, and the corrupting power of 
saloon politics, than all our zealous missionaries can gain con- 
verts to a full knowledge of the sweet truths of the Gospel. It 
is a fact, a sad, disheartening fact, well known to every priest 
in charge of souls, that the demoralizing influence of the saloon 



14 INTEMPERANCE: THE EVIL AND THE REMEDY. [Oct., 

undermines the moral and material well-being of our people 
more every year than all other evil influences combined. We 
are false to the best interests of the people if we do not heed 
the admonitions of the church and lend our aid in combating 
the drink evil and the blighting, debasing influence of the 
saloon. 

NATIONAL CUSTOMS. 

In dealing with the drink problem as it confronts us in our 
own country, it is not amiss to bear in mind that we are not to be 
controlled by the national customs of other lands. If in other lands 
much drinking of intoxicants does no injury to the people, that cir- 
cumstance does not diminish intemperance here. If frequent and 
generous potations have contributed to-the peace, prosperity, hap- 
piness, and plenty of other nations, this circumstance is a poor con- 
solation for us, who know that nine-tenths of our poverty and sev- 
en-tenths of our crime are traceable directly to the curse of ex- 
cessive drinking. If the temple of Bacchus is enshrined in the 
affections of the people of other countries, it is no gratification 
for us to be obliged to acknowledge the humiliating fact that in 
this, our country, " universal suffrage is a sham where rum rules 
our large cities." We are not governed by the customs of other 
lands or other times. The drinking customs of this country in- 
flict only injury upon our people ; the liquor-saloons of this 
country endanger our free institutions by their corrupting influ- 
ence in the political life of our nation. We Americans are con- 
scious of no blessing that has visited us through the active 
agency of saloon influences. 

CATHOLICS AND PROHIBITION. 

A certain class of Catholics, imbued with erroneous ideas of 
Christian ethics, appear to assume that a man cannot be a good 
Catholic, free from the suspicion of heresy, and ally himself with 
the advocates of prohibition of the liquor-traffic. It is not a 
part of my duty to advocate the cause of prohibitory legisla- 
tion, and I make no plea on this occasion in behalf of prohibi- 
tion. But to assert that a man cannot be a consistent Catholic 
and an earnest prohibitionist is to misrepresent the claims of 
the Catholic faith on the loyalty of its adherents. It may or 
may not be good public policy to advocate prohibition of the 
liquor business. It may not be the best means of suppressing 
intemperance to prohibit the saloon, but it certainly is not con- 
trary to Catholic teachings for an American citizen to cast his 



1893-] INTEMPERANCE: THE EVIL AND THE REMEDY. 15 

ballot and lift up his voice against the existence of such an 
"unbecoming business" anywhere in our midst. 

I think no honest man will assert that the Catholic who ex- 
erts his influence against what his church terms " a dangerous 
business " is not on the safer side for the public good, than the 
man who votes and talks in favor of the " personal liberty " of 
endangering the public welfare by permitting the saloon-power 
to rule over us. The saloon does not exist as a public necessity ; 
its prosperity is an evidence of the people's poverty and sin. 
How often the elegant equipment of the palace of King Alco- 
hol mocks at the poverty and wretchedness of the weak and 
unfortunate creatures whose morbid appetites for drink conquer 
their better natures, and in the presence of the fascinating charms 
of the gilded abode of intemperance they surrender themselves 
completely and are deaf to every appeal of affection or duty. 
It is the duty of good citizenship to remove temptation as far as 
we are able from the weak and the erring. We are not true to 
our duties as good Catholics if we, by our action or negligence, 
place pitfalls of sin in our fellow-men's pathway. 

CATHOLICS AND THE LABORING CLASSES. 

It is the crowning glory of the Catholic Church that, true to 
the spirit of her Divine Founder, she has never become the 
church of any special class, as also she has not permitted her- 
self to be narrowed down as the church of any particular nation 
or generation of men. She is the church of all times, all na- 
tions, and all classes and conditions of men. She is the living 
voice' of God to cheer, instruct, and comfort all the people. But 
in this country, owing to the mighty waves of immigration from 
less fortunate lands, during the past half-century, bearing a noble 
army of toilers to our hospitable shores, the great body of the 
wage-earners, the wealth-producers of this country, the masses 
of the people, crowd around our altars, and with loyal, honest 
hearts appeal to our church to devote her best efforts to their 
moral and spiritual welfare. The great army of labor, the bone 
and sinew of the nation, acknowledges a loyal allegiance to the 
Catholic Church. The debasing, brutalizing influence of exces- 
sive drinking, and saloon environment, falls upon the laboring 
classes of our people with more disastrous effect than upon 
those better favored by fortune. The dreadful vice of intem- 
perance has made frightful havoc among our hard-working Cath- 
olic people. What else but this spendthrift vice could afflict a 
large portion of our people with poverty so hopeless as to be 



16 INTEMPERANCE: THE EVIL AND THE REMEDY. [Oct., 

like an incurable disease a people to whom countless millions 
are yearly paid ? What else huddles so many of them into the 
swarming tenement-houses of our cities ? I make no odious 
comparison between the intemperance of the wealthy and the 
intemperance of the poor. The heathenish vice of drunkenness 
is an abomination wherever its foul presence is known. I only 
state a fact which cannot be set aside ; a fact which the phil- 
anthropist and the statesman cannot ignore, namely, that the 
greatest curse blighting the lives and desecrating the homes of 
the poor in this country to-day is the curse of drink. The 
homes of comfort and luxury are, alas! too often blighted by 
the presence of the demon of intemperance, and drunkenness 
among the wealthier classes of the people is equally odious and 
even more disgraceful than among the poor. But the poor are 
greater sufferers, and hence enlist our deeper sympathy when in- 
temperance blights their lives, for in addition to the heart-ache 
and sorrow which the vice entails equally upon rich and poor, 
it adds the horrors of penury, beggary, and hopeless degradation 
to the lives of the children of toil. 

An inspection of the poor quarters of any city in the land 
will reveal tenement-houses crammed from cellar to roof with 
human beings whose deplorable condition excludes from them 
good and wholesome influences. Most of these wretched people 
are besotted with drink and corrupted with every ugly form of 
depravity. Such people do not become intemperate because they 
live in such dwellings ; they abhor such dwellings until drink 
has robbed them of the sense of decency and shame. Better 
dwellings will never cure intemperance. Drunkenness revels in 
the stately mansion as well as in the tenement row. Poverty 
and misfortune sometimes consign sober and virtuous people to 
close contact with vice, but sobriety and thrift will soon relieve 
the industrious from vicious environment. 

REMEDIES AGAINST INTEMPERANCE. 

The Catholic Church is the most powerful and effective insti- 
tution in the world for the moral elevation of the people. 
To find practical remedies for the emancipation of the masses 
from the slavery of drink, we Catholics need only to apply the 
moral means at our disposal. 

Great and long-standing evils are not remedied in an hour. 
When we have to deal with human passion and human weak- 
ness, when we must conquer bad habits and cure diseased appe- 
ites, our progress will not be rapid, and discouragement and 



1893-] INTEMPERANCE: THE EVIL AND THE REMEDY. 17 

failure will often be our reward. Evil there will always be in 
the world, and human energy must not slumber because wicked- 
ness and sin remain. The people look with longing and hope 
to the Catholic Church to lead them away from the bondage of 
drink. The church that civilized the savage, and that preserved 
the civilization which it erected on the ruins of barbarism, is 
able to rescue the masses of the people in this country to-day 
from the cruel thraldom of drink. The drink-curse is intrenched 
in custom, hence we must follow it into society. At all social 
assemblages of Catholics, let them deny themselves the indul- 
gence in intoxicating liquors, and thus publicly proclaim their 
recognition of the principle of self-denial. At the reunions of 
friends and family connections, whether occasions of joy or of 
sorrow, let Catholics show their horror of drunkenness by deny- 
ing themselves the use of strong drink. There is no gratification 
worthy of a Christian that cannot be enjoyed without the use 
of intoxicating liquors. As an act of reparation for what our 
religion has suffered from intemperance, let our Catholic people 
proscribe intoxicants at all their public gatherings. Let there be 
such an earnest and potent public sentiment among our Catho- 
lic people that no liquor-saloon can crowd itself right up to the 
doors of our churches, and thus by its foul presence tempt weak 
and unwary men to wickedness, under the very shadow of the 
cross. Let there be a sound, healthy, public conviction among 
our Catholic people that it is not much credit to them, and will 
not advance their interests among right-thinking men, to permit 
the saloon-keeper to be their representative, politically or so- 
cially. 

Our Catholic people should cast their ballots and exert their 
political privileges for the enforcement of just and wise laws 
against the abuses and the dangers of the liquor business, and 
for the protection of the young and the habitually intemperate. 

The drink-curse shields itself behind false theories of science, 
and many have been deluded by the false notion that alcohol 
is beneficial to health. Thirty-six States of this Union have, by 
law, made the teaching of true principles of temperance com- 
pulsory in our common schools. Too much importance cannot 
be attached to the practice of inculcating habits of total absti- 
nence among children, and our boys and girls during the dan- 
gerous and trying period of youth. 

If our prelates, priests, and people join hands together to 
work in harmony and strength for the realization, of the admo- 
nitions of our plenary councils, the awful curse of intemperance 
VOL. LVIII. 2 



1 8 INTEMPERANCE: THE EVIL AND THE REMEDY. [Oct. 

can be almost entirely eradicated from among us. We must 
encourage, then, our total-abstinence societies by every means 
at our command. We priests, mindful of Pope Leo's words, 
must " shine as models of abstinence," and by exhortation and 
preaching avert the many calamities with which this vice threa- 
tens church and state. 

In those sanctuaries of affection and virtue, the Christian 
homes of our people, let the sophistries of the advocates of 
alcohol be exposed by sound reasoning ; the temptations and 
dangers of the saloon be carefully exposed ; and let fathers and 
mothers merit for themselves the reward and consolation of 
sober sons and daughters by showing a noble example of self- 
control and sobriety. 

Let there be a general and generous distribution of temper- 
ance literature, tracts, lectures, statistics, and good reading 
among our people. And this work and agitation in favor of 
sobriety and temperance must be constant and active. The 
allurements of drink are ever thrusting themselves in the path- 
way of men. Near to the house of prayer the working-man 
finds the drinking-saloon, cheerful, enticing, and hospitable, as 
he goes to worship God on Sunday morning. Close to the 
gates of the factory or mill the agents of alcohol ply their 
trade, and tempt the weary toiler to spend for a moment's 
gratification his hard-earned money that is much needed in his 
humble home. Surrounded thus by attractive temptations, men 
need constant warnings, repeated admonitions, and such whole- 
some influences as will strengthen and safeguard them against 
the overpowering spell of drink. 

Hundreds of our homeless young men, living in lodging or 
boarding houses, strangers often in a large city, are allured to 
the saloon and fall into habits of dissipation and drink on 
account of the loneliness of their lives and the craving for hu- 
man companionship. We Catholics need some lessons in Chris- 
tian sociability and fraternal charity. By extending a little 
sympathy and kindness, by cultivating better social relations 
among our fellow-Catholics, and by inspiring our young men 
with noble ambitions, and enticing them away from liquor- 
saloons, thousands can be saved from lives of dissipation, reck- 
lessness, and sin. 

JAMES M. CLEARY. 

Minneapolis, Minn. 




STATUE OF THE LATE FATHER DRUMGOOLE. 




THE GREAT MONUMENT AT MOUNT LORETTO. 

HOSE who see with the eyes of the flesh behold with 
wonder and delight the great Statue of Liberty, 
whose electric torch, reaching toward heaven, flings 
its white searching rays afar over the waters of our 
noble New York harbor. It is a splendid figure, typical at once 
of the might and majesty, the grace and intellect of the giant 
motherland. But there is a still prouder monument, invisible 
to the voyager, away beyond there on Staten Island, whose 
torch is fed by " that light that never was on sea or shore/' 



20 THE GREAT MONUMENT AT MOUNT LORETTO. [Oct., 

the light of the charity of God glowing and thrilling and dis- 
tending all the pulses of a great human heart, even when the 
life-blood that fed it had ceased to flow, and suffusing all the 
place with a halo of imperishable glory. Mount Loretto is that 
monument styled, and its pharos is the soul of the saintly Fa- 
ther Drumgoole. 

An earthly grave, it is true, holds all that was earthly of this 
marvellous follower of the Divine Master, and his immortal es- 
sence has returned to its everlasting source. But, in something 
more than a metaphysical sense, that ardent soul of his, filled 
with the consuming love which he bore to God's poor, reigns 
all over the place, and guards the nest which he built there for 
the callow birdlings of this city, whom the hawks of vice and 
misery have orphaned and left parentless and destitute. 

No, there never was a monument like to this. The pyramids 
of Ghizeh may look down upon the wreck of empires with stony 
mystery until the days of the earth are done ; but they guard 
only the ashes of forgotten despots. Even though the homes 
on Staten Island moulder away in lapse of time, or give place 
to the works of a later civilization, the name of the man who 
founded Mount Loretto will go down to the last syllable of re- 
corded time in the great bead-roll of that church which is to 
last, by God's irrevocable decree, ay, even to the very consum- 
mation of the world. 

Pillars and obelisks and arches we freely raise to those who 
save or serve their country on the purple field of war. Deeds 
at which the angels weep are sometimes perpetuated, too, in letters 
of gold on the tall shaft which soars unblushingly in the face 
of heaven. Even perjured infamy has its blazon, 

" Where London's Monument, towering to the skies, 
Like a tall bully, lifts its head and lies." 

But even if the name and work of Father Drumgoole were 
not writ large in the great phalanstery which he raised on 
Staten Island, it will be engraven indelibly here on earth, 
upon the grateful hearts of the thousands whom he has rescued 
from ruin, moral and physical, to the welfare of the state and 
the greater glory of God. 

There is no more striking distinction of the flowing tide of 
Catholicism we are now witnessing than the seeming unfitness 
and incongruity of the selected instruments. It bears a startling 
likeness to the very beginning of the New Dispensation. Men 



1893-] THE GREAT MONUMENT AT MOUNT LORE T TO. 2f 

are called to the Apostolate whose outset in life and early train- 
ing have been wide as the poles asunder from all ideas of a sacer- 





MISSION OF THE IMMACULATE VIRGIN, GREAT JONES ST. AND LAFAYETTE PLACE. 

dotal life. Take the case of the eminent founder of the Paulist 
House. What beginning could possibly have been more unpromis- 
ing? Father Drumgoole's is a still more astonishing instance of 



22 THE GREAT MONUMENT AT MOUNT LOKETTO. [Oct., 

a divinely-aided development from an unexpected origin to a state 
of ministerial potency capable of achieving any great work on 
which the mind was set. An invisible finger, an inaudible voice 
would appear to have summoned such men as unmistakably as 
the Saviour's own human voice did his chosen ones when he 
walked by the Sea of Galilee. 

The believers in the doctrine of " environment " might ad- 
vantageously study the early life of this great priest before they 
put forth any new instances to buttress up their hypotheses. 
The keystone of their philosophy is that the man is the out- 
come of his surroundings, and at one with them. The very con- 
trary was the case with Father Drumgoole. His birth was not 
illustrious ; he was only cradled in virtue and honest indepen- 
dence ; and his lot was cast amongst the poor. Examples of 
how the poor are easily converted into the vicious were con- 
stantly before his eyes. He saw the children of the poor living 
as outcasts on the streets, apt pupils for the school of Satan, 
and familiarity did not breed within him indifference. Environ- 
ment in him brought no assimilation. He could not pass by 
with a shrug of the shoulders when he saw some famished Arab 
looking for a chance to violate the seventh commandment, or 
heard the ribald or profane vocabulary of the gutter from in- 
fantile lips. No ; it was these things which made his heart beat 
fast and his eyes grow dim, from fear and sorrow. To succor 
and befriend the elfish gamins of the street was his delight 
from the days he began to think, and keep them from sin and 
mischief as far as he could. 

Some other pen must write Father Drumgoole's biography, 
however ; here it is only glanced at for the purpose of showing 
how unexpectedly he found himself in later life not only able to 
fulfil his cherished dream of entering God's priesthood, but of 
founding the greatest juvenile home which is known. In all 
probability he had never contemplated the extension of his phil- 
anthropic work over such a vast area as it now covers, else per- 
haps he might have shrunk back in hopeless discouragement 
from its difficulties. It began in a very modest way indeed, but 
little by little, as his devotion became known, and the blessings 
of his labors began to be apparent, he found his hands strength- 
ened as if by supernatural aid ; and it was vouchsafed that he 
should not close his eyes for ever until he had beheld the tiny 
seed he had sown burst from the soil a mighty tree whose shel- 
tering arms and luxuriant foliage were ample to cover all that he 
dared to hope. 



1893-] THE GREAT MONUMENT AT MOUNT LORETTO. 23 

It was at a small home founded by the Society of St. Vin- 
cent de Paul, in Warren Street, New York, that he was enabled 
to make a beginning with his long-cherished project. This was 
in 1873, two years after his ordination. In this house were 
packed all the homeless boys that he could pick up, but so great 
was the number that kept on applying for its shelter day by 



1 




FATHER DOUGHERTY. 

day that the community were soon obliged to rent the adjoining 
house for a similar purpose. Those boys who were big enough 
to work were found situations, their board and bed and relig- 
ious instruction being provided in the house, with school and 
recreation in the evenings. Lord Rosebery, the present English 
minister for foreign affairs, paid a visit to this establishment 
soon after it was started, and having first seen the tiny chapel 
and then the theatre and gymnasium, remarked to Father Drum- 
goole that it was in the chapel that he caught the souls of the 
children, and then entrapped their bodies by means of the recrea- 



24 THE GREAT MONUMENT AT MOUNT LORETTO. [Oct., 

tion hall. But this was only a superficial view of the matter. 
It was by means more directly touching than these that Father 
Drumgoole gained that marvellous hold over the army of boys 
whom he called his own which bound him to their hearts as 
with hoops of steel. He became not only their vicarious parent, 
their nurse, their mentor, their playmate, their provider, but of 
a verity their body-slave. He toiled incessantly in their behalf all 
the time, day and night, that he could spare from his priestly 
duties, and was often known to do even menial work to minister 
to their necessities and their comfort. He played with them as 
one of themselves, and never was so happy as when in their 
midst, the younger gambolling about him and playing little elfish 
tricks with him. Little wonder, then, that he was the idol of 
his very extensive family. Two rules for his home were always 
insisted upon by Father Drumgoole. The child who was abso- 
lutely destitute, applying for admission, must never be refused ; 
the child who, though not destitute, was in a position where his 
faith was endangered, must not be refused. A home for such 
must be provided, though he were to beg the city for them. 
And from these two cardinal principles he never deviated. They 
remain in force still, the unwritten law, if not really the lex 
scripta, of the two houses of " St. Joseph's Union." 

The spiritual welfare of his boys was the one great primary 
object with Father Drumgoole. To prepare them by due in- 
struction for the reception of the Sacraments, he labored with 
an unflagging earnestness that often raised fears for the stability 
of his own physical constitution. In his letters about the home 
in Warren Street he used to dwell with delight upon the num- 
bers of lads whom he had brought into the fold of grace dur- 
ing the year, and the growing proportion of those who ap- 
proached the Sacraments at Eastertide and Christmas. But 
these letters were likewise filled with laments of the inadequacy 
of his home for the ever-increasing needs of the poor. It was 
not alone that all his beds were filled ; the benches, tables, and 
chairs throughout the building were likewise requisitioned now. 
It was for thousands of boys, he saw now, it was necessary to 
provide, not hundreds merely. And those who clamored for 
help were not confined to boys ; he made it a rule to relieve 
the hunger of all who asked food, even though he were to go 
hungry himself. 

To St. Joseph and his blessed spouse he always had recourse 
when his perplexities were most troublous. They, who had the 
care of the Divine Child, knew how his heart went out to the 



1893-] THE GREAT MONUMENT AT MOUNT LORETTO. 25 



homeless children of this great city, and they seemed to him 
to enter into his feelings. Day by day the vision of a great 

home for them all grew in 
his mind's eye, until at last 
it began to take bodily 
shape. The idea of found- 
ing a great institution, which 
he was determined to call 
St. Joseph's Union, at last 
became a concrete fact ; and 
with the approbation and 



'llllr 
Blip- 
"PH.. 




the blessing of the late Car- 
dinal McCloskey he began 
the practical work of found- 
ing a boys' home. Friends 
came to his assistance with 
generous help ; the proceeds 



of a remarkably successful 
bazaar formed a substantial 
nucleus ; the starting of a 
magazine called The Home- 
less Child and Messenger of 
St. Joseph, and the enroll- 



ment of many thousand 
members of St. Joseph's 
Union, in all parts of the 
world, insured a permanent 
source of revenue ; so that 
in about four years after 
the initiation of his project 
he was able to open the fine 



(i) HOME OF FRANCISCAN SISTERS, MOUNT LORETTO ; (2) GATEWAY OF MOUNT 

LORETTO ; (3) ORIGINAL FARM-BUILDINGS AT PLEASANT PLAINS ; 

(4) A DORMITORY AT MOUNT LORETTO. 



26 THE GREAT MONUMENT AT MOUNT LORETTO. [Oct., 



building on Lafayette Place and Great Jones Street with which 
his name is indissolubly identified. This edifice stands on ground 
formerly occupied by the old Protestant church of St. Bartholo- 
mew, and its price was nearly seventy thousand dollars. Its 
consecration was performed by the cardinal-archbishop, and his 
Holiness Leo XIII. sent, through Cardinal Jacobini, his blessing 
on the work. 

Soon afterward the home removed from the old house in 

Warren Street to 
its new and mag- 
nificent quarters. 
Thenceforward the 
work of Father 
Drumgoole seemed 
to prosper and ex- 
tend with a vol- 
ume which denot- 
ed something more 
than an earthly im- 
pulse within it. Be- 
fore long he saw 
the need of a 
branch house, and 
the branch house 
was soon forthcom- 
ing, and on a scale 
which dwarfed the 
parent one into 
the dimensions of 
a mere auxiliary. 
Three large vacant 
farms on Staten 
Island were pur- 
chased, and, consolidated into one great holding, with a field 
farm one mile square, were named Mount Loretto, and solemnly 
dedicated. It is with the methods and achievements of this 
remarkable institution that one would be tempted to deal at 
some length proportionate to their importance. But, in truth, 
so great an undertaking as this would deserve a chronicle all to 
itself ; the most that a single magazine article can aspire to do 
is to let the outside world have a glimpse of the great educa- 
tional and moral work going on there from day to day. 

It does not give any clear idea of Mount Loretto to say it is 




MOUNT LOKETTO CHURCH. 



1893-] THE GREAT MONUMENT AT MOUNT LORETTO. 27 

a place where a couple of thousand young persons find a home 
all the year round. The bare buildings and accommodations for 
these must indeed be extensive and imposing. But when one 
seeks to realize it as a place where every equipment, not merely 
for viva voce and object-lesson instruction has to be provided 
for many hundreds of children, but for the practical work of young 
mechanics like those serving their apprenticeships in great com- 
mercial workshops and factories, and where many branches of 
useful handicraft are systematically taught, and every modern 
mechanical appliance utilized in the teaching, so that the young 
workman when he goes out upon the world of trade shall not 
find himself a novice dealing with new and strange machinery 
and methods of production it is no small task, even with the 
advantage of a " personally-conducted " tour through the maze 
of buildings, to grasp the meaning of such an institution as 
Mount Loretto. If some idea of all this can be got at length 
from an inspection of the ranges of workshops and other build- 
ings, some dim notion may then be formed of the herculean 
task which Father Drumgoole faced in getting this vast scheme 
of beneficence organized, established, and planted there on 
Staten Island in practical operation. Of course it would be 
physically impossible for one man to do all this. He had the 
help of other devoted priests, such as Father Dougherty, the 
present head of the institution ; Father McNicholl, and Father 
Cassidy. The administration of the whole is under the care of 
forty-nine Sisters of the Order of St. Francis. It is upon their 
shoulders that the task of keeping this mighty engine in motion 
now devolves. To Father Drumgoole belongs the honor of ori- 
ginating and planning this noble offering to God and humanity. 
Our illustrations will give some notion of the vastness and 
variety of the workshops and industrial buildings which are 
scattered over the extent of " Pleasant Plains," as the holdings 
in their entirety are called. Still, in order to gain a real know- 
ledge of their wide extent and amazing variety a personal pro- 
gress over Mount Loretto is necessary. It will be perceived at 
once that the task of constantly feeding, clothing, bedding, and 
instructing in field and workshop the legion of youthful pupils 
and toilers congregated there is approached in an intelligent 
way. Adequacy and method are the two leading principles in 
the application of means. The working of the farm subserves 
the double purpose of furnishing agricultural instruction and 
food for the producers an object-lesson of the most practical 
kind. Those who cultivate small kitchen-gardens at their homes 



28 



THE GREAT MONUMENT AT MOUNT LORETTO. [Oct., 



can comprehend the pleasure which the sight of what one sows 
and watches over from the budding to the maturing gives the 
cultivator. The raising of 
live stock is also attend- 
ed to on the farm, and 
the necessary supplies of 
milk and fresh meat are 
drawn to a considerable 
extent from this native 
source. The farm-stock, 




machinery, and mills 
needed for the work- 
ing of this agricultural 
school are on a large 
scale ; and the work- 
ing of this branch of 
the institution forms a 
great industry in itself. 



(i) BARN AT MOUNT LORETTO; ( 2 ) PARADE OF BOYS AT MOUNT LORETTO; 
(3) AND ( 4 ) STOCK- YARD AND FARM-BUILDINGS AT MOUNT LORETTO. 



1893-] THE GREAT MONUMENT AT MOUNT LORETTO. 29 

There is a huge barn, sufficient, one would think, to form a 
granary for an army ; and the number of farm-buildings of 
other kinds scattered all over the place make a very imposing 
display. The great dairy is a model of brightness, and is fur- 
nished with the most improved appliances for the making of 
butter and cheese. 

Then, the bakery. No sinecure the office of commissariat- 
master where there are so many mouths to feed, and the baker's 
department is not the least considerable in this huge hive. It 
is a large building, and filled with the latest make of machinery 
for the production of the " staff of life." It is by machinery 
that the process of kneading is performed, instead of the human 
knuckles and sometimes horresco referens ! the human feet. 
From thirteen hundred to fifteen hundred loaves are turned out 
of this bakehouse- every day. The bread is exquisitely white and 
fine, and the baking unexceptionable. 

Amongst the curiosities of the place are a great hennery, 
with a steam incubator which hatches a thousand chickens at a 
time ; four artesian wells, from whence is derived the water which 
furnishes the steam-power, and a model kitchen-garden and flower- 
garden. These supply all the culinary and floral needs of the es- 
tablishment and the magnificent church which ministers to its spiri- 
tual wants. The engraving of the exterior of this building which is 
given enables the reader to form some idea of its style, if not 
of its proportions. Its size may be estimated from the fact that it 
easily accommodates all the denizens of Mount Loretto. A 
model was selected for this church by his Holiness the present 
Pope, of whom it is a memorial. 

The Trades' School is a conspicuous piece of architecture at the 
north side of the main quadrangle. Its dimensions are ample, and 
the number of mechanical arts taught here by no means inconsider- 
able. The lower story is devoted to the sawing, planing, moulding, 
and carving of timber ; and it will be noted that some of the hand- 
carving here shown is exceedingly fine. On another story is a 
great shoe-factory, wherein are made all the shoon required for 
the boys, and in the manufacture of which machinery alone is 
employed save in the case of some half-dozen old men who 
find refuge here, regular old shoemakers of the classic-pattern 
who sew their work and hammer it out in the way which dates 
from the Flood. All the clothes for the boys are similarly made 
in another great workshop ; another is devoted to knitting socks 
and vests, the machines again coming into play in either case. 
Engineering, printing, upholstering, and butchering are likewise 



3o THE GREA7^ MONUMENT AT MOUNT LORETTO. [Oct., 

taught in this building, and all by the most experienced instrucr 
tors that money can procure. Stenography and typewriting 
have likewise their classes. The class for music is also held in 




this building, and it contains a library and reading-room, and a 
couple of excellent billiard-tables for the recreation of the older 
lads. 

A walk through the spotlessly clean dormitories of Mount 
Loretto makes no trifling promenade in itself, but it is a pleas- 



1893-] THE GREAT MONUMENT AT MOUNT LORETTO. 31 

ant one. The mode in which the beds are arranged, the neat- 
ness and airiness of the whole place, give one an idea at once 
of cheerfulness, health, and pleasant rest for the well-cared 
young fellows who inhabit the ranges. These buildings are all 
only one story each above the ground-floor, so that in case of 
fire there could be little danger of loss of life, from the great 
number of the windows and their slight elevation. 

A dining-hall which easily accommodates seven or eight 
hundred diners forms an imposing feature in the Mount Loretto 
main building, and the kitchen which supplies such an enor- 
mous table is not the least interesting object. All the cooking 
here is done by steam. It is wonderful to see the rows of 
great joints of meat which are treated, and the deft me- 
chanical contrivances for the various processes of cooking. As 
all the inmates, as a rule, possess robust appetites, the care of 
the larder at Mount Loretto is no trifling responsibility. 

Military drill forms part of the course for the bigger boys. 
At tuck of drum they come from the playground and form in 
battalions on the parade-square, where they are put through 
their evolutions by skilful veterans. Patriotism is a feeling which 
is sedulously cultivated ; they are taught to look with pride on 
the flag of the Union, as well as prepared to do their part as 
men in defence of it, should the grim necessity unhappily ever 
arise. The martial strains of their fine bands would do credit 
to many a crack corps of musicians. 

The sheltering wings of Mount Loretto cover many more, 
the more in need of their shelter because the more helpless. 
There is a Blind Asylum for destitute girls, and there is a Home 
for Girls, dedicated to St. Elizabeth ; where from three to four 
hundred little ones are maintained and brought up as Catholic girls 
should be, under the gentle care of the Franciscan sisterhood. 
In the instruction of these little ones the kindergarten system is 
largely utilized. No pleasure could be to many minds greater 
than that afforded by the spectacle of these bright and happy 
little girls going through their pretty exercises. There is such 
a droll mixture of the wise and the elfish about their playful 
evolutions and their quaint singing and recitation, that one is 
insensibly reminded of the old tales of the gnomes and the 
fairies of the old country. 

The merely material achievements of this work of Father 
Drumgoole's since its foundation are immense in their signifi- 
cance. In round numbers, already about twenty thousand 
children have been provided for by the mission, and sent out 



32 THE GREAT MONUMENT AT MOUNT LORETTO. [Oct., 



to fight life's battle fortified with the armor of faith and the 
self-reliance begotten of skill in manly labor. But this is not 
all. The outdoor relief dispensed by his charities has been on 
an enormous scale. Over two hundred thousand persons are 
fed and helped with clothes and necessaries every year. On 
each of the great feasts of the church the poor are given an 
excellent dinner. As many as fourteen hundred persons have 
on some of these days been fed at these generous tables. The 
parent house in Lafayette Place, besides training between six 

and seven hundred 
boys constantly, 
provides those who 
have gone out upon 
the world as young 
workmen with a 
splendid home, 
where they are free 
from the dangers 
and temptations of 
a great city, and 
at a minimum cost. 
It will at once 
be recognized that 
an undertaking so 
vast and all-em- 
bracing as this 
needs a great rev- 
enue to maintain it 
in a state of effi- 
ciency. Whence 
does it derive its 
funds ? Nothing, it 
should be borne 
in mind, is looked 
for as a result of 

the boys' labor as mechanics; all the substantial results are ap- 
plied to the boys' own advantage. The bulk of the revenue, 
wonderful to say, is obtained by means of the press. On the 
premises at Mount Loretto is printed a yearly magazine enti- 
tled The Messenger of St. Joseph. It is the mouthpiece of an 
organization founded by Father Drumgoole and named St. Jo- 
seph's Union. The ramifications of this organization extend all 



ACCLAMATIONS OF GREAT JOT 




JUBILEE CELEBRATION AT FEMALE ORPHANAGE, 
MOUNT LORETTO. 



1893-] THE GREAT MONUMENT AT MOUNT LORE T TO. 33 

over the globe, and the subscriptions to the magazine and the 
bounty of friends of the institution furnish its mainstay. 

One more light in which this wonderful institution rivets our 
attention. It is the one great effectual shield and breastwork 
against the miasmatic evils of proselytism. Hunger and want 
have been at all times the allies upon whom the insidious oily 
proselytizer relied, knowing well the ordinary weakness of frail 
humanity when the wolf is at the door. The number of human 
souls which Father Drumgoole's interposition has been able to 
save for God, only the ledgers of heaven can tell the task was 
impossible for human book-keeping. 

A trinity of great names represents in especial the active 
and all-pitying charity of the church in our own day. They 
are those of Dom Bosco, Father Damien, and Father Drum- 
goole. All three were very great friends in life, and much 
correspondence passed between them. Those names are now 
immortal and ineffaceable. 

In his quiet grave at Mount Loretto, in a sweet sequestered 
spot chosen by himself, the founder of the noble institution 
rests in his last earthly sleep. But the fragrance of his memory 
floats as a sweet perfume ever about the place, and the light 
of his spirit ever guides the way of those who have taken up 
the work which he in Heaven's good time laid down. 

JOHN J. O'SHEA. 




VOL. LVIII, 




34 THE MAJOR. [Oct., 



THE MAJOR. 

'HE principal street in Pequod began at the foot 
of a hill and meandered leisurely past the post- 
office and general store, the bakery, two saloons, 
a dozen cottages of unequal size and varied 
architecture, until it reached a larger hill. 
There it made a wide detour, appearing again on its upward 
way broadened and smoothed and gravelled, with a plank walk 
at one side and a rocky path on the other, shaded by large 
elms, and hedged in by a general air of prosperity and exclu- 
siveness as befitted its rising fortunes. At the top of the hill 
it ended abruptly at the entrance to the Pequod Grand Hotel, 
an imposing and very modern structure, with its verandas and 
turrets and balconies dazzling with fresh paint. The flag of 
the country waved and flapped, or hung pensively idle, from 
the pole reaching to dignified heights -above the tower, pro- 
claiming to the world that for three months of the year the 
Grand Hotel was the home of the brave, if they were able to 
afford it, in the land of the free. 

The equality of the people who found rest and presumable 
recreation under its much-gabled expanse of roof was doubtful. 
Their status in the eyes of the landlord was determined by the 
totals of their weekly bills. From the point of view of the 
guests it depended on the amount of money or its collateral 
possessed by the payers of the bills, and on the way in which 
the money was made. On the first and second counts Major 
Hawkins was invulnerable ; his totals were large and so was his 
fortune. In addition to occupying the best suite of rooms in 
the house, he tipped liberally and on all occasions ; but on the 
third count he was lamentably lacking. As this conviction was 
slowly borne in upon his inner consciousness about the second 
week of his stay, he indulged in some angry imprecations sotto 
voce, and used language that a Georgetown professor of rhetoric 
would have pronounced shocking. 

He had made his money, he told himself, by the exercise 
of brains and pluck of the finest kind ; he paid his debts, kept 
his word, was true to his friends, and generally managed to get 
even with his enemies ; and what more could be expected of a 
man who began life at fourteen with twenty-five cents capital, 



1 893-] THE MAJOR. 35 

and a pair of shoes, to be worn on Sundays and state occasions, 
that were not mates? He owed his present success in life, he 
was not backward in asserting, to the rule of doing as well as 
it could be done whatever fell to his lot to do. His first posi- 
tion job he called it was that of taking the horses from a 
livery stable to water at a little creek which ran through his 
native village. He watered those horses at the regular time, de- 
spite all the seductions of a dog-fight or of a circus-wagon. 
Then he became attached to the fortunes of a celebrated race- 
horse ; from that he speedily attained to the coveted honor of 
being a jockey. His horse generally won, so that his employers 
and the book-makers began to regard him as a sort of a mas- 
cot ; their rivals offered sundry and tempting inducements to 
get the youth into their service, but he was loyal to his 
master. Through varied stages, all inseparably connected with 
the race-course, he rose to his enviable position as owner and 
book-maker one of the magnates that contributed so largely to 
the national amusement. There was nothing in all the world 
that he loved so dearly as he loved a horse. Until this un- 
lucky summer, when a threatened breakdown and the impera- 
tive orders of his physician banished him from all excitement, he 
had not realized that money made on horses was not quite a 
fit associate for money made in another kind of stock watered 
on Wall Street. He had selected Pequod because a favorite 
racer was, like himself, in need of repairs, and was undergoing 
them at a famous horse-farm in the neighborhood a sort of 
equine hospital and to be near this interesting invalid, which 
he had raised from a frisky colt, he was recuperating at the 
Pequod Grand Hotel. 

Major Hawkins was naturally of a social turn of mind, and 
nothing would have delighted him more than to take part in 
the quiet little games of cards which went on in the parlor, or 
to bear his proportion of the expenses of the picnics and ex- 
cursions around the country. But he never was invited. At 
first he thought it was on account of his being a stranger ; but 
when he saw other strangers received into the inner circles of 
the coterie, he began to examine himself to discover the cause 
of his exclusion. He could not see that any one had better 
clothes than he, or spent money more freely. He wore the 
shiniest of silk hats and the jauntiest of sack-coats, and carried 
the whitest of diamond scarf-pins on his expansive bosom. Not 
having a mind capable of descending to petty details, he did 
not perceive that his combinations of attire were somewhat 



3 6 THE MAJOR. [Oct., 

original. He saw no reason why a man should not wear a cap 
and a frock-coat, or a silk hat and a flannel suit, or a beloved 
scarf-pin with all costumes. Had he thought of the matter at 
all, he would have explained the absence of diamonds on the 
forms of the men he saw by the abundance of them on the 
forms of their wives. He had never before spent a summer at a 
quiet country hotel, given over to the wants of pater and mater 
familias, with their numerous olive branches ; to maiden ladies 
with side curls and hobbies, and to beardless youths being 
speedily developed into pronounced cephalologians from the 
amount of feminine adulation bestowed on their lightest word 
and some of their words were extremely light, thought the 
major contemptuously. 

Major Hawkins had spent his summers, since reaching years 
of affluence, at Long Branch or Saratoga, or other popular re- 
sorts, where he was never at a loss for plenty of friends men 
of his own sort, and women too. He did not care anything 
about women as women ; long ago he had married, and the 
marriage had not been happy, so that when death left him free 
from connubial bonds he gave no thought to ever renewing 
them. 

But he pined for companionship for some one with whom to 
talk over the races, the political situation, to go driving and 
play poker, and linger over the old wines he ordered down 
from New York. Life at Pequod was not altogether happy, 
although the air was fine, and the regular hours he was forced 
to keep were undeniably doing him good. And as for Creole 
Beauty, she was positively growing more bewitching every day. 
So he decided to endure his loneliness for the prescribed period. 

In regard to his title, no one knew less than he did himself 
as to its origin. He had been rejected during the war on ac- 
count of supposed weak lungs, and he had never stayed in one 
place long enough to belong to a militia company. But he had 
a luxuriant moustache which drooped in the inimitable military 
way, and an air which insured obedience from his subordinates ; 
so a major he became and a major he remained. 

It was this involuntary isolation from his fellow-men that 
opened the way to the major's intimacy with the village chil- 
dren, who during the long, hot summer days came to play at the 
spring. The spring was on land still in dispute between the 
hotel people and the trustees of a proposed church ; the matter 
was to be settled by that mysterious power called the law, but 
in the meantime children from the village and children from 



1 893.] THE MAJOR. 37 

the hotel met on what would probably be the only common 
ground of their lives. The major revenged himself on hotel 
parents by refusing to have anything to do with the hotel chil- 
dren ; but for the little ones of the village he proved a veritable 
Prince Charming. Never had they revelled in such quantities 
of stale candy and weak lemonade and foaming soda-water and 
pink ice-cream ; never had the little old woman who kept the 
bakery, and sold thread and needles and postage-stamps and 
candy, made money so rapidly and so continuously. The hotel 
people had an unaccountable prejudice against village commerce 
as represented by the bakery woman, and their darlings only 
ate the candy which came direct from the big city. Among 
the children in the major's train was one little dark-eyed girl, 
with tangled hair inclined to curl, a freckle on her nose, and 
two fronf; teeth in the process of coming through her red gums 
a little girl who lisped on account of the missing teeth, and 
said "Yeth, ma'am," " Yeth, thir," "If you please., thir," in the 
most captivating, childlike way to the major's witticisms. Her 
name was Nell, and she lived with her grandmother in the 
smallest of the cottages. 

Nell's mother had been the village beauty until she disap- 
peared one day with a young man named Durand, who had 
spent a month at the hotel in the interests, he claimed, of a 
proposed land company. Three year later she returned in the 
last stages of consumption, bringing her baby with her, and 
wearing a faded widow's cap. Then she died, and nothing 
more was ever learned by the villagers of her history. They 
resented this secrecy as an infringement on their rights to know 
all about each other's affairs, but they were good to the baby, 
who played in the lonely cottage and pattered about among 
the chickens her grandmother raised for the early spring market. 

" Well, Nellie, what shall it be to-day chocolate-drops or 
taffy?" called the major cheerily as he met his favorite at the 
post-office. 

" If you pleath, thir, I like pink ith-cream, thir," said the 
little girl, looking up with a smile of bon-comradeship into the 
honest, kindly face of the major. Then with her small, dirty 
hand clasped in the major's big, clean one, she trotted along 
chatting confidently about the chickens, and a doll that was 
sick, until the bakery was reached, and the pink ice-cream rose 
like an enchanted pyramid before her ; then she relapsed into a 
sphinx-like silence until the pyramid was no more. 

This appetite for pink ice-cream, so out of proportion to 



38 THE MAJOR. [Oct., 

the rest of the diminutive personage, was a constant puzzle to 
the major. But girls were a puzzle anyhow, he thought. 

The days wore away pleasantly enough for him now, until a 
day came when Nellie was not at the spring. On inquiry he 
learned that Nell's grandmother was ill, and a week later the 
news was brought to him by a dozen awe-struck little urchins 
that the grandmother was dead. 

After the bustle of the old woman's funeral had subsided 
the question which agitated the Pequod natives was the question 
of Nell's future. The Baptist minister's wife, a motherly soul 
with nine blessings of her own, took the orphan to her heart 
and home until it could be determined what was to be her 
fate. But this arrangement obviously could not be permanent ; 
another mouth to feed, another pair of feet to keep in shoes, 
another little body to clothe it was simply impossible ; but for 
a few days she was glad to give the child a shelter. 

Soon it was rumored in the village that there was to be a 
sale to dispose of the grandmother's effects, the money to go 
to Nell, after the outstanding debts, should there be any, were 
paid. No one apprehended any debts, however ; the old woman 
was not the kind to make debts. The money for the funeral 
had been found in a broken pitcher, painted all over with fat 
little shepherdesses, and filled with a bunch of paper flowers. 
No one would have dreamed of looking there for money, but 
Nell, when asked where her grandmother kept her pocket-book, 
marched to the pitcher and handed Mrs. Burt a roll of bills 
enough, and more than enough, for the modest funeral. 

Mrs. Hart said that she would buy the silver spoons out of 
pure charity for the orphan, provided they sold them cheap ; 
the spoons had been used a long while, and they never had 
weighed a great deal ; besides everybody knew spoons always 
went for a mere song at a sale ; not but what she hoped every- 
thing would bring a good price for the sake of that poor child 
who didn't have a relative or a soul on earth belonging to her, 
unless her pa, that nobody knew anything about, had some folks. 
Mrs. Jinks said she might buy the parlor table and the carpet ; 
the table was real nice, and the carpet almost as good as new, 
although nobody ought ever to buy a carpet at a sale unless 
out of charity. 

And the other neighbors, presuming on the report of the 
sale, made it an excuse for tramping through the poor little 
cottage, strangely silent and uncanny in its desertion ; there 
was the old clock ticking away steadily ; the queer orna- 



1 893.] THE MAJOR. 39 

ments all dust-covered ; the faded ingrain carpet still show- 
ing the marks of a muddy shoe which would never have been 
allowed on its bright surface during the lifetime of the owner ; 
on the table coveted by Mrs. Jinks was the family Bible be- 
tween two upright candlesticks, keeping guard like sentinels ; 
over the mantel were chromos of Washington and the Three 
Graces, and some faded photographs framed in straw. The 
kitchen seemed more hospitable, with the sun streaming through 
its chintz curtains, the rows of pots and pans shining in orderly 
array on the shelf. Everything was humble and plain and cheap, 
but it had been a home with its little joys and sorrows, its 
placid, peaceful existence, and twice in a decade it had wit- 
nessed the supreme tragedy of every life the falling of the 
curtain in death. Outside the geraniums, the hardy roses, the 
phlox, and the marigolds were drooping and thirsty for their 
daily supply of water. The chickens were cared for tenderly 
by a neighboring widow, who thought she might buy them if 
the price were not too great. 

Gradually the question of Nell's future made its way to the 
great hotel, and a half-dozen ladies who headed committees for 
all sorts of charities in their city homes banded together to do 
something for the child ; all the while deprecating the fate 
which forced charity work on them during the hottest days in 
August. One of them wrote to an orphan asylum in which she 
was interested, but the answer came back promptly that there 
were too many applicants already, and that Pequod should be 
made to understand that it must take care of its own orphans. 
Then a subscription list was thought of ; and on the first night 
of the major's return from a business trip to New York he 
was approached by Mrs. Van Horton Brown, a lady who had 
hitherto ignored his very existence, and solicited to attach his 
signature to a sum more or less liberal for the orphan. He re- 
fused with more force than politeness, and left the worthy ma- 
tron wondering at the hypocrisy of human nature as exempli- 
fied by questionable widowers, who pretended a fondness for 
children and would not give even five dollars to keep the wolf 
from an orphan's door. 

After dinner the major donned his silk hat as being more in 
keeping with the solemn occasion, since he could not forego a 
seersucker coat with the thermometer at ninety, and made his 
way to the minister's, where he was told he would find Nell. 

The visit was eminently satisfactory to all concerned ; good 
Mrs. Harlan, with a roll of the major's bank-notes in her hand, 



40 THE MAJOR. [Oct., 

was only too willing to keep the child indefinitely. And when 
Nell put her arms around his neck and cried, he vowed by all 
the most binding vows he knew that she should never want for 
anything while he had a dollar, nor go to that insufferable Mrs. 
Brown's orphan asylum either. 

In a day or two the major was off again. The fall racing 
was nearing its season, and there were many things to be looked 
after. This time the object of his journey was to see the direc- 
tors of a fair association in a little hamlet on his way to New 
York, and decide whether their fair would be worthy of a trot- 
ting match for Creole Beauty. In a suburb of this thriving town 
there was a modest brick building hedged in with rows of ma- 
ples and slender willows, and with a smooth, sloping lawn dotted 
with bright flower-beds ; the major had long known in a vague 
way that this was a boarding-school for girls in charge of sis- 
ters, but the matter had never concerned him ; he knew noth- 
ing about girls, and was not interested in nuns ; they were good 
women sacrificing their lives for a world that lacked a great 
deal, in his estimation, of being worthy of the sacrifice ; but 
that was their affair, not his. Now it suddenly occurred to him 
that this was the very place for Nellie Durand. After deciding 
a plan he did not usually lose any time in acting upon it, so 
on his way to the depot from the fair grounds he stopped at 
the cross-surmounted gate. He liked the looks of the place, 
and he liked better the looks of the superior who entered the 
parlor in response to his summons. 

After an interview, short but very much to the point, the 
sisters agreed to receive the little girl as a pupil, to give her a 
home during the vacations or as long as it would be required. 
The compensation asked seemed so ridiculously small in the 
eyes of the major that he got reckless and said : " Put in all 
the extra fixings, Mother, music and singing and painting, and 
all the frills your girls learn ; I don't know anything about such 
things myself, but I believe girls and women like them, and I 
like a song myself if it's got any tune to it. And get her 
whatever clothes she needs, and I'll pay the bills. She's a 'cute 
sort of a youngster, and I ain't got anybody of my own that's 
got any claims on me, and I'll take care of this little one." 

And thus, by a propitious turn in the wheel of her fortune, 
Nellie Durand found herself domiciled as the youngest pupil in 
this pleasant convent-school. On the second day after her 
arrival she wrote, with much painstaking, a letter which was 
preserved for years in a pigeon-hole of the major's desk : 



1893-] THE MAJOR. 41 

" deer mager ; i like it Hear ; i like mother josuf and i like 
the girls wun naimed mari give me some candy i like her i like 
you moar than eny body i can play kroka 

yore Loving littel girl 

Nellie Durand." 

The next missive showed a decided improvement over this 
one, and the major suspected that such rapid strides in spelling 
and the use of capitals were only brought about by the judi- 
cious assistance of a teacher. 

Every week a letter came telling of the simple joys and am- 
bitions of the convent ; of her studies and her teachers and her 
schoolmates. Occasionally he answered one, and two or three 
times a year, when he happened to be in the neighborhood 
anything under a hundred miles was the neighborhood to the 
major he paid the child a visit. At Christmas he ordered a 
box sent to her with candy and fruit and cake enough to ban- 
quet the school. He would have bought her jewelry and furs 
and hats, only that the mother superior told him that such 
things were forbidden to the pupils, and that they were not 
becoming for children, and that he had better leave Nell's 
wardrobe to the sister, which he did accordingly. 

The years went by uneventfully enough, judged by the hur- 
rying standards of the world, but marked by the usual happenings 
of growing girlhood for Nell. She had the mumps and the 
measles and the whooping-cough, and the other complaints of a 
well-regulated childhood ; she won prizes, and sometimes got 
into trouble and was put in penance; she was the champion 
tennis-player ; the best pianist, the poorest scientist in the 
school. 

And before the major realized the number of summers that 
were passing over his head, his girl he always thought of Nell 
as " my girl " wrote that she had been promoted to the gradu- 
ating class and would finish the following year. 

" Bless my soul ! is it possible ? " said the major, looking at 
the letter. " Well, time don't stand still, nor girls neither, and 
I guess she's thinking herself a woman ; bless me ! I don't know 
what to do with her when she gets out of school ; she might 
study medicine or something, or go to Europe." As a reward 
for her promotion Nellie was given permission to spend a part 
of her vacation with a schoolmate who lived in Brooklyn. 

The summer burst upon the world, outwardly as beautiful as 
ever, but with terror in its train ; the terrible scourge of the 
cholera was upon the land ; an infected ship from a foreign 



42 THE MAJOR. [Oct., 

port had brought the fatal germ, and whilst it was held in leash 
by the watch-dogs of science and self-sacrifice, every heart was 
trembling. Business was at a standstill ; the rich hied away to 
the mountains and the pure air of the country ; the poor hud- 
dled together on their door-steps or in the streets, and talked 
with bated breath of the monster whose approach was daily 
dreaded. There were some who scoffed at the idea of the 
cholera getting a foothold in a land so well guarded ; with 
physicians so able, health commissioners so alert, sanitary pre- 
cautions so many; and among these was the major. He was 
rushing hither and thither over the country making engagements 
for his horses, and securing investments just as if the cholera 
were some far-off myth of the Middle Ages, that could not 
touch this decade of science and progress, of care and of com- 
mon sense. 

The exigencies of his calling took him to a little hamlet in 
the interior of the State off the main line of travel, and reached 
only by a local train making one leisurely trip a day. He was 
not feeling very well, and tired and hungry, and not especially 
amiable he never was when he was hungry he went to a vine- 
embowered inn, dignified with the name of the Continental Ho- 
tel, and ordered his supper sent to his room. 

After smoking a cigar he tumbled heavily into bed, wonder- 
ing vaguely if he were getting another confounded bilious at- 
tack, all unconscious of the hoarse murmur that was gathering 
on the evening air. A negro was reported dying in one of the 
alley-ways, and it was whispered with white lips that cholera 
was the disease. 

About ten o'clock that night, as the men were gathered in 
excited groups on the hotel veranda, the report came that the 
negro was dead. Then terror broke loose. The cholera was 
upon them. A panic ensued differing from other panics only in 
size ; there were not people enough to endanger life and limb 
when they all rushed into the streets, the soberest for the time 
demented. Flight was the thought uppermost in every mind; 
the little train would come up in the early morning, perhaps on 
its last trip ; for who could tell what regulations the quarantine 
officers would impose, and then escape would be impossible; 
to the mountains, to the very top where it was always cold, 
they would go camp out or beg or borrow or steal their way, 
it mattered not when life was at stake. 

The waiters in the Continental Hotel threw down their 
aprons and prepared their little belongings ; the cook deserted 



1893-] THE MAJOR. 43 

the kitchen, the maids vanished, and when the major, about 
midnight, rang his bell long and loudly there was no response. 
He was burning with thirst and his head ached ; he got up ; he 
must have water, but he was so dizzy he could hardly stand. 
A death-like silence was about the place ; he shouted, but only 
the corridor brought back the echo ; then he swore, but not 
with his usual vim, for he was feeling strangely ill, and then he 
staggered back to bed. It seemed an eternity he lay there, 
longing for, dreaming of water. Towards morning, when the 
faint red streaks of an approaching day came through the blinds, 
footsteps were heard going rapidly through the halls ; he shout- 
ed with all his might, and after a few moments the landlord, 
then locking up his house and preparing for flight, came to the 
door of his forgotten guest. He turned the knob and stepped 
into the room, but one glance at the ghastly-looking occupant 
of the bed, and he turned and fled as if the very air bred con- 
tagion. 

Hastily he gathered his needed effects, locked his hotel, and 
left the sick man to die. What else could he do ? The cholera 
made short work of its victims, and why should he risk his life 
for a man he never saw until yesterday? 

When the morning train came steaming into the rough brown 
station every person in the village able to raise the funds for 
transportation was waiting to be carried away anywhere out of 
the stricken town. In an hour the telegraph wires flashed the 
news of the cholera, and the afternoon papers reproduced it with 
startling head-lines. There was one paragraph tucked away 
among the sporting items telling to the world, which cared so 
little for him, that Major Hawkins, the popular book-maker and 
connoisseur in race-horses, had been stricken with the dread 
scourge, and was dying or dead in the deserted village. 

Dead ! yes he was surely dead. He had died and gone to 
some infernal region where all the torments he had ever heard 
of were concentrated in one terrible thirst. Water! only water! 
He was faint from loss of food, but he was not even conscious 
of that. His thoughts went back to the spring which bubbled 
up so clearly near the Pequod Hotel, and with that image be- 
fore him he nearly went mad. Was heaven a land bubbling 
over with just such springs? Heaven! he had not thought 
much of heaven ; religion had not been in his line, he said to 
himself. And was this the end of his life, to lie here and die 
all alone, not one friend near? Then a great wave of self-pity 
swept over his heart he had not had a fair chance; life had 



44 THE MAJOR. [Oct., 

been a struggle, a weary struggle for money; then for more 
money, because he knew nothing else. There had been enjoy- 
mentsor he had called them enjoyments at the time ban- 
quets to celebrate a great victory on the race-course, when the 
popping of champagne corks mingled with the loud laughter 
of his companions, and when the heavy, heated air reeked with 
the odors of costly havanas, and the jokes, not always the clean- 
est, went round. There had been envyings and jealousies, and 
that one little domestic episode too stormy to cause regret. 
For the most part he had been homeless, living in hotels and 
boarding-houses ; running about the country, making acquain- 
tances in plenty, but hardly one friend who would miss him 
three weeks after he was gone. Was this life ? Was this the 
best he could have done with the chances which for good or 
bad were now over? What good to others, what good to him- 
self, had they brought? Then he thought of Nell the one be- 
ing in all the world who would miss him, and she would not 
miss him for long, he had seen so little of her since she grew 
up ; but at least he had taken care of her when she had no 
other protector, and that was something to be glad of when he 
faced that unknown gulf between the Whence and the Whither 
now slowly and relentlessly closing about him ; that was one 
meritorious act, at least, when he would stand before the God 
he had almost forgotten, to meet the judgment of each thought 
and word and deed. The cold drops started from his brow ; he 
was so cold and yet so intolerably hot at the same time. Was 
this death ? Ah ! the cholera was surely upon him had he been 
buried alive ? Then his senses cleared, and again he thought of 
Nell. What would become of the child when he was gone? 
She would be penniless ; for he remembered with much poignant 
regret that he had made no will ; he had meant to make one ; 
he wanted to provide for the girl ; but he had put it off, and 
now some distant cousins, whom he had never even seen, would 
come into his property, leaving the child, who really loved him, 
penniless. 

Oh, for one day! just one day of active potent life; he 
would do so much ! Was he dreaming ? Was that a noise in 
the house ? Had the landlord come back ? Was he dead ? Was 
he crazy ? Surely there was somebody coming. 4< My God, send 
me help ! " 

Quick, rapid footsteps, the sound of opening and closing 
doors, as of one in search of something, then the footsteps ap- 
proached his own door ; he tried to call, but the words stuck in 



1 893.] THE MAJOR. 45 

his throat, then the door opened Had an angel come down 
from heaven in answer to his prayer, or was it Nellie bending 
over him ? 

Quickly the girl brought water, sparkling in a crystal pitch- 
er, that seemed nectar from Paradise. She went unchallenged 
through the deserted and silent house, foraging in pantry and 
kitchen, and returned with a broth which she forced between 
the parched lips. Nor had she come empty-handed ; some 
medicines, and a book of directions, had been hastily secured ; 
but of one thing she was positive, the major did not have the 
cholera ; the symptoms were not what her book called for, and 
she was puzzled as to what to do. But she fell on her knees 
and prayed with all the fervor of her desolate soul for help and 
guidance. 

" Nellie little girl my good angel ! " gasped the sick man, 
"you have risked your life for me, and I am leaving you penni- 
less. I neglected to make a will, and now it is too late." 

" Dear major, don't think of me ! Don't think of money, or 
anything like that ; you are very, very ill perhaps you will die 
and you must think of God and of your soul. You have been 
so good to me our Lord will reward you for it I am sure, but 
we all have our sins, and you must be sorry now with all your 
heart for everything that offended God ; you didn't mean to 
offend him I know." 

She stroked his clammy brow and chafed his hands, talking 
to him with simple earnestness, repeating the truths of her little 
catechism and the counsels of her beloved teachers. 

But the major did not die. The doctor who was summoned 
from New York said he had malarial fever, and that the negro 
had probably died from any one of a hundred things excluding 
cholera. After a week the patient was able to be moved, and 
the doctor's certificate enabled him to enter again the land of 
the living. His convalescence was rapid under the devoted 
nursing of Nell ; but long before he was able to sit up he sent 
for a lawyer and had the papers drawn up for a formal adop- 
tion of the girl. He declared that he owed, not only his life to 
her, but the deliverance from such a hell that no man could 
ever go through a second time without becoming crazy. He re- 
gretted that the adoption had not been made earlier, but then 
the child was young, scarcely seventeen, and she would soon 
get accustomed to a change which, after all, would practically 
be only a change of name. 

After graduating with highest honors in the following June, 



46 THE MAJOR. [Oct., 

delivering a tearful valedictory, and bearing away an armful of 
prizes, Nellie went to a finishing school for the simple reason 
that there seemed to be no other place to go. The major had 
some little trouble in entering her at a suitable school ; applica- 
tions to several well-known institutions resulted in a polite re- 
gret that they were full, after the antecedents and present voca- 
tion of the major were investigated. 

Another year passed when business called him West, and, as 
Nell had never been beyond the Alleghanies, he resolved to take 
her with him. 

She now called him papa, with the prettiest accent in public, 
but in private she still clung to the old title of major. They 
stopped off at Ovington to see a famous stock-farm where rivals 
of the blue grass region were said to thrive. 

The major was delighted with Ovington. A place which be- 
gan with forty inhabitants, a baker's dozen of houses and three 
saloons, and grew in twenty-one years into a regular city with 
forty thousand inhabitants, electric lights, street railways, magni- 
ficent private mansions, represented an achievement which ap- 
pealed to his love of enterprise ; there was a certain analogy, 
he was not slow in thinking, between Ovington and his own 
life. Nell shared his enthusiasm, and her enthusiasm took a 
practical turn ; she had acquired from the major the way of do- 
ing a thing quickly, and doing it well, that appealed to her 
sense or her inclination. She explored the residence quarter of 
Ovington during the major's visits to the stock-farm, and at the 
end of the second day she said in her most persuasive tones : 

" Major, you like Ovington, and I like Ovington ; there is the 
loveliest house for sale up on Ray Avenue, awfully cheap ; sup- 
pose we buy it and settle down. You could get a stock-farm 
and have all the horses you like ; maybe they would sell the 
Horton farm they say it is mortgaged ; you have no ties in the 
East, and everything is charming here." 

The proposition figuratively, if not actually, took the major's 
breath away. 

" Why, Nellie, what an idea ! " he ejaculated, adjusting his 
spectacles to see if she were really in earnest. "Who would 
have thought of such a thing? But then you always were a mas- 
ter-hand at planning ; but it is absurd, my dear, perfectly absurd 
of course it is." 

At noon the following day he announced that it was not a 
bad idea, not a bad idea at all, about that house, but not to be 
thought of. At night he admitted that he had been up to see 



1893-] THE MAJOR. 47 

the place ; that it was a grand house, going for a song, and that 
he might buy it as a speculation. In the meantime an enter- 
prising reporter had heard of Major Hawkins and his contem- 
plated purchase of Ovington real estate. The real estate men 
heard of him about the same time. A half-column article in the 
Herald described him as a capitalist from the East ; he was in- 
terviewed and his opinions solicited on all things pertaining to 
the West ; together with the opinions, there appeared a eulogy 
of himself which made him glow with satisfaction. It was grati- 
fying to be a keen, alert capitalist, eminently a man of affairs, 
combining the shrewdness of the East with the breezy, off-hand, 
cordial manner of the West. 

"You can cut that piece out, Nell, for your scrap-book. 
That reporter is an enterprising chap, and a mighty fine fellow." 

At the end of the week the major had purchased the Ray 
Street house, the Horton stock-farm ; had been introduced at 
the Valhalla Club, and invited to dinner by the ex-owner of the 
house. He had paid cash for his purchases, and a man capable 
of doing that needed no other recommendation. A year after 
Major Hawkins and Nell had taken up their abode in Oving- 
ton the city was called upon to receive and entertain a party 
of distinguished visitors from the East. They were business 
men with their wives and daughters, who were travelling in a 
special car on a leisurely tour to the Pacific coast. They were 
to be the guests of the Board of Trade, and a prominent fea- 
ture of their entertainment was to be a reception and ball at 
the Valhalla Club. Heading the reception committee of leading 
citizens was the name of Major Hawkins, and notable among 
the bevy of matrons and maids delegated to do the honors of 
the club was Miss Helen Durand-Hawkins. 

Such was the name engraved on her visiting cards. The ma- 
jor had smiled humorously when he first saw the cards with the 
hyphenated and imposing name, but the smile had a touch of 
fond pride. 

There was one little ripple that disturbed the serenity of this 
young lady, and that was the major's persistence in wearing his 
flashing pin on all occasions. Not for all the diamonds in the 
State would she hurt the feelings of the kind old man to whom 
she owed everything ; but, being a person of some inventive 
genius and of a well- developed determination, she believed that 
the obnoxious pin, for this auspicious occasion, could be gotten 
rid of in some way. 

On the evening of the reception she emerged from her blue- 



48 THE MAJOR. [Oct., 

and-gold room resplendent in a gown which had made the ma- 
jor stare when the bill was presented, but he was not displeased. 
On the contrary, he seemed to take a sort of pride in the fact 
that this girl could spend money about as liberally as any girl 
in the city. 

" I don't know what these gimcracks cost, Nell, but get the 
best. I want Miss Helen Durand-Hawkins to be the belle of 
the ball. There ain't anything too good for a girl with such a 
name as that," he added, with a twinkle in his eyes. 

She knocked at the major's door, and found that gentleman 
trying earnestly to get his tie into the proper loop. After de- 
manding and receiving the admiration due her gown, she with 
deft fingers adjusted the tie. 

" Really, major, you are quite too irresistible in your new 
dress clothes ; I am afraid Mrs. Dawson already has designs on 
you, and I don't want a step-mother coming in here." 

The major chuckled ; the question of marriage was as foreign 
to him as the question of becoming king of England, but 
nevertheless it gratified his vanity to be teased about the pret- 
tiest and most attractive widow in Ovington. And still talking, 
Nell adroitly possessed herself of the pin. The major did not 
miss his treasure until he was already at the club. Among the 
visitors was Mrs Van Horton Brown, and with her Major Haw- 
kins went into supper. That lady peered over her lorgnette at 
the tall, beautiful girl with the receiving party, trying to recall 
where she had seen that face or whom it resembled, but her 
memory played her false. The major remembered her perfectly, 
although he gave no sign ; but her presence recalled old memo- 
ries. His thoughts were a complex mingling of the past and 
the present ; the wandering, unsatisfactory life he had led, and 
the new era which had come to him in his declining years. It 
was something to be a "leading citizen" the phrase gave him 
vivid pleasure of a thriving city like Ovington, and to have a 
beautiful, happy home. 

And he owed everything, life and all, so he told himself, to 
Nell to a little barefooted girl, with a freckle on her nose, who 
liked " pink ith-cream, if you pleath, thir." 

It was in pursuance of this train of thought that he confided 
to Mrs. Dawson : " I'll bet a Nancy Hanks against a mule that 
there ain't a finer girl between New York and Frisco than my 
Nell." 

LELIA HARDIN BUGG. 




1 893.] THE TRUTH ABOUT THE JEWS IN SPAIN. 49 



THE TRUTH ABOUT THE JEWS IN SPAIN, 
i 

HE situation in Spain when the Catholic monarchs, 
Ferdinand and Isabella, ascended their thrones 
called for their closest attention. What policy 
should then be adopted by them to repair the 
ravages of preceding reigns and give to the na- 
tion the stability needed as a basis for its aggrandizement in 
the future, was the problem presenting itself for solution. It 
was their desire to establish a national unity founded on the 
creation of three other unities ; to wit, of territory, of religion, 
and of gor^fament. 

To bring about territorial unity it was indispensable to drive 
the Arab power out of Spain, and thereby complete the work of 
the Reconquest and put an end to causes likely to provoke new 
invasions or break up in any way the nation's territory. 

To accomplish religious unity the only way was to discourage 
the religious contentions which kept the nation in disturbance 
and led to frequent scenes of bloodshed. 

The purpose of political unity required the establishment of 
permanent tribunals to assist the crown in the government of 
its realms, and, moreover, the co-operation of competent men in 
the different branches of public administration. 

The reforms and undertakings of Dona Isabel of Castile and 
Don Ferdinand of Aragon had for their aim to satisfy those 
three needs. 

The capture of Granada, which crowned with brilliant success 
the national struggle for the Reconquest, made an end of Moor- 
ish dominion, but the fall of the last bulwark of Islamism in 
Spain could not be regarded as complete unless the causes which 
had promoted the Saracenic invasion were also removed for 
ever. 

The insidious endeavors of the Jews to get possession of 
the stronghold of Gibraltar gave unmistakable evidence of new 
perils for the national integrality. Should it be a matter of sur- 
prise if, under these circumstances, the Catholic sovereigns 
viewed the expulsion of the Jews as necessary to complete the 
Reconquest and a guarantee of the independence of Spain ? 

In order to arrive at religious unity, disturbed by Judaism, 
which, Proteus-like, ever kept changing its form, was it not in- 
VOL. LVIII. 4 



50 THE TRUTH ABOUT THE JEWS IN SPAIN. [Oct., 

dispensable to get rid of what was left of the Hebrew race, 
having no element of political vitality left except what served 
as a leaven of conspiracy? 

But the situation was complicated by the presence of the 
converts from Judaism, for, while it was against justice to im- 
plicate all these in the reprobation incurred by the Crypto-Jews, 
it was not permissible to allow the latter, under cover of a 
false conversion, to plot against the safety of the state and to 
provoke popular tumult. 

Hence it seemed fit to establish a high tribunal, thoroughly 
competent to take cognizance of questions of a religious charac- 
ter, and which, strictly impartial in dealing with proceedings of 
so delicate a nature, was to attend solely and exclusively to the 
maintenance, of purity in the faith. This idea gave rise to the es- 
tablishment of the Royal Supreme Council of the Inquisition as 
a permanent tribunal. 

The judicious historian Colmenares, in giving an account of 
the creation of the supreme councils of state and of finance of 
Castile and of Aragon, states : " There was besides wanting a 
tribunal or council having in charge, specially and closely, to in- 
vestigate causes involving religion and to serve as a firm foun- 
dation for peace in the realms. The monarchs desired it and 
were instigated to accomplish the purpose by the great cardi- 
nal of Spain. It was accordingly carried out in the Cortes,* 
which established a council entitled ' the General Supreme In- 
quisition.' "f 

It is not opportune here to pass judgment either on the 
proceedings or the abuses of this much calumniated institution ; 
we confine ourselves to narrating how it originated, not accom- 
panied with arbitrary action nor violence of any sort, but, on 
the contrary, motived by a desire to prevent disorder by not 
allowing any private citizen to take upon himself to pass judg- 
ment in religious matters. This was an important and delicate 
judicial function requiring authority and ability, both of which 
the Catholic monarchs proposed that this new tribunal, created 
by a bull of Sixtus V. in 14824 should duly possess. 

While seeking a solution of the questions touching converts 
from Judaism, that of the scant population of publicly professed 
Jews remained unsettled. They were wretched, everywhere 

* Toledo, in 1480. \Historia de Segovia, chap. 34, p. 18. 

\ The following books are reliable works of reference in regard to the institution above 
named : La Inquisicitn, by Don Juan Manuel Orti y Lara. Historia verdadera de la Inquisi- 
tion, by Don Francisco Xavier Garcia Rodrigo. La Inquisition Espanola, by Rev. Father 
Ricardo Cappa. 



1 893.] THE TRUTH ABOUT THE JEWS IN SPAIN. 51 

looked upon with aversion, subject to nefarious attempts to way- 
lay them, and were objects" of violence from every quarter. 
Judging from the habitually benevolent disposition evinced by 
the Catholic monarchs, they must no doubt have been very so- 
licitous in regard to disposing of the case of their Jewish sub- 
jects ; but things had reached such an extremity that their per- 
manent stay in Spain had become utterly impossible. While 
their case was, so to speak, on the tapis, the complaints alleged 
against them were aggravated by a most dreadful incident. We 
refer to the murder or martyrdom of Juan de Pasamonte, more 
commonly known under the name of El santo niiio de la Guardia 
(the holy boy of la Guardia), perpetrated in Holy Week of 1490.* 
The circumstances attendant on this crime, in which the scenes 
of the Passion of our Blessed Redeemer were parodied with re- 
volting mimicry, aroused furious protestations, which, had the 
murder taken place previous to the reforms carried out by the 
Catholic monarchs, would assuredly have caused the spilling of 
much blood. After the surrender of Granada, on January 2, 
1492, there remained for the victorious sovereigns, in order to 
complete their work, to pronounce final sentence in the trial, set 
on foot several centuries before, of the Hebrew race. The sen- 
tence was not delayed. On the 3ist of March of that same 
year that famous edict was promulgated in Granada by virtue 
of which all unbaptized Jews were ordered to leave the realms 
within a period of four months. 

This edict, if examined impartially, deserves to rank as a 
memorable document because of the spirit of rectitude resplen- 
dent in it, by which the Catholic monarchs were animated 
throughout their proceedings. They set out in it by deploring 
the evils resulting from the intercourse of Christians with Jews 
which had led, in the Cortes of Toledo, to an enactment order- 
ing Jews in all towns, cities, and other places to be separated 
from Christians, and that Jewries and localities for separate habita- 
tion be assigned to them, *' in which they were to dwell in their 
sin, and in their segregation be led to remorse." 

This enactment not having sufficed to put a stop to the evil, 
the Inquisition was established, by means of which it was ascer- 
tained that the evil resulting to Christians from intercourse with 
Jews was indeed very great. It was averred against the latter 
" that they boasted of unceasingly trying to corrupt the faithful 

* The original trial records are in existence and preserved at Alcala, and the subject of 
this murder has been treated by Tepes, in his Historia del Santo Nino de la Guardia (Ma- 
drid, 1582); also by Don Adolfo de Castro in Vidas de Ninos celebres (Cadiz, 1865). 



52 THE TRUTH ABOUT THE JEWS IN SPAIN. [Oct., 

in order to entice them into their eternally reprobated belief or 
opinion." The monarchs having concluded that "the true re- 
medy for all these evils and difficulties lay in a complete cutting 
off of intercourse between Christians and Jews," by expelling 
the latter from the kingdoms, even went so far in their lenient 
spirit as to confine the order of expulsion to the cities and 
places of Andalusia " where it appears they have done most 
detriment, believing that thereby their coreligionists in other 
towns, cities, and places in the kingdom would cease doing and 
committing the evil practices aforesaid." But as neither meas- 
ures formerly taken, nor the punishments inflicted on certain 
Jews " who have been found most guilty of said crimes and 
transgressions," have availed " for a thorough cure," the mon- 
archs, counselled by the prelates, grandees, and gentry of their 
realms, and by personages of science and conscience, "after 
having given the matter much deliberation," decreed the entire 
expulsion of the Jews, to take place in the term of four months, 
during which " they might arrange for the best disposition of 
their persons and property." To this end their majesties took 
and received them under their care and protection to enable them 
in the period aforesaid " to go about in safety and attend to real- 
izing, by sale or barter, all their personal and real property, and 
to disposing of them freely as they pleased." Finally their 
majesties, moved by feelings of most elevated justice, granted 
" permission and privilege for the removal, by sea or by land, 
from their realms and dependencies, of the emigrants' goods and 
chattels ; provided, however, that these last be not such as are 
prohibited by the laws of the kingdom." 

The measure determined on by royal authority was certainly 
rigorous, but their majesties tried, through really paternal solici- 
tude, to mitigate its severity. They aimed at making it quite 
patent that their resolve had not been actuated by hatred of 
the Jewish race, but through their love of their Christian sub- 
jects and their duty to insure the welfare of their dominions. 

At the expiration of the time appointed the emigration of 
the Jews in Castile and Aragon began. Many moved into Por- 
tugal, some into Navarre ; such as lived in the Basque provinces 
embarked at Santander and Laredo ; residents of Toledo, Mur- 
cia, and La Mancha left by way of Cadiz, Malaga, and Cartha- 
gena; those belonging to Aragon by way of Valencia, Tortosa, 
Tarragona, and Barcelona; some directed their steps to Africa, 
others to Naples, Venice, Greece, and Roumania; a few even 
went as far as the Turkish Empire. 



1 893.] THE TRUTH ABOUT THE JEWS IN SPAIN. 53 

They met nowhere with violence; but rather, on the contra- 
ry, wherever they passed they were treated with great benign- 
ity, and " were constantly," as an ocular witness states, " in- 
vited to be baptized ; some were converted and journeyed no 
further." * 

How numerous were these expelled subjects the learned Se- 
ftor Amador de los Rios, whose good will towards the Jews is 
shown particularly in the third ' volume of his work, states va- 
rious figures from 400,000 down to as low as 90,000, and then, 
yielding to the force of truth, exclaims: "The amount apparent- 
ly most reliable is open to fluctuation ; hence, with such a di- 
versity of figures, it is impossible at the present day to name a 
number which can be accepted as the certain one." 

It may be inferred from the fact that Jewish writers have 
quoted on this question the highest figures that, as was natural, 
they have sought to exaggerate. The chronicler of the Catholic 
monarchs, commonly known as El Cur a de los Palacios, relates 
that a Jew from Vittoria, whom he baptized, told him that there 
were in Spain when the edict of expulsion was promulgated 
over 160,000 Hebrews. 

These figures, which some accept as authentic, indicate, not 
the number of Jews who left Spain, but the total in the coun- 
try at the time. If we subtract therefrom a part representing 
the convert's probable exaggeration, and deduct also the number 
who, sincerely or otherwise, received baptism in order to avoid 
leaving Spain, we are led to the conclusion that the aggregate 
number of banished Jews cannot have been other than relatively 
insignificant. 

The charges brought against the Catholic sovereigns because 
of the measure of expulsion are the following : 

1. That their action in the matter was despotic, and had 
been taken without consulting the Cortes of the kingdom. 

2. That they showed themselves ungrateful and disloyal 
towards the Jews, who had rendered them important services. 

3. That the expulsion resulted disastrously for the commerce, 
agriculture, and productive industry of the kingdom. 

4. That it led to the depopulation of Spain. 

If the edict be considered in connection with the above 
points of accusation, and if all the historic facts which brought 

*Cura de los Palacios, Cronica de los Reyes Catolicos, chap. 112. This same chronicler 
relates that the women and lads were made by the rabbis to sing and play on timbrels and 
tambourines, to cheer up their coreligionists, and were made to believe that God designed to 
free them from captivity and lead them to the promised land (chap. no). 



54 THE TRUTH ABOUT THE JEWS IN SPAIN. [Oct., 

the measure about be recalled, the rejoinder is as plain and 
categorical as can be desired. 

All historians, including even those most severe in their 
judgment of the expulsion, concede that it was a measure " de- 
manded by public feeling."* Even Amador feels himself con- 
strained to admit that the measure was entered upon neither 
prematurely nor precipitately, but, on the contrary, as a natu- 
ral effect of an unmistakable and uncompromising public 
opinion. The chroniclers of that period declared the measure 
to have been highly popular and that warm poetic praise was 
awarded it in verse. On what grounds, then, can the measure 
be claimed to have been an arbitrary one ? If the Cortes re- 
flected public sentiment, and during entire centuries had been 
calling for rigorous measures against the Hebrew flock, where 
does the dictatorial feature appear ? 

The charge of ungrateful and disloyal treatment of the Jews 
does not need to be dwelt upon. For whatever service ren- 
dered by them to the cause of the Reconquest they got paid 
in return ; they are not folks to render services for nothing.f 
To suppose that what they did was out of love and loyalty to 
their adopted country would be indeed an egregious miscon- 
ception. 

It is a proven fact that no act of disloyalty, treachery, or 
conspiracy took place in which they were not involved as par- 
ties to it. Was their closing attempt to get possession of Gib- 
raltar deserving of much gratitude ? 

The expulsion was not disastrous either to agriculture or 
trade, because it can be proved that the Jews expelled were in 
general poor, of scant culture, engaged in small trade, the in- 
ferior remains of a broken-up population of which the rich 
and most influential part had at that time become converts. 

But setting the above view aside, if the Jews compelled to 

* Don Modesto Lafuenta, Historia general de Espana, book iv. chapter 8. 

t Senor Amador, in order to prove the ungratefulness of Ferdinand and Isabella towards 
the Jews, goes so far as to attribute to a convert, Luis de Santangel, no less than the dis- 
covery of the New World because he lent seventeen thousand ducats for Columbus's undertak- 
ing; "a native of Aragon," he says, "of Hebrew stock, carried away by an enthusiasm as 
great as that of Isabella, and taking a part equally active, intelligent, and glorious in the pro- 
ject, offered cheerfully to lend to the monarchs," etc., etc. History has recently thrown light 
on this fact, and reveals that Santangel was not a Jew, but of Hebrew stock ; he acted in this 
matter as if he were the former, for the money he lent brought him good increase when re- 
turned, and documents are in existence showing that the amount lent by him was repaid with 
accrued interest. He neither participated in the noble enthusiasm of the queen, nor is his 
intervention in Columbus's enterprise deserving to be ranked as glorious (Coleccion dedocu- 
mentos ineditos relatives al descubrimiento, conquista y organisation de los antiguos posesio- 
nes Espanoles de Ultramar Collection of unpublished documents relative to the discovery, 
conquest, and organization of Spanish ultramarine possessions.) 



l8 93-] THE TRUTH ABOUT THE JEWS IN SPAIN. 55 

leave were so prominent in agriculture and productive industry, 
how came it to pass that the countries in which they afterwards 
established themselves did not become resplendent with the 
fruits of Jewish intelligence, activity, and culture ? The industry 
marvellously exploited by that race was dealing in money, 
which does not make nations either prosperous or happy.* 
In this view, Barcia, a modern writer and free-thinker, after 
having published statistics about the Jewish population of Eu- 
rope, adds : " This statistical table shows that the greater or 
lesser amount of Jewish population is proportionate with the 
higher or lower degree of civilization of the countries in which 
they reside. Russia is to-day the European nation having the 
largest number of Jewish inhabitants.'^ 

Neither Spanish culture nor national wealth suffered loss as 
a consequence of the expulsion of 1492. This is sufficiently 
demonstrated by facts. Our golden era began at even time 
with the disappearance of the Hebrew population from Spain. 
During the very days when the Jews were quitting Spain Colum- 
bus sailed from the port of Palos to discover a new world and 
thereby to greatly extend the dominions of Spain. 

The population of Spain was, numerically, little affected by 
the departure of the foreign element above mentioned. The 
Hebrews were, in fact, ever strangers in our country, which on 
the other hand was enlarged and became mightier by the con- 
quest of the splendid kingdom of Granada, and was benefited 
by the country's peace due to the Catholic sovereigns and by 
their judicious statesmanship. The depopulation of Spain was 
caused mainly by the discovery of the American continent. 
That event is open neither to lamentation nor condemnation, 
because great deeds are achieved at the price of the heroes' 
blood who achieve them ; the glories and grandeurs of nations 
cost heavy and dolorous sacrifices. " The pelican was formerly 
supposed to exhaust and weaken itself by feeding its progeny 
with blood from its own breast ; Spain, the mother country, 
was America's pelican.":): 

*Zurita, the reliable chronicler of Aragon, states : " Usury and gains constituted the law 
most reverenced and adored by that nation (the Hebrew) and in which it most sincerely be- 
lieves." The truthful Curate of los Palacios says : " None of them was ever known to till the 
earth, nor earn a living as a laborer, carpenter, or mason ; all of them were on the lookout 
for soft offices and ways to make money by little work ; they were a very subtle folk, usually 
living by many gains and usuries got out of the Christians, and in a short time such of them 
as began poor became rich " (chap. 112). 

f Nuevo diccionario etimologico de la lengua Castillana. 

\La Edad media comparada con los tiempos modernos, by the Right Rev. Father 
Jacinto Martinez, Bishop of Havana, vol. ii. p. 125, Madrid, 1873. 



56 THE TRUTH ABOUT THE JEWS IN SPAIN. [Oct., 

We have stated already that the expulsion of the Jews 
formed the completion of the Reconquest, and the following 
question properly comes up: When, in 1568, the Moriscos, 
assisted by their brethren in Africa, revolted in the Alpujarras 
Mountains, resolved to re-establish the Mohammedan dominion, 
what would likely have been the conduct of such domestic foes 
as the Jews if they had remained in Spain ? And during the 
religious wars which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 
inundated Europe with blood, to what great danger would not 
the peace of Spain have been exposed, " threatened by the Cal- 
vinists of France on one side, and by the Lutherans of Eng- 
land on the other, if both of these could have relied on such 
efficacious allies as the Jews in the interior and on the coasts ?" 

It remains for us to prove that the expulsion was a gain for 
the Hebrews themselves. The learned academician, Sefior Me- 
nendez Pelayo, furnishes us with the evidence of this proposi- 
tion in brief and eloquent words. " The edict of expulsion," he 
says, " was necessary in order to save that unfortunate race from 
the unceasing and fierce menaces of popular uprisings." It is 
very easy to assert, as does a certain writer, " that the Catholic 
monarchs should have opposed a barrier to the current of in- 
tolerance," but who will undertake to resist a sentiment pre- 
vailing through an entire nation ? With the passions of the 
multitude excited to the highest point who could have prevent- 
ed a repetition of the massacres of 1391 ? "The decision come 
to by the Catholic monarchs," says, in conclusion, this historian, 
"was the only one to be taken, and was the completion of a 
historic law." 

MANUEL PEREZ VILLAMIL. 




1893-] THE SUPREME END AND OFFICE OF RELIGION. 57 



THE SUPREME END AND OFFICE OF RELIGION, 
i 

HE end and office of religion is to direct the as- 
pirations of the soul towards an infinite good, 
and to secure a perfect fruition. Man's long- 
ings for perfect wisdom, love, and joy are not 
aberrations of the intelligence, or morbid condi- 
tions of --any kind ; they are not purely subjective, blind reach- 
ings forth towards nothing. They are most real life, excited in- 
to activity by the infinite reality of the Supreme Being, the 
most loving God, calling his creature to union with himself. In 
studying the office of religion we therefore engage in the inves- 
tigation of the highest order of facts, and weigh and measure 
the most precious products of human conduct man's endeavors 
to approach his ideal condition. 

Reason, if well directed, dedicates our best efforts to pro- 
gress towards perfect life ; and if religion be of the right kind, 
under its influence all human life becomes sensitive to the touch 
of the divine life from which it sprung. The definition of per- 
fect religious life is, therefore, equivalent to that of most real 
life ; the human spirit moving towards perfect wisdom and joy 
by instinct of the divine Spirit acting upon it both in the inner 
and outer order of existence. 

REGENERATION. 

But man's ideal is more than human. Man would never be 
content to strive after what is no better than his own best self. 
The longing towards virtue and happiness is for the reception 
of a superior, a divine existence. The end of religion is regen- 
eration. 

Otherwise stated, religion has not done its work with the 
effacement of sin and the restoration of the integrity of nature. 
It has indeed this remedial office, but its highest power is trans- 
formative : it is the elixir of a new and divine life. The su- 
preme office of religion is regeneration. 

To remit actual sin is not the main purpose of religion, but 
rather to remedy that first evil by which our race lost its super- 
natural and divine dignity the evil called original sin. And this 
is the meaning of Christianity's great word, Regeneration. It is 
not only said " Unless ye repent," but also " Unless ye are born 



58 THE SUPREME END AND OFFICE OF RELIGION. [Oct., 

again, ye cannot enter into the kingdom of God"; "born of 
water and of the Holy Ghost "; " born, not of blood, nor of 
the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God." 

The supreme end of religion is not emancipation, but regen- 
eration. As among the Romans, when a citizen emancipated 
his slave he by that act conferred citizenship on him, so the 
pardon of sin by Christ is not only remission, but also adoption 
among the sons of God. 

That gift from above known as the grace of Christ does not 
simply break the fetters of sin, it ennobles the slave with the 
dynastic dignity of God. Thus the value of grace is essential 
in its transforming power, accidental in its cleansing power, or 
its power of reconciliation. 

The final end of all created existence is the glory of God in 
his office of Creator. As man is a micro-cosmos, so the human 
nature of the God-man, Jesus Christ, is the culminating point at 
which the creative act attains to its summit and receives its last 
perfection. In that humanity, and through it in the Deity with 
which it is one person, we all are called to share. The supreme 
end and office of religion is to bring about that union and to 
make it perfect. 

THE NEW LIFE. 

" The justification of a wicked man is his translation from 
the state in which man is born as a son of the first Adam, in- 
to the state of grace and adoption of the sons of God by the 
second Adam, Jesus Christ our Saviour." These words of the 
Council of Trent affirm that the boon of God's favor is not 
merely restoration to humanity's natural innocence. God's friend- 
ship for man is elevation to a state higher than nature's highest, 
and infinitely so, and yet a dignity towards which all men are 
drawn by the unseen attraction of divine grace, and towards 
which in their better moments they consciously strive, however 
feebly and blindly. 

Religion, as understood by Christianity, means new life for 
man, different life, additional life. " He breathed into his face 
the breath of life." What life? What life did Christ mean 
when he said, " I am come that they may have life and may 
have it more abundantly"? Is it merely the fulness of the 
natural life of man? No, but a superior and transcendent life, 
which is nothing less than the natural life of God, given to man 
to elevate him to a participation in the Deity into a plane of 
existence which naturally belongs to God alone. 



1893-] THE SUPREME END AND OFFICE OF RELIGION. 59 

In the breathing forth in Eden, the Holy Spirit, God's life 
and breath, passed into man. Mark the second breathing: 
" Breathing upon them, he said, * Receive ye the Holy Ghost.' " 
And this is what St. Paul means when he says, " For us, we 
have the mind of Christ " (I. Cor. ii. 16). The Christian mind 
is thus to be discovered and tested by comparison with the high- 
est standard : " Be ye perfect, as your heavenly Father is per- 
fect." 

Before coming to the ways and means and processes of ac- 
quiring this divine life, we must consider 

ATONEMENT FOR SIN. 

It may be asked, Why does Christ elevate us to union with 
his Father through suffering? The answer is that God is deal- 
ing with a race which has degraded itself with rebellion and 
with crime, which naturally involve suffering. 

God's purpose is now just what it was in the beginning, to 
communicate himself to each human being, and to do it per- 
sonally, elevating men to brotherhood with his own divine Son, 
making them partakers of the same grace which dwells in the 
soul of Christ, and shares hereafter in the same blessedness 
which he possesses with the Father. To accomplish this pur- 
pose God originally constituted man in a supernatural con- 
dition of divine favor. That lost by sin, God, by an act of 
grace yet more signal, places his Son in the circumstances of 
humiliation and suffering due to sin. This is the order of atone- 
ment, a word which has come to signify a mediation through 
suffering, although the etymological meaning of it is bringing 
together into one. Mediation is now, as ever before, the con- 
stant and final purpose of God's loving dealing with us. We 
are saved, not only by Christ's death, but, says the Apostle, 
" being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life " (Rom. v. 10). 

Understand atonement thus, and you know as a sinner should 
what mediation means. Understand mediation thus, and you 
know as a child of God should what a calamity sin is. 

In the present order of things atonement is first, but origi- 
nally mediation, as it was the primary need of imperfect nature, 
was likewise God's initial work. As things are, too, the gift of 
righteousness through sharing the cross of Christ elevates man 
to a degree of merit impossible if the gift were purely and sim- 
ply a boon. 

A mistaken view of this matter of atonement is to be guard- 
ed against. For if there is any calamity surpassing the loss of 



60 THE SUPREME END AND OFFICE OF RELIGION. [Oct., 

consciousness of sin, it is the loss of consciousness of human 
dignity. If I must believe a lie, I had rather not choose the 
monstrous one that I am totally depraved. I had rather be a 
Pelagian than a Predestinarian. But neither of these is right. 
Christ and his church are right, and they insist that the divine 
life and light are communicated to us as being sinners, and in 
an order of things both painful to nature and superior to it, 
and yet will allow no one to say that any man is or can be 
totally depraved. 

Hence St. Paul : " I rejoice in my infirmity." Not that sor- 
row is joy, or is in itself anything but misfortune ; but that in 
the order of atonement it is turned into joy by restoring us to 
the divine sonship. 

Religion is positive. It makes me good with Christ's good- 
ness. Religion does essentially more than rid me of evil. In 
the mansions of the Father, Sorrow opens the outer door of the 
atrium in which I am pardoned, and Love leads to the throne- 
room. If forgiveness and union be distinct, it is only as we 
think of them, for to God they are one. And this is to be 
noted : all infants who pass into Heaven through the laver of 
regeneration have had no conscious experience of pardon of 
any kind, and yet will consciously enjoy the union of filiation 
for ever. Nor can it be denied that there are multitudes of 
adults whose sanctification has had no conscious process of the 
remission of grave sin, for many such have never been guilty 
of it. To excite them to a fictitious sense of sinfulness is un- 
truthful, unjust, and unchristian. Hounding innocent souls into 
the company of demons is false zeal and is cruel. Yet with 
some it seems the supreme end and office of religion. This ex- 
plains the revolt of many, and their bitter resentment against 
the ministers and ordinances of religion, sometimes extending 
to the God whose caricature has been seated before their eyes 
on the throne of false judgment. No order of life needs truth- 
fulness, strict and exact in every detail, so much as that known 
as the religious. The church is the pillar and ground of truth. 
The supreme end and office of religion is not the expiation of 
sin, but elevation to union with God. 

PARDON AND LOVE. 

The expiation of sin is the removal of an obstacle to our 
union with God. Nothing hinders the progress of guileless or 
repentant souls, even their peace of mind, more than prevalent 
misconceptions on this point. Freed from sin, many fall under 



1 893.] THE SUPREME END AND OFFICE OF RELIGION. 61 

the delusion that all is done ; not to commit sin is assumed to be 
the end of religion. In reality pardon is but the initial work of 
grace, and even pardon is not possible without the gift of love. 

The sufferings of Christ, as well as whatever is of a peniten- 
tial influence in his religion, is not in the nature of merely pay- 
ing a penalty, but is chiefly an offering of love. Atonement is 
related to mediation as its condition and not as its essence. 
Thus viewed the sufferings of the King of Martyrs manifest in 
an indescribably pathetic manner the holiness of God's law, the 
evil of sin, and the divine compassion for the sinner. 

Pardon, we repeat, considered solely by itself, is the removal 
of an obstacle to our advancement into the divine order. The 
completion of man's being is his glorification in the Godhead: 
this is the answer to those who are shocked at the thought that 
Christ came into the world as a mere sin victim. Christ's sor- 
row is indeed our atonement, but the end he had in view is the 
ecstatic joy of the union of human nature with the divine na- 
ture. We are washed in the Redeemer's blood, but that blood 
does not remain on the surface ; it penetrates us and sanctifies 
our own blood, mingling with it. We are not ransomed only 
but ennobled. 

THE PROCESS. 

The process, on man's part, of union with God is free and 
loving acceptance of all his invitations, inner and outer, natural 
and revealed, organic and personal. This is affirmed by the 
dogma of Trent : " Justification is not solely the remission of 
sins, but is the sanctification and renewal of the inner man by 
the voluntary reception of grace and gifts." The main practical 
lesson of which is that love, the unitive virtue, reigns supreme in 
Christian life, which is the union of the divine and human. 
Love is a virtue as supremely necessary for pardon as for per- 
fection. And if obedience be required it should be perfect 
or instinctive obedience. The instinct of rational obedience is 
love. Who obeys who keeps the commandments ? " He that 
loveth me, keepeth my words." " I ran in the way of thy com- 
mandments when thou didst enlarge my heart" (Ps. 118). 

And love is the full meaning of the word spiritual, when 
used in description of religious character : " filled with the Holy 
Spirit," "born of the Holy Spirit," "led by the Spirit of God." 

Loving God is the practical element in our reception of the 
Holy Spirit. The fruition of love is union with the beloved. 
If tro be regenerated means to be born of God, then what is to 



62 THE SUPREME END AND OFFICE OF RELIGION. [Oct., 

be sought after is newness of life by the immediate contact 
with life's source and centre in love. The perfection of any 
finite being is the closest possible identity with its ideal. The 
supreme end and office of religion is to cause men by love per- 
sonally to approximate to the ideal, not merely of humanity, but 
of humanity made one with the Deity. 

The carrying out of this process by a dual nature such as 
man's is menaced by one of two dangers : either divorce from 
the bodily and external life of man, or slavery to it and divorce 
from the spiritual. The former is false mysticism, and the latter 
is formalism. The one endeavors to etherealize a being who is 
part of, if monarch of, a visible realm ; and this leads to delu- 
sions, not seldom ending in the wild dream that one is irrespon- 
sible for deeds done in the flesh a spectral man. The other is 
degeneration into externalism, and absorbs the soul in thoughts 
of the outward means rather than the spiritual ends of religion, 
forming an unspiritual character. 

But Christ, the Son of God and the Son of Man, is the 
synthesis. His union of the inner and outer life was made into 
the harmony of inspired speech when the angel said to Mary, 
" The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the 
Most High shall overshadow thee " ; the Incarnation, the becom- 
ing man, of essentially spiritual being. 

As a method or process of human betterment, religion is 
the fulness of all outer and inner, visible and invisible aids to 
bring the mind and heart of man under the immediate influence 
of the divine Spirit in the union of love. Organizations, and 
authorities and discipline, sacraments and worship, are external 
channels, helps, and incitements to love, instituted by the Son of 
God, as the extension of his own external divine life. Their 
end is to convey to the soul his inner divine life, and bring it 
into participation in his immediate union with the Father and 
the Holy Ghost. His external order or church serves him every- 
where and for all time, as his body served him while on earth, 
continuing and completing by a visible means the spiritual end, 
man's deification through divine love. 

The effect of this on character is obvious, for it forms a 
character integral in the supernatural sense. 

CHARACTER. 

Let me quote in amplification of this a description of the 
character produced by the " voluntary reception of grace and 
gifts ": " The age, we are told, calls for men worthy of that 



1 893.] THE SUPREME END AND OFFICE OF RELIGION. 63 

name. Who are those worthy to be called men? Men assured- 
ly whose intelligences and wills are divinely illuminated and 
strengthened. This is precisely what is produced by the gifts 
of the Holy Spirit ; they enlarge all the faculties of the soul at 
once. The age is superficial ; it needs the gift of Wisdom, 
which enables the soul to contemplate truth in its ultimate 
cause. The age is materialistic ; it needs the gift of Intelli- 
gence, by the light of which the intellect penetrates into the 
essence of things. The age is captivated by a false and one- 
sided science ; it needs the gift of Science, by the light of which 
is seen each order of truth in its true relations to other orders 
and in a divine unity. The age is in disorder, and is ignorant of 
the way to true progress ; it needs the gift of Counsel, which 
teaches how to choose the proper means to attain an object. 
The age is impious ; it needs the gift of Piety, which leads the 
soul to look up to God as the Heavenly Father, and to adore 
him with feelings of filial affection and love. The age is sen- 
sual and effeminate ; it needs the gift of Fortitude, which im- 
parts to the will the strength to bear the heaviest burdens, and 
to prosecute the greatest enterprises with ease and heroism. 
The age has lost and forgotten God; it needs the gift of Fear, 
to bring the soul again to God, and make it feel conscious of 
its responsibility and of its destiny. Men endowed with these 
gifts are the men for whom, if it but knew it, the age calls. 
Men whose minds are enlightened and whose wills are strength- 
ened by an increased action of the Holy Spirit. Men whose 
souls are actuated by the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Men whose 
countenances are lit up with a heavenly joy ; who breathe an 
air of inward peace, and act with a holy liberty and a resistless 
energy. One such soul does more to advance the kingdom of 
God than tens of thousands without those gifts. These are the 
men and this is the way, if the age could be only made to 
see and believe it, to universal restoration, universal reconcilia- 
tion, and universal progress, as far as such boons are attain- 
able."* 

Religion taken, then, at the highest development, which is 
Christianity, is the elevation of man to union with God, in an 
order of life transcending the natural. It attains this end by 
elevating the soul to heavenly wisdom in divine faith, heavenly 
life in divine love. This attests itself not only by the outward 
criterion of unity with Christ's Church, but also by the inner wit- 

* The Church and the Age. By Very Rev. I. T. Hecker. Catholic Book Exchange, 120 
West 6oth Street, New York. 



64 THE SUPREME END AND OFFICE OF RELIGION. [Oct. r 

ness of the spirit ; it exalts and extends the consciousness of 
God ; it pervades daily life and transforms it with Christ's hero- 
ism ; it infuses into the soul the fullest confidence in God's father- 
ly oversight ; it imparts deep tranquillity ; and bestows the most 
joyous sense of loving intercourse with that benign power which 
alone can secure us the victory over death and hell. 

It will be seen that the ideal religious character is not 
formed by constant absorption in thoughts of the Deity's attri- 
butes of sovereignty, but rather by meditation on all the attri- 
butes, loving kindness being supreme. For the same reason it 
is not obedience that holds the place of honor among the vir- 
tues ; in forming the filial character love is supreme. Love out- 
ranks all virtues. The greatest of these is charity. It is not 
the spirit of conformity, but that of union, which rules the con- 
duct of a son. " For ye have not received the spirit of bond- 
age again to fear ; but ye have received the spirit of adoption, 
whereby we cry Abba! Father!" (Romans viii. 15). 

It never can be said that it is by reason of obedience that 
men love, but it must always be said of obedience that it is by 
reason of love that it is made perfect. Obedience generates 
conformity, but love has a fecundity which generates every vir- 
tue, for it alone is wholly unitive. The highest boast of obedience 
is that it is the first-born of love. As the Humanity said of 
the Divinity, " I go to the Father, because the Father is greater 
than I," so obedience says of love, " I go to my parent-virtue, 
for love is greater than I." 

Hence not the least fault we find with the religious Separa- 
tion of the last three hundred years is, that it has unduly accent- 
uated the sovereignty of God. 

WALTER ELLIOTT. 

Paulist Convent, New York. 






AN AMERICAN ARTIST. 

T a time when American art, as represented by 
the present generation of artists, is in what 
might be called a purely experimental and imi- 
tative condition, the critic and the art-lover can 
well hail with sincere pleasure the appearance 
of a talent so individual and so creative that it 
does not offer a mere technical reflection of the methods of 
the foreign schools, but presents itself with an original style of 
thought and of expression. It is such a gift which we find in 
James E. Kelly. He is one of the few men among our artists, 
whether they be painters or . sculptors, whose works bear the 
impress of a distinct personality, and do not convey a sugges- 
tion of some inspiration, or at least some motive force, acquired 
from a stronger mind. 

That an artist should disdain to profit by the experience of 
men of greater or more mature powers than himself, it would 
be folly to demand. Indeed, if he did not, he would be guilty 
of an act of injustice to himself. But to study the methods of 
the masters, and create out of them a method of his own, is a 
vastly different matter from falling into a facile imitation of 
any man or any school, and becoming but the thin shadow of 
the substance a reflection of a reality. It does not constitute 
a man an artist that he paints or models like somebody else, 
no matter how cleverly he may do it. He is an artist only 
when he creates like himself, and like himself alone : when he 
not only reproduces, but produces. 
VOL. LVIII. 5 



66 



AN AMERICAN ARTIST. 



[Oct., 



It is the fulfilment of this condition which has gained for 
Mr. Kelly the place which he occupies, among the altogether 
too few men in the art world of America, upon whom the 
honor of originality, in the sense of thought and style of ex- 
pression, as well as technical merit, may be conferred. 

The circumstances of Mr. Kelly's birth, and the character of 
his education, hold in them the secret of the development of 
that forceful artistic personality which distinguishes him. The 

artist is born, not made, 
it has been truly said ; 
but from the very fact 
that he is born with the 
sensitive artistic tempera- 
ment, he must be, after 
all, in his art itself, the 
product of the environ- 
ment by which his in- 
trinsic or natural gifts are 
influenced and modelled. 
Born in New York 
City on July 30, 1855, of 
a Scotch father and an 
Irish mother, James E. 
Kelly thus comes of a 
stock in which inventive- 
ness, energy, determina- 
tion, and poetic feeling 
are natural traits. His 
mother, wiser than many 
mothers are under such 
circumstances, appreciat- 
ed his childish love of 
pictures, and encouraged 
it. When he became a 
pupil in the public 
schools, an observant in- 
structor noted the bent 
of his mind and ad- 
vanced him even beyond 
his grade, in order to 

place him in a class where drawing was taught. When an ap- 
plication was made at the school, by an engraver of jewelry, 
for a boy to learn his trade, this same kindly and clear-sighted 




THE CALL TO ARMS (Troy Monument). 



1 893-] 



AN AMERICAN ARTIST. 



teacher recommended young Kelly for the place. So his first 
serious artistic efforts were devoted to the embellishment of 
watch-cases and trinkets. 

His service at this employment was of very brief duration, 
and he returned to school for another year ; after which he 




commenced the study of wood engraving, in the establishment 
of the once famous old firm of Meeder & Chubb. Here he 
acquired considerable facility with the burin, but his active and 
creative talent demanded something more than a mechanical 
outlet. This came to him by an accident not unusual in the 
careers of artists. 

NOTE. Sittings were given for the above in 1880. 



68 



AN AMERICAN ARTIST. 



[Oct., 



J. D. Woodward, an artist of great ability and one of the 
earliest in this country to make a specialty of landscape draw- 
ing on wood, was attracted to the young engraver, who was 
continually making sketches on his own account, and gave him 
some instructions as to the manner of drawing on the boxwood 




block the designs which the engraver had to reproduce. At 
this time the process of photographing upon wood, by which 
the artist of the present is enabled to execute a design on 
paper, which is then photographed on the block, was not per- 
fected, and the drawings were made directly on the boxwood, 
sometimes entirely with the pencil or pen and ink, but gener- 



I893-] 



Aff AMERICAN ARTIST. 



69 



ally in a combination of washes of indian ink finished with pen- 
cil or pen. With the friendly suggestions of Woodward young 
Kelly, who had already cultivated considerable facility in sketch- 
ing from nature, was soon in a position to exchange his place 
in the wood-engraver's studio for one in the art department of 
the great Harper's publishing house in Franklin Square. 

Here he was given every encouragement by Mr. Charles 




SHERMAN. 



Parsons, himself an artist and the chief of the art department, 
and had among his associates C. S. Reinhart and E. A. Abbey. 
The former, who had already spent a couple of years of study 
abroad, was then probably the leading designer, and certainly 

NOTE. Studies for Gen. Sherman's head were made in 1879. 



AN AMERICAN ARTIST. 



[Oct., 



the strongest draughtsman on wood, of this country. Abbey, 
like Kelly, was also a graduate from a wood-engraver's estab- 
lishment in Philadelphia, of which city he is a native. It was a 
period when a great change was coming over graphic art in 

the United States. 
The methods of 
wood engraving 
were on the eve of 
a complete revolu- 
tion, as were those 
of the art which 
provided the en- 
graver with a found- 
ation for his work. 
A new spirit and 
fresh blood were, 
in fact, being in- 
jected into an art 
which had grown 
mannered by long 
practice along fixed 
systems, and these 
young men, per- 
haps even without 
their own conscious- 
ness, were among 
the leaders in the 
movement. 

Leaving the 
Harper's, Kelly 
and Abbey had 
for some time a 
studio in associa- 
tion, working inde- 
pendently for the publishers. Kelly, while continuing his studies 
at the Academy of Design and the Art Students' League, the lat- 
ter of which he, Theodore Robinson, and Carl Hirschberg, both 
the latter now well-known painters, were, in a manner, the found- 
ers, had commenced to paint and exhibit his pictures, and also 
experimented in the use of distemper for illustrative work. He 
was never idle. Every phase of picturesque city life and charac- 
ter came within the scope of his quick pencil, and his collection 
of sketch-books already formed an extensive working library. 




I893-] 



AN AMERICAN ARTIST. 



In 1876 began that period of his career which may be con- 
sidered to have first established his reputation before the public. 
The appearance, in the St. Nicholas magazine, of an article 
illustrated by him called " A Horse Hotel," and relating to the 
enormous stables of one of the local street-car companies, 
heralded a long series of pictures from his pencil in Scribner's 
Monthly, the progenitor of the present Century. These pictures, 
for spirit, dash, ready grasp of character and sense of the pic- 
turesque, even in the simplest and rudest material, stood alone. 
The most hopelessly unpictorial subjects became picturesque in 
his hands ; and in every sketch and drawing the imprint of its 
origin stood boldly 
forth. The eye sin- 
gled them out at 
once, and they left 
no one under the 
necessity of inquir- 
ing who the artist 
was, for their identi- 
ty proclaimed itself. 

In two details he 
drove the engravers 
to despair. He not 
only made the sim- 
ple outline, with its 
precise, firm touch, 
expressive of finish 
by its various inflec- 
tions of thickness 
and strength, but in 
his more finished 
drawings on the 
small magazine scale 
he introduced the 
massive breadth and 
large treatment of 
cartoons of great 
size. The engrav- 
ers, who at that 
time to a certain extent dominated the artists, accustomed to 
handle the carefully rounded-off and elaborated drawings of 
the older school, declared it impossible to produce effects from 
these, where the thickness or delicacy of a line, or the variations 

NOTE. Gen. Parker was Gen. Grant's military secretary. 




AN AMERICAN ARTIST. 



[Oct., 



of masses of shade laid on with a flat brush constituted color, 
texture, and modelling. Here his old experience as an engraver 
stood him in good stead. After he had grown weary of seeing 
his drawings butchered by ignorant or careless hands, he delib- 
erately and in detail laid down directions as to how they should 

be cut, and the en- 
gravers found that 
the impossible was 
possible after all. 

Since that time 
many men have 
worked upon the 
same principle, and 
have had their 
drawings translated 
with brilliant suc- 
cess, thanks, large- 
ly, to the resolute 
stand made by this 
one man in defence 
of his idea. It may 
be stated that his 
methods were vio- 
lently attacked by 
the veteran artist 
and wood-engraver 
W. J. Linton, in the Atlantic Monthly, but Mr. Linton, one of 
the greatest men in his art whom the world has produced, be- 
longed distinctly to the old school, although it was a school of 
his own which he created out of the old lines. He subsequently 
modified his opinions upon this and many other matters, when 
his logical intelligence completely comprehended the tendency 
of the time, for he was too great an artist and too honest a 
critic to permit prejudice to blind him to justice. Meanwhile 
his attack had the result of doing its victim more good than 
harm. 

The productiveness of Mr. Kelly as a draughtsman continued, 
and, indeed, has never been entirely suspended to this day. 
But his restless and experimental spirit, that spirit of the artist 
in whom creativeness is ever active and ambition grows but 
more eager by conquest, led him into a field in which he found 
his true vocation, and in which he occupies a unique position 
in American art. 




I893-] 



AN AMERICAN ARTIST. 



73 



From boyhood he had been a diligent student of American 
history, and especially of the military history of this country. 
He had gone deeply into the details of our great wars, and had 
sought out and located many relics hitherto decaying in obscur- 
ity. Without being aware of it, he had gathered a great mass 
of material for reference, both artistic and literary, in the course 
of his general employment : notes and memoranda made simply 
because they interested him, and without a special view to any 
future application of them to practical use. The time arrived 
when this special direction of his taste, and this accumulation 
of information and knowledge, decided the turning point of his 
career. 

He had painted a portrait of General Sheridan from life, the 
general having given him sittings for it. The portrait, treated 
with great vigor, and with a strong grasp of character, had 
gained the approval of the original, and of his circle of friends 
and associates. The artist's father, while viewing it, dropped a 
remark as to who would be likely some day to make a statue 
of the general. It 
was only a casual 
observation, but it 
produced impor- 
tant results. 

Mr. Kelly had 
not only no practi- 
cal knowledge of 
the methods of 
modelling or sculp- 
ture, but had not 
even considered the 
possibility of ever 
acquiring them. 
But the suggestion 
made by his fa- 
ther's remark set 
him thinking. He 
pondered over a plan by which he might convert his Sheridan por- 
trait into a statue, and made studies of it from various stand- 
points, erecting on paper, as it might be, the elevation, at different 
stations of view, of a sculptured work. The farther he advanced 
with these studies, the greater grew the fascination of that new 
possibility which rested in them. But to make drawings was one 
thing. To build up a plastic work, in a medium entirely novel to 

NOTE. The above is an altar-panel in the Paulist Church, N. Y. 




74 



AN AMERICAN ARTIST. 



[Oct., 



him, was quite another. The very difficulties the work presented, 
however, were with him an incitement to its accomplishment. 

He applied to his friend, Mr. Jonathan Scott Hartley, the 
sculptor, for advice. Mr. Hartley provided him with a recipe 
for the composition of hard wax for modelling, as well as with 
such technical suggestions as were necessary. His mother pre- 
pared the wax according to the formula, and the statuette, or, 
more properly speaking, the present small model for what should 




PAUL REVERE. 



some day be a grand public monument to one of the greatest 
of American soldiers, was completed. The artist wished to ex- 
hibit it at the National Academy of Design, but it would be 
necessary to cover it with a glass case in order to do so. He 
hesitated to incur the expense, his means being restricted, not 



1 893.] 



AN AMERICAN ARTIST. 



75 



knowing whether it would be accepted by the jury of admission ; 
but, fortunately for him, he showed the work to Mr. J. G. 
Brown. This noble veteran, to whom true talent never appealed 
in vain, said simply : " Buy the -glass." He bought the glass. 
The statuette appeared in the Academy exhibition of 1879. 
At that time Mr. J. Q. A. Ward, the sculptor, was president 




MOLLY PITCHER AT MONMOUTH. 

of the Academy. He noticed the work, and called General 
Sheridan's attention to it. The general had not been aware 
that it was in progress at all. He had sat for a painting, not 
a statue. He visited the Academy, and, enthusiastic as he was 
by nature, the rest came naturally. The composition, in spite 
of trifling dilettante criticism against it, must be accepted, up- 
on the positively expressed approbation of the original,* as the 
authoritative statue of Fighting Phil. Sheridan, for all time, and 
in fact as the only one in existence. 

* CHICAGO, February 27, 1881. 

MY DEAR MR. KELLY : A short time ago, just before I started for New Mexico, I re- 
ceived your letter, notifying me of the completion of the statuette, and that you would send 
me a copy. Yesterday it was sent home, and myself and friends had an opportunity of see- 
ing it, and one and all expressed their admiration of your spirited work. The action is mar- 
vellously good, the accuracy of detail and likeness of myself is wonderful in so small a work. 
In addition to all this there is a spirit in the entire work of both horse and man which cannot 
well be equalled. I am greatly pleased at your success, and will to-morrow place the statuette 
where it can be seen by the public. I shall want one in bronze as soon as you put it in metal, 
which I understood was your intention. 

With kind regards and thanks, I am yours truly, P. H. SHERIDAN. 



76 



AN AMERICAN ARTIST. 



[Oct., 



Of the artist's works in sculpture since the Sheridan statue 
much more might be said than the reasonable limitations of an 
article of this character render possible. To allude to but a 
few of them will be sufficient to give an idea of the extent and 
character of all. 

He has on the battle monument at Monmouth, N. J., five 




ARNOLD WOUNDED AT SARATOGA. 

bronze panels, representing scenes associated with this memora- 
ble field. On the battle monument at Saratoga are two. On 
the field of Gettysburg is his monument to the Sixth New York 
Cavalry. His colossal figure of Columbia, calling the nation to 
arms, caps the column of the Volunteer's monument at Troy, 
N. Y. He has now in hand another important statue, of Zebu- 
Ion M. Pike, the discoverer of Pike's Peak, which is to be pre- 
sented to the City of Manitou, Colorado, by Col. Jerome B. 



I893-] 



AN AMERICAN ARTIST. 



77 



Wheeler, for whom he has also executed a monument at 
Woodlawn Cemetery. His model for a statue of Paul Revere, 
for the city of Boston, secured the first prize in competition, 
but was never executed in extenso, as the subscription was not 
completed. Of his Sheridan I have already spoken. He has also 
modelled a noble and characteristic figure of General Grant, 
at the lines at Fort Donelson, for which he had sittings from 
the general. Among a number of panels which he has executed 
may be justly singled out a portrait of Thomas A. Edison, and 
one of Admiral Worden, who commanded the Monitor in her 




RAMSAY DEFENDING HIS GUNS AT MONMOUTH. 

fight with the Merrimac, that fight which revolutionized, the 
methods of marine warfare of the whole world. 

In these subjects, which are an index to the others which 
have not been enumerated, the national tendency of Mr. Kelly's 
creativeness is abundantly illustrated. He is an American artist, 
dealing with American subjects, as well, above all, as dealing 
with them in his own way. The same originality of treatment 
reveals itself in them as in his illustrations and his pictures. 
They reflect neither the Italians of the Renaissance nor the 
Frenchmen of the present ; they reflect the artist himself. 

The characteristics of his imaginative compositions are pic- 
turesqueness of conception and arrangement, and boldness and 



AN AMERICAN ARTIST. 



[Oct., 



breadth of treatment. At the same time historical details are 
closely adhered to, both in the compositions themselves and in 
the minor accessories. The artist's fund of information, gathered 
as it were by mere accident, here comes into play. He brings 
to his task the knowledge of an archaeologist, and, without obtrud- 
ing it upon the observer, gives 
to his works a permanent his- 
torical value. In the course of 
his researches for these works 
he has assembled a mass of ma- 
terial of a literary and historic 
importance entirely independent 
of the artistic results to which 
they were contributory. The 
pictorial effect of a composi- 
tion is, naturally, first with him. 
But there must come accuracy 
of detail, in costume and the 
like, down to its minutest 
items. These things may not 
be observed by every one ; in 
fact they are not designed to 
be observed. They are only 
portions of the whole. But the 
artist is only satisfied when he 
has acquired them. As long as 
he knows that they are there, 
he is satisfied that he has, at 
least, done the best for his com- 
position that circumstances per- 
mitted. 

There is a singular fascina- 
tion about tracing the career of 
a gifted man through its vari- 
ous stages of development. The 
fascination becomes greater when this development is indepen- 
dent of all conventional assistance, when the man, in fact, 
makes himself, and when his individuality and force of character 
render him the conqueror of success against all possible diffi- 
culties. Had James E. Kelly undergone the course of European 
training, by the rules of masters and of schools, which has 
filled the country with artists who work like their masters and 




1 893.] AN AMERICAN ARTIST. 79 

their schools, his personality would probably have been lost. 
At any rate its vigor would have been impaired. But studying 
and working at home, in his own manner, seeking knowledge, 
not waiting to be taught it, and analyzing it, not accepting it 
as a lesson, he has grown and expanded in healthy soil : in soil 
so fertile that it warms and enriches his talent to ever higher 
and riper fructification. 

His most recently completed work, and one of the most im- 
portant of all of his productions, is an illustration -of this. It 
is the reredos for the beautiful altar of the Church of the Paul- 
ist Fathers, in this city. This reredos has for its subject the 
apotheosis of St. Justinus, the martyr whose story is one of the 
only partially unveiled mysteries of the history of the early 
Christian faith. Justinus, according to the meagre facts of his- 
tory, was a pagan, born in one of the Roman cities of ancient 
Samaria. The date of his birth is obscure, but the fact that he 
was converted to Christianity and became an earnest and elo- 
quent advocate of the faith is assured. He is supposed to have 
been beheaded about the year 165 A.D., in the reign of Marcus 
Aurelius, in consequence of his refusal to conform to the rites 
of Roman paganism. The relics of his martyrdom, found in the 
catacombs, now rest within the altar erected to his honor in 
this city, and for which Mr. Kelly has provided one of the 
most noteworthy pieces of ecclesiastical sculpture in the United 
States. 

The reredos represents St. Justinus, with two supporting 
angels, in about half the size of life. The conception of the 
work, its composition and characterization, are thoroughly orig- 
inal, and its execution is as refined as its sentiment is noble. 
Justinus is a heroic manly figure, the type of the fearless ex- 
pounders of the faith of his day, who went forth upon their 
missions knowing that their termination must be a cruel death 
at the hands of their foes. The suggestion of upward movement 
in this figure is subtly conveyed by the graceful arrangement of 
the lines. The supporting angels, graceful female forms, are 
mere accessories to the composition. The artist, by a bold but 
thoroughly commendable innovation upon the conventional rules, 
has made them to appear rather as wafting than raising the 
martyr upwards, towards his celestial crown. 

I might write much more about this artist, whose career I 
have watched with unvarying interest for many years. It would 
be a pleasure to me to do so, as an act of recognition to him- 



8o 



AN AMERICAN ARTIST. 



[Oct., 



self. But exhaustive biographies belong to books, not to peri- 
odical literature. The time will come when some pen, more 
eloquent perhaps, but certainly not more appreciative, than 
mine, will do full justice to him, for out of the current conten- 
tions of schools and fads in American art he is destined to 
arise as one of a group that might almost be counted on the 
fingers of one's hands as American artists in fact, not merely in 
name. 

ALFRED TRUMBLE. 








OCTOBER. 

AIREST month of all the year! 
Bright October, brown and sere ! 
Genial sunshine, freshen'd air, 
Summer heats and storms repair. 
Ling'ring flowers love to rest 
On thy verdure-mantled breast. 
Bird, and bee, and butterfly 
Revel, ere they say good-by. 
Festal garb thy woods have donn'd, 
Where the green yet lingers fond 
Blent with scarlet, crown'd with gold. 
Be it warm or be it cold, 
Give me October ! 

ALBA. 




1893-] GLADSTONE. 81 



GLADSTONE. 

" Who broke no promise, served no private end ; 
Who gained no title, and who lost no friend." 

HE figure that looms largest in the public life of 
Great Britain at the present moment is un- 
doubtedly that of the great old statesman of 
eighty-three years, whose eyes have not been 
dimmed by the mists that oftentimes cloud the 
vision of old age, and whose elastic step still keeps pace with 
the spirit of progress and reform. His powers of life at such 
an age are the marvel of his contemporaries, and his public 
spirit and patriotism have been aptly likened to Tennyson's pic- 
ture of the feelings of Ulysses on his return home from his 
lengthened wanderings after the siege of Troy. He was a man 
well stricken in years, laden with honors, outworn with toil ; he 
was entitled to his rest, but he could not rest. Rest did not 
belong to that spirit with which Heaven had inspired him. His 
indomitable will, his undying energy, drove him to more heroic 
deeds, and to still greater labors. So has it been with Gladstone. 
Six years ago the Tory party, to quote Mr. Gladstone's own 
words, were " running a race with an old man's life," and many 
of their leading men were not ashamed to avow the brutal sen- 
timent ; but their ungenerous hopes have been disappointed, and 
the old man has lived to form another ministry. 

It is more than twelve years since his own countrymen be- 
gan to gaze in amazement at the industry and mental capacity 
of their venerable statesman. In 1880, when he had already 
passed years three score and ten, he entered on his historic 
campaign in denunciation of the Bulgarian atrocities, and hurled 
Beaconsfield from office. In 1885 he sounded the tocsin of war 
once more, and again led his party to victory ; and on the de- 
feat the temporary defeat of his Home-Rule Bill, in 1886, he 
faced the country again, and received his dismissal with the 
same equanimity that had characterized his previous triumphs. 
History, surely, affords no sublimer spectacle than that present- 
ed in the last years of his life, in which, at a time when nature 
calls imperatively for repose, he undertakes the gigantic task 
of making peace between two angry nations that have battled 
VOL. LVIII. 6 



1 893.] GLADSTONE. 83 

relentlessly for centuries, and seeks to crown a wonderful career 
by arousing the conscience of his countrymen in regard to the 
system of government under which Ireland has for so long suf- 
fered. 

What a wonderful career his has been, and how many strik- 
ing achievements have been crowded into it ! He was the first 
to promulgate the habit of thrift amongst the people, and 
to give them the facilities for saving their pence and shillings. 
His Railway Act of 1844 legalized the claim of the masses 
to cheap locomotion, and settled the pretensions of the rail- 
way corporations to monopolies ; and by the Corn Laws and 
the Navigation Laws he also left his mark in history. His 
first budget, in 1853, abolished the duty on over one hundred 
articles, and relieved the people of taxation to the amount 
of five millions of pounds ; so that there is not a householder 
in Great Britain to-day who has not directly and largely bene- 
fited by his legislation. He abolished the prohibitive tax on 
newspapers, despite the most virulent opposition of the Con- 
servative party and the House of Lords; and in 1869, in face 
of enormous difficulties, he triumphantly carried his disestab- 
lishment of the Irish Church Act, by virtue of which the 
Irish people devout Catholics as the enormous majority of 
them are were relieved of the monstrous injustice of having 
to support a church with which less than a tenth of them 
were in sympathy. That measure of justice was supplemented 
by an Irish Land Act which considerably clipped the claws of 
the Irish landlords ; but his great achievement in that respect 
was passed into law in 1880, when, by a further measure, he 
established in Ireland judicial tribunals to determine the rents 
which tenants should fairly pay, and at the same time as- 
serted their rights to free sale and fixity of tenure. His 
Franchise Bill in 1884 added no less than two million house- 
holders to the electorate, and enabled the Irish people, for 
the first time in their history, to return to Parliament eighty- 
six pledged supporters of the Irish demand. These are but a 
few of his many striking reforms ; but they are sufficient to 
make one wonder what, if it be true that Mirabeau was the 
incarnation of an epoch, should be said of Gladstone, for his is 
a career pregnant with changes that once seemed revolutionary, 
and almost monotonous in the recurrence of triumphs over ob- 
stacles that ninety men in every hundred would at first sight 
declare insuperable. And best of all as Longfellow wrote of 
Burns: 



84 GLADSTONE. [Oct., 

" Still the burden of his song 
Is love of right, disdain of wrong ; 

Its master chords 

Are manhood, freedom, brotherhood ; 
Its discords but an interlude 

Between the words. 

" And now he haunts his native land 
As an immortal youth; his hand 

Guides every plough. 
He sits beside each ingle-nook, 
His voice is in each rushing brook, 

Each rustling bough." 

As the greatest British orator of his generation, Gladstone's 
position is unchallenged. The rich, silvery tones, the delightful 
modulation and soft resonance of his voice, the natural ges- 
tures which he employs, the deliberation, and withal the earnest- 
ness, of his words, and the succinct reasoning with which he step 
by step unfolds his arguments all strike the listener with ad- 
miration. True, old age has somewhat weakened his splendid 
powers of elocution, and there is betimes more huskiness in his 
voice than his admirers like to admit ; but behind the enfeebled 
power of lungs there is the same old spirit, the same sprightly 
vigor, the same enthusiasm that lor half a century has enchanted 
his countrymen, and made even some of his political opponents 
confess that as an Englishman they are proud of him. 

Not the least striking feature of his personality is the extra- 
ordinary versatility of his genius. " He unites cotton with cul- 
ture and Manchester with Oxford," was the figure employed by 
a critic who wished to emphasize his many-sided accomplishments. 
Yesterday it was a masterly oration on current politics ; to-day 
it is a magazine article on some question of ancient classics, or, 
mayhap, on the ecclesiastical architecture of the twelfth century ; 
to-morrow it will be a practical discourse on jam-making ; and so 
from day to day. Once he sat for Oxford in the imperial Par 
liament, and as its representative reflected more credit upon 
that city than it ever reflected upon him ; but the time came 
when Oxford treated Gladstone as Edinburgh treated Macaulay 
and bade him " never more be officer of hers." The world has 
long ago passed the verdict that the loss was Oxford's ; and 
were the opportunity now afforded to its electors they would 
probably endorse the judgment. 



I893-] 



GLADSTONE. 



He differs, too, from most English statesmen in that he does 
not think England the world, or his own country the only one 
in which liberty can really flourish ; and he therefore watches 
the contemporary history and struggles of all lands as closely as 
he studies their past records. Freedom is as dear to him in 
Bulgaria or in Ireland as it is in America or in Britain, and tyr- 
anny as odious in St. Petersburg as in London. His mind is 
cast in a deeply religious mould, and his love of religion and 
things religious is as old as himself ; but he tempers his devo- 
tion to the church of his childhood and his old age with an 
equal devotion to the principle of religious equality, and his iden- 
tification with the dominant sect has not been allowed to inter- 




HAWARDEN. 

pose between him and Irish disestablishment, or to prevent him 
from declaring his sympathy with the movement to effect a 
similar operation on the state churches of Scotland and of 
Wales. 

But his Liberalism has in it a touch of conservatism, and his 
opponents will perhaps begin to realize how conservative he 
really is only when he will have passed beyond the reach of their 
heartless gibes and vindictive personal abuse. Many, indeed, of 
his political admirers do not hesitate to dub him the greatest 
Conservative of the time, for he exerts the most conservative of 
influences on the most radical of political parties. Revolution- 
ary doctrines and methods are to him " the abomination x>f de- 
solation " ; and he has more than once severely tried the loyalty 
of his followers by his scrupulous regard for established prerog- 
atives and for the interests of others. The favorite charge with 
his opponents is what they affect to regard as his " unscrupulous 



86 GLADSTONE. [Oct., 

inconsistency." He entered political life as a member of one 
party, and became the leader of another, say his critics. But so 
did the " patron saint of Toryism " Beaconsfield who was in 
earlier days " the rising hope of the stern and unbending Radi- 
cals." Parnell, too, began as a Tory ; and the late Conserva- 
tive leader, Mr. W. H. Smith, turned his back on Liberalism 
only after being blackballed at a London Liberal Club. Politi- 
cal prejudice is generally inherited ; and it is nothing to a man's 
discredit if reflection and experience dispel those prejudices. It 
was Sydney Smith, I think, who defined the man with unalterable 
opinions as an unalterable jackass, and Gladstone does not 
claim the distinction that the witty Englishman was willing to 
confer upon those who would turn consistency into a fad. He 
has toned down some of his old theories ; he has expanded and 
developed others ; for, to quote from one of his own speeches, 
" he has been all his life a learner, and is a learner still." "I 
was educated," said the Liberal leader, on another occasion " I 
was educated to regard liberty as an evil ; I have learnt to re- 
gard it as a good. That is a formula which sufficiently explains 
all the changes of my political convictions. Except in that par- 
ticular I am not conscious of having changed much. ... I 
have never been a lover of change, nor do I regard it as a good 
in itself. Liberty, however, is good in itself, and the growing 
recognition of that is the key to all those changes of which you 
speak." Nor have those changes been time-serving. In not one 
of them has he bent before a popular storm, but, on the con- 
trary, has had in every case to educate up to his ideas the ma- 
jority of the electorate. The passing of such a simple act of 
justice as the disestablishment of the Irish Church shook the 
faith of " Anglican England," and roused enormous hostility be- 
fore the people could be induced to view the position from the 
stand-point of their leader; and his recognition of the Irish de- 
mand for legislative autonomy entailed, as he had reckoned, a 
crushing defeat in Parliament and an equally crushing defeat at 
the polls. But confident in the righteousness of the cause, he 
was content to wait till the seeds he was sowing would take 
root and bring forth fruit. Through six dreary years he ap- 
pealed to the consciences of his countrymen to cast aside their 
anti-Irish prejudices, and recognize Irishmen, not as their infe- 
riors, but as their equals; and his brilliant victory at the elec- 
tions one year ago showed that his lessons had been learned, 
and that the people had once more admitted the greater pru- 
dence and foresight of their grand old leader. His changes have 



1893.] 



GLADSTONE. 



been part of the process of evolution, born of experience ; and 
in every case the nation has, sooner or later, signified its appro- 
val and signified it with emphasis. 

The veteran statesman is often taunted with the allegation 
that he only espoused Home Rule in 1886, but of that charge he 
has already been acquitted 
by his quondam colleague, 
the Duke of Devonshire, 
who declared in a speech 
delivered after the introduc- 
tion of the Home-Rule Bill 
that no one who had fol- 
lowed Mr. Gladstone's re- 
cent career, or had lately 
been associated with him in 
the management of public 
affairs, could feel honest sur- 
prise at his adoption of 
Home Rule. Moreover, un- 
til the Franchise Bill of 1884 
was passed, the Irish Na- 
tionalist party was but a 
fraction of the Irish repre- 
sentation, and it was only 
at the elections of 1885 that 
the Irish people were en- 
abled to demonstrate in a 
constitutional manner that 
the enormous majority of 
them was unanimous in the 
demand for the restoration 
of their national rights. It 
was by Gladstone's efforts 
that the franchise was 
extended to Ireland, and 
the inevitable corollary a Home-Rule Bill was introduced after 
the subsequent elections. 

" How cruelly do those men," said Mrs. Gladstone to an in- 
terviewer some months ago, " misunderstand my husband when 
they say that his passionate interest in Ireland is but a thing of 
yesterday. Well do I remember the day when he received his 
first ministerial appointment, in 1841, from the hands of the 
great Sir Robert Peel. It was two years after our marriage, and 




88 GLADSTONE. [Oct., 

I remember that the day of which I am now speaking was that 
on which my niece, poor Lady Frederick Cavendish, was born. 
My husband came home and threw himself into a chair, looking 
quite depressed. ' What have they given you ? ' I asked. ' The 
Board of Trade,' he replied, ' and I wanted above all things to 
have the Irish secretaryship, which they have given to Lord 
Eliot, together with a seat in the cabinet. I did not want a 
seat in the cabinet, but I did want to follow Thomas Drummond, 
and to assist in governing Ireland according to his ideas and 
principles.' They thought my husband would be a good man 
for the Board of Trade because he is a merchant's son ; but 
from the outset of his political career it was his darling ambi- 
tion to take hold of the Irish question." 

Few of his political pamphlets have attracted so much at- 
tention and comment as his pronouncement on " Vaticanism," 
the vigor of his attack on the Papacy and Catholicity especially 
coming from the defender of the Oxford movement causing no 
small surprise to students of his public career. His maturer 
judgment has led him to retract much of what he wrote in the 
hurry and energy of youth ; and only a few months ago he 
availed himself of a fitting opportunity to recant the charges of 
Catholic disloyalty or rather the incompatibility of loyalty to 
the pope and to the queen and the impossibility of good Catholics 
being good citizens ; for practice and experience in public affairs 
had taught him that his theoretical deductions were illusive. 
The occasion was the introduction into Parliament by Mr. Glad- 
stone last year, during the regime of the Conservative govern- 
ment, of a bill to revoke and annul all acts of Parliament which 
exclude Catholics from the lord-lieutenancy of Ireland and the 
lord-chancellorship of England, they, with the throne, being 
the only offices from which Catholics are still debarred. His 
scheme was defeated by the Conservative majority in the House 
of Commons; but any bill if once introduced, and unanimously 
adopted, by the Liberal party is certain of early enactment, 
and here again, therefore, we find the Liberal leader educating 
his party and his countrymen, even at the expense of defeat 
and passing unpopularity. " A Jesuit in disguise," " A truckler 
to Rome," "A Papist at heart," are terms ethereal in their mild- 
ness compared with others which the introduction of the Dis- 
abilities Removal Bill provoked ; but the alarmist bigots have 
found Gladstone's power too strong for them, and make to-day 
no secret of their conviction that Gladstone's defeat last year 
on the measure is but the prelude to its early success. 



1893-] GLADSTONE. 89 

" How comes it so ? 

He used no magic and he owned no spell, 
But with keen glance, strong will, and weighty blow 
Did one thing at a time and did it well ; 
And sought no praise from men, but in God's eye 
Nobly to live content, or nobly die." 

In his home life this great Englishman is an object of love 
to all around him. His habits are simplicity itself, and austere 




MR. GLADSTONE'S DAUGHTER AND GRANDCHILD. 

only in their regularity. Retiring to bed about midnight, he is 
called at half-past seven every morning, and always rises in- 
stantly ; and be the weather what it may, an hour later finds 
him at church, three-quarters of a mile off. And to see the 
religious devotion of the old statesman is an event not soon to 
be forgotten, for all through prayers he kneels, with an endur- 



90 ','V^ 1 GLADSTONE. [Oct., 

t' 
ance that .many . of his juniors must envy, on the hard stone 

floor. Xo h'e&r him " read the lessons" during service is the 
ambition; of- most visitors to Hawarden, and the devotion he 
breathes into every word is characteristic of the earnestness of 
his life. On his return from morning service he breakfasts, and 
then proceeds to deal with his correspondence, which, as might 
be expected, is of a very heterogeneous nature, and always en- 
tails, even when he is aided by a corps of secretaries, several 
hours' attention. Two o'clock finds him at luncheon, after which 
he spends a few hours in his library ; and when he has taken 
his evening walk or drive, dinner-time has come upon him. The 
interval between that hour and bed-time is also devoted to 
study, so that altogether this octogenarian leads a wonderfully 
busy life. That life's race, however, is all but run ; and though 
his illustrious physician, Sir Andrew Clarke, jocularly insists that 
his patient is possessed of such extraordinary vitality that there 
is " no apparent reason why he should not go on living for 
ever," his admirers and they are numbered by the million 
fear that his time amongst them must be reckoned by months. 
But be that as it may, he has lived long enough to establish 
his position as the greatest statesman of his time, and the great- 
est in the range of English history. 

JEREMIAH MACVEAGH. 




1893-] AN INTERESTING LETTER FRO^^A^M/^ 9 i 





( 

AN INTERESTING LETTER FROM TAi&W^&f &ILICIA, 
THE BIRTHPLACE OF ST. PAUL. 

i 

HE Letter of the Bishop of Tarsus, of which I 
present below a translation, was sent to me 
through the venerable Bishop de Goesbriand of 
Burlington, with a letter from himself, which is 
a sufficient attestation of the genuine and trust- 
worthy nature of the Oriental prelate's communication and 
appeal. All our readers will be charmed with the description 
of the native country of St. Paul, and edified by the account 
which the modern Paul of Tarsus gives of his apostolic labors 
in the very footsteps of his illustrious predecessor. The forti- 
tude, courage, and hopefulness with which the missionary bishop 
struggles against poverty, hardships, and opposition awaken our 
admiration and sympathy. The narrative is like an appendix 
to the Acts of the Apostles, or a postscript to one of St. Paul's 
Epistles. Of course, the bishop's na'ive confidence that the 
Congregation of St. Paul will build a church in Tarsus to his 
honor must be disappointed. It is only a modest contribution 
which is within our power, besides the publication of the 
bishop's appeal in this magazine. 

The apathy and parsimony toward Catholic Foreign Missions 
which prevail generally are lamentable, although in part excus- 
able. They are becoming, however, always less and less excus- 
able, so far as our own most flourishing provinces are con- 
cerned ; as the wealth of Catholics increases, their own religious 
wants are more amply provided for, and attention is more dis- 
tinctly called to the great needs and the promising outlook of 
our missionary enterprises. 

The great zeal of our Holy Father Leo XIII. for missions 
to the Eastern schismatics is well known. The newspapers and 
occasional visits of Eastern missionaries have lately made us ac- 
quainted with the existence of a deep and widely-spread move- 
ment of return to unity in the bosom of the separated commu- 
nions. There are three great divisions of Eastern schismatics : 
the Greeks, whose separation dates from the eleventh century ; 
the Nestorians, and the Eutychians, whose schism originated in 
heresy respecting the dogma of the Incarnation, as defined by 
the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, and dates from the 



92 AN INTERESTING LETTER FROM TARSUS. [Oct., 

fifth century. When their minds and consciences are awakened 
to the sin and the blighting misery of their state of schism, 
their return to unity is much facilitated by the fact that they have 
not wandered so far away from their original Catholicism as 
the Protestants of the West. Retaining an episcopate of a 
valid consecration, and such a large amount of Catholic doctrine 
and ritual, corporate reunion can be effected whenever bishops, 
with their clergy and people, submit to the Holy See. Single 
conversions of individual priests and laymen require less change 
than in the case of Protestants. A general reconciliation of 
these Eastern Christians is devoutly to be hoped for, and ear- 
nestly to be labored for. Western Christians owe their Chris- 
tianity to the East. Now that it is flourishing and powerful 
in the West, decayed, blighted, and down-trodden in the East, 
under the baleful influence of schism and Mohammedanism, the 
West owes to Eastern Christendom, to the memory of the 
apostles and the great fathers of the church, to Jesus Christ 
and his Cross, a great debt of gratitude. The East sent mis- 
sionaries to the West, and the West is bound to send mission- 
aries to the East. 

To the memory of St. Paul a special debt of gratitude is 
due, and there cannot be a better way of paying it than by 
sending help to the destitute and struggling Catholics of his 
native country, who are in want of churches, of schools, of 
priests of the most necessary means of practising their religion. 
To build a church in honor of St. Paul in Tarsus seems to me 
a work to which every one who is sensible of the gratitude 
which we owe to that great apostle should gladly contribute, 
according to his ability. The apostolic bishop who is charged 
with the pastoral care of the few and poor Catholics of Cilicia, 
cannot hope to erect in Tarsus a St. Paul's Cathedral which 
shall equal the Roman Basilica, or even St. Paul's Church in 
New York. His expectations are moderate, and will be satis- 
fied by the erection of a church sufficient for the religious 
needs of his people. It is evident that a bishop whose annual 
revenue is only $500 will thankfully receive even a small con- 
tribution, and it will be a shame if there are not enough of 
these from different quarters, coming in little rills into his trea- 
sury, to enable him to provide for the immediate and pressing 
wants of his diocese. 

I will gladly receive and securely transmit any donations, 
large or small, which may be sent to me, for St. Paul's Church 
in Tarsus ; and I will be greatly obliged to any editors of 



1893-] AN INTERESTING LETTER FROM TARSUS. 93 

Catholic papers who will communicate the contents of the pre- 
sent article to their readers, through their columns. 

In my translation there may be some errors in proper 
names, since it is not always easy to ascertain correctly what 
they are from a French manuscript. 

AUGUSTINE F. HEWIT. 



THE BISHOP OF BURLINGTON'S LETTER. 

CATHEDRAL OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION, ) 
BURLINGTON, VERMONT, July 24, 1893. ) 

Very Rev. Father Hewit, C.S.P. : 

DEAR FATHER : Whilst attending the Eucharistic Congress in 
Jerusalem I became intimately acquainted with Right Rev. P. 
Terzian, Bishop of Tarsus. Like all the Catholic prelates of dif- 
ferent rites in the East, he is a learned, very exemplary bishop ; 
but like all the prelates of the Levant, extremely poor. I was 
rather pleased when, of himself, he spoke to me about the 
Congregation of St. Paul in America, and of his idea of writing 
to you. I could but encourage him to do so, knowing your 
charity and your power to do good. 

I returned from Jerusalem with the conviction that the 
harvest indeed is ripe in that country. 

So write to Paul of Tarsus and help him if you can. 

God bless you and all your works. I have the honor to be 
respectfully and truly yours, 

L. DE GOESBRIAND, 

Bp. of Burlington, Vt. 

THE LETTER OF BISHOP PAUL OF TARSUS. 

ADANA, ASIATIC TURKEY, j 
June 29, 1893. J 

Very Rev. Father Hewit, C.S.P. : 

Having been informed of the interest which you take, Very 
Rev. Father, in all works for the honor of St. Paul, I take 
the liberty of sending you this relation concerning my diocese 
of Adana and Tarsus, the country of St. Paul, of which I was 
consecrated bishop one year ago. 

My diocese, which embraces the greater part of ancient Cilicia, 
is situated on the Mediterranean, confronting on the south-west 
the island of Cyprus. It is bounded on the east by the pre- 



94 AN INTERESTING LETTER FROM TARSUS. [Oct., 

feature of Aleppo and the territory of Marash, on the north 
by the province of Caesarea, from which it is separated by the 
lofty chains of Mt. Taurus. On its southern coast it has the 
port of Mersina. 

These missions were commenced about forty years ago, and at 
present we count 3,000 souls, converts from the Armenian 
schism. In all the province there are above 100,000 schismatics. 
Our Catholics are at Tarsus, Adana, and other towns in the 
vilayet of Adana. There is one priest in each of the four mis- 
sions of Adana, Tarsus, Sis, and Hadjine, who work with an 
admirable zeal, but are too few for the amount of labor required 
in missions scattered over such an extensive territory. 

Tarsus, a city celebrated from time immemorial, as is attest- 
ed by coins marked with Phoenician and Greek characters which 
have been discovered, is built on slightly elevated ground. Al- 
exander the Great conquered it. It was illustrious as the chief 
seat of learning after Athens, and its Academy and colleges 
sometimes even surpassed those of Athens. The rivers Caly- 
cadmus, Sarus, and Pyramus water this delicious and fertile 
land, flowing down from mountains covered with an almost 
perpetual snow. The Cydnus, celebrated in history, flows by 
Tarsus, and in ancient times was navigable, and famous for the 
rapidity of its current and the coldness of its waters, in which 
Alexander had a narrow escape from drowning. Tarsus was 
the birthplace of some distinguished personages. Rome was in- 
debted to her for the brilliant professors Antipater, Archelaus, 
Nestor, the rhetorician Hermogenes, and the two Athenodori, 
Stoic philosophers, the latter of whom was the preceptor of 
Augustus. The physician Arius, also, was from Tarsus. It was 
subject to the Roman empire ; Antony made it a free city as a 
reward for its friendly sentiments towards Julius Caesar, and in 
his honor it demanded that it should receive the name of Juli- 
opolis. In the time of our Lord Jesus Christ Tarsus was the 
metropolis of Cilicia. The greatest glory of this city consists in 
its having been the birthplace of the great Apostle St. Paul, 
the model of the apostolate, the vessel of election, whose 
charity and zeal never recoiled before any difficulty in spread- 
ing everywhere the knowledge and love of our Lord Jesus 
Christ. The first bishop of Tarsus was Jason, a relative of St. 
Paul. His successors were Urban, consecrated by St. Paul 
Athanasius, martyred under Valerian ; Helenus, who assisted at 
the Council of Antioch in 268, and Clinus, who baptized St. 
Pelagia, the Virgin-Martyr of Tarsus. There are more than 



1893-] AN INTERESTING LETTER FROM TARSUS. 95 

five mosques which were formerly churches, dedicated to St. 
Sophia, St. Peter, St. Theodore, St. Paul, St. Stephen, the Holy 
Apostles, St. John Baptist, St. Sergius, St. Mary; of which the 
last mentioned is now in the possession of the Armenian schis- 
matics. The remaining antiquities are the Deunuk-Tach, generally 
regarded as the tomb of Sardanapalus, some walls, and two 
ancient gates. Medals and other objects appertaining to tombs 
are often found by making excavations in certain places. 

Until about A.D. iioo Tarsus was very flourishing, and pre- 
sided over five metropolitan and eighteen suffragan sees. Un- 
happily, at the present time, the Christians of Cilicia, number- 
ing above 100,000, are separated from the communion of the 
church, and in a state of deplorable ignorance. Twenty-five 
years ago a small number of Armenians returned to the fold of 
the church, in Tarsus, and there are many others disposed to 
do likewise, but up to the present time we have not been able 
to build a church for our converts ; and these Armenians, who 
are generally very pious and take great delight in assisting at 
the ceremonies of the church, after having given up their beau- 
tiful and magnificent monumental churches, have no suitable 
place for celebrating the sacred rites of religion ; and thus, when 
they become Catholics are in a deplorable state of deprivation, and 
an object of derision to the Protestants. In this place we have 
a zealous and pious priest, who gathers our Catholics in a mis- 
erable chapel. We have a parochial school under the name of 
St. Paul ; but the girls, for the want of a Catholic female school, 
attend the schools of the schismatics and Protestants. These 
last have a temple, three ministers educated in America, three 
well-appointed schools, one of which is a night-school for boys ; the 
two others are for children of both sexes. Hundreds of children 
frequent these schools, many of whom are from all parts of Ci- 
licia, so that the youth of the province receive an anti-Catholic 
education, to our prejudice. American societies have occupied 
the important centres throughout all Cilicia; Tarsus, Adana, Sis, 
Hadjine, Chiar, Mopsuestia, Pajas, Mersina, Djebel ; they have 
everywhere sumptuous establishments, schools, temples, colleges, 
orphanages ; and while our works remain stationary on account 
of our poverty, the Protestants are gaining ground. Within forty 
years they have won over more than 20,000 souls in all Cilicia, 
But the Armenians, attached by their nature to the ceremonies 
of the church, are never content to remain Protestants; they 
come to me from time to time, begging me to build churches 
and schools, and promising to become Catholics. Unhappily, 



96 AN INTERESTING LETTER FROM TARSUS. [Oct., 

for the want of the necessary means, I can do nothing. My 
Very Rev. Father, during a year past, I run here and there, 
to hinder Protestant proselytism ; and not having priests enough, 
I go myself everywhere, to baptize infants, administer to the 
sick, bury the dead, and teach the catechism, so that I am often 
obliged to interrupt my ministry in one place in order to hasten 
to others. American societies lavish their gold and silver in 
Cilicia to seduce the Armenians, while I can build neither 
churches nor schools to confirm my neophytes in the holy faith. 

At Adana, the place of my residence, there is a church 
in a lamentable condition, the roof of which being of common 
earth, when it rains all the altars become wet ; so that prompt 
and thorough repairs are absolutely necessary. [I should think 
so, indeed !] There are some hundreds of Catholics here ; there 
is a school for girls conducted by the Sisters of the Immaculate 
Conception which is doing good, and I have lately myself 
commenced a school for boys ; but, unhappily, both schools 
are too small. 

Sis, a very interesting city of Cilicia, is the residence of the 
schismatical patriarch of the Armenians, who are very numerous 
in that place. We have there a chapel, a school, lately opened 
under the direction of the zealous priest in charge of the mis- 
sion, and about one hundred recently converted Catholics. 

Hadjine is the principal mission of the diocese. It was be- 
gun twelve years ago, with five Catholic converts, who have in- 
creased to the number of above 2,000, which is being daily aug- 
mented. If we had a church, I am confident that the entire 
population of the city, which amounts to 30,000, would be con- 
verted. There is but one missionary there, a very devoted and 
zealous priest. I have opened a school which has 200 pupils. 
My heart bleeds for the 300 girls, who for the want of a Catho- 
lic school attend that of the Protestants. I hope that Providence 
will furnish the means of opening a school for these little 
girls. 

At Chiar, a village founded on the ruins of the ancient city 
of Gomana, a mission has existed during the last four years, 
embracing 45 families, to whom new converts are daily added, 
although there is no resident priest. I have commenced a school 
at this mission. Besides these localities, there are several other 
cities and villages which demand missionaries. I am obliged to 
visit them often, and to encourage the converts, who are ex- 
posed to the danger of becoming entirely discouraged and los- 
ing the faith, on account of the apparent and involuntary neg- 



1893-] Aw INTERESTING LETTER FROM TARSUS. 97 

lect of them on our part. In order to furnish a supply of mis- 
sionaries for this vast diocese, I have received a number of young 
men to be instructed and trained for the ministry under my 
personal supervision. But for all these works I have only the 
moderate sum of 2,400 francs yearly, which I receive from the 
Propagation of the Faith. You can judge, my Very Rev. Father, 
of my precarious condition. How is it possible to meet the ex- 
penses of so many necessary works : visits to make, schools to 
support, chapels and presbyteries to build, and these poor Ar- 
menians to defend against an anti-Catholic propaganda ? 

Having come to this diocese after my consecration, one year 
ago, I made an apostolic visitation which lasted five months, 
amid many difficulties and dangers. I have traversed, during 
this journey, repeatedly, Mount Taurus, dangerous forests and 
valleys, exposed to the inclemency of the weather without a 
shelter, and often obliged to sleep on the mountains in the open 
air. Although suffering much, I was nevertheless content, rely- 
ing on the grace of God, which enables his servants to endure 
all things for the salvation of souls. But to this contentment 
succeeded a profound sentiment of sadness when I saw every- 
where newly-converted Catholics without priests, churches, or 
schools. I reflected, besides, that if I had sufficient resources 
at my disposal, the number of conversions would be greatly in- 
creased. I preached everywhere, always having a numerous au- 
dience. Where there was no chapel, I used to erect an altar in 
a cemetery; but when it rained I was obliged to resort to some 
miserable shelter, insufficient to contain half of the people, and 
constantly threatening to fall down on our heads. Indeed, I ad- 
mired the constancy and devotion of these neophytes, and the 
great sacrifice which they have made, in abandoning their large 
and beautiful churches, to assist at the Holy Sacrifice in a wretch- 
ed stable, enduring, moreover, a continual persecution from 
schismatics and Protestants. On account of this admirable con- 
stancy, I cannot doubt that a happy future for religion will dawn 
in this diocese. On my part, I will continue to labor for it, 
hoping for success. 

At the outset, we ought to build a church in honor of St. 
Paul, at Tarsus. This project was formed by my worthy prede- 
cessor, who obtained a sufficiently spacious site, upon which 
stands our present chapel. It has not been possible to erect 
the church thus far, and I believe that the accomplishment and 
the glory of this good work has been reserved by Divine Provi- 
dence for the Congregation of St. Paul in America. It would 
VOL. LVIII. 7 



9 8 



AN INTERESTING LETTER FROM TARSUS. 



[Oct., 



be a strong blow against the anti-Catholic efforts which pro- 
fane this blessed soil, by false and dangerous teachings. Ameri- 
can Catholics, noble athletes of our holy religion, by erecting a 
worthy monument to the name of him who is their Patron, will 
compensate the evils and the desolation which have invaded this 
poor, unfortunate country ! 

This sanctuary will proclaim better than any words of mine 
your generosity, your lively faith, and your ardent charity. Your 
Congregation, which does so much good at home, will obtain 
also many conversions in this foreign and distant land, drawing 
down upon its members the benediction of God, for which the 
Pastor and people of this poor diocese will always pray with 
tears of joy and gratitude. 

Awaiting a favorable answer from you, my Very Rev. Father, 
I pray you to accept the assurance of the sentiments of profound 
respect and cordial affection, with which I have the honor to 
subscribe myself, 

Your Reverence's very devoted and affectionate in our Lord, 

J PAUL TERZIAN, 
Bishop of Adana and Tarsus. 





1893-] COLONEL DONN PIATT. 99 



COLONEL DONN PIATT.* 

Beloved by some, misunderstood by more, 

His birth a blunder, and all life a bore, 

He lived a dual nature to the end, 

Puzzling alike to enemy and friend ; 

With heart as tender as the world e'er found, 

He had the will to strike, the skill to hound ; 

Longing for love the paths of peace adorn, 

Fighting he passed in battle and in storm ; 

'Twasmore to shield the weak than serve the right 

That moved his heart to feel, his hand to smite, 

And gained the name, unjust, of Ishmaelite. 

r R. CHARLES GRANT MILLER, without writing a 
biography, has given us more than a biographical 
sketch of the brilliant Colonel Bonn Piatt. Piatt 
came of that Kentucky-Virginia stock which has 
peopled southern Ohio, a hardy race of planters 
with brain and brawn farmers indeed, but cultured gentlemen ; 
alumni of the University of Virginia, William and Mary's, and 
old Bishop Chase's school at Gambier, in Ohio, Kenyon College ; 
ready and equipped, if occasion occurred, to serve the country 
in field of battle or halls of legislature ; otherwise content to 
cultivate their fields and enjoy life midst the glories of that per- 
fect rural scenery which so abounds in beautiful southern Ohio. 
To Piatt there came occasion, and so he was prominent in poli- 
tics and literature. We congratulate Mr. Miller on his study 
if we may translate the French word etude thus of Colonel 
Piatt's life. 

There is much that is remarkable in his boyhood. Mr. 
Miller quaintly tells us why his studies at the Athenaeum in 
Cincinnati were interrupted. He threw the professor of mathe- 
matics out of the window. Most lads are content to throw the 
text-book out, being satisfied with a strong desire to throw the 
professor after it. Not so with Donn both professor and book 
suffered the indignity. Mr. Miller remarks that "this precluded 
the possibility of his attending the Athenaeum longer." We 
should judge so! The lad was precocious and bright. He had 
as intimates and companions and mind you, Donn was only a 

* Donn Piatt : His Works and Ways. By Charles Grant Miller. Poems and Plays. By 
Donn Piatt. Sunday Mediations and Selected Pross Sketches. By Donn Piatt. Cincinnati : 
Robert Clarke & Co. 1893. 



IOO 



COLONEL DONN PIATT. 



[Oct., 



lad in his early teens Hiram Power, the sculptor; J. Q. A. 
Ward ; the painter Frankensteine, Tucker, and Clevenger, well- 
known artists. 

We can fancy him in the studio of Power, or beside the 
easel of Ward, talking art and politics to those eminent men, 





DONN PIATT AT FIFTEEN. 

tolerated because of his brightness and quick wit, and loved 
because of his affectionate manner and gentle bearing. The 
man was in the boy. Journalist as a mere lad, and famous as 
the editor of the Mac-o-chee Press an obscure country-town 
paper, but yet so brilliantly edited as to gain recognition the 



1893-] 



COLONEL DONN PIATT. 



icr 



country over. Soon into politics, and as soon into the halls of 
the legislature of Ohio as a member. Then came the years of 
his earnest literary work as a newspaper writer, and finally the 
establishment of the Washington Capital, together with George 




Alfred Townsend. We were at college in New Jersey in 1871- 
72, and one of our companions used to receive the Capital, 
sent from home. Four of us one from Kentucky, two from 
Washington, and one from Ohio were accustomed to get to- 



IO2 



COLONEL DONN Pi ATT. 



[Oct., 



gather and read the Capital out loud. Not an unremarkable fact 
that college boys were deeply interested in what Colonel Piatt 
would have to say about politics, society, and literature. So it 
was, too, the country over. The Capital was read and quoted 
far and wide. His retirement to Mac-o-chee followed his career 




DONN PIATT AT THIRTY-FIVE. 

as a journalist, but Piatt had as a maxim " Labor is health. It 
develops, strengthens, and contents the toiler, while it sweetens 
life." Those years of retirement at Mac-o-chee were busy years, 
and were fruitful in the production of two of his books, and 
his work as editor of Belford's Magazine. Mr. Miller makes this 
strange survey of Colonel Piatt's character in his final chapter: 



1893-] COLONEL DONN Pi ATT. 103 

" No two men looked at him alike. One was captivated by his 
sparkling wit, another interested in his bold thought, another 
touched by his tender sentiment, and another shocked at his 
keen, remorseless sarcasm. Different to every one, he was ever 
the same to each. A composite of the sternest, coldest Puritan 
and the most ardent Southern chivalry ; the ceaseless conflict 
between the two elements made him an enigma to his friends, a 
wonder to his enemies, and a mystery to himself." We do not 
think this just to Colonel Piatt or true in itself, though we take 
it as Mr. Miller's honest estimate of his subject's character. 
The volume is enjoyable reading and most interesting to the 
end. To Catholics it is interesting to note that Piatt was to- 
ward the end of his life a devout Catholic. He hardly was a 
convert. His mother, a very remarkable woman and of distin- 
guished ancestry, was a convert, and it is likely that Bonn was 
baptized in the church as a boy. However no record of his 
baptism was ever found, and so Donn was conditionally bap- 
tized when he was formally received into the church. Of the 
other two books we need but add a word. Regarding his 
poetry, one may judge it from the first poem printed in the 
volume before us : 

" The bloom was on the alder 
And the tassel on the corn." 

We think it his best ; we think it beautiful in sentiment, and 
we rank it as good poetry. Doubtless it was the reading of 
this that led Whitcomb Riley a pilgrim to Mac-o-chee, and in- 
spired his verse-tribute to Piatt, which ends : 

" Donn Piatt of Mac-o-chee : 
What a darling destiny 
Has been mine ! To meet him there 
Lolling in an easy chair 
On the terrace, while he told 
Reminiscences of old 
Letting my cigar die out 
Hearing poems talked about, 
And entranced to hear him say 
Gentle things of Thackeray, 
Dickens, Hawthorne, and the rest, 
Known to him as host and guest 
Known to him as he to me, 
Donn Piatt of Mac-o-chee ! " 



IO4 



COLONEL DONN PIATT. 



[Oct., 



In regard to the plays, we may state that so talented an ac- 
tress as Clara Morris, and careful staging and a fair company, 
did not save one of them from utter failure in New York, where 
it was produced. They all read well enough, are full of that 




dry wit for which Donn Piatt was famous, but they "act" bad- 
ly. Those who know Donn Piatt as soldier, journalist, and 
statesman will be astonished to learn that he is the author of 
a libretto for a comic opera. No one could be found to buy 



I893-] 



COLONEL DONN PIATT. 



105 



it, though the music is said to be good and has a well-known 
composer for author. It cost Colonel Piatt no small amount of 
labor to write the book of this opera, and he was somewhat in 
conceit with the work. Yet he had that world-philosophy which 
understands a failure and acknowledges it. 

The third volume, Sunday Meditations and Selected Prose 
Writings, is the refined gold of Colonel Piatt's literary work, 
only not a little of the dross adheres to the gold in the form of 
selected prose. 

We deem it would have been better not to have published 




COLONEL DONN PIATT. 

some of the " selected prose sketches," as they are termed. They 
are purely " newspaper " writing in kind and matter. Mr. Miller 
has aptly said of a journalist that " while he lives he moulds pub- 
lic opinion after his own judgment ; he marks out the destiny 
of nations ; he stands as if with his hand on the pulse of the 
world, and measures the throb of every event in the universe; 
and when he dies, not a line that he has written lives longer 
than the conditions that called it forth and gave it meaning." 



106 COLONEL DONN Pi ATT. [Oct., 

Then why put these newspaper sketches forth in a printed 
volume? The conditions that gave them meaning and called 
them forth have passed away; and too many of the con- 
ditions were purely local. To one who knew not the conditions 
some of them must seem positively vulgar. It grates on our 
sense of the " eternal fitness of things " that they should be 
found side by side with noble sentiments to be found in the 
" Sunday Meditations." Perhaps Mr. Miller intended them as spe- 
cimens of Colonel Piatt's wit. If so they are too numerous and 
more fittingly placed in the volume " Works and Ways." 

We believe the " Sunday Meditations " were written recently, 
and hence while the author was a Catholic. They demonstrate 
what an intense religious sentiment Colonel Piatt had. If the 
theologian may be inclined to think that now and then they 
limp in doctrine, let him consider the author. The wonder is 
they are so true. They are lofty and noble, and will inspire a 
love of truth and God, and all we understand by religion, in 
those who may read them. It is a pity they were not published 
by themselves, for they fill one hundred and seventy-nine pages. 

His literary style was of the highest in journalistic art. 
Scintillating, witty, with the keen edge of sarcasm. Writing with 
him was an inspiration. It was not that labored perfection that 
comes from long practice. Many a journalist becomes such by 
gradual gradation from printer's devil to the editorial sanctum. 
Not so Piatt. He wrote as he thought, and his thought was 
gem-studded from the start. His was a power that made him 
envied by every newspaper man the country over. His too was 
a bravery that knew no fear. Hunted in his very home by men 
whose object was to kill him on sight ; sought for on the streets 
of Washington by legislators whose Credit Mobilier rascalities 
were day by day ruthlessly shown up in his paper, the Capital ; 
beaten on the very floor of the Senate chamber, he never flinched 
in his task. He poured shot and shell into the enemy's camp, 
utterly routing them. And it was during these days that he 
manifested what a power was in his pen. 

If Mr. Miller is the author of the preface to this volume, 
for it is unsigned, and, indeed, we state that he has edited the 
books only on hearsay, we think that he fails to fully appreciate 
the doctrine of the Meditations. How thoroughly Donn Piatt 
knew and how intensely he loved his creed, we know from long 
conversations with him during his many visits to this city. We 
came across him one night in the darkened hallway of a friend's 
house devoutly telling his beads. " Will be with you in a minute," 



I893-] 



COLONEL DONN Pi A TT. 



107 



he said, "after I have finished this petition to the Blessed 
Mother. Have been so busy all day I have not had time to 
say my morning prayers till now." It was 9 P.M. His faith 




MAC-O-CHEE LIBRARY. 



was simple and pure and holy. He loved his religion because 
he loved God and truth. 

Just a word here of Bonn Piatt's conversion. He came 
through darkness to the light of faith after a long, weary march. 



io8 COLONEL DONN PIATT. [Oct., 

We conceive that he was always what is termed a God-fearing 
man. But his notions were vague, restless, unsatisfying. His 
religion was like that of many a noble-minded non-Catholic, 
bringing him only a longing that neither consoled nor sanctified. 




LOUISE KIRBY PIATT. 

But a nature such as his could not and did not rest satisfied 
with a mere longing. When at last a defined creed was pre- 
sented to his intellect, when the objects on which faith is exer- 
cised took hold of his mind and remained mirrored on his soul, 
he said the word " credo." With faith and prayer, and 
participation of the consoling and sweet, life-giving Sacrament, 



1893-] COLONEL DONN PIATT. 109 

there came to him the joy which God gives to every earnest- 
minded believer, and that peace which the world cannot give nor 
take away. 

Donn Piatt is best known as an author by his book, Memo- 
ries of the Men who saved the Union. He will be better known, 
we think, by his forthcoming volume, Life of General Thomas. 
We hope Robert Clarke & Co. will publish the former work in 
unison with these volumes and the Life of General Thomas. 

In the prose sketches there is one among the "Celebrated 
Men of the Day " on Garfield. We re-read it with pleasure, es- 
pecially the sentence : " There is but one act of his life that 
appears in strange contradiction to his character, and that is his 
letter to Secretary Chase in regard to Rosecrans's campaign, 
while he, Garfield, was Rosecrans's chief of staff. In common 
with his other true friends, I shrink from it, and can only hope 
that some circumstance, to the world unknown, existed then to 
justify the writing." We say that we have re-read this with 
pleasure because it gives us a glimpse of one of Donn Piatt's 
characteristics his outspoken frankness. His was a high estimate 
of General Garfield's brilliant qualities of mind, and he loved 
him for his great generosity of heart, and that something mag- 
netic which makes a friend and keeps him. Certainly Piatt was 
Garfield's friend. Yet his love and his friendship did not in- 
duce silence when he wrote of Garfield, and, with a note of sad- 
ness, indeed, he speaks of what most men look upon as Garfield's 
great shame. 

Reverting now to his mother and his tender affection for 
her recently going over a large packet of Donn's letters, we 
find the terms again and again recurring in referring to her, 
"my dearest mother," "my sainted mother," and these were re- 
cent letters. We hope that when the publishers of From the 
Highways of Life * bring out a second edition, or a second vol- 
ume, some one may be found to write the history of her con- 
version. Mr. Miller relates of her, which happened of course 
before her conversion to the Catholic Church, that she was in- 
tent on building a church at Mac-o-chee, and that her husband, 
Judge Piatt, was intent on building a house. Business calling 
the judge to Cincinnati, and keeping him there, Mrs. Piatt took 
workmen and material which the judge had on the grounds, 
with instruction to go ahead with the house, and built her 
church and had it completed by the time the judge returned, a 

* From the Highways of Life. The Catholic Book Exchange, 120 West 6oth St., N. Y. 



no COLONEL DONN PIATT. [Oct., 

short time later on. We are told the judge gracefully submitted 
to the inevitable and suffered himself to be taken to the build- 
ing to inspect it and to worship. We have been told the family 
contemplate the erection, on the very spot of this primitive 




ELLA KIRBY PIATT. 

house of worship, of a fine Catholic Church. The history of such 
a woman is well worth preserving, and her conversion to the 
true faith would add not a little lustre to that wonderful set of 
biographies contained in From the Higliways of Life. 

SAMUEL BERNARD HEDGES. 




1893-] THEORY AND PRACTICE OF PROFIT-SHARING. in 



THEORY AND PRACTICE OF PROFIT-SHARING. 

i 

N English historian has said: "Those to whom all 
innovation is dangerous, naturally and without dis- 
honesty refuse to discriminate between the darker 
and lighter shades, the anarchic and the Christian 
points, in the doctrines which threaten their 
power, influence, interest, rank, authority. To them every oppo- 
nent in civil matters is a demagogue and an anarchist." It 
must, however, be seriously doubted if to-day an earnest seeker 
after economic truth is any longer entitled to raise the plea of 
honesty in refusing to draw these just, though in the past per- 
haps not always clearly discernible, distinctions. Economic sci- 
ence " enlightened by the spirit of the Gospel " is nowadays 
very well prepared to establish, and has established, that indus- 
trial divisions should be perpendicular, not horizontal. The 
workman's interests are bound up with those of his employers, 
and it is only the idle, the dissipated, and above all the inca- 
pable, to whom the description of the communist as 

. . . " One who has yearnings 

For an equal division of unequal earnings" 

may fairly be applied. This point of distinction cannot be 
urged too much. Besides, it leads to another closely related 
point on which it is well to dwell even a little longer. It is 
easy, no doubt, to exaggerate the achievements and possibilities 
of co-operation in general, but it seems to us that it is easier 
still to belittle them. Co-operation has its belittlers in plenty 
among its numerous critics. Theorists are constantly telling us 
that it is on the wrong tack and that the founders of the move- 
ment did not know what they were about. Such notions, if 
listened to, would end by disgusting co-operators with their 
work, the first principle of which is self-help. On the other 
hand, to common practical folk, especially to the average man 
of the English-speaking race used to ways of every-day busi- 
ness, the progress of the co-operative movement will appear one 
of the most astonishing things in industrial history. The advice, 
then, of the great Florentine, 



ii2 THEORY AND PRACTICE OF PROFIT-SHARING. [Oct., 

. . . " Lascia dir le genti 
Segui il tuo corso," 

is to be remembered against theorists of the above description 
in the face of facts like the following. 

That a combination of ordinary working-men, started for the 
purpose of carrying out a new commercial experiment without 
capital, without state help, with nothing to rely upon but its 
own efforts and intelligence, should in 50 years be able to 
boast of having an annual turnover exceeding 50,000,000 
=$250,000,000) and a membership of 1,750,000, representing about 
a sixth of the population of Great Britain ; of possessing pro- 
perty to the value of 12,000,000 (== $60,000,000), and of put- 
ting into the pockets of its members from 4,000,000 to 
5,000,000 (== $20,000,000 to $25,000,000) every year, which 
would otherwise be lost to them, must seem to everybody in all 
sobriety a colossal fact. It is the sort of fact which the British 
(and why not the American ?) intelligence can appreciate. Brit- 
ish working-men are not constitutionally given to dreaming of 
the millennium. Millions sterling impress them more ; and these 
millions of the co-operative budget will be in their eyes (and per- 
haps in a not very distant future too, in American eyes) a su- 
perb vindication of the main line of policy pursued by co-opera- 
tion in the past, and the soundest guarantee for its future. 
Can the American working-man, in the face of such facts, set up 
the plea of the Austrian and German delegates to the recent 
International Miners' Congress at Brussels : " It is all very 
well for you English to talk of what you can do by combina- 
tion and self-help ; but we have no combination ; we dare not 
hold public meetings, we dare not organize, we have no free 
press, we have not the franchise " ? Is the American working- 
man without that Magna Charta of political liberty? Will he 
admit that the British working-classes are in advance of him in 
this respect? 

Besides, that plea is a palpable untruth, at least as far as the 
German working-man is concerned. He has not only the fran- 
chise, but the imperial legislation does not interfere with, nay 
even favors, his lawful combinations and meetings necessary for 
the movement in question.* The latter, moreover, as the United 

* There were in existence in Germany on May 31, 1892, not less than 2,840 co-operative 
societies in various branches of industry (against 2,664 on the same day 1891) besides 1,122 
co-operative supply associations, not including loan and credit building societies. The num- 
ber of certain classes of societies is constantly increasing, the total increase for 1891-92 
was 8;o. 



1893-] THEORY AND PRACTICE OF PROFIT-SHARING. 113 

States consular reports explicitly show, has considerably ad- 
vanced in imperial Germany, in spite of legislative restriction, 
if there was any. So it has in France. 

It would take twenty Montesquieus, said Proudhon, to devise 
the new constitution for the new socialist state of society, for 
which, according to collectivist thinkers themselves, human na- 
ture will not be ethically fit for at least five hundred years. 
Either remark may be true, but neither certainly is to the 
point. For it seems to us that we are neither in need of 
Montesquieus nor of an essential change of human nature 
to carry out in this much-boasted-of land of liberty of ours 
what has been accomplished in the " old effete monarchies " 
of Europe. Nations can and should learn from one another, 
and what man has done man can do again. Besides, we may 
have any number of Montesquieus who will devise to order 
a complete new scheme of society in the course of twenty 
minutes. But for the question in hand we need no new 
scheme at all, but only a little, or rather plenty of good 
will, honesty, and application of that practical common sense 
which Americans generally are never backward in claiming as 
their hereditary possession in theory at least. In the mean- 
time it is worth our while and the reader's attention to look 
more closely at another, American instance, where unselfish skill 
has managed to push successfully the solution of the problem. 
The kingdom of heaven does not come in all its entirety through 
the imitation of foreign patterns, but in this practical age the 
study and examination of good examples and models must come 
before action. Co-operation and profit-sharing are a means to 
mitigate the conflict between capital and labor, even under exist- 
ing conditions. With monopoly privileges destroyed and minim- 
ized (practically all of them have been created by unjust, un- 
wise, and hopelessly stupid legislation), it would add large sums 
to the incomes of the wages classes without diminishing any 
fairly-earned income of the employing class. 

Profit-sharing, as the term is now commonly used, implies 
a voluntary agreement on the part of the principal in a 
business to set aside some portion of the profits of his busi- 
ness for division among all or certain of his employees as a 
stimulus to their zeal and industry. Thus understood, profit- 
sharing involves the participation of the employee in all the 
complex factors that affect the final result or profit of a busi- 
ness, including necessarily its losses, since they tend to impair 
VOL. LVIII. 8 



ii4 THEORY AND PRACTICE OF PROFIT-SHARING. [Oct., 

or may even extinguish the profit. He thus becomes practically 
a partner, except that his participation in losses is limited to 
the surrender of his share in anticipated profits, and does not 
involve any impairment of his personal capital. But in most 
cases the interest of each participator in the profit fund is 
largely affected by the actions of others whom he cannot con- 
trol or influence, and- thus what he may earn or save for the 
common good may be lost by the mismanagement or extrava- 
gance of others. To admit them to participation in the net 
results of the whole business, while commendable as an act of 
generosity, is not defensible either as an equitable adjustment 
of the complex and often conflicting interests involved or as a 
theoretically correct solution of an economic problem. Now, a 
solution, while not simple, is attainable under many circumstan- 
ces, and moreover attainable by methods which experience has 
shown to be practical and successful. But it still leaves un- 
touched another feature, namely, the surrender by the principal 
of any portion of his legitimate profits without the assurance of 
an equivalent return from those on whom he bestows it. This 
is wrong in theory, and often objectionable in practice. For it 
may be commendable as an act of charity, but as a solution of 
the problem in question it is neither complete nor accurate. 
Moreover, charity to those who do not need it is a doubtful 
good, and among intelligent and self-respecting men is not 
always relished. Certainly the problem in hand will be best 
solved if it can be so formulated that the element of gratuity 
or charity, of giving without tangible consideration, can be elimi- 
nated. 

Let us then suppose that a principal, wishing to enlist the 
self-interest of his employees to augment the profits of the busi- 
ness, should offer to the operatives a proposition somewhat as 
follows : " I have already ascertained the cost of our product in 
labor, supplies, economy of material, and such other items as 
you can influence. I will undertake to organize and pay for a 
system whereby the cost of product in the same items will be 
periodically ascertained, and will agree to divide among you a 
certain portion (retaining myself the remainder) of any gain or 
reduction of cost, which you may effect by reason of increased 
efficiency of labor, or increased economy in the use of material, 
or both. This arrangement is not to disturb your rates of wages, 
which are to continue, as at present, those generally paid for 
similar services." There can be no question as to the inherent 



1893-] THEORY AND PRACTICE OF PROFIT-SHARING. 115 

fairness and accuracy of this solution if accomplished. It 
speaks for itself. But can it be accomplished ? " Hie Rhodus, 
hie salta !" 

Now that system for which the designation of " gain-shar- 
ing " (to differentiate it from profit-sharing as ordinarily un- 
derstood and practised) has been adopted, affording a basis for 
allotting to the employees a share in the gain or benefit accru- 
ing from their own efforts without involving in the account the 
general profits or losses of the business. Such a system is now 
in actual use, as affecting some three hundred employees of 
an American firm, with a trial of more than two years, and is 
demonstrated to be practical and beneficial, it being not a 
mere device for getting more work for less pay, but affording 
a practical opportunity for increasing the earnings of the em- 
ployees. What may be called the lame limb in it, the only 
one so far as shown by experience, is the remoteness of the 
reward, the average working-man being accustomed to quick 
returns, and not to working for a benefit which may come to 
him at the end of twelve months. But this fact does not touch 
the main principle of the plan, and relates only to one of its 
details, which in turn depends largely upon the character of the 
product. 

Theories which are totally fantastic and impracticable have 
the backbone taken out of them by the knowledge lurking in 
every sensible man's mind that, were they only worth it, they 
would have been tried. The executive possibility acts as a con- 
stant safety-valve. Now, co-operation generally is no longer a fan- 
tastic and impracticable theory ; it has been tried, and is constant- 
ly being tried. The effect of the new American environment 
may prove, in some lines, of a sobering nature. But without 
men of talent, character, and self-reliance our country would be 
badly off in government, as well as in economic life. The neces- 
sary supply of executive ability, therefore, must be calculated to 
be at par with the demand for it. The mass of laboring 
America, as of every other country, is composed neither of 
talking politicians, nor of the riotous and criminal element 
which exists upon the fringe of every moving crowd. But the 
evidence of countries like England must tell them that simply 
to follow the instincts of morality, and to lead a life of indus- 
try, sobriety, and thrift is not enough ; these qualities do not 
save the English laboring poor from ending their days too fre- 
quently in the work-house. And since the tendencies and laws 



n6 THEORY AND PRACTICE OF PROFIT-SHARING. [Oct., 

of economical development are everywhere essentially the same, 
the American laboring class, in the long run, will have to go 
the way of the English, unless they begin making a successful 
opposition betimes along the lines indicated. 

A little beginning has been made at home. The American 
" Association for the Promotion of Profit-sharing," of which the 
United States Commissioner of Labor, Honorable Carroll D. 
Wright, is the president, has for its object " the promotion and 
extension of such methods of uniting the interests of employers 
and employees as 'profit-sharing,' 'industrial partnership,' 'the 
premium system and kindred systems.' " The association has 
begun to publish a quarterly of sixteen pages, No. 4 of which 
bears the date of July, 1893. From its columns we are glad to 
learn that the number of firms and corporations now practising 
profit-sharing in Europe and America is known to be about 
three hundred a fair beginning for a reformatory, not to say 
revolutionary, measure like the one in question. The agitation 
thus started, however, is not limited to printer's ink. " The 
Profit-sharing Congress" has been held at Chicago. The United 
States Labor Commissioner presided and made the opening 
address, and the list of speakers contained names from England, 
France, and America. The report of the meeting may be ex- 
pected in the October issue of the association's periodical, and 
we would advise our readers to be on the lookout for that most 
interesting paper as bringing the whole matter, no doubt, up to 
date. 





1893-] AN INTERESTING REPORT ON EDUCATION. 117 



AN INTERESTING REPORT ON EDUCATION 
(1889-90). 

: N quantity of matter, in exhaustive nature of its 
contents, and in prima facie evidence of the most 
painstaking effort to fulfil a duty, the Report of 
the Commissioner of Education, for which we are 
indebted to the courtesy of the State Department 
at Washington, deserves admiration. It comprises two bulky 
volumes containing over seventeen hundred pages of printed 
matter, statistical, analytical, and descriptive, and furnished with 
copious indices and lists of schools and school officials. As a 
guide to the present condition of education, primary, interme- 
diate, and high, in every accessible country, it is a work of ex- 
ceedingly great value and will be frankly acknowledged to be 
worthy of a great State Department. But as a guide to the 
truth on the condition of education in the past, in countries 
where the flame of religious discord played havoc too often with 
the evidences of antecedent progress, we are at the outset forced 
to own it is not reliable, and its animus is only too plainly ap- 
parent. 

THE SCHOOL-MASTER IN SCOTLAND. 

Let us take the case of Scotland. We are presented with 
an historical resume of the condition of education in that coun- 
try in the period between the twelfth century and the so-called 
Reformation whose purpose is to prove the paradox that while 
it was to the efforts of the Catholic Church in Scotland was due 
the founding of schools and universities, it was despite the ef- 
forts of the same church that these same schools and universi- 
ties flourished. It is odd to read in a passage beginning with 
a tribute to the zeal of the church in this matter the statement, 
a little later on, that it was owing to foreign influences that 
freedom of thought was asserted against the repressive and ar- 
bitrary supervision of the church. 

Scotland enjoys the honor of being the first European coun- 
try in which a compulsory education act was passed. This was 
as early as 1494, in the reign of James IV. The proofs that 
education high and low in Scotland was, up to the period of 
Knox and the iconoclasts, sedulously fostered and promoted 



n8 AN INTERESTING REPORT ON EDUCATION. [Oct., 

are superabundant, as are those also that the so-called Reforma- 
tion in Scotland was destructive of all that had been so care- 
fully built up, for many a sorrowful year. So much for the 
baseless innuendoes of the Education Report. 

A PROTESTANT WITNESS FOR TRUTH. 

A Protestant clergyman, the Rev. J. P. Lawson, thus refutes 
the calumnies as to the ignorance of the Catholic clergy in 
Scotland before the Reformation : " Much has been said and 
written respecting the ignorance which prevailed in Scotland be- 
fore the Reformation, but it must be remembered that much of 
what the ancient ecclesiastics are accused of rests on the sole 
testimony of their enemies, who embraced every opportunity of 
ridiculing and calumniating their fallen adversaries. The covet- 
ousness, moreover, of those who expected to share in the con- 
templated plunder of the Church induced them to listen willingly 
to the many false and disgraceful stories propagated concerning 
them, and which were readily believed in times which did not 
afford easy opportunities for investigating the truth of the alle- 
gations. To learning the Scottish clergy who lived before the 
Reformation have some claims ; it is among them alone that 
we find any knowledge of the arts and sciences, for the studies 
which formed the literature of the times were held to be un- 
worthy of the warlike spirit of the nobility. Before the founda- 
tion of the universities, schools were established in all the prin- 
cipal towns under the superintendence of the clergy, and it ap- 
pears from the cartularies of the monasteries that many of 
them possessed schools in which instruction was communicated 
by the monks, who also superintended the education of the 
young nobility. Perth and Stirling had flourishing schools be- 
fore 1173, and there were also similar institutions in Ayr, Ber- 
wick, Montrose, and Aberdeen these facts prove that educa- 
tion was not entirely neglected." 

In the year 1450 the University of Glasgow was founded, 
which is still, even in our times, the most valuable possession 
of the great commercial capital of Scotland. This university 
was founded by Pope Nicholas the Fifth and William Turnbull, 
Bishop of Glasgow. 

A GREAT POPE. 

It may be worth while to copy the following extract from 
Lord Macaulay's address when elected lord-rector of the Uni- 
versity of Glasgow in 1850: "At this conjunction a conjunc- 
tion of unrivalled interest in the history of letters a man never 



1893-] AN INTERESTING REPORT ON EDUCATION. 119 

to be mentioned without reverence by every lover of letters 
held the highest place in Europe. Our just attachment to that 
Protestant faith to which our country owes so much must not 
prevent us from paying the tribute which, on this occasion and 
in this place, justice and gratitude demand to the founder of 
the University of Glasgow, the greatest of the restorers of learn- 
ing, Pope Nicholas the Fifth. He had sprung from the common 
people, but his abilities and his erudition early attracted the 
notice of the great. He had studied much and travelled far. 
He had visited Britain, which, in wealth and refinement, was to 
his native Tuscany what the back settlements of America 
now are to Britain. He had lived with the merchant princes 
of Florence those men who first ennobled trade by making 
trade the ally of philosophy, of eloquence, and of taste. It was 
he who, under the munificent and discerning Cosmo, arranged 
the first public library that modern Europe possessed. From 
privacy your founder rose to a throne, but on the throne he 
never forgot the studies which had been his delight in privacy. 
He was the centre of an illustrious group, composed partly of 
the last great scholars of Greece, and partly of the first great 
scholars of Italy. By him was founded the Vatican Library, then 
and long after the most precious and most extensive collection of 
books in the world. By him were carefully preserved the most 
valuable intellectual treasures which had been snatched from the 
wreck of the Byzantine Empire. His agents were to be found 
everywhere, in the bazaars of the farthest East, in the monaste- 
ries of the farthest West, purchasing or copying worm-eaten parch- 
ments on which were traced words worthy of immortality. Under 
his patronage were prepared accurate Latin versions of many pre- 
cious remains of Greek poets and philosophers. But no depart- 
ment of literature owed so much to him as history. By him 
were introduced to the knowledge of Western Europe two great 
and unrivalled historical compositions the works of Herodotus 
and of Thucydides. By him, too, our ancestors were first made 
acquainted with the graceful and lucid simplicity of Xenophon, 
and with the manly good sense of Polybius." 

A UNIVERSITY BLESSED BY GOD. 

How much higher than ours is the idea of a university ex- 
pressed by no less an authority than an official of the avow- 
edly anti-Catholic French government of to-day ! Listen to the 
words of M. Greard, Vice-rector of the Academy of Paris, spoken 
in presence of M. Fallieres, Minister of Education, on the 



120 AN~ INTERESTING REPORT ON EDUCATION. [Oct., 

opening of the new Sorbonne in 1889. He is speaking of the 
ancient University of Pari : 

"One of the first in date, if not the first, the University of 
Paris in the middle ages, was without contradiction the most 
renowned and the most hospitable of all. The scholars of the 
times, who in the search of origins prided themselves less upon 
exactitude than imagination, considered it by right of inheritance 
the sovereign depository of the treasuries of science. The uni- 
versity from which all the others descended, wrote Bishop Tilon 
de Mersebourg, is that of Babylon, founded by Ninus ; to Baby- 
lon succeeded the city of the Pharaohs, Memphis ; to Mem- 
phis, Athens, the work of Cecrops ; from Athens, Rome, and 
from Rome, Paris. Bologna is entitled justly to credit for edu- 
cation in jurisprudence; none will contest the supremacy of the 
University of Paris in sacred and profane literature. Ten col- 
leges were grouped about it as about the common mother col- 
lege of " Dennemarche," the English college, the Scotch college, 
the German, the Lombard, and the Greek. Kings sent their 
sons hither to form them in the dialect and good manners. From 
the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries it contributed to the 
elevation of the greater part of mankind, poets, savants, and 
philosophers coming from all known sections of the world, of 
whom posterity has preserved the memory or consecrated the 
name William Occam, the " invincible doctor," Raymond Lulli, 
Thomas Aquinas, Benoit of Anagni, the embryo Boniface the 
Eighth, Brunetto Latini, one of Dante's masters, Dante himself, 
Thomas Morus, Erasmus, and many others. Oh, unique city! 
Oh, Paris without equal! Parisius sine part! wrote Lanfranc, of 
Milan, in separating himself from his companions of study. 
They loved * the delectable speech,' which resounded in ' this 
gentle land of university blessed by God.' They felt every- 
where at their ease because, by the unanimous testimony of 
those who met them here, love of truth was the sole rule which 
characterized the discipline of the teaching and which each of 
his right enjoyed. It is not rash to say it, at a time when all 
the intellectual life was enclosed within the walls of the schools, 
the University of Paris was the most active propaganda centre 
of the spirit of France." 

To what effect the university leavened the genius of France 
was thus testified by the same witness : 

" In the middle ages it was the French spirit which first in- 
spired and almost wholly sustained to the end the impetuosity 
of the Crusades, gave to religious enthusiasm its full scope and 



1893-] AN INTERESTING REPORT ON EDUCATION. 121 

at the same time opened new paths to the activity of the peo- 
ples of the Occident. It was the French spirit which at the 
end of a centenary conflict recovered the sense of country, real- 
ized it in a valiant and touching image, and, by an effort which 
politics could but consecrate, set the bases of national unity. If 
it received from without the breath of the 'reform' and of the 
' renaissance,' with what vigor it appropriated and converted it 
to the highest aspirations ! What awakening of antiquity, reju- 
venated and purified by Christianity, was the opening of French 
literature in the seventeenth century, an expansion so rich and 
so brilliant that even after the lustre of military glory, for so 
many years undimmed, was extinguished, this century, although 
desolated at its end, preserved for contemporaneous people as 
well as for posterity the radiant name of Louis the Fourteenth ! " 
We have got beyond such obsolete notions in these days of 
rapid movement and smartness in idea. We want no " university 
blessed by God." It is enough for us that we have a univer- 
sity for the advance of learning. The serpent is the personifica- 
tion of learning. We are afraid that the rod of Moses may 
swallow up all the rods of the Egyptian magicians ; hence we 
must put Moses out of court. 

THE ALTERNATIVE TO DESPAIR. 

Now what is the effect of this learning " unblessed of God " ? 
Hear one of its advocates, M. Henri Lavisse, on the subject. 
It was in celebrating the opening of the new Sorbonne (where, ac- 
cording to the speaker, the "official" consumption of champagne 
was thirteen hundred bottles) he spoke these words at the sub- 
sequent students' banquet : 

" In the great uncertainty when, on all vital questions, we 
leave science and philosophy, human activity, if it have not an 
immediate, visible, and tangible object, will risk decay." 

And what is the only antidote against this danger of dry-rot 
in the wide-reaching sphere of human activity, when the dread 
pall of uncertainty hangs over it ? What refuge is there for the 
human mind in the day of doubt, precursor of despair? Patri- 
otism. So says M. Henri Lavisse. 

No one will question the nobility of the principle of patriot- 
ism. It is the finest impulse of the human heart, in the cata- 
logue of worldly incentives to self-sacrificing deeds. It is a vir- 
tue which lifted Hellenic and Latin paganism at times to a 
pinnacle of sublimity. But there is a higher principle, and it is 
embodied in the formula " for God, and for country for our 
altars and our firesides." 



122 AN INTERESTING REPORT ON EDUCATION. [Oct., 

GERMANY FINDS A MODUS VIVENDI. 

The perfection to which the system of education, high and 
preparatory, has attained in France is matter for unbounded 
eulogy. The French state system, it is claimed, is the best on 
earth. But the worth of every system is measured by its re- 
sults ; and, tested this way, the French system must fall back a 
pace. What was the agency by which Germany was enabled to 
conquer in the last gigantic war ? Her educational system. 
The German soldier was better taught and better drilled than 
the French soldier. This was true of the rank and file; it was 
true conspicuously with regard to the officers and the generals. 
Their bravery was no greater than that of the French ; their arms 
were not superior. But their military and scientific training was 
infinitely more so. They had an intimate knowledge of French 
geography, and their marching powers were far beyond those of 
the French levies. These advantages stood them in good stead, 
enabling them to win many a victory. Tested by these practi- 
cal proofs, the German educational system stands at the head of 
the European machinery. It is a matter, then, to be noted and 
remembered that the state system in the German Empire is not 
one that banishes God from the school-house and the university. 
There is a mixture of religious denominations in Germany, as in 
this Republic, but that fact has not been found a reason why 
scholars and students should be deprived of the advantages of 
religious instruction at the public institutions. The Minister of 
Education in Prussia is also the Minister of Spiritual and Me- 
dicinal Affairs Minister der Geistlichen, Unterrichts, und Medi- 
cinalgelegenheiten. The provincial school boards are composed 
of Catholics and Protestants, according to the common law ; 
and religious instruction for a specified number of hours weekly 
forms part of the regular curriculum in the higher schools as 
well as the lower. 

FOOD FOR REFLECTION. 

These are things to be pondered on by every thoughtful 
American citizen. The ages have changed all the conditions of 
greatness for nations no less than individuals. To a sinister 
genius like that of Napoleon Bonaparte it would now be im- 
possible, thanks to the spread of education, to wreck and ruin 
neighboring states and populations, as he did in the days of 
European ignorance. The wars of the future must be decided 
by science rather than by military genius ; and it is consoling 



1893-] AN INTERESTING REPORT ON EDUCATION. 123 

to think that the tendency of education is to make the curse 
of war a diminishing one as the world advances. 

There is a cardinal difference between the final end and aim 
of all European education and all American education. Europe 
is a congeries of states whose traditional condition is that of 
hostility. The smaller ones are only saved from annihilation by 
the mutual jealousies of the greater. Hence great and small 
live in a state of perpetual preparedness for aggression or de- 
fence. This, happily, is not the case throughout the United 
States. The ideal, all over this vast continent, is peace and the 
highest development of the powers of mind and body, to the 
ultimate perfection of the human race. The safeguarding of 
the Republic, at the same time, is never overlooked ; but the 
path of free America is emphatically that of peace. Her aim is 
at a higher civilization, and not a refinement of barbarism, as 
scientific warfare assuredly is. 

A SOULLESS LAMP. 

We look in vain through the utterances -of our State authori- 
ties on public education for any indication of that spirit which 
we would fain see animating all those who climb the steep of 
learning. The soul of religion is not there the pole-star which 
should ever guide us through the tangled path of life. World- 
wisdom is the best thing they teach as an official system. 
Catholics, as citizens of this State, have a right to the advan- 
tages which it offers for the higher education. Under the ex- 
isting condition of things they can avail of them, and avail of 
them with the accompaniment of religious teaching, by means 
of the Summer-School, now happily established. 

There is matter for earnest reflection, throughout all the 
pages of this report, for those charged with the responsibility 
of laying down the lines upon which education ought to pro- 
ceed. Those who advocate the extrusion of religion from our 
schools and universities will find, we venture to say, but cold 
comfort in it. 

While we thus take exception to some of the arguments 
and suggestions put forward in this valuable state document, 
we must at the same time render it its just meed of praise as a 
most valuable and interesting contribution to our sum of knowl- 
edge on the existing school systems of the civilized world. We 
have only glanced at it cursorily thus far, but at some other 
opportunity it may be our duty to examine in detail some other 
portions of the information given in its useful pages. 




THE LORDS AND THE HOME-RULE BILL. 

I. 

'O-DAY we write the record : " Rejected amid 

jeers " ; 
To-day you say : " 'Tis finished " O noble House 

of Peers! 
Seven centuries of ruin came pleading at your 

gates, 

And begged a word for justice amid your high debates : 
Long years of woe and rapine spoke eloquently there 
The wailing of the children, the dying mother's prayer ; 
But not a phrase of comfort gave you unto their calls, 
The mandate of the people was stabbed within your halls. 
You say, my Lords, " 'Tis finished 'tis dying let it die : 
We'll hear no more for ever of Ireland's rabble cry." 
But mark you well the message it is no idle threat : 
Despite the wrong of ages the right shall have its debt ! 
Despite your jeers and laughter, ere yet this work is done 
The yeomanry of Britain shall rule the Eldest Son ! 

II. 

How long shall hollow custom the hearts of freemen hedge ? 
How long shall Justice bargain with titled Privilege? 
How long, O men of England ! shall lords of castled lands 
Rule, through your weak concession, the lords of honest hands ? 
Not yet in all the story that Britain proudly boasts 
Has freedom come unconquered unto her island coasts. 
Each boon of human progress that makes old England's dower 
Was wrung through bitter anguish from lordly place and power. 
When men were beasts of burden beneath the heavy yoke 
These heeded not, nor cared they until the masses spoke ; 
While Famine stalked through England and claimed her hourly 

dead, 

These haggled in their chambers to tax the people's bread : 
Yea, not content with ruling by rack-rent's mighty rolls, 
They snatched at God's own thunder and sought to rule men's 

souls ! 



1893-] THE LORDS AND THE HOME-RULE BILL. 



III. 



125 



Laugh, laugh, my Lords! laugh gayly : 'tis all you know to do- 
'Twere rash to hide the genius proud nature gave to you. 
Laugh well before the people and bear the message home ; 
Laugh, as a Nero fiddled amid the flames of Rome ! 
But know, while now you revel in insolence of birth, 
A spark is lit in England that is not quenched by mirth. 
It grows in town and hamlet, on mountain and on moor, 
Fanned by the winds of Justice, the sorrows of the poor ; 
Onward it sweeps, still onward across your ancient tracts, 
It grows and shall rush onward to seething cataracts : 
Until in mighty volume, with tongues of living flame, 
It sweeps away for ever the House of lordly shame ; 
Until, upon the ruins, shall rise in might again 
A nobler, freer Britain to rule the hearts of men ! 

JOHN JEROME ROONEY. 





126 AN EPOCH IN CATHOLICISM. [Oct., 



AN EPOCH IN CATHOLICISM. 

is not often given to those whose lives are thrown 
in public assemblies to witness such an inspiring 
scene as was presented in the Columbian Catho- 
lic Congress on Tuesday, September 5, when 
Monsignor Satolli was presented to the assembled 
delegates. As he stepped forward to respond to the warm 
words of welcome from Judge O'Brien the vast assembly, filled 
with but one thought that of veneration for his august person 
and love for his personal qualities of mind and heart rose in 
their places, and with rousing cheers and waving handkerchiefs 
expressed the sentiment which filled their hearts. The words 
spoken by the Apostolic Delegate on this occasion in his magic 
eloquence come to us with a more than human inspiration. He 
could not help being impressed with the living faith and wonderful 
devotion of the representative American Catholic ; he had seen 
the marvellous energy displayed in the material and intellectual 
order by the young American race, and in a burst of enthusiasm 
he bade the Catholics of America to go forward " with the gospel 
of truth in one hand and the Constitution of America in the 
other." 

Through this profession of faith and patriotism the Col- 
umbian Congress will mark the opening of a new era for the 
church in this country. Never in so pronounced a way or in 
so authoritative" a manner were the harmonies between the 
church and the national aspirations emphasized. The note of 
the true policy for American Catholics was struck by the strong 
and steady hand of Monsignor Satolli ; and its echo will not die 
away, but it will be struck again and again in every church and 
chapel in the land, until all discordant sounds are hushed. 
There is need of the gospel of truth, which shall be like the 
generous flood of sunshine into the dark and tangled marsh 
of error with its matted undergrowth of vicious principles, to 
drive into their lurking places noisome reptiles of error. Catholics 
have always been loyal to the gospel of truth in their words, 
in their thoughts, and in their actions. In its enlarged expression 
and wider assimilation are safety and permanence for the civil 
order. Hand-in-hand with this devotion to the Catholic truth 
there must be manifested an intense love for the institutions 



1893-] AN EPOCH IN CATHOLICISM. 127 

which are the outgrowth of a soil where the church has re- 
ceived her most wonderful expansion ; a love for the liberty 
which has permitted this growth, and if not for the higher 
reason of loving liberty and prosperity, for their own sakes at 
least ; because there is opened here a country which offers the 
most promising field to the religious zeal of Catholics, and the 
best conditions of success for the church. 

In gathering up the results of this notable gathering of repre- 
sentative men from all parts of the country, though the bugle- 
note of advance from the Apostolic Delegate may be deemed the 
most important, still only second to this, and scarcely less impor- 
tant, is the advancement given to the study of the social problems ; 
and the expressions of practical reforms on the lines suggested by 
the Holy Father will command a great deal of attention. The im- 
portance of the solutions of social problems commended itself to 
those whose duty it was to prepare the programme of papers, and 
as a consequence a large share of the deliberations was devoted 
to the discussion of these problems. The abilities of trained 
scholars and thinkers of the largest capacity were enlisted in 
preparation of papers on these topics, and when the delibera- 
tions are published in full these thoughtful papers will consti- 
tute a text-book wherein questions of burning interest and of 
world-wide concern will be carefully and thoroughly treated. 
If the congress had accomplished no other good work than merely 
revoicing the words of Leo XIII. on the condition of labor, 
and of bringing them again to the attention of thoughtful men, 
it would have been well worth the convening ; but it has gone 
farther it has applied the principles enunciated by the encycli- 
cal to the present evils, and offered some practical remedies. 

The necessity of a more thorough study of these social prob- 
lems is evident to all, for the church, whose care is the soul of 
the nation, cannot prosecute its designs if it neglect the body 
of the nation, and it cannot lead men to the Divinity if it have 
no care for humanity. Nothing commends a religion to the 
attention of thoughtful men like the fact that, while it leads men 
to a higher life, it softens some of the asperities of this. If 
the Christian Church does not offer some relief to the crying 
needs of the people in the gospel of daily life the people will 
look elsewhere. There is no blinding our eyes at this late day 
to the existence of social evils which are a menacing danger to 
church and society the discontent among wage-earners, the 
strained relations between employed and employers, the grasp- 
ing greed of the monopolist, the constrained poverty among 



128 AN EPOCH IN CATHOLJCJSM. [Oct., 

those willing to work. The remedy must come from that insti- 
tution, moulded by divine hands, which has ever been the friend 
of the poor; while it has extended its strong arm to support 
legitimate government, it has always stood between the oppres- 
sor and the oppressed. The church offers the solution in theo- 
retical principles; but her action on the individual conscience is 
of paramount importance, teaching each his individual rights 
and responsibilities, and compelling action along the lines sug- 
gested and through the individual on society, thus establishing 
a basis of mutual forbearance founded on justice, and a know- 
ledge of each other's rights. 

So the Congress, affirming again the truism that there should 
be no conflict between labor and capital, that their real interests 
do not clash, but that they should rather unite against a common 
enemy in monopoly ; suggesting the principle of arbitration in 
the event of strikes and lockouts ; re-emphasizing the thoroughly 
Catholic principle of the fatherhood of God and the brother- 
hood of man ; denouncing the evil of saloon-keeping as the 
origin of so much of the poverty arising from the vice of in- 
temperance ; resisting the endeavor of those who would rob the 
laborer of his day of rest on Sunday ; insisting on the necessity 
of more thorough religious education among the children of 
the land, has marked out the lines along which we are to march 
to success, and finally, in affirming that " it is only the school- 
bell and the church-bell that can prolong the echo of the liberty- 
bell," it restates the fact that it is to the religious instinct that 
American institutions owe their origin and their perpetuity. 

The resolutions, expressing as they do the ripest thought of 
the Congress, voicing the sentiments of a representative body of 
laymen and clergy, cannot but demand attention, and conse- 
quently will do their choicest work in influencing public opinion, 
not merely with our neighbors at home, but particularly among 
the nations of Europe, whose eager eyes are looking to the 
young republic for the solution of these pressing difficulties. 

So the second great Congress of American Catholics has gone 
into history, and its sessions will mark the passing of another 
milestone in the path of true progress. We await the coming 
of a third. The good these congresses do is of so high a na- 
ture that to disregard them is to cast aside an important ele- 
ment of success. Catholics of this country are the products of 
the various countries of the Old World, and the only bond of 
unity is that of their faith. In the upbuilding of the nation 
among Catholics particularly, it seems to be expedient to elimi- 



1893] AN EPOCH IN CATHOLICISM. 129 

nate all racial divergencies as fast as is consistent with the 
better preservation of the faith. To bring together, therefore, 
representative men of many races, from the broad prairie, the 
cultivated field, and the teeming city; from the counting-house 
and the busy shop ; from the professorial chair and the editorial 
sanctum men whose environments have been totally different, 
so that they may meet on the same platform, look into each 
other's faces and exchange ideas, no one thing is so calculated 
to melt away divergencies and break down barriers and to en- 
gender sympathetic bonds of union, so that as they are one in 
faith they may be one in heart, and as the church unites them 
in her unity, there may be also a union in national life. More- 
over, there goes out from such- a body of free and independent 
Catholic citizens a strength and force of expression on topics 
akin to their faith that compel a hearing. They are no mere 
tools of the clergy or dupes of a clerical tyranny, but they be- 
speak the sentiments which are born in free and independent 
hearts. They know their rights and are ready to defend them, 
and will not permit them to be trampled on with impunity. 
They place themselves in the line of progress, and are alive to 
the opportunities of the day. They recognize, with Emerson, 
that ".we live in a new and an exceptional age, that America 
is another name for opportunity, and that our whole history 
appears like the last effort of Divine Providence in behalf of 
the human race," and in the struggle to appropriate as large a 
share of the choicest blessings of the time by banishing apathy, 
by arousing a healthy Catholic public spirit through such con- 
gresses as these, Catholics can best achieve their purposes. 

LOOKING FORWARD. 

What a future lies before our mighty church, if the tide of 
human progress be not rolled back by some new and unexpected 
convulsion ! The vista is almost dazzling in its glory and mag- 
nitude. A glance back at the strides which this continent has 
made, even in the lifetime of the present generation, shows us 
a fact unexampled in the world's history. The wave of popula- 
tion which has swept in upon its shores has dwarfed all previ- 
ous movements of the human family into mere parochial mi- 
grations. It is not alone that this inrushing tide has been 
vast ; it is not alone that it has been continuous year after year; 
but it is the fact of its ever-increasing quantity which opens up 
for the speculator realms of conjecture on the future and its 
potential Teachings such as the onward march of no other nation 
VOL. LVIII. 9 



130 AN EPOCH IN CATHOLICISM. [Oct., 

ever presented to mortal prevision. This for the ordinary 
mind the mind of the man who, every time he assists at the 
divine mysteries, praying for the welfare and spread of God's in- 
destructible Catholic Church, sees in the fact almost the sub- 
limity of a new creation. 

Much has been spoken and written concerning the signifi- 
cance of the discovery of the New World in its relation to the 
course of mundane events; much also regarding its influence up- 
on the course of the Catholic Church. But the results which 
we^now see working out of the influx of the overflowing peo- 
ples of the Old World upon this continent are profoundly aston- 
ishing phenomena, not only from an ethnic and a philosophic 
point of view, but from the spiritual stand-point. It fills the 
mind with wonder to look on at these marvellous developments, 
and gives a clearer conception of the occult and irresistible 
methods of the Master-hand which controls the destinies of men 
and nations, for the accomplishment of vast and beneficent 
designs. We know, thanks to science, something of the work- 
ings of geology what part the glaciers played in shaping the 
hills and forming the alluvial lands, how the mountain rills 
trickled on and on in ever-increasing number, until at last they 
channelled out the giant rivers and the great deltas ad har- 
bors. The penal laws, the sumptuary statutes, the petty perse- 
cutions, the landlord extortions of Europe, were the glaciers 
and the watersheds which moulded and furrowed out into a 
glorious symmetry the social framework of this immense terra 
nova, and all the while that suffering mankind was marvelling 
when the days of injustice would cease, from the depths of the 
future the great Watcher was evolving a glorious compensation 
for all who had suffered defeat in those evil times. 

To-day the Catholic Church counts nine million adherents in 
the United States ; fifty years ago they did not number one 
million. Were we to form an estimate based on this ratio of 
progression and the vital laws of Catholic peoples, we should 
be able to contemplate an enormous forward stride in the ulti- 
mate goal of the human race the fusing all into one fold un- 
der one Shepherd. It is not easy all at once to grasp the full 
significance of this unprecedented onward movement. It should 
be followed stride by stride in order to gain a true knowledge 
of a rate of progression which seems almost inexplicable on 
grounds of ordinary reasoning. The census of 1844 showed a 
Catholic population of 811,844, a priesthood numbering 709, and 
church edifices to the total of 675. Nine years afterwards the 






1 893.] AN EPOCH IN CATHOLICISM. 131 

Catholics mustered 1,698,300, the priesthood had mounted up to 
1,492, and the church buildings to 1,545. In 1866 the roll of 
Catholic population had risen to 3,842,000, with 2,770 priests 
and 2,930 churches. That is to say, the Catholics had more 
than quadrupled within twenty years, and the, priesthood and 
the churches had arisen in a proportionate ratio. Those twenty 
years were a phenomenal period, and the great increase they 
brought was largely attributable to the unparalleled exodus from 
Ireland during the famine years. But the growth of the church 
since then, although not quite in the same astonishing ratio, has 
been vast indeed. The Catholic population has been almost trebled 
in that period, and the hierarchy, clergy, and church edifices have 
multiplied in corresponding measure. Were it not for the Civil 
War, which swept off many thousands of the Catholic manhood, 
the results we might have seen must have been infinitely greater 
subjects for marvel. In the Old World such facts as these, did 
they occur, would be regarded as of supernatural portent. But 
everything which has happened on this continent since its dis- 
covery has been unprecedented in character and magnitude and 
significance, so that we have come to regard the seemingly 
miraculous as the matter of ordinary and commonplace occur- 
rence. We must lift ourselves a little above the earth, if we 
possibly can, and take a bird's-eye view of them all over the 
great terrene and adown the track of years, in order to grasp 
their impressive lesson and suggestion. 

Not in numbers alone has the church gained vastly in the 
past memorable half-century. The texture and fibre of that 
growth is matter for equal gratification. It used to be a favor- 
ite shibboleth with the enemies and traducers of the Catholics 
that ignorance was the great strength of that "superstition," 
that it dreaded the light, and that the torch of knowledge must 
soon show the benighted Papists the morasses into which they 
were being led by the ignis fatuns of " Romanism." Where is 
the fallacy now ? Blown to the four winds of heaven. The 
Catholic population, judged by the educational test, wear no 
badge of inferiority ; one has only to go into any one of the 
Catholic churches to judge for himself of the strength and sin- 
cerity of their devotion. Indifferentism, it is plain, is no ele- 
ment in the Catholic congregations. What they hold, they hold 
firmly as dear life aye, and as they have many and many a 
time proved, under the bitterest tests of their fortitude, beyond, 
immeasurably beyond, all that mortal life means. 

But when we come to consider, in connection with these 



132 AN EPOCH IN CATHOLICISM. [Oct. 

hopeful conditions, the additional fact of the cordial relations 
which exist between the Catholic Church and the Republic, we 
see how great a change has come over the world even in our 
own lifetime. It seems a little anomalous that the church 
which is the first and greatest republic on earth, should have 
come to be universally regarded as the traditional upholder of 
monarchies and despotisms, and the traditional foe of common- 
wealths. But that it has been so regarded, down to the days 
of the present great Pontiff, no one can gainsay. Leo XIII. 
has effectively dispelled that illusion. He has shown that the 
church is the friend of good government no matter what its 
form, and most especially the friend of the people. 

" For forms of government let fools contest ; 
Whate'er is best administered is best." 

If Catholics needed any stimulus to excite their allegiance, 
he points to the flag of their adopted country, and bids them 
rally round that symbol of freedom and support it as freemen 
should. He feels the impulse of the age, and his heart throbs 
sympathetically with the marching-step of this masterful young 
continent. There is no religion for the toiler like the Catholic 
religion ; for it was founded by One who toiled from his boy- 
hood. It lightens his labor with an immortal hope ; it lights 
his way to triumph over difficulties; it kindles his enthusiasm 
to strive for the highest prizes of intellectual success. It is, in 
fine, the one religion of the democracy. 

There can be no misgiving about the meaning and import 
and effect of the Chicago Catholic Congress. It opens a new 
era for the Catholic Church. The stately old Mother, garbed in 
her diaphanous robes, once more sallies forth in the full blaze 
of day to war with ignorance and prejudice and to cheer on her 
faithful children to the noble strife. The labarum of Truth is 
in the van, and the smile of Heaven plays all along the ranks 
of the radiant host which she has summoned to the campaign. 
How fervently each Catholic heart joins in the note of prepara- 
tion and wishes for the mission a glorious God-speed ! 





TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 

EADING General Lew Wallace's new work, The 
Prince of India* is a process something like 
standing in the centre of a great living cyclo- 
rama watching with painful rapture the move- 
ment of a gigantic battle-field. The author has 
selected for his theme scenes and events which led up to a 
world-transforming culmination. Perhaps even more influential 
on the course of civilization than the fall of Jerusalem was 
the siege and capture of Constantinople by the barbarous 
Turks. It is with this absorbing drama that the author of Ben 
Hur now deals. He has produced an historical romance which 
is sure to rivet the attention of many readers. 

The difficulties of dealing with such a chapter of history, in 
such a way as to convey a clear idea of the multiplicity of ele- 
ments which entered into and brought about the catastrophe, 
was no small one. Other writers, living at a distance and un- 
acquainted with the local circumstances, had attempted to give 
pictures of Byzantine life, out of the copious store of literature 
relative to it which has come down to us, but, however credi- 
table these works were, they had the drawback of being mere 
efforts of the imagination. But General Wallace had an enor- 
mous advantage in his long connection with the place and his 
extensive knowledge of Oriental character, history, and social 
life. By means of this experience he has been enabled to give 
his work, not only a close vraisemblance, but to impart to it a 
considerable historical value as well. 

But, in truth, the elements of romance impregnate the real 
history of the closing days of the Byzantine Empire so largely 
that its bare presentation must furnish a claim in itself to rank 
high in that department of literature. Hence, in order to lift 
it out of the category of already published narratives, General 

*The Prince of India ; or, Why Constantinople Fell. By Lew Wallace. New York: 
Harper & Brothers. 



134 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Oct., 

Wallace must needs seek adventitious aid. The elements of the 
supernatural and the mystic are largely introduced, and his re- 
course to these safe sources of inspiration is entirely justified 
by the circumstances of the period of which he treats. Astrolo- 
gy was in that day accepted almost as an exact science ; it had 
its written laws, and many even of the clearest minds believed 
in its truth most devoutly. The conqueror of Byzantium did 
not make his final assault upon the city until he had duly con- 
sulted the celestial portents. To mysticism in Eastern religion 
was superadded a belief in sorcery and witchcraft, almost uni- 
versal. The mental perplexities of the time were rendered still 
more embarrassing by the bitter controversies which raged in 
the Eastern Church over matters of creed and ritual. No period, 
in short, could be selected which offers more temptation to the 
skilled romancist than that which the author has chosen. 

Under these circumstances it might be wondered why 
General Wallace should resort to the device of invoking a figure 
which had already been conjured up by a master-spirit in ro- 
mance we mean, that of the Wandering Jew. We need not 
endeavo/ to read " between the lines," however, to find out the 
reason for this shift, for we discern the motive ere many chap- 
ters have been got through. His Jewship is a convenient vehi- 
cle for an impartial criticism of all the religious systems of the 
time, except the Hebrew ; and a similar use is made of some 
other personages, introduced to wit, the Princess Irene, the 
monk Sergius, and the old priest Hilarion in contrasting the 
primitive church with the one which prevailed in their days. 
The religious polemics of the time play, indeed, a very large part 
in the work throughout, and make it at times, it must be owned, 
not a little tedious. 

One of the criticisms on General Wallace's writings declares 
that the faintest trace of humor is not discernible in his style. 
To our mind, there is humor of the most grotesque kind un- 
conscious, though, perhaps in his picture of the imaginary per- 
petual traveller. He makes him derive his subsistence by rifling 
the tombs of such personages as King Hiram, instead of work- 
ing at any honest calling for his living. By means of the trea- 
sures in precious stones which he finds there, he is enabled to 
put on a brave air and pass as a person of some consequence ; 
and when he is asked for his credentials he simply describes 
himself as a Prince of India. Notwithstanding his love of plun- 
der and his fraudulent personation, he is a great stickler for 
religion and morality. He conceives the great idea of uniting 



1893-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 135 

all the religions of the world in one, and making himself the 
Grand Arbiter between all the creeds. For this purpose he 
travels all over the world studying all the systems, passing here 
as a Mussulman, there as a Buddhist, and so on. Finally, he 
goes to the Emperor Constantine, and lays his grand scheme 
before him ; he is granted a day for the discussion of that scheme 
before the patriarch and the clergy, and when he comes down 
to details, they, finding his proposition amounts to nothing 
more than deism pure and simple, scout him out of court. The 
next best thing in his mind, since he cannot have universal 
peace, is to have universal war ; and so, being rejected by the 
Greeks, he goes to Mahommed, the Sultan of the Turks, and, 
telling him that he is the man of destiny, and that the hour 
has come for him to strike the blow, prompts him to attack 
Constantinople. And this is why, as the story is intended to 
show, Constantinople fell. 

This Jew is the most extraordinary production of human 
inventiveness ever presented. Take him from any point of view, 
he is an utterly ridiculous person, unamenable to the ordinary 
rules of common sense. Eugene Sue's creation was hardly open 
to this objection. He had some of the characteristics of a hu- 
man being about him. 

The old Greek dramatists and poets and sculptors had a 
great advantage, in one respect, over their imitators of to-day. 
Their gods were originally human, and when they attained to 
the dignity of Olympus, they carried their human sympathies 
with them at least to any extent necessary for Olympian pur- 
poses. Hence the Greek who wished to depict something god- 
like or transcendent was not driven back on his own devices ; 
he had his models all around him, and he had merely to glorify 
them from his own imagination in the way suitable to the end 
he had in view. But the modern novelist who, like the author 
of the Prince of India, chooses to deal with the unreal or legen- 
dary in connection with the real and the enacted, requires more 
skill than General Wallace possesses. It would demand the deli- 
cate touch of the author of the Scarlet Letter to make the Jew 
of the legend a logical and intelligible sublunary immortal, in- 
stead of the self-conflicting compound that he appears under 
General Wallace's hands. The author has not even taken the 
pains to make the man keep the one color of hair or beard 
throughout the story ; but perhaps this is in keeping with the 
tendency he shows in him to vary his motives as he goes along 
his endless way. 



136 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Oct., 

The more human characters in the narrative partake very large- 
ly of this distorted quality. They are all exaggerated, like the 
shapes in a concave mirror. The air of the transcendental 
clings to them at every turn. Even the Turk, Mahommed, the 
captor of Constantinople, is invested with a mantle of shining 
nobility. He is made such a hero that the Princess Irene, who 
is presented to us as the incarnation of the loftiest feminine in- 
tellect, beauty, and purity, feels no compunction in bestowing 
her hand upon him after he has captured the capital of her coun- 
try. We prefer to take his description from the historian, Gib- 
bon, who, despite his prejudices against Christianity, gives us a 
noble picture of his enemy and victim, the Emperor Constantine, 
in contrast to the shocking delineation of Mahommed which truth 
compels from his lips. Though versed in every branch of litera- 
ture and learning then known, he says, Mahommed was steeped 
to the lips in every vice of his age, and neither learning nor re- 
ligion had any influence on his savage and licentious nature. 
Gibbon could not sully his pen by transcribing his sins ; only the 
fiendishness of his cruelty can be likened to them in enormity, 
and this again be comparable only to his awful duplicity and 
want of faith in dealing with outside states and personages. He 
depicts him, in short, as that very worst of all possible human 
amalgams the cultured savage. Against testimony of such kind 
as Gibbon's it is vain to try, as General Wallace does, to make 
him such a hero of romance as a pure-souled and highly-refined 
and Christian maiden could ever willingly bestow her hand and 
heart upon, as Princess Iren& did. The most unspeakable of 
unspeakable Turks is the Mahommed of fact ; and the humblest 
Christian maiden who would not yield except by overpowering 
force to his suit would be far more of a heroine than the Prin- 
cess Irene. 

It is not, then, on any ground of historical consistency or of 
fidelity to human character, or cleverness in construction, that this 
book demands time for its perusal. It is for the proof it gives of 
laborious and erudite search into the complex events, political 
no less than religious, which brought about the overthrow of the 
oldest imperial throne in the world and the most interesting of 
cities. It is as much for the rich volume of oriental lore which 
General Wallace has laid open for our entertainment. From 
this point of view indeed his work is a monumental one. 

The appearance of an English and abridged version of the 
Life of the Venerable Joseph Benedict Cottolengo * synchronizes 

* The Life of the Venerable Joseph Benedict Cottolengo. By a Priest of the Society of 
Jesus. San Francisco, Cal.: A. Waldteuffel. 



1 893.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 137 

aptly with our brief note of the late Father Drumgoole and his 
work here. There were many points of resemblance between 
these two exceptional priests. Their charity took the form of 
a burning zeal for the rescue of the youthful poor from the 
frightful snares of poverty and vice, and they both succeeded 
in giving practical shape to their ideas in a degree that points 
unmistakably to help from on high. There are many points 
of resemblance between Father Drumgoole's institution and the 
Little House of Providence in Turin which was founded by 
Father Cottolengo. But his labors for the elevation of humani- 
ty took a more extended form than those of Father Drum- 
goole. The fallen women, the dissolute men of the town were 
taken in hand by him, and the number of those whom he re- 
claimed from sin and crime was wonderfully great. He is 
shown to us in this work (which is compiled from the original 
work of Don F. Gastaldi) as one endowed with remarkable gifts 
of grace and unflinching courage in the work to which he had 
been ordained by Heaven ; and no more convincing arguments 
could be used against the scoffers and cynics of a materialistic 
and utilitarian age than the actual proofs of supernatural grace, 
powerful to compel the most unlikely achievements, afforded in 
the cases of such servants' of God as these. 



I. THE PHYSICAL SYSTEM OF ST. THOMAS.* 
Father Cornoldi, the author of this treatise, was a co-opera- 
tor with the celebrated Father Liberatore in his great and life- 
long work of the restoration of scholastic philosophy. Both 
these distinguished Jesuits died within the same year, Father 
Cornoldi before the present treatise was published. Mr. Dering, 
the translator, also died while his translation was passing through 
the press. He had won a high place in English Catholic litera- 
ture by a series of well-written and interesting novels, having a 
much higher purpose than mere amusement, for, as the Intro- 
ductory Notice states : " Mr. Dering's life and literary labors had 
been devoted to the enlightenment and conversion of his coun- 
trymen." 

Besides being a fine writer in the highest and most useful 
department of fiction, Mr. Dering was also an ardent lover 
and student of metaphysics under the guidance and direction 
of his revered master Father Liberatore. He translated two 

* The Physical System of St. Thomas. By Father Giovanni Maria Cornoldi, S. J. Trans- 
lated by Edward Heneage Dering. London and Leamington Art and Book Company. New 
York, Cincinnati, and Chicago : Benziger Bros. 



138 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Oct., 

of his important works, " Principles of Political Economy " and 
" On Universals." His translation of Father Cornoldi's treatise 
has been executed in a perfect manner, giving an abstruse Latin 
work, in a very difficult and much-disputed part of special meta- 
physics, in a dress of pure idiomatic English. There is no 
need to say that the topics of the treatise are of the greatest 
importance and interest, and have been ably treated by Father 
Cornoldi. The English translation of such a work is therefore 
a valuable addition to the small library of works on scholastic 
philosophy which we possess in our mother tongue. 



2. THE NEW BIBLE.* 

The Bible, as the so-called critics view it, is a new book 
and, as they claim, must have new uses. 

Mr. Crooker denies both its authenticity and inspiration, and 
what he desires is a new Christianity based on the rationalistic 
theories. But if Mr. Crooker could overthrow the traditional 
doctrine regarding the Bible, we do not believe that the Chris- 
tian religion would remain very long. 

Like most writers of his class, he is very positive in his as- 
sertions ; the conclusions of the critics no matter how contra- 
dictory are, according to him, in almost every instance " proven." 
While credulous to absurdity, he is incredulous to evidence. 

With those who are willing to accept theories on the au- 
thority of such writers as Kuenen, Briggs, Driver, etc., his book 
may have some weight, but with others we cannot believe that 
it will. 

Every intelligent Catholic is ready and glad to admit any 
fact that the critics have discovered, and boldly challenges them 
to show any proof that the sacred books in all their parts may 
not be accepted as inspired in matters of faith and morals. 



3. LETTERS AND WRITINGS OF MARIE LATASTE.f 
About twelve years ago Mr. Thompson published the first 

volume of this work, and his wife now publishes the second 

volume, and will soon publish the third and final volume, which 

her husband left ready for the press. 

As a biographer of the saints we consider Mr. Thompson 

one of the best. 

* The New Bible and its New Uses. By Joseph Henry Crooker. Boston : George H. 
Ellis. 

f Letters and Writings of Marie Lataste. Translated by Edward Healy Thompson. 
Vol. II. New York : Benziger Bros. 



1893-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 139 

4. BREVIARIUM ROMANUM.* 

This is a duodecimo breviary, of convenient size, good type, 
published and bound in very neat style, and containing the new 
offices up to date. It follows the Typical Edition, with the re- 
quisite additions. We can recommend it to the clergy as a 
very complete and at the same time a very handy edition of 
the breviary, especially adapted to be carried about when travel- 
ling. 

5. PRACTICAL SERMONS.f 

The reverend author has given a good title to these forty- 
odd sermons they are practical. At the same time they are 
interesting ; they breathe the spirit of the spoken word, and there 
is a force, an earnestness in them that leads one on to the end. 
We cannot have too many such sermons as these, for they are 
ever profitable alike to priests and laity. We can commend the 
book to priests as being suggestive of good things both in mat- 
ter and manner. 

We would especially commend it for use among the laity as 
being a book where they can find the chief dogmas of religion 
treated in a spirited and interesting manner. 



6. FATHER ZAHM'S " CATHOLIC SCIENCE.";); 
There are few truths, perhaps, more important to make plain 
to the world at the present day than that which it is the principal 
object of Father Zahm's book to demonstrate, namely, that there is 
really no conflict between religion and science, if we understand 
by religion the Catholic religion, and by science that which is 
really worthy of the name. This last is a very important dis- 
tinction, for unfortunately there are at the present day a num- 
ber of more or less scientific men who have got the popular ear 
from the very fact that they are rather lecturers than investi- 
gators, and have the name among the community at large of 
leaders of science, who in reality are found to hold for the 
most part quite a subordinate place when one once gets inside 
of scientific circles. These men, by giving way to a propensity 
to rash theorizing, have dragged the reputation of science in 

* Breviarium Romanum. Editio Quinta post Typicum Ratisbon^. Neo-Eboraci et Cin- 
cinnati : Fr. Pustet. 1893. 

t Practical Sermons. By Rev. John A. Sheppard, A.M. 

\Catholic Science and Catholic Scientists. By Rev. J. A. Zahm, C.S.C., Professor of 
Physics in the University of Notre Dame. Philadelphia : H. L. Kilner & Co. 



140 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Oct., 

the mud, and seem to have succeeded in making Catholics think 
that such is the spirit of scientific men generally. 

Father Zahm shows in this book very plainly the difference 
between this pseudo-science and the genuine article, and makes 
clear what scientific men generally know pretty well, that real 
science, so far from being on a line of divergence from the 
Christian religion, is on the contrary approaching to it, and 
every day more and more rejecting various wild assumptions 
which have been made in its name, but not by its most able or 
worthy representatives; and he also shows what most scientific 
men do not know, that the Catholic Church is ready to meet 
real science half way ; that, without surrendering a particle of 
defined dogma, it is receding from certain opinions which sci- 
ence has made improbable. 

He proves moreover that the church has shown in time past, 
and shows at the present time, interest in science, and a desire 
for its cultivation among her members ; and that these, both 
clerical and lay, have always entered the field of science in 
great numbers, meeting in so doing not with censure but en- 
couragement ; and that many of these have risen to high dis- 
tinction. He perhaps rather exaggerates in the general impres- 
sion produced by reading this part of his work ; it seems to us 
that it can hardly be said, for instance, that any Catholic as- 
tronomer of this century can be ranked with Gauss or Bessel. 
It would be too much, in our opinion, to claim that Catholics 
that is to say, thoroughly devout and faithful ones have actu- 
ally led the van in genuine scientific research ; the fact is, as a 
rule, they have had more important matters to think of, and 
have not been able or inclined to throw themselves into 
physical inquiries with the exclusiveness that is required for 
pre-eminent success. But the main point is, and this no one 
will doubt who reads the book, that they have done such a very 
large share of the scientific work, even of the last three centu- 
ries, that to say that the church is opposed to science or igno- 
rant of it is simply nonsense and absurdity. 

The book is very interesting, and full of facts which will be 
new to the majority even of Catholics, and in the name of 
both religion and science should not be passed over by any 
one who is interested in either. The reputation of its author is 
of itself sufficient for this ; the reader may be assured that it 
comes from one who knows what he is talking about on both 
subjects. 



1 89 3.] EDITORIAL NOTES. 141 



EDITORIAL NOTES. 



IT is safe to say that there is not one, no matter how " New- 
Yorkish " he has been in his estimate of Chicago and the Fair, 
who, having seen the " White City," has not come away with 
the frankest expression of appreciation of the wonderful sight 
there, and open-hearted praise for the management which has 
created it. To the throngs who have visited it day by day it 
has been a liberal education, a true people's university. 

Scholars have come from the East and the West, and have 
seen with what success man has wrested from Nature her secrets ; 
they have seen the latest and best methods for coaxing riches 
from the soil ; they have observed the many hundred ways in 
which the chained powers of the sky have been utilized : they 
have looked at machines which seem in their perfect mechan- 
ism to have more than instinct. But great as is this " Diana of 
the Ephesians," its history would have been but a half-told tale 
had there not gone along with the great Fair at Jackson Park 
the various congresses where the highest point attained in men- 
tal culture was shown, and where the ultimate triumph of mind 
over matter was indicated. The published reports of these 
many summer-schools will be one of the most complete libraries 
in the world, for they will furnish us with the latest and best 
thoughts in almost every great department of knowledge. 

* 

Of these various congresses none has excited so much won- 
der as the Parliament of Religions. It was a unique sight, one 
that, mayhap, will not occur again this side of the brig of doom, 
to see marching into the hall the procession led by C. C. 
Bonney, the bearded patriarch of the Cosmic religions, and com- 
posed of representatives of nearly all the religions of the world. 
The cardinal of historic Rome, in his scarlet robes, was side by 
side with the high-priest of Shintoism, with his picturesque 
head-dress, while the latest votary of private judgment repre- 
senting his own sect rubbed skirts with the orange monk of 
the oldest religious order in the world. Woman was there, too, 
in her new role as "reverend." Nor was there anything lack- 
ing to make that gathering of September one of the most no- 
table the world has ever seen. 



142 EDITORIAL NOTES. [Oct. 

One need not dip into the future even as far as human eye 
can see to behold in this vision of the religious world the signs 
of a coming millennium. Fifty years ago it would have been 
an utter impossibility. Even twenty-five years ago woman could 
not have stood where she stands to-day. But in one generation 
all is changed. Surely the " world do move." Instead of ran- 
corous strife, when one religion would not even so much as 
dare touch the hem of another's garment for fear of corruption ; 
when in the name of the gentle Nazarene the bitterest passions 
were let loose, to-day we witness the timeo Danaos et dona fe- 
rentcs done away with, and from the ends of the earth come the 
disciples of Buddha and Confucius to sit down with followers 
of the gentle Christ in a great love-feast of the brotherhood 
of man. 

To the cardinal of the Catholic Church, as the representative 
of the oldest branch of organized Christianity, was accorded the 
post of honor. It was his duty to open the Parliament by the 
Universal Prayer to the common Father ; and since it was first 
spoken on the mount never was it uttered with more fervor, 
and, perchance, never did it give such praise to the great 
Father in heaven as when it was voiced in that wondrous gath- 
ering. 

Nor was there any lowering of the standard of Christianity, 
nor any yielding of its high claim to be the only divine reli- 
gion, to meet on the same platform with Buddhism and Shin- 
toism, because one of the fundamental conditions on which the 
Parliament was organized was the understanding that there 
should be no surrender of one jot or tittle of any belief. A 
religious symposium like this may be considered by some to 
have an agnostic tendency ; to be an acknowledgment that 
religion has no objective reality, but is a sentiment born of the 
mind, and that God is the creation of the human intellect. 
There might be some shadow to this thought if the mere 
presence of a churchman there were the admission of the 
truth of other creeds ; but St. Peter in the streets of Jerusalem 
on the day after Pentecost did not have a firmer conviction of 
the truths he taught, and the falsity of the religious belief of 
his hearers, than did Cardinal Gibbons when he made his pre- 
sentation of the belief of the Catholic Church. 



Although the final step in the Home-Rule movement has 
not been reached, the fact that the bill for its establish- 



1893-] EDITORIAL NOTES. 143 

ment in Ireland has passed the House of Commons is one of 
the most momentous events in Ireland's latter-day history. The 
final division on the bill, which took place on the night of Fri- 
day, September I, gave to the ministry a majority of only thirty- 
four in a full House of Commons. 

The falling-off in Mr. Gladstone's original majority of forty- 
two was due to the defection of a couple of dissatisfied Liberal 
members and the loss of a seat since the general election. But 
even with a diminished majority, the passage of such a measure 
by a British House of Commons is the greatest act of repara- 
tion ever made by the British Parliament to Ireland or to any 
other country. We know how exceedingly hard it is to get an 
individual to confess that he is wrong, and acting unjustly, all 
the time that it is his apparent interest to do so, and the victim 
of his injustice is too weak and too friendless to prevent him. 
To behold the legislature of a great empire solemnly undoing 
its work and publicly condemning her old evil ways is a sight 
indeed for gods and men. 



Those who looked to the House of Lords to destroy the 
labors of the Lower House for a whole session were not with- 
out grounds for their confidence. That body has displayed 
as much eagerness in rushing to the attack on the Home-Rule 
Bill as a tribe of redskins closing around a victim at the tor- 
ture-stake. They swarmed in great numbers around the feast, 
many coming long journeys especially for the purpose. One 
peer, Lord Headley, came post-haste from the Zambesi region, 
to vary the amusement of lion-hunting by that of baiting the 
great measure of Mr. Gladstone. Another, it is said, came from 
a lunatic asylum to vote against the bill. But to the Marquis 
of Salisbury was left the part of Lord High Executioner, and he 
filled the role with all the zest of a hereditary headsman of lib- 
erty, as a Cecil may well claim to be. The speech with which he 
brought the discussion to a close was full of bitterness, as a 
matter of course ; but it was no less distinguished for the most 
reckless disregard of historical truth and the testimony of con- 
temporary fact. 



One of the points insisted upon by Lord Salisbury is that, 
owing to the existence of people of different races in Ireland, 
fusion is impossible, race-hatred unavoidable, and the only hope 
of order lies in government, strong and coercive, from without. 
This false premise he carried to its logical absurdity in a sentence 



144 EDITORIAL NOTES. [Oct., 

declaring that " representative government is not suited to a 
country which does not possess homogeneity of race." Lord 
Salisbury's own country is a good example to the contrary, in 
itself. Anglo-Norman, Anglo-Saxon, and Cambrian, not to speak 
of the Danish and Pictish elements, were the original component 
parts of the mother of parliaments. Want of homogeneity 
seems to be the very reason why parliaments flourish here in 
our own States, and in the English colonies. And then take 
the case of the great Austrian Empire. As many races are set- 
tled down within its limits as there are tributaries to the 
Amazon, and the only way they can possibly get along is by 
their present system of representative government. 



However, the House of Lords is not squeamish in the matter 
of truth and sense. Its belief is bounded by what it likes or 
dislikes. It followed up Lord Salisbury's oratory by a division 
on the second reading of the bill, without any waste of time. 
A minority of forty-one peers saved the reputation of the whole 
assembly for downright perversity ; in the majority of four hun- 
dred and nineteen by which the measure was rejected we are 
not surprised to learn that there were about a score of " lords 
spiritual" that is to say, members of the Bench of Bishops of 
the Anglican Church. 

When we hear people denouncing the presence of the Irish 
Catholic priests in Irish politics in the future, we may w-ell 
point to this example of English Protestant bishops interven- 
ing in the political affairs of a country in which they have no 
earthly or spiritual concern. 



The House of Lords laughed, we read, when they rejected 
the bill ; but what has since transpired suggests the possibility 
of a new and significant illustration of the proverb that " those 
who laugh last laugh best." The Peers seem to have aroused, 
by their scant courtesy to a measure which has consumed 
almost a whole session of Parliament, a feeling which they had 
not adequately discounted. They have set Englishmen thinking 
and asking by what right, beyond the mere accidental one of 
birth, they presume to fling themselves across the track of popu- 
lar legislation, and " hold up " the cars of progress, so to speak. 
An address, couched in tones of stern resentment, has been 
issued by the National Liberal Federation in England, calling upon 
the people to take up the insolent challenge of the Peers, and 



1893-] EDITORIAL NOTES. 145 

make a mending or an ending of that reactionary institution. As 
the Federation is in close touch with the ministry this pronounce- 
ment is regarded as having a semi-official character. Mr. Justin 
McCarthy, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, has 
also issued an address on their behalf to the Irish National 
Federation of America appealing for continued help in the 
coming and probably final struggle for Home Rule. We have 
not any fear for the result of the appeal. The gage of the 
Peers must be taken up and flung back in their faces. The 
score which Ireland especially has to settle with this obstruc- 
tive body is one of long and bitter accumulation. 



The earnest and patriotic advice recently tendered to the 
French hierarchy and clergy, as well as the leading Catholic 
laity in France, has been taken to heart and acted on. In the 
result of the general election recently held there we behold its 
practical outcome. His Holiness pointed out that it was the 
duty of French Catholics to give a loyal adherence to the Re- 
public, as that was the form of government which the vast 
majority of the French people unmistakably desired. Whilst 
doing all that in them lay to secure the right of Catholic edu- 
cation and the free exercise of the Catholic religion, they owed 
it to the country to give the institutions which the people de- 
sired their unhesitating and unequivocal support. Hence the 
republic is again returned to power with a largely preponderat- 
ing majority. The monarchical groups have been able to return 
only sixty-eight members, while the Socialist force reckons only 
sixty. The Bonapartists have lost their staunch representative, 
M. Paul de Cassagnac ; Clemenceau, the extreme leader of the 
extreme Radicals, has shared his fate ; Count De Mun, whose 
able advocacy of the Catholic claims deserved a better re- 
turn, we are sorry to say has likewise succumbed to the new 
movement, although he had loyally yielded to the Sovereign 
Pontiff's advice in his election address. The republic now 
stands in a position from which hardly anything can dislodge 
it, save its own moral disintegration. This result is mainly 
due to the action of the far-seeing occupant of St. Peter's chair, 
who has once again proved himself superior to old tradi- 
tions and a true friend of the democracy, not in France mere- 
ly, but all the world over. 



It is matter for surprise that the Fortnightly Review should 
sully its pages by publishing the article on " Immortality and 

VOL. LVIII.IO 



146 EDITORIAL NOTES. [Oct., 

Resurrection " by Mr. Grant Allen in its September number. 
It is the most indecent attack on Christianity that ever appeared 
in a respectable journal ; and if Christianity were in the mori- 
bund condition of the old lion in the fable it might well mur- 
mur pathetically about this sort of assailant flinging his heels in 
its face. It is not to be wondered at that when Mr. Allen is 
blasphemous towards God he should be insulting towards men 
the boots of many of whom, in an intellectual sense, he is not 
fit to clean. When he ceases to pocket dollars for articles of 
this kind and tenth-rate novels, it will be time for him to sneer 
at ministers of religion as its " paid advocates." The pity natu- 
rally induced by the mental condition of such a man outweighs 
the malice of his insults. He has no hope for immortality for 
his soul in a .future world ; and he has not even the poor con- 
solation of being able to secure the ghost of any here below 
for his ephemeral literature. 



With profound grief Mother Church deplores the sudden 
taking off of two of her most talented children, and at the 
same time two of the most brilliant lights in the educational 
world Father Walsh, of Notre Dame, and Brother Azarias, 
of the Christian Brothers. Both had consecrated their lives to 
the sacred cause of education, and both had achieved an envi- 
able reputation in this highest of spheres. Both, too, were taken 
away in the very midst of their usefulness. 

No blow could have been more sudden and stunning in 
effect than the death of Brother Azarias ; none more truly and 
unaffectedly mourned. Of the great galaxy of teachers of the 
distinguished order to which Brother Azarias belonged he was, 
it may safely be said, primus inter pares. He was a scholar, 
and a ripe one, and his best intellect was given to the unselfish 
task of making the whole world a sharer in that heritage of 
knowledge in which he himself was so rich. The close of his 
life, in the meridian of his ability, just when he had concluded 
a masterly course of lectures at the Summer-School, had an ele- 
ment of the tragic in it a fearful reminder of the vanity and 
the fleeting nature of all things of earth. At some more oppor- 
tune time we hope to be able to render some attempt at jus- 
tice to his memory ; for the present we can only pay the trib- 
ute of a fervent requiescat. 



1893-] NEW BOOKS. 147 

It is hardly necessary to bespeak for the communications of 
the Very Rev. Father Hewit and the venerable Bishop of Tar- 
sus a sympathetic hearing. There is not a Catholic who has a 
cent to spare whose zeal and generosity will not be forced by 
this touching appeal from the ancient see of the great Apostle 
of the Gentiles. Let it not be said that this voice from the 
theatre of his early labors has reached the American shore with- 
out rousing any responsive echo. Our poverty-stricken brothers 
in Christ must not plead in vain ; the dilapidated temples in 
which the Divine mysteries are now held there are a reproach 
to our common Christianity. America will, we are certain, lend 
a helping hand to repair this wrong, and lend it willingly. 

There is a wide-spread devotion to St. Paul throughout 
America, for there is none of the Apostles whose spirit was so 
akin to all that we know as American as his, and therefore no 
more graceful tribute can be paid to his American spirit than 
by American Catholics building a temple in his honor in the 
city of his birth. We would be pleased to have the Press take 
up this subject and give it wide-spread notice. The Paulists 
will be glad to acknowledge, through THE CATHOLIC WORLD, 
all subscriptions sent for this object. 



NEW BOOKS. 

LONGMANS, GREEN & Co., New York and London : 

Skeleton Leaves. By Frank Leyton. Domestic Economy. By F. T. Paul, 
F.R.C.S. Heat. By Mark-R. Wright. English History for American 
Readers. By Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Edward Channing. 
Life 'with Trans-Siberian Savages. By B. Douglas Howard, M.A. The 
Seven Cities of the Dead. By Sir John Croker Barrow, Bart. 
H. L. KILNER & Co., Philadelphia: 

Catholic Science and Catholic Scientists. By the Rev. J. A. Zahm, C.S.C. 
FR. PUSTET & Co., New York: 

Plain, Practical Sermons. By Rev. John A. Sheppard, A.M. 
ST. ANSELM'S SOCIETY, London: 

Religious Problems of the Nineteenth Century. By Aubrey De Vere, LL.D. 
GEORGE H. ELLIS, Boston : 

The New Bible and Its New Uses. By Joseph Henry Crooker. 
BENZIGER BROS., New York : 

The Physical System of St. Thomas. By Father Cornoldi, SJ. Translated 
by Edward Heneage Bering. First Prayers for Children. Simple Pray- 
ers for Children. The Month of the Holy Angels. St. Francis de Sales 
(for October). Catholic Belief. Golden Prayers. 
They have in press: 

Christ in Type and Prophecy. By Rev. A. J. Maas, SJ. The Priest 
in the Pulpit: A Manual of Homiletics and Catechetics. Adapted 
from the German of Rev. I. Schuech, O.S.B., by Rev. B. Luebbermann, 
Professor at Mt. St. Mary's Seminary, Cincinnati, O. With a Preface by 
Most Rev. W. H. Elder, 'D.D., Archbishop of Cincinnati. 



148 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [Oct., 



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. 

A SMALL boy of voracious appetite, whose name does not appear in history, 
was taught by sad experience in one short lesson the folly of biting off 
more than he could chew. This important object-lesson was lost sight of re- 
cently by many Catholic Reading Circles. In high hopes they sailed forth over 
the bounding sea of Columbian literature, determined to read every chart pre- 
pared by rival historians relating to the personal character, motives, and voyages 
of the great discoverer of America. The undertaking proved entirely too vast 
for one short year, especially for those having only brief intervals for the enjoy- 
ment of learned leisure. Reading Circles are not expected to do the work of a 
university. They can be profitably organized to suit the needs of busy people, 
and to give them opportunities to concentrate attention upon a limited amount 
of reading. As to quantity no definite rule can be given, except that it should be 
adjusted to suit the needs of the members. For the season of 1893-94 many ad- 
vantages of a practical kind will be found in following the plan outlined by the 
president of the Ozanam Reading Circle, Miss Mary F. McAleer, in the following 
report : 

In presenting the sixth annual report of the Ozanam Reading Circle it may 
not be amiss to recall the occasion when Father McMillan introduced the Read- 
ing Circle idea to the Paulist parish, at a public meeting in October, 1886, attend- 
ed mostly by the graduates of St. Paul's Sunday-school. A definite course of 
reading was proposed, the books to be provided at the expense of the parish 
library. Looking back at that time I can see how we have developed the ideas 
with which we started. To Mr. Alfred Young is due the practical supervision of 
the work of succeeding years. Throughout his practical admonitions to us he 
has endeavored to make us better acquainted with Catholic authors, and the best 
writers of current literature. 

With each advancing year the desire to improve upon the last has caused 
much discussion. As improvement depends largely on comparison, we commu- 
nicated with other Circles as to their mode of work. We found that where a 
long course of reading was prescribed, entailing home study with penalties in 
the form of fines for non-fulfilment, a general dissatisfaction existed. 

A former member now removed from New York pays this tribute to our 
plan : " Our association undertook a somewhat extensive course of study of the 
Columbian epoch for the winter of 1893, but the work has become such a burden 
for the greater number of the members that I am convinced of the Ozanam 's 
wisdom in having more than one subject under consideration. Experience is a 
good teacher, and I find that a pleasant meeting of not too exhaustive a character 
brings out more members than an evening or afternoon of study is able to do." 

This letter gave the Ozanam members great satisfaction, as it coincided 



1893-] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 149 

with our plans for the season of 1892-93. Last October, in addition to our regu- 
lar officers, we elected a committee of five to arrange a programme for the year. 
We considered ourselves very fortunate in having the gifted and clever writer, Mrs. 
Elizabeth Gilbert Martin, as a member of this committee. The recognition Arch- 
bishop Ireland has extended to her since she arrived at St. Paul, Minn., serves 
to make the Ozanam proud of her membership. Under the direction of Mrs. 
Martin this committee met once a month, or oftener if necessary, to suggest work 
for the Circle, to recommend books, prepare lists of authors, etc. Finally we 
decided on a plan which was considered feasible to even the busiest of the mem- 
bers. A volume of Brother Azarias, entitled Books and Reading third edition, 
revised and enlarged was placed in the hands of every member to be used stu- 
diously for home-work. Occasional selections were given at our weekly meet- 
ings. Then Pere Didon's Life of Christ was obtained, and ten minutes of each 
meeting were devoted to a reading aloud from this treasure-house of Christian 
wisdom. In addition to these two books our regular exercises of quotations, 
essays, recitations, prose readings, and poetical selections were continued. Look- 
ing over the minutes I find these names among the list of authors : Cardinal 
Gibbons, Cardinal Manning. Rev. George M. Searle, C.S.P., Father Hecker, 
Marion Crawford, John Boyle O'Reilly, Mary A. Tincker, and many others. 
We also had a brilliant original essay entitled The First Leo, author unknown. 
We wish to thank the author whoever she may be (for we presume it was written 
by a woman), as this paper served to bring forth some lively talk and consequent 
information. 

One Monday evening of each month was devoted to informal talks on reli- 
gious literature. Many questions were answered concerning the Bible and the 
other books that are under the care of the church, and the literature of the first 
three centuries. These talks gave rise to much discussion, in which each mem- 
ber spoke out without fear of criticism. The expression of opinion being sponta- 
neous, naturally helped very much our means of obtaining knowledge. 

During the winter we were greatly aided in our work by the reception of 
the following advice, which may be of use to other Reading Circles. In acknow- 
ledging a letter from the president of the Ozanam, Mrs. Martin, now residing 
in St. Paul, Minn., writes : 

" Ever since receiving your letter I have had on my thinking-cap, hoping to 
find under it some suggestion that might be of use to you and the Circle general- 
ly. I have discovered but one, but I venture to suggest that as a fruitful one. 
Your own remark that one of the exercises for the next meeting was to be a 
newspaper article on Pope Leo XIII. shows me that it will not be new to you. 
We are living in a very momentous period of church history we might call it 
portentous, too, for it is big with promise of great events. What better can 
bright young girls do who are likely to live to take part in the days that are com- 
ing the days, perhaps, of the prophecy when ' All shall be taught of God ' than 
to get a firm, clear notion in their minds of what is going on about them ? I 
think that you could not lay a better foundation for your studies in this direction 
than by reading Father Hecker's last book, The Church and the Age. In 
connection with this, preliminary to it if you like, take the New York Sun letters 
from Rome signed ' Innominatuo.' 

" Father Hecker was a spiritual generator, fecund in ideas which will grow 
and put forth new seeds in their turn. Study his influence and his life. You will 



150 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [Oct., 

find, as Archbishop Ireland so well says in his introduction, the American move- 
ment now working in the church springs from him.* 

"The beginning of church history as found in the Gospel of St. John and 
current church history as I find it in the papers interest me more than any points 
between." 

These words from a member of the Ozanam convey the plan and spirit 
of our work during the past year. The newspaper article on Pope Leo referred 
to by Mrs. Martin was one written by Miss Mollie Onahan, and was most deserv- 
ing of careful perusal. 

In conclusion let me cite a tribute received from Sorosis last March. In 
compliance with a request from that noted club, managed entirely by women, 
requesting the Ozanam to be represented at the World's Fair, four original 
papers and an article setting forth our plan of work were sent on type-written 
sheets, with money to pay for the binding selected by the committee of Sorosis. 
The following were the subjects of these papers : Cardinal Manning, the artist 
Millet, the Diver of the Doirro, and a Christmas story. These were not written 
specially for the occasion, but were selected from work contributed during the 
past two years. In acknowledging their receipt Sorosis says : 

" The club folio has reached us safely, and is admirable in every sense. If 
on examination any change is requisite, we will inform you. Hoping you and 
others will enjoy looking at it in the exhibit at the Columbian Exposition, we 
remain, yours cordially, COMMITTEE OF SOROSIS." 



From her note-book Miss Helen M. Sweeney Has prepared an account of 
some of the notable points that attracted her attention in the talks on religious 
literature, which indicate very clearly a line of reading that might be usefully 
adopted by reverend directors of sodalities, in places where Reading Circles are 
not considered the correct thing for some unknown reason. Every sodality could 
and should have at least a few members to do something for the diffusion of 
Catholic literature. Miss Sweeney writes : 

" At the Reading Circle meeting held last summer, during the first session of 
the Catholic Summer-School, various methods of conducting these Circles were 
discussed by those who had each tried his own and thought it the best one. Some 
advocated the Circle that, under the guidance of a director, read an allotted time 
and amount under the penalty of a fine for omission. Some advocated the plan 
of question and answer, that to those with limited education has no doubt proved 
of inestimable value. Some laid out "winter courses" that were followed with 
more or less fidelity generally less. But for a successful solving of the question 

* The passage from Archbishop Ireland mentioned by Mrs. Martin is as follows : 
" Father Hecker looked on America as the fairest conquest for divine truth, and he girded 
himself with arms shaped and tempered to the American pattern. I think it may be said that 
the American current, so plain for the last quarter of a century in the flow of Catholic affairs, 
is largely, at least, to be traced back to Father Hecker and his early co-workers. . . . 
Father Hecker understood and loved the country and its institutions. He saw nothing in 
them to be deprecated or changed, he had no longing for the flesh-pots and breadstuffs of 
empires and monarchies. His favorite topic in book and lecture was, that the Constitution of 
the United States requires, as its necessary basis, the truths of Catholic teaching, as opposed 
to the errors of Luther and Calvin. The republic, he taught, presupposes the church's doc- 
trine, and the church ought to love a polity which is the offspring of her own spirit." 



1 893.] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 151 

of compulsory reading or non-reading we of the Ozanam Reading Circle take the 
palm. We have tried and found very successful the plan of making our Director 
do the reading, and we well, we enjoy it and profit thereby. 

" During the winter months we have had monthly talks from Father McMillan, 
and from his first one discovered that religious literature may be divided into 
several branches : dogmatic, moral, ascetic, biographical, liturgical, and miscella- 
neous writings ; the missal, the ritual, and breviary were briefly reviewed. One 
of the points made manifest in these delightful talks was the constant vigilance 
that is exercised by the Catholic Church in all matters, but particularly in her 
literature. Each bishop is compelled to supervise religious books that appear 
in his diocese. The councils are the crucibles in which everything pertaining to 
our literature and spiritual welfare are tried and sent forth if found desirable. A 
proof of this supervision is given in the Manual of Prayer a prayer-book com- 
piled chiefly from the mjssal, and containing everything necessary in its most 
perfect form. The proofs of this book were sent to every bishop in the United 
States, and received approval and correction. 

" Another example of the care exercised by the church over its literature is 
given by the preparation of Didon's Life of Christ, a book that Father McMillan 
devoted one talk to prior to our reading it in the Circle. The primary motive for 
the existence of this book was furnished by the crying need of the times, that de- 
manded a life of Christ, written to answer infidel objections, by a Catholic and for 
Catholics. In order to have every detail perfect Pere Didon was sent by his or- 
der to travel in the lands that Christ's presence has made holy, and as a Christian, 
a priest, and an historian he has given us the result of his life-work in a noble 
form. Aside from this the book has been edited by Monsignor O'Reilly, who has 
verified every Scripture text in it according to the decisions of the best scholars. 
It has a masterly introduction by Cardinal Gibbons, and the proof-sheets were 
submitted to the Master-General of the Dominicans in Rome. As can be seen, no 
one could, if he would, write loosely or carelessly on Catholic subjects. 

" In one of our ' talks ' we discovered what was very pleasing to our feminine 
souls that one of the most beautiful feasts in our calendar, that of Corpus Chris- 
ti, owed its institution to a woman. Among the books of devotional literature 
there are none more carefully or beautifully written than those on the subject of 
the Blessed Sacrament. Up to the thirteenth century there was no feast particu- 
larly devoted to the Blessed Eucharist. Because of visions had by Juliana of Liege 
in 1252 Pope Urban appointed St. Thomas Aquinas to write the office of the 
Feast of the Blessed Sacrament. This he did in such a beautiful, glowing, poetic 
style that it was accepted throughout the whole Catholic world, and is now used at 
every Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. In this work of love, one of the fin- 
est offices of the church, St, Thomas condensed all the scriptural allusions to the 
Eucharist, and it is said was aided by the angels, hence his appellation, " Angelic 
Doctor." This office contains beautiful selections from the Psalms, from the 
Epistles of St. Paul, several hymns remarkable for poetical excellence, and is a 
perfect exposition of the doctrine of the Real Presence. 

" But of all the books over which our Mother Church has watched with zealous 
care there has been none so carefully prepared as the keystone of our faith, the 
Bible. In settling other vexed questions the Council of Trent decided upon the 
Latin Vulgate as the standard version vulgate is used in the sense of common or 
popular. This edition was prepared by St. Jerome in the last decade of the fourth 



152 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [Oct., 1893. 

century. He had access to documents that have since been destroyed. St. Gre- 
gory in the beginning of the seventh century required the Vulgate to be used in 
preference to any other version. Its claims are proved by many ancient docu- 
ments which are in Rome. The Douay Bible, our standard English edition, so 
called after the town in France where the first English translation was made, was 
most carefully examined before being published, because of the possibility of error 
creeping into a translation made from a dead to a living tongue. The New Tes- 
tament has been translated from the Greek, as Greek was the language of all the 
Apostles except Matthew, who used Syrochaldaic. 

"Our sixth and last talk was given by Father Clark, who devoted the evening 
to the Christian literature of the first three centuries. This literature is altogether 
of a religious character; it may be divided into the following heads : the canoni- 
cal books, the liturgical books, or forms of administering the Sacraments, the 
Acts of the Martyrs, the Acts of the Roman Pontiffs, and various treatises written 
in defence of the church, and lastly, what may be termed the picture catechisms, 
the rude pictures found on the walls of the catacombs. St. Clement, the second 
pope, must be mentioned as an author of this time. He wrote many books that 
have been preserved with the greatest care, notably ten books called " Recogni- 
tions," two epistles to the Corinthians, twenty homilies or conferences, and an 
epistle to St. James, in which he tells of the martyrdom of St. Peter and of his 
own appointment in the place of authority. These monthly talks did much to 
excite our interest in the great works that are historical monuments to the 
Catholic Church, proving her antiquity, the divinity of her origin, and the splendid 
law and order by which she maintains her supremacy. They made us feel that, 
in the religious world, each could do her little part in upholding the grand plan 
by reading, digesting, and presenting to our friends and neighbors, as we now 
have done, a rtsumt of our winter's work." 



One of the hottest days in July a lady came to inquire at the house of the 
Paulist Fathers how she could prepare to become a member of the Ozanam 
Reading Circle. For her sake and for others it is here stated that no laborious 
preparation is required. The best time to join is now, the present month of Oc- 
tober. Send a note at once to the Secretary of the Ozanam Reading Circle, 415 
West Fifty-ninth Street, New York City. 



Columbian * lEyposition, 

Section B t ffilocfe I, 




would respectfully call your attention to the ex- 
hibition of ECCLESIASTICAL METAL WORK which 
is now being shown in the Manufactures and Liberal 
Arts Building of the World's Fair in connection with 
our other departments. 

(Sorbam flfoT Co., 
Sil\>ersmitbs t 

Broadway and igth St., New York City. 



THE 



CATHOLIC WORLD. 



VOL. LVIII. NOVEMBER, 1893. No. 344. 



THE PLEA OF THE AUTUMN LEAVES. 

HE fading leaves are pleading with the 

autumn breeze, 

While fondly they are clinging to their pa- 
rent trees ; 
They whisper, begging, hoping longer span 

of life : 
"So soon to die," they say, "be whirled 

amidst the strife." 
When we were young, in spring we gave our 

shade, 
And when you touched us, trembling music 

made. 

We then had strength, and could thy force defy ; 
But loved thy wooing, listened to thy sigh. 
Let beauty plead, for death who rifles all 
Has cast o'er us a wondrous gorgeous pall, 
And made us fairer in our deep distress 
Than when you lingered, with sweet, fond caress. 
Though we are dying, faithful would we cling, 
And some slight comfort to our loved trees bring ; 
Still clothe them with what tender grace we may, 
And rustling whisper low, We with you stay. 
Why, ruthless, part us from our stems and fling, 
Like fluttering bird to earth with broken wing ? 
Have pity, spare us, toss and tear us not away, 
The plaything of the wind that loved us yesterday ! 

E. O'CONNOR. 

Copyright. VERY REV. A. F. HEWIT. 1893. 
VOL. LVIII. II 





154 THE ESSENTIAL GOODNESS OF GOD. [Nov., 

THE ESSENTIAL GOODNESS OF GOD. 

IMPORTANCE OF VINDICATING THE GOODNESS OF GOD. 
\ 

HERE is nothing more necessary at the present 
time than earnest effort to convince and per- 
suade men of the goodness of God, in order to 
win them to faith and religion. 

The great obstacle to religious faith, for a 
great number, is the aspect which the present condition and 
future destiny of a large, if not the larger part of mankind, 
offers to them. It appears to them as a phenomenon, irrecon- 
cilable with the idea of a supreme being who is both infinitely 
good and infinitely powerful. This is because of the evil which 
exists in the world. They think that there should be no evil 
in a world created and governed by such a being. They say : 
that a good creator must will that his creation should be all 
good without any evil, and exert all his power to make it so. 
Many of this class may only hesitate and waver in their faith, 
while endeavoring to make head against an involuntary scepti- 
cism, "and longing to find a way of dissipating the darkening 
cloud in their mental sky, which obscures but does not totally 
hide the sun. Such persons may suffer very acutely. A senti- 
ment of intense sympathy for mankind in general becomes very 
painful, when the view of their present condition and future 
destiny is gloomy. There is no resource to be found in a 
denial of the existence and providence of God, for to deny these 
is like exchanging a dark day for black night. 

Unhappily, there are others, who give way to their sceptical 
tendencies and melancholy sentiments, and suffer themselves to 
drift into agnosticism or even positive atheism. The final 
logical and moral outcome of this philosophy of despair is pessi- 
mism and nihilism. 

This is enough to show the great importance, the necessity, 
even, of vindicating the goodness of God. 

THE VINDICATION MUST BE METAPHYSICAL. 

The objection to Theism from the existence of evil is meta- 
physical. Therefore it must be met and refuted by metaphys- 
ics. Modern unbelief, after having made war, under the guise 



1 893.] THE ESSENTIAL GOODNESS OF GOD. 155 

of rational philosophy, on revelation, has at last invaded the 
realm of philosophy, and has aimed its weapons against reason 
and its first principles. Theism, or natural theology, is the 
highest and noblest part of metaphysics. It springs out of 
ontology, or metaphysics pure and simple, as a fruit-bearing 
branch springs from the stem and root of the tree. Ontology 
is the science of being in its deepest reasons, and of unity, 
truth, and goodness, which are identical with being. It attains, 
therefore, its last object in God, who is being in all the pleni- 
tude of its essence, and who is the first and final cause of all 
finite being. 

Now, the objection against the goodness, and therefore the 
being of God, is derived from a perversion of the metaphysical 
principle that from the essence of God which is good, only an 
operation which is good can follow. Operation follows essence 
and is determined by it an axiom which no philosopher will 
deny. God operates as First and Final Cause, and therefore 
it is a necessary logical conclusion, that his essence being good, 
he can only intend the good, in creating and ruling the world, 
and can only produce the good by his efficient causality. Now, 
the contention that the existence of evil in the world cannot 
have its first and final cause in God is just. That is to say : 
God cannot intend evil as an end, or be its efficient cause. 
But when the inference is drawn that God cannot permit evil 
to arise from the deficient action of second causes, and that 
his goodness requires that he should prevent this result by the 
exercise of his omnipotence, the conclusion is perverse and 
false. The existence of evil may be permitted, because it is in- 
cidental to a moral order better and more perfect than any 
other, and can be overruled so as to become the occasion of 
producing a much greater good than would result from its ex- 
clusion by an act of supreme power. God is good by his 
essence, which is infinite and unchangeable. Evil is the corrup- 
tion of a nature which has received a finite existence and good- 
ness from God, and as finite is liable to change, and capable 
of becoming better or worse. The contention is principally 
about moral evil, which alone presents any great difficulty. The 
source of moral evil and of all the physical evils which are its 
consequence, is in the abuse of free-will by rational creatures. 
The vindication of the goodness of God in face of the objection 
derived from the existence of evil will, therefore, terminate in 
this contention : that it is congruous to the goodness of God to 
confer the gift of free-will on rational creatures, notwithstand- 



156 THE ESSENTIAL GOODNESS OF GOD. [Nov., 

ing the evil caused by its abuse, and in view of the good 
springing from its right use, and from the overruling of evil to 
a final result which is good. 

THE IDEA OF GOOD IN THE METAPHYSICS OF ARISTOTLE. 

Having undertaken to remove the ground of objections against 
the goodness of God, from the existence of evil, by a metaphysical 
argument, we cannot do better than to seek for it in Aristotle, the 
great master in purely rational philosophy. It is not that the 
metaphysics of Aristotle, or that pure rational philosophy in itself, 
can furnish an ultimate and adequate solution of the problem, 
how it is congruous to the goodness of an almighty creator and 
ruler to permit his created subjects to corrupt and mar any 
part of that nature which is essentially good, and has been in- 
tended by his wisdom for a good end. It is in divine revela- 
tion, in Christian theology and philosophy, that we must find 
the solution which is sufficient for faith, and which gives to 
reason all the satisfaction of which it is capable, under its pre- 
sent limitations. The metaphysical argument can only prepare 
the way for some minds to faith, and afford some subsidiary aid 
to faith for those who already possess it. 

Both by reason and faith we have a certitude that God is ; 
that he is the One, the True, the Good, in his essence. From 
this it follows that his operation is good ; and that evil cannot 
have its origin in his essence or his operation. Since it exists, 
nevertheless, we must ascribe its origin to some other cause, 
explain its nature accordingly, and as it cannot be said that it 
has arisen because God, who is omnipotent, could not prevent 
it, we must explain, the best we can, why he has permitted 
evil. We cannot fully explain his reasons for permitting 
evil. It is only a small portion of the rulings of his provi- 
dence which we know, and we know this in an imperfect 
manner. The final outcome is in many aspects hidden from 
our view. Therefore, at last, we have to fall back on first 
principles of philosophy and revelation. At present, we have 
only to do with the first principles of philosophy. There can 
be no evil in the essence or the operation of God. He must 
have sufficient reasons and good intentions which have deter- 
mined his permission of evil. And, if we cannot understand 
these reasons fully, or perceive clearly how the phenomena of 
the world are reconcilable with good intentions, we must be 
content to endure our ignorance. We must not call in question 
our first principles, cast metaphysics to the winds,|and suffer 



1 893.] THE ESSENTIAL GOODNESS OF GOD. 157 

our minds to be swallowed up by the quicksand of scepticism 
and pessimism. 

We may go back to the metaphysics of a pagan sage, 
to find a remedy for the intellectual malady which has become 
so infectious and contagious among degenerate Christians. 
Having no knowledge of Christ and Christian truth, living in 
the darkened and poisoned atmosphere of heathenism, Aristotle 
was able, by the pure light of natural intelligence and rational 
logic, although I do not question his having received secret aid 
from grace, to attain such a clear view of the one supreme, 
eternal and infinite being, truth and goodness, in essence, hav- 
ing its necessary reason of being in itself, existing in pure and 
perfect actuality, that Christian philosophers must admire his 
sublime metaphysics. Aristotle demonstrates that prior to all 
potency of becoming something by receiving an action from 
without, the being which does not become, but is, in act, by 
reason of its essence, all that is possible and thinkable, in abso- 
lute plenitude, must exist, without beginning, without any 
movability of change, and without end. 

Being is the intelligible and intelligence. The intelligible 
is an object of supreme complacency and love, and intelli- 
gence is also will, resting with supreme complacency in the con- 
templation of being ; and in this contemplation consists its su- 
preme beatitude. As intelligible, being is the truth ; as lovable, 
it is the good. Being, truth, and goodness are identical. The 
spiritual essence in which they are one, is God ; the One, the 
True, the Good. 

There is no eloquence or poetry in Aristotle. He is brief, 
dry, often dark, and the sublimity of his ideas is hidden in 
metaphysical formulas which are like those of algebra and geome- 
try. Plato is different. He soars on the wings of his genius 
into the empyrean, to contemplate the idea of God as the su- 
preme and infinite good. These two great sages of Greece com- 
plete each other, and the philosophy which is combined from 
the best elements of each is the ultimate result of the highest 
and most successful endeavor of intelligence and reason, lacking 
the light of revelation, to attain the knowledge of truth, to ap- 
prehend the intelligible, to investigate being in its deepest 
reasons. 

They agree in this : that the supreme being is identical with 
the supreme good, the intelligible identical with the lovable, in- 
telligence identical with complacency in good, all in absolute, 
indivisible unity ; ens, unum, verum, bonum, existing in an Act, 



158 THE ESSENTIAL GOODNESS OF GOD. [Nov., 

whose reality is commensurate with possibility. This is the true 
and the only Metaphysics, which is as firm and unalterable as 
the first principles of mathematics, uttering the last word of 
human intelligence and reason. 

THE OPERATION OF GOD, FOLLOWING HIS ESSENCE, MUST 

BE GOOD. 

That the operation of every being having an active force 
must spring out of its nature and be determined by it, is axio- 
matic in philosophy. Nature is essence considered as having 
an operative energy. It is evident, at once, that the essence of 
God being absolutely good, the first principle of all goodness, 
nay, the good in itself in the infinite plenitude of all possibility, 
the energy of this divine nature in actual operation, must have 
an outcome corresponding to itself. The intrinsic and necessary 
operation of the divine nature is absolutely and infinitely good. 
It is the act of intelligence and will within the divine essence, 
terminating in the divine essence itself as its adequate intelligi- 
ble and lovable object. It is the life and the supreme beatitude 
of God, as Aristotle has demonstrated. 

The operation of God outside of his own being begins and 
proceeds by imparting and diffusing the good which is in him- 
self, through a movement of the whole universe and the single 
parts of it toward a Final Cause which he finds in himself, and 
which is the same with the final reason of his own being. 

The relation of all beings in the universe to God as Final 
Cause, is the one which Aristotle presents most frequently and 
most clearly. They are moved by the attractive force of the 
first mover, who is immovable ; that is, incapable of any passive 
effect from any cause and energy distinct from himself, and un- 
changeable from within, because he is essentially pure and per- 
fect Act. God is in perfect rest in the possession of the good. 
All beings which are movable and set in motion by the first 
mover, are moved toward the same supreme good, as desirable, 
each one according to the capacity of its nature. The opera- 
tion of God outside of himself, is therefore a continuation and 
an imitation of his intrinsic act. Complacency in the good 
which he is, has for its sequel complacency in the good which 
he causes. The love of his own being, as it were, overflows in 
love of beings who are distinct from himself, and is manifested 
by the diffusion of good among them. 

Mr. McMahon, the translator of Aristotle's Metaphysics, in 
his analysis of Book XL (p. Ixxvi.") savs : " We find Aristotle 



i 893.] THE ESSENTIAL GOODNESS OF GOD. 159 

laying it down that God's existence is what must be most ex- 
cellent and happy, and therefore, as such, his aim must be the 
promotion of general felicity in all parts of creation, and the 
actuating principle in his divine perfections must be love, and 
nothing else but love." 

FROM ARISTOTLE WE TURN TO CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 

Here, I will leave Aristotle, and retain only his abstract 
principles, as they are contained in the highest Christian phil- 
osophy, free from the limitations of his own special theories, or 
shortcomings, and from the embarrassment arising from different 
interpretations of his doctrine concerning the First and Final 
Cause of the universe. 

It is the fundamental doctrine of the pure and perfect The- 
ism of Christian philosophy, that God created all existing things 
out of nothing, in finite limits of time, space, grade, and num- 
ber, by a free act of his will, for a motive and end which this 
sovereign will found in his own wisdom and goodness. 

The motive and end, or the final cause, of creation, can only 
be the manifestation of the divine wisdom and goodness, for 
his own extrinsic glory, by an outpouring of free, disinterested 
love upon his creatures. God is the Final as well as the First 
Cause of the creation and all the beings it contains. They are 
intended to find their ultimate perfection and well-being, by a 
movement of return to the source and origin of their existence ; 
each species and individual, according to its capacity and energy, 
and the particular purpose and destiny for which it has been 
made. 

All the ideas and intelligible ratios of created beings God 
finds in his own infinite essence. They are created in accord- 
ance with these ideas ; they are, in their natures, their exist- 
ence, and their operation, a diminuted, finite imitation of the 
divine nature, being, and activity. 

All essences, substances, modes, and forms of existence, all 
capacities and energies in created nature, must be therefore 
good, and for a good end. They are copies of ideas in the 
divine mind, and these ideas have their foundation in the divine 
essence which is ens, unum y bomim, verum. Creation, therefore, 
has derived, participated, finite being, one origin and end, one 
kind of being without intrinsic opposition of contrary principles, 
and this being is all true and good. The perfections of God 
are reflected in it, like the sky in dew-drops. 

It follows from this that there is no real or possible essence, 



i6o THE ESSENTIAL GOODNESS OF GOD. [Nov., 

substance or nature, which is the opposite and contrary of the 
good, i.e., intrinsically evil. God cannot be the efficient cause 
of anything which is not good, or operate from any intention 
which is not for a good end. 

THE DEFINITION, ORIGIN, AND REASON OF EVIL. 

But what then is evil, whence is it, and wherefore? 

Evidently, it is a negative quantity, a lack or a privation of 
some good which might be or ought to be in natures which 
are essentially good. It is a corruption of natures which are 
corruptible, a disorder, a perversion, a recession from being into 
not being, in the direction of nonentity, or nothing. The in- 
corruptibility of the divine essence is an attribute which belongs 
to it as the supreme, absolute, self-existing being in all possible 
plenitude, incapable of change, either by gain or loss. The cor- 
ruptibility of the creature is a consequence of its having a re- 
ceived, finite, and changeable existence, an intrinsic tendency 
toward the nothing out of which it has been taken. 

The absence of being in itself, and of the plenitude of being, 
in creatures, is sometimes called by metaphysicians metaphysical 
evil. This term may do very well in pure metaphysics, but it 
is unfortunate and misleading in popular language. That crea- 
tures are not self-existent and infinite is not a flaw in the crea- 
tion. That one creature lacks something which is not proper 
to its species or its individuality, is not a flaw in its nature. 
Capacity of change and motion is not intrinsically evil, since it 
does not necessarily imply change for the worse, and often re- 
ceives a movement to the equally good or the better. 

Physical evil is every kind of corruption in any nature, which 
deprives it of some good pertaining to its proper well-being, 
and is not in the moral category. 

Moral evil is the corruption of a rational being, which vitiates 
the moral good which ought to exist in his voluntary acts and 
his habitual character. 

This is the chief, and strictly speaking the only, evil in the 
world, which presents a serious difficulty, as to its cause and 
the reason for its permission. 

God cannot be its efficient cause, and there is no created effi- 
cient cause, determined by its nature to produce the effect of mo- 
ral evil. All causes except the free-will of a rational creature 
are out of the question. The nature of every rational creature 
is good ; free-will as a faculty is good ; the proper object of the 

will is the P"Ood. The abuse of free-will, the self-determination 



1893-] THE ESSENTIAL GOODNESS OF GOD. 161 

of a rational creature to an immoral choice, is an aberration 
from the right course, a failure to exercise the power conferred 
on him to accomplish the work of his own perfection, and thus 
to attain the glorious destination for which he was created. It 
is, therefore, more correct to denote the cause of evil, with St. 
Gregory Nyssen, as a deficient, rather than as an efficient cause. 
The nature of the rational creature determines him to seek for 
the good which is desirable. By his intelligence and will he 
considers and embraces that which among all desirable objects 
he regards as the most eligible. But he does not rightly ex- 
ercise the faculties of knowing and willing, so as to choose his 
own true and supreme good ; but, on the contrary, he deceives 
himself by an error of judgment, and acts on this false judgment 
by choosing a false appearance of good, instead of his real and 
supreme good, which he ought to have chosen. It is this false- 
hood and aberration of mind and will which is moral evil, which 
is sin. It degrades the rational nature of the sinner, deprives 
him of his due relation to God, and turns him away from his 
true destination. He becomes something worse than he was, and 
than he ought to be. But still, he does not become in essence 
and substance an evil being. His essence and nature, and his 
operation, in so far as it is the activity of his purely natural 
energy, are good. All that in him which is from God, and pro- 
ceeds from the action of God, as first and efficient cause, is 
good. The moral evil which corrupts his nature and operation 
is a lack, a privation of that good which ought to proceed from 
his own free-will and to complete the work of God in him. 
Once turned away from God and his true end, toward self and 
the pursuit of happiness in the inferior good of creatures, the 
way is opened to every kind and degree of moral aberration and 
degradation. This is the source and origin of all the moral evil, 
of all the vices and sins by which humanity has been devastated 
and which make of the world such a sad spectacle. The 
origin of moral evil is in the free-will of rational creatures. 
The physical evils and miseries by which mankind are afflicted 
are the consequences of the moral disorder caused by sin. 

When the two questions : What is evil? and Whence is evil? 
have been answered ; the third remains : Why does God permit 
evil? It is clear that he is not its first and efficient cause, and 
its final cause. It does not proceed from his creative power and 
will, or enter into his intention. The only way, therefore, in which 
the existence of evil can be referred to the will of God is this ; 
evil has not been excluded from the world bv the exercise of 



1 62 THE ESSENTIAL GOODNESS OF GOD. [Nov., 

the divine omnipotence. He could have excluded all evil, if he 
had willed to do so ; as he did not will to do this, it exists by his 
permission. It is self-evident that he has a good and sufficient 
reason, congruous to his wisdom and goodness, for permitting 
evil, and the great problem, the enigma of theology, is to dis- 
cover what this reason is. 

THE REASON FOR PERMITTING EVIL CANNOT BE FOUND IN PA- 
GAN PHILOSOPHY. 

It is in vain to look for a solution of this problem in the 
philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, or in any philosophy separat- 
ed from the theology derived from divine revelation. It is a 
necessary conclusion from the principles and truths revealed by 
God in his works to the intellect and reason of man, that all 
the doctrine taught in the Christian religion is the word of God 
revealed to faith, spoken by the Personal, Incarnate Word, Je- 
sus Christ. From this pure and divine source of light we must 
derive our faith and the philosophy of our faith. And when 
our rational philosophy betrays its shortcomings and fails to 
give an answer to the questions of our curious intellect which 
is satisfactory, we must let in this light upon its dark obscuri- 
ties, and resort to faith to supply the deficiencies of reason. 

HOW FAR CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY CAN SOLVE THE PROBLEM. 

In the endeavor to solve the problem of evil, Catholic phil- 
osophy has gone as far as the limited human reason, aided by 
the light of revelation, can go. 

So far as physical evil is concerned, we have not far to seek 
for a sufficient explanation of its existence. For the corruption 
of those natures which are not rational, is a temporary incident 
of the beginning and progress of universal nature, through the 
operation of second causes and created forces, toward its final 
perfection, when God will make it incorrupt, and incorruptible 
by any natural causes. 

The physical evils by which rational creatures are afflicted, 
and which are the consequence of moral evil, serve to check, to 
diminish, to counteract, and to remedy the moral devastation 
which is caused by sin. For all those who become finally mor- 
ally perfect and completely happy in a state of permanent in- 
corruption, physical evil is temporary and becomes the means of 
attaining their highest good. 

It is only the permission of moral evil, and of its consequen- 
ces, in the orivation of the final anrl nprferi- ornnH wVifrh i<; the 



1893-] T HE ESSENTIAL GOODNESS OF GOD. 163 

natural exigency and destiny of rational creatures, which is the 
really perplexing and difficult problem. 

The question is : Why should God give to rational creatures 
free-will, in a state of equilibrium between good and evil, involv- 
ing the risk of an abuse of the self-determining power, and 
its disastrous consequences? According to the light of natural 
and unaided reason, it would seem more congruous to the good- 
ness of God, intending only with pure benevolence the diffusion 
of itself in creation, that he should at once, by one stroke of 
power, make the whole rational creation unchangeably perfect 
and happy Besides this, it might appear to some minds more 
consonant to the idea of a plan of operation intended and exe- 
cuted by infinite goodness and power, that the whole universe 
should be created at once in a state of consummate and immov- 
able order and beauty. The ideal picture is certainly an attrac- 
tive one, but, as we very well know, purely imaginary. 

THE PLAN OF GOD INCLUDES MORAL PROBATION. 

God has chosen another plan. He has set in motion a mul- 
titude of second causes, and put in operation natural laws, by 
which, from inchoate chaos, order and beauty have been and 
still are slowly evolved. Moreover, he has chosen to place his 
rational creation at the beginning, in a state of moral proba- 
tion, with the power of free-will, so that beings created after 
his image might work out, by the exercise of con-creative causal- 
ity, their own moral perfection, and thus attain to a final state 
of incorruption and beatitude. It is not difficult to see that 
God has intended, by this plan, to produce a much higher and 
greater good, than that which would be accomplished if the 
universe were made the passive recipient of the action of omni- 
potent power upon it and in it. The difficulty arises when we 
consider the moral evil which has resulted from the abuse of 
free-will by a multitude of intellectual and rational creatures. 
But especially, it is the final and irremediable loss of the beati- 
tude to which they were destined, which makes the problem of 
the permission of evil so dark and perplexing. 

HOW FAR REASON CAN SOLVE THE PROBLEM. 

Is there any rational solution of this problem ? Is there an 
answer to the question, Why and for what reason did God place 
the destiny of rational creatures in their own hands, when the 
abuse of this power was incident to its possession, and conse- 
quent upon this abuse a long train of disorders, of moral and 



164 THE ESSENTIAL GOODNESS OF GOD. [Nov., 

physical evils, ending in the eternal loss of a multitude of an- 
gels and men ? 

In a general way the problem can be solved and the ques- 
tion answered. The goodness of God toward those who have 
ruined themselves is vindicated ; because it is clear that he in- 
tended their good in conferring the gifts and powers which they 
have perverted to evil. The greater good, for the sake of which 
the evil is permitted, is to be found in the virtue, the sanctity, 
the perfection, and final glory of the great multitude of rational 
creatures who have made a right use of their free-will. Again, 
evil has been so overruled by the wisdom and mercy of God, 
as to make a superabundant compensation for the partial injury 
it has done to the creation. The heroic virtues acquired and 
practised in contending with evil, especially by the glorious host 
of martyrs, counterbalance the loss of the possible angels and 
saints who have fallen into the state and doom of sinners. But 
above all, there is the glory of the Redeemer and his Cross, 
which would not have adorned the world if there had been no 
sin to expiate, and no sinners to redeem. 

It is not reasonable to argue, that the goodness of God re- 
quired him to dispense with all this for the sake of saving the 
votaries of all kinds of vice, together with Lucifer and his fol- 
lowers in rebellion, from the misery which they have brought 
upon themselves by sin. This would be to suffer good to be 
overcome by evil. Whereas, under the supervision of divine 
providence, good must and will overcome evil. In the end, God 
will establish perfect and immutable order, and leave nothing 
inordinate in the universe. The perpetual existence and the state 
of those who have finally lost the beatitude for which they were 
originally intended, contributes to this order. For, they are in 
the state and condition which are due to them, according to jus- 
tice, which is one form of goodness, and they contribute passively 
to the glory of the Creator, and to the perfection of that moral 
order which is a more excellent good than a universal diffusion 
of mere sensible enjoyment could be. 

COMPLETE SATISFACTION TO BE FOUND ONLY IN FAITH. 

At last, however, human reason must withdraw, dazzled and 
confounded, from the effort to penetrate the secret counsels of 
God. It is necessary, in order that the mind and the heart may 
rest in calm tranquillity, that God should speak to man by a di- 
vine revelation. He has done so. In his word, he has assured 

nc rf Vlic rrrr>r1n/acc \\\c \r\i.rc* Viic- Itic-4-J/^/^ .-> .-. A ^ lI~ T -. 



i 893.] THE ESSENTIAL GOODNESS OF GOD. 165 

his Son, he has given us a revelation of love so great, so un- 
speakable, as to submerge a Divine Person in the deepest sea 
of suffering, for the expiation of human sin, and the final tri- 
umph of good over evil in the universe. 

It is by a divine faith, infused and sustained by divine grace, 
that we are raised above our weak and tremulous reason and 
human sentiments, to believe without wavering and hesitation 
in the goodness and love of God, to confide absolutely in his 
divine providence over his creatures, to submit unreservedly to 
his sovereign will, and to love him supremely, as the chief good 
in himself, and our own chief good. 

FAITH IN THE DIVINE GOODNESS MADE EASY BY THE IN- 
CARNATION. 

God has made this easier for us by the Incarnation of the 
Second Person in the Godhead in our human nature. The eter- 
nal Son has become man, and in his sacred person, clothed with 
humanity, he has combined and united divine love with human 
love in a transcendent manner ; dying on the cross for the salva- 
tion of the world. Into his hands the Father has committed sov- 
ereign dominion over the human race. He is the final judge 
and arbiter of the destiny of all human beings. It is impossible 
that he should depart from the most perfect standard of justice, 
tempered with mercy, and harmonized with the most perfect 
love, in that final act of his sovereign power, by which he will 
establish the universe in its eternal order. In this faith and 
confidence in Jesus Christ the mind and heart can find perfect 
rest from the disquietude of a continual brooding over the pro- 
blem of evil. 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF DESPAIR. 

The only alternative is the philosophy of despair. At the 
present time, no thinking mind can entertain the hypothesis that 
there is a self-existing being, who is in his essence evil and 
malevolent. Whoever disbelieves in a Creator and Ruler of the 
world, infinitely good and infinitely powerful, must refer all 
things to an unconscious, blind force in nature, and regard all 
the evil and misery to which men are subject as a doom of 
fate, or as happening by chance. Many, who have fallen into the 
miserable scepticism so prevalent in this age, may be so absorbed 
in the occupations of life, or engaged in pursuing its frivolous 
amusements, that all their interest is centred in the present, 
with scarcely a thought about their origin, or their end. But 



i66 THE ESSENTIAL GOODNESS OF GOD. [Nov., 

when these objects fail them, the question of the value of life 
forces itself on their attention. There are others, more thought- 
ful by nature, who can never be distracted from a consideration 
of the philosophy of life, by these occupations and amusements ; 
and others still, whose misfortunes deprive them of any sense of 
happiness, except that which religion offers. The tendency of 
the philosophy of doubt and unbelief is therefore toward prac- 
tical pessimism and despair. Its final conclusion is: that life is 
not worth living, and its extinction the only end to be expected 
or desired. The dreary accounts of recent English newspapers 
of the prevalence of a suicidal mania are an illustration of this 
fatal tendency. 

Nothing can be more unnatural than this turning away from 
life and plunging into the abyss of death. Not only those who 
actually kill themselves, but all who turn their minds and hearts 
away from God, the author of life, to a melancholy pessimism, 
or any kind of sceptical agnosticism, are intellectual and moral 
suicides. All rational beings who deprive themselves of eternal 
life by the abuse of their free-will are suicides. 

THE LOVE OF GOD NATURAL AND REASONABLE. 

It is the height of folly, as well as the most fatal and 
criminal wickedness, to yield to the deadly fascination of the 
suicidal mania, and abandon the pursuit of eternal life in God, 
because a multitude have chosen the way that leads to death. 
This is what they do who, by brooding over the evil caused 
by sin, lose their faith and confidence in the goodness of God, 
and consequently in his being and providence. Even the pagan 
Aristotle could perceive the truth that God acts from love and 
only from love. In his revelation, God declares that he is love, 
that he hateth nothing which he hath made, that he even hear- 
eth the young ravens when they cry ; and more than this, that 
he so loved the world, that he hath given his only-begotten 
Son, that whosoever believeth on him may not perish, but have 
everlasting life. The whole operation of nature is towards the 
production of life ; the love of life and the desire for happiness 
are implanted by nature in the human bosom. The love of 
God and the opportunity of gaining eternal life are offered to 
all men. It is a plain dictate of reason, that each one should 
make it his paramount object in life to secure his own eternal 
well-being, and leave the government of the world in the hands 
of God. It is mere foolish cant to call this care for personal 
salvation selfishness. Enlightened and ordinate self-love is not 



I893-] 



THE ESSENTIAL GOODNESS OF GOD. 



167 



immoral or mean, but is just and honorable, and consistent 
with the most disinterested and generous love of our fellow- 
beings. Moreover, the pursuit of eternal well-being is not a 
mere striving after enjoyment. It is a striving after a state of 
perfection and incorruption. Not only self-love, but the love of 
the good in itself, the love of God, the creator, father, and re- 
deemer of men, is its motive. It is the categorical imperative 
of conscience which obliges every rational being to attain his 
due and proper destination, to fulfil the purpose for which he 
was created. To refuse this concurrence with the will of God 
is not only an act of folly, but of cowardice and treason. 

As for those who are the children of God, if they would 
have a perfect and immovable tranquillity amid the trials, 
storms, and combats of their period of probation, let them 
regard the sovereign will of God as identical with his goodness 
and love. 

And let those whose office it is to strengthen the just in 
Christian virtue and to bring unbelievers and sinners to faith 
and reconciliation with God, make it their chief object to con- 
vince and persuade men of the goodness, the love, and the 
mercy of the sovereign creator and ruler of the world. 

AUGUSTINE F. HEWIT. 





1 68 Miss MILLIONAIRE. [Nov., 



MISS MILLIONAIRE. 

RS. LANE had come over to take counsel of Mrs. 
Gray, choosing her as an adviser because her sis- 
ter Alice was the village belle, and because hers 
was the only carnage in Warrenton. 

" You remember my telling you about meeting 
that Miss Ladham and her mother at Old Point, and how 
charmed Colonel Lane was with the girl ? Well, the other day 
when I wrote thanking her for the photographs she sent us at 
Christmas, I renewed the invitation we had given her to visit 
us, but with no more notion that she would accept than I had 
that I would fly to the moon." 

There was a tragic inflection at this new instance of the cer- 
tainty of the unexpected. 

"And is she coming?" Mrs. Gray asked, remembering with 
renewed appreciation of its fitness the nickname of " the Veneer- 
ings " which some wit had bestowed on the Lanes. 

"Why, certainly. I wrote some pretty stuff, which took her 
fancy, about ours being just the village to spend Lent in ' far 
from the madding crowd/ and all that. And she is coming next 
week. Now, how in the world are we to entertain her? a girl 
who has been everywhere and who is worth a million of dollars." 

Mrs. Gray, who occasionally earned some money by helping 
with the tax-list, calculated that the sum named would buy al- 
most half of Warren County, before she asked with solemn 
sympathy: "What have you thought of doing?" 

Her evident awe at the situation had an exhilarating effect 
on Mrs. Lane. " I thought we might have some young men to- 
see her, for one thing ; and I knew you could advise me about 
that, your sister is so popular. There are Dr. Decatur, and 
Major Arnold ; they, with Armistead Trenholm, were all I could 
think of. Who else could you suggest?" 

" She would not recognize dry-goods clerks ? " asked the ad- 
viser tentatively. 

" Well, scarcely ! " was the reply, given with fine scorn. 

" I thought not, and that narrows the list greatly. Some of 
Alice's best friends are clerks, and she likes them almost as well 
as you and I used to like Palmer Ewart and Joe Kent when, 
they sold us calico in Mr. Parker's store." 



1893-] Miss MILLIONAIRE. 169 

The face was a pleasant one to match the reminiscent tone 
of the last words, but Mrs. Lane, being a politician's wife, knew 
her constituents, and hastened to disarm resentment by saying, 
apologetically : 

" Oh ! of course since the war we have learned to regard the 
man rather than his occupation, but in the North it is different. 
Northerners are, in a way, much more exclusive than we are." 

" I suppose a moneyed aristocracy has to be," said Mrs. 
Gray, with as contemptuous a tolerance as if she had not a mo- 
ment before been appalled at the mention of a million of dol- 
lars ; " but how will Miss Millionaire be able to stand Armistead 
Trenholm ? " she asked, laughing ; " she will faint at the sight of 
his shabby clothes, yet he declares he will not get new ones 
while he is making so little money." 

" But Colonel Lane says he is a wonderfully clever fellow," 
the prospective hostess declared adding, impatiently, " and even 
a millionaire, if she be a young woman, is not going to wish to 
be made a hermit of. Besides, all the girls like Armistead, don't 
they?" 

" I don't know whether Alice does or not," Mrs. Gray an- 
swered, while a shade of annoyance fell over her face, " but all 
the rest do ; and Miss Millionaire might be interested in him as 
'a type.' Aren't they always looking for types?" 

And as she stopped speaking, such a romantic possibility oc- 
curred to Armistead Trenholm's friend that she no longer felt 
the least antagonism toward the coming moneyed aristocrat, or 
her entertainers, and lent herself with a sudden warmth of in- 
terest to making plans for her pleasure. She forestalled Mrs. 
Lane's questions as to Alice by telling her that she would be 
home the next week and would aid in every way she could in 
entertaining Miss Ladham ; and she rendered any hints about 
the carriage unnecessary by placing 'it at the disposal of Mrs. 
Lane's guest ; suggesting, too, that Armistead Trenholm would 
take her horseback-riding or buggy-driving when the ladies could 
not go in the carriage with her. 

The rich planters who had made Warrenton a collection of 
grand houses in the old days had a fine sense of being sufficient 
unto themselves. They were to a man ready to fight it out 
with the whole State rather than allow the new railroad, which 
was to connect Norfolk and Raleigh, to pass through their town. 
The whistle of the locomotive and rush of trains seemed to these 
stately gentlemen a desecration of the elegant repose of their 
homes, and the railroad was forced to curve out of its line and 



\rr\t T VTTT 



170 Miss MILLIONAIRE. [Nov., 

establish its depot three miles from the village. There were in 
those days individuals great enough to conquer corporations, 
and no doubt the planters went to their last rest with the con- 
sciousness of having saved their homes strong upon them. 

Perhaps, too, if the superstition prevalent in that country 
had grounds in truth, the old worthies turned uneasily in their 
graves many a time when their degenerate descendants, after 
much striving, succeeded in building those three miles of rail- 
road whereby they might be connected with the main line. 
But the descendants themselves were so proud of this achieve- 
ment that they built the road down their main street, so that the 
shrieking engine blew smoky defiance in the face of those man- 
sions whose former owners would have resented every puff as a 
personal indignity. 

The modern Warrentonians, indeed, measured time by the 
morning and afternoon comings of "the train"; yet even this 
constantly interesting event took on a new importance on that 
March day when Miss Ladham was expected. Every one had 
seen Mrs. Lane, in her last city-made suit and with an accession 
of stiffness due the occasion, go out to Warren Plains that 
morning accompanied by Colonel Lane, who apologized for 
wearing his best clothes by giving a peculiarly devil-may-care 
touch to his slouch hat. The colonel was a successful lawyer, 
and affected a certain carelessness in matters of dress along with 
a certain bluntness in his manners and speech both were popu- 
lar with a large class of possible jurors. And also Warrenton 
was on the alert to catch a glimpse of the owner of a million 
of dollars. Her very presence in their midst seemed to envelop 
them in a golden glory. 

To Agnes Ladham, as Colonel Lane helped her from the 
train into Mrs. Gray's waiting carriage, another sort of golden 
haze was over the town as it lay bathed in the bright noon sun- 
shine. The gabled houses, gray with age, set in groves of tow- 
ering and often ivy-clad oaks ; the faint gleam of yellow flowers 
that blossomed in wild profusion in the century-old gardens at 
the sides of the houses ; the Episcopal church, ivy-clad too, 
surrounded by flat tombstones, blue now with the periwinkle in 
a riot of bloom ; the court-house with its colonnade, from whose 
pillars the stucco had fallen in patches ; the spacious court 
square, where some country people had left their mules and 
oxen to browse on the chance sprigs of grass while their owners 
bartered eggs for coffee and snuff. All this Agnes Ladham 
qualified in her own mind as " delicious," and her first sense of 



1893-] Miss MILLIONAIRE. 171 

disappointment was when she found that the Lanes lived in the 
only new house in the place, rather than in one of the weather- 
beaten mansions that abounded. Nothing was farther from her 
thoughts than that she herself was being closely watched, a fact 
of which Mrs. Lane was as keenly conscious as if every shutter 
along their way had flown open at once and revealed the curious 
faces which they now screened. 

Mrs. Ray, the postmistress, summarized the village verdict 
the next morning to Alice Cottrell, whose return had made the 
train's afternoon trip noteworthy the day before. 

The old woman stood in the door of the post-office, which 
was also her dwelling, and watched the girl coming toward her 
with an odd sense of personal triumph in the charm that hung 
around her. For though Mrs Ray, hard of feature and angular 
of frame, had never thought it out, there was in her tenderness 
for Alice a feeling that the girl's fresh prettmess and bloom of 
womanhood might bring to her all the brightness which the old 
woman's life had lacked. It is often thus with older women 
whose hidden hearts yet beat maternally they see in the young 
beauty a realization of their lost ideals of themselves. 

" I been a-standin' here a-watchin' you," she said as Miss Cot- 
trell stood still by her door-step. " I was feared all them Ger- 
mans an' things Janet's been tellin' me you been a-goin' ter had 
'spoiled yo' beauty,' as folks used ter say. But they haint ; 
an' I be hushed ef them boys warn't right in what they said 
about you yistiddy." 

" What did they say, Mrs. Ray ? " the girl asked, her face 
bright with the pleased expectancy born of her consciousness of 
being the village favorite. 

" Aw ! theuwas standin' roun' yere waitin* for me ter open 
the evenin' rrdjff (you know I won't hurry myself fur none of 
'em), an' they were a-talkin' about that rich Yankee gyal the 
Lanes got visitin' 'em. You ain't seen her yet ? peaked face, 
eye-glasses, sort o' springin' gait, rough-lookin' dress, smashed 
together hat looks lak a reg'lar Yankee schoolmarm, but not ter 
say a rale ugly one. An' presently one of 'em ups an' says : 
'Wjell, Miss Alice come home to-day too, an' I tell you what, 
boys, the Yankee may have the cash, but she cayn't hold a 
candle to our gyal for style an' beauty.' You're right there, I 
sez to myself ; an' he was too, as all of 'em told 'im." 

The blushes which encarmined her face at this tribute to her 
fairness so enhanced it that Armistead Trenholm, coming by at 
that moment, thought he had never seen her look so pretty, 



172 Miss MILLIONAIRE. [Nov., 

and paid her one of his rare compliments by saying, as he took 
her hand : 

" It's been mighty lonesome without her, hasn't it, Mrs. 
Ray ? " 

"Yes," said the old woman, as she stepped back into the 
office and returned with a letter, " but I reckin we'll have ter 
git used ter it, Armistead. This looks like it ; she jest left 
Wilmin'ton day befo' yistiddy an' stopped overnight in Weldon, 
an', behold you ! here's a letter fum Wilmin'ton, come on the 
same train she did in a man's writin' too." 

Alice took the letter eagerly and read it at once, the two 
others watching; then, with one of those pretty filial ways which 
endeared her to the old of all classes, she smilingly handed it 
to Mrs. Ray to read a proceeding which Mr. Trenholm found 
so satisfactory that he asked her to allow him to walk home 
with her. 

They had gone but a few steps, however, when the girl turned 
and ran back to where Mrs. Ray was still standing. 

" Was it Cousin Armistead who said that ? " she whispered. 

"Good Lord, naw!" exclaimed Mrs. Ray in emphatic denial. 
" He 'peared ter git mad when the other boy said it." 

" Oh ! he never did like me anyhow you know," Alice de- 
clared with sudden pique. Coquette though she was, she was 
too unversed in the ways of men to put other construction on 
his resentment. 

" Naw, I don't know," answered the wiser woman ; " le' me 
ask 'im if he don't?" But before she could make a feint 
of calling him, her questioner had joined him and they were 
walking off. 

" It wouldn't never do in the world," the postmistress soli- 
loquized. " He's too everlastin' poor. Pity that Yankee gyal 
warn't a man ; Alice would have 'im lovin' her in no time. An' 
Alice ought ter marry a rich man. We've had enough of po' 
fokes marryin' po' fokes." 

In this remote village marriage was still believed to be the 
manifest destiny of every young woman. 

Mrs. Lane and Mrs. Gray stood and watched Colonel Lane 
drive off with Miss Ladham and Alice Cottrell in the carriage. 

" She says she has enjoyed every hour of her stay with us," 
Mrs. Lane declared, in a voice wherein triumph and relief were 
mingled. 

" She has disappointed every ideal I had of a millionaire, 



1893.] Miss MILLIONAIRE. 173 

and has besides destroyed my last stronghold against discontent 
with poverty," her friend replied, conscious of a vague regret 
that this was true. " I had persuaded myself that riches made 
people selfish and * stuck-up,' when here comes the richest 
woman I ever knew, and she is so sweet and simple that she 
makes us poor folks feel like sophisticated worldlings by com- 
parison." 

" She does not think us such," Mrs. Lane said, decidedly 
being the greater worldling of the two she felt no self-accusa- 
tions " she says we are the kindest people she has ever met, 
and she has quite fallen in love with you and Alice." 

"How does she like the young men?" queried Mrs. Gray, a 
trifle anxiously ; " Dr. Decatur and Major Arnold and Armistead 
Trenholm, for instance ? " 

" She enjoys Dr. Decatur's fiddling and drollery ; she thinks 
Major Arnold a good whist-partner ; and as for Armistead, she 
has never mentioned him except to ask me if Alice was going 
to marry him." 

4< The idea ! " exclaimed Alice's sister, with totally uncalled- 
for vehemence. " I hope you told her that they were like brother 
and sister." 

" Well, no ; but I told her they were close kin, though I 
failed to make her see that fourth cousins were near relatives," 
said Mrs. Lane with a quizzical smile ; " and besides," she con- 
tinued, with the air of a woman who is feeling her ground, " I 
told her that Alice is probably engaged or will be soon to Dun- 
can Pembroke, of Wilmington ? " 

The interrogative inflection was wasted, however. Mrs. Gray 
had no intention of discussing her sister's affairs, even if she 
had not just then been absorbed in what, she would have said, 
were Armistead Trenholm's interests. 

Mrs. Lane felt fully justified in declaring that her guest had 
"fallen in love" with her friends; for Alice Cottrell and Agnes 
Ladham, from being quite constantly thrown together, soon fell 
to liking each other's companionship. 

One afternoon, after they had been for a long walk down 
the piney woods road, they found the parlor fire particularly al- 
luring. That parlor was in itself enough to fascinate one with- 
out the fire, thought Miss Ladham, and with the blazing logs it 
was irresistible, though she discovered that its owners rather de- 
precated the old-fashioned air which charmed her. The high 
oak mantel, surmounted by the gilt-framed, ceiling-reaching mir- 
ror, which reflected the Dresden vases and prism-fringed cande-' 



i/4 Miss MILLIONAIRE. [Nov., 

labra on the shelf ; the polished brass andirons and fender 
which saw themselves, by means of the flicker of the wood fire, 
in the black marble hearth ; the velvet carpet, worn into soft 
neutrality of tone ; the small-paned windows draped in old 
crimson damask that fell from deep brass cornices ; the fine 
steel engravings of subjects our grandfathers liked, and the two 
or three family portraits ; these, with the incongruous bits of 
modern bric-a-brac and willow chairs which Alice and Janet had 
introduced to lighten up the room, all made a picture like one 
in a book, and which accorded well with the two young women 
themselves, whose notions of the great outside world were all 
book-gained and whose curiosity about it was so great, yet so 
tempered by their exquisite courtesy to the stranger and their 
inbred belief in their own perfect gentility. Somehow the talk 
turned on heroes as the three sat before the fire, and Mrs. 
Gray said musingly just as her sister was called from the 
room : 

" It seems to me I have seen heroes in my every-day life. I 
think I would call Armistead Trenholm one." Miss Ladham 
looked up amused ; but these people took themselves seriously, 
and she spoke quite sincerely when she said : 

" I thought him a very unusual man, but will you tell me 
why you think him a hero ? " 

Like most women, Janet Gray was capable of a certain sort 
of eloquence when her feelings were enlisted, and so she briefly 
told the history of Armistead Trenholm's twenty-eight years. 
It was not an uncommon story to the teller. She herself had 
known of several similar ones, and she knew there had been 
hundreds like it throughout the South ; but her sisterly devo- 
tion to the man of whom she spoke made her voice fall into 
tearful tenderness now and then, as she told of the young boy, 
sensitive and delicate, who ploughed barefoot that his mother 
might not lack for food ; of her death, broken-hearted after all, 
though the war was over ; of the lonely boy's struggles, still 
gaining education by snatches, yet never giving up ; of the way 
he worked through college, of the brave life after it, lived unmur- 
muringly, relinquishing every comfort until the money could be 
earned to pay for it ; and always the high purpose and high 
hope living on, despite the shabby clothes and bitter poverty. 
As Agnes Ladham listened she thought she understood why 
those clear eyes looked out at one so frankly, and she forgave 
a certain awkwardness which had heretofore repelled her. 

" What has Janet been chattering about ?" Alice asked, re- 



1893-] Miss MILLIONAIRE. 175 

turning a moment or two after her sister had ceased speaking. 
" I could hear her constantly in the sitting-room." 

" She has been talking very eloquently," said Miss Ladham 
with a ring of what was perhaps reflected tenderness in her 
voice. " She has been telling me of your cousin, Mr. Tren- 
holm." 

" Then I am sure she waxed eloquent," Miss Cottrell said 
with smiling conviction ; " Cousin Armistead is Janet's chief 
weakness." 

" I would scarcely couple weakness with his name after Mrs. 
Gray's story," declared Miss Ladham, with a shade of resent- 
ment in her tone that made Alice wonder and grow silent for 
a moment ; and then she asked their visitor for a song. 

It was characteristic of the woman that any exaltation of 
emotion was apt to take a religious tone ; and because she had 
been touched by the story she had just heard she felt like 
praising the Creator who had made his creature strong and 
true, so that instead of singing some operatic selection, as her 
listeners expected, she struck the notes of the " Te Deum," as 
it is chanted in the Episcopal service, Alice and her sister, de- 
vout " church-women," both joining her. Armistead Trenholm 
passing, heard the music and entered unannounced, Mrs. Gray 
acknowledging his presence by silently motioning him to make 
the fourth in the group ; and presently his magnificent, though 
untrained, bass voice swelled the chant until the room was filled 
with harmony. 

Somehow it seemed natural that he should have come in 
just then, and Miss Ladham did not stop playing, so that the 
four went on singing together the familiar hymns, each moment 
deepening the spell which music and firelight were working. 
And when at last Miss Ladham remembered with a start that 
Mrs. Lane would be waiting for her the night had fallen, and 
Armistead Trenholm had to walk home with her. 

That was the first of many walks the two took together, 
and Agnes Ladham told her hostess there never was such a 
beautiful world as this old Warrenton world was in that blos- 
soming Lenten spring-time. She told herself that she was grow- 
ing devout, since the lack which she, like many another pious 
Protestant, had always felt in her religion had ceased to trou- 
ble her. 

Not all the ritualistic rector's efforts could make the little 
church other than bare ; yet Agnes said she had never found it 
so easy to pray as she did there when she and Armistead and 



176 Miss MILLIONAIRE. [Nov., 

Alice and the other Warrenton young folks would meet there 
on Wednesday and Friday afternoons for the Lenten evening 
services. 

And so Easter came and Miss Ladham knew she must be 
going. Warrenton had not felt so rich in many a day as it did 
that Easter week with its millionaire guest and Duncan Pem- 
broke, who was worth quite a hundred thousand, they said, both 
sojourning in its borders. 

Indeed, Mrs. Ray predicted to the crowd which gathered for 
the mail on Easter Tuesday that they would hear of two rich 
marriages in Warrenton before the year was out, and based 
her prediction upon the fact that she had that afternoon seen 
Armistead Trenholm and Miss Ladham walk toward the coun- 
try road together, and an hour afterwards saw Duncan Pem- 
broke drive Alice Cottrell through the town. 

It was certainly an afternoon worth living through. The 
world was full of April's warmth and veiled brightness. Though 
the trees had attained all of their foliage it was still of ten- 
der green transparence, and the air was fragrant with the per- 
fume of innumerable fruit blossoms. By the stream the yellow 
jasmine twisted itself about the great grape-vines that looped 
from tree to tree across the brown water and changed them 
into living gold, and the white dogwood starred the dark places 
of the woods. 

As the two strollers walked on, Agnes Ladham felt her 
heart full of quiet happiness, the greater perhaps because her 
companion was sad, and she believed from what he had said that 
his sadness came because this was their last walk together. 

They sat down by the stream and watched the swift current 
whirling away under the country bridge the freight of jasmine 
flowers that Agnes idly threw into the water. As they sat, for 
the most part in silence, Trenholm abstractedly carved a letter 
in the soft bark of the beech-tree near him, where many letters 
had been carved before. 

"That is an excellent 'A,'" Miss Ladham said as he finished 
it. " Let us see if the ' L ' will be as good." 

He looked at her and then at his work with a start of sur- 
prise which made her blush, and he felt his own cheek flush 
also. How was she to know that " C " and not " L " had fol- 
lowed "A" in his carving ever since he could cut into the bark 
of a beech-tree ? 

" But you have a middle name, and so ' L ' is not the next," 
he said to cover his embarrassment, and fell to work so indus- 



1893.] Miss MILLIONAIRE. 177 

triously that they were soon admiring the A. W. L. which 
would remain as long as the tree did. 

" I would cut the initials of the man who would like vastly 
to change those," he said, glancing at her smilingly; "but there 
is no hope for him I know, so I need not waste my knife." 

She suddenly looked up at him with a wonderful light in 
her eyes, and her voice trembled as she said, looking away 
again : " How do you know there is no hope for him ?" 

He was surprised and puzzled at her manner more than her 
speech, and for an instant wondered if she were coquette 
enough to wish him to put his own name there. Partly to show 
her how far he was from falling into such a trap, he stooped 
and wrote Dr. Decatur's name in the sand. 

" There it is," he said, laughing quietly. She read, and 
sprang up to her feet in an instant with such a gleam of pain 
and anger in her face that he rose quickly and started to apolo- 
gize ; but before he had spoken there was a whirl of wheels 
and Alice and Mr. Pembroke drove over the bridge, so absorbed 
in each other that they did not see the two who stood watching 
them. 

" As you people down here phrase it, ' I reckon that's a 
match,' " Miss Ladham said with a show of lightness to do 
away with the effect of her resentment a moment before. 

" I suppose so," Trenholm answered in a voice that made 
her look at him. He stood as if turned to stone, and his blue 
eyes and tawny beard made startling color in comparison with 
the death-like pallor of his face. 

Agnes Ladham felt all the blood go back from her own 
cheek at the sight. But she was a brave woman and she meant 
to know the truth would she not leave him to-morrow? 

She drew nearer to him and laid her hand on his arm : 

"Tell me," she said, with a curious mixture of demand and 
entreaty in her tone, " do you love Alice Cottrell ? " 

Then, taught by his own pain, he looked down into her true 
eyes and read their secret. 

For a moment he saw, or thought he saw, what that secret 
might mean for him wealth, honor, and this noble woman's 
love. He believed Alice already lost to him, and why might 
he not take all this at so small a price as one lie? 

Had he known the full value of wealth, had he ever lived 
where he could have seen what money would buy, perhaps he 
would have lied. Much of a man's courage is due to a man's 
ignorance ; but he had formed his life by high ideals, and had 



1 78 Miss MILLIONAIRE. [Nov., 

grown strong through poverty and struggle, so that it was for 
but a brief instant that he was tempted. When he spoke it 
was with an infinite sadness born of a sense of her sorrow and 
his own, but he told her the simple truth : 

" I have loved her all of her life," he said. 

" She ought to be a very happy woman," his companion 
answered as simply, and then they turned and walked home- 
ward in silence. 

The next day both the millionaire and Duncan Pembroke 
left Warrenton and the village relapsed into its normal state. 
As of old, Alice Cottrell sat on the steps of her home and 
Armistead Trenholm, walking by, went in and joined her 
though not quite as of old ; both were conscious of a certain 
constraint. 

" So Miss Ladham has gone ; are you inconsolable ? " asked 
Alice as he sat down beside her. 

" So Mr. Pembroke has gone ; are you inconsolable ? " he re- 
torted. 

" If I would have been," she said confidently, " Mr. Pem- 
broke would not have gone." 

" You mean that you sent him away ? " Trenholm asked, 
almost fiercely, and the tears rose into the girl's eyes she had 
struggled much with herself during these last few days. 

"Yes," she answered, with the petulance of a woman whose 
nerves are unstrung from having been overstrained. " I sent 
him, and I have no intention of listening to your telling me 
that I ought to have had better sense. I am worn out with 
hearing what a wonderfully good ' chance ' I am throwing away. 
You shall not begin it over again." 

"Why do you think I would begin it?" he asked, striving 
to calm the great joy which was pulsing through him. 

" Oh ! because they all tell me the same thing," she an- 
swered wearily. " I suppose it is good to be rich, but I have 
never found poverty so bad that I can marry a man solely to 
escape it. It seems to me there are so many things better than 
money." 

He took the cold hands that lay on her lap in both his. 

" Is love one of these better things, my Alice ? " he asked, while 
the love of his life illumined his face and made his tongue eloquent. 

As the two sat together in the firelight one evening in the 
late fall of that year Mrs. Gray came in, and they noted how 
her eyes were misty with tears. 



1 893.] Miss MILLIONAIRE. 179 

" Yes," she said, explaining, " I have just been listening to 
Mrs. Lane's account of an incident which occurred during the 
long visit she and Colonel Lane made to Agnes Ladham this 
summer. She said that they were all sitting by the sea-shore 
when Colonel Lane half-jestingly asked Miss Ladham if she had 
never been in love, and when she answered ' yes ' he wanted to 
know, in his blunt fashion, why she had not married, then 
never dreaming of the real reason, much less that she would 
tell him the truth. I fancy I can see her face now, as she said 
in her simple, direct way : ' Because, Colonel Lane, the man 
whom I loved did not love me.' Mrs. Lane told me she was 
completely dumbfounded at a woman's telling such a reason ; 
and as for Colonel Lane, she says he forgot his manners and 
swore then and there that such a man must have been a con- 
summate fool. For my part, I quite agree with him. Fancy any 
man with a soul in him throwing aside Agnes Ladham's love. 
The tears will come," she concluded, as she brushed the mist 
from her eyes. " That noble young life to be saddened in such 
a way!" 

"Armistead," said Alice, as her sister left the room, "she 
loved you." 

And as he made her no answer, but looked afar off, she 
came over and knelt down beside him. 

" And, O Armistead ! " she exclaimed, in a voice tremulous 
with love's divine humility, "you knew it and gave up all that 
for just me ! " 

" My dearest," he answered, as he covered the bowed head 
with kisses, " what would I not give up for just you ? " 

Thus the tide of wealth which seemed coming Warrenton- 
ward flowed back again, and if Alice Cottrell and Armistead 
Trenholm were so foolish as to believe that in its ebbing they 
had found a pearl of great price, who was there to convince 
them of their mistake? 

F. C. FARINHOLT. 

Asheville, N. C. 



i8o THE FOSSIL CONTINENT OF AUSTRALIA. [Nov., 




THE FOSSIL CONTINENT OF AUSTRALIA. 
i 

HE great island of Australia, which extends from 
39 to 11 south latitude, and which is separat- 
ed from the Indian-Malay region by a narrow 
but deep belt of water, is held by good authori- 
ties to equal, from a zoological point of view, 
all the rest of the earth. Its separation from the mainland of 
Asia probably dates from far back in the secondary period, and, 
according to Wallace, for some time before as well as during a 
part of the tertiary period it formed two islands, the island to 
the eastward being united to what is now New Guinea and 
also to Tasmania, and it was only at a comparatively recent 
epoch that its divided parts became one. No country has 
changed so little during later geological time : Australia would 
seem to have stood still and been forgotten, while the rest of 
the globe has developed and assumed a new fauna and flora. 
Its mammals especially excepting the bats and small rodents, 
such as rats and mice are markedly isolated ; they represent 
types which at one time were broadly distributed over the 
earth, but which have now become extinct everywhere except 
here and in a few of the outlying islands, with the single ex- 
ception of the opossum in distant America. And let us observe 
that this wide disconuity is a sign of great antiquity. To quote 
Wallace in Island Life :. " The more widely the fragments are 
scattered, the more ancient we may usually presume the parent 
group to be." 

Imagine a country nearly as large as Europe without any 
of the forms from which domestic animals have descended, un- 
less we except the Dingo the native dog * which, however, is 
believed to have been introduced by man. We may liken Aus- 
tralia to a gigantic plate. Almost perfectly flat in the centre, 
it gradually rises as you approach the coast ; its vast plains are 
covered in many parts with dense scrub ; the rivers are insigni- 
ficant compared with those of other countries ; and with its salt 
lakes, its sand-storms, and a climate in the interior so arid that 
a drought has been known to last for twenty-six months, we 
do not wonder that this isolated, lost land perhaps millions of 

* The dingo is not a marsupial. 




1893-] THE FOSSIL CONTINENT OF AUSTRALIA. 181 

years separated from its parent continent possesses a life-sys- 
tem so very primitive and peculiar that naturalists have agreed 
to make Australia a separate region. We meet here with two 
new orders Marsupials and Monotremes which are found no- 
where else excepting, as we have said, the opossum in Ameri- 
ca. And these animals are the lowest in organization of all 
mammals, as well as the earliest to appear in geological time. 
By a marsupial we mean a mammal which is destitute of a 
placenta to nourish the foetus, and which is provided with a 
pouch (marsupium) in' which it places its immature, embryonic 
young : and let us observe that the marsupial bones supporting 
the pouch are developed in male and female alike. In the 
pouch of the large kangaroo are several long, string-like pieces 
of flesh, and after the mother in an almost mysterious manner 
has transferred the blind and naked little creature (no bigger 
than a human baby's little finger) into the pouch and stuck it 
on one of these milk-strings, she presses the milk into its mouth 
by the help of a peculiar muscle, and the larynx of the young 
one is so constructed that it is able to breathe while it takes 
nourishment, and so it cannot choke. Marsupials vary greatly 
in habits and looks, and range in size from a mouse to a deer, 
me go on all fours, others move on their hind legs alone - r 
me eat grass and leaves, others live on meat, insects, and 
ney. Their brain development is extremely small, and they 
nifest little if any affection for their offspring : they are never 
seen to play with them, and appear to care for nothing but 
their own stomachs. The most intelligent of Australian marsu- 
pials is the opossum ; and here let us say that the American 
opossum is the most highly organized of the marsupial order, 
he Australian flying-squirrel is closely related to the opossum ; 
d the smallest of this family, which is not bigger than a mouse, 
able to skim through the air and alight with accuracy at a 
point eighty paces distant. The so-called Australian bear 
(Phascolarctiis cinereus] is quite a harmless marsupial, which 
feeds on grass, and is in no way related to the bear family. 
When the young one is old enough to quit the pouch, it perches 
itself on its mother's back and goes with her wherever she 
goes. But the marsupial tiger is a carnivorous beast, fierce 
and very destructive to sheep and young cattle. 

Lower even in organization than the marsupials are the mono- 
tremes. These creatures, which consist of two genera the 
Echidna, or native hedgehog, and the Ornithorhynchus, or duck- 
mole have the marsupial bones but not the pouch, nor have 




1 82 THE FOSSIL CONTINENT OF AUSTRALIA. [Nov., 

they any teeth. The ornithorhynchus (which has rudimentary 
teeth not piercing the gum) is possessed of jaws very like the 
bill of a duck ; its body is fifteen inches long, and the feet are 
webbed. The echidna also swims very well, but its feet are 
not webbed. These two mammals exceed in strangeness any 
other mammals in existence, and show a marked affinity to birds 
and reptiles. Their skulls as in the case of birds are devoid 
of sutures, while the front extremities are joined to the breast- 
bone by a coracoid and an epicoracoid, the same as in reptiles. 
But the strangest fact connected with the monotremes is that 
they do not bring forth their young alive, but lay eggs ; and 
after the little one emerges from the shell it is suckled by the 
mother. Their eggs, moreover, in their stages of development 
are very like the eggs of reptiles, and outwardly resemble those 
of a turtle. 

A singular lizard is the Australian frilled lizard, so-called 
from a mass of loose skin dangling from its neck, and which 
it can elevate into a ruff. This little creature, when it is not 
disturbed, sits upright like a kangaroo, and when it runs it 
makes long, high jumps, sometimes five feet high. 

The jungle-hen of Australia (Megapodius tumulus) and the 
brush-turkey (Talegalld) are curious birds. They construct with 
their powerful feet a mound of earth and fallen leaves in which 
they bury their eggs, where, reptile-like, they are hatched by 
the artificial heat generated by the fermenting of the vegetable 
and other refuse matter. But it has only lately been discovered 
how the young birds get out of the mound : they lie on their 
backs and work their way up to the surface with their feet. 
Wallace in Geographical Distribution of Animals, speaking of 
this singular mode of hatching eggs, says : " This may, perhaps, 
be an adaptation to the peculiar condition of so large a portion 
of Australia, in respect to prolonged droughts and scanty water 
supply, entailing a periodical scarcity of all kinds of food. In 
such a country the confinement of the parents to one spot dur- 
ing the long period of incubation would often lead to starva- 
tion and the consequent death of the offspring." 

The bower-bird of Australia must also be mentioned. It is 
the size of a thrush, and is noted for the opening or bower 
which it makes in the brushwood, but which is never used as a 
nest. It clears the dead leaves and twigs off the ground for a 
space of two or three square feet, and in this clearing it de- 
posits heaps of snail-shells and red berries, or it will sometimes 
arrange a number of fresh leaves side by side, and at these 



THE FOSSIL CONTINENT OF AUSTRALIA. 183 

little heaps of bright-colored objects and rows of green leaves 
it gazes and sings for ever-so-long ; then when the leaves begin 
to wither and the shells lose their brightness, the bird stops 
singing and sets to work gathering new ones. It really seems 
to enjoy looking at its playthings, and to have an eye for what 
is beautiful. And why not ? The same God that made man 
made this little bird. 

A singular fish, too, is found in South Australia : the Cerato- 
dus is a survival from a past geological epoch, for its fossil 
teeth have been discovered in the Jurassic and triassic forma- 
tions in Europe, Asia, and America. It belongs to the primi- 
tive lung-fish (Dipnoi], which had lungs as well as gills. The 
ceratodus, however, has only one lung. At night it leaves the 
water and feeds on grass near the river-bank, for its fins are so 
constructed that it is able to wabble about like a tortoise. In 
this animal we have a connecting link between fishes and rep- 
tiles. But the ceratodus is not the only fish supposed to be 
extinct which has come to light in recent years in Australia. 
A fresh-water herring, provided with a double armor (which is 
peculiar to most of the herrings whose fossil remains have been 
found in Brazil, Wyoming, and Asia Minor), has quite lately 
been discovered in several of the rivers of New South Wales. 
It was a characteristic fish of the cretaceous and early tertiary 
periods, and like the ceratodus it had in those far-off times a 
wide range, but, like it, it has been driven to seek refuge in 
)laces remote from its primeval home the ocean. 

Australia has trees which in some respects are as odd as its 
limals. We only mention two. The so-called cherry-tree has 
the pit outside the berry instead of inside, whence its botanical 
nam e Exocarpus. 

Other trees, among them the eucalyptus, have their leaves 
vertical instead of horizontal, and consequently they do not af- 
ford much shade. The eucalyptus is the most prominent tree 
in Australian scenery; it varies greatly in size, some of the 150 
species being mere bushes, while others average 300 feet in 
height, and the tallest eucalyptus of all rises 471 feet from the 
ground and surpasses the biggest tree of California. 

It is interesting to know that, while the characteristic genera 
of the Australian flora are different from those of South Africa, 
it is in this last-named part of the world that we find its near- 
est botanical affinities. 

In the caverns of Australia the fossil remains of many ex- 
tinct mammals have come to light belonging to the tertiary 



1 84 THE FOSSIL CONTINENT OF AUSTRALIA. [Nov., 

period. They are all marsupials, and allied to the ones now in 
existence ; but none are of an earlier age than the tertiary. 

One of these extinct animals, the Diprotodon, related to the 
kangaroo, was almost as big as an elephant. And let us add, 
for it is a proof of ancient geographical changes, that among 
these fossil remains are two genera of kangaroos which are not 
like any of the living Australian ones, but belong either to the 
arboreal species at present inhabiting New Guinea, or to species 
which to-day are found only in Tasmania. Now, New Guinea 
and Tasmania were at one time united to Eastern Australia. 

It may be asked how so many big marsupials so much big- 
ger than any now living came to disappear. It is not believed 
to have been the direct effects of the ice age, for in a country 
like Australia no very extensive glaciers can have been formed. 
Wallace, in his Geographical Distribution of Animals, says, speak- 
ing of the Australian fauna : " The lowering of the ocean dur- 
ing the glacial period would be favorable to the still further de- 
velopment of the fauna of such a country ; and it is to the un- 
favorable conditions produced by its subsequent rising equiva- 
lent to a depression of the land to the amount of two thousand 
feet that we must impute the extinction of so many remarkable 
groups of animals. . . . Extensive tracts of fertile land might 
have been submerged, and the consequent crowding of large 
numbers of species and individuals on limited areas would have 
led to a struggle for existence in which the less adapted and 
less easily modifiable, not the physically weaker, would suc- 
cumb." 

The better opinion is that Australia has not been joined to 
any continent since before the beginning of the tertiary age, for 
true placental mammals do not appear anywhere until the ter- 
tiary ; and owing to the peculiar conditions which have pre- 
vailed on this island, its generally hot and dry climate, its ex- 
treme isolation, the Australian fauna was not affected by the 
struggle which on the great continental masses brought about 
the evolution of mammals more highly organized than marsu- 
pials. 

The presence of a group of marsupials in North and 
South America might at first lead one to believe in a former 
direct land connection between Australia and some part of the 
new world. But it is generally held that this family Didelphy- 
idae is the remnant of a primeval, generalized type of marsu- 
pials which abounded in Europe during the secondary era, and 
which gradually made its way over the whole northern hemi- 



i 893.] THE FOSSIL CONTINENT OF AUSTRALIA. 185 

sphere; but which did not get to America, however, before the 
pliocene epoch, or even later, coming by the land-bridge across 
Behring Straits. 

The natives of Australia belong, as we might expect, to a 
most primitive race, several families dwelling together and form- 
ing a small, wandering tribe without any social organization. 
They have no bows and arrows, but make use of spears. They 
do not cultivate the soil, and the food they like best is human 
flesh. They have a wide-spread belief in demons, but it is 
doubtful if they believe in a soul independent of the body. 
Wizards are common among them, and the dread of witchcraft, 
to which they ascribe pestilence and sickness, has a baneful in- 
fluence on their character. But in this respect civilized races 
are only a century or two in advance of them. Comparative 
anthropology gives no satisfactory answer in regard to their ori- 
gin ; they are a puzzle, too, to the philologist, and they would 
really seem to form a group apart and distinct from any other 
race, even the Papuans of New Guinea, their nearest neighbors. 
Let us observe, however, that Mr. Curr, in his recent and val- 
uable work The Australian Race points out the curious fact 
that not a few Australian words are almost the very same words 

Bare spoken by the negroes of Africa. 
The aborigines of this fossil land the habitat of marsupials 
d monotremes, animals which have long been extinct elsewhere 
bring before us the interesting question of the antiquity of 
man. 

WILLIAM SETON. 




VOL. LVIII. 13 




BROTHER MAURELIAN. 




CATHOLIC EDUCATION AT THE WORLD'S FAIR. 

i 

S the tree is to be judged by its fruit, in the words of 
the Divine Master, so the generous vine of Catholic 
education may be appraised, in a measure, by the 
living proofs it modestly puts before mankind in 
the noble Hall of Liberal Arts at the Columbian 
Multitudinous and wonder-compelling as the va- 
rious departments of the Columbian Exposition are from many 
points of view, the array of examples of Catholic training here 
presented claims the palm over all. As an exposition of a sys- 
tem, it is the most striking in extent, in variety, in evidence of 
a masterly system of mental direction, that ever yet was brought 
before the world's notice. It dwarfs into insignificance the dis- 
plays of educational results made by any and every institution 



Exposition. 



1893-] CATHOLIC EDUCATION AT THE WORLD'S FAIR. 187 

in the country universities, colleges, and training-schools, taken 
altogether. The mobilization of such an army of practical wit- 
nesses for superiority was in itself a peculiar task. It demanded 
a special and intimate knowledge of a system which may be de- 
scribed as world-wide ; it demanded a personality influential 
enough and magnetic enough to secure the heartiest co-operation 
simultaneously in places separated by vast distances; it demand- 
ed one, moreover, endued with an indefatigable spirit of indus- 
try. The man was found in the person of Brother Maurelian. 
He is the Von Moltke with whom the scheme of mobilization 
originated, and by whom it was so splendidly carried out. 

Brother Maurelian might be excused if he feel a little pride 
in the result of his effort ; yet it would be unjust to the man 
to say that any such human weakness animates him. He does 
not work for applause ; he works for success in a great task ; 
he works for something higher than terrestrial fame. He be- 
longs to an order whose motto is unselfishness, and who have 
devoted themselves to the task of educating the masses with the 
zeal of crusaders. Though their work is in many countries, and 
though they have to deal with many temperaments, they so as- 
similate themselves with the crude materials of all that is best 
each, that they make them as clay in the hands of the potter. 
Ireland they rejected, up to the present year, all state aid, 
r the grand reason that one of the conditions of its acceptance 
was that they banish the emblems of religion from their schools ; 
yet they entered the lists with the most pampered and opulent 
academies in the kingdom and carried off the lion's share of 
the spoils at the Intermediate and Royal University Examina- 
tions. Of this magnificent order Brother Maurelian is a shining 
type. And he is not a man of th^^bookish theoric " merely ; 
the practical work of getting this great body of school-produc- 
tion together gives a striking instance of his powers of mind 
and body. 

Brother Maurelian is but one of many in his order. To him 
is due the successful organization of this triumph and exhibit; 
but one has only to look around that special portion of it which 
represents the work of the Christian Brothers' schools in this 
country, in Canada, in France, in England, and in Spain, to 
recognize at once the fact that master-minds are at the head of 
this great teaching institution. The men standing at the head 
of this order have been selected for their special aptitude for 
the work. They must not only be teachers by precept, but men 
able to demonstrate by practical example the truth of the prin- 



sir 

\ 



1 88 CATHOLIC EDUCATION AT THE WORLD'S FAIR. [Nov., 

ciples of accuracy, judgment, and fitness which they inculcate in 
science and in art. They are born leaders of the mind, possess- 
ing in a large degree that influence over others which, for want 
of a better term, is styled magnetism, and that gift of lumi- 
nousness in explanation without which no teacher, no matter 
how clear to himself his perceptions, can fulfil his office effec- 
tually. The case of the lamented Brother Azarias may be 
pointed to as another forcible illustration of this felicity in se- 
lection which is a characteristic of this remarkable order. 

Recognizing the importance of being early in the field, Brother 




AN AISLE ON THE EAST SIDE. 

Maurelian made his application for space at the Exposition as 
soon as the directorate and committees were organized. Al- 
though he encountered much difficulty at the outset, he was met 
at length in a spirit which cannot be too highly extolled. Thirty 
thousand feet of floor-space, roughly speaking, was placed at 
his disposal, and the position which he was fortunate enough to 
secure is probably the finest in the great hall devoted to Manu- 
factures and the Liberal Arts. This space, large as it is, would 
not suffice for a tithe of the exhibition which could have been 
made, had there been more time for preparation and a condition 
of unlimited space ; and as a matter of fact it has not nearly 



. 



; 



1893.] CATHOLIC EDUCATION AT THE WORLD' s FAIR. 189 

sufficed for the great mass of materials forwarded to Brother 
Maurelian from the various dioceses which responded to his in- 
vitation. He had asked for a space of sixty thousand feet, an- 
ticipating the large amount of material which would be at his 
command, but he could hardly have expected the directors to 
give more than they did, under the circumstances. But the dis- 
play he makes is so imposing, so extensive, so splendid, so mar- 
vellously eloquent of care, of taste, of industry, of energy, of 
the whole soul of Catholic teaching, as to make all those iden- 
tified with other educational exhibits almost literally green with 
envy. Here is what a secular journal, the Chicago Staats- 
Zeitung, says of the display as contrasted with those of the pub- 
lic schools : 

"Petted by the state, raised up as an idol by catering poli- 
ticians, regarded as something sacred and a noli me tangere, fur- 
nished with all that money can procure beautiful buildings, airy 
class-rooms, apparatus, methods, teachers enjoying a fine salary 
these American schools, the pride of the country, should they 
not have taken advantage of the presence of the assembled 
teachers and pedagogues of the world, and of an opportunity 
seized by every country of the globe to exhibit their work, to 
prove to their admirers their excellence which they boast of in 
theory, but do not show in practice ? 

" They do not, we say, and we ask, Could they have done it ? 

" What would those chatter-boxes, those text-book teachers, 
ose lesson-hearers, with the curly locks, chewing 'tutti-frutti,' 
decorated with a stylish hat, with no deeper thought than that 
of the next ice-cream party ; those defective patterns of humani- 
ty who are running our public schools what could they exhibit ? 
Just that which was to be expected : models of buildings, or their 
photographs, methods and means bought by the state at a heavy 
expense, but not the results of the schools, not the proofs of 
education. These are missing in the exhibit of the public schools. 
The Kindergarten and the training schools only are praiseworthy 
xceptions. 

" The weakness of the public schools shows all the more for- 
ibly the strength of the Catholic educational institutions at the 
Exposition. Instead of beautiful building models and costly 
methods, they have exhibited the practical results of their schools. 
And these are great results. 

" All honor to the men and women who, without state aid, 
or the encouragement afforded by public opinion, have built 
those schools ; all honor, we say, to the teachers who, not en- 




A GLANCE AT THE ARTISTIC FEATURES. 



1893-] CATHOLIC EDUCATION AT THE WORLD'S FAIR. 191 

ticed by a salary, are educators from principle and not from 
greed." 

Bearing in mind the fact that in the collection which has 
called forth this tribute of admiration but the work of only a 
portion of the Catholic schools of twenty dioceses in the United 
States was shown, one might easily imagine what would have 
been the writer's wonder had all the archdioceses, dioceses, and 
vicariates in the Union, numbering about ninety, been represented 
in similar proportions. Perhaps it is better that the display is 
confined to its present dimensions. It conveys a deeply im- 
pressive lesson, whose effect might be minimized by being fur- 
ther protracted. It is the frailty of our nature to grow weary 
with the repetition even of excellent things when we have had 
enough to convince us of their undeniable worth. It is sufficient 
to say that as it stands the Catholic Educational Exhibit is in- 
comparably the greatest display of its kind ever made. 

The importance of putting such proofs of Catholic activity 
before the world, at this particular epoch, was at once perceived 
by all the hierarchy of the United States. Bishop Spalding, of 
Peoria, took an especial interest in the project from its incep- 
tion. The unfortunate divergences of opinion amongst Catho- 
over questions of school attendance and state help, perhaps, 
.turally led many outsiders to think that while internal dis- 
agreement reigned the real work of education might be to some 
extent neglected. To such mistaken people there could be no 
greater surprise than this revelation of Catholic activity. There 
have been no controversies to disturb the serenity of the public 
schools' managers. With them everything has gone on as smooth- 
ly as the current of the Schuylkill and apparently as somno- 
lently. They have come out into the daylight only to appear 
ridiculous by comparison. 

To the kindly co-operation of Dr. S. H. Peabody, chief of the 
Liberal Arts Department of the Exposition, the promoters of 
the Catholic Educational Exhibit owe mainly their success in 
having their display so extensive and effective as it is. To his 
aid they are indebted for the prominent site and ample space 
they have secured ; and he, on his part, feels how largely this 
display has contributed toward making the World's Fair an ade- 
quate exemplar of the active mental and mechanical progress 
of the age. In his little speech at the throwing open of the ex- 
hibit he warmly expressed his thanks, on behalf of the World's 
Fair authorities, to all who had co-operated in the work. His 
surprise at the colossal results achieved in such a brief inter- 



11 



192 CATHOLIC EDUCATION AT THE WORLD'S FAIR. [Nov., 

val was by no means concealed ; and the eulogy which he pro- 
nounced on the zeal of the whole Catholic teaching body in 
preparing the youth of the Catholic populations for the practi- 
cal work of existence was the genuine expression of a broad 
and liberal mind. In this marvellous array of proofs he beheld 
a signal refutation of the widespread calumny that the tenden- 
cy of Catholic education is to dwarf the scope and limit the 
faculties of the human mind. But he saw only one side of 
the picture. This was but the practical side of the Catholic 
system which he was beholding. Behind that mass of work of 
hand and brain lies the invisible, sleepless activity which, while 
training the physical faculties, keeps ever leading on the moral 
ones to a clearer conception of the truth that there is a 
higher goal to be reached by the intelligence than the conquest 
of earthly knowledge, and that the sum of human perfection 
must have its final complement in the display which shall merit 
the everlasting award of the Judge who sits on high. This is 
what is meant by the two-fold work of Catholic education. 

American Catholics are taught to love and reverence the 
American Constitution, that Maxima Charta which guaran- 
tees their religious as well as civil freedom. They have good 
reason to love it and take pride in it, for were its letter and 
its spirit acted on they would be under no such disadvantage as 
they are with regard to the education of their children. As 
President Bonney very pertinently recalled to mind, in his gen- 
erous address of welcome to the Catholic Congress, the third 
article of the ordinance of 1787 for the government of the terri- 
tory of which Chicago is the metropolis commanded that " re- 
ligion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good govern- 
ment and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of 
education shall for ever be encouraged." Thus it will be 
seen that the framers of this ordinance distinctly contem- 
plated the teaching of religion and morality, without regard 
to creed, in the public schools of the United States. Their 
idea was, then, strictly in accord with the Catholic idea. Any 
training system that did not include the teaching of religion 
and morality was not, in their view, education. But we may, 
for the present, leave this reflection, and proceed to a review 
of what is being done by Catholics without any state help. 

In the arrangement of the mass of material placed at his 
command Brother Maurelian has exhibited a masterly ingenui- 
ty. By a simple device he has managed to double the ground- 
space, so to speak. By running a desk around each of the 



1 893.] CATHOLIC EDUCATION AT THE WORLD' s FAIR. 193 

compartments into which the exhibit is divided, he has been 
enabled to supplement his wall surface so that none of his 
space shall be wasted. Sufficient room is given for the visitor 
to walk all through the compartments and examine the work 
spread out upon the desks and hanging on the walls. The finer 
and more frangible objects are displayed in high glass cases 
standing in the centre of each compartment. 

What is here made manifest may be divided into two bran- 
ches : the methods of teaching and their practical application 
by the taught. Take, for instance, a specimen of work from 
the De La Salle Institute in New York. It is the engineer's 
plan for a great iron bridge. Here you see the notes taken by 
the pupil from the teacher's instructions. Then you see the 
plan and the elevation drawn in regular artistic fashion. The 
dimensions are given ; then the details down to the last bolt ; 
then the estimate of the cost of the whole work. There is no 
particular missing ; the plan might be at once put into a con- 
tractor's hands and he would have no difficulty in setting to 
work to make the supposititious structure a substantial reality. 
So in astronomy, so in music, so in mechanics of many kinds. 
The system is lucidly demonstrated in the intelligent action of 
lind upon mind. 

Twenty dioceses of the United States invite examination of 
teir educational methods. The Canadians have an independent 
exposition of their own, of which a word later on. The Ameri- 
can dioceses stand in the following alphabetical order: 

Brooklyn, Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Covington, Denver, 
Detroit, Dubuque, Fort Wayne, Green Bay, La Crosse, Manches- 
ter, Milwaukee, Natchez, New Orleans, New York, Pittsburgh, 
'hiladelphia, San Francisco, Sioux Falls. 

The religious teaching orders in charge of the schools whose 
work is shown are the following : 

Benedictine Sisters, Dominican Sisters, Franciscan Sisters ; 
Franciscan Sisters of P. A. ; Ladies of Sacred Heart of Mary, 
Madames of the Sacred Heart, School Sisters of Notre Darne, 
Polish Felician Sisters, Sisters of Chanty (B. V. M.); Sisters of 
Charity, Emmittsburg ; Sisters of Charity, Mount St. Vincent; 
Sisters of Charity, Nazareth ; Sisters of Christian Charity, Sis- 
ters of Divine Providence, Sisters of Loretto ; Sisters of Notre 
Dame, Cincinnati ; Sisters of Notre Dame, De Namur ; Sisters 
of Mercy ; Sisters of Providence, Vigo Co.; Sisters of St. Agnes, 
Sisters of St. Joseph ; Sisters of St. Francis, Oldenburg ; Sisters 
of the Holy Cross, Sisters of the Good Shepherd, Sisters of the 



194 CATHOLIC EDUCATION AT THE WORLD'S FAIR. [Nov., 

Holy Child Jesus, Sisters of the Holy Family, Sisters of Hu- 
mility of Mary, Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Sis- 
ters of the Incarnate Word, Sisters of the Holy Names, Sisters 
of the Poor Handmaids of Christ, Sisters of the Precious 
Blood, Sisters of the Presentation, Ursuline Sisters, Visitation 




BISHOP SPALDING. 



Sisters, Grey Nuns; Congregation of Notre Dame, Montreal; 
Sisters of Charity, Greensburg; Sisters of Charity, Leavenworth ; 
Sisters of Charity, Mount St. Joseph ; Sisters of Charity, Cin- 
cinnati ; Benedictine Fathers, Congregation of the Holy Cross, 
Congregation of St. Viateur, Fathers of the Holy Ghost, Jesuit 



1893-] CATHOLIC EDUCATION AT THE WORLD'S FAIR. 195 

Fathers, Lazarist Fathers, Secular Clergy, Brothers of the Chris- 
tian Schools. 

Individual exhibits are shown also by the Catholic University 
of America, Washington, D. C.; the Catholic Archives of Amer- 
ica from Notre Dame University, Indiana ; the Catholic Total 
Abstinence Union of America represented by its Temperance 
Publication Bureau; the Catholic text-books; the Columbian 
Library of Catholic Authors ; the League of the Sacred Heart ; 
Miss M. G. Caldwell (first foundress of the Catholic University), 
embroidery; Miss M. L. Ash's art school, Memphis, Tenn.; the 
Papal Josephinum College of Columbus, Ohio, and the Uni- 
versity of Notre Dame, Ind. 

A glance at the artistic features of the general exhibit re- 
veals some work which challenges attention, not from its mere 
abundance, which is great, but from its general excellence. 
Some of it is simply splendid. The place of honor is properly 
given to the Chicago exhibit, and the chef d'ceuvre in this is 
outside strict definition, perhaps, of a school-show piece. It is 
a white Carrara marble statue of Archbishop Feehan, with the 
figures of a couple of school-children at his feet. The work is 
full of grace, dignity, and life, and tells its own story as elo- 
quently as any marble composition can ; and all the cunning of 
the modern Italian school of sculpture is exemplified in its 
treatment. It is the work of a Roman artist, and its cost was 
fifteen thousand dollars. The priests of Archbishop Feehan's 
diocese subscribed the sum as an affectionate recognition of his 
claim to be regarded as the " protector of their schools " a dis- 
tinction which he undoubtedly deserves. Oregon's fine portraits 
of a large number of the American Catholic hierarchy, which 
are found in the collection sent by Notre Dame University ; as 
well as the portraits of Archbishop Riordan and Bishop Spald- 
ing, which are apart, may also be excluded from the list of 
educational exhibits, in a similar sense. But besides these there 
is a great body of artistic work, in oil, in water-color, in crayon, 
in Indian ink, and in pencil, which furnishes a means of judg- 
ing what advance we are making in this important branch of 
education. 

There is no one so weak as to believe that America has 
achieved the first rank in art, but every honest critic believes 
that earnest effort is being made to attain to excellence. Art- 
ists do not spring out of the ground like the fabled men and 
women of Deucalion and Pyrrha's time. Genius is not to be 
compelled ; in due time, no doubt, it will visit the American 



196 CATHOLIC EDUCATION AT THE WORLD'S FAIR. [Nov., 

shore, and found a true school of art here. It is not claimed 
for any of the schools 
whose art-teaching is 
here exhibited that they 
have reached the high- 
est level attainable. 
There is great inequal- 
ity observable in the 




mass ; there are 
bad drawing and 
inharmonious and 
slovenly coloring in 
some ; but there is 
on the other hand, 
much that is really 



1893-] CATHOLIC EDUCATION AT THE WORLD' s FAIR. 197 

true and good, and there is some that of its kind is positively 
beautiful. This is true especially of the specimens of illuminated 
work executed by the pupils at the Sacred Heart Convent in San 
Francisco. The collection of work shown by the Sisters of Mercy 
of that city is also remarkable for its excellence. Some admir- 
able work in crayons and water-colors is presented by the pupils 
of Miss Starr's preparatory fine-art classes. The steel engravings 
from the Catholic High School of Philadelphia, founded by 
Thomas Cahill, are especially fine, and a corresponding level of 
excellence is noticeable in the examples of drawing and paint- 
ing and embroidery turned out by the same institution. 

Numerous examples of oil-painting are shown in different 
sections of the exhibit ; and of these a very crotchety critic 
observed in one of the daily papers that the only good end 
they serve is to show the worthlessness of the teaching. Criti- 
cism of this kind is not worth answering. These pictures are 
not put there as pictures in an art gallery are. They are 
there neither for competition nor sale. They are put there 
simply to show what progress the young art-students are making 
in the very difficult technique of color, which many eminent art- 
ists vainly spent their lives in trying to master, and which no 
degree of excellence in line-drawing could ever help some to 
gain. 

It would be just as reasonable to take exception to the oc- 
casional blunders in spelling, or the faulty compositions which 
are found occurring here and there in the class papers of the 
pupils. Surely no one would expect perfection from those who 
are in the state of tutelage. The whole school system, so far as 
it applies to the training of the mental and physical faculties, is 
laid bare to the world's inspection, with all the imperfections 
of juvenile human nature on its head ; and there never was a 
creature more out of his element than the professional art-critic, 
the individual, as a rule, who has failed in everything himself, 
in such an exhibition. 

Even Mr. Sneerwell would find it hard to get ground for 
cavil in the beautiful specimens of work shown by the pupils of 
the Christian Brothers' schools in Paris. It is full of art work- 
manship in many branches, all of marvellously fine execution 
for boys, and the specimens of drawing and engraving are of a 
remarkably high order for juveniles. The French claim to be 
at the head of the list in all things educational, and no one can 
say that the challenge which they give out at the World's 
Fair will be readily taken up. 




SOMEJDF THE NEW YORK EXHIBITS. 



p 



1893-] CATHOLIC EDUCATION AT THE WORLD" s FAIR. 199 

In the Canadian exhibit some noteworthy features are pre- 
sented. The display made by the Catholic schools of Quebec 
covers 1,700 square feet of floor, while the showing of the Pro- 
testant schools from the same province fits in a nook measuring 
175 square feet. The Protestant province of Ontario, on the 
other hand, sends from a total of 5,878 schools an aggregate of 
375 exhibits ; while the Catholics of the same province send 
from a total of only 289 schools no fewer than 234 exhibits. 
The quality of the artistic work sent forward by the Catholic 
schools is vastly superior to that of the other schools of the 
Dominion which have sent specimens of their products. There 
are some aspects of the Dominion display which make it com- 
pare favorably even with that of any of the other countries 
represented. The show of herbaria, for instance, in which 
specimens of the multitudinous wild flowers of Canada are col- 
lected and arranged with exquisite harmony of arrangement, is 
especially impressive. The fine sense of fitness in association, 
and taste in grouping and artistic form, seen in these numerous 
collections, is at once felt and confessed. In the work of the 
brush, the crayon, and the pencil, too, Young Canada need not 
have any trepidation about competing for honors. Some trace 
of the French genius is visible throughout the display from the 
rovince of Quebec. 

It is not a matter for deep wonder that this display exhibits 
a superiority. Besides the inherited genius of Gaul, the people of 
that province enjoy the advantage of an enlightened plan in the 
educational laws of the state. The minority in any locality is 
entitled to a just proportion of the public taxes levied for edu- 
cational purposes, to be applied in accordance with the views of 
the minority. This in effect leads in that province to the de- 
nominational rule in education. As the Catholics are greatly in 
the majority in Quebec, they receive the maximum of the 
public taxes, and are thus enabled to secure the very best teach- 
ing appliances that money can obtain. The teaching power 
they already possess in plenty within their own religious and 
semi-religious bodies. 

In the various kinds of handicraft shown here the work of 
American boys in the more practical and every-day classes of 
production need not fear comparison with that of any others. 
Especially fine examples are sent in from the Catholic Protec- 
tory of New York, for boys and girls, and the great Trade 
School on Staten Island described in a preceding article. 

Teaching those who are in possession of every natural facul- 




EXHIBIT OF THE NOTRE DAME UNIVERSITY. 



1893.] CATHOLIC EDUCATION AT THE WORLD'S FAIR. 201 

ty is in many cases no easy matter ; but the instruction of that 
unhappy section of the human family who come into the world 
sans sight or hearing or power of speech, or become so after 
their coming, must be regarded as the perfection of the teach- 
ers' skill. It was with Catholic teachers the idea of educat- 
ing these maimed intellects began, and by them in France and 
Italy and Ireland that it is carried on mostly at present, with 
results that on consideration seem perfectly astounding. The 
cultivation of literature, music, and the fine arts, as well as many 
mechanical industries, by the blind and the deaf and the dumb 
demands specially qualified teachers; and to the furnishing of 
these the religious orders now devote constant and the most 
earnest attention. The specimens of work sent in by the Cath- 
olic Protectory pupils of this class deserve more than a passing 
notice. There are some very beautiful specimens of lace shown 
in the Canadian exhibit, the finest being the work of a girl of 
thirteen who is totally blind. The instructresses of these Cana- 
dian blind girls are the good sisters known as the Grey Nuns. 
Marvellously fine work is also shown by the Ephpheta School 
of Chicago, in an astonishingly varied field. Engraving, litho- 
graphing, photography, designing for carpets and wall paper, 
Kd many other decorative branches of industry are taught, it 
11 be seen, most successfully in this admirable institution. 
To many the attractions of the kindergarten display made 
re will prove superior to any other, as that system has now 
come to be regarded as the summum bonum in the educational field. 
Here is a bright and picturesque array of proofs how readily 
the little mind can be developed into the big one as its powers 
are one by one awakened and appealed to in the course of 
its school-play years. The little pictorial efforts, and the efforts 
in tiny handicraft, show that the shepherd boy who began draw- 
ing his sheep upon a slate, and the builder of miniature fortresses 
in the mud or the sand by the sea-shore, were most likely in 
reality the originators of the idea which Froebel and his suc- 
cessors took up and translated into action. 

It is only the preparatory stage in literature and art, it must 
be remembered, which this exhibit contemplated as the scope 
of its ostent as an educational display. The fact that there 
are contained in it illustrations of the higher education in both 
of these walks of civilization serves only to show, perhaps, the 
nakedness of our land in that respect. The higher education, as 
an institution, for American Catholics, is a thing of the possibili- 
ties ; how immensely they are handicapped in that direction may 
VOL. LVIII. 14 



2O2 CATHOLIC EDUCATION AT THE WORLD'S FAIR. [Nov., 

be learned from a comparison of the other educational exhibits 
with theirs. All that the public and private generosity of a 
great people could do has been done for the men and women 
of other creeds here ; all that has been done for the Catholics 
has been done out of their own resources. The Columbian Li- 
brary of Catholic authors is a collection of no small interest 
and value as testifying that in the higher education Catholic 
names are not by any means unknown, even here ; and the 
women's department in this collection is not the least interest- 
ing portion of it. The fine exhibition from the Catholic Uni- 
versity of Notre Dame, Indiana, gives an excellent idea of the 
present state of scholastic life in that institution and the high 
plane of its studies and scientific pursuits. The American Cath- 
olic Historical Society deserves a word of praise for the flood 
of light it lets in on the past of the struggling church on this 
continent by its rich archaeological collection of ecclesiastical, 
artistic, and literary work. 

To the collection of these objects made by Professor Ed- 
wards, of Notre Dame, Indiana, the palm of merit in this 
department must be given. He has got together a perfect store- 
house of precious ecclesiastical relics. 

They tell a wonderful tale in their way, these mitres and 
croziers and vestments, tarnished with age ; these missals and 
breviaries and calf-bound volumes whose pages are yellow-gray as 
the face of a mummy. Placed side by side with the glittering 
ornaments and the snowy pages in the neighboring collection of 
modern things, they seem to proclaim with startling force and 
suddenness this pregnant fact : " We, the old and the new, 
are true symbols of that to which we belong. She is the one 
who from her beginning was endued with the gift of perennial 
youth. She is young to-day as she was at the outset two 
thousand years ago. This is a paradox, but it is true." 

Now, look upon this picture, and on this. Behold the two 
exhibits side by side that made by the Catholic schools on the 
one hand, that of the public schools on the other. Take them 
grade for grade and compare the work ; can the high-salaried 
teachers of the public schools show more satisfactory proofs for 
the state-aided system than the teachers who eke out their neces- 
sarily scanty pittance with a never-failing fund of charity and 
holy devotion to duty? Does the teaching of religion and mo- 
rality in the Catholic schools impair the efficiency of scholars or 
teachers? Most emphatically, no; the very contrary seems to 
be the case. The two exhibits themselves, looking at them from 



1893-] CATHOLIC EDUCATION AT THE WORLD'S FAIR. 203 

this point of view, are a signal proof to the contrary. The soul- 
less system has had no stimulus to come forward and place its 
works before the world ; it is content with the filling of ex- 
amination papers, and the passing of certificates, and the filling 
of checks. These duties fulfil all the needs of the day and 
this is the practical way of looking at it. 

But this is not the Catholic way in America the way which 
is really the most practical of all. There is no inspiration which 
can fire the soul of artist or poet like the inspiration caught 
from religion ; there is nothing which makes a craftsman so 
emulative, so reliable, as the sustaining power of religion. There 
is no influence which builds up one orderly state out of the 
complex masses of thinkers and toilers like religion. This is a 
truth which the foremost European states are now learning 
some, like France, from sorrowful experience to the contrary. 

Many things are taught, in fine, by this exhibit. We are lifted 
up in thought, as we wander through its varied mazes, from the 
contemplation of the wisdom and the care manifested in the de- 
tails of the system, to the nobility of the purpose ; and we see 
underlying it all the sublime tenacity with which the Catholic 
Church goes on in her beneficent way. Through good report 
and evil report she adheres to her mission, whether states or 
governments frown upon her or smile. She will not neglect her 
own, no matter who despises them, but like a tender mother 
and guide still helps them onward in the world, upward toward 
the light. 

JOHN J. O'SHEA. 





204 WHERE GOD AND MAN MEET. [Nov., 



WHERE GOD AND MAN MEET. 

^OGMA has no reason of being unless it lead up to 
practice ; for Christianity is essentially practical ; 
objectively it is an historical fact, subjectively it 
is a relation of life between man and God. To 
be sure, man's conduct and living need an intel- 
lectual basis, since he is a rational being ; and therefore dogma 
is a necessary part of religion, as being that intellectual basis ; 
but religion would fall short of completeness, would not suit 
the condition nor answer the needs of a created being, if its 
intellectual basis, its abstract and theoretical truths, did not 
issue in practical conduct, expressive of the purely mental 
truths. Now, practical Christianity is service of God, service of 
man. With this latter I have nothing to do in this paper. 
Christian practical life, as service of God, is resumed in worship 
and grace ; hence we say, dogma leads up to worship and grace, 
and apart from them has no reason of being. 

THIS VIEW OF RELIGION, 

therefore, is all-important ; to do good is better than to know 
good ; conduct is three-fourths of life. Man's destiny in eter- 
nity shall be decided by what he has done, not by what he 
has known in this present phase of existence. Religion is the 
meeting of man and God, and to the meeting each brings 
his own peculiar act ; man yearns and aspires after God, God 
goes out towards man, and by these two tendencies both 
are brought together into union, or religion, giving that word 
the primary meaning of renewed bond, religare. Now, wor- 
ship is the word we have for the aspiration of man after 
God. Grace is the word we have for the leaning of God to 
man. 

What man aspires to is union with God, the beginning and 
the end of his being. What God desires, without infringing on 
that liberty with which he has endowed man, is to unite to him- 
self, as closely as human nature permits, the rational creature 
who came forth from his love. Unitive love, as it is the source 
whence man sprang, so also is the term to which he tends. Per- 
fect religion then may be defined, union of man with God as 
complete as human nature is capable of bearing. We hold that 



1 893.] WHERE GOD AND MAN MEET. 205 

the completeness of the union shall be realized only in another 
world. There the intellectual basis of the union shall be, not 
objective dogma and subjective faith, but a knowledge of God 
quite different from that we now have called, in our imperfect 
human language, the Intuitive Vision. There the medium of the 
union shall be, not worship and grace, but worship and a pecu- 
liar quality, of which we only know that it exists, and which 
we describe as the height of glory. There the result of the 
union shall be, not the partial and intermittent holiness of this 
world, but everlasting sinlessness and happiness without fear of 
loss. 

However, taking man as he is found now and here, his union 
with the Creator has for intellectual basis dogma and faith, and 
for medium worship and grace, for in these they meet, man by 
worship, God by grace. Therefore the central point in religion, 
practical religion, is worship and grace, and if they be not 
brought about, dogma is but a tinkling brass and a sounding 
cymbal; it is worship and grace that the Apostle St. Paul 
has extolled under the name of charity as essential to re- 
ligion. 

I now go on to consider apart these two elements of our re- 

|:ion to God Worship, man's contribution ; Grace, God's con- 
bution to the relation ; and then I will inquire if there is any 
iigious act in which they are synthetized. If there is any such 
t, then that act is the very centre and soul of religion. 



WORSHIP. 



I define worship to be the recognition by man of God as 
his first and last cause. This recognition must be interior ; that 
is, the intellect of man must grasp the relation between himself 
and God, the heart must be moved by it, and the will affected 
by it. This interior worship is worship in spirit, but worship 
should have another quality ; it should be worship in truth. 
Now, the truth is, we are not pure spirits. Such is the dual na- 
ture of man, invisible in the visible, spiritual in the material, 
soul in the body, that what is within not only comes from with- 
out, but must be shown forth exteriorly. It is through the 
senses, as channels, that his mind is awakened by things of the 
outer world to grasp them to itself in knowledge ; and again, 
the interior knowledge of the mind and affection of the heart 
and movement of the will flow out into the world about us 
through the senses. All internal phenomena of intellect, heart, 
and will have their external incarnations. Hence worship, from 



206 WHERE GOD AND MAN MEET. [Nov., 

the necessity of man's make-up, must be exterior, and body it- 
self forth in acts produced by our senses and speaking to the 
senses of others. 

Moreover, since man is by nature social in the religious 
as well as the civil sphere ; and since society is the result of 
the sociability which God has planted in man, and for this 
reason society owes allegiance and gratitude to God ; exterior 
worship must be public and social, and be between men a 
bond in their religious life, as government is a bond between 
them in their political life. It is evident that an exterior, 
public worship means and implies temple, priesthood, assemblies, 
rites, and ceremonies. We reach these conclusions from a study 
of human nature. 

But now suppose that God should choose to make to man a 
revelation of himself, as first and last cause, more explicit and 
fuller than the knowledge that creation gives ; then we may be 
justified in conjecturing that, instead of leaving in man's choice 
the mode and manner of worship by which he is to be honored 
as first and last cause, he will inform man through revelation of 
the specific rites and ceremonies in which he wishes to have em- 
bodied, through which he wishes to have expressed, the recog- 
nition of his claims over creation. This is just what God has 
done ; I assume the revelation ; we shall see presently what 
specific rite he has chosen to be the worship of himself by man. 
But here I will say this about that rite : From our preceding 
considerations we may safely assert beforehand that it will be 
an exterior act, to be performed in public assembly by a vica- 
rious representative of the God worshipped and of the people 
worshipping, an action expressive of the union between man 
and God, showing forth man's aspiration to God, and God's 
desire to raise man to himself, an action synthetic of man's 
worship and God's grace. Before pointing it out and showing 
it to be as I have just described, let us consider the second 
element of that relation which religion is, God's grace. 

GRACE. 

Let us give this name to the action of God on man. It is 
his breath on humanity ; it is the leaven that preserves and 
raises the mass, the lever by which mankind is lifted above it- 
self. Christianity as an ideal, as a set of truths, could not 
have been conceived by human mind ; but granting it could, 
it had never been realized in the world, in the life of the 
race, by human strength ; that effect required a divine cause, 



1893-] WHERE GOD AND MAN MEET. 207 

God's own action. From this historic result, the spread 
of the Christian religion, some notion of grace is already 
gained. 

But to know it intimately it should be experienced. It is 
not something that falls under the senses. In nature around us 
there is nothing exactly like it. It is not a physiological fact, 
though it has its radiations in and through the material part of 
man. It is a purely psychological fact that the senses do not 
engender, nor anything created beyond and out of the senses, 
nor the soul either. Though the soul is the recipient of grace, 
the originator and direct causative principle of it is God ; hence 
it is a supernatural fact. " It is God made sensible to the soul," 
said Pascal. " It is an inspiration of divine love causing us to 
practise what we know by faith," said St. Augustine. It is in 
moral nature what attraction is in physical nature ; it binds us 
to God and makes us revolve around him. 

BUT THIS IS NOT A FULL ACCOUNT OF IT. 

A thing is best known and defined from its end, the ultimate 
purpose of its being and existence. Now, I have already said 
that religion in its perfection is such an union with God as hu- 
man nature is capable of bearing. The intellect of man is capable, 
by special grant of superadded strength, not by its innate and con- 
genital strength, of a knowledge of God far superior to that we 
now enjoy, and of a different kind altogether. Our present know- 
ledge of God is imperfect, partial, indirect, coming to us through 
analogies, anthropomorphic similitudes ; it is, as St. Paul puts it, 
seeing " through a glass darkly," and " now we know only in 
part." 

The embodiment of the intellect does not comport any 
other mode of knowing him. But revelation tells of a transfor- 
mation of the body after death that will give the intellect a 
wider latitude, and allow it a keener glance in another and bet- 
ter light than that of reason, a light which is a special and un- 
due gift of God. The knowledge we shall then have is now 
called by us, in the limited range of human speech, the Intui- 
tive Vision, and is described by St. Paul in the words, " then 
we shall know face to face." The love consequent upon such 
knowledge is so fully unitive that sinlessness, or the impossibili- 
ty of divorce from God, shall be our portion for ever hence 
perfect happiness. It is a universal truth of human experience 
that things created, be they ransacked ever so much for the 
boon, cannot give full happiness, and that the heart of man is 



208 WHERE GOD AND MAN MEET. [Nov., 

restless until it nestles in God. Such knowledge and such union 
are the perfection and crown of religion. 

A SUPERIOR EXISTENCE. 

But such knowledge and union, though we may and shall 
be made capable of them by special grant, and not within our 
natural reach, are not due by any title we hold from creation. 
They constitute a new life, a superior existence, into which we 
need to be generated, born anew, recreated, so to speak. Now, 
our present life is an apprenticeship to our future life ; what we 
begin here will be continued there by the stern law of evolution. 
Apprenticeship is the doing, in an imperfect, inchoative way, of 
the profession, trade, actions that constitute later life. Is it not 
logical to say that the future supernatural life of glory will have 
in this present natural life of earth its germ, beginning, inchoa- 
tion, apprenticeship ; that the action of God, unveiling himself 
to us hereafter face to face and binding us to himself indissolu- 
bly, will begin even here and now in a partial inchoate way? 
This is the outgoing of God to man we call grace ; it is God's 
side of the relation, as worship is man's side of the relation ; 
both constituting religion. Grace, then, is the germ, the prin- 
ciple of the life to come ; and as that life to come is in a sense 
divine, since it is not due to us and is God's gift, grace is de- 
fined by our theologians to be Semen Dei, participatio quadam vita 
divina, consortium vita divina The seed of God, a certain partici- 
pation in God's life, a consorting in God's life. 

Heaven forbid I should say that grace is the monopoly 
of the Catholic Church, of Catholic times and places. It 
is God's gratuitous gift, and who shall bind him in the giv- 
ing, unless indeed he bind himself? Neither have I to inquire 
how, by what means and agencies, is granted that grace which 
God may grant outside the Catholic Church. But I draw atten- 
tion to this consideration. Just as in his revelation he may 
have indicated to us the mode of worship he chose and requires; 
so also he may have made ordinances as to the transmission of 
grace, may have affixed it to certain rites, ceremonies, human 
agencies, which arrangement, I again repeat, would be in per- 
fect keeping with man's dual constitution and double make-up : 
soul in body, spirit in matter, the invisible in the visible. If God 
has made an arrangement of this kind, probabilities and conjec- 
turing must give way to positive legislation, and the question is 
not what he might do, but what he has done. 

This reflection leads me to a third consideration : is there 



1 893.] WHERE GOD AND MAN MEET. 209 

in our religion an act which is by divine ordinance the synthe- 
sis of worship and grace, the perfect expression of the relation 
of man to God? 

EUCHARIST THE SYNTHESIS. 

The recognition of God as first and last cause can have no 
outward expression more direct, exclusive, and forcible than sac- 
rifice. All other religious acts are of themselves indifferent to 
that recognition, and are made to be expressions of it only by 
the directive intention of the worshipper ; but, apart from such 
intention of man, it is not in other religious acts, in their na- 
ture, to be expressions of that recognition of God's suprem- 
acy. The offering and the immolation of created life to the 
Creator is an act such that it is of itself, and cannot be made 
by man anything else than, the recognition of God as the Master 
of the Universe. Sacrifice is the essential act of worship. All 
religions known to history, whatever else they lacked, certainly 
did have sacrifice at the foundation of their worship. Christianity 
has its sacrifice before which all others disappear as shadows 
before the reality. God made man, Christ Jesus, is the victim, 
and the Cross the altar. This is the supreme act of worship 
which humanity gave its Creator, a worship worthy of God since 

less than God Incarnate was the giver. 



THE MASS, THE SUPREME SACRIFICE. 



I Now, this sublime act of worship, accomplished once for all 
the name of the human race by the High-Priest, Child of the 
race as well as Son of God, is brought within the compass of 
ch and every man that he may join in it and have share in 
and is reproduced mystically yet really beneath the vault of 
ur temples in that public act of religion known as the Mass. 
Thus adown all the ages the worship of the Catholic is invested 
with the dignity of Christ's own worship. This is the special 
act of worship God has chosen and requires of mankind. His 
will has been signified by the doings and sayings of the Saviour 
in the Last Supper. This is the recognition by man of God's 
supreme dominion, the expression of man's aspiration to God. 
All other acts of worship have worth and force only in as far 
as they approach this one and are connected with it. This act 
of worship may be performed in the simplicity of the catacombs 
or in the grandeur of the world-basilica ; but, whether in sim- 
plicity or grandeur, it is man's nobility, consolation, and strength ; 
and for the world it is the inspiration and motive of all that is 



210 WHERE GOD AND MAN MEET. [Nov., 

noblest in moral heroism and artistic progress. For this worship 
architecture, painting, sculpture, music, and poetry have done 
their best ; it is the centre, as of religion, so also of Christian 
civilization. 

If an exterior public action or rite, such as the Mass, is the 
manner of worship God chooses by which man is to recognize 
his supremacy; it is not at all improbable, nay, it is to be ex- 
pected, that the action of God on man, or grace, shall come to 
him in a similar manner. And in fact God has affixed his grace 
to certain rites and sensible signs. The best-known instance is 
that of water signifying and effecting a new birth and giving the 
right to the kingdom of heaven. Now, if the Mass is the su- 
preme act of worship, it is because Christ is the victim offered 
in that sacrificial act ; and if he is the victim offered, it must 
needs be that he is therein present. Here is an instance of, I 
will not say grace, but the Author of grace present under the 
sensible elements which alone are visible in the Mass. It is not 
my task to enter into the mystery, but to affirm it for an ulte- 
rior purpose. Our belief then is, that Jesus Christ is really, 
truly, and substantially present under the appearances of bread 
and wine in the sacrifice of the Mass. With this belief al- 
lowed, I proceed with my study. 

If you make an investigation of the sacrifices of the religions 
of the human race, you will find that almost everywhere man- 
ducation of the victim has been an integral part of that act 
of worship ; as if man sought to participate in the expiation 
done by the victim, or to invest himself with the dignity of 
God, to whom the victim was sacred. Shall you be astonished 
to see this feature, a trait of humanity, reproduced in the Chris- 
tian sacrifice ? At any rate, hesitancy must give way before the 
clear and emphatic words of the Lord himself. He is a victim 
not only that through him we may worship, but also that through 
him and of him we may be fed and live. 

THE COMMUNION, THE GREATEST GRACE. 

Grace, as I have explained, is a divine life in germ. Life is 
maintained and strengthened by food ; animal life by animal 
food, intellectual life by intellectual food, divine life by God 
himself ; and why should I shrink from the thought, why should 
it not seem natural, that he come to me under the guise of 
food ? Oh ! the deepest of mysteries is life, and why should I 
recoil before a mystery in the supernatural, divine life Grace 
and Baptism have begun in me ? What stronger, more em- 



I893-] 



WHERE GOD AND MAN MEET. 



211 



phatic sign that God's action on me is intimate, that his influ- 
ence has penetrated my being, that his life has become my 
own ? By that same exterior act, in which I go out to him in 
worship, he comes to me as strength and food of my soul and 
binds me to him through means of the elements beneath which 
he has chosen to hide the sublimity of the Saviour's sacrifice. 
The sacrifice is worship, the communion is grace. In the one 
public act worship and grace concur, God and man meet, reli- 
gion as a relation between both is completely expressed, and 
thus the Holy Eucharist becomes the central point of religion 
in the Catholic Church. 

Man has even aspired to become like unto God. This as- 
piration is at the bottom of all the errors as well as all the truths 
in the world. The errors have been that man has sought to be 
divinized by his own strength, or thought divinity due to his 
nature, or deemed himself substantially one with God and only 
accidentally differentiated from him. The truth is, that in Jesus 
Christ the divine and human nature have met in one personality. 
In him humanity's aspiration has been realized. The truth is, 
that each one of us individually finds union with God in Christ 
offered as victim and given as food in the central act of Chris- 
m worship the Holy Eucharist. 



Catholic University. 



THOMAS O'GORMAN, D.D. 





2i2 THE DOCTOR'S STORY. [Nov., 



THE DOCTOR'S STORY. 

EITHER of them was over-young. The doctor 
was turned forty, and had gleams of white in 
his dark hair and a delicate tracery of fine lines 
about the corners of his eyes. His closely- 
trimmed beard was gray under the chin ; and as 
for Margaret, she was a woman whose lovely charm only in- 
creased with the gracious, dignifying years. She lived near us 
in the city, and for years had kept house for her father and 
brothers. 

We were all so surprised when they married, though I am 
sure I do not know why we should be. His ship had come in 
unexpectedly one Saturday night ; he had gone directly to her 
house, and the next morning they appeared at church together. 
She had had such a quiet life ; many loved her, though the men 
whom she knew never dared to overstep, to our knowledge, the 
bounds of friendship ; and then he had been away for so long. 
The few who did know of the attachment had almost forgotten 
it. He was ship's doctor on board the Harnia, and had always 
thought himself too poor to ask her to marry him and was too 
proud to ask her to wait. But now the captain, dying, had 
left him a tidy income and a house and farm just outside of 
Baltimore. 

A little before the wedding Margaret told me in her quiet 
way that they had been lovers all their lives. Separated by 
time and circumstances, they never really had been parted in 
their hearts. They had rarely written, but each knew the other 
would be faithful to the end. "When this chance came," she 
said, " it seemed only natural that he should come back to me. 
'All things come to those who wait.' Twelve years are a long 
time to look forward to, but when one looks back they do not 
appear so very long. I seem to have just been getting ready 
all this time," and she smiled softly as she stroked the beauti- 
ful damask she was marking. So she had been getting ready. 
The girl of twenty-three had ripened and developed into the 
sweet-faced, placid woman. No storm had shaken her heart. 
Perfect sympathy had kept her nature poised and balanced, and 
ever sweet and wholesome, for the one man to her in the whole 
world. I could see she was intensely happy, though not demon- 



1893-] THE DOCTOR'S STORY. 213 

stratively so. They were married quietly in September, and not 
long afterwards they asked me out there. Burnside was at its 
best, ablaze in all its autumn glory. Her two brothers, Neil 
and Langdon, were with her when I arrived. 

I had known Margaret for a long time and had always ad- 
mired her, but never had fully understood the deep, calm, quiet 
nature until I saw her in her own home. The love that had 
withstood time, distance, and change had now been crowned in 
the sweet afternoon of her life by this perfect marriage. Her 
serene and happy face was a pleasure to look upon, as she 
moved about her lovely home. 

The chilly nights with their frost-nipped air and early darken- 
ing shadows made the library the brightest room in the house. 
It was but seldom the doctor had an evening to himself, but 
on this evening he lay outstretched in his big, wide, old sleepy- 
hollow, lazily basking in the firelight with dreamily happy eyes. 
It was a large room, somewhat darkly furnished in a pleasant 
harmony of rich browns and reds, and lit by lamps in all sorts 
of curious shapes and shades. The place showed the rovings of 
the master. There were relics from nearly all his voyages, rugs 
from the East, Turkish embroideries, delf from Holland in thick 
ebony frames, cabinets filled with curios from India and Japan. 

Kting into the chimney-corner was a huge divan piled high 
h cushions. There were large, old leather chairs, and blue-and- 
ite cups and saucers Margaret's contribution from her family 
ics. The doctor's eyes roved about the lovely room, but 
rested oftenest on Margaret's bent head as she sat working at 
the table under the crimson-shaded lamp. She was good to 
look at ; from her brown hair curling softly on her temples, 
her drooping eyelids, her happy, peaceful lips, her white throat, 
she made a lovely picture to the man who was looking at her 
with his heart in his eyes. I sat there with a book, but enjoyed 
the living romance far more than the printed one on my knee. 
Neil lay on the rug propped up on his elbows poring over 
the medical journal spread out before him. He adored his 
brother-in-law and was soon to take up the study of medicine 
under him. Whenever the reins of conversation were left in 
that lad's hands the talk was pretty sure to turn sooner or 
later to what Langdon called " his beloved bones." 

" Do you know what I heard a doctor say once," he said, 
"when he was questioned why he studied medicine? He said he 
had just lost his wife, and went into the profession to find out 
why people died." 



214 THE DOCTOR'S STORY. [Nov., 

" It is a pity he could not go a little farther and keep them 
from dying," said Langdon. 

" Why do people want to be kept from dying ? " said the 
doctor. 

"Afraid of the dark," answered Langdon. 

" ' Better keep the ills we have than fly to ills we know not 
of,' " quoted Neil. " Everybody does seem afraid of it though, 
don't they ? " 

" Margaret," said the doctor, "what are your thoughts on 
the matter ? " 

The blood just tinged her cheek, as it always did when his 
voice sounded her name. She looked up ; her dark eyes had a 
depth that seldom came except when she was alone with him 
and heart spoke to heart. Yet to-night, with three of us there, 
guests in her own home, the same deep, unalterable look of 
perfect love passed from her soul to his. She left the table and 
went and knelt by his chair, resting one ivory-white hand on 
its crimson back. 

" I do not fear death," she said in a low, reverent tone ; 
" particularly now that I am so happy. I would not grieve if 
God called me to-nighj." 

She answered her brother's quick movement with a slow, 
sweet smile ; but in the doctor's eyes there was no surprise. 
Lover-husband as he was, there was scarcely need of words be- 
tween those two perfect souls. He felt as though he himself 
had said it ; that to her, as to him, death had no terror, as it 
meant an eternity together. 

Prosaic Neil grew restless, flung himself into a new attitude 
and jerked out : " Well, by hookey, I for one wish there wasn't 
any such thing as death ! " 

The doctor smiled, though Margaret did not. " Neil," he 
said, "that reminds me of a story I heard in my young days 
and have not thought of in years." 

"Tell it," we said. 

Langdon moved out of his corner, keeping his finger in his 
book, jealous of every moment spent away from the library 
shelves, though anxious to hear the story from the well-travelled 
man that he knew the doctor to be. 

" During my student-life," he began, " I went on one of my 
vacations on a walking-tour through the Apennines. I had 
started with a chum, but when we were but two days out he 
was summoned home by telegram. I went on alone, stopping 
for rest and night's lodging wherever I happened to be. The 



1893-] THE DOCTOR'S STORY. 215 

whole trip was thoroughly enjoyable except for the latter part, 
and I will tell of that at once. One day I was caught in a 
terrific mountain storm and wandered about for hours afterwards 
in my wet clothes. Toward evening I found myself near a con- 
vent. The good nuns could not harbor a man of course, so 
they directed me to the cure's house, a few rods down the road. 
I could see its light twinkling in the darkness like a big fire-fly 
in the woods. I was received with all the hospitality and good- 
will in the world, and made as welcome as though the unlocked 
for intrusion was the payment of a long-promised visit. I had 
a very good but simple meal, and found my host most enter- 
taining. At nine o'clock we could just hear the ringing of the 
convent bell. I was as ready to go to rest as the priest, who 
had been up since four. 

" I was shown into a little white room that had not much 
style, but very great cleanliness. On the white-washed wall 
hung an immense crucifix. The floor was sanded in some at- 
tempt at a floral design ; to get into the high, white-curtained 
bed I had to use the single rush-bottomed chair as a step, but 
after once tumbling in I was not long awake. The next morn- 
ing I found myself a victim to what I had laid myself out for, 
rheumatic fever. For three long weeks I lay there suffering 
every kind of physical torture, and when the terrible pains in 
my body had gone my head commenced. Blind with pain, I 
could only lie there motionless for days and pray that the sun 
would stop shining in through the uncurtained window on the 
dazzling white wall opposite." 

" Was there no woman there ? " said Margaret, horror-stricken. 

"Yes." 

" Margaret has been mentally putting a green paper blind 
on that window ever since the sun began to come in," said 
Neil mischievously. 

"There was an old woman there," the doctor went on, "but 
I guess poor old Battino had no use for sick young men or 
green blinds or anything else much, and I was trouble enough 
as it was. At last the day came when I was able to get up ; 
and one evening just before sunset, dizzy and weak, I crept to 
the porch outside, where the cure sat and smiled a languid ac- 
quiescence to his repeated expressions of sorrow for my illness, 
joy at my recovery, and determination to keep me till I was 
'whole again.' I leaned back in his cushioned chair and let the 
cool breeze play on my hot eyes and head, and slowly could 
feel the tide of life creeping back from its low ebb. The dread- 



2i6 THE DOCTOR'S STORY. [Nov., 

ful pain I had been in shut out the seriousness of my attack, 
and I now heard, with something like surprise, how near to 
death he thought me. I do not know what definite thought 
was in my sick brain, but I said petulantly, ' And to think that 
all our suffering here, in every ill that flesh is heir to, is not 
enough, but we have to add death to the list. Surely God 
ought to be satisfied and not give us that bitter cup too.' 

" 'And would you live for ever?' said the cure. And I, think- 
ing of a certain heart waiting here at home for me, said 
'Yes.' 

" The cur leaned forward and rested his arms on his knees, 
his thin white fingers swinging to and fro. There was on his 
lips the calm smile of age as it listens to the wild fantasies of 
callow youth. 

" ' Why can we not live on and have no death ? ' he said. 
' My son, that has been the eternal question since that awful 
morning when the gates of Paradise shut with a clang that has 
been echoing down the walls of time ever since. Let me tell 
you a story '; and he got up and began pacing to and fro on 
the narrow strip of gravel between us. ' Call it allegory, fable, 
moral, what you will ; it is a nut that has plenty of meat.' 

" * Once there was a planet, wonderfully like this, inhabited by 
a race of men not unlike ourselves. They lived, had all the 
sorrows and joys of life, its manifold pleasures and pains, its 
quiet phases and its turbulent ones they had all that life can 
hold, but they knew not death. 

4< ' At first that was grand. The brilliant hopes incidental to 
golden youth were theirs, and untrammelled by thoughts of ex- 
tinction. Ambition mounted high and met no wall of resistless 
time or sudden cessation by death. Dreams of great wealth 
were flushing their lives with tints of rose, and shortness of life 
brought no rude awakening. But, alas ! the hopes they saw bud 
in the morning of their lives they saw blossom, and saddest of 
all, saw decay. The dreams of ambition were fulfilled, but 
brought no pleasure in the realization. Wealth piled up on 
wealth, but where was the capacity for enjoyment ? 

"'They grew older and older; the infirmities of age came on, 
weighed them down, toppled them over but no release. After 
a time the old, old, old people grew helpless and dropped down 
by the wayside ; they fainted by the doorsteps, but there was 
none to succor them. The young were all eagerly working for 
their own sustenance ere they, too, would fall by the way. 
Every day added fresh numbers to the heap of skin and bone 



1893-] THE DOCTOR'S STORY. 217 

that lay there "sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every- 
thing." Their strength was only enough to moan, and that moan- 
ing rent the air. Layer after layer of dust settled upon the moan- 
ing heap, and even through those thickening strata the awful 
sound went on : O kind Death ! O dear Death ! O longed-for 
rest that never comes ! 

" * That sadly-peopled planet even yet goes spinning down 
the aisles of space, and the wailing still goes on. 

" ' Listen ! In every wind that blows the sound of it comes to 
our waiting ear. Even in summer the wind is sad with the 
burden of that ceaseless plaint, and in winter it is inexpressibly 
so. In November we pray for the souls of the dead ; why not 
pray for those poor unfortunates who had everything in life but 
its chief blessing death ? That's the story.' " 

As the doctor finished the wind outside rose to a shriek, 
and Langdon and I started as though we had been shot. Even 
Margaret's face grew a shade paler, and she held closer the 
hand within her own. It was as if we heard the pitiful cries 
of those condemned souls. 

" Gad ! but that's a gruesome story," said Neil. " What do 
you think of it, Margaret?" 

Margaret's pure, sweet eyes sought her husband's. " It is a 
good story, dear," she said. " Never has that line been brought 
home to me with such force : * O grave, where is thy victory ? 

death, where is thy sting ?' We should not be afraid of 
death. To Catholic hearts there is no separation in death. 
Every day we say we believe in the 'communion of saints'; 
surely we cannot let the words slip by and leave no trace. If 

1 were to die to-night," and she smiled half-sadly at the con- 
vulsive pressure her fingers received, " I would not be far away 
would be just across that river whose lapping waves we can 
almost hear in moments like this"; and the lovely, dreamy voice 
sank almost to a whisper. 

" Jehoshaphat ! maybe when I am married I too can talk in 
that strain, but until then give me flesh and blood. Langdon, 
come to bed "; and Neil hurried out. We could hear them 
scurrying through the dim hall and laughing to chase away each 
other's fear. I followed the boys, leaving those two before the 
fire looking with love-lit eyes, not into the future, but beyond 
it into eternity. 

HELEN M. SWEENEY. 



VOL. LVIII. 15 



218 



ORO SUPPLEX. 



[Nov., 



ORO SUPPLEX. 




GRECIAN urn that time withstood 
Sang to a bard then loved of few 
That all things beautiful are true. 
Everything that's true is good. 
The beauty of our home below, 
The solemn truth of home above, 
May mingle in one common love, 

Since both from God's great heart must flow. 

Not, therefore, in the fearful night, 

Not in a close and silent room, 

Where day is turned to sombre gloom 

Save for dim ray of taper's light : 

Near open windows let me lie 

With curtains drawn full wide apart, 

That heaven's light may fall athwart 

My folded hands, when I must die. 

Ah ! may it chance a day in spring, 

When earth and air again look glad ; 

When birds, returned, with joy seem mad, 

And rapt, with quiv'ring voices sing ; 

When lilacs nod their purple plumes 

To new-grown grass of tend'rest hue, 

To hills outlined in faintest blue ; 

While sapphire depths the light illumes. 

Then may the priest beside me kneel, 

To tell my contrite soul 'tis shrived, 

Nor let my senses be deprived 

Of Extreme Unction's final seal. 

And, Virgin Mother, hear me call ! 

Grant, Queen, that on my death-dewed lips 

The sacred Host ere life quite slips 

Like snow-flake from the sky, may fall ! 



M. G. FLANNERY. 




1893-] THE NEGRO RACE. 219 



THE NEGRO RACE: THEIR CONDITION, PRESENT 
AND FUTURE. 

HE religious condition of our eight millions of 
blacks gives food for anxious thought, and is 
fraught with lively interest to every citizen of 
this Republic. American Catholics may be said 
to have folded their arms for two and a half 
centuries, specially indeed since the war, and allowed their non- 
Catholic countrymen full swing in the religious training of the 
colored race. We did our share for them in other ways ; we 
had more than a proportionate representation in the Union 
army which emancipated them, while we were an insignificant 
number on the opposite side. But as far as religion goes our 
efforts have been trivial. To appreciate how truly so, consider 
how few of the black race are Catholics but one in fifty. And 
here is the first element in their religious condition ; their actual 
numbers adhering to the various sects count up, all told, about 

Kur millions, while fully as many are without any religion 
all. 
Moreover, the peculiarity of their religious organizations is 
at they themselves do their whole religious work. They 
e the bishops, preachers, elders, deacons, and flock. Except 
a few Episcopal clergymen, all the ministers laboring among the 
blacks are of their own race. The white clergymen are found 
only in their universities, colleges, seminaries, and other higher 
schools ; yet the African churches seem to move along smoothly 
enough. 

As to their religious knowledge, it is no surprise to learn 
that very many of the negroes who profess religion are ignorant 
of the most fundamental truths of revelation. They have some 
idea of our .Lord, a great reverence for his Holy Name, a no- 
tion of sin and of the Bible the latter, however, more in a su- 
perstitious than a rational way. Baptism, in the eyes of a mul- 
titude of them, is all that is needed. No matter what sect may 
claim them, once baptized they are saved. " Once in grace 
never out of it "; or, to give another favorite saying of theirs : 
" The Blood of Jesus never burns." Now, as no soul is exempt 
from the necessity of learning the essential truths of God's 
revelation, it is a primary question as to whether or not these 



218 



ORO SUPPLEX. 



[Nov., 




ORO SUPPLEX. 

GRECIAN urn that time withstood 
Sang to a bard then loved of few 
That all things beautiful are true. 
Everything that's true is good. 
The beauty of our home below, 
The solemn truth of home above, 
May mingle in one common love, 

Since both from God's great heart must flow. 

Not, therefore, in the fearful night, 

Not in a close and silent room, 

Where day is turned to sombre gloom 

Save for dim ray of taper's light : 

Near open windows let me lie 

With curtains drawn full wide apart, 

That heaven's light may fall athwart 

My folded hands, when I must die. 

Ah ! may it chance a day in spring, 

When earth and air again look glad ; 

When birds, returned, with joy seem mad, 

And rapt, with quiv'ring voices sing ; 

When lilacs nod their purple plumes 

To new-grown grass of tend'rest hue, 

To hills outlined in faintest blue ; 

While sapphire depths the light illumes. 

Then may the priest beside me kneel, 

To tell my contrite soul 'tis shrived, 

Nor let my senses be deprived 

Of Extreme Unction's final seal. 

And, Virgin Mother, hear me call ! 

Grant, Queen, that on my death-dewed lips 

The sacred Host ere life quite slips 

Like snow-flake from the sky, may fall ! 



M. G. FLANNERY. 




1893-] THE NEGRO RACE. 219 



THE NEGRO RACE: THEIR CONDITION, PRESENT 
AND FUTURE. 

HE religious condition of our eight millions of 
blacks gives food for anxious thought, and is 
fraught with lively interest to every citizen of 
this Republic. American Catholics may be said 
to have folded their arms for two and a half 
centuries, specially indeed since the war, and allowed their non- 
Catholic countrymen full swing in the religious training of the 
colored race. We did our share for them in other ways ; we 
had more than a proportionate representation in the Union 
army which emancipated them, while we were an insignificant 
number on the opposite side. But as far as religion goes our 
efforts have been trivial. To appreciate how truly so, consider 
how few of the black race are Catholics but one in fifty. And 
here is the first element in their religious condition ; their actual 
numbers adhering to the various sects count up, all told, about 
four millions, while fully as many are without any religion 
at all. 

Moreover, the peculiarity of their religious organizations is 
that they themselves do their whole religious work. They 
are the bishops, preachers, elders, deacons, and flock. Except 
a few Episcopal clergymen, all the ministers laboring among the 
blacks are of their own race. The white clergymen are found 
only in their universities, colleges, seminaries, and other higher 
schools ; yet the African churches seem to move along smoothly 
enough. 

As to their religious knowledge, it is no surprise to learn 
that very many of the negroes who profess religion are ignorant 
of the most fundamental truths of revelation. They have some 
idea of our Lord, a great reverence for his Holy Name, a no- 
tion of sin and of the Bible the latter, however, more in a su- 
perstitious than a rational way. Baptism, in the eyes of a mul- 
titude of them, is all that is needed. No matter what sect may 
claim them, once baptized they are saved. " Once in grace 
never out of it "; or, to give another favorite saying of theirs : 
" The Blood of Jesus never burns." Now, as no soul is exempt 
from the necessity of learning the essential truths of God's 
revelation, it is a primary question as to whether or not these 



220 THE NEGRO RACE: [Nov., 

are acquired by the blacks through their church-membership. 
Behold the drawback in the negro churches. They are taught 
the fundamental truths of the Christian religion but very im- 
perfectly. Far too often their churches are mere hustings for 
political candidates, or are like social clubs ; and their houses of 
worship are often used for nearly all kinds of gatherings. 

At the same time the ignorance of religious truth among 
the negroes does not weaken the religious sentiment which is 
naturally strong in them, and which, strange as it seems, is of- 
ten divorced from their sense of morality. In this matter, 
however, they are without anything worthy the name of guid- 
ance. Recently a leading preacher declared in the public press 
that two-thirds, if not three-fourths, of the colored preachers were 
immoral. " If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the 
ditch." It is impossible to say to what extent this laxity of 
morals is attributable to the frightful doctrine of the inamissi- 
bility of grace, which is not theirs alone, but that of the many 
millions of Southern whites who profess the Calvinistic doctrine 
of justification. Their test of conversion, writes a Mrs. Rice in 
the Christian Union, is an abnormal paroxysmal experience, af- 
ter which they have " got religion " and no sin is to be laid to 
their charge. This writer is also authority for the statement 
that even a murderer has been known to conduct a Sunday- 
school, with great apparent zeal and unction, for months after 
his undiscovered crime. 

Unhappily the attitude of the whites towards the immoralities 
of the negroes works much harm in lowering the standard of 
morality in the poor people's eyes. A black person is not ex- 
pected to be virtuous, and is looked upon with wonder if he or 
she happens to be so. It is related of an elderly colored wo- 
man, when urging a younger one to give up her bad ways, that 
the latter gave this scornful answer: "Huh! de white folks 
hires me, an' thinks as much o' me as dey does o' you." And 
even if the whites stopped here it would not be so bad. No 
race can throw the first stone at the negroes, for their hybrids 
belong to all races. 

It cannot be too much insisted upon that, as a rule, the 
whites give no edifying example to the blacks. Especially is 
this the case with many of those who have dealings with the 
negroes. Many employers, venders, traders, and agents are to 
blame for a downward moral drift in those poor people. Is 
our public sentiment, let me ask, calculated to engender noble 
aspirations in the negroes ? Is the tone of the press such as 



li 

11 



1893.] THEIR CONDITION, PRESENT AND FUTURE. 221 

would awaken in their hearts better thoughts ? Do the corrupt 
practices so widespread in politics ; the systematic adulterations 
in foods, clothing, etc.; the frequent fraudulent failures do 
such facts tend to elevate the negro race ? We need not then 
be surprised at Fred. Douglass's question : " If the negro could 
be bottled up, who could or would bottle up the irrepressible 
white man?" Men are always ready to have a fling at the 
black man, who usually is more sinned against than sinning. 

Who is responsible for the irreligion and the immorality 
of the negro ? The colored people did not intrude themselves 
upon us ; they were brought here in chains, and held by a cruel 
slave code in the communities where they now are. Slavery, 
then, is the first cause ; a negro was a chattel and counted as 
such. True, in good Christian families, which are too often the 
exception, the slaves were conscientiously looked after. But in 
the "negro quarters" it seldom happened that personal and 
family rights were or could be recognized or respected. Mar- 
riage, alas! was practically a union during the good pleasure of 
the master; nor were Catholic masters always found proof 
against the demands of poverty or cupidity when it was ques- 
ion of marital or parental rights among the slaves, even sacri- 
ficing their own offspring when of Ham's race. .Nor in dispos- 
ing of their slaves did they always consider whether the pur- 
chasers were Catholics or not. 

The whole tendency of the slave code was in favor of the 
whites, who should be angels indeed not to abuse the prac- 
tically limitless power by which the laws invested owners of 
slaves. 

A concomitant to slavery was ignorance. In the earlier years 
of the Republic slaves were permitted to learn to read and 
write; afterwards this was forbidden by severe laws. And we 
have heard former slaves tell how, when they were growing up, 
they would steal out at night with their spelling-book or reader 
hidden next the skin, in order to take reading lessons from, 
some kind friend, although at the risk of a severe whipping if 
caught. 

Nor, in this connection, should we forget the transition from 
slavery to freedom. Emancipation must have wrought a strange 
intoxication to the millions of slaves who had seen themselves 
ever surrounded by whites, who alone were respectable and who 
frequently idled away their entire lives. Emancipation, they 
thought, was to make the blacks like such whites. Wild dreams 
of ease and comfort must have flitted through their imagina- 



222 THE NEGRO RACE: [Nov., 

tions. Hence, to realize the stern condition which the daily 
life of duty and care entailed upon them must have produced 
among many of the emancipated very strange results. 

We think that Protestantism may in part be held responsi- 
ble for the present irreligious and immoral condition of the 
negroes. The widely-spread race prejudice, as powerful in the 
North as in the South, though shared by Catholics as well as 
by others, is truly a Protestant instinct. It is inhuman, un- 
Christlike, and unworthy even of our manhood, not to speak of 
our citizenship or our Christianity. For two and a half centu- 
ries our non-Catholic countrymen have had control of the negro 
in the South, and what is the result ? They gave him in some 
measure their religion ; they placed no restriction on their reli- 
gious teaching or on their codes of morality ; to-day the whites 
and blacks of the South profess common beliefs ; yet in spite 
of all, we hear from the whites hardly a good word of the 
blacks. How marked a contrast is this to the influence of the 
Catholic Church ! 

From the baptism of Clovis, when the haughty Gaul de- 
spised the Goth fully as much as ever our Southern whites 
despised the blacks, to the crowning of Charlemagne as the 
common head of an undivided people, only the same period of 
time elapsed as that between the introduction of slavery into 
our territory and the present day. Yet it was long enough for 
the Catholic Church to blend the master and slave into one, and to 
make the new race the custodian of the ancient and the beginner 
of modern civilization. Nor was it different with Goths and Ro- 
mans in Italy, with Normans and Saxons in Great Britain. 
Even in our day and in our own hemisphere, whatever misery 
afflicts Spanish America, the Catholic instinct of human equali- 
ty has delivered it from race antagonisms. There is no negro 
problem in Catholic South America. 

But when we look at our negro question from the mission- 
ary point of view, and ask, Is not the Catholic Church in 
America to be blamed for lack of zeal ? I answer with an un- 
hesitating Yes. After all, Protestantism has done something to 
Christianize the blacks ; but we have done, I may say, nothing. 
They have made and are making great missionary efforts, pour 
ing out money like water ; but we have attempted almost noth- 
ing. In fact, it was announced a few years ago, at the Lake 
Mohonk conferences, that the various denominations had spent 
since the war on the negroes thirty-five millions of dollars. 
Add to that immense sum the hundred and thirty higher institu- 



; 



1893.] THEIR CONDITION, PRESENT AND FUTURE. 223 

tions, with twenty-five thousand scholars, of whom one thousand 
are preparing for the Protestant ministry. 

Imperfect as is this picture of the religious condition of the 
negro race and of its causes, it is enough, however, to give us 
a fair idea of the state of things. It tells us of from eight to 
nine millions of blacks, living in one section of our land, and 
that the most Protestant, just emerged from slavery; enjoying 
the franchise ; learning how to read and write ; two-thirds of 
them living on plantations, one and all being made to feel a 
frightful ostracism which descends so deep as to exclude them 
in some places from public conveyances ; a people one-half of 
whom have no religion, and the other half are professing only 
a shade of sentimental belief. 

Yet there is a cheerful view to be taken. However sadly 
situated this people may be there are bright hopes in store for 
them. All drawbacks and discouragements notwithstanding, 
they have won the nation's respect. They are not rebels against 
public authority ; they are law-abiding citizens. They love the 
worship of God ; in their childish way they desire to love God ; 
they long for and relish the supernatural; they willingly listen 
to the word of God ; their hearts burn for the better gifts. 
They are hard working ; patiently and forgivingly do they bear 
their wrongs. This is in marked contrast with their white 
neighbors, too many of whom have not a word of good to say 
for the black man, thus verifying the old paradox that we 
never forgive those whom we have wronged, much as we may 
pardon those who have injured us. 

It is related of Michael Angelo that going along the streets 
of Rome he espied a rough, unhewn block of marble. " There 
is an angel hidden there," said he, pointing to the stone, Hav- 
ing had it brought to his studio, the immortal artist soon began 
to chip at it and to hack at it and to shape it, till finally there 
came forth from it the faultless angel in marble which his pro- 
phetic eye had seen in it. 

A similar block of marble is the negro ; far harder to work 
pon than the Carrara lump of Michael Angelo, because the 
chisel must be applied to the human heart. And has the negro 
a human heart ? Is he a man ? Yes, thank God ! he is a man, 
with all the affections and longings, all the faculties and quali- 
ties of human kind. Behold, then, it is his manhood that is 
the first ground of our hope. Like the Roman poet Terence, 
who is himself supposed by some to have been a negro, since he 
was one of the slaves of Scipio Africanus, the black man may say: 



224 THE NEGRO RACE: [Nov., 

" Homo sum, et nihil humanum alienum a me puto." The 
negro's first claim upon us is our common humanity, and that 
means a close tie of brotherhood. 

The future of the negro appears, therefore, to a missionary 
like myself to be hopeful. It rests primarily on the great 
truth that the human race is one. There is one Lord, one God, 
one Father of all. From this we rise to the supernatural des- 
tiny of our common humanity : one Jesus Christ, one church, 
one life of probation, one heaven, one hell. The negro has 
everything that makes a man, everything that makes a Chris- 
tian. Holy Church teaches the same doctrine to blacks as to 
whites ; furnishes the same sacramental channels of grace, bap- 
tizes the black infant, confirms the negro boy, administers Holy 
Communion to him, marries the black man and woman, ordains 
the black priest, gives him the same Extreme Unction as the 
white receives. As the negro passed out of slavery it was the 
Catholic Church which could say to him with the apostle, in 
his new relation : " For ye have not received the spirit of bond- 
age again to fear, but ye have received the spirit of adoption 
whereby we cry, Abba! (Father)." Romans viii. 15. 

Her code x>f laws for the black is the same as for the white 
no difference. Sunday Mass, Friday abstinence, Lenten fast 
oblige the black man no more than the white. Yes, the human 
nature predestined to Christian grace and so admirably recog- 
nized by the church is the foundation of our hopes. 

The negro's heart, like the white man's, is essentially good. 
Here we have a foothold. Grace we know builds upon nature 
and presupposes it. The civil law in its turn recognizes the 
manhood of the negro ; who votes or should legally vote like a 
white man ; is ruled by the same laws ; bows to the same rulers 
in the general, state, and local governments ; has before him, if 
delinquent (at least on the statute-book), the same legal process 
and sentence, the same jail and keepers as the white man. In 
ante-bellum days there were special enactments which made the 
negro a chattel. In our days all odious restrictions are dis- 
appearing before a juster and fairer recognition of his man- 
hood. 

The manhood of the negro race, moreover, is a truth of re- 
ligion, and one which Leo XIII. has well insisted upon in his 
letter to the bishops of Brazil at the time of the emancipation 
of the slaves of that country. " It was sin," he writes, " which 
deserved the name of slavery ; it was not natural. From the 
first sin came all evils, and specially this perversity that there 



1893.] THEIR CONDITION, PRESENT AND FUTURE. 225 

were men who, forgetful of the original brotherhood of the 
race, instead of seeking, as they should naturally have done, to 
promote mutual kindness and mutual respect, following their evil 
desires, began to think of other men as their inferiors and to 
hold them as cattle born to the yoke." And the very argument 
which we hear so often in political agitation, and read so much 
in the public press, viz., that by nature the black man is infe- 
rior, Leo XIII. declares an outrage on our common humanity. 

When in addition to the consideration of the negro's man- 
hood we add the further reflection that the greater part of 
mankind were slaves at the coming of Christ, there is all the 
less reason to despise our black countrymen, and all the more 
hope for their future. Men go into ecstasies over the future 
of the white races ; they love to recount their progress since 
the dawn of the Christian era. Let us remember to-day, how- 
ever, how wide-spread slavery was in ancient days. We all are 
the offspring of races the vast majority of whom were legally 
or practically slaves. The negroes to-day are only taking their 
turn. 

In the Roman Empire slaves were so numerous that Petro- 
nius in his " Satyrion " makes one of the players ask a servant how 
many infant slaves were born on his estates the preceding day, 
and is informed that thirty boys and forty girls were the increase 
of that day on that one estate. Roman patricians took a pride 
in having everything they needed made by their own slaves, 
thus destroying free labor, and with it, in the course of time, 
their own supremacy. These slaves were whites, and very many 
of them mechanics : carpenters, masons, shoemakers, millers, ba- 
kers, wool-combers, weavers, dyers, tailors, embroiderers, etc. 
Add to these carvers, mosaic-workers, glaziers, painters, as well 
is three other grades corresponding to professions in our times, 

., architects, surgeons, and physicians. 

As in Rome so throughout the rest of the civilized world. 
White slavery flourished everywhere, and Canon Brownlow is 
the authority for the statement that serfdom has not as yet 
been legally abolished in England, although it has ceased to be 
a practical question since the War of the Roses that is, for four 
centuries. In Italy a modified form of slavery existed to the 
end of the seventeenth century, in Spain till the first quarter 
of the eighteenth century, and only the Revolution of 1789 blot- 
ted out French serfdom all this in spite of the steadfast and 
aggressive efforts of Catholicity. 

In Ireland, before St. Patrick came, a female slave, called 



226 THE NEGRO RACE: [Nov., 

"cumhal," was the unit of currency, thus showing how deeply 
rooted was slavery in ancient Irish institutions. 

Although St. Patrick, once himself a slave, made great ef- 
forts towards emancipation, still slavery flourished in Ireland 
till St. Lawrence O'Toole moved, at a national synod, at Armagh, 
in 1170, to recognize the English invasion as a sign of divine 
anger against the Irish for their slave-holding. A peremptory 
admonition was thereupon sent out ordering the release of all 
English slaves in the land. Thenceforward it disappeared, till 
Cromwell sent thousands and tens of thousands of Irish men 
and women, boys and girls, as slaves into the West Indies. 

In the life of St. Vincent de Paul we read that the thought 
of his foundling asylum originated at the sight of the place 
called La Cooche, where those unfortunates were sold to circus 
managers and the like. He himself for some years was a slave 
in Africa, and did not hesitate to escape at the first opportunity. 

Since the discovery of America, however, the slavery that 
we have been familiar with is negro slavery. The color of the 
slave changed ; and with it our memories seem comatosed. We 
forget the slavery of our ancestors. In modern times the ne- 
groes seem to have slipped into the shoes of the more ancient 
white slaves. There is nothing in the fact of slavery itself which 
will argue against the negroes, nor again will their color prove 
aught derogatory to their advancement. After, indeed, centu- 
ries of Christianity, the white races have not much to boast 
of. In the matter of religion they are much split up ; in mor- 
als there is in our days a strange, sad laxity ; in honesty the 
world is all but dominated by very loose and unjust principles. 
Of course there is progress wonderful progress yet not to 
such an extent as would belie the hopes of the negro's ad- 
vance. 

If, then, the negro may be called a man among men and an 
heir to all the glorious privileges of humanity, and also of 
Christianity, what, we may ask, are the means to be employed 
to place him in possession of his divine heritage ? There is, I be- 
lieve, one true means for his advancement, and that is the negro 
himself, guided and led by the Catholic Church. The first ele- 
ment in the elevation of the black race is the black man him- 
self. To attempt anything for the blacks without making the 
black man himself the chief instrument for good, would be to 
attempt the play of " Hamlet " with the part of Hamlet left out. 

His future demands the building up of his character, and 
this is best done by the mingled efforts of brotherly white men 



i 893.] THEIR CONDITION, PRESENT AND FUTURE. 227 

and worthy black men. His temperament, his passions and 
other inherent qualities, in great measure also his industrial and 
social environments, are beyond his control, and he needs the 
aid of the best men of his own race, but associated with and 
not divorced from the co-operation of the best of the white 
race. In the formation of his character, which is his weak spot, 
chief stress should be laid on moral training and education. Ex- 
ternal influences, controlled by noble men and women of both 
races, will count for more with him than with us. We can 
hardly appreciate how much the negro has to contend with 
while making his moral growth, for neither the antecedents nor 
surroundings of our black countrymen are calculated to draw 
out the noblest side of human nature. That personal encourage- 
ment to well-doing, to ambition to rise above degrading circum- 
stances so necessary to all of us, so indispensably so to him, 
the black man rarely receives. Neither by nature nor by tradi- 
tional training can the colored people, taken as a body, stand 
as yet upon the same footing of moral independence as their 
white brethren. The careful, patient, and Christian intervention 
of the whites and the best of the blacks working together in 
using all the means demanded for the formation of manhood 
and womanhood is their right as well as their need in the pre- 
sent hour. They must be given the ample charity of Christ in 
their development, just as they have been given the full equal- 
ity of citizenship. And in all this Catholics should lead the 
way. The influence of Catholics should be extended to foster 
and develop in the colored race those traits which tend to impart 
a sterling, self-reliant character. 

Catholics may do very much. We are a large proportion, if 
not a majority, in many labor organizations. Let us welcome 
black working-men to every equality. We have very many influ- 
ential Catholics in public life. Let them take sides in matters 
touching the blacks under the guidance of Catholic principles. 
There are about nine thousand priests in the land ; let every 
priest exert an influence of sympathy in his personal dealings 
with the colored people of his vicinity. Perhaps there are 
twenty thousand religious teachers who, in their institutions, 
should receive negro boys and girls without discrimination. If 
Catholics, thus in possession of a vast power for moral elevation, 
give the right hand of fellowship to their black countrymen in 
all civil and personal relations, the work of converting them will 
be easy. Nor can we Catholics afford to ignore them or ex- 
clude them. For if we should do so, then the name " Catho- 



228 THE NEGRO RACE: [Nov., 

lie " would be a misnomer when applied to the American 
Church, and we should sink into the position of a sect. The 
negroes, as things stand, care nothing for the Catholic Church. 
Why should they? What has the Catholic Church done for 
them ? But they would be the most ungrateful people earth 
ever bore if they should forget what our non-Catholic country- 
men have done and are doing for them in every relation of 
life. 

Turning again to ourselves, let every one of us in private 
life, whether laymen, priests, or religious, bear in mind that it 
is not enough to give a despised race their legal rights, but 
that Christian principle exacts a special regard for race suscep- 
tibilities. The Irish and Germans and Italians resent the terms, 
" Paddy," and " Dutchman," and " Dago," so let us cease to call 
the colored people " Niggers " and " Darkies," even in private 
conversation ; and in every other way let us do unto the black 
people as we should wish to be done by were we blacks our- 
selves. Let us bear in mind that among whites of every kind 
there is an immense amount of partly Christian and partly nat- 
ural tradition, which is weak among the blacks by no fault of 
their own. There is the home, the domestic fireside, the respect 
for Sunday, the sense of respectability, the weight of the re- 
sponsibilities of life, the consciousness of duty, the love of 
honesty, which is regarded as true policy, the honor of the 
family name, the fear of disgrace, together with the aspirations 
for a share in the blessings and privileges which our country 
and civilization afford. And while very many of our white 
countrymen are not Catholics, and are even but nominal Chris- 
tians, still these weighty influences wield a potent charm for 
good over their lives. 

In regard to the negro race, however, these hardly exist ; at 
best they may be found in isolated cases, though it is true that 
very encouraging signs of them are seen occasionally. Yet a 
vital part in the natural development of the negro will be se- 
cured by these elements, the sense of responsibility, the dignity 
as well as duty of labor, and, lastly, self-denial and thrift. 

All these sit too lightly on the negroes. Care for the future 
they know not ; and although they labor well enough, yet they 
lack thrift. Their cheerful dispositions lighten much of their 
sorrows ; and their love for music also soothes full many an 
evil day and dismal night. A patient, suffering race are they, 
whose sorrows are sure to win for them the fulness of divine 
blessings. Poverty and lowliness were characteristics of the 



1893.] THE IK CONDITION, PRESENT AND FUTURE. 229 

Messias; they are two marked traits in the negro race. They 
too are, as it were, "A leper, and as one stricken by God and 
afflicted." Surely, if fellow-suffering creates a bond of sympa- 
thy, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ must deeply sympathize 
with, and love, the negro race. 

We have intimated that the Catholic Church has accomplished 
little for the conversion of the negroes. It is but just to add 
here what is really being done. 

From the official report of the episcopal commission charged 
with the distribution of the annual collection for the negro mis- 
sions we learn that during the six years of its existence $220,220 
have been distributed among negro missions, and as much more 
among Indians. 

There are at present twenty-eight priests laboring among the 
negroes exclusively, who are in charge of thirty churches. Of 
course they do not include the many more in Maryland, Ken- 
tucky, Louisiana, Missouri, and elsewhere whose churches are 
partly for whites and partly for blacks. 

Since 1888, when the reports began to be published, the 
average number of adult converts yearly is about 670, while 
every year there were 4,500 children baptized. Moreover, twenty- 
odd different orders of white women have charge of 108 schools, 
in which assemble 7,884 pupils. The orphanages and other in- 
stitutions for colored children are growing. St. Benedict's Home, 
Rye, N.Y.; the Providence House of Mother Katherine Drexel, 
near Philadelphia; orphanages for boys, in Wilmington, Del., 
and Leavenworth, Kans.; one for girls, as also a foundling 
asylum, in Baltimore, Md., and two other orphan asylums in St. 
Louis, Mo., and New Orleans, La., are all doing good service 
for the homeless children of Ham, while the home for aged 
colored in New Orleans, La., shelters the lingering days of its 
worthy inmates. The night-school and guild in Baltimore and 
the industrial school at Pine Bluff, Ark., are both paving the 
way towards teaching colored children a means of livelihood. 

There are three orders of colored women : the Oblates of 
Baltimore, established in 1829; the Holy Family of New Or- 
leans, dating from 1842, and the Sisters of St. Francis, started 
about five years ago by Bishop Becker, of Savannah. There 
are four sisterhoods exclusively devoted to the negroes : the 
Franciscans from England, who have houses in Baltimore, Rich- 
mond, Norfolk; the Sisters of the Holy Ghost in San Antonio, 
Texas; the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, Mother Katherine 
Drexel's community, in Philadelphia; the Mission Helpers of 



230 THE NEGRO RACE: [Nov., 

Baltimore. These last named are devoted to the home-life and 
training of negro women, visiting the jails, hospitals, and having 
sewing-schools even in private houses. In all about seventy 
Catholic sisters have consecrated, or will shortly consecrate, 
their lives before God's altar for the sake of the sin-laden and 
ignorant images of Christ in ebony setting. 

Unhappily, however, none of our brotherhoods as yet have 
ever wielded a birch in a negro Catholic school. 

The society to which I belong has missions in Maryland, 
Delaware, and Virginia. At our training school, the Epiphany 
Apostolic College, are upwards of sixty young men, of whom 
several are colored, studying the subjects necessary for their 
advance. At St. Joseph's Seminary, our mother-house in Balti- 
more, seventeen seminarians are being trained for the negro 
missions. These young men represent the whole country from 
Maine to Oregon, from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexi- 
co. This large number of aspirants for the negro missions is 
due to the generous co-operation of the bishops and clergy of 
our land, while their support is given us by the noble Catholic 
laity, who in very great numbers subscribe for our little annual 
The Colored Harvest. 

We may fitly close with the sentiment of St. Gregory the 
Great, when contrasting our Lord's conduct in refusing to go 
to the nobleman's dying son, although asked to do so, while 
unasked he went and healed the centurion's servant. 

" He did not deem that the nobleman's son was worthy of 
his presence, but he refused not to help the centurion's ser- 
vant. What is this but a rebuke to earthly pride, which maketh 
us to respect in men their honors and riches rather than that 
Divine Image wherein they are created ? It was not so with 
our Redeemer, who would not go to the son of the nobleman, 
but was ready to come down for the centurion's servant, to 
show that to him the things which are great among men are 
but of little moment, and the things which are little esteemed 
among men are not beneath his notice. 

" Our pride, then, standeth rebuked that pride which maketh 
us forget for the sake of one man that another man is a man 
at all. This pride, as we have said, looketh only at the sur- 
roundings of men, not at their nature, and seeth not that God 
is to be honored in a man because he is a man. Lo ! how the 
Son of God will not go unto the nobleman's son, but is ready 
to go and heal the servant. Of myself I know that if any one's 
servant were to ask me to go to him, I have a sort of pride 



1 893.] THEIR CONDITION, PRESENT AND FUTURE. 



231 



which would say to me, silently inside my heart : Go not ; thou 
wilt lower thyself ; the Papal dignity would be lightly esteemed ; 
thy exalted station will be degraded. Behold how He who 
came down from Heaven doth not deem it below him to go to 
help a servant, and yet I, who am of the earth earthy, shrink 
from being trodden on." {Quoted from the Breviary Office. 
Homily on the Gospel for the Feast of St. Pancratius and Com- 
panions, May 12.) 



St. Josephs Seminary, 

Baltimore, Md., June 24, 1893. 



JOHN R. SLATTERY. 





IN THE NORTH. 

A GOLDEN vapor veils the far-off blue, 
Soft, fleecy clouds like exhalations float ; 
On fitful currents drifts each phantom boat, 
With filmy, tissue sails unfurled to view. 
The scented winds of summer lull and 

woo ; 
The wood is stirred, from many a ruffled 

throat 

Song pours like incense, on its shrines re- 
mote ; 
And all the insect world goes droning too. 



Yet in the wanton sunshine, which she spills 
On rustling grain, on clover blooms, on flowers, 

On glistening disks of leaves, from clear, cold skies, 
As from her heart, there comes a breath that chills; 

And thoughts of pulsing warmth, through tropic hours 
Which thrill the life of all the South, arise. 

EMMA PLAYTER SEABURY. 






HERE IN THE DELIGHTFUL PINE HIGHLANDS STANDS THE COLLEGE. 



MOBILE SUMMERVILLE SPRING HILL. 

N a July day in the year 1704 the good ship Peli- 
can, from Quebec, arrived at the fort where Jean 
Baptiste le Moyne and Sieur de Bienville had 
established a colony. 

It was a wonderful day for that little settlement. 
The fort and the scattered population had only known the rare 
visits of missionary priests. Now Monseigneur St. Vallier, the 
Bishop of Quebec, remembering their spiritual poverty, and mak- 
ing the little fort into a parish, placed it under the special care 
of the Seminary of Foreign Missions. The coming of the Peli- 
can meant the first real establishment of the church in Alabama, 
after two hundred years of heroic missionary labors. 

As far back as 1538 the Sacrifice of the Mass had been of- 
fered in Alabama. De Soto's Spanish expedition, after reach- 
ing Florida, had passed over into Georgia and Alabama. As 
they journeyed along the banks of the Coosa and the Alabama, 
and thence across to the Tombigbee and intervening streams, 
till they reached the Mississippi, they made frequent pauses ; 
VOL. LVIII. 16 



234 MOBILE SUMMERVILLE SPRING HILL. [Nov. 

and at each place of rest the Divine Sacrifice was offered. 
Twelve priests and four friars were in this company. The name 
of Father John de Galligos is the only one that has been pre- 
served. 

De Soto's expedition, though undertaken after greater pre- 
paration and at more cost than any other, was an unfortunate 
one. Shipwrecks, storms, sickness, and losses in battle left only 
a handful of soldiers, one priest, and three friars of this numer- 
ous company. After remaining for a short period among the 
Cherokees, Alibomians, and Choctaws, the expedition was pushed 
westward. After burying De Soto on the banks of the Missis- 
sippi, they passed down into Mexico. 

When next we catch a glimpse of the faith, it is in 1559. A 
Dominican priest, Father Dominic, and a Jesuit, Father Segura, 
journeyed from Pensacola to Mobile, with an escort of Spanish 
soldiers. Finding no church and no vestments, these simple, 
saintly men, vested in the skins of wild beasts and under a cha- 
pel of boughs and moss, offered the Holy Sacrifice. Here, 
among the Alibomians and the Spanish colonists and soldiers, 
they labored for a year. Then they abandoned the Mobile 
mission. 

Here we lose sight of Father Dominic; but Father Segura, 
with the halo of martyrdom won ten years later in Virginia, is 
an unfading picture of that heroic past. 

A century and a half of silence. Then came Jean Baptiste 
le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, soldier, sailor, adventurer, and 
gentleman of New France. From Montreal he came with his 
two brothers, Iberville and Sauville. The two latter, under or- 
ders from the French government, founded colonies and erected 
forts, Iberville at the mouth of the Mississippi and Sauville at 
Biloxi. In the meanwhile the founder of Mobile was looking 
for an advantageous place to settle. The shores of the beauti- 
ful bay filled his fancy. Sauville dying at Biloxi, Bienville was 
ordered to take his place. 

Yielding to his own preference, he located his fort a little 
north and east of Biloxi, and made it the capital of the then 
Louisiana. Honoring the royal French saint, and placing under 
his protection the tribes of Mauvillian Indians, Bienville called 
his settlement and seat of government " Fort St. Louis de la 
Mobile." After successive forts at Dog River, Ship Island, and 
Dauphin Island, it is generally believed that Bienville's final 
choice, the first Mobile, stood where Twenty-Seven Mile Bluff 
now stands. 



236 MOBILE SUMMERVILLE SPRING HILL. [Nov. 

Two Canadian missionaries, Father Davion and Father Ber- 
gier, ministered to the colonists until about 1703. 

I find it a pretty link of past and present that in the same 
set of records in the Cathedral of Mobile where are recorded 
the baptisms of to-day, is inscribed by Father Davion the first 
baptism in the new parish, September 6, 1703, that of an Indian 
girl, " une petite enfante femme appalache" 

A stately record is that which chronicled the induction of 
Father de la Vente as first parish priest of the Church of the 
Immaculate Conception name still of Mobile's Cathedral " in 
presence of Jean Bienville, Lieutenant of the King, command- 
ing the fort ; Peter du Quay de Boisbriant, major ; Nicolas 
de la Salle, scribe and acting commissary." There stand the 
signatures of two centuries ago. Shortly after Bienville had es- 
tablished his colony a church and a little home for the priests 
were here built. It is generally believed that these buildings 
were not located exactly at Mobile, but at Dauphin Island, or 
the adjacent coast of Mississippi Sound. Tradition says that this 
early parochial residence was quite primitive a log-cabin with- 
out doors or windows ; but it has not preserved the details 
as to the mode of ingress and egress ; whether, after the scriptu- 
ral style still in vogue in Arizona the clergymen entered after 
the manner of the sick man who was lowered from the roof to 
the feet of the Saviour, or by the more usual means. 

Some explanation of the ungenerous use of Father de la 
Vente's name on the pages of Pickett's Alabama may be found 
in the crusade that this first parish priest began against the im- 
morality of the colonists. Bienville, the governor, was not ex- 
empt from the general condemnation ; and in the hostility ex- 
cited against the zealous pastor there may be traced a traditional 
lack of justice to his memory. In 1710 Father de la Vente 
returned to France to die. On Father Huve fell the entire 
charge of the parish. He, too, turned towards "the pleasant 
land of France " when, worn out and almost blind, he was 
obliged to resign his mission. His name is last written in the 
records of Mobile Cathedral in 1721. 

The religious as well as the political history of Mobile for 
nearly a hundred years can now be briefly told. 

Bienville founded New Orleans in 1720. Its growth overshad- 
owed Mobile. The colonists left or died out. Down on Dauphin 
Island, at the little church, a Capuchin, Father John Mathew, min- 
istered to the few remaining until 1736. A band of Appalachee 
Indians, ten miles from Mobile, had a chapel that Father Huve 



238 MOBILE SUMMERVILLE SPRING HILL. [Nov. 

had built for them. Father Charles, a Carmelite, visited them 
after Father Huv's departure. These Indians had kept the 
faith for two hundred years, since the days of the Spanish mis- 
sionaries. Names of Jesuits, Carmelites, and Capuchins appear 
as occasional missionaries. The fort was dwindling down. A 
great political change was coming. In 1763 the French flag 
went down before that of England ; and the colonists, the few 
remaining, passed under British law. But to the struggling 
colonial church that change meant leaving a kind protector, in 
France, to fall under the harsh task-master, England. The pe- 
nal laws against Catholics bore as heavily on the colonies as on 
the mother country. The missions were abandoned ; but now 
and then a brave priest would journey down and bring new 
life to the struggling faith. 

Father Ferdinand, the last French priest, returned at inter- 
vals to his little flock. 

A record in 1777 speaks of Father Paul, a Capuchin, coming 
to baptize some negro slaves for the Krebs family. These 
struggling gleams are all we see for seventeen years. Then 
Bernardo Galvez, the gallant Spanish governor of Louisiana, 
dashes into Mobile's history. He captured the fort from the 
English, floated the flag of Spain, and gave every freedom to 
the church. From this conquest of Galvez, in 1780, the church 
records are kept in Spanish. A parish priest, Father Salvador 
de la Esperanza, presides ; the ceremonies of the church are re- 
sumed with much dignity, and even pomp. The Spanish Capu- 
chins are zealous missionaries at this time. But Spanish names 
only do not occur ; French, Irish, English, and Scotch are among 
the colonists. All these years the churches of Pensacola and 
San Augustine, of Florida, were being affiliated by the labors 
of the same missionaries, and have kept pace with Mobile. 

An incident occurred about this time in Florida that in after 
years took an added interest to Mobilians. A carpenter of New 
Smyrna, named Francis Pellicer, seeing the hardships of a 
band of Greeks whom an English colonist, named Mr. Turnbull, 
had imported, braved every danger to journey to Governor 
Moultrie with the story of their wrongs. Redress followed 
speedily. The memory of the brave Pellicer comes down with 
added honor, as the ancestor of Bishops Pellicer and Manucy. 

The last Spanish priest to preside in Mobile was Rev. Vin- 
cent Genin. He left with Spain. In the year 1813 the United 
States took possession ; and Mobile, from the flag of France and 
England and Spain, went under the stars and stripes. 




(1) ANTHONY DOMINIC PELLICER, 
FIRST BISHOP OF SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS. 

(2) MICHAEL PORTIER, 
FIRST BISHOP OF MOBILE. 



(3) DOMINIC MANUCY, 

THIRD BISHOP. 

(4) JOHN QUINLAN, 
SECOND BISHOP. 



240 MOBILE SUMMERVILLE SPRING HILL. [Nov., 

Twelve years had Mobile been in the keeping of the United 
States. From the small population of five hundred, when Span- 
ish rule ended, the city doubled and trebled its population. Its 
growth attracted the attention of the seminary at Quebec. It 
had outgrown its missionary days. These zealous Canadians pro- 
posed that a bishop be appointed. 

A young French priest, Rev. Michael Portier, teaching in a 
seminary in New Orleans, was sent as Vicar-Apostolic of Ala- 
bama and Florida. As the good bishop said : " My diocese 
is as large as all France, and I have two priests and three 
churches." 

A little later the Mobile church was burned, and Bishop 
Portier's only cathedral was a little frame chapel that measured 
thirty feet in length and twenty in breadth. The division of 
dioceses in those days was characterized by a great territorial 
generosity, in due proportion to great scarcity of resources and 
workers. Undismayed by the prospect, Bishop Portier set out 
to see for himself the territory under his charge. He obtained 
a promise from the two priests that they would remain until 
his return. They generously promised ; and it is all the more 
praiseworthy as they actually belonged to New Orleans. 

From its superiority in numbers and promise of greater growth, 
the bishop had selected Mobile as his residence. Going to 
Pensacola, he found a population decreasing and impoverished ; 
the church laid waste and neglected. Passing on to San Augus- 
tine, he found an even more deplorable state of affairs. A 
ruined church and indifferent pastors made his visit one of 
great importance. It was nearly six months later before he 
reached Mobile. The two priests' return to New Orleans and 
the church being burned, left him without any help. A nearly 
fatal illness followed his exertions in visiting his diocese. But 
help was at hand. Another priest was found, and young Mr. 
Chalon, the bishop's cousin, just ordained at Bardstown, joined 
him in Mobile. Realizing the need of foreign aid, the bishop 
went to Europe ; and upon his arrival in Rome was made 
Bishop of Mobile, with his vicariate raised to a diocese. This 
was in 1829. He obtained from his native France the finan- 
cial aid he so sorely needed. Eight zealous young men, five 
priests and three seminarians, were willing to share with him 
the hardships of the church in the new land. 

The end of the year 1829 saw the bishop back in Mobile, 
with his noble band of workers and with sufficient financial aid 
to carry on his work. 



1893-] MOBILE SUMMERVILLE SPRING HILL. 241 

The return of the bishop is quaintly described in the remi- 
niscences of the older population. It is said the poor young 
Frenchmen wept as they served the bishop at his first Mass 




AT SPRING HILL ON THE EASTERN SIDE. 



in the little log church, remembering the stately structures and 
the dignity of worship in their native land. 

It was nearly noon when they reached the city, but the 
bishop at once proceeded to say Mass. After Mass, going to 
the temporary shelter of the bishop, they were met by an an- 
cient colonist, who endeavored to make up by the excess of his 
welcome for the very meagre bill of fare he presented. The 
bishop and his vicar, Rev. Mr. Chalon, were the only ones to 
whom he could offer breakfast. To the others he could only 
give a slice of bread and an apple. Seven o'clock in the even- 
ing still found them fasting and houseless ; but by that time 
they had secured a little hut in the woods, offered them by a 
charitable countryman. Here they repaired. A supper was 
served, with their trunks for a table and chairs, their fingers for 
knives and forks, and afterwards, worn and weary, the bare earth 
of the hut for couches. 



242 MOBILE SUMMERVILLE SPRING HILL. [Nov., 

Through all their hardships Bishop Portier was a true father 
to his priests, sharing equally with them and bearing the greater 
burden of the responsibility. In going back over his heroic his- 
tory, and following his wonderful labors and privations in build- 
ing up his diocese, we who know him by the tender affection 
of our ancestors must bear in mind that Monseigneur Portier was 
a gentleman of the highest breeding and culture. In after years, 
with a flourishing diocese and a prosperous people of elegant 
tastes surrounding him, no social gathering was considered com- 
plete without the presence of this courtly, accomplished prelate. 
The dinners at Spring Hill, the aristocratic neighborhood of his 
beloved college, were not complete unless Monseigneur Portier, 
with his fund of keen Gallic wit and brilliant conversation, was 
present. All that meant improvement to the city had the aid of 
his interest and his scientific European training. It is said that 
to Bishop Portier Mobile is indebted for her original water-supply. 




THE LAKE AT THE COLLEGE. 

The railroad to Dauphin Island, making that fine natural harbor 
Mobile's port of entry, was a favorite project of his ; it is even 
said, originated with him. This project still stands to-day as one 
of Mobile's strong hopes of success. 

When the site of Spring Hill College and three hundred 



1 893.] 



MOBILE SUMMERVILLE SPRING HILL. 



2 4 3 



acres of land adjoining were purchased, the bishop himself helped 
to clear the land and dig the foundation, so eager was he to 
begin this beloved institution. 

Equally earnest was he in securing the foundation of the 




"WE FOUND ROSES IN BLOOM, THOUGH IT WAS WINTER." 

Convent of the Visitation. These two gems of his mitre, these 
two institutions that he so fostered, stand to-day in flourishing 
state and prosperity, and are as he would wish himself the 
lasting monuments to his zeal. 

As one leaves the City of Mobile and goes towards the de- 
clining sun, straight out beyond the sound of trade and toil, 



244 MOBILE SUMMERVILLE SPRING HILL. [Nov. 

he touches a noble avenue, broad and oak-fringed. A couple 
of miles of suburban homes, lovely gardens and spreading trees, 
and then he is at " Summerville." The name fits wonderfully. 
It is a region to suggest perpetual summer, fadeless gardens, 
and everlasting foliage. The air is sweeter as he moves along, 
the breeze blows over the swaying pines, and under a sky as 
blue as Italy's. A glimpse of lofty towers is seen as one peers 
out of the car-window a stately building with goodly expanse 
of acres around it. Through the many spreading oaks and 
back beyond the buildings a clear stream runs merrily a 
" creek " in local parlance, but swift and deep enough to be 
dignified as a " river " in some regions. The whole prospect is 
charming the noble structure, the beautiful lawns, with the 
woodland and river background. 

Should we leave the cars and walk to the gate, an inscrip- 
tion in stone above the post would tell us that this is " The 
Academy and Monastery of the Visitation." 

Going three miles further we begin the ascent of Spring 
Hill. Here, at the summit, we find St. Joseph's College of the 
Jesuits. We have left the city far at our feet. Here in the 
delightful pine highlands, surrounded by miles of forest, stands 
the handsome structure. The walks through the woodlands, 
with the pine-trees fringed with wild jessamine and the hedges 
of Cherokee roses, would tempt one even [if the college were 
not the goal. 

These two institutions are so closely identified with the 
growth of the diocese that the history of Mobile must neces- 
sarily be their history. 

Bishop Portier's earnest desire to establish a house of reli- 
gious women in Mobile seemed to be answered when the be- 
quest of an Irish priest, who died in San Augustine, Florida, 
placed some funds in his hands. The conditions of the bequest 
were that it was to be used in founding a monastery of the 
Visitation Order. Bishop Portier decided to locate it in the sub- 
urbs of Mobile. There was then only one house of this order 
in the United States that of Georgetown, D. C. There Bishop 
Portier applied, and in response to his appeal Mother Made- 
leine Augustine d'Arreger, then superioress at Georgetown, came 
herself to establish the Mobile monastery. " We found roses 
in bloom," writes one of these pioneer religious, "though 
it was winter." January, 1833, they arrived in Mobile. 

Pages might be filled, half-humorous, half-pathetic, of the 
early establishment of the convent. A little hut in the woods 



246 MOBILE SUMMERVILLE SPRING HILL. [Nov., 

was their only monastery while waiting for the building Bishop 
Portier was having erected for them. Their privations and 
struggles are quaintly told, particularly the picture drawn of the 
whole community going in procession to the next neighbor's, 
after crossing a prairie and scaling a hedge, to get water, there 
being none on their own premises. The good neighbor was 
very kind, and seeing the advancing group would send out her 
servants to assist them. 

In the month of May they moved into their new monastery. 
In the four months of their stay these religious had so won on 
the confidence of Mobilians that even their new building soon 
began to be too small for their pupils, and they were obliged 
to add another wing to the building. 

In these pioneer days they speak most gratefully of the 
kindness of their neighbors most of them Protestants, and 
many of whom had never before seen a Catholic nun. In sick- 
ness there were delicacies sent and every assistance offered. 

The name of Colonel Owen is particularly remembered for 
many thoughtful acts. He sent to the sisters a little colored 
girl, one of his slaves, to assist them in their housework; and 
while the building was still unfinished he sent every night two 
of his most faithful colored men to watch the grounds. During 
these years the kindness of Bishop Portier was unremitting ; and 
with it went the generous aid of Fathers Chalon and Loras. 
The latter was confessor to the convent until he was transferred 
to Iowa, to be first Bishop of Dubuque, in 1838. 

Steadily advancing and gaining daily in public esteem, we will 
now leave the good sisters in their new monastery, and turn our 
attention to their neighbor and contemporary, Spring Hill Col- 
lege. We left good Bishop Portier enthusiastically aiding with 
his own hands the rise of this beloved institution. In 1830 the 
college was opened. At first the bishop placed it in the 
hands of the Eudist Fathers ; but it afterwards passed into the 
care of the Society of Jesus, the Rev. Father Gautrelet, S.J., 
being first president of the college. In 1836 it was chartered as 
a university; and in 1840 Pope Gregory XVI. gave the Spring 
Hill faculty the right to confer degrees in theology and phil- 
osophy. 

The fame of the college was soon spread abroad. Scholars 
from every State and from Central and South America flocked 
to its doors. In the ante-bellum days the wealthy planters, the 
majority of whom were Protestants, considered no education 
for their sons equal to that of Spring Hill ; and, in like man- 



1893-] MOBILE SUMMERVILLE SPRING HILL. 247 

ner, no training was so satisfactory for their daughters as the 
gentle, exquisite culture received from the ladies of the Visita- 
tion. So it comes to pass that, in looking over the alumni of 
both institutions to select a few names, I arh confronted with 
the fact that I might as well undertake the genealogy, for 
three generations at least, of almost every well-known family of 
the South-west. 

For over sixty years the alumni of Spring Hill College have 
been represented in every profession ; and distinguished successes, 
in their various lines of life, seem to be the almost unbroken 
rule. Some though, who have left a sacred memory among us, 
I will mention. The cousins, Bishop Pellicer and Bishop Manu- 
cy, were students and seminarians of Spring Hill, ordained by 
Bishop Portier, and labored long in the diocese. They were 
consecrated bishops at the same time ; and Bishop Pellicer 
founded the diocese of San Antonio, as did Bishop Manucy that 
of Brownsville, Texas. 

Rev. R. N. Miles, S.J., the eloquent Jesuit orator and son 
of the distinguished General Miles, was a student and professor 
of Spring Hill. Visiting Europe, he preached in various coun- 
tries, and the fame of his eloquence was spread abroad. It 
was said he could preach equally well in French, German, 
Italian, Spanish, and Latin as in his mother English. Father 
Miles's sudden death in September, 1890, at the Jesuit College 
in New Orleans, was a great grief to his many admirers. He 
had been preaching with unusual power and eloquence a few 
hours before his death. 

Richard Dalton Williams, the Irish poet and patriot, was 
also a teacher here. 

Among the earliest of the Jesuits to reach Spring Hill was 
Father Yenni. He needs no introduction to students familiar 
with his Greek and Latin text-books. This learned Tyrolean 
rests, after fifty years of teaching, in the pretty college grave- 
yard. 

The present college buildings are not the original ones. 
Those were destroyed by fire in 1869. Among the many losses 
in this catastrophe none seemed greater than that of the won- 
derful collection in the museum under charge of the learned 
scientist, Father Cornette. 

The progress of the Visitation Convent was not to be an 
uninterrupted one. In 1840, after seven years' steady growth, 
the good sisters experienced a sad misfortune. The monastery 
was almost entirely destroyed during a thunder-storm. It be- 




(1) HON. G. M. PARKER. 

(2) CLAUDE BEROUJON OF MOBILE. 



(3) RAFAEL PEREZ SANTA MARIA, 

HAVANA, CUBA. 

(4) COL. ROBERT WHITE SMITH. 



1893-] MOBILE SUMMERVILLE SPRING HILL. 249 

came necessary to rebuild, and, as the good old sisters were 
wont to say, every stone of that new building meant a sacrifice. 

Many of the sisters were injured by the falling bricks and 
timber, but none of them fatally. The members of the commu- 
nity at that time speak most feelingly of the unbounded kind- 
ness of their neighbors. A new building was finished in 1850. 
Four years later this new building was burned. The fire was 
even more disastrous than the storm had been, and the sisters 
had to crowd together in the few remaining buildings. 

The sisters again entered a new monastery in 1855. This 
with some substantial remodelling, and the building of a new 
church, is the present abode of the Visitandines of Mobile. In 
their various struggles the sisters have had many true friends, 
both laity and clergy. Each of the four bishops of Mobile has 
been a devoted friend ; Father Bazin, the energetic missionary 
priest, afterwards Bishop of Vincennes, Ind.; Father McGarahan 
and Fathers Loras, Rampon, and the Jesuits of Spring Hill. 

Among the laity the name of the venerable Claude Berou- 
jon is especially remembered. This saintly old French gentle- 
man was a life-long friend. His daughter, one of the most ac- 
complished musicians of her day, entered the order. His esti- 
mable wife, of the fine old Irish name of O'Neil, was with him 
in every good work. Her sister, Miss O'Neil, and another pious 
lady had charge of the many orphans left by the cholera epi- 
demic of 1850, until the Sisters of Charity came in 1851 to 
open an asylum for girls, and the brothers of the Sacred Heart 
one for the boys. The children of Mr. and Mrs. Beroujon were 
educated at the Visitation. A few years ago their grandchildren, 
and, as the great-grandchildren are still young, it is presumed 
the fourth generation will be included in the devoted pupils 
of the Visitation. Another name gratefully repeated in the 
cloister is that of the Hon. Percy Walker. In the year 1837 
he procured a charter for this institution a proceeding which 
meant, at that time, great personal power and independence. 
Know-nothingism was rampant, and the plea of the good sisters 
for an obvious right like this would have been hopeless in the 
hands of a less fair-minded man. This, too, as a simple matter 
of justice; for Mr. Walker had not the sympathy of the same 
faith, not being a Catholic. It was only one of the many acts 
that has made the name of Percy Walker so bright a one on 
the pages of Mobile's history. 

Other kind friends of the Visitation's early years were Mr. 
Robert White Smith and Mr. Gideon Marsena Parker. Mr. 

VOL.LVIII. 17 



250 MOBILE SUMMERVILLE SPRING HILL. [Nov., 

Smith's daughters were pupils. Of his many courtesies I can 
best speak in the words of one of the community: "Though 
not a Catholic, for kindness and generosity he was unsurpassed." 

Mr. Parker was mayor of Mobile and was identified with all 
of the city's good works. His daughters, one of them being as 
highly cultivated a lady as it was ever the good fortune of the 
writer to meet, were educated at the Visitation. This year's 
catalogue contains the names of his grandchildren. 

Across the Gulf, in picturesque Havana, the convent has an 
unfailing friend in Sefior Rafael Perez Santa Maria. This courtly 
Cuban gentleman has left a record in the institution for num- 
berless thoughtful acts. 

So many pupils of the Visitation have left its portals to en- 
ter life in various spheres and many lands, it would be difficult 
to trace even a tithe of them. 

In the cloister itself many distinguished names have been 
borne under the humble black veil. Down in the quiet grave- 
yard of the nuns rests Sister Augustine Barber, whose history, 
with that of the Rev. Virgil Barber, S.J., marks an especial 
event in American Catholic history. 

Another grave is that of Sister Clara Teresa Quays, who 
died about a year ago. She was for years an efficient teacher 
of French and music. The historic prestige of the past and the 
ennobling progress of the present surround with ties of kinship 
this gentle nun. She was a relative of Dr. Rogers, Mr. Glendy 
Burke, Mr. James Freret and Miss Manetta Quays of New Or- 
leans : and the Morgan brothers of New York ; and a descen- 
dant of General Casimir la Coste and the Chevalier de la Ron- 
de, and also of that synonyme for generosity and royal charity 
in the past of Louisiana, the donor of St. Louis Cathedral, Don 
Andres Almonaster y Roxas. So interesting is the personnel of 
nuns and scholars in this lovely retreat, we could linger over 
many attractive names ; but the institution itself must claim a 
word before we depart reluctantly from its portals. 

As one steps into the lofty, cool, airy hall out of the June 
fervor the first impression is one of thorough restfulness. We 
walk along the broad piazza the inevitable "gallery" of the 
South and through the well-stocked library to the pretty study 
hall. The ventilation and airiness of the various rooms and 
corridors is simply perfection. The water-supply through the 
building is abundant and delightful. Down in the recreation 
grounds a charming bath-house, built over the creek, covers a pool 
of limpid clearness where the pupils find much comfort and 



1 



1893-] MOBILE SUMMERVILLE SPRING HILL. 251 

The college and convent started, and two asylums built, 
Bishop Portier turned his attention to the finishing of his new 
cathedral. After the little church had been burned, Bishop Por- 
tier erected a small brick building connected with the Female 
Asylum. This was used as a church until the cathedral was 
dedicated in 1850. The ground upon which the cathedral stands, 
as well as the site of the Female Asylum and the bishop's 
residence, with some adjoining property, was an old Indian 
burying-ground. It was deeded to the church by the Spanish 
crown, during the administration of Governor Bernardo Galvez. 
The church in Bienville's time is supposed to have been situated 
on Royal Street. 

The last service of note held in the old church was a very 
successful mission given by the Paulists then Redemptorists 
Fathers Hecker, Hewit, Walworth, and Deshon. In 1886 the 
Paulists gave another fruitful mission in the cathedral ; and the 
venerable Father Deshon, of the original four, was among the 
missionaries. 

After the dedication of the cathedral the former building 
was used by a German congregation under Father Imsand, S.J. 
This beloved Jesuit was afterwards for many years pastor of 
St. Joseph's Church, and has left a beautiful memory of zeal, 
piety, and unbounded charity. The sin was great and the heart 
hard indeed that could not be touched by the quaint, earnest, 
loving ministrations of this kind father. When he died in Pen- 
sacola the people of Mobile never rested until his body was 
brought back to his dear St. Joseph's. Here he sleeps ; and 
those that knew him pray at his tomb, and teach their children 
and their grandchildren to gather there, as at the shrine of a 
saint. The gloomy jail, the white-washed hospitals, within sight 
of St. Joseph's, have treasured around them tenderest stories of 
Father Imsand's unfailing sympathy for every form of human 
misery. 

The beautiful retreat for the sick, Providence Infirmary, un- 
der the Sisters of Charity, was scarcely completed, under Bishop 
Portier's fostering care, when he himself was obliged to seek 
rest there. Death found him in beautiful resignation, on the 
1 5th of May, 1859. 

The name of Father McGarahan is especially dear to the 
older Mobilians, during the later part of Bishop Portier's ad- 
ministration, so active was he in all the good works carried 
forward at that time. Especially tender, too, is the memory of 
Father Hackett, so unceasing was his charity. 

When, in 1826, Bishop Portier was consecrated there was in 



252 MOBILE SUMMERVILLE SPRING HILL. [Nov., 

the town of Cloyne, County Cork, Ireland, an infant boy of a few 
months who, in the coming years, would wear the same mitre 
and bear the same cross. 

John Quinlan ! The eye fills and the pen falters. " The ten- 
derest heart that ever the world's strange windings trod." From 
the Seminary of Mount St. Mary's of the West the young 
Quinlan was called to be Bishop of Mobile. Able, learned, zeal- 
ous, great plans for his new work may have been in his mind ; 
but his was to be the mission of mercy. Scarcely had he as- 
sumed his mitre when the terrible war cloud broke over the 
land. He had just returned from Europe, with several young 
priests, to establish new parishes and widen out the work. 
But the dead, the dying, the sorrowing claimed their care. 
The priests were sent to the battle-fields, the bishop himself 
going over the fatal field of Shiloh. After the war bishop and 
priests and people went bravely to work. Churches sprang up 
all over the State ; parochial schools for both sexes in every 
parish of the city. 

Convents and schools were established in Montgomery by the 
Sisters of Loretto, and also in Birmingham ; in Selma by the 
Ladies of the Sacred Heart ; in Tuscaloosa by the Ursuline 
Sisters ; in Cullman by the Sisters of Notre Dame ; and in Tus- 
cumbia by the Sisters of St. Benedict. To the Jesuits was given 
the mission of Selma and its vicinity; while to the order of 
St. Benedict were allotted the twelve northern counties of 
Alabama. 

Bishop Quinlan was a most eloquent speaker, and the cathe- 
dral was always thronged to hear him preach ; even as it was 
when its vaulted roof rang with the brilliant oratory of the 
poet-priest, Father Ryan. In March, 1883, Bishop Quinlan died, 
and in his death his people felt as if a father had been taken 
from them. 

Bishop Manucy, who had been pastor of churches in Mobile 
and Montgomery, was called from his Vicar-Apostolic of Browns- 
ville, Texas, to be the new incumbent. His health failed rapid- 
ly, and a few months after his appointment he asked to be re- 
lieved. In spite of illness his zeal for the glory of God was un- 
bounded. It seems impossible that one so near the grave could 
have accomplished so much for the spiritual and temporal 
relief of the diocese. But he knew the end was near ; and when 
he stood up in the cathedral to present to his people his suc- 
cessor, Bishop O'Sullivan, it was a last farewell. In a few weeks 
the cathedral was again filled to attend the last rites over the 

crnnH nlH HicTirr 



I893-] 



MOBILE SUMMERVILLE SPRING HILL. 



253 



Bishop O'Sullivan was consecrated September 20, 1885, com- 
ing from the diocese of Baltimore, where he had been a priest 
for eighteen years. It is superfluous to speak of his work for 
the past eight years. There are stronger sermons, in stone, 
than my pen might trace that attest his zeal. There is the 
beautiful cathedral, finished without and frescoed within, the 




FOUNTAIN AND GARDEN AT SPRING HILL COLLEGE. 

stateliest church edifice in the South. There are ten new churches 
scattered over the State, new schools and societies established, 
and a diocese free of debt and prospering daily. 

Bishop O'Sullivan's work is written all over, to the furthest 
limit and remotest corner of his administration. 

It is a wonderful panorama that unfolds to our backward 
glance, from the days of the chapel of boughs and moss, and 
the priests in the skins of wild beasts, and the handful of sava- 
ges, to the stately cathedral, the churches everywhere, the Catho- 
lics counted by the thousands, and the faith growing day by 
day in fervor and in numbers. 



Mobile. 



M. E. HENRY-RUFFIN. 



254 THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN MYTH. [Nov., 



THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN MYTH. 

BY BOKARDO BRAMANTIP, 
Huxleyan Professor of Dialectics in the University of Congo. 

(From the Thirty-seventh Century Magazine, April, A.D. 




AST New Year's day the Eighteenth Centennial 
of the Emancipation Proclamation of Abraham 
Lincoln was celebrated with great e'clat. Where- 
ever African civilization has extended, through 
the four quarters of the globe, the children of 
Africa, and the nations they have civilized, celebrated the festi- 
val with joy and enthusiasm. Never to be forgotten was the 
spectacle on the banks of the Victoria-Nyanza, at the unveiling 
of the statue of Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation 
the master-piece of the great Natalian sculptor, Durango. 

The president of the Universal Confederation of Nations pre- 
sided in person over the ceremonies, which were witnessed by 
the assembled multitudes of Africa's sons, and pilgrims of every 
race and clime on the face of the earth. 

It could not but impress all with the thought that this is, in 
truth, an era of good feeling and universal brotherhood. 

Now, I have no disposition to cast a shadow on the general 
rejoicing by the expression of any disagreeable scepticism, and 
it is not altogether a pleasurable undertaking to dispel the 
happy delusion under which my countrymen are laboring in 
honoring an event which, as I maintain, is not known ever to 
have taken place. On the contrary, in a certain way, I, and 
all other advanced thinkers, who look upon the popular tradi- 
tion of Abraham Lincoln and his Emancipation Proclamation 
as a myth of the dark ages, may consistently, notwithstanding 
our want of faith, unite with our African brethren in this jubi- 
lee, precisely as the Agnostics of the nineteenth century took 
part in the festivities of Christmas. All we ask is to be allowed 
to accept the tradition in a rational way ; that is to say, as the 
concrete poetic or legendary expression of great abstract under- 
lying ideas as, for instance, that " Truth crushed to earth shall 
rise again " and the inherent power of the African race to at- 
tract to itself as to a magnet the moral forces of the universe, 



l %93'~\ THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN MYTH. 255 

in the eternal struggle for the enfranchisement of the soul and 
the elevation of humanity. 

But unfortunately a narrow and fanatical spirit seems to 
have taken possession of those who managed this latest Abraham 
Lincoln centennial. This spirit found very obnoxious expression 
by the orator of the day at the unveiling of the Lincoln statue, 
to which I have just alluded. He was no less a personage than 
the Principal of the Law School of the University of Uganda. 

He seized the opportunity to speak in a censorious, not to 
say contemptuous tone, of those who do not accept the popular 
story as " gospel truth," even going so far as to charge them 
with juggling with history. 

I feel entirely justified, under this provocation, in speaking 
out my mind freely on this matter. 

I had not supposed that any man who had a reputation for 
scholarship to lose would venture, at this day, to avow his be- 
lief in the Abraham Lincoln legend. But it seems I am mis- 
taken. For the distinguished principal of the Uganda Law 
School boldly avows that he fully and firmly believes in the 
literal truth of this extraordinary story. Far be it from me to 
rebuke his temerity. Indeed, I cannot forbear to express my 
profound admiration for the courage he thus displays in facing 
the ridicule of the advanced thinkers of this thirty-seventh cen- 
tury. Only when he makes the astounding assertion that this 
story is true beyond all reasonable doubt, and is accepted as 
true by the best scholars of every age since the nineteenth cen- 
tury and proceeds to give a long list of historians who, as he 
asserts, express this belief, I feel called upon to warn the Afri- 
can public that they ought not to listen to this man. 

It is galling to our pride to be told that our brethren in 
America were indebted for their freedom to a white man one 
of the degenerate Caucasian race. 

But what is to be expected of a lawyer when dealing with a 
question of evidence ? 

One might as soon be expected to listen patiently to a 
theologian venturing to enter the lists of controversy with a 
professional scientist upon a question of Biblical history or criti- 
cism. He is to be distrusted from the outset. 

We all know how vigorously and how effectively in the nine- 
teenth century the Aristotle of our New Dialectics warned the 
British public not to pay any attention to theologians when dis- 
puting questions of Biblical history and criticism with a profes- 
sor of biology. 



256 THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN MYTH. [Nov., 

It is well known that the very chair which the principal of 
the Law School fills was endowed by a wealthy and credulous 
admirer of Abraham Lincoln Marino Tobago upon the express 
condition that every year, on Emancipation Day, its occupant 
should deliver a panegyric on the great American President 
and his services to the African race. 

Is it not apparent, then, that here was a direct bribe to per- 
vert history ? For since it would be absurd to deliver a pane- 
gyric on a man who never lived, or to extol his services to the 
African race if he never rendered any service, the learned princi- 
pal could not, of course, be expected to investigate the questions 
of Lincoln's existence and services with an unbiased mind, at 
the risk of reaching conclusions which would make it impossible 
for him, with any self-respect, to retain his place. 

The learned principal of the Law School displays too much 
feeling for an historical critic. He manifests in his address a 
profound veneration for the martyred President. He evidently 
believes this story with his whole soul. 

This alone disqualifies him from exercising a dispassionate 
and impartial judgment upon the questions at issue. 

The scientist or the Agnostic, on the other hand, never has 
any fixed belief, and is as ready to change his views for newer 
theories as he is to change his clothes with the rise and fall of 
the thermometer. 

It is obvious, then, that he is incomparably better fitted to 
get at the truth of any historical question than a man who is 
handicapped by strong convictions. But let this pass. 

I now propose to examine critically the popular tradition, 
upon the accepted principles of agnostic dialectics, as they have 
been transmitted to us from the great masters of the art in the 
nineteenth century. 

What is the story we are asked to believe ? Stripped of 
everything that is non-essential, reduced to what its advocates 
claim is the assured residuum after all controversy, it is briefly 
stated as follows : 

About the year 1860, on the eve of the great civil war in 
America, there suddenly appeared as a great public leader a 
man of obscure origin, named Abraham Lincoln. 

Although previously wholly unknown to the great mass of 
the people, he was chosen President of the Republic, and as 
the principles he represented were looked upon with abhorrence 
and fear by nearly one-half the nation, his election precipitated 
a rebellion. But he showed himself from the very outset to be 






1893-] THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN MYTH. 257 

a man of destiny the greatest of statesmen and the wisest of 
rulers. During the course of the war, and, as it is commonly 
stated, on the first day of January, 1863, he issued a Proclama- 
tion emancipating the slaves everywhere throughout the territory 
in possession of the rebels. This was practically tantamount 
to universal emancipation. Thus was the slavery of the African 
man abolished. He suppressed the Rebellion and saved his 
country. 

Elected to the Presidency a second time, shortly after his in- 
auguration, while attending the theatre on a Good Friday night, 
he was assassinated by an actor who, after committing this hor- 
rible crime, leaped upon the stage exclaiming, " Sic semper 
tyrannis the South is avenged ! " But although the theatre was 
crowded with people warmly devoted to the President, his mur- 
derer was allowed to withdraw unmolested. From the moment 
of his assassination Abraham Lincoln was looked upon as a 
martyr, and by the African people in America as their " Moses," 
who had led them out of the Egypt of their bondage. Such is 
the popular tradition. 

Now, I frankly admit at the outset that I see no sufficient 
reason to doubt that such a man as Abraham Lincoln lived in 
America in the nineteenth century, and that he was President of 
the United States during the civil war. 

This admission ought to be set down by my readers to my 
credit ; proving, as it does, my extreme fairness and moderation. 
At the same time I guard myself against being supposed to af- 
firm that Abraham Lincoln did ever actually exist, or was ever 
actually President of the United States. I say this much by 
way of forewarning, as it is possible the exigencies of this con- 
troversy may require me to withdraw the admission just made ; 
for there is, as is well known, a brilliant school of historical 
critics who more or less question the historical reality of Abra- 
ham Lincoln, and the genuineness of all the alleged contemporary 
and early accounts of his times. 

But, excepting so far as I have now admitted, I maintain that 
the popular story of Abraham Lincoln is unhistoric fit only to 
be relegated to the category of myths. 

There is no good reason to think that he was ever re-elected 
to the Presidency, for we have no certain record of any official 
act of his subsequent to the close of his term of four years. 
He seems to have been succeeded immediately at the close of 
such term by one Andrew Johnson. 

The story of his assassination suggests in all its details the 



258 THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN MYTH. [Nov., 

hand of a novelist or a playwright. The time chosen for the 
tragedy, a Good Friday night ; the place, a crowded theatre ; 
the assassin, a professional actor of tragedy ; the murderer's 
dramatic leap upon the stage, brandishing the weapon of death 
and exclaiming in dramatic tones, " Sic semper tyrannis! " (which, 
it may be remarked, was simply the legend of the State of Vir- 
ginia) ; the vast audience paralyzed with amazement or fear all 
these accessories seem like skilfully arranged settings for the 
tragic climax of a romance or a drama. All I here claim, how- 
ever, is that the story looks artificial and suspicious on its face. 

It is wholly immaterial that the story appears to have been 
generally believed by the American people in the latter part of 
the nineteenth century, or in the following three or four centu- 
ries ; such ancient belief does not even tend to prove that the story 
is true it is rather a reason for doubting it. It is essential for 
the higher historical criticism the sine qua non of its possibility 
that the speculations of modern critics should not be handicapped 
by the beliefs of the people, or by the views of the so-called 
historians of early ages before the dawn of Scientific Historical 
Criticism. For whatever any believer in this myth may say to 
the contrary, it is simply a fact that history I mean true scien- 
tific history had its origin with the African Renaissance. All 
that transpired before the overthrow of Aryan power in Europe 
and America, and the final triumph of African supremacy in 
both hemispheres, belongs to the " Dark Ages." 

I know the Law School principal, like most others of his cloth, 
professes to take a totally different view of this matter. In or- 
der to be perfectly fair, I give what he has to say on this sub- 
ject in his address in his own words, as follows : 

" Conceding that posterity is better qualified than contempora- 
ries to form a just estimate of the character of public men and 
measures, and to discover through the development of institutions, 
whether civil or religious, the nature and inherent power of their 
germs, yet questions as to the existence of alleged historical facts 
are a wholly different matter. The general belief of the Ameri- 
can people living, say, in the year 1893, and subsequently in 
that century, or in the centuries immediately following, in the 
popular story of Abraham Lincoln's life and death, and in the 
fact of the Emancipation Proclamation, and that such narratives 
as Horace Greeley's American Conflict and General Grant's Per- 
sonal Memoirs, and the autobiographies of General Sherman and 
General Sheridan were authentic and credible, ought to be re- 
ceived as settling these questions for all time. 



1 893.] THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN MYTH. 259 

"The contemporaries of Lincoln, or those living in the times 
immediately following, were vastly better qualified to pass upon 
these matters than scholars living in our own day ; and while 
in the lapse of time the evidence upon which they acted must, 
in the nature of things, have become to a great extent lost or 
impaired, its import is crystallized and preserved for all time 
in the verdict of contemporaneous and early common belief. 
Upon the same principle, in the interpretation of ancient docu- 
ments, the wisdom of centuries finds its expression in the maxim 
of the common law * Contemporanea expositio est optima et for- 
tissimo, in lege? 

" These questions ought to be treated, then, as res judicata. 
It is about as irrational to refuse thus to accept the verdict of 
Lincoln's contemporaries, and of those who lived in early times 
succeeding him, and to insist on rewriting his history de novo, 
after the lapse of eighteen centuries, as it would be to insist on 
settling the question of the source of the Nile by making obser- 
vations at its mouth, and refusing to credit the report of those 
who had looked upon its head-waters. Nor can it be doubted 
that the generations immediately succeeding received and re- 
tained the general belief of Lincoln's contemporaries on those 
matters in its essential integrity, and transmitted it in their 
turn to those who came after them. 

" It is inconceivable that in the twentieth or succeeding cen- 
turies the original tradition should have become obliterated, or 
a new belief imposed upon mankind. 

" Shakspere thus illustrates the persistency and integrity of 
even oral tradition, in a dialogue between the young Prince 
Edward and the Duke of Buckingham on their way to the 
Tower of London : 

" Prince I do not like the Tower, of any place. 

Did Julius Caesar build that place, my lord ? 
" Buckingham He did, my gracious lord, begin that place ; 
Which, since, succeeding ages have re-edified. 
" Prince Is it upon record, or else reported 

Successively from age to age, he built it ? 
" Buckingham Upon record, my gracious lord. 

" Prince But say, my lord, it were not register'd, 

Methinks the truth should live from age to age, 
As 'twere retail'd to all posterity, 
Even to the general all-ending day."* 
" If this be true of purely oral tradition, and true as to a 

*" Richard III., "act iii. scene i. 



260 THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN MYTH. [Nov., 

matter of comparatively little importance, what likelihood is 
there that the contemporary record of events of such vast import 
as those we are now considering was lost or falsified ? 

" To believe this to have occurred is to yield, at one and 
the same time, to the extreme of credulity and the extreme of 
scepticism. But these extremes naturally meet together." 

Thus far ^the learned principal of the Law School. 

Now, I submit that his notions are wholly effete and untena- 
ble. Had they prevailed, neither the Tubingen school in the 
nineteenth century, nor the Timbuctoo school in the thirty- 
seventh, with all their brilliant and varied theories, would have 
had a raison d$tre. 

It would have followed, for instance, that the results reached 
by Origen in the third century, Eusebius in the fourth, and St. 
Jerome in the fifth, all in substantial accord in settling the au- 
thenticity and text of the New Testament, would never have 
been superseded by the speculations of Strauss or Baur or Renan. 

It is true that Origen, Eusebius, and St. Jerome were men 
of profound scholarship (I mean, of course, for their age), and 
unquestionably had the advantage of vastly more material, in 
the way of early manuscripts (since lost), than the critics of the 
nineteenth century. 

But the latter made up for this disadvantage by the vast 
increase of the "historical temper" upon which our Agnostic 
forefathers of the nineteenth century so well insisted. 

While in the lapse of time early manuscripts disappeared, 
their place was more than supplied by the "imaginative" ele- 
ment, which as a great authority, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, says, 
is essential for the higher criticism. In her New Reformation 
she tersely describes the advanced school of higher criticism as 
" half-scientific, half-imaginative." * 

Of these two elements it is obvious the " imaginative " is 
by far the most important, and has chiefly contributed to the 
brilliant results in Biblical criticism to which the school has 
mainly devoted its attention. 

I insist upon the opposite of my opponent's thesis, and 
maintain that critics of the thirty-seventh century are better 
qualified to pass upon the truth of the popular story of Abra- 
ham Lincoln, and the authenticity, competency, and credibility 
of such narratives as Greeley's American Conflict and Grant's 
Personal Memoirs, than were those living in the twentieth or 
in the latter part of the nineteenth century. 

* Nineteenth Century, March, 1889, p. 457. 






1893-] THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN MYTH. 261 

The beliefs of the first century were ignored by the critics 
of the nineteenth as superstitious and incredible. The scholar- 
ship of the nineteenth century seems to us childish, crude, and 
inadequate. A thousand years hence the best results of modern 
criticism will doubtless be looked upon as mere literary curiosi- 
ties, void of intrinsic value. And thus it must ever go on with 
the advance of thought (or of time) to the end. With each 
succeeding age the work must be done over again, and history 
must be rewritten or " reconceived " (as Mrs. Ward puts it), 
in the light of modern ideas. It follows from this discussion 
that in dealing with the Lincoln legend we should start with a 
" tabula rasa" disregarding the beliefs and the so-called histo- 
rians of early times, and proceed to reconstruct or " recon- 
ceive " the tradition, so as to conform it to the advanced views 
of modern critics. 

The story is the outgrowth of " hero-worship," so prevalent 
in the nineteenth century. The Aryan race was given to the 
love of the wonderful, and to the idolatry of its great men. 
We have this story of Lincoln, just as we have the stories of 
Columbus, of Washington, of Cromwell, of Charlemagne, of 
King Arthur, of Robin Hood, of Romulus and Remus, of the 
Cid, of Amadis de Gaul, and of Don Quixote. They are one 
and all the outgrowth of this love of the wonderful and of this 
" hero-worship," and as Huxley said of miracles, I may with 
equal appositeness say of these stories : " If one is false all 
may be false." * 

The age lacked " the historical temper." It was prone to 
believe every marvellous story told of its heroes. We have 
learned to expect such stories in the narratives of that time, 
but they are no longer acceptable to the dispassionate criticism 
of an age of scientific thought. 

As was said by Mrs. Ward (in her New Reformation) of his- 
torians before her time, we may now say of the historians of 
the nineteenth century : " They represented the exceptional, the 
traditional, the miraculous, and they have had to give way to 
the school representing the normal, the historical, the rational."f 

I reject this story, then, because it is not only " traditional," 
but also because, as viewed in the light of the present day, it 
is "exceptional." 

Precisely formulated, the postulate, or first principle, upon 
which I reject this tradition as a myth is as follows : It is im- 
probable and incredible that such a career as that which the 

* Essays upon some controversial questions (1893), p. 374. 
f Nineteenth Century, March, 1889, p. 467. 



262 THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN MYTH. [Nov., 

tradition ascribes to Abraham Lincoln should occur in the thir- 
ty-seventh century ; and if so, it is improbable and incredible 
that it occurred in the nineteenth century. By a similar postu- 
late, or first principle, our Agnostic predecessors in the nineteenth 
century made short work of the Gospels. The writers of the 
Gospels reported the "miraculous." And as miracles since the 
apostles were assumed to be improbable and incredible, there 
was no good reason why they should be thought probable and 
credible in the apostles' time. 

The Agnostic controversialist of the nineteenth century did 
not assert, indeed, with Hume, as an a priori principle, that 
miracles were impossible, or not, theoretically, susceptible of 
proof. On the contrary, he did not admit any such thing as an 
a priori principle at all. 

He merely said, like the Dutch justice of the peace : " I will 
consider the evidence, and in four days I will decide the case 
in favor of the plaintiff." 

Possibly, however, my opponent may deny my first principle, 
and maintain that such a career as Lincoln's is not incredible, 
and that it might be, or even that it has been, paralleled in 
modern times. 

Well, there were those in the nineteenth century who denied 
the first principle upon which our Agnostic forefathers based 
their assault upon the Gospels. These people denied that mira- 
cles were incredible or impossible, either in the time of the 
apostles or since their time, and affirmed, on the contrary, 
" that the Supreme Being has wrought miracles on earth ever 
since the time of the apostles," as well as in and before their time. 

This struck at the root of the entire argument against the 
Gospel narratives, and it would be necessary, as against people 
who thus argued, to prove that miracles were incredible at any 
time. But those who thus objected were either Romanists or 
no better than Romanists, and of course it would have been a 
waste of time for a scientist or an Agnostic to attempt to rea- 
son with people of that class. 

If, however, my opponent requires me to demonstrate my first 
principle, to wit, that the reported career of Abraham Lincoln 
is " exceptional " and incredible, viewed in the light of the thirty- 
seventh century, I will proceed at once to do so. 

ist. It remains to be proved that there has been any career 
at all analogous to that ascribed by the popular tradition to 
Abraham Lincoln, or as "exceptional" as his, since the nine- 
teenth century, and especially in our own day. 

All T ran ca\r ic if will K* i A'.CC. ~,,1 *. :.~U 4--. ~ f ,' ,, ( . , ~ A<-rn/~>c_ 



i 893.] THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN MYTH. 263 

tic on this point. Indeed, any proof offered may be at once re- 
jected as being testimony to the "exceptional." 

2d. " Hero-worship " is unknown to modern civilization. 

Individualism is looked upon as the bane of equality and a 
menace to the social equilibrium. Ever since the African Re- 
naissance it has been the business of the state to educate the 
people, up and down, to a common level. 

The same school for all the . same school books, the same 
code of morals and manners carefully prescribed by the legis- 
lature, the same rules for dress and for the daily routine of oc- 
cupations, including the same physical exercises, together with a 
careful adjustment of marriages under state supervision, and a 
careful selection of offspring fit to survive ; all this has secured 
the complete equality of the people, mentally, morally, and 
physically. 

It is true that a great thinker of the nineteenth century, 
John Stuart Mill, protested against this grand system of gov- 
ernmental education, stigmatizing it as "a mere contrivance for 
moulding people to be exactly like one another."* 

Precisely. And it is a matter of congratulation that Mill's 
protest was unheeded. The very thing he deprecated was 
the thing aimed at, i.e., " moulding people to be exactly like 
one another," and the elimination of "individuality of character 
and diversity in opinions and mode of conduct." With such 
success has the levelling process been carried out, that no citi- 
zen is in any respect the superior or the inferior of any other 
citizen. Neither we nor our fathers have ever known any other 
state of things. 

" Hero-worship," a thing impossible at the present day, is 
known to us only through the legends of former ages. 

It follows from all this that the story of Abraham Lincoln, 
being improbable and incredible in the light of the present day, 
must be rejected as a myth of the " Dark Ages." Q. E. D. 

As the immediate occasion for this discussion was the alleged 
Emancipation Proclamation, it is proper I should give especial 
attention to the question of its authenticity. 

But if I succeed in discrediting that supposititious document, 
I discredit at the same time the entire popular tradition, of 
which it is a component part. For falsum in uno,fahum in omnibus. 

I submit, then, the following six reasons for disbelieving the 
historic truth of the alleged Emancipation Proclamation. 

* Mill on Liberty, American edition, 1863, p. 205. 

NOTE. This clever satire on the tactics of modern Agnostics will be concluded in the 
December number. ED. C. W. 



1 




264 THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. [Nov., 

THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. 

PLANNING THE CAMPAIGN.* 

O definite scheme for conducting meetings com- 
posed mostly of non-Catholics has been yet adopt- 
ed, but the mingling of doctrinal and moral dis- 
courses seems to me prudent, adding such devo- 
tional exercises as all can join in. It is agreed 
that controversy should be- avoided, disputation being a slow 
method of persuasion. It is hard to conquer champions without 
embittering their followers. 

One sometimes insists too strongly on logic when dealing 
with non-Catholics, and although their minds are driven to the 
water they cannot be made to drink. I hope to gain attention 
by presenting the great moral truths speaking of conscience, sin, 
the fate of the dead, and the like. What everybody is curious 
about will suggest the choice of the doctrinal subjects : Can we 
get along without the Bible ? Can we commune with the souls 
of the departed? What is the use of a church-society? or thus: 
Church membership, its uses and abuses ; Creed or no creed, etc. 
But the impression is gaining ground that the main thing is 
to present the Catholic view of a moral life, as an inducement 
to consider the entire question of the true religion. Unless other- 
wise informed before opening next September, I will give the 
non-Catholic brethren a regular mission, minus the sacraments 
and plus a considerable access of doctrinal preaching. It is to 
be hoped that a revelation of the inner life of the typical Cath- 
olic, the longings and the joys, the struggles and the triumphs 
of human nature under the guidance of Catholic truth and the 
Catholic aids of religion, will of itself recommend the church to 
favorable study, and that is the main thing with very many out- 
side. Let us but hammer away at vice with all the scorn we 
are masters of, exalt virtue with true Christian enthusiasm, and 
prejudice will melt away. This will also draw wicked men to 
hear us and to hear the church. St. Paul affirmed that his mis- 
sion was to preach Christ and him crucified, but when face to 
face with the pagan sinner, Felix, his preaching of Christ was 

* These thoughts occurred'to me some time before beginning, and were jotted down. 



. 



1893-] THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. 265 

that " he reasoned of righteousness, temperance, and judgment 
to come." 

Queries can be answered either as asked from the audience, 
or handed in to me in writing, and meantime a great amount 
of missionary literature should be distributed. 

The advantages of this plan are obvious on reflection. It is 
integral Catholicity, it is concrete religion, as far as the spoken 
word is concerned. It treats not only of the true and false, but 
also of the good and bad in man's relation to his Maker, and 
these in conjunction or in contrast. The missionary in this way 
strikes with both hands the right against vice and the left 
against error. 

Such a plan is also far more likely to draw hearers than any 
other, for pure argumentation, while hard to get up, is harder 
to make pleasing to a large audience. 

The mission plan is easily made attractive, embraces a 
large variety of subjects of vivid interest, and opens for one's 
cultivation the wide field of the human emotions in addition to 
that of the intellect. A third advantage is that, whether con- 
verts are made to the true religion or not, one is sure to make 
better men and women. A final reason, and one of no small force, 
is that the lecturer can with more confidence ask for a collection 
if he gives a consideration of greater or less value to all. But 
no man willingly hires his own hangman, even when he con- 
fesses that his execution is merited. 

So there's the plan. Will it be carried out? 



THE FIRST NON-CATHOLIC MISSION. 



This village of Beechville* claims fifteen hundred inhabitants, 
the adjacent country being fairly well under cultivation. For 
town and country there are Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, 
Lutheran, and Catholic churches, the last named having less than 
fifty families. The others are in the usual state of rural Protes- 
tant congregations, which live mainly in hopes of better days. 
The first four have resident ministers, ours being visited every 
other Sunday by my old and much admired friend, Father. 
George. The Episcopalians are feebly striving to get up a con- 
gregation, and what are called the Free Methodists have a little 
church on a back street, in which they indulge in the antique 
Methodist liberty of a howling religion. 

What kind of a man Father George is, his zeal for souls ex- 

* The reader will allow me to change the names of places and persons, being assured of 
a perfectly accurate narrative in every other respect. 
VOL. LVIII. 18 



266 THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. [Nov., 

hibits. With missions that require his driving twenty miles every 
Sunday, he not only serves the faithful to the full standard of 
pastoral zeal, but he has a big heart for non-Catholics. He 
long ago purchased with his personal means a copy of Catholic 
Belief for every family in his mission. As soon as he learned 
that the Benzigers had brought out a popular edition of that 
valuable book, he ordered five hundred for distribution to non- 
Catholics. He pays the bulk of my expenses here, hall-rent 
and printing, out of his own pocket, though the Beechville 
Catholics declared to me that they would make it good to 
him ; and they will keep their word if Father George will let 
them.* 

This town is a hot-bed of the anti-Catholic party known as 
the " A. P. A." the American Protective Association. Indeed 
this whole State has felt its power. Let us hope that it will be 
as short-lived as the old Know-nothing party, which bloomed 
and faded in a single lustrum. Orangemen from Canada are 
chiefly responsible for the movement here, both as to organiza- 
tion and bitterness of spirit. 

I selected this locality to begin the non-Catholic missions be- 
cause I knew Father George to be highly sympathetic. My ar- 
rangement with the bishop left me free to choose, with every 
good will on his part ; and on my arrival I found that all my 
suggestions as to preliminaries had been adopted and improved 
upon. 

I boarded with my dear friend Joseph Sobieski (as he might 
well be named), a Polish American, who could serve as a model 
for the new generation of his race in America. To him and 
his family I am greatly indebted. 

The following notice appeared in both the Republican and 
Democratic weekly papers of the village for two weeks before 
our opening : 

" REV. WALTER ELLIOTT. 

" On Monday evening, September 18, Rev. Walter Elliott, of 
New York, Catholic evangelist, will begin a series of religious 
meetings in the Village Hall. The lecturer is no stranger 
among us, having preached here a year ago to Catholics ; his 
present course of meetings is designed to interest persons of all 
denominations or of none. The topics chosen are of living in- 

* It may be worth while explaining the financial side of these missions. The diocese pays 
the Paulist community five hundred dollars for the services of the missionary from September 
to June. This is in lieu of all stipends of whatever kind, all money collected or otherwise ob- 
tained in the diocese being expended on the missions. 



j893] THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. 267 

terest to all serious-minded persons. Everybody will be wel- 
come, no admission fee being charged. 

" These lectures and religious exercises being designed for all 
who are interested in the life to come, nothing will be said to 
hurt the feelings of any. On the contrary, the meetings will 
be found attractive and instructive to all classes of minds re- 
gardless of religious connections. Care will be taken to provide 
excellent singing. Emphasis will be laid on the virtues contri- 
buting to perfect manhood and womanhood, and the hatefulness 
of the opposite vices. Reason, Scripture, history, and literature 
generally will be drawn upon for illustrations and proofs. 
Among the subjects to be treated of are the following : The Life 
of Man, or Time and Eternity ; The Sin Evil, and its Remedy ; 
Conscience: has it the Authority of God? The Gates of Hell; 
Mercy and Justice, or the Union of Obedience and Love ; Christ 
and His Following ; Why I am a Total Abstainer ; Why do we 
Mourn for the Dead ? Can we Communicate with the Dead ? 
Other subjects will be treated of on request. All requests for 
information on religious subjects will be cheerfully complied 
with. The meetings will open at 7:30 Monday evening, Sep- 
tember 1 8, and will continue each evening during the week." 

The hour of meeting was afterwards fixed at 8 o'clock, as 
the stores close then, and the mail is distributed just before. 
It was deemed best to open on Monday evening, instead of 
Sunday, so as not to lose the church-goers. This gave me an 
opportunity to hold a singing-class of all our own people in the 
church on Sunday night before Benediction of the Blessed Sac- 
rament. Our little choir is not a bad one, and having sent them 
some of our tiny Mission Hymn-books a couple of weeks before- 
hand, they nightly carried the audience with them in the singing 
of three or four hymns. 

Celebrating High Mass at noon and preaching on zeal for 
souls, holding a singing-class at night and preaching on the 
Holy Eucharist, the Sunday was well occupied. And the reader 
may be sure that Sunday and Saturday and every day spent 
in such work is productive of prayer among the Catholics of 
the place : " It prays itself," when all is ventured upon God's 
good pleasure for stirring the hearts of non-Catholics to come 
out and hear a priest. So our little congregation prayed hard. 

Monday morning nearly every store-window displayed the 
following bill, which was given to non-Catholics generally, and 
especially to farmers : 



268 THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. [Nov., 

" REASON CHURCH BIBLE. 

Lectures every Evening this Week at 8 o'clock, Local Time, 

at the 
OPERA HOUSE, 

BY 

REV. WALTER ELLIOTT. 
The Following Subjects will be Discussed : 

Time and Eternity ; or, Does Man Live For Ever ? 

The Still, Small Voice of Conscience Whose Voice is it ? 

Intemperance ; or, Why I am a Total Abstainer. 

Can we get along without the Bible ? 

The Man, the Citizen, the Church Member ; or, Church and 

State in America. 
Why I am a Catholic. 

Opportunity will be given to have questions answered publicly 

or privately on all matters of religion, morality, 

Bible, Church, etc. 

Members of all churches or of none invited and welcomed. 
Good music furnished. No admission fee." 

Some of the subjects, such as temperance, were chosen be- 
cause of the conviction that the best way to obtain a hearing 
is to make the points of resemblance between Catholics and 
non-Catholics the points of contact for missionary purposes. 
We have a friendly feeling in common about some truths and 
some virtues ; but we are not always aware that these can be 
made bridges across the torrent of prejudice. Non-Catholics do 
not know how profoundly we love the Bible, how intensely we 
value the interior life, that of confidence, love, reverence towards 
God, and trust in the continual guidance of his Holy Spirit. 
Let them but know as a preliminary that the church stands 
and falls with the Bible, that all her external ministrations have 
for their sole object to build up the inner man, and they are 
better prepared to consider the true relation of Church and 
Bible, and the divine institution of the Sacraments. To seek 
a hearing without a start of agreement of some kind, is to ask 
one's audience to follow you walking backwards. 

The natural virtues, also, are common ground, as well as the 
hatred of ordinary vices. Hatred of intemperance on the part 
of Catholics, especially if accompanied by the practice of total 
abstinence, if only it be brought into public notice, and made 
useful against drunkenness, saloons, and saloon-going, is a mis- 
sionary go-between of the best sort. Let us but vigorously war 
against gambling, bribe-giving and bribe-taking, and do it openly, 



THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. 269 

and the best elements among non-Catholics will be turned 
towards us, and that right end foremost. The same is to be 
said of all sorts of vice and crime. Claiming the leadership of 
the world in faith and morals, any little piece of the world is a 
fair field to show our practical capability. 

Patriotism, especially as we are so largely foreign in our 
membership, is a virtue to be thoroughly developed before the 
non-Catholic people from a Catholic stand-point. That topic, 
and the Catholic view of the vice of intemperance and of its 
occasions and its remedies, gave me more favor with my audi- 
ence than any others which means that they won favor for the 
Catholic religion. 

Monday morning dawned in the ram, and it was feared that 
we should have a wet evening. " Anyway," said I to myself, 
" the rain will be a good excuse for a slim attendance " ; but be- 
fore night the wind changed and the weather was favorable. 

So the first night the hall was filled, scarcely a seat to spare. 
Tuesday night the same, except that Catholics were fewer, two- 
thirds at least being non-Catholics, and the boys were not there. 
Wednesday night was the temperance lecture, and it brought a 
large attendance, many standing, and not a few unable to enter. 
The numbers increased nightly after that, till at the close, on 
Saturday night, the hall was packed full long before the opening 
and a great number were turned away. The three or four last 
meetings were made up of about four Protestants to one 
Catholic. 

About a score of boys attended the first meeting, thinking, 
doubtless, that it was wanton waste to lose any free show at 
the Opera House. After gawking at me for a quarter of an 
hour they give me up as a poor show, and then both distracted 
and amazed me by their pinching and kicking and thumping 
each other, ending, when we were half-way through, by leaving 
the hall very demurely and on tiptoe, but clattering and yell- 
ing as they went down-stairs. We also had the trouble with 
babies usual at country gatherings. 

An encouraging feature was the attendance of non-Catholics 
from the country. Some families came from a distance of eight 
or ten miles, and did so every night. Such people are the 
ones who think, and God will assist them towards the church. 
We gave all such, and in fact nearly all the non-Catholics, a 
good assortment of leaflets, and many of them copies of Catho- 
lic Belief. The leaflets distributed here are : What Catholics do 
not believe (a new four-page tract) ; The Plea of Sincerity ; Is 



270 THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. [Nov., 

it Honest ? (a splendid old tract on the church and the Bible) ; 
What my Uncle said about the Pope ; Why I am a Total Ab- 
stainer ; and Why I am a Catholic. 

Of course the Protestant leaders took the alarm. Word was 
passed around among church members to stay away. The 
Masons held an extra meeting ; the Baptists got up an im- 
promptu ice-cream party. But nothing could hurt us ; the atten- 
dance kept on increasing. Only one difficulty could not be 
mastered : I was unable to hold private or conversational meet- 
ings. I announced them for ten o'clock in the forenoon, but 
met only a few non-Catholics, and they had been urged to 
come by their Catholic friends. How shall we bring to bear a 
more intimate and personal influence ? God, let us hope, will 
show us the way pretty soon. 

The " order of exercises " was the recitation of the Our 
Father in common, all standing. Then we sang a hymn from 
my hymn pamphlet, followed by answering of questions from 
the query-box. After that another hymn, sometimes two of 
them ; then the short discourse, which some nights became a 
long one. I then gave out announcements for the following 
evening ; the hymn " Come, Holy Ghost " was sung ; reading of 
the Bible followed, and then was delivered the main discourse 
of the evening. That over, we sang "O Paradise," and I gave 
them, all standing, my blessing, making a big sign of the cross 
in doing so, the meaning of this having been explained the 
first night. Beginning at eight, we were all done at half-past 
nine. 

I conducted the meetings in secular dress, and I am a trifle 
ashamed to say, after so many happy years of missionary 
preaching in cassock and with crucifix to our faithful people, 
that I soon felt quite at home in preaching God's word in coat- 
tails. 

There sat my three hundred non-Catholics and looked at 
me the old horror of a Catholic priest, familiarly addressing 
them on the way of salvation. It was a delicious sensation to 
be watched and listened to, and measured up and down as a 
representative of our Redeemer's Catholic truth and love. I was 
ever wishing in my heart, as I spoke or sang or prayed, that 
they would say to themselves, " Well, the old religion is not 
so bad, after all "; and that a few would say, " It has a chance 
of being true." This much is certain; whether glad or sad, all 
Beechville feels that Catholicity stands in this town higher than 
before far higher. 



THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. 271 

And how easily is all this done ! How differently from the 
old-time missions to non-Christians here, when the noblest men 
of France and Belgium left the reeking atmosphere of the court 
of Louis XIV. and buried themselves among the savage tribes 
of this region, to learn a barbarous tongue, and to be starved 
and mutilated and then martyred, or spurned and rejected by 
the most cruel race known to history. Glorious heroes they 
were, and their memory a perpetual stimulant to us so-called 
missionaries, who are pampered with every luxury, petted by 
the Catholic people, and respectfully listened to by this noble 
nation of Americans. 

Of course a feeling of fatigue followed the ninety minutes 
of mental and vocal exertion, to say nothing of the tired legs. 
But all was compensated for by the interest of the audience. 
There is a rare joy in addressing people on the great truths 
who do not wish to be persuaded, and yet want to be honest. 
They are drawn into your thoughts and arguments and appeals 
to tarry at least for a while in your Catholic world's fair. All 
this is a joy. Then, too, there are no long hours of hearing con- 
fessions, my little congregation giving me no more than eighty 
the whole week. 

I found on the first and second day that the question-box 
needed to be baited ; and so I not only called attention to it 
at every meeting, but on Tuesday evening I had a prominent 
non-Catholic read out publicly a couple of objections which had 
come to my ears, and I answered them. After that I had all 
the questions and objections I wanted. They served an excel- 
lent purpose. I took them out of the box a few minutes be- 
fore beginning, examined them publicly, and after the opening 
prayer and hymn answered them. I treated them kindly, ex- 
plained and developed them briefly when necessary, quoted 
Scripture in my answers when I could recall a text, struck back 
but did so good-naturedly, sometimes raising a laugh. I could 
answer seven or eight questions in twenty minutes or less. I 
adopted the expedient on Friday evening of asking questions 
of my own, choosing some far more difficult to answer than 
any from the box. This worked well, and as they pertained 
to the topics I was to lecture on they helped me to clear away 
difficulties beforehand. If I could have had some one to cate- 
chise me from the audience it would have been perfection. I 
had made arrangements with an educated Catholic layman in a 
neighboring town to come and assist me. As he is a lawyer of 
well-earned reputation and a man of exemplary life, I hoped 



272 THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. [Nov., 

for great things from him, both as an interlocutor from the 
audience and as a lecturer to spell me. But he was taken sick 
and was house-bound the whole week. 

The reader may be entertained with one evening's harvest of 
questions : 

Where is it in the Bible that we are forbidden to eat meat 
on Friday ? 

Why do you use sprinkling as a mode of baptism ? 

Why do you baptize children that are not old enough to 
repent ? 

Why do priests demand security or money before they will 
attempt to pray for souls in Purgatory? 

How is it that a priest always preaches in Latin? How is 
it that every Catholic is a Democrat? (These two by the same 
questioner.) 

How if a man dies in sin and the widow pays twenty-five or 
fifty dollars to the priest to pray him out of Purgatory? I know 
this to be a fact. Please answer this. 

What class of people go to Purgatory ? In what part of the 
Bible is Purgatory mentioned ? Give Bible description of it. 

Where is Purgatory ? 

Why do Catholics consecrate their places of burial? 

Why do Catholics keep Lent? Also, why do they abstain 
from meat on Fridays and other days ? 

Is it true that a Catholic priest will refuse to perform a 
funeral ceremony unless he is paid in advance ? 

What is the object of convents? and why must the world 
be renounced when one enters it? (Written in a feminine 
hand.) 

In what way does the punishment given to your members 
by the priests under the name of penance benefit them, since 
Christ has died for all mankind, making salvation free ? 

Is it true that money is demanded from penitents in the 
confessional, and that the enormity of the sins committed fixes 
the price to be paid ? 

We Protestants believe that the granting of an indulgence is 
a license, or permission, to commit sin, granted by the Catholic 
Church for a money consideration. 

Why do women become nuns? 

How does sin and evil come to exist ? 

This last was the only real poser, and as it has puzzled all 
grades of minds since St. Augustine, I was not distressed. My 
answer took the case out of the philosophical into the personal 



i 893.] THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. 273 

field ; the possibility of sin in my own case and that of each 
one personally is a powerful means of increase in virtue, re- 
ligious character being built up and perfected by resistance and 
conquest. God, therefore, by permitting evil, offers me oppor- 
tunity for good, etc. 

The wording and handwriting of these questions indicated, 
as a rule, the average amount of intelligence found among our 
ordinary American people ; and are they not for the most part 
suggestive of dense ignorance about Catholicity ? One of the 
questions reminded me of a young lawyer, whose case I came 
across in New York City last spring, who answered an invitation 
to attend a Catholic sermon by saying he was too rusty in his 
Latin to understand it ! So it is in hewing away and burning 
up this jungle of delusion that we must expend much of our 
labor. But let us bear in mind that if the pioneer's work is 
rude and tedious, the virgin soil once uncovered and cultivated 
produces the most abundant harvest. 

My expenses here have been : hall-rent, $5 a night ; print- 
ing, including press notices and hand-bills, $8 ; leaflets and 
hymn-books, about $5, representing far more material than that 
sum would lead one to think; incidentals, including railroad 
fare between here and my next mission, will not raise the sum 
to $50. Of course my Sobieski family have saved me the cost 
of boarding and lodging. I confess that the amount of hall- 
rent annoys me, for it is quite an item for a small station like this ; 
but the town is rank with anti-Catholic sentiment, and hence the 
terms were held stiff. But at Linden, my next mission, we are 
to get the hall for a dollar a night, and the printing for a couple 
of dollars more. And I am invited to my third mission with a 
promise of the hall free of rent. 

Saturday evening I bade farewell to my non-Catholic friends, 
ur gi n g them to be faithful to their consciences, to seek the 
truth, and to follow the light earnestly, and finally to go to in- 
telligent Catholics for knowledge of our religion, and not to 
listen to men and women who had been expelled from the 
church. This last admonition I gave because this whole region 
has been overrun by the lowest class of ex-priests, and, curiously 
enough, they have got a hearing, though hardly credence, from 
large numbers of the people. I also invited my audience to at- 
tend High Mass at our church on Sunday morning, announcing 
a sermon on Holy Communion. The most regular and best dis- 
posed of my nightly auditors, to the number of forty or fifty, 
were present with us the next morning. All the strangers were 



274 THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. [Nov., 

given a non-Catholic Mass-Book* and many of them a copy of 
Catholic Belief. 

Any converts? I hear you ask. One, a good man whose 
wife is a Catholic, and who had been fighting the church off 
for years, was placed under instruction. Two fallen-away 
Catholics were reconciled ; and several with no Catholic ante- 
cedents, whole families in some cases, very clearly started on 
the way to conversion at least so we flattered ourselves. But 
to change from utter disbelief in the church to a state of 
mind fit for the reception of the grace of faith is a slow 
process. 

What we have surely done is to rectify public opinion here, 
to throw the Antis on the defensive, and a rather silent de- 
fensive at that, and to fill our own people with the spirit of 
hope and of zeal. Anyway, we got a good hearing and made 
what use of it was possible, leaving the entire town and neigh- 
borhood discussing Catholicity and its claims upon mind and 
heart. This account of the Beechville mission is like a solitary 
and forlorn knight sounding a blast on a wheezy trumpet. But 
it is an earnest invitation to more capable champions to buckle 
on their armor and, grasping their arms, to come out on the 
battle-field. 

WALTER ELLIOTT. 



A NON-CATHOLIC MISSION ELSEWHERE. 

When epidemics are in the air, they start up all of a sud- 
den in the most unexpected places. Like scientific inventions, 
they appear to have simultaneous discoverers worlds apart from 
each other. So with the revivals of religious feeling very often. 
The mere mention of missionary enterprise in one locality brings 
under notice the fact that other places totally undreamed of are 
in a state of expectancy, and ripe for missionary work. Just 
as Father Elliott started out on his new crusade, it was dis- 
covered that oases of religious desire had sprung up in other 
places previously supposed to be Saharas of God-forgetting in- 
difference or immemorial prejudice tempered by utter ignorance 
of everything Catholic. 

Once the missionary fervor is on, the hurried emergency is 
certain to be met somehow. 

* An excellent little pamphlet got out by the Catholic Book Exchange, 120 West 6oth 
Street, New York City. It contains the entire Mass in Latin and English in parallel columns, 
together with brief but sufficient explanations and instructions. It is sold very cheap. 



1893-] THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. 275 

The call came only a very little while ago from an active 
little town in Virginia a town of about twelve hundred souls, 
about fifty of whom are Catholics. It is on the sea-coast, and 
the terminus of one of our great lines of railway. Many of the 
inhabitants are railway men ; the rest a heterogeneous popula- 
tion, with little or no knowledge of Catholic belief. Our mis- 
sionary was prepared for this state of things, for he sent before 
or carried with him an assortment of literature suited to the 
immediate needs for primary enlightenment. On his arrival he 
found large posters announcing his advent staring him in the 
face in the windows of the little stores and on every available 
hoarding. The fact that he was a Paulist, he found, had pro- 
duced a very dubious condition of mind in the uninitiated. Paul- 
ists, they had somehow come to conclude, were disconnected 
with the Church of Rome. They might be followers of Wyck- 
liffe ; they might be believers in the cult of John Huss ; but 
they never dreamed of them being associated with the "ancient 
superstition." Their bewilderment was intensified when they 
found themselves invited not only to come and hear, but to ask 
questions and " heckle " the missionary at the close of each 
morning and evening. 

One very distinct advantage our missionary discovered when 
he arrived. The church which awaited him happens to be quite 
a fine building. It holds fully five hundred people, though up 
to his coming it had never been by any means incommoded 
with worshippers. Curiosity to see and hear him attracted a 
numerous congregation at the outset. He altogether eschewed 
the controversial field in his discourses. He took for his key- 
note the universal care and love of the Creator and the blessings 
of leading the Christian life, of morality, of sobriety, of peace 
and good-will to all one's fellow-citizens. 

Naturally, with such a scanty Catholic population, the great 
majority of his listeners were outsiders. Their interest was 
deep. They hearkened in amazement to the expositions of 
Catholic teaching on all these vital subjects. The " question- 
box " was freely used at the conclusion of each service, and he 
had not only to give written answers to a great number of 
pointed queries, but to explain from the altar more fully what 
things they desired to know. 

The facts about the sacrament of penance and the obligations 
of the priest regarding the secrecy of the confessional were 
especial objects of inquiry. The meaning of the use of images 
and pictures was another point upon which their minds had 



276 THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. [Nov., 

been sadly misinformed. The questions submitted, as a rule, 
bore a striking similarity to those propounded to Father Elliott, 
as described in the preceding article. The answers given brought 
satisfaction and conviction straightway to several. The follow- 
ing letter was received from one of the interested listeners, and 
may be taken as a typical expression of the mental state of 
many others who attended the mission to its close. The letter 
is from a professional man, and one of the most intelligent of 
the auditors: 

" Please let me thank you for explaining so forcibly and 
lucidly the doctrine of the Catholic Church regarding the 
confessdbijiak in answer to my query which was placed in the 
question-box,' My mind is satisfied now on that subject. 

.".Many tilings in the Catholic faith which, heretofore, have 
been,- yague mysteries to me, have been made quite clear by 
your' interesting lectures ; hidden beauties have been revealed 
of which I little dreamt. 

" The manual which you kindly sent I shall peruse with 
much pleasure. Again thanking you for your kindly courtesy, 
believe me sincerely, 

To many others of slower intellectual movement the process 
of dispelling the clouds of doubt was not so simple. People do 
not abandon long-cherished beliefs and prescriptive prejudices, 
in every case, at the wave of any magician's wand. But the 
seeds of inquiry and aspiration have been sown, and they will 
surely fructify in their own time. Henceforth the question-box 
and the public " heckle " may be regarded as indispensable ad- 
juncts to missionary undertakings. 

One most gratifying circumstance has to be noted. Our 
" Uhlan " missionary had not to travel in a hostile country. 
No discourtesy, no sullenness, met him wherever he went. It 
was universally recognized that he did not come as a Regulus, 
bearing the symbols of peace or war, to suit the requirements 
of the situation. The message he bore, it was seen, was a mes- 
sage of love and philanthropy moral and material elevation. 
His large stock of doctrinal and temperance literature was soon 
exhausted, and the considerable number of copies of Catholic 
Belief were eagerly sought for and as greedily devoured. 

The experiences here go to show that there is a ripe harvest 
before the reapers in many other places. There is no greater 
test of civilization than the tone of the public mind on the all- 



18930 



NOVEMBER FEASTS. 



277 



important questions relating to man's future state. Religion, 
which should be in a wholesome condition of sentiment the 
great pacificator of passions, has unhappily too often been the 
agency which kindled the deadliest of strifes, is beginning to 
be considered, as it should ever be from its supreme impor- 
tance, in the dispassionate spirit becoming the citizens of a 
free and equalizing state. This is a powerful proof of the supe- 
rior quality of the average American mind practical in affairs 
of the soul and the kingdom to come, as well as in the things 
affecting its existence and position in this world of energy 
and activity. 





NOVEMBER FEASTS. 

O Mother Church ! an artist thou whose skill 
Awakes the soul's most latent harmonies ; 
With touch unfailing dost thou sweep its 

keys, 

And myriad vibrant chords responsive thrill 
In paeans jubilant as laughing rill 

Or dirges sad as ocean's threnodies, 
'Tis thus November's feasts, in thy decrees, 
Our hearts with bliss and woe successive fill. 
All Saints in joy, All Souls in grief we spend, 

Yet grieving aid our dear ones gone before ; 
Their ransom blest in orisons we send 

And bid Our Lady ope their prison-door, 
For love faith-shot of death itself is free, 
And prayer outstretches to eternity. 



A. B. O'NEILL, C.S.C. 




278 THE SOCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL WORLD. [Nov., 



THE SOCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL WORLD. 

E have a report lying before us, "On the Labor 
Question in the United States," drawn up by 
direction of the Royal Commission on Labor, 
and presented to both houses of Parliament by 
command of the queen, and some other offi- 
cial publications " On the Relations between Capital and Labor," 
emanating from the English Foreign Office, upon the contents of 
which we base the following observations : 

Factory Inspectors. A book could be written on our factory 
legislation. Faulty as it is, it is still more so owing to the lack of 
energy in carrying it out, as far as it is up to the mark. Our 
factory inspectors, where they exist, may be good people, but 
what truly efficient activity of factory inspection means we have 
to learn from a tabular statement, reprinted from a German re- 
port for 1889. A good instance of such activity in one of the 
busy industrial districts is that of the inspector for the district of 
Zwickau, in the Kingdom of Saxony, who, with three assistants 
and one chemical expert, carried out the following during 1889: 

Number. 

Inspections of factories, 1,787 

Inspections and first trials of lifts and cages in mines, ... 60 

Inspections connected with the contamination of running water, . . 91 
Investigations of accidents involving inspections and examination of 

witnesses, 29 

Inspections of stone-quarries and chalk-pits, ..... 78 

Trials and inspections of drying cylinders, etc., 12 

Inspections of stationary steam-boilers, 

Cases of attendance at law-courts during civil and criminal proceedings, 1 1 
Cases of attendance at meetings of the district authorities in matters 

connected with licenses, 3 

Besides the above, mediation was undertaken in one case to 
arrive at a compromise between masters and men on strike ; 635 
written opinions were given, of which 446 referred to matters 
connected with factory labor and 189 to steam-boilers; 82 es- 
tablishments were visited more than once during the year ; in 8 
cases night inspections took place, in 6 cases inspections on 
Sundays or holidays. Expeditions to establishments not in the 
town of residence of the inspectors involved 274 whole days' 
journeys and 188 half-days' journeys (for five persons, therefore, 
about 73 days' journeys each). Our readers will draw their own 
conclusions whether and how far our American inspectors, where 



1893-] THE SOCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL WORLD. 279 

they exist, can compare with this standard, though nobody can 
say why they should not be equal to it. 

Eight-Hour Movement. Looking over our legislation since 
1868 the unprejudiced reader must be struck by the success 
with which our own authorities met in effectually eluding 
the outspoken and enacted will of the nation from which they 
derive their authority, and that they are believed to represent, 
viz.: " that eight hours shall constitute a day's work for all labor- 
ers, workmen, and mechanics now employed, or who may here- 
after be employed, by or on behalf of the government of the 
United States." It remained for Secretary Lincoln, in 1883, to 
put a stop to the violations of the eight-hour law by direct- 
ing his subordinates to require the men to work only eight 
hours a day to earn their daily wages. Remarkable as this case 
of wilful misconstruction of a United States statute by United 
States officers always must be considered, there are even to-day 
branches of the government service where men are compelled 
to work long hours without extra compensation, and where no 
committee or court could be found to hold, as in the case 
of the government arsenal employees, that their claim for com- 
pensation was " thoroughly made out " because they do not fall 
under the terms of the statute " laborers, workmen, and mechanics." 

Still more remarkable is the course of the general eight- 
hour movement in the United States (outside of government 
service). In our country (as in France up to 1871) every- 
thing is done to encourage individualism, and so strongly indi- 
vidualistic was the tone thus introduced that it was only com- 
paratively recently that the efforts to induce working-men to 
unite together met with any measure of success. In proclaiming 
industrial freedom and abolishing the guilds, in 1791, the inten- 
tion of the leaders of the French Revolution was to give each 
workman an equal chance. And the brilliant positions achieved 
by men of humble origin during the empire apparently en- 
couraged and justified this view. Our working-men were, and in 
great part still are, misled by the same fata morgana. But the 
employment of machinery and other improved methods of pro- 
duction gradually threw into the hands of capitalists advantages 
which were denied to the many. No sooner was this fact fully real- 
ized than a complete volte face was made in democratic thought 
in France In our country, however, the artisan has not yet, 
at least not as a class or to the same extent as in the old 
countries, realized that he has been "divorced from his tools," 
and there is no longer any scope for individual effort unless 



280 THE SOCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL WORLD. [Nov., 

supported by capital for, had not Jay Gould started with no 
capital to speak of, and did the abolition of slavery not give 
free labor equal chances? No wonder, therefore, that in 1865 a 
California bill for obtaining an eight-hour law was defeated in 
the legislature by the introduction of an amendment providing 
for its going into effect " after New York and Massachusetts 
had passed a similar law." But better still : after passing the 
bill in question by a unanimous vote in 1868, the States of New 
York, Illinois, Connecticut, Wisconsin, and New Mexico have 
passed eight-hour laws, and yet they are for the most part in- 
operative in all these States, since they make eight hours the 
legal day only where it is not " otherwise agreed." It must, 
however, be acknowledged that an improvement is making 
rapid progress. For, though the Chicago anarchist disturbances 
of May 4, 1886, checked the movement, in 1889 the Federation 
of Labor took the matter up, and the strike, inaugurated by 
the Brotherhood of Carpenters in May, 1890, was immediately 
successful in New York, and resulted in the establishment of an 
eight-hour day for the building trades generally. After a short 
struggle the carpenters gained their point in 35 leading cities, 
both for themselves and for other branches of the building 
trades, whilst in 240 cities their hours were reduced from 10 to 9. 

The New York Labor Bureau in 1890 obtained an expres- 
sion of opinion from 40 leading citizens, 2$ of whom were in 
favor of an eight-hour day, whilst 3 opposed it, and 2 remained 
neutral. Most of the labor organizations advocate this reduction 
in the working hours because they think that it would diminish 
the number of the unemployed. Where it has been introduced 
they report that their members have had more regular work, 
and that there has been an increase of ten per cent, in number 
employed. They fear, however, that the adoption of the shorter 
day will stimulate immigration, unless it should at the same 
time be adopted in Europe. Some members, therefore, advo- 
cate the imposition of a heavier tax upon all immigrants. The 
Cigar-Makers' Union report a great increase in steadiness of 
work amongst their members, and attribute it to the adoption of 
the eight-hour day in 1886. 



Co-operation. Another subject of special and not less inter- 
est is co-operation. Now, co-operative societies in the United 
States are few as compared with those in Great Britain and 
France. It seems the co-operative idea has not taken very deep 
root in this country. One bureau says that " an explanation in 
part of the lack of vigilance and greater indifference among 



1893.] THE SOCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL WORLD. 281 

American working-men is, perhaps, the less urgent need of such 
organization here. The fact is, that many of the co-operative 
concerns in the United States have failed through mismanage- 
ment." In our opinion, however, the need of such organization 
in our country is, to say the least, quite as great as in the Old 
World ; for the condition of the working-class is essentially the 
same in all parts of the civilized world, and as to the indiffer- 
ence and the mismanagement, the reporting officer is certainly 
as well informed as we could claim to be. It must, however, 
be admitted that a fair proportion of these societies is succeed- 
ing. Their history is rather rich and interesting, though the 
oldest surviving productive company dates back only to 1867. 
The others, amongst them distributive societies, building asso- 
ciations, Farmers' Grange stores, etc., are still younger. On 
the other hand, where productive co-operative societies pay divi- 
dends to labor, difficulties of another kind appear, arising from 
the jealousy of the members. Nevertheless, these are the only 
co-operative societies proper, and it is this form of co-operation 
which has been specially advocated by the Knights of Labor. 
The most extreme amongst them advocate a " solidarity " sys- 
tem, according to which individuals or labor organizations buy 
shares, which bear no interest and are redeemable after a year. 
The district committee manages the business, taking twenty-five 
per cent, of the profits, after wages are paid, to provide land for 
the workers, twenty-five per cent, for a reserve fund, and fifty 
per cent, for the extension of the business. After two years of 
existence these enterprises were in 1888 reported to be succeed- 
ing. The Knights have, however, modified their principles 
sufficiently to establish several co-operative factories on the 
more ordinary basis of a certain percentage of interest to be 
paid to shareholders, as well as a proportionate dividend to 
labor. 

But considering the immense area of the United States, it 
cannot be said that there are a commensurate number of co- 
operative institutions. With the exception, again, of Massachu- 
setts, where the best legislation provides for the most flourish- 
ing co-operation, the failures amongst co-operators throughout 
the States may be attributed, to a large extent, to a lack of 
suitable legislation, the absence of any participation on the 
part of leading minds in the co-operative movement, and the 
want of a tie to connect the different co-operative enterprises 
into one whole. 

VOL.LVIII. 19 





TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 

/ 

'HE intellect of America would appear to be in a 
very immature state, in the view of the authors 
of the new work, English History for American 
Readers* One is the author of a Young Folks' 
History of the United States, and the other is 
Assistant Professor of History in Harvard University. The effect 
which a perusal of this volume leaves upon the ordinary adult 
mind is that the former, while composing it, labored under the 
mistake that all American readers are still in statu pupillari, 
so that language of the simplest character was the best suited 
to their mental condition ; and that the latter took the view 
that to read admitted history in the very opposite sense in re- 
gard to many of the recorded facts was the proper course fora 
teacher of Harvard. Here is a specimen paragraph from one 
of the earlier chapters : 

"The younger William had a big, red face, and people called 
him Rufus, or the Red. Many of the great barons of England, 
owning large estates in Normandy, would have preferred to have 
but one ruler for both countries. But Robert was absent, and 
as William Rufus promised Lanfranc to govern well, the arch- 
bishop crowned him without delay. William was a good soldier 
and hunter, and he kept the nobles in order ; but there was 
nothing else that was good about him." 

This style of narrative bears a remarkable resemblance to 
that adopted in such favorite romances as Jack the Giant-Killcr 
and the History of Old Mother Hubbard. 

This simple mode is observed throughout many portions of 
the book. Accuracy in statement is not, however, always the 
accompaniment of simplicity. Many errors will be found to 
have crept into this work, some apparently from a slipshod style 
of chronicle, while as for others it is difficult to account for 
them on any such ground. The average reader might, for in- 
stance, be apt to conclude that the Bill of Rights was the con- 
stitutional document of a period anterior to the Revolution, from 

* English History for American Readers. By Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Ed- 
ward Channing. 



1893-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 283 

the fact of finding it bracketed along with the Petition of Rights 
as belonging to "the Stuart time." Slipshod writing in matters 
of opinion or prejudice, however, is a very different thing from 
slovenliness in statement of fact ; hence a very different conclu- 
sion must be arrived at with reference to the following passage : 

" The king " (Henry VIII.) " first applied to the pope for a 
divorce from Catherine, claiming the original marriage to have 
been illegal. Ordinarily the pope would have made no difficulty 
in complying with such a request, but just at this time it hap- 
pened that he was shut up in the castle of St. Angelo, in Rome, 
by Charles the Fifth's army." 

When it is borne in mind that the event here dealt with so 
jauntily was the cardinal one in the introduction of the so-called 
Reformation in England, the value of such " history " to the 
American public at once becomes apparent to the reader who 
knows anything about the real facts. There never was a more 
delicate and at the same time more important matter presented 
to the judgment of the Holy See than this question of the va- 
lidity of Henry's marriage with Queen Catherine (for that was 
the real question), and the political issues involved in it were of 
as much moment, in a worldly point of view, as the religious 
ones in their own sphere. Yet Pope Clement, despite every 
wile and every menace of the powerful English king, steadfastly 
refused to do anything in the matter until he had fully satisfied 
himself that he was doing nothing contrary to the law of God. 
A very similar state of affairs arose when Napoleon thought to 
bully Pope Pius into consenting to his divorce from Josephine. 
The whole world which knows anything knows that this is the 
traditional policy of the church with regard to divorce. There 
is no point on which her attitude is more resolutely inflexible 
than on that of the inviolability of the marriage tie. Yet the 
compilers of this " history for American readers " do not shrink 
from stating that " ordinarily " this is not so. It is not to be 
wondered at, when such misstatements can be made on great mat- 
ters, that minor misstatements, such as that the whole of Ireland 
(including Ulster, into which the English dared not enter save 
on embassies to the powerful chiefs O'Neil and O'Donnell) was 
brought under English rule in 1584. It was in 1598 that 
O'Neil defeated Marshal Bagenal so disastrously at the battle 
of the Yellow Ford. 

As the affairs of Ireland are, unfortunately for herself, bound 
up with those of England, more than one reference to them 
must perforce be made in any synopsis of English history ; and 



284 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Nov., 

this disagreeable duty has been performed by the authors of 
the text-book with more than perfunctory carelessness in seve- 
ral cases. Another example of this spirit may be cited. Writ- 
ing of the Act of Union, they say : " The Irish Catholics had 
not opposed the Union, probably because they expected Catho- 
lics would be allowed to sit in the Parliament of the United 
Kingdom. What promises Pitt and Cornwallis may have made 
is not known. But Pitt, when he found that the king would 
not permit any concessions to be made to the Catholics, felt 
obliged to resign." 

Here we have two gross and unpardonable misstatements. 
The Irish Catholics as a body opposed the Union with all 
their might ; there were but a few exceptions. Hopes were not 
only held out to the Catholics that the Union would bring 
them relief from political disabilities, but promises were lavish- 
ly made ; and these promises are known. In his speech on the 
measure on the 3ist of January, 1799, Mr. Pitt said: "No man 
could say that, in the present state of things, and while Ire- 
land remained a separate kingdom, full concessions could be 
made to the Catholics without endangering the state and shak- 
ing the constitution of Ireland to its centre. On the other 
hand ... it was obvious that this question might be agitat- 
ed in an United Imperial Parliament with much greater safety 
than it could be in a separate legislature." And to emphasize 
this veiled promise he quoted from Virgil : 

" . . . Nee Teucris Italos parere jubebo, 
Nee nova regna peto ; paribus se legibus ambo 
Invictae gentes aeterna in fcedera mittant." 

The Catholic laity made the most strenuous exertions to 
make known their abhorrence of the Union project by means 
of public meetings and petitions, but these were suppressed 
with brutal displays of military force by the government troops 
and the Orange magistracy. Even at this early period of his 
career, Daniel O'Connell was thundering with all the force of 
his masterly eloquence against the iniquitous measure, declaring 
that he would rather a thousand times entrust the fortunes of 
the Catholics to their Protestant fellow-countrymen than sur- 
render the Parliamentary independence of the nation. Mean- 
time the viceroy and Lord Castlereagh were plying Archbishop 
Troy and several other Irish prelates with insidious promises. 
On this point Mr. Plowden, the Protestant historian, who writes 
of events of which he had contemporary knowledge, says : 



1893.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 285 

" That the British Ministers were sincere in their intentions 
of bringing forward, and confident in their expectations of 
carrying, the question of Catholic Emancipation in an Imperial 
Parliament, is manifest from certain written communications 
made by them to some of the leading persons of the Catholic 
body, about the time of their retiring from office, which were 
to the following effect : 

"The leading part of his Majesty's ministers finding insur- 
mountable obstacles to the bringing forward measures of con- 
cession to the Catholic body, whilst in office, have felt it im- 
possible to continue in administration under the inability to 
propose it with the circumstances necessary to carrying the 
measure with all its advantages, and they have retired from his 
Majesty's service, considering this line of conduct as most like- 
ly to contribute to its ultimate success. The Catholic body 
will, therefore, see how much their future hopes must depend 
upon strengthening their cause by good conduct in the mean- 
time. They will prudently consider their prospects as arising 
from the persons who now espouse their interests, and compare 
them with those which they could look to from any other quar- 
ter. They may with confidence rely on the zealous support of 
all those who retire, and of many who remain in office ; when 
it can be given with a prospect of success, they may be assured 
that Mr. Pitt will do his utmost to establish their cause in the 
public favor, and prepare the way for their finally attaining 
their objects ; and the Catholics will feel that, as Mr. Pitt could 
not concur in a hopeless attempt to force it new, he must at 
all times repress, with the same decision as if he held an ad- 
verse opinion, any unconstitutional conduct in the Catholic 
body. 

" Under these circumstances, it cannot be doubted that the 
Catholics will take the most loyal, dutiful, and patient line of 
conduct ; that they will not suffer themselves to be led into 
measures which can, by any construction, give a handle to the 
opposers of their wishes, either to misinterpret their principles 
or to raise an argument for resisting their claims ; but that by 
their prudent and exemplary demeanor they will afford addi- 
tional grounds to the growing number of their advocates to 
enforce their claims on proper occasions, until their objects can 
be finally and advantageously attained." 

Many other errors in matters of the gravest importance will 
be found in this text-book. History, at its best, is generally 



286 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Nov., 

only a revelation of half the truth about anything ; in such 
compressions and distortions of it as these under notice, the 
densest ignorance about it is a state more preferable than the 
sort of knowledge derivable from such a source. 

The fact that some eminent masters of logic and rhetoric 
have entered the lists against blasphemous infidelity, and that the 
latter still squirms, has roused up at least one author of more 
ardor than judgment to have a fling at it too. The outcome 
of this enthusiasm is a work called The Guardian Angel* a 
copy of which has been sent us bearing commendations from 
Mr. Gladstone, the London Times, The Review of Reviews, and 
other periodicals, on its front. We do not know how such 
commendations could be given by any persons of judgment who 
had read the book. We have taken that trouble, and we have 
never spent time less satisfactorily. A greater tissue of absur- 
dities than those heaped together in a chapter describing an 
imaginary tour in the supramundane world it would be im- 
possible to conceive. In fine, we may say, atheists in a divin- 
ity of literature might well be excused for their scepticism 
if they were asked to take this extraordinary production as a 
proof of their error. 

It is no light task to attempt to prescribe the rules and 
rationale of reading, so varied are the necessities and tastes of 
mankind all the world over. No essayist can hope to do more 
than, out of his own conscience and cultured experience, point 
out some general principles of procedure ; and this has rarely, 
if ever, been done better, in a succinct shape, than in the little 
volume just published from the pen of the Rev. J. L. O'Neill, 
O.P. Reading is the one thing in which there is to the mass 
of mankind no observance of method ; every one proceeds as 
the French regiments returning from parade usually do, in 
loose marching order, going along just as he likes or as best 
he can. To persons of taste and judgment little instruction on 
such a topic is needed ; the portion of the community which 
stands most in need of guidance in this matter are the begin- 
ners; and to all those who have the mental government of this 
portion Father O'Neill's book will be an excellent help. One 
of the most pressing needs of the age is a body of every-d^y 
, literature of a type which, while beneficial and helpful in form- 
ing the youthful mind, shall be at the same time full of that 
living interest without which it is impossible to captivate the 

* The Guardian Angel. By " Lillian." Albany : The Ideal Publishing Company. 



tic 
Pr 



1893.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 287 

minds of young people. It is singular that this rich field is 
left entirely in the possession of the vicious-minded, and that 
everything which tends to draw out the inherent evil in human 
nature is poured out in floods, while really good juvenile litera- 
ture is put upon the market only in driblets. This is the quar- 
ter upon which all the energies of the reformers of reading 
ought to be turned ; persons of maturer minds can hardly ever 
be impressed for good or evil by anything they read ; their 
mental pabulum is chiefly taken as a pastime, or in order to 
give roundness and polish to the expression of ideas and 
opinions already set and rooted. The proof of the failure of 
mere book-lore to influence great minds to liberality of thought 
or rectitude in action is found in some of the examples cited 
by the author Bacon, for instance, who, with all his philoso- 
phy, was a corrupt judge ; and Carlyle, who, with all his reading, 
was nothing more than a bitter cynic and a shameless advocate 
of brute force in politics. Books for men address themselves 
only to the head ; the heart is fed by something higher and 
holier than mere reading. As a treatise on a subject which, 
despite its age, is ever fresh, this little work of Father O'NeiU's 
is a welcome addition to the literature of the age.* 

It is observed by one of the writers of The Niagara Book f 

,t nobody has as yet written a poem about the great Falls ; 

d a similar observation, it strikes us on reading the work, 
might be made about the want of an adequate prose descrip- 
tion. Several eminent writers try their hand at it in this " sou- 

nir," but the result is distinctly disappointing. It is true that 

contains a couple of excellent articles by W. D. Howells and 
Professor Shaler, but they are too brief. Mark Twain is put in 
as a set-off, but his jokes have an ancient-fish-like smell, and 
the talk is all about the Garden of Eden and hardly anything 
about Niagara. The chief good saying he can be credited with 
is, that Adam thinks he would be happier outside the Garden 
of Eden with Eve than inside it without her. Throughout 
the work are scattered some half-tone illustrations, but it is 
only bare justice to say that while they are nicely executed, 
we have seen much better in books which were not specially 
written to form souvenirs of Niagara. Professor Shaler's article 
treats chiefly of the geology of the falls region, and is, despite 

* Why, When, How, and What We ought to Read. By Rev. J. L. O'Neill, O.P. 
Boston, Mass.: Thos. B. Noonan & Co. 

t The Niagara Book. By W. D. Howells, Mark Twain, Professor Nathaniel S. Shaler. 
Illustrated by Harry Fenn and others. Buffalo : Underhill & Nichols. 




288 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Nov., 

this fact, agreeable and interesting. It goes without saying, as 
the French put it, that each of the articles sustains the high 
literary merit of the contributors, but their brevity is decidedly 
a drawback. 

We have received the third and concluding number of The 
Poets of Ireland a Biographical Dictionary, by David J. O'Dono- 
ghue, a very painstaking Irish litterateur. The author appears 
to have gone to a great deal of trouble to glean particulars 
regarding Irish poetasters as well as poets, for the list includes 
names of writers who probably never aspired to and certainly 
never deserved place in a biographical dictionary. The work 
is mainly valuable for the information it gives regarding those 
minor poets of real merit whose works are still remembered, 
although only to a select few was anything authentic about their 
authors known. It is published by the author himself, at I Elea- 
nor Grove, Barnes Common, London, S. W. 

The many legends of the life and voyages of St. Brendan * 
are presented to us in a collected shape, and at a most appro- 
priate time, by Father O'Donoghue, of Ardfert. The fact that 
the reverend author has his habitat in that part of Kerry which 
was mainly the scene of the famous saint's labor on land has 
given him an opportunity of gathering and arranging the many 
traditions connected with ,his name, and verifying many of the 
transactions recorded in the half-mythical stories so as to show 
that there was at least some substratum of truth underlying 
them, which has not, we believe, fallen to the lot of any mod- 
ern chronicler. He acknowledges his indebtedness to the pre- 
vious work of Cardinal Moran, the Acti Sti. Brendani, for much 
contained in his narrative. He also gives us an English transla- 
tion of the Latin version of the saint's voyage, existing from a very 
early period and familiar in many countries in the middle ages; 
also a large portion of the saint's life found in the ancient Book 
of Lismore, in the original Irish text as well as in a translation. 
In an appendix to the work are found both a metrical and a 
prose life of St. Brendan in quaint Chaucer-like English, from 
old manuscripts in Trinity College, Dublin, with an interesting 
introduction by an eminent antiquarian, Mr. Thomas Wright, 
F.R.S., who states his belief that "the legend of St. Brendan 
exercised an influence on geographical science down to a late 
period, and it entered as an important element into the feelings 
of the Spanish sailors when they went to the discovery of 

* Brendaniana ; St. Brendan the Voyager, in Story and Legend. By the Rev. Denis 
O'Donoghue, P.P., Ardfert. Dublin : Browne & Nolan, Nassau Street. 



1893-] TALK ABOUT NEIV BOOKS. 289 

America." In one of the notes to this appendix we find a 
curious derivation for the term " Maunday " as applied to the 
Thursday in Holy Week. It was commonly supposed to have 
been derived from the old Anglo-Saxon word " maund," mean- 
ing a basket, from the custom prevalent in the monasteries of 
distributing loaves of bread amongst the poor from large bas- 
kets on that day. It is here given as connected with the cus- 
tom of washing the feet on that day, in imitation of the action 
of our Blessed Lord ; which ceremony was called his mande 
(command) a Norman-French term, evidently. This work of 
Father O'Donoghue's is one which we ought to hail as a very 
valuable addition to our store of literature relating to the early 
Irish Church and its wonderful army of missionary monks and 
scholars. It contains some very choice illustrations. 




I. LECTURES ON THE SCIENCE OF THOUGHT.* 

To all who have followed Professor Miiller as a master in 
his learned researches, as well as to those who, while admitting 
his erudition, fail to be convinced that he has at all or even 
fairly well solved the problems of language and its relations to 
nought, these short lectures will be interesting, and more es- 
cially the correspondence between Professor Miiller and Fran- 
is Galton, the Duke of Argyll, George J. Romanes, and others, 
on "Thought without words," given in an appendix. We fail 
to see where his antagonists have weakened the force of his ar- 
guments sustaining the thesis that "Thought and Language are 
inseparable" although it strikes us as a strange misuse of terms 
in so learned a writer to employ the word identical as synony- 
mous with inseparable, as he would appear to do both in the 
title and in the course of his second lecture, " The Identity of 
Language and Thought." Oddly enough he corrects this error 
in rather slipshod fashion in the opening of his third lecture, 
where he says "if thought and language are identical, or, at all 
events, inseparable, it would follow, etc." His arguments for the 
inseparability of thought and language (mental nomina) are for- 
cible, though not the last word which, we think, might be said 
upon the subject ; but we find not a shadow of proof for their 
identity. The instances presented by his adverse critics to prove 
that thought is possible without words, Professor Miiller clearly 
shows, go to prove just the contrary. They fail to understand 
his definitions of "thought" and "words." By thought he means 

* Three Introductory Lectttres on the Science of Thought. By F. Max Muller. Chicago : 
The Open Court Publishing Co. 



290 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Nov., 

not a simple sensation or perception, but a real concept. Now, 
every such concept is a judgment ; a judgment is not possible 
without distinction ; distinction is the act of intellection inter- 
lection and this evidently supposes apprehension of things, and 
relations not identical in meaning. To apprehend things or rela- 
tions of different meaning, or to convey such diverse meanings 
to others, plainly demands the use of different names, or words. 
By "words" we are to understand not only terms made up of 
letters or vocal sounds, but any symbol, figure, sign, or move- 
ment taken to stand for the meaning of the thing or relation 
to be distinctively apprehended or conveyed. He contends that 
the mind is the subject thinking the word which is the object of 
thought ; that ordinary people fancy they think the things 
themselves ; but that the real object of our thought is the ver- 
bum mentale the subjective word. Therefore the accuracy, 
range, power, and elegance of one's thoughts depend upon the 
character and extent of the treasury of mental words names 
for meanings, or means of self-expression one has at command. 
The unlettered boor is restricted in the range of his thoughts, 
is dull of apprehension, is illogical, weak, and vacillating in opin- 
ion, coarse and vulgar, simply because his mental vocabulary is 
so very limited. His eyes may see and his ears hear all the 
beauties of nature, and even of art, which his highly cultured 
landlord sees and hears, but his mind is unable to analyse the 
very same sensations both receive, having also no names to note 
and distinguish his mental perceptions ; and therefore his con- 
cepts what deserves the name of thoughts are but very few ; 
that is, he thinks very little, because he knows very few names of 
things and of their relations that have a meaning. 

The power of self-expression by means of the verbum men- 
tale does not always suppose the knowledge of a spoken or acted 
word in which to convey one's meaning. So an ignorant or 
half-educated person is often quite unable to express himself 
clearly, as we say ; that is, he knows himself what he means, 
having his own clearly understood subjective symbol, sign, or 
name for his thought, but lacks the knowledge of such vocal lan- 
guage or ability of expression by gesture as may adequately con- 
vey his meaning to others. " I know what I am thinking of ; 
and what I mean," he will say, " but I do not know how to 
express myself." It is not these exterior, sensible, vocal words 
which Professor Miiller insists are, "at all events, inseparable 
from thought." 

We think, as we have said, that the instances offered by his 






1893-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 291 

critics in evidence of the possibility of thinking without words 
are valueless, but there are two facts which occur to our mind 
that are certainly difficult of explanation for any other reason. 
The one is the widely accepted belief in certain results of men- 
tal action known as unconscious cerebration. Of this one may 
possibly say that it only goes to show that strictly conscious 
attention and reflection are not necessary to some active and 
fruitful mental operations ; that is, an attention and reflection 
of which the thinker gives account to himself. The sudden 
mental vision of a nomen, a word, pregnant with multiple mean- 
ings may supply the result of a vast chain of labored analytical 
reasoning. A practised pianist catches only a glimpse of a long, 
intricate musical printed phrase, and instantly understands all 
the tones and their varied harmonic relations. To him this 
complicated musical chain of reasoning is practically only one 
word, a single but comprehensive name, in which is summed 
up the mental result of the laborious analytical scientific study 
and manual practice of many years. 

The other instance is the phenomenal power of almost in- 
stantaneous arithmetical calculation shown by some uneducated 
persons endowed with this singular gift. Not only does the use 
of symbols and methods of logical procedure seem impossible, 
but these very persons are unable to tell how they achieve such 
astonishing results. Moreover, when taught to use ordinary 
rational methods of calculation their phenomenal power is greatly 
weakened or they lose it altogether. We would like to know 
what explanation Professor Miiller might find to offer for these 
apparent acts of thought without words. 



2. A MISSIONARY BIOGRAPHY.* 

The Josephite Fathers of Baltimore, besides their great work 
of training young men for apostolic work among the negroes, 
are infusing the missionary spirit into the American Church, and 
one of their means for doing this is the publication of biogra- 
phies of missionary saints. 

The life of St. Peter Claver, who devoted his life to the 
work of saving the souls of the unfortunate Africans who in his 
day were ruthlessly kidnapped and sold by thousands into the 
most cruel bondage ever known among Christians is an example 
which ought to inspire us with zeal for the conversion of that 

* St. Peter Claver, Apostle of the Negroes. Edited by a Father of St. Joseph's Society, 
Epiphany Apostolic College. Philadelphia : H. L. Kilner & Co. 



292 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Nov., 

race which free America once enslaved but has now enfran- 
chised. 

The Christian spirit has so far triumphed in our country as 
to emancipate them, and may it so far prevail as to Christian- 
ize them ! All national and race problems can be solved by 
the Catholic Church and in no other way. As the Church 
is now solving the labor-question for the world, so will she 
one day solve the race-question for our country. What an 
interest, then, every devout American Catholic should take 
in the evangelization^ of the blacks ! What saint's life deserves 
more to be studied by us than St. Peter Claver's life, and who 
can tell the story of his life so well as an American missionary 
to the American negro ? What a noble work it would be to 
help Father Slattery and his zealous co-laborers to circulate this 
book, especially among the negroes who are being educated in 
our public schools. We wish he could raise a fund for this pur- 
pose. 

3. HEAT.* 

We are not familiar with the more elementary books by the 
same author noticed in the title ; this present volume is intend- 
ed by Mr. Wright as a sequel to them, or to be taken up by 
students who, by mathematical training, or by reading works of 
the character of those mentioned, are able to do so without too 
much difficulty. 

Let it not, however, be supposed that this book is one of 
a very abstruse character. It ought to be comprehensible to 
all who have any taste or ability for mathematics, and quite an 
ordinary preparation in that line. And indeed it does not seem 
to us that it is worth while for any one to study works in any 
department of physics unless they are simply practical ones, 
giving results available for ordinary use, unless they have some 
mathematical ability. The exact sciences cannot be treated pro- 
fitably without mathematics ; and the more mathematical the 
form is, the easier really the book becomes. When exact rela- 
tions are to be treated of, an equation is better than anything 
else. 

The book of Mr. Wright is very satisfactory in this respect; 
it might carry the principle even further than it does with ad- 
vantage, in our judgment. It is clear, not long-winded, and 
well up to date. We know of no better one of its character. 

* Heat. By Mark R. Wright, Author of Sound, Light, Heat and Elementary Physics. 
New York : Longmans, Green & Co. 



1893-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 293 

4. ECCLESIASTICAL LAW.* 

The principal change made in this excellent and well-known 
work, distinguishing this from previous editions, is the much 
fuller development of the article concerning Apostolic Legates, 
Nuncios, and Delegates. The matter added is of great impor- 
tance and interest, especially at the present time, and it would 
have been an excellent plan for many of our recent newspaper 
writers to read it (which, the work being in English, they could 
easily have done) before airing their own ideas on the subject. 
They would at least have learned that the appointment of a 
Delegate Apostolic is by no means a new departure, as some 
have seemed to imagine. 

The powers of the College of Cardinals while the Papal chair 
is vacant have also been more completely defined ; and the article 
on the Roman tribunals has been rewritten, a much fuller ex- 
planation being given. 



oi 

I- 

in 



5. THE DIVINE SPIRIT.f 

This is a short record of a number of genuine conversions 
of criminals sentenced to death, occurring in the experience of 
'ather Duffo, S.J., and under his ministrations. All the cases 
re interesting, and some really extraordinary ; particularly so 
in one instance, where supernatural virtue in a very high degree 
was attained. In this case, as^ in a considerable proportion of 
the rest, the conversion was from heresy as well as from a sin- 
ful life. 

One cannot read this little book without being profoundly 
impressed with the love and mercy of God, who thus makes 
use ever of sin and its just punishment to draw sinners to him- 
self. It is this which makes these remarkable narratives specially 
instructive and important. 

It is published also for the benefit of the Carmelite nuns of 
New Orleans, to aid whom, we need not say, is a most excel- 
lent charity. 

* Elements of Ecclesiastical Law. By Rev. S. B. Smith, D.D. Vol. I.: Ecclesiastical 
Persons. Ninth edition, carefully revised by the Author. New York : Benziger Brothers. 

t Wonderful Operations of the Divine Spirit in the Sinner's Heart, displayed from the 
years 1858 to 1863 in the prison of New Orleans. Baltimore : The Baltimore Publishing 
Company. 



294 EDITORIAL NOTES. [Nov., 



EDITORIAL NOTES. 



A FTER a fifteen days' session the Parliament of Religions 
-HL dissolved on Wednesday, September 27. It was closed by 
an address of remarkable power by Bishop Keane, Rector of 
the Catholic University in Washington, and the singing by all 
present of Cardinal Newman's immortal hymn, " Lead, kindly 
Light." The audience which joined in this fraternal demon- 
stration was immense. It filled the great Columbus Hall to the 
last available inch of its space, and the greater number of those 
who composed it had been waiting for admittance for three 
hours before the doors were thrown open. 



The Parliament was described by more than one of the con- 
cluding speakers as the greatest event ever recorded in history. 
The expression is hardly applicable. It was the only event of 
the kind that ever took place. It is impossible to say that 
great results may not in time flow from it. It was the first 
time that the leading representatives of those ancient creeds 
in the far East whose followers -are numerous as the sands of 
the sea-shore, so to speak, ever had the opportunity of hear- 
ing the religion of Christ expounded authoritatively, and many 
admitted that the sort of Christianity to which they were accus- 
tomed in the Orient was that which brought the bayonet and 
the rum-bottle, as well as the opium-traffic, as adjuncts to 
Eastern civilization. How far these frightful agencies are from 
the true spirit and teaching of Christianity they have had an 
opportunity of learning authoritatively for the first time at 
Chicago. 

Bishop Spalding has " done the state some service, and they 
know it." The archbishops of the Union are not unmindful o f 
his great share in bringing about the success of the wonderful 
Catholic Educational Exhibit, and, to mark their sense of it, 
they have put it upon record. In a series of resolutions lately 
made public, they express their recognition of the great services 
he has rendered the Catholic cause at large in his capacity of 



1893-] EDITORIAL NOTES. 295 

president of the exhibit. How onerous was the duty may well 
be estimated by any one who has had the opportunity of view- 
ing the vast collection, and noting the many institutions which 
have been laid under tribute in order to bring it together. 
Neither were the archbishops unmindful of the share of Brother 
Maurelian in bringing about the result. A special resolution 
with regard to him was embodied in the series ; also one thank- 
ing the bishops, clergy, religious sisterhoods and brotherhoods, 
as well as the teachers and Catholic authors, who have con- 
tributed to the collection. 



Mr. Gladstone delivered a speech to his Mid-Lothian con- 
stituents at Edinburgh at the end of September. He devoted a 
considerable portion of it to a view of the action of the House 
of Lords with reference to the Home-Rule Bill. Although the 
veteran statesman gave no precise forecast of his immediate in- 
tentions on the subject, it is evident that he is revolving in his 
mind some line of action calculated to frustrate their evident 
design of forcing his hand by making him appeal to the coun- 
try on the main issue. He vehemently repudiated their right 
to dictate any such appeal, and addressed to them a serious 
warning on the danger they themselves were incurring in put- 
ting themselves in opposition to the declared wishes of the peo- 
ple embodied in the legislation passed by the popular house. 
It seems from this to be his determination to proceed next 
session with those measures of reform for Great Britain to 
which the ministry is pledged, and take the dissolution at such 
time as seems most likely to effect his purpose of carrying the 
Home-Rule Bill, if in the meantime the peers do not retreat 
from their untenable position. 



Whilst the sympathy and encouragement of all scattered 
Irishmen are with the great mass of their countrymen at home 
in this struggle, it is in no small degree disheartening to find 
the leaders of the Irish party again bickering amongst them- 
selves. There is a tempest in a teapot over the matter of the 
Paris funds a subject of very secondary importance in compari- 
son with the question of the fitness of the principals to assume 
the direction of Irish affairs when these are entrusted once more 
to Irish hands. The mass of correspondence which has been 
sprung upon the public in connection with this damnosa hcere- 
ditas, as we may call it, reveals a far greater capacity for the 
composition of stinging letters than the control of their own 



296 NEW BOOKS. [Nov., 

personal jealousies on the part of several prominent Irishmen. 
It would be infinitely better that the whole Paris fund should 
lie at the bottom of the Dead Sea than that the cause of Ire- 
land should suffer by affording the Unionists a pretence for re- 
viving the ancient calumny that Irishmen are constitutionally 
unfitted for the responsibility of governmental administration. 



NEW BOOKS. 

LONGMANS, GREEN & Co., London and New York : 

A Short History of Ireland from the Earliest Times to 1608. By P. W. 
Joyce, LL.D. The Man from Blankley's, and Other Sketches. By F. 
Anstey. Practical Essays on American Government. By Albert Bush- 
nell Hart, Ph.D. Can this be Love? By Mrs. Parr. 

CHARLES L: WEBSTER & Co., New York: 

Fisher Ames, Henry Clay, etc. (Hour-glass Series.) By Daniel B. Lucas, 
LL.D., and J. Fairfax McLaughlin, LL.D. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & Co., Boston and New York : 

Two Bites to a Cherry, and Other Tales. By T. B. Aldrich. The Son of a 
Prophet. By George Anson Jackson. Sub-Coslum. By A. P. Russell. 
The Witness to Immortality. By George A. Gordon, Minister of the 
Old South Church, 'Boston. A Sketch of the History of the Apostolic 
Church. By Oliver J. Thatcher, of the University of Chicago. 

BENZIGER BROTHERS, New York; BURNS & OATES, London: 

The Blessed Virgin in the Fathers of the First Six Centuries. By Thomas 
Livius, M.A. The Flight into Egypt. By Sister Anna Catherine Emme- 
rich. An Explanation of the Gospels of the Sundays and Holy days. From 
the Italian of Angelo Cagnola by Rev. L. A. Lambert, LL.D. Together 
with an explanation of Catholic Worship, its Ceremonies and the Sacraments 
and Festivals of the Church. From the German by Rev. Richard Brennan, 
LL.D. Claude Lightfoot; or, How the Problem was Solved. By Francis 
J. Finn, S.J. Connor D' Arcy' s Struggles. By Mrs. W. M. Bertholds. 

E. W. ALLEN, 4 Ave Maria Lane, E.C., London : 

Songs in Spring- Time: The Passing of Lilith, and Other Poems. By 
John Cameron Grant. 

THE WILLIAMSON BOOK COMPANY, Boston: 

In Dreamland, and Other Poems. By Thomas O'Hagan. 

GARRETSON, Cox & Co., Buffalo : 

The Cyclopedic Review of Current History. 2d Quarter, 1893. 

GEORGE H. ELLIS, Boston: 

Jesus and Modern Life. By M. J. Savage. With an Introduction by Pro- 
fessor Crawford H. Toy. 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, New York: 

David Balfour. By Robert Louis Stevenson. Ivar the Viking. By Paul 
Du Chaillu. With Thackeray in America. By Eyre Crowe, A.R.A. 

FR. PUSTET & Co., New York and Cincinnati : 
Blessed Gerard Majella. 

La Rabida. By Mary A. Lambert. 




TARSUS, THE BIRTHPLACE OF ST. PAUL. 

THE project suggested by Bishop Paul, the present Bishop of 
Tarsus, encouraged by the venerable Bishop of Burlington, taken 
up by the Paulists as outlined in the last number of THE CATHO- 
LIC WORLD, has stirred up a great deal of enthusiasm in many 
quarters, and contributions are pouring in from many who wish 
to express in this way their devotion to the great Apostle of 
the Gentiles. 

There is surely nothing presented of late years which so 
warmly commends itself to our charity as the object for which 
the modern Paul of Tarsus so eloquently pleads. In him the 
burning enthusiasm and the ardent apostolic spirit of St. Paul 
live again. 

The difficulties he has to contend with come principally 
from American Protestant missionaries using American money 
to pervert his poor people from the true faith. Already by 
means of their superior school-houses and by lavish gifts have 
they enticed hundreds of the poor Catholic children away. This 
evil work should be stopped, and American Catholics, in their 
abundant generosity, can stay the hand of proselytism and 
strengthen the efforts now being made by Bishop Paul, at won- 
derful self-sacrifice, to bring his poor people back to the religion 
of St. Paul. 

Many gifts have already been received, the principal among 
which are 

VOL. LVIII. 20 



298 TARSUS. [Nov., 

The Paulists, $100.00 

John B. Richmond, M.D., 5.00 

Walter F. Atlee, M.D., ... 5-OO 

Rev. T. J. Jenkins, 9.70 

H. L. Richards, 10.00 

Louise Sanieska, ....... 5- 

Mr. Madden, 5.00 

Chas. P. Romadka, . . . . . 10.00 
Our Lady of Perpetual Help Council, No. 90, 

C. B. L., 72 members, 7.20 

The following letter from Bishop Paul explains itself : 

TARSUS, September 16, 1893. 

VERY REV. FATHER HEWIT, C.S.P. : 

Your consoling letter of July 29 reached me while visiting 
one of our new and laborious missions ; and I gave thanks to 
God, who watches over the works done for him. I thank you 
from the bottom of my heart, Reverend Father, and I constantly 
pray the God of all goodness to bless you, and bestow upon 
you every spiritual and temporal blessing. I cannot tell you 
what great joy and encouraging consolation your good letter 
gave me. 

At present I am making my second pastoral visit, and have 
been travelling already three months, visiting first of all Tar- 
sus, then Adana, Sis, Fek, Roumly, Char, and Hadjine. 

During my visit I found that, thanks to God, all our under- 
takings were in a most prosperous condition ; especially the 
schools which I started a year ago. These have been remark- 
ably successful. 

At Char, the ancient Gomana of the Romans, the Protestants 
and schismatic Armenians have been obliged to close their 
schools : all the children in that place coming to ours. Many 
children from the neighboring villages also come to our schools 
for instruction. 

A Protestant boy, fourteen years of age and still unbaptized, 
had been instructed by our school-master, and was presented 
to me for baptism. It was a very simple Pontifical ceremony ; 
of course, without priests and deacons, but it proved to be a 
very touching and impressive one. Such a large crowd of peo- 
ple came to witness it that I was obliged to perform the bap- 
tism out-of-doors, on the border of a river. For myself, I wept 
tears of joy, and all thought of many trials vanished from 



1893.] TARSUS. 299 

my mind. The young neophyte, named Paul, is fired with zeal 
to bring about the conversion of his parents. I feel assured 
also of the conversion of other non-Catholic children taught in 
our schools. 

At Roumly twenty-one families were converted during the 
past year. Having no priest to send them, I have confided the 
instruction of the children to a good, fervent Catholic layman 
of Hadjine, visiting them from time to time myself when able. 

At Feke seventy families came to me declaring themselves 
Catholics. They begged for priests and schools ; but my strait- 
ened resources do not allow me to grant their request at pres- 
ent. Next year I hope to be able to do something to satisfy 
their urgent need. 

For the mission at Sis, the residence of the schismatic patri- 
arch, I am obliged for the present to be content with only one 
school for boys. This is a very promising mission. I chose 
four young men of excellent talent, and have put them under 
the direction of the missionary pastor at Sis, a highly capable 
and very apostolic priest, to be trained as school-teachers. 

I have spent a good deal of what little means were at my 
disposal upon the missions of Tarsus and Hadjine, more inter- 
esting places, but unfortunately the most neglected. I am pre- 
paring to open schools for girls, and I await the coming of the 
Sisters of the Immaculate Conception. They will soon arrive, 
and will then devote themselves to the necessary instruction of 
those children who have unfortunately fallen into- Protestant 
hands. At Hadjine there are fifty families, and the number of 
converts has increased to four hundred. 

Having finished my visitation of eight missions, lying chiefly 
.in the mountainous part of Cilicia, I am once more at home in 
my dear Tarsus. What a prophetic country ! I seem to be 
able to trace the sacred footsteps of the holy Apostle St. Paul. 
Every time I enter [it profound sighs break forth from my 
breast. O unfortunate country! shall it ever be granted to me 
to see you some day all Catholic ? Shall I have the inexpressi- 
ble happiness of prostrating myself in adoration of the Euchar- 
istic God, the divine Source whence the missionary draws the 
force for his arduous vocation, in a splendid temple worthy of 
the Catholic name? What joy, O valiant and indefatigable 
Apostle, to see thy majestic statue raised upon our altars ! 

Ah, dear Reverend Father, though I weep, yet I do not de- 
spair. Yes, an interior voice encourages me. The people every- 
where show the most lively sympathy. At holy Mass I trans- 



300 TARSUS. [Nov., 

lated your letter to them. I cannot describe to you the joy I 
saw upon their countenances, or the gratitude which these poor 
people feel towards you. They unite with their unworthy pas- 
tor in most fervent prayers for you. I entertain the most con- 
fident hopes that we shall be able to show the most happy re- 
sults when we shall have succeeded in building our church of 
St. Paul, which will assuredly be the source of abundant bless- 
ings, not only to our generous and charitable benefactors, but 
also to this native land of the great Apostle. 

But I do not hide from myself the immense difficulties to 
be overcome. The Protestants spend large sums of money and 
labor industriously to get the full control of the children by 
building and conducting numerous free day and night schools, 
chiefly at Adana, Tarsus, Sis, and Hadjine, where also their 
success has been the greatest. But fortunately parents every- 
where prefer our schools, as has been shown by the fact that 
no matter in what mission I have opened a school it is filled 
at once with children. The American Protestant ministers are 
preparing to make a union of schools with the schismatic Arme- 
nians, a wretched people, who here are truly as sheep without a 
shepherd. 

I have tried, Reverend Father, to picture to you the work 
which you have shown a charitable willingness to aid. By the 
grace of God I give myself wholly to my duties, and reserving 
nothing for myself, I give all that I receive to our poor missions. 
Just now all my money force is exhausted, but I have no fear 
that the good God will leave me lacking even in that, so far as 
it is needful. He will speak more eloquently than I to charita- 
ble hearts, like your own generous and sympathizing heart ; and 
dispose them to aid me in laboring for the conversion of this 
people through the intercession of St. Paul. 

Begging you, Reverend Father Hewit, to receive the assur- 
ances of my profound respect, with sentiments of most sincere 
gratitude ; and wishing you all desirable blessings, and above 
all the Divine benediction, I have the honor to remain 

Yours devotedly in our Lord, 

PAUL TERZIAN, 
Bishop of Adana and Tarsus. 



1893. THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 301 



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. 

READING Circles are closely identified with parish libraries in many places. 
It is a considerable saving of expense if the books to be used can be bor- 
rowed from a public or a parish library. From a report published in the Semi- 
nary we learn that the Rev. Michael J. Lavelle most generously aided the for- 
mation of a free circulating library soon after his appointment as rector of the 
Cathedral, New York City. Beginning with about four hundred volumes in No- 
vember, 1887, the Cathedral Library now contains over fourteen thousand care- 
fully selected books, many of them donated by benefactors of the good work. A 
valuable collection of eleven hundred volumes, made by the late John R. G. Has- 
sard, was purchased for the department of musical literature. The best available 
editions of books in English Catholic literature and ecclesiastical history have 
been bought. The list of fiction contains a large and liberal selection of the best 
English and French novels. Though not restricted exclusively to Catholic au- 
thors, the list of healthy books for juvenile readers has been chosen with unusual 
care. A complete building was assigned for the use of the library by the trus- 
tees of the Cathedral. By his incessant personal service, and varied knowledge 
of books and how to buy them, the Rev. Joseph H. McMahon, Director of the 
Cathedral Library, has successfully established the best Catholic circulating library 
in the United States. This statement is made with full knowledge of many ex- 
cellent parish libraries, which have a long record of members extending back 
over twenty-five years, but which have not had the same opportunities of securing 

wealthy benefactors. 

* (r * 

The administration of the Cathedral Library is confided entirely to the Rev- 
snd Director. In the technical work he is assisted by a number of young ladies 
)f the parish, whose services are given entirely gratuitously. For the present the 
library is open five times during the week: on Sundays, from 10 A.M.-I2 M.; on 
Tuesdays and Thursdays, from 7.30-9 P.M.; and on Wednesdays and Saturdays, 
from 2-5 P.M. The great amount of time and labor given in the library by these 
young ladies can be realized only by those who are familiar with the details of libra- 
ry work ; and in this instance only by those who know the difficulties against which 
they have had to contend. Among these difficulties the chief was the absence 
of a complete printed catalogue. While the catalogue was making the library 
was still kept open, an endeavor being made through information given by the 
librarian to supply the wants of the patrons for the latest accessions. All books 
are purchased by the director on his own responsibility. The result of this sys- 
tem is that any book called for, if not on the shelves of the library, can be pro- 
cured at once by purchase, and can be put in circulation as soon as the publishers 
are able to deliver it to the library. 

The circulation in 1888 was 8,393, divided as follows: Religion, 2,029; Tra- 
vel, History, and Biography, 450; Fiction, 5,263 ; Science and Literature, 648. In 
1889: Religion, 2,282; Travel, History, Biography, 875; Fiction, 8,679; General 
Literature, 1,305 ; total 13,141. In 1890: Religion, 2,299; Travel, History, and 
Biography, 1,188; Fiction 8,274 ; General Literature, 1,821; total, 13,582. In 
1891 (owing to illness of director the library was closed for four months) : Reli- 



302 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [Nov., 

gion, 2,075 I Travel, History, and Biography, 977 ; Fiction, 5,027 ; General Litera- 
ture, 1,622; total, 10,749. In 1892: Religion, 3,398; Travel, History, and Biogra- 
phy, 1,489; Fiction, 19,470; General Literature, 1,862; total, 26,219. 

As some readers in a public circulating library oftentimes lack discrimination, 
it has been deemed advisable to exercise a strict supervision over the circulation 
of many books that are on the shelves of the library, which require a certain 
amount of judgment to be read with profit. To that end a special department 
has been instituted, which is designated by the letters "11," and in which 
are to be found all books which should not be read by young persons except un- 
der direction. These books are given out only on personal application to the 
director, or by his special permission. In this way the difficulties that would 
either arise from the absence of these books or from their indiscriminate dis- 
tribution are, it is believed, completely avoided. The books in this department 
will be found throughout the catalogue under their proper headings. 

Supervision is exercised over the reading of children who come to the library, 
parents being required to sign the application blanks of their children, and to cer- 
tify their willingness that their children should be members. The librarians ex- 
ercise also considerable discretion in giving out books to children, suggesting 
those that they think the more fitting, and prudently withholding at times those 
that are asked for. 

Efforts have been made to encourage the children in our schools to enter up- 
on systematic courses of reading. In connection with this subject we again call 
the attention of teachers to the excellent booklet on literature for children, writ- 
ten by George E. Hardy, M.A.,of New York, and the graded list of books for chil- 
dren prepared by him ; and likewise to the papers read at the Convention of 

American Librarians in Chicago, in July, 1893. 

* * * 

A new department of the Cathedral Library pays special attention to sup- 
plying clergymen with necessary books of instruction and controversial works for 
converts. Special lists of books have been prepared dealing with the different 
phases of religious belief, and the library is ready and willing at all times to co- 
operate with clergymen and religious in the great work of instructing neophytes 
in the faith. It has been the aim of the library likewise to be of assistance to 
Catholics living in distant portions of the country, and away from Catholic influ- 
ences, by sending, under proper guarantees, books which might help them to 
increase their own fund of information in matters pertaining to religion, and 
possibly to spread a knowledge of the same among their neighbors. By this 
plan many persons living at a great distance from New York have been benefit- 
ed. The attention of clergymen and religious communities is especially called to 
this feature of our work. 

Another distinguishing characteristic of the work in this department has 
been the effort to establish branches of the Cathedral Library in various parts of 
the city. It is hoped that two of these branches will soon be in operation ; one 
in the parish of the Nativity, 44 Second Avenue, under the direction of the Rev. 
B. J. Reilly, and the other in the parish of St. Stephen, 142 East Twenty-ninth 
Street, under the direction of the Rev. J. B. McCabe. These parishes were both 
operating small parochial libraries. It was suggested to them that by mutual co- 
operation their readers could have the benefit of the books in the Cathedral 
Library. So with the consent of the reverend pastors the libraries were amalga- 
mated. Any books of the Cathedral Library can now be obtained at either of 
these branches, such books being either on the shelves of the branches, or being 
sent for as soon as ordered. 



1893.] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 303 

The Cathedral Library is also the headquarters for the Cathedral Library 
Reading Circles, which last season numbered thirty-eight active members. All 
the books used in the different courses of these Circles are supplied from the 
Cathedral Library. The members of one of the circles meet at the library 
monthly for a business meeting, and weekly for informal discussion, and for dis- 
tribution of books. The library building contains also the collection of rare 
books and documents belonging to the United States Historical Society of New 

York. 

* * * 

When first opened membership in the library was confined to persons who 
were properly parishioners of the Cathedral parish, or who belonged to some of 
the societies connected with that parish. It was felt, however, that the library 
should be made something more than a parish library, especially since it had 
grown so rapidly. A year and a half ago, therefore, the library was thrown open 
to the public at large, though no book is given without satisfactory reference. In 
every respect the Cathedral Library is a free public circulating library. At pre- 
sent it numbers among its readers Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Gentiles. 
The Cathedral Library is supported entirely by voluntary contributions. As 
the expense of the library, however, has far exceeded the donations, the Cathe- 
dral Library Association was organized in 1889 with the cordial approbation of 
his Grace, Archbishop Corrigan, for the following objects : ist. To provide funds 
for the support of the Cathedral Library, a circulating library, free to residents of 
New York City, and to non-resident members of the Cathedral Library Associa- 
tion ; 2d. To publish and circulate as widely as means would allow leaflets 
treating of the salient points of Christian Doctrine ; 3d. To distribute among the 
poor, and in hospitals, reformatories, etc., Catholic periodicals, etc. 

Any one can become a member of the Cathedral Library Association by 
paying an annual subscription of one dollar. There are also associate members, 
patrons, and founders who contribute larger sums. 

* * * 

Expert makers of statistics for libraries should read the estimate of results 
which Rev. J. H. McMahon gives in these words : 

" It is most difficult to determine the practical good done by any library. 
The circulation furnishes one good test, although not altogether reliable. The 
mere fact of circulating a large number of books is not to be regarded as a fair 
standard by which the efficiency of a library may be judged. The character of 
the circulation may be such as to suggest that the library is doing harm rather 
than good. So many circumstances concur to determine the character of the 
circulation that it is impossible to pronounce judgment on this basis alone. For 
instance, it has been the fashion to take the circulation of a library, and ascertain 
by the relative proportion of works of fiction circulated to the actual aggregate of 
volumes in circulation, whether there has been an undue proportion of works of 
fiction distributed. That proportion should, however, be based upon the total 
number of books in the library, the total number of books in each department, 
and the entire number of books circulated. But even this is not a fair test. A 
free circulating library, for example, will not only have a fiction department 
largely in excess of other departments, but will have this department very 
largely drawn upon by people who procure their serious reading elsewhere. 
In many libraries, also, the fiction department embraces juvenile literature of all 
classes. Now, a very large percentage of the readers in a free circulating 
library are children ; it is unnecessary to add that the circulation of the fiction 
department will be seemingly out of all proportion. Hence we do not place 



304 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [Nov., 1893. 

much reliance upon the figures in the circulation account as determining the 
good any library is doing. However, it affords a certain means of determining 
whether the library is to be considered as a desirable adjunct. An examination 
of the figures given as the record of our circulation will suffice to show that 
the library has grown very much in popularity, and that the general character of 
reading is distinctly of a high order." 

" It is noteworthy that there has been a marked increase in the number of reli- 
gious books drawn from the library each succeeding year, and when it is borne in 
mind that the fiction department has been very much increased, while additions to 
the department of religious literature are, from the nature of the case, fewer. It 
is most desirable for teachers and spiritual directors to examine attentively the de- 
partment of religious literature, as we find that books of this character need only 
be recommended to be read. It is gratifying to note also that the experience of 
the assistants in the library is that there has been a marked improvement year by 
year in the character of books called for by our readers. We have ascertained 
likewise that neighboring libraries have been obliged to procure many books that 
were asked for by people who were familiar with our catalogue, and in this indi- 
rect way the library has been of service in placing on the shelves of these purely 
secular libraries many Catholic books that undoubtedly would not otherwise have 
found their way thither. It will be interesting also to teachers to learn that the 
books read by boys are much better, as a rule, than those asked for by girls. The 
boys show more discrimination, more solid judgment. Teachers, it would ap- 
pear to us, have an immense power to influence the reading of these children, 
whether boys or girls, and we would respectfully suggest the advisability of 

their doing so." 

* * * 

The Cathedral Library Association has published the following books dur- 
ing the past few years: 

Books and Reading (3d edition). By Brother Azarias. 

Series of Liturgical Manuals. 

The Order of the Consecration of a Bishop. Latin and English rubricated 
(2d edition). 

The Rite of Ordination of Priests ; Latin and English rubricated. 

The Order of the Consecration of an Altar ; English translation. 

The History of St. Joseph's Seminary of New York. Paper, beautifully illus- 
trated, 25 cents ; bound in cloth, $i. 

The Apostolic Union of Secular Priests. 

Meditations of Stations of the Cross. By Henri Perreyve. Translated by 
Emily V. Mason. 

Manual of the Lady Servants of the Poor. 

The Blessing of a Bell. 

The League Annuals for '90, '91, '92. 

Life of St. Aloysius. 

Preparation for First Communion. By Rev. F. X. Schouppe, SJ. 

These publications can be obtained at the Cathedral Library, or may be or- 
dered through any bookseller. 

In addition to these a series of leaflets has been published similar to the ex- 
cellent publications of the Catholic Truth Society of England, the Society 
of the same name established at St. Paul, Minnesota, and the Catholic 
Book Exchange of New York. Thousands of these leaflets were distributed by 
a committee of the League of the Sacred Heart would that we had many other 
members of the League in the same good work ! in prisons, hospitals, and re- 
formatories. The Apostolate of the Press could not hope for a stronger fortifi- 
cation than the great Cathedral of New York. 

M. C. M. 




ONE OF Two CANDELABRA STANDARDS. 

15 feet high, carrying 42 lights, with pedestals of Mexican onvx. 
Presented to the Sanctuary of the Church of the Panlists. 



Workmanship by DREW & MAY, igth Street and Third Avenue, New York. 




MOST REV. FRANCIS SATOLLI, D.D., 

Archbishop of Lepanto and Apostolic Delegate to the United States. 



THE 



CATHOLIC WORLD. 



VOL. LVIII. 



DECEMBER, 1893. 



No. 345. 



MOST REV. FRANCIS SATOLLI, D.D., 

ARCHBISHOP OF LEPANTO AND APOSTOLIC DELEGATE TO 
THE UNITED STATES. 

BY THOMAS S. DUHIGG. 

the life f the Re P ublic the Catholic Church 
is, indeed, a great fact and factor. As ear- 
<iJ|i^OJ' ly as t ne year 1857 Brownson wrote that 

^| " the church serves the cause of patriotism ; 

f^fsOgP that, if embraced, it is sure to give us a 
^fcl'V^E^N high-toned and chivalric national character; 

^^^%|jji ^ that it enlists conscience in the support of our 
JjJBfi^lf^r free institutions and the preservation of our 
republican freedom as the established order 
tne country, is a good reason why the 
American people should not oppose her, 
why they should wish her growth and 
prosperity in our country." The people of 
the United States are beginning to see clearly what an in- 
fluence for good upon the country and its future there ought 
to be in a body of over ten millions, absolutely one in wor- 
ship, religious thought, and discipline. The history of 



THE CHURCH IN THESE UNITED STATES 

is evidence of what zeal, determination, adherence to high 
ideals, love of God and neighbor can accomplish. As in all 
places and at all times, so here from the beginning has the 
church aimed not at making a show but at doing a work of 
faith, purity, and charity. In our exultation over the prospect 

Copyright. VERY REV. A. F. HEWIT. 1893. 
VOL. LVIII. 21 




306 MOST REV. FRANCIS SATOLLI, D.D. [Dec., 

of the great success of the church in this country we must 
not forget that much of this success is due to the favorable 
conditions in which she finds herself placed. The children of 
those wise statesmen who legislated for the free and independent 
States of America, and who laid the foundations of the new 
Republic upon the grounds of eternal justice, have ever been 
a God-fearing, law-abiding, and religious people. Nowhere in 
Christendom is there among all classes a greater regard and 
higher respect for religion and revealed truth than here. There- 
fore, in a large measure, has the faith been able to achieve such 
glorious triumphs. Catholics in the United States rejoice in the 
fact that they possess the liberty which Christ demands for his 
church the liberty to carry out his great commission and to 
govern herself ; to be untiring and zealous in erecting sanctuaries 
of piety, charity, and learning, and, like her divine Master, to 
do good unto all men. The successors of St. Peter in the see 
of Rome have not been unmindful nor unobservant of the splen- 
did opportunities the church in America has ever had to grow 
into magnificent proportions and to make religion flourish. Es- 
pecially is this so, when they saw that the losses sustained in 
the old world have more than been made up by the accession 
in the new of self-sacrificing men and women anxious for the 
truth that should make them free. The evidence of God's work 
faithfully done, the tender love and regard for the Holy See, so 
manifest' in the clergy and laity of the United States, made 
Gregory XVI. on one occasion say that he was more truly pope 
in this than in any other land. His successor, Pope Pius IX., 
always manifested a tender love and solicitude for whatever 
concerned the growth and welfare of the American Church. 
When the years of his long and glorious Pontificate were ended, 
we saw that we were indebted to him for the creation of all 
but one of the ten archbishoprics then existing, and of at least 
three-fifths of our sixty-odd episcopal sees and vicariates. 
This love, so characteristic of the Pontiffs Gregory and Pius, 
burns even yet more brightly in the bosom of him who is at 
the head of government in the church, the saint and scholar, 
the arbiter of nations, Pope Leo XIII. 

THE MISSION OF LEO. 

A writer in the Catholic Quarterly Review, in an article en- 
titled "Pius IX. and his Pontificate," said: " We have lost Pius 
IX., but God has put in his place one whose name has already 



1 893.] MOST REV. FRANCIS SATOLLI, D.D. 307 

become a familiar word on the lips of Christendom. For what 
special purpose Leo XIII. has been raised up by Providence we 
know not. Time alone will reveal it. His name is of happy 
augury, for it indicates strength the royal energy that conquers. 
May Leo have sweet, persuasive words for his children and even 
for his enemies, blended with inflexible rigor, and indomitable 
strength in defending the rights of the church, and condemning 
the errors that belong to a false, impious civilization with 
which Satan is endeavoring to delude mankind and overthrow 
Christianity ! " These words sound like a prophecy in these later 
days ; surely the aspiration has seen its fulfilment. For among 
the men who mould the century and guide its movements Leo 
XIII. is conceded by all to be pre-eminent. With the solicitude 
of all the churches upon him, yet with a special, fatherly affec- 
tion does he regard the church in America, and love it because 
of the great promises for the future it holds out. As if to show 
in a still more positive manner his peculiar affection for us he 
has commissioned his favorite disciple and closest friend to be 
his representative amongst us. In his letter to the cardinal 
archbishops, and bishops of the United States on 

THE MUCH-DEBATED SCHOOL QUESTION 

the Holy Father says: "We have often given manifest proofs, 
both of our solicitude for the welfare of the faithful people 
and bishops of the United States of America, and of the 
peculiar affection with which we cherish that portion of our 
Saviour's flock. Of this we have given an additional and un- 
mistakable evidence in sending to you as our Delegate our 
venerable Brother Francis, Titular Archbishop of Lepanto, an 
illustrious man not less pre-eminent by his learning than by his 
virtues, as you yourselves, in the recent meeting of the arch- 
bishops in New York, have plainly testified, thus confirming 
the trust which we had reposed in his prudence. Now, his 
legation had this for its object : that it should be a public 
testimonial of our good will towards your country, and of the 
high esteem in which we hold those who administer the govern- 
ment of the Republic ; for he was to assist, in our name, at the 
dedication of the Universal Exposition held in the City of Chi- 
cago, in which we ourselves, by the courteous invitation of its 
directors, have taken part. But his legation had this, also, for 
its purpose : that our presence should be made, as it were, per- 
petual among you by the permanent establishment of an Apos- 



3o8 MOST REV. FRANCIS SATOLLI, D.D. [Dec., 

tolic Delegation at Washington. By this we have manifestly de- 
clared, not only that we love your nation equally with those 
most flourishing countries to which we have been accustomed 
to send representatives vested with our authority, but also that 
we vehemently desire that the bonds of mutual relationship 
binding you and your faithful people with us, as children with 
their father, should grow closer every day. Nor was it a small 
comfort to our heart that this new act of our care in your re- 
gard was followed by a general outpouring of thanks and affec- 
tion toward us." 

THE ADVENT OF ARCHBISHOP SATOLLI, 

bearing with him the highest of commissions, and speaking to us 
authoritatively in the name of the Holy Father, will be fraught 
with innumerable advantages, and will give a fresher and stronger 
impulse to the zeal that has built up the church in America. 
The object of these pages is to set forth the life-work of the 
man whom Leo XIII. has selected for such a responsible posi- 
tion, to detail the incidents of his brilliant career, that American 
Catholics may have a correct idea of the learning, piety, and 
wisdom of the first permanent Apostolic Delegate to the United 
States. A sketch of the Apostolic Delegate must necessarily be 
preceded by an account of the influences that have moulded 
and fitted him for his work. As we are what our education 
makes us, as the actions of our maturer years depend greatly 
upon the direction given them in the beginning, so must we 
look for the explanation of great men's lives to the influences 
that surrounded them in the days of youth. 

The Delegate was born in the year 1837, at Marsciano, a de- 
lightful parish in the diocese of Perugia. At the time of Satolli's 
birth Perugia enjoyed the unenviable distinction of being one of 
the centres of agitation of the revolutionary societies, whose ob- 
ject it was to foster popular discontent throughout all Italy. 
Through the catching terms of " patriotism and national unity," 
they imposed their schemes upon a people who knew not whither 
they were led. The old Italian political and social order was to 
be destroyed ; religion and its institutions to be harassed and 
persecuted ; a new order of freedom and equality was to be es- 
tablished, and Italy would acquire the prominence among the 
nations she deserved, but which had been withheld from her 
through the mistakes of Papal administrations. Time has shown 
the value of these pretensions, but they acted powerfully upon 
the minds of the Italian people at that period. The ultimate 



1893-] MOST REV. FRANCIS SATOLLI, D.D. 309 

object of the agitators was to deprive the Holy See of the rights 
vested in it for centuries, to despoil the Sovereign Pontiff of 
his possessions, and to make him dependent in his administra- 
tion of the Universal Church. There was great need of a man 
who, by his personality, learning, and prudence, should put a 
check on the movements of these unscrupulous men. Such a 
man the then reigning pontiff found in Monsignor Joachim Pecci, 
the delegate, or governor, of the province of Benevento. Ac- 
cordingly, in May of the year 1841, he was 

APPOINTED DELEGATE OF SPOLETO AND GOVERNOR OF UMBRIA. 

It was no easy task to reconcile the violently opposed emotions 
of the people in Umbria at that period, yet in two short years 
was the work successfully accomplished. It was effected by 
Monsignor Pecci's fostering of industry, agriculture, and com- 
merce, by his working a thoroughly moral renovation of the 
people through religion. So well did affairs prosper in Perugia 
during his wise and beneficent rule that the announcement of 
his appointment as Archbishop of Damietta and Apostolic 
Nuncio to the court of Brussels was received by the people of 
Umbria as a personal misfortune. They resolved to leave no 
measures untried to have him again in their midst. And so it 
came to pass that on July 26, 1846, Monsignor Pecci made 
his formal, solemn entry into the diocese of Perugia as its 
bishop, amid general rejoicing and wonderful display. The sub- 
ject of this sketch was but nine years of age when the arch- 
bishop took up his residence in Perugia. The triumphal entry 

>f the archbishop, afterwards his friend and patron, the fervid 
ithusiasm manifested by over sixty thousand of the grateful 

kalian people on that wonderful holiday, are memories dearly 
lerished by our Delegate. Perugia, from being a hot-bed of an- 
-chistic sentiment, became, under the firm, wise, and chari- 

ible guidance of its bishop, a centre of faith, education, and 

)iety. It was during such happy times that Archbishop Sa- 
tolli spent his youth. At the age of thirteen years, having 
already felt 

THE DESIRE TO ENTER THE PRIESTHOOD, 

he was placed in the diocesan seminary of Perugia, which, found- 
ed in 1571 by Cardinal Fulvio della Corgna, had then become, 
owing to the enlightened zeal and policy of Archbishop Pecci, one 
of the most flourishing schools in all Italy. There, under the 
guidance of carefully selected professors, and under the personal 



310 MOST REV. FRANCIS SATOLLI, D.D. [Dec., 

supervision of the great archbishop himself, Satolli laid deep and 
broad the foundations of that splendid scholarship so well known 
in these later days to the literary world. For ten years he 
showed an ever-increasing aptitude for the sacred sciences, a rare 
enthusiasm in the pursuit of knowledge, a close application to 
the duties of a seminarian. In the same institution, his student 
days over, the young ecclesiastic took up the office and duties 
of professor. He was called upon by his superiors to give a 
course of lectures on higher mathematics, a task which he fulfilled 
to their satisfaction, and in a manner that won for him great 
praise and renown. Is it not probable that this work of his 
seminary days had much to do in developing that clear-cut, pre- 
cise, and penetrating logic so evident in the later years of his 
professorship? His preparatory studies were now completed, 
and he was ordered to prepare himself diligently for the graces 
of the priesthood, and in the year 1862 he was ordained and 
privileged to go up to the altar and offer the clean sacrifice, 
the ever unfailing source .of strength, comfort, and zeal in the 
divine service. In November of the same year that he was or- 
dained he was 

CALLED TO THE CHAIR OF LITERATURE IN THE SEMINARY, 

a post which he occupied for only a short time, when he was 
sent to Rome, that he might perfect himself still more in the 
sacred sciences, particularly in the science of philosophy. It 
can easily be imagined how the young priest devoted himself 
to a study that always had a peculiar fascination for him. For 
the long period of seven years did he ardently avail himself of 
the opportunities for study and research which the Eternal City 
affords to the inquiring mind. These were days when, relieved 
from any distracting responsibility, his whole object was to fit 
himself for the work that he would soon be called upon to un- 
dertake. In the year 1870 he repaired to the famous Benedic- 
tine Monastery of Monte Casino. This famous abbey, placed 
upon the mountain-side and looking down upon the plains 
of Aquino, the birth-place of the Angelic Doctor, was founded 
in the sixth century by St. Benedict. Notwithstanding the 
struggles for its possession and the many changes to which it 
had been subjected, it ever held the reputation of being one 
of the most distinguished schools of letters in the land. 
Through its vast corridors and silent cloisters the civilization 
of modern Europe had flowed out. There is no denying 
the fact that the traditions of the Benedictine spirit had a great 



1893-] MOST REV. FRANCIS SATOLLI, D.D. 311 

deal to do with the Christianizing of society in Europe. The 
names of Bede, Wilfrid, Bernard, and Anselm are suggestive of 
the influence of that spirit. In this beautiful retreat, hallowed 
by the glorious memories of the past, and consecrated by the 
saintly lives and splendid erudition of the Benedictine friars, 
Satolli took up his abode. 

For two years of the time he remained there he delivered 
lectures on ecclesiastical history, discussing particularly the in- 
teresting questions that centre about the life of Charles the 
Great and his relations to the church. In 1875 he was recalled 
by his bishop, Cardinal Pecci, to assume charge of the parish 
church of Marsciano, the village where he was born. While 
fulfilling with zeal and devotion the arduous labors of a parish 
priest he found time to attend to the duties of director of the 
Academy of St. Thomas, founded by Cardinal Pecci in the dio- 
cese of Perugia. He was happy and contented in the work 
that had been allotted to him, he possessed the unshaken confi- 
dence of his bishop, who trusted in the learning, prudence, and 
piety of the disciple, educated under his fostering care. But 
the ordinary routine of a pastor's work in a quiet village on the 
mountain-side was soon to be interrupted by the changes that 
took place in the church at that time. 

CARDINAL PECCI ELECTED POPE. 

January 7, 1878, the gentle, loving, and Christian soul of 
Pius went to meet its Maker. Throughout his long and glorious 
pontificate he possessed the heritage of the saints, suffering for 
the cause of Christ and his truth. Gentle of heart, yet firm 
and obstinate in the assertion of God-given rights, his last act 
was a solemn protest against the usurpation of the government 
and the alienation of the temporalities of the church. February 
1 8 the cardinals of Holy Roman Church met in solemn con- 
clave to choose a successor to Pius. The tempests then raging 
about the bark of Peter called for the election of a man of 
pre-eminent virtue, of experience in managing diplomatic inter- 
course, of patience and firmness in asserting the rights of 
Christ's Vicar on earth, of wisdom in safeguarding the Papacy, 
the very reason of whose existence men were foolishly begin- 
ning to dispute. Such a man, in the estimation of the assembled 
princes of the church, was Cardinal Pecci, Camerlengo of the 
Holy Roman Church and Archbishop of Perugia. Upon his 
election, when the usual question was put to him, " By what 



312 MOST REV. FRANCIS SATOLLI, D.D. [Dec. 

name do you wish to be called ? " he simply answered " Call 
me Leo." 

HIS FIRST WORK. 

With Leo's accession to the See of Peter a new era of glory 
and success began for the Universal Church. Two hundred mil- 
lions of Catholics, spread all over the globe, manifested their joy 
and enthusiasm upon the election of Leo XIII. He took up 
the burden at a period when men's passions and prejudices were 
being excited by an unholy propagandism, when the church was 
persecuted, reviled, and calumniated, through the greater por- 
tion of the world. And to-day we see the fruits of Leo's pon- 
tificate. Wonderful transformation in the space of fifteen years ! 
Among the wonderful results obtained from his far-reaching 
wisdom, not the least have come from his position on the 
methods of teaching to be followed in the preparation of young 
men for the work of the priesthood. While Bishop of Perugia 
he had constantly inculcated the necessity of a more solid and 
thorough preparation for those who were to take upon them- 
selves the onerous duties of the ministry. His efforts were 
always directed towards restoring to its ancient place and 
splendor the Christian philosophy which attained its scientific 
maturity in the thirteenth century under St. Thomas Aquinas. 
When he attained supreme jurisdiction in the church he was 
more than ever convinced of the necessity of establishing once 
more in all its force and vigor the old scholastic philosophy, as 
shown forth by the great doctors and saints of the church. This 
philosophy was to save the social order and to lead it back to the 
old paths. It was not before the 4th of August, 1879, that the 
Holy Father found time to complete and publish that wonder- 
ful document, the Encyclical " ALterni Patris" in which, by vir- 
tue of his supreme authority, he declared that the Thomistic 
philosophy should in all Catholic schools be the source from 
whence the professors should borrow their doctrine and their 
method. 

THE OLD SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY. 

That Leo XIII. should call Catholic thinkers back to the 
thirteenth century, the culmination in St. Thomas of the best 
thought of paganism and Christianity, seemed to many to indi- 
cate a desire on the part of the Pope to put on the mind all 
the fetters of the old conservatism. Events have proved the 
utter foolishness of such fears, which arose either from ignorance 



1893-] MOST REV. FRANCIS SATOLLI, D.D. 313 

or malice. There is no document among the acta of Leo which 
so clearly shows the splendid qualities of mind, the deep 
thought and research of the Pontiff, as this encyclical. It is a 
masterpiece of eloquent diction, of clear, terse exposition of the 
history of philosophy, and a magnificent tribute to the provi- 
dential genius of the Angel of the Schools, St. Thomas, who, 
as Cajetan remarked, " because he had a sovereign veneration 
for all the ancient doctors, seems to have united in himself the 
intellectual powers of them all." The Pope clearly points out 
that the departure from the philosophy of St. Thomas marks 
the downfall of rational philosophy, the decay of all moral and 
political truth, the beginning of what was called by some one 
" the unscientific handling of even physical science." It was time, 
therefore, for the Holy Father to call a halt to a system of 
teaching that had proved inadequate, and to restore the ancient 
landmarks by which, in the days of true progress, the course of 
philosophy and all science was regulated. By imposing upon 
Catholic professors the obligation of teaching the scholastic 
method, he effectually disproved the arguments of those who 
were bold enough to consider the philosophy of St. Thomas 
as barbarous, antiquated, and unintelligible. Such men either 

iled in honesty of speech or were sadly lacking in the capacity 
understanding. Ever since the publication of the encyclical 

holasticism has made remarkable strides. " The disciplining 
of mind, and the broadening of thought, the natural results of 
the scholastic method, are no less effectual in this era of critical 
empirical science than during the centuries of unhesitating be- 
lief. The love of independent research which it must inspire 
will be the reasonable service of our faith, and the crowning 
glory of a Pope truly alive to the times in sympathy and 
thought " (Rev. Dr. Pace on " Scholasticism "). Strange to say, 
in the beginning this wonderful document was interpreted to 
mean that the Pope intended to set aside as pernicious, or use- 
less, or hostile to revelation what Christian theologians, philoso- 
phers, and scientists acknowledged and accepted as true science. 
The Sovereign Pontiff, writing on February 24, 1880, to the 
Archbishop of Cologne, and later to the bishops of Northern 
Italy, expresses the value he sets on, and his appreciation of 
such science, while at the same time he encourages and stimu- 
lates all in their efforts to restore Christian philosophy by mak- 
ing the great works of St. Thomas the basis of their studies 
and teaching. Very soon after the announcement of his educa- 
tional views and methods he ordered that the return to the 



as 

I 



314 MOST REV. FRANCIS SATOLLI, D.D. [Dec., 

scholastic philosophy should begin in the schools of the Eter- 
nal City. 

SATOLLI MADE TEACHER OF THEOLOGY. 

In looking about for one upon whom he could rely, both 
for ability and love of the Angelic Doctor, he determined to call 
the parish priest of Marsciano to become his principal agent 
and helper in the philosophical and theological schools of Rome. 
Was it not a great compliment to Satolli to be thus chosen by 
the Holy Father from out the large number of undoubtedly 
able men in Italy to carry out the great work of scholastic re- 
form ? In 1880 he was made professor of dogmatic theology 
in the Urban College of the Propaganda, succeeding Abbot 
Smith, recently deceased, who had held that position for close 
on to thirty years. 

Those whose privilege it was to sit at the feet of Satolli and 
listen to his masterly exposition of Catholic truth, know the 
wonderful genius and talent of their professor. They have a 
profound veneration for the man, and count it a privilege in- 
deed to have been of the number of those who were witnesses 
of the eloquent diction, the ardent enthusiasm, and the clear 
methods of the greatest Thomist of the day. 

The Holy Father, well pleased with the manner in which 
Professor Satolli carried out in the Propaganda the commission 
entrusted to him, made him also, between the years 1882 and 
1885, professor of theology in the famous Roman Seminary. 
From the year 1884 to the year 1886 he held the important 
office of rector of the Greek College. The college had been in 
sad financial disorder, and the standard of discipline was not 
what the Pope wished it to be. In two years Professor Satolli, 
by his executive ability and attention to detail, restored it to 
its former flourishing condition, and thereby gladdened the 
heart of the Sovereign Pontiff, who had always evinced an 
earnest solicitude for the Seminary of St. Athanasius. In 1885 
the Pope conferred on Professor Satolli the dignity of Canon 
of St. John Lateran (the Mother and head of all the churches 
of the city and the world). 

INTRODUCES A NEW COURSE OF STUDY. 

In 1886 Professor Satolli was relieved of his duties as rector 
of the Greek College and appointed president of the College 
of Noble Ecclesiastics. This college was founded in Rome for 
the education of those who were destined for the diplomatic 



1 893.] MOST REV. FRANCIS SATOLLI, D.D. 315 

service. While occupying this very important position he 
inaugurated a new study entitled " Ecclesiastical Public Law." 
To give direction and method to this study he published 
three works : one on Ecclesiastical Public Law in general, a 
second on Corcordats and the relations of Church and State, 
and the third on the Public Law of the Church from the first 
to the sixth centuries. 

The Holy Father at this time hastened to establish in Rome 
an Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, in which the best scholars 
and scientists of the church should labor to build up the grand 
edifice of philosophical science as the Pope desired. Professor 
Satolli was associated in this movement with such distinguished 
scholars as Cardinals Pecci, Mazzella, Zigliara, and others whose 
literary fame was world-wide. In connection with the works of 
this institution Professor Satolli wrote quite a number of arti- 
cles which were published in the Transactions of the Roman 
Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas. It is astonishing how, in the 
midst of an unceasing round of duties, he still found time to 
give to the world so many productions remarkable for the ver- 
satility of learning evidenced by the subjects treated, and for 
the clearness and scientific method shown in all. Besides the 
rorks mentioned, he published during his stay in Rome volumes 
>n " Divine Grace," " The Blessed Trinity," " The Incarnation," 
The Divine Operations," "The Unity of God," and a complete 
mrse of logic. 

These works were not put out in a hurried fashion, as if mere- 
for the sake of publishing them, but were the natural result 
long years of inquiring research, and were a distinct acquisi- 
>n to the literature of the subjects treated. From 1884 to 
>88 Professor Satolli included among his other duties the 
ibors of member of the Congregations of Studies, Index, and 
Holy Office. When requested to assist in the work of preach- 
ing the word of God, notwithstanding the pressure of his other 
obligations, he readily assented, and preached the .Lenten ser- 
mons both at St. Charles on the Corso and at St. Lawrence-a- 
Damaso. 

MADE ARCHBISHOP OF LEPANTO. 

Such is the authentic account of the busy days of Satolli's 
life in Rome. Such singleness of purpose, such obedience to 
high ideals, endeared him to the heart of the Sovereign Pontiff, 
and all Rome knew that Satolli was destined for greater and 
higher honors. On the nth of June, 1888, he was consecrated 



3i6 MOST REV. FRANCIS SATOLLI, D.D. [Dec., 

Titular Archbishop of Lepanto in the Redemptorist Church on 
the Esquiline Hill. 

About this time American Catholics were to see the fulfil- 
ment of an aspiration they had held for many years. The bishops 
had long seen the desirableness of a higher or university edu- 
cation for both clergy and laity. In 1866, while engaged in the 
work of the Second Plenary Council of Baltimore, they put on 
record their testimony of the necessity of such education. It 
was no secret that our colleges gave but an indifferent mental 
training, and that thoroughness in education was the very rare 
exception. A proper intellectual education is pre-eminently a 
discipline for accuracy of mind. That such education was not 
given was well known to the enlightened prelates of the coun- 
try, and they were all anxious to provide the only possible 
remedy for the defect by the establishment of an institution 
national in its scope and character ; namely, a university solidly 
constituted and thoroughly equipped. The object of such an in- 
stitution would be "to remove the original dimness of the 
mind's eye ; to strengthen and perfect its vision ; to enable it 
to look out into the world right forward, steadily and truly ; to 
give the mind clearness, accuracy, and precision ; to enable it 
to use words aright ; to understand what it says, to conceive 
justly what it thinks about, to abstract, compare, analyze, 
divide, refine, and reason correctly " (Newman's Idea of a 
University}. 

AN AMERICAN CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY. 

When the archbishops of the United States were in Rome 
during November, 1883, the Pope himself particularly insisted 
on this matter of higher education. He arranged the schema 
of studies to be followed in the proposed university, and from 
the very beginning has shown a personal and kindly interest 
in its success. When the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore 
was in session he was very anxious concerning its deliberations, 
and looked upon it as a work with which he was closely iden- 
tified. After the labors of the council had been completed he 
wrote, saying : " It was a great satisfaction to us to learn that 
you and your brother bishops have undertaken the noble work 
of building as soon as possible a Catholic University in 
America." 

It was to be expected that grave difficulties would be en- 
countered at the very beginning of this great undertaking. 
Many have been overcome ; many still remain. But this insti- 



1 893.] MOST REV. FRANCIS SATOLLI, D.D. 317 

tution, carrying with it the blessing of our Holy Father, and 
being the object of his especial solicitude, must succeed, and 
from its walls shall go forth men solidly grounded in the sciences 
to do valiant work for the cause of Christ and Holy Mother 
Church. 

ARRIVAL OF SATOLLI. 

The inauguration of the Catholic University at Washington 
took place in the fall of 1889, a ^ the same time that the Cente- 
nary of the Catholic Hierarchy in the United States was being 
celebrated. The Pope, to show that he was entirely in sympa- 
thy with the objects of the university, commissioned Archbishop 
Satolli to act as his representative on the occasion. It was, 
therefore, in the fall of 1889 that Archbishop Satolli made his 
first appearance in the United States. 

It was fitting that the man who had done so much for the 
cause of higher education throughout his life should be selected 
to represent the Pope on that occasion. His address at the in- 
auguration was remarkable for its impassioned eloquence, intense 
enthusiasm, and noble sentiments. 

During his short stay in America he was the recipient of 
honors from all classes of society. Among the most pleasant 
recollections he holds of that time is that of the reception and 
banquet tendered to him by the alumni students of the Ameri- 
can College, Rome, in New York, which was graced by the 
presence of the Archbishop, Most Rev. M. A. Corrigan, D.D. 
Many of those present had been his disciples, had sat on the 
old benches of the Propaganda, and had acquired from him a 
love for the study of the Angelic Doctor. 

Never is the Delegate so happy as when he meets some 

his beloved " discepoli " (students) of the old days. 

Last September Archbishop Satolli came to us, at first as 
Papal Commissioner to the Columbian celebration, and in that 
capacity received official recognition from the government, be- 
ing formally received by the President and members of the cabi- 
net. His appointment as commissioner to the World's Colum- 
bian Exposition was regularly confirmed by an act of Congress, 
and in virtue of his position he took a prominent part in the 
dedicatory services last October. At the same time the Pope 
instructed him to act as his temporary representative for the 
settlement of pending questions of law and discipline in the 
church. 



3i8 MOST REV. FRANCIS SATOLLI, D.D. [Dec., 

APPOINTED APOSTOLIC DELEGATE. 

Events moved rapidly in the church at that time. Men had 
not grown accustomed to the new order of things ; it was a period 
of transition from the old methods of government to the newer 
arid more fruitful relations with the centre of unity. It is not 
to be wondered at, therefore, that there was an uncertainty in 
the minds of many as to the powers of the position occupied 
by Monsignor Satolli. The Holy Father very soon solved the 
doubt by appointing him the first Apostolic Delegate to the 
United States, with complete jurisdiction over the bishops, priests, 
and laity of the country. 

It is the custom of the Holy See to send its accredited re- 
presentatives to countries where the church is solidly estab- 
lished, to facilitate its work, and to keep it in touch with the 
centre of authority. The powers of these representatives vary 
according to the nature of the commission entrusted to them. 
Nuncios or ambassadors are those who are sent to foreign 
courts, and whose duties are simply those of a diplomatic nature. 
Legates are sent with relation to some definite, determined, tem- 
porary work to be performed. Delegates apostolic are the pleni- 
potentiary representatives of the Pope, with full power, namely, 
to determine judicially all cases, with exception of those few 
cases which at all times have been reserved to the immediate 
jurisdiction of the Sovereign Pontiff. According, of course, to 
the words of the brief commissioning them must the extent of 
their powers be. What then is the precise position of the Dele- 
gate in relation to the Catholics of the country? He possesses 
the delegated authority of the Holy Father, and no judicial 
cases are reserved from his judgment. He holds the high pre- 
rogative conferred upon him by the Pope, " nostra vice qua corri- 
genda sunt, corrigatj qua statuenda, constituat" ; of correcting, in the 
name of the Pope, whatever needs to be corrected, and of estab- 
lishing whatever he sees necessary for the good of religion. 
This is further made evident from the words written to him by 
the Holy Father upon his appointment as permanent Delegate : 

" We grant you all and singular powers necessary and ex- 
pedient for the carrying on of such a delegation. We command 
all whom it concerns to recognize in you, as Apostolic Delegate, 
the supreme power of the delegating Pontiff ; we command that 
they give you aid, concurrence, and obedience in all things ; 
that they receive with reverence your salutary admonitions and 
orders. Whatever sentence or penalty you shall declare or in- 



1893-] MOST REV. FRANCIS SATOLLI, D.D. 319 

flict duly against those who oppose your authority we will 
ratify, and, with the authority given us by the Lord, will cause 
to be observed inviolably until condign satisfaction be made, not- 
withstanding constitutions and apostolic ordinances or any other 
to the contrary." 

The writer has attempted to give a faithful portrait of the 
Delegate, and an account of the influences and circumstances 
that moulded and fitted him for his career. We have seen him 
successively as a model seminarian, a zealous pastor, an illustri- 
ous professor, a distinguished author and versatile writer, a pru- 
dent and successful rector of colleges, a painstaking preacher of 
the word of God, an enthusiastic director in the philosophical 
and theological academies of Rome, and, finally, as Apostolic 
Delegate to our country. 

No man to-day knows the mind of the Holy Father as well 
as the Delegate his acts show how thoroughly he is in sympa- 
thy with the Pope. Whatever the Delegate has done since his 
appointment has been the result of calm, mature, and earnest 
deliberation. He is too great a man to be swayed by feeling 
and passion ; he is absolutely unapproachable in his integrity. 
His high regard for truth and principle, his love for the church, 
his knowledge of what the Holy Father expects of him, make 
him an impartial judge of the most unimportant case that is 
presented to him. He is a type of the true priest kind, gen- 
tle, affable, easy of approach, careful in judgment, prudent in 
decision. In these pages we must have found reason to admire 
the man because of the wonderful gifts of intellect that are his. 
Those who know him best are at a loss which to admire the 
most, his wonderful genius or his profound humility. Possessing 
full authority, yet does he appear as if he possessed it not. One 
goes into his presence without fear or trepidation, assured be- 
forehand of a generous welcome. The interest he evinces in 
what is said, the kindly light in his eye while he listens, the 
manner in which he renders his decision, all speak to you of a 
man among men, of a learned and pious prelate of the church. 

EFFECT OF HIS APPOINTMENT. 

The church in America already owes much to the presence 
of its first Delegate. He has given it a new and fresh and 
strong impulse to advance the kingdom of God among men, and 
the light of the future will clearly show how beneficial were the 
actions of Archbishop Satolli in the cause of religion. His 
presence among us will go far to show that there never was a 






320 



MOST REV. FRANCIS SATOLLI, D.D. 



[Dec., 



more logical-' and systematic government than that of the Catho- 
lic Churcn;' He will teach us all that "the Catholic Church is 
the greatest and holiest school of respect the world has ever 
seen*, .because it excels in tranquillizing distracted men by instill- 
ing into; them an ineradicable sense of security, and holding up 
before them the splendid, unwavering torch of truth " (Guizot's 
History of European Civilization). 

The people of America, without regard to creed or class, have 
taken the Delegate to their heart. Wherever he has gone all 
have given him a reception unparalleled in religious annals. The 
better they know him the more will their admiration for him 
increase. As for the children of the Church, to know that he 
represents the Holy Father is quite enough. He has come 
bearing the message of peace, of harmony, of unity, that we 
should be all of one mind and one sense. We know not how 
soon he may be called by the Sovereign Pontiff to newer and 
higher honors. This much, however, we do know : that when 
he leaves these shores he will carry with him the prayers of a 
grateful people that he may be spared many years to reflect 
lustre upon the church he loves so well. And not the least of 
his glorious achievements will be the work performed by him as 
first occupant of the Papal Delegation in the United States. 

St. Cecilia's Rectory, Brooklyn, 
Feast o* St. Joachim, 1893. 





1893-] MARIA IMMACULATA. 



MARIA IMMACULATA. 



BY ALBA. 

RANDED with shame, confronted with de- 
feat, 

Behold the Tempter flee 
Before the promise of thy rising sweet 

Star of the deathful sea ! 
Star in whose light the angel choirs grow 

dim, 

And pale the glories of the cherubim ! 
Star which shall gild life's billows dark 

and grim ! 

Star whose pure rays shall be 
Through the long vista of each wistful age 

(How wistful and how drear!) 
Of earth's deliverance the sweet presage, 
Heralding sunrise near ! 




Thought he to blight the Virgin predestin'd 

Angels and men before, 
First of pure creatures in th' Eternal Mind, 

Grac'd all creation o'er? 
Thought he his hateful venom could infect 
God's masterpiece, the Spirit's Bride Elect? 
Could not the Son his Mother dear protect, 

Though sin lay at the door? 
O Serpent ! ere th' inscrutable decree 

Permitted thee an hour, 
With jealous care all set apart was she 

Beyond thine utmost pow'r. 



Behold her, by the Triune God discern'd 

First object of his love! 
And shall the rebel from his footstool spurned 

Breathe on his chosen Dove ? 
Shall sin the first of her existence claim 
Who from God's lips shall hear a mother's name? 

VOL. LVIII. 22 



1893-] MARIA IMMACULATA. 323 

Shall she but for an instant bow in shame 

Who shall all shame remove ? 
Against the impious child our Lord doth nurse 

A wrathful enmity; 
And to his own sweet Mother shall a curse 

His own first welcome be? 



Woman blest ! Fair type of womanhood, 

Create for God alone ! 
Fountain elected of the Precious Blood, 
Calling^God's Son thine own ! 

1 see a throne for thee in Heav'n prepared 
Which by nor saint nor angel may be shar'd ; 

A throne of which to dream Faith had not dar'd 
Till the Most High had shown. 

Through mists prophetic I behold thee stand 
In vesture of wrought gold, 

The Royal Mother at the King's right hand, 
Eternal court to hold. 



Unnumbered daughters are around thee there, 

To Mary's likeness made, 
Each than a new-created world more fair, 

In holy works array'd. 

Yet, in the first of these bright Eve, create 
Alone among them all, immaculate 
Shines there a grace which finds in thee no mate ? 

Oh ! let it ne'er be said. 
Form'd without sin, yet from that grace descending, 

Man's Mother we have seen. 
Form'd without sin, in faithfulness transcending, 

Behold the Heav'nly Queen ! 



Angels a-nd cherubim surround thy throne, 
On bright, resplendent wing[: 

Their Maker's glory in his works to own, 
Thy lofty grace they sing. 

Spirits of purity, their robes of snow 

No lightest taint of sin or frailty know ; 

Yet on those robes no precious life-drops glow 
With splendor ravishing. 



324 MARIA IMMACULATA. 

But thee Immaculate the Holy Rood 
As its bright first-fruit bore 

Purer than Heav'n, yet with Redemption's Flood 
Crimson'd all o'er and o'er! 



[Dec. 



O Woman blest ! Fair type of womanhood, 

Create for God alone! 
Throughout creation's goodly multitude 

Beside thee there is none. 
For lo ! the heav'ns all-glorious and serene 
In sight of the Eternal lose their sheen ; 
And charg'd with folly have e'en angels been 

By the All-holy One. 
But when he looks thy Virgin-soul upon, 

Far other word saith he 
" Thou art all fair, My Dove, My Chosen One ; 

There is no spot in thee." 





THE CRADLE OF THE INFANT COMMUNITY (1809). 




EMMITSBURGH THE VESTIBULE OF HEAVEN. 

BY HELEN M. SWEENEY. 

HILE wandering in the Manufacturers' Building, in 
the beautiful White Wonderland by the Lake 
this summer, we came unexpectedly upon the 
power that rang the chimes clashing above our 
heads. Seated at a small key-board of eight or 
nine notes, a woman's hand was manipulating the white keys 
and setting the imprisoned music free. In a most musical clangor 
the notes of " Nearer, my God, to Thee " rang out on the free 
air hundreds of feet above our heads. As the clear, sweet tones 
fell upon my ear, my thoughts reverted to the peaceful valley 
in the midst of which the Convent of St. Joseph lifts its time- 
crowned head. There, too, it is woman's hand that is busy. 
There are set in motion the tones and chords of bright young 
lives. Not "like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh " are 
the strong characters nurtured at Emmitsburgh, but a most com- 
plete and harmonious chime which, like sweetest music to our lis- 
tening sense, charms the heart and mind of all who come in con- 



326 EMMITSBURGHTHE VESTIBULE OF HEAVEN. [Dec., 

tact with an unassuming convent girl, brought up in the " good 
old-fashioned way." 

The very place itself has a charm peculiarly its own. The 
village of Emmitsburgh consists of one long street that straggles 
off into the mountains, crossed by another at right angles to it. 
What is the industry of the place ? It has none ; a wave of 
life and bustle strikes it during commencement week, when the 
girls at St. Joseph's, and their brothers at St. Mary's, cross the 
line that divides their school-days from the busy life outside the 
encircling hills. Then the visiting friends and parents are en- 
tertained in the primitive little place, which, in a few days, sinks 
back again to its silence and obscurity. But St. Joseph's, the 
mother-house of the Sisters of Charity, is a village in itself. 
Beside the Academy, properly so called, set apart for the edu- 
cation of young ladies, stand other buildings the infirmary, 
where old and disabled sisters come to breathe out in prayer 
the remnant of an active life spent in God's service ; the chapel, 
which is a regularly consecrated church dedicated to St. Joseph ; 
the seminary, where postulants are trained in hospital work and 
pursue a normal course in teaching, and are otherwise fitted for 
the manifold duties that devolve upon a Sister of Charity ; 





ST. VINCENT DK PAUL. MADAME LE GRAS. 

finally, the farm-buildings. The sisters have here five hundred 
acres, three hundred and fifty of which are under cultivation, 
the remainder being laid out in flower-beds, lawns, and pleasure- 
grounds. The view from the tower on the academy is inspiring. 
To right and left, to north and south, rise the noble peaks of 



1893-] EMMITSBURG&THE VESTIBULE OF HEAVEN. 327 

the Blue Ridge encircling this valley of delight ; Carrick's Knob 
and Little Round Top are the twin guardians of this lovely 




spot. The farm-buildings, so trim and neat, by their number 
and size are a colony by themselves. Here are the work-shops, 



328 EMMITSBURGHTHE VESTIBULE OF HEAVEN. [Dec., 

the butcher and baker shops, the mill, the dairy and stables. 
Wide, cultivated fields stretch out in every direction ; thrift and 
industry, and the blessing of God, have made of this spot an 
earthly paradise. To the right, and barely discernible, is the 
shrine to Our Lady of the Field, a lovely tribute raised by 
grateful children to a mother who has so blessed these fields 
with plenty, 

There are forty farm-hands on the place subject to the " Sis- 
ter Farmer," and it is truly edifying to see how docile these 
men are to her, a woman of strong character, good judgment, 
and remarkable executive ability. She sees to all the buying 
and selling for her small army sometimes numbering four hun- 
dred souls and by her management, tact, and zeal has made 
St. Joseph's a model farm. Every man and boy on the place 
submits to her and obeys her with promptitude and respect, 
and work some of them for forty years as faithfully as though 
for their personal aggrandizement. They have formed among 
themselves a fire department, have a room in which they meet 
and drill to fit themselves for service in case of a repetition 
of the disastrous fire that occurred in 1885 which swept away 
the old infirmary. 

The sisters, though engaged in educational work throughout 
the world, were not primarily destined to be a teaching order. 
Theirs is the true spirit of charity, love of God and of their fel- 
low-men. When making application for entrance into the com- 
munity, the pious applicant gives but one answer when 
questioned as to her motive " To serve God through his 
poof." 

There appeared in a recent number of this magazine an ar- 
ticle with the heading " Where the Spirit of St. Vincent Lives." 
The title, while distinctive of the beautiful spot described in 
the paper, was in one sense far from being wide enough for the 
saint's chief prerogative. His spirit does not dwell in one spot, 
no one home contains his most devout followers ; but wherever 
a Daughter of Charity, in whatever garb, has found her way, 
there in her heart and in a lightsome circle round about her 
dwells the spirit of their great founder. 

It is quite, impossible to chronicle in an article, necessarily 
short, an adequate account of the great good these children of 
St. Vincent have done. Twenty years ago their number was es- 
timated at thirty-five thousand ; to-day there must be fifty thou- 
sand in the seventeen provinces that include every quarter of the 
globe, North and South America, Europe, Africa, and lately 



1893-] E-MMITSBURGBTm VESTIBULE OF HEAVEN. 329 

even Turkey.* The American province contains over two thou- 
sand members in one hundred and eight houses, all having sprung 
from the little mustard-seed planted in 1809 at Emmitsburgh by 
the sainted Mother Seton. That name has become a familiar 
one in every Catholic household. Every one knows and loves 
the memory of the holy woman who was wife, mother, nun ; 
and in each capacity was an edification to the world. None 
but those who have themselves left the church of their baptism 
for the true faith can fully estimate the sacrifice she made, from 




SCIENCE CLASS. 

a worldly point of view, when she joined the " ancient creed " ; 
they only can understand the zeal and devotion with which she 
took up her self-imposed task of rigorous work and charity. 
Her life reads like a romance, but no romance could so thrill 
our Catholic hearts as the story of that lonely grave on foreign 
shores where she left her idolized husband ; that strange con- 
version ; that heroic struggle with her little band in the beauti- 
ful valley now hallowed by her memory. 

Still stands to-day the little stone house that was the cradle 

* Not long ago a pasha remarked that if any women could enter the kingdom of hea- 
ven, the " White Birds" would surely do so. 




IT is REFRESHING TO COME INTO THE HOLY ATMOSPHERE OF ST. JOSEPH'S. 



lat 



1893.] EMMITSBURGH THE VESTIBULE OF HEAVEN. 331 

of the infant community. Small, low, mean to alien eyes ; to 
those who know how sacred ! This humble roof sheltered brave 
souls who gave up all for Him whose greatest commandment 
was, Love one another. Well did they live up to the divine 
word. It was heroic courage that sustained their fainting spirits 
in the face of cold, hunger, distress, and seemingly dismal fail- 
ure. Little by little the work commenced. A Rule founded 
on that of St. Vincent was adhered to as close as the new and 
difficult circumstances would permit, and finally success came, as 
it does come to strong souls who "find a way or make it." Sus- 
tained by all the rites of our holy religion, encouraged by the 
material aid and friendship of Bishops Carroll, Dubourg, and 
Flaget, the young sisterhood grew in strength and holiness. 
Soon they moved into a larger house, which still stands, having 
as its greatest treasure the carefully guarded room where Mother 
Seton gave up her soul to the God she loved so well. Those 
dear eyes never looked on the present prosperity. She died in 
1821 with but one wish in regard to her convent unfulfilled. 
From the very beginning it had been her earnest desire that 
the community she had gathered around her should be affiliated 
with the order in France founded by St. Vincent de Paul in 
1633. This arrangement she thought conducive to the welfare 
of her establishment. Bishop Flaget applied to the mother-house 
in Paris, and obtained permission for three sisters of the French 
use to come to this country and teach the customs and regu- 
ations peculiar to the order in France. This was in 1810. Na- 
poleon was riding roughshod over the greater and lesser inter- 
ests of France at the time, and forbade the sisters to leave the 
country. Bishop Flaget was forced to return without them, 
bringing with him, however, a copy of the Rule. Years passed 
on ; Mother Seton died, never having seen the desire of her heart 
accomplished. However, in 1850, the affiliation took place, and 
the quaint habit and huge white cornette were adopted in place 
of the black dress and round black bonnet of Mother Seton. In the 
meantime, during those forty years these zealous workers in Christ's 
vineyard had been sent to various missions throughout the land, 
wherever death had made orphans for them to succor, where ill- 
ness had made a place for them to go, where poverty had in- 
vited their footsteps ; eager for self-sacrifice, wherever bishops 
had seen the need for woman's deft hand and martyr spirit, 
there these intrepid souls had found their way and carved for 
themselves an everlasting name, not in enduring brass but in the 
hearts of grateful men. 



n 




'THE MOTTO OF THE ORUER DIGNIFIES EVERY LABOR." 



1893-] EMMITSBURGHTHE VESTIBULE OF HEAVEN. 333 

When the Rule of the Daughters of Charity at length found 
its way to the American institute it was discovered that some 
of the work being carried on in the different dioceses was not 
compatible with the regulations laid down by St. Vincent. But 
these sisters had made places for themselves in parishes where 
they were found indispensable. Then the choice was offered 
them either to adopt the French and original Rule and habit, 
or so modify these as to adapt them to the new circumstances. 
The mother-house at Emmitsburgh took the French Rule and 
habit, the others, establishing themselves at Mount St. Vincent's- 
on-the-Hudson, retained the old dress and Rule of Mother Seton. 
The latter are under the direct supervision of the bishop in 
whose diocese they are, while the " cornettes " have as the head 
of their community the most honored father, Superior-General 
of the Congregation of the Missions ; each province has a direc- 
tor and each house a chaplain, all Lazarists, sons of St. Vincent, 
to minister to these his daughters. The present director of 
the American Province is Very Rev. S. V. Haire, C.M., and the 
chaplain at Emmitsburgh is Rev. S. Lavizeri, C.M. 

It would be impossible to write of Emmitsburgh and not 
weave into it the name and memory of Very Rev. Francis Bur- 
lando, who for twenty years was the director of the sisters. 
With love and veneration they speak of him to-day as they 
point out, among other improvements, the fine Distribution Hall 
that was planned and built by him. It was his beautiful thought 
that suggested the 'hall's chief decoration (between the seal of 
the community and the monogram of St. Vincent), the angel-fig- 
ure bearing a crown and pointing upward, " so that, my children, 
when you receive the crown on your graduation day, you may 
be reminded that awaiting you is the crown of eternal life." 
His greatest pleasure was to play the organ in his beloved 
church ; and feelingly the sisters tell how, on that memorable 
Sunday, February 16, 1873, he sang High Mass, played the or- 
gan for Vespers, and later in the evening closed his eyes for ever 
on the world he had done so much for in the quiet way char- 
acteristic of a son of St. Vincent. In a letter written to one 
of the distant sisters the presiding directress wrote, "We feel 
as though we could never smile again," so close was the hold 
he had on their hearts. He was identified with the community 
for so many years, they had seen so much sorrow and joy to- 
gether, that his death left a gap in their lives which nothing 
seemed able to fill. His figure stands out clearly for a moment 
in the red glare of the Civil War. The "high-water mark" is 



I 




THEY AROUSE SUCH INTEREST IN THEIR WORK. 



1 893 .] EMM IT SB URGH THE VESTIB ULE OF HE A VEN. 335 

but eight miles from the convent. On that awful July morning, 
when the sisters awoke, their quiet farm was all white with the 
tents of the soldiers who were on their way to Gettysburg. All 
day long the fearful sounds of battle went on. Father Burlan- 
do, true to the promptings of St. Vincent, started out with a 
little band of his devoted children to offer their services. They 
carried provisions, wine, linen, in fact everything needful for im- 
mediate relief. " We have come to nurse the sick and wounded," 
said they ; " do you want us ? " " Want you ! " and General Fow- 
ler opened his lines in passionate gratitude to the most practical 
kind of chanty. That was the first appearance of the Sisters 
of Charity on the American battle-field, but not the last, as 
many a grateful soldier's heart can testify. They went every- 
where, on Confederate and Union field alike, their white cor- 
nette their surest passport.* 

Since Mother Seton's death the work she began in lowliness 
and poverty has increased a hundred-fold. Her spiritual chil- 
dren have followed closely in her footsteps, and to-day, seventy- 
two years after her death, speak most tenderly of " our dear 
Mother." Every spot hallowed by her presence is pointed out 
with love and pride Mother's walk, Mother's seat, Mother's 
garden, and, dearest of all, Mother's chapel, where rest the re- 
mains of her they hold so dear. It is a tiny Gothic structure 
in the centre of the lovely little God's-acre, full of sunshine 
and peaceful shadows. She was first laid to rest under a grand 
old oak-tree in the cemetery ; but later her remains were placed 
in the mortuary chapel, and in 1877 Archbishop Bayley was in- 
terred beside her. On either side of the altar, where anniver- 
sary Masses are said, are tablets commemorative of this re- 
nowned aunt and nephew. Mother Seton's reads : " She hath 
opened her hands to the needy ; she hath stretched out her 
hand to the poor." " Her children have risen up and called her 
blessed." The wood just outside this blessed spot is the sisters' 
recreation ground. They feel, with that perfect love for God 
and each other which they possess, that their dear dead are not 
really separated from them, but lie asleep in their midst, never 
out of their thoughts or prayers. 

Steeped in the selfishness of the world, it is refreshing to 

* An interesting incident occurred while the writer was collecting the material for this 
paper. On July 4, 1893, the thirtieth anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg, General Fowler, 
with the remnant of the famous Fourteenth of Brooklyn, visited the battle-field and afterwards 
drove over to Emmitsburgh to see again the sisters whose very habit he had learned to venerate. 
" Ever since that awful morning," he said to us, " I raise my hat in reverence to every white 
cornette in recognition of the heroic bravery and goodness they showed that day." 



336 EMMITSBURGHTHE VESTIBULE OF HEAVEN. [Dec., 

come into the calm and holy atmosphere of St. Joseph's this 
favored spot where love rules. All sordid thoughts disappear ; 
every ambition, however exalted, fades into nothingness in the 
face of sublime self-abnegation. The motto of the order " The 
charity of Jesus Christ presses me " dignifies every labor, how- 
ever humble, and renders every menial service a noble deed. 
The spirit of St. Vincent permeates the very lives of these 
devoted women, and transmutes all baser metals into purest 
gold. In accordance with the lowliness of their founder, no 
titles are used in this community. The Mother-Superior resides 




" THE WALLS, A WARM CRU, GIVE WARMTH AND COLOR TO THE SWEET INTERIOR." 

in the Mother-house in Paris, each province has a sister-visita- 
trix, and each mission a sister-servant ; the latter " title " mani- 
festing the spirit of the heart that so willingly takes upon it- 
self the burden that is sweet and the yoke that is light. 

Is it not meet that into those spotless hands the care of 
children should be given the young hearts that are " harps of 
a thousand strings," vibrating to every wind that blows, waked 
by every passing touch? With what depths of tenderness, what 
holiness of purpose, one should tune the music of those sensitive 
souls ! 



1893-] EMMITSBURGHTHE VESTIBULE OF HEAVEN. 337 

"Your little Mother, my darlings," said their sainted foun- 
dress in one of her daily visits to the class-room, " does not 
come to teach you how to be good nuns or Sisters of Charity ; 
but rather I would wish to fit you for that world in which you 
are destined to live ; to teach you how to be good mistresses 
and mothers of families ; yet if the dear Master selects one 
among you to be closer to him, how happy are you ! He will 
teach you himself." 

The motive of that " little Mother " is carried out to-day in 
the methods of instruction conducted in this most home-like 
school. A visit to the class-rooms showed the latest and most 
improved methods of teaching : diagrams of the telephone, 
telautograph, Gramme's machine, the spectrum, the dipping- 
needle ; maps of the world and of the heavens, charts of the 
physical sciences all served to prove how thorough the educa- 
tion is that fits the girl for life beyond those walls, whether it 
is as "good mistresses or mothers of families," or any other 
calling she may have. The best educated woman is the best 
woman ; and whatever tends to make her better is the only 
form of education. 

The curriculum of most of our Catholic schools and colleges 
is about the same read one and you read them all. The day 
has happily gone by when they were considered below par. 
No one could examine the educational exhibit at the World's 
Fair, and still retain the old prejudice. At St. Joseph's the 
same care is given to music, literature, art, science, and the 
commoner branches as in every other advanced academy through- 
out the land ; and with them, as with all Catholic educators, 
the mental and moral training go hand-in-hand ; but there is a 
something about these teachers that inspires the fortunate pupils 
under their care with more than the ordinary love and devotion. 
They are so kind, so cordial, so warm-heartedly enthusiastic 
with the children, who remain children until the very day 
they leave them ; they rouse such interest in the work, they 
carry their pupils so freely along the higher way, that it is no 
wonder the world has had some of its cleanest, purest litera- 
ture from St. Joseph's graduates some of those pens being 
the Misses Mosby; the late Miss Meline, of Cincinnati; the 
Misses Baker, of Maryland ; Mrs. Mohun, daughter of Mrs. A. H. 
Dorsey ; Miss Skinner, of Pennsylvania; Mrs. M. E. Richardson, 
of New Jersey ; Miss Pauline Stump, of Maryland ; Miss C. 
Hickey Pizzini, of Richmond, and the secretary of the World's 
Fair. 

VOL. LVIII. 23 



338 EMMITSBURGHTHE VESTIBULE OF HEAVEN. [Dec., 

A feature in the academy is a school society known as the 
Confraternity of the Ladies of Charity. All the pupils are 
members of it, and contribute a small sum , annually. They 
help to clothe the naked and feed the hungry, and have thus 
inculcated lessons of truest charity which in after-life bear good 
fruit and lead to the establishment of similar organizations in 
their respective localities, as in the case of Mrs. William Doyle, 
of Lynchburg, Va. Thus the mental and moral training bind 
their lives together by an unbroken chain of purifying and sof- 
tening emotion. 

" Most of the stones of the City of God," says an eminent 
divine, " and all the best of them are made of mothers." It is 
as such mothers and model heads of families that the following 
names are mentioned as graduating from Emmitsburgh : Mrs. A. 
M. Parrott, of California (whose four daughters were also gradu- 
ates) ; Mrs. Keeley, of New York ; Mrs. Ledwith, of Orange, 
New Jersey ; Mrs. O. Smoot and Mrs. Gardener, of Washing- 
ton ; Mrs. William Doyle, of Lynchburg, Va.; Mrs. Dynan, of 
Chicago ; Mrs. Dr. E. F. Shorb and daughter, of Washington ; 
Mrs. Ficklin, of Chicago ; Mrs. M. E. Richardson, of New Jer- 
sey ; Mrs. William Hennessy and daughter, of Chicago ; the 
Carrolls, of Carrollton ; Mrs. Clarence White and daughter, of 
Philadelphia ; Mrs. Dr. O'Gorman and three daughters, of 
Newark ; and the three nieces of Cardinal Gibbons (the cardi- 
nal has always taken the greatest interest in the school and 
never misses a commencement); the four daughters of Judge 
Winchester, of Louisiana ; the niece of Archbishop Elder ; 
Pepelia di Garmandia, whose mother was a Spalding ; Miss E. 
Burritt, whose mother was a Carroll ; and Pilar Gonzales, of 
Mexico, who represented the Children of Mary at the sacerdo- 
tal jubilee of the Holy Father. The Association of the Chil- 
dren of Mary originated in this order, and was introduced into 
the school in 1853, consequent upon the apparition vouchsafed 
to a novice of the community Sister Catherine Laboure, in 
France. Since the day they were so signally favored the asso- 
ciation has spread throughout the world. Here at St. Joseph's 
love for that " purest of creatures, sweet mother, sweet maid," 
has been specially fostered. In a lasting remembrance of their 
school-days the old pupils have erected on the grounds a beau- 
tiful chapel to their Patroness. 

Religion, in its truest, deepest, sweetest sense, is in the very 
air here. It is one of the rules of the school that the practices 
of their religion beyond the necessary devotions are never 



1893-] EMMITSBURGHTHE VESTIBULE OF HEAVEN. 339 

urged. It is observed that the force of silent example tends to 
increase their piety, and adds greatly to the zeal that cultivates 
the inner life and serves to strengthen the loyalty to our Holy 
Mother Church. True piety, artless simplicity, and practical 
charity are the characteristics of the girls of St. Joseph's. So 
persuasive has the sweet influence been that many of the old 
pupils have followed the example of the " little Mother," and 
have become " good nuns or Sisters of Charity " ; among them 
Miss Majors, now Mother Beatrice, Superioress of the Carme- 
lites in Boston ; Miss Keating, Superioress of the Carmelites in 
Baltimore; Miss Devereaux, Superioress of the Sisters of Mer- 
cy in New Orleans ; Miss Wiendahl, Superioress of the Sisters 
of Mercy in Louisiana, and Miss A. Abell, of Baltimore, found- 
ress of the Strict Observance of the Visitation in Wilmington, 
Delaware. 

" And I was glad when they said unto me, * Let us come 
into the house of the Lord.' " The sisters have made the house 
of the Lord a lovely resting-place for Him they love and serve 
so well. It is photographed on my heart. Impressive is the 
pure white marble altar, where in a Roman niche above the en- 
tablature stands the figure of our Mother holding the Divine In- 
fant in her arms. The light falls from above in some mysteri- 
ous way and lends a charm entirely new to the lovely group. 
The walls, a warm tcru, give warmth and color to the sweet 
interior. One immense picture, St. Vincent receiving a found- 
ling ; another, the Sacrifice of Isaac ; an altar to the Sacred 
Heart and one to Blessed Perboyre, are gifts of benefactors ; 
the magnificent organ is a gift from Mrs. Parrott, of Califor- 
nia. The church is the only place in which the postulants min- 
gle with the sisters. What a quaint habit the former wear, and 
what thoughts it excites ! " He that goeth forth bearing pre- 
cious seed shall doubtless return again, bringing his sheaves 
with him." For one long year the "precious seed" lies hidden 
in the happy hearts of the young novices, and then they 
" go forth." And when, long years afterward, perhaps, they 
return to dear Emmitsburgh which never loses the glamour 
of home for them prematurely old, broken down perchance, 
sometimes sick and weary, where are their sheaves? Ask 
the thousands of orphans brought up under their care, the 
foundlings taken in from the cold, friendless street, the sick they 
have nursed, the dead whose eyes they have closed, the youth 
they have educated ask the Man of Sorrows to whose poor 
they have stretched out their hands, ask the Master whose voice 



340 EMMITSBURGHTHE VESTIBULE OF HEAVEN. [Dec., 

is almost audible when death comes to their heroic souls, 
" Well done, thou good and faithful servant." 

AND NOW ONE LAST, FOND LOCK. 

On my last day at St. Joseph's the morning had been cloudy, 
a soft gray pall hung over everything, veiling but not obscuring 
the rare beauty of this the sweetest spot on earth. At last, 
far away to the west, over Little Round Top's purple head, a 
yellow gleam appeared. It spread and spread until the valley 
and the surrounding peaks were flooded with the golden splen- 
dor, and all St. Joseph's smiled again. A hush was in the air, 
the very mountains seemed to have caught the spirit of prayer ; 
the dark shadows in the woods fled before the spreading sun, 
and the heart thrilled to the touch of that wondrous beauty. 

So, too, this noble sisterhood has come out from the shadow 
of its early obscurity, into the bright sunlight of prosperity. 
God grant they may ever live in the sunshine of success! The 
blue hills shut them in ; the traffic of the world disturbs them 
not with its feverish rush and roar; within and without all, all 
is peace. " God's hand may be elsewhere, but his smile is here." 

Neiv York. 




I893-] 



Miss ALTHEA' s CHRISTMAS GIFT. 



MISS ALTHEA'S CHRISTMAS GIFT. 




BY MARION AMES TAGGART. 

HE snow fell silently, swiftly, and steadily into 
the quiet streets of Harrow. The strong north 
wind, blowing in from the ocean hard by, found 
its progress impeded by the soft mass, and slack- 
ened its speed as it neared shore, but it revenged 
itself by whirling the flakes sharply around the corners, and drift- 
ing them up against the fences, and through the rattling slats 
of the window-blinds. 

Safely sheltered from the storm without, Miss Althea Bellamy 
sat by her solitary fireside. The furniture of the room was solid, 
old-fashioned mahogany that had been used by three generations 
of Bellamys dead and gone ; nothing new or veneered in its 
ugly dignity. The only modern thing in the room was the low 
brass lamp which shed a rosy light upon the pictures in their 
heavy gilt frames, and down on the coils of Miss Althea's dark 
hair and the folds of her silvery dress. The Bellamys always 
dressed for tea, and though of all who had once gathered 
around the table in the sombre dining-room Miss Althea alone 
remained, still in all respects she conscientiously, and a little 
sadly, conformed to the Bellamy social traditions. This was the 
more true that in one all-important respect Miss Althea had 
proved false, not only to Bellamy tradition but to all the opin- 
ions of her section had rejected the blessed fruit grown on 
Plymouth Rock. 

Since the first Bellamy, accompanied by others from the 
Massachusetts Bay colony, had sought a new spot in the wilder- 
ness in which they had founded the town of Harrow, all the 
family had gone faithfully, and rather gloomily, twice a day on 
Sundays and once during the week to the plain, bare meeting- 
house which stood on what was known as " Meeting-House 
Hill," and had leaned for support against the hard, high-backed 
family pew, while they were bombarded with still harder doc- 
trine from that ark of the covenant, the great dark pulpit. Some 
of the Bellamy sons had wandered from this severe spiritual re- 
gimen to the more lavish diet of early Unitarianism, but it re- 
mained for Althea, the only child of her generation, and conse- 



342 Miss ALTHEA' s CHRISTMAS GIFT. [Dec., 

quently the last of the Bellamys, to reject all her early training, 
think for herself in a way to make all her relatives stand aghast, 
and, still worse, to prove herself ready to follow the logic of her 
conclusions a point much harder to endure than her having 
them and stoop in the first freshness of her beautiful young 
womanhood to assume " the yoke of Rome." To be a Catholic 
meant so much that was awful to the ears of Harrow ; it meant 
to be warped from the truthful habit of Puritanism into deceit ; 
it meant to be foreign and un-American, for unorganized Know- 
nothingism was rife in such a small New England town, and 
perhaps the relatives and friends of Miss Althea were to be pitied. 

But certainly to the young girl the new-old faith brought 
the opportunity to suffer for it, as it cost her final separation 
from the lover whose wife she would soon have been, and left 
her alone with memory in the fine old mansion. Not that Miss 
Althea lived always alone in the homestead built by her Puritan 
ancestors ; she had an adopted niece as companion, who was 
too young, Miss Althea felt, to keep Christmas sadly in the old 
house and the village church, with its congregation composed 
chiefly of mill-hands from East Harrow, and she had sent her to 
Boston to spend the holidays. 

It was Christmas eve that night, in spite of the storm, and 
Miss Althea remembered it. Harrow had not outgrown the 
opinions of its early settlers sufficiently to make much of Christ- 
mas eve, but Miss Althea recalled other Christmases when she 
had been young, and had, like her niece, gone to the city for 
the bright ten days. It had not been so long ago either ; Miss 
Althea was but thirty-five ; but fifteen years is a long time in 
Harrow, and Miss Althea felt old. 

She remembered one Christmas particularly, and it was be- 
cause she remembered that she sat reading with a rigid deter- 
mination not to let her eyes stray from her page. She clasped 
the dark arms of her chair with her slender hands, and turned 
a leaf at intervals. But though she read slowly, whispering each 
word to assure herself that she was really reading, she retained 
no knowledge of the pages as she turned them, and her ears 
were strained to catch the slightest sound in the storm. 

She heard the shrill screaming of a locomotive down at East 
Harrow, and said to herself that the 10:20 from Boston must be 
passing. 

She raised her delicate face, which was still beautiful, and 
looked up at the tall clock, finding to her surprise that it was 
but a little past nine. The slight interruption prevented her re- 



1 893.] Miss ALTHEA'S CHRISTMAS GIFT. 343 

turning to her semblance of reading, and she suddenly realized 
that it was but a semblance, and that though she had kept her 
thoughts from straying to that Christmas eve fifteen years ago, 
the memory was too strong for her, and that the dull aching in 
her heart and temples came from the feeling that another Christ- 
mas eve was passing in the night, that she was in Harrow, and 
alone. 

She clasped her hands straight in front of her, giving up all 
attempt to control her thoughts. The old grief came surging up 
in her so strongly that it was useless to resist, and perhaps she 
could calm herself better if she thought it out clearly over again. 
It was far wiser that things had come about as they had. Every 
woman dreams once, and Miss Althea told herself that if the 
happiness of that Christmas eve had not been a dream it would 
never have ended as it did. Yet reason has sometimes but little 
effect on the only living thing that claims its power, and every 
pulse in Miss Althea's being throbbed rebelliously to her logic, her 
throat and eyes ached with unshed tears. But the Bellamy wo- 
men rarely cried, and Miss Althea sat erect, not breaking through 
her habitual self-control even in her solitude. 

A step came quickly up the street ; muffled as it was by the 
snow, Miss Althea recognized young Talbot, her neighbor, and 
that he had been spending his Christmas Eve with pretty little 
Annie Davids down below. She felt as though she must cry 
out, remembering her own lost youth and her loneliness, and as 
she pressed her hands a little tighter, the young fellow passing 
broke out whistling an air for ever associated in her mind with 
that happy time she was trying to forget. A shudder passed 
over her, and a great storm of sobs that shook her from head 
to foot, bringing tears, and Miss Althea wept that Christmas 
Eve as she had not wept for fifteen years, when grief was new 
to her and very hard to bear. There was something terrifying 
in the passionate weeping of the slender woman alone with the 
ghost of happiness on that blessed night, but her tears ceased 
at last, and she laid back in her chair, sobbing at intervals, and 
utterly worn out. 

The door-bell rang loud and sharp through the silent house. 
Miss Althea sprang to her feet, startled but not frightened ; no 
Bellamy was ever frightened, and nothing ever happened in 
Harrow. She hastily lowered the light lest any one should dis- 
cover the traces of her tears, and smoothing her hair with one 
hand, while she wiped her eyes with the other, went to the 
door. The snow blew into her face as she opened it, and a man 



344 Miss ALTHEA'S CHRISTMAS GIFT. [Dec., 

standing on the step, taking off his hat respectfully, stepped in- 
side without waiting for an invitation. 

" Good evening, Miss Bellamy," he said ; and Miss Althea 
recognized him as the factotum of the railway station. 

"What can I do for you, Mr. Hobson?" asked Miss Althea 
gently. 

" There's been an accident, Miss Bellamy ; that's what's the 
matter," he said. " The down-train goin' through here at 
9:05 collided kinder telescoped, you may say. I guess it's a 
pretty bad mess. Mebbe you heard the rumpus?" 

"Yes," said Miss Althea, alarmed. "Am I wanted?" 

" Well, miss, you are and you ain't," said Hobson judicially. 
" You're wanted here that's about the size of it. They've stowed 
away pretty much all the victims near the deepo, but there's 
one man worse hurt'n the rest who wants kinder easy handlin', 
and Mr. Stanton says, says he, ' There's Miss Althea,' he says, 
' she's got room, an' she's got heart, an' she's got soft hands 
like,' says he. 'Hobson, go ask Miss Althea'; an' I come." 

"Yes, of course," said Miss Althea, decidedly, once more in 
possession of her calmness and Bellamy efficiency in time of 
need. " Go bring him at once " ; and she opened the door for 
the moderate Hobson, well knowing his inability to get himself 
off unaided. 

"Well, Miss Bellamy," he said, "I knew you'd say yes, an' 
we might as well bring him right off ; but 'twas a form like to 
get permission. We'll be here inside an hour." 

Miss Althea shut the door on Hobson and the storm, and 
went up-stairs to make ready for her guest with a cheerful alac- 
rity that seemed to betoken enjoyment of her task. She tied a 
long white apron over the gray silk that she had not time to 
lay aside, and went to the linen closet to select the finest 
and softest from her fragrant stores of inherited delicate sheets 
and pillow-cases, all hemmed by hand with a broad hem, and 
marked with a tiny " E " and " B," for her grandmother had 
been Elizabeth Bradford, and in marrying had proved the fal- 
lacy of the prediction as to " changing the name and not the 
letter." 

With considerable difficulty Frances Adelaide, familiarly 
known as "Fran'sad," who had served the household since Miss 
Althea was a child, was awakened, a fire was kindled on the 
hearth, and the kettle set on to boil below-stairs. When these 
and all other possible preparations were made Miss Althea had 
but a few moments in which to await her guest. 



1893-] Miss ALTHEA'S CHRISTMAS GIFT. 345 

Fran'sad opened the door, and from the " sitting-room " Miss 
Althea heard the scuffling of their feet as the men with heavy 
tread carried their burden up to the chamber she had made ready. 

An hour passed before the doctor knocked on the door of 
the room where she sat eagerly awaiting him. 

" Well, Althea," he began, rubbing his hands cheerfully, 
"there is no need of pitying you, I suppose, for you are the 
kind of girl to prefer company with broken bones to a sound 
man. The poor fellow up-stairs is pretty badly hurt, enough so 
to be a dangerous case, but by no means hopeless. He needs 
better quarters than any of the other unfortunates, so I brought 
him here. He will not require much care through the night 
only a teaspoonful of this at two and four at six I will return. 
He will not be conscious to-night at all, but this must not 
alarm you ; if there be danger it is not immediate. We will 
have some one to stay with you to-morrow, but to-night it will 
not be possible. I hope you are not frightened ; you are a 
girl of strong nerves, Althea." 

To this white-haired man, who had known her grandmother, 
Miss Althea's thirty-five years were not, and she found it very 
pleasant to be spoken to in the old terms which Doctor Long- 
mead alone used now. 

"I am not in the least nervous, doctor," she said, "and am 
very glad to be useful. Fran'sad has hot water ready, and you 
will prepare to face the storm, please "; and she set before him 
a heavy-topped, cut-glass decanter, the low, bulging sugar-bowl, 
a glass and spoon, and went out for the water with which she 
speedily returned. The doctor belonged to a class and genera- 
tion of New-Englanders which had not learned the inherent 
depravity of a glass of negus, which he cheerfully brewed and 
sipped in perfect satisfaction and peace with mankind, includ- 
ing himself. 

" You look pale, my dear," he said, surveying Miss Althea 
attentively over the rim of his steaming glass. " Don't worry 
your woman soul with care that poor fellow does not need, and, 
I would add, don't go out in the snow to church to-morrow, only 
I know it would be no use. 

"I'll drive over to the south parish to-morrow, and bring 
Aunt Beulah Hopkins to look after him, and you too. Good- 
night," he added, drawing on his capacious fur gloves, "though 
I believe it is already another day ; so a Merry Christmas, my 
dear, and, as Tiny Tim said : ' God bless us, every one ! ' ' 

So saying, Dr. Longmead pulled the heavy door fast behind 



346 Miss ALTHEA'S CHRISTMAS GIFT. [Dec., 

him, and Miss Althea was left alone with Fran'sad and the un- 
conscious presence in the " spare room." The clock ticked sol- 
emnly and, in spite of her assurance to the doctor that she was 
not nervous, she began to feel that the thought of that unseen fig- 
ure above her head, lying unknowing and unknown, was unbeara- 
ble ; she arose and went quietly up the stairs. In her own room 
she laid aside her rustling dress and donned a flannel wrapper 
of a dark color, that fell in soft folds around her slender figure. 
Then she stepped gently across the hall and pushed open the 
door of the sick-room. 

She had formed a mental image of a man well advanced in 
years, gray and grizzled, the reality of which she was prevented 
seeing by the imperfect light of the fire, with which alone the 
room was illumined. 

Returning to her own chamber, she brought a small lamp 
and, delicately shading it with her transparent hand, she walked 
to the bedside. 

The face on the pillow was unmarred by the accident, a 
handsome face, not older than Miss Althea's own. The lamp, 
light fell full upon it, and the habitual self-control of all the 
Bellamys stood Miss Althea's patient in good stead then, or he 
might have suffered. She did not move or cry out, much less 
faint or drop the oil on his helpless form, but stood as one 
turned to stone before her lover of other days, the lover for 
whom she had that night shed as bitter tears as when they had 
parted fifteen years before. 

How long she stood thus she never knew ; she was recalled 
to herself by a faint motion of the hand nearest to her on the 
counterpane. A gust of womanly tenderness, and the repressed, 
unextinguished love of fifteen years swept over her. Setting 
down her lamp, she knelt beside him and would have snatched 
the hand, but something held her back. 

The love and longing that seemed to suffocate her found 
only one outlet. With frightened, lightest touch she smoothed 
a wrinkle in the broad hem of the sheet, and then, with tears 
raining down her cheeks, clasping her hands, knelt looking at 
him. What had come to him in these long years of separation? 
Had he forgotten ? Would his consciousness when restored fly 
straight to some woman who held the place that was to have been 
hers? some woman who had not, as he had said in those bit- 
ter words of parting, " placed a barrier between their love, and 
had cared so little she could give him up for an idea." Cared 
so little ! 



1893-] Miss ALTHEA' s CHRISTMAS GIFT. 347 

She did not kiss so much as the tip of his finger. In all 
these years of her maidenly grieving she had never in the soli- 
tude of her own chamber kissed the picture which she had kept 
hidden away in the drawer of her desk, and upon which she 
gazed so often, and she did not now venture to touch him as 
he lay unconscious, perhaps dying. 

A sudden panic seized her lest the doctor should be mis- 
taken, and he should know her. Trembling she fled from the 
room, and dropped motionless into the chair that had been her 
mother's. 

There was but one thought distinct in the whirl of her brain, 
and Miss Althea Bellamy recognized it, blushing in the dark- 
ness. The doctor had ordered the medicine at two ; in a little 
while, then, duty would recall her to that room, she would have 
something to do for him, and she longed so unutterably to be 
near and to serve him that her maidenly soul was ashamed. The 
week that followed gave little time for thought. Aunt Beulah 
Hopkins came, and for a while it seemed as though Miss Althea's 
nursing and hers, and Doctor Longmead's skill, would be power- 
less to save the life for which they battled. 

The danger passed, however, and the long days of convales- 
cence began. It was with very mixed sensations that Miss Al- 
thea learned from the doctor, as the result of the first conscious 
hour, that there was no one for whom to send John Ainger 
had not married. 

Kate, Miss Althea's niece, came home ; she found a very 
much altered home and aunt on her return. The possession of 
" a real live man," as she said to nurse, brought to their doors 
in so interesting a manner, delighted Kate's soul, and gave 
occupation to her restless brain and monotonous hours. Miss 
Althea, now that John Ainger was recovering, refused to go 
near the sick-room ; a fact that Kate noted at first with indig- 
nant wonder at her aunt's strange coldness. But Miss Althea 
behaved so very queerly that Kate's indignation melted before 
a perception of something like the truth, though she wondered 
no less, never having heard of the existence of John Ainger. 
Miss Althea's Bellamy calm was greatly disturbed ; she grew 
restless, went on long walks, " actually fluttered," Kate thought, 
"just as though she weren't Aunt Althea." 

With shame and annoyance Miss Althea realized that she 
was growing irritable, and hated herself for noting bitterly how 
soft and pretty were the little curls around Kate's temples ; 
how fresh her color, light and springing her step as, bound on 



I 



348 Miss ALTHEA' s CHRISTMAS GIFT. [Dec,, 

kindly ministering errands, she passed in and out of the room 
from which Miss Althea was excluded. She did not call this 
stinging tightening around her heart which Kate's youth and 
beauty cost her by its own ugly name, but she shut herself up 
in her room across the hall and cried miserably. And not one 
word did their guest say all this time ; not a question did he 
ask as to where he was, or why he never saw any one but the 
plain old farmer's widow and the young girl, neither of whom 
he could have mistaken for the mistress of the home where he 
found himself. Kate was young, but she was a woman ; she 
scented a romance in the mystery, and every sense was on the 
alert ; she suspected the doctor of knowing more than she of 
these matters, and resolved to lay siege to him. 

" Docky," she said one day when she found him alone, using 
her childish name for him, which she did when she wished to 
be particularly coaxing, looking at him from her soft rings of 
hair in a very guileless manner : " Wasn't Aunt Althea engaged 
to some one ever so long ago ?" 

And Doctor Longmead gave her a queer look from under 
his heavy brows, and said : " See here. Miss Katherine Pandora, 
shut the lid down and bridle your curiosity, because hope flies 
away, you know, when the box is open. If your aunt has any 
confidences to give, she'll give them." 

And Kate was satisfied that she knew enough. 

It was not long after this that Kate came to Miss Al- 
thea at night, stepping softly across the hall to her aunt's room, 
where she sat in darkness. "Auntie, dear, do you think it 
would be very wrong if I took advantage of my position to 
look at the contents of our guest's satchel ? " she said hesitat- 
ingly. 

" Very wrong unpardonable, Kate," said Miss Althea sharp- 
ly. " He is our guest, and ill. We you must do all your duty 
toward him ; what he is does not concern us. We shall never 
see him again when he is gone." In spite of herself Miss 
Althea's voice faltered. 

"Then, auntie, I must confess to you all my sins," said 
Kate, kneeling in mock contrition. " I could not control my 
curiosity another moment ; I did open that satchel." 

" Kate, I am ashamed of you," said Miss Althea with much 
annoyance. 

"So am I, auntie, dreadfully; but I am rather proud of him. 
Aunt Althea, I found a Vade Mecum in that man's bag, well 
thumbed, and in it a little pious picture, on which was written, 






1893-] Miss ALTHEA'S CHRISTMAS GIFT. 349 

' From his friend on the day of his baptism,' and it was signed 
with the name of a priest in New York. Isn't that lovely?" 
added the artless Kate innocently. " To think we are playing 
good Samaritan and pouring oil into the wounds of a Catholic 
in this benighted region. Why, Aunt Althea, what is it ?" she 
cried, frightened at the effect of her words. But Miss Althea 
pushed her into the hall and closed the door ; and Kate never 
heard the words that were poured out between her sobs as 
Miss Althea knelt by her bedside in the dark old room. 

There were electric currents all through the house for a 
month, and Miss Althea grew visibly thinner. John Ainger 
was able to sit by the window then, and Miss Althea formed a 
very un-Bellamy habit of going in and out of the back door. 

One night she arrayed herself in her gray silk, and thus for- 
tified outwardly in dignified raiment, as a help toward reaching 
a state of mind to correspond, seated herself by her fireside as 
she had not done since Christmas Eve. Kate lightly ran down- 
stairs and into the room ; Miss Althea did not see her face full 
of repressed excitement. 

"Reading, auntie?" she asked. " What have you there?" 
recognizing the binding of the State Geological Survey, which 
she thought indicative. 

"I really The Newcomes" stammered Miss Althea, "or, no 
it Isn't either. I took up the wrong volume," added Miss 
Althea, blushing deeply. 

Kate considerately refrained from remarking that the geo- 
logical report and Thackeray did not stand in the same case. 
She merely handed her the right volume, at the same time 
pinning some fragrant roses on Miss Althea's silvery dress. 
"You are such a pretty girl, Althea Bellamy," said Kate, as 
she gave a farewell pat to the glossy coils of dark hair ; then 
she ran away. Miss Althea felt her heart beat faster under the 
touch and praise. She opened The Newcomes at the letter 
Madame de Florae writes to her girlhood's lover ; nothing else 
perhaps could have held her attention that night, but she read 
that record of enduring love with interest. Some one entered 
the room ; she did not raise her eyes. 

" Miss Bellamy," said a voice. Leonore de Florae and 
Colonel Newcome fell to the floor, as Miss Althea sprang to her 
feet at that familiar voice, heard again after so many years. 

" I hope you I am glad you are better, Mr. Ainger," she 
said, trembling. 

"Thanks to your hospitality, yes," he said, "but I am still 



350 Miss ALT HE A' s CHRISTMAS GIFT. [Dec., 

a little weak. May I sit down ?" She motioned feebly to a 
chair, herself remaining standing. " You are not changed," he 
said, looking up at her in the same old boyish way. " It is a 
queer thing. I was on my way to Harrow to see you when 
the accident happened ; but I did not expect to arrive that 
night, nor stay so long. Do you think it strange they brought 
me here, and not somebody else ? I do. I hope you are glad 
to see me." 

He waited so long for an answer that she had to give one. 

" I don't know," she said very low, like a school-girl and not 
at all like Miss Althea Bellamy. 

" Don't know !" exclaimed John Ainger. " See here, Althea, 
I came here to tell you something. I have been impatient to 
get strong enough to tell you, for I could not bear to stay here 
an hour till I had your answer. You know when we parted I 
could not see things as you did, and I wouldn't be a hypocrite 
even to win you, Althea. Indeed, I could not have won you 
that way ; for when your honest eyes looked through me and 
discovered the humbug you would have scorned me as I de- 
served, and I'd have lost you here and heaven hereafter. You 
know I despised the church you believed in, and if it was what 
I thought it I was right to hate it. I know better now ; 
but I have not got to that. Well, you loved God better than 
you did me, Althea, and that was one reason I loved you ; but 
we had to part, and I went away. Fifteen years is a long 
time, Althea, and these have been as long as fifty. There is 
something in me that makes it pretty hard for me to change in 
anything, and no one who had ever known you would be likely 
to care much for other women. At any rate I did not, and 
there seemed to be very little worth living for after I left 
Harrow. You may believe that I did not feel any more kindly 
to the church for robbing me of you. 

" It will be a story to tell you later if you will hear it, but 
in a word about two years ago I wandered into a church in 
New York one Sunday, I scarcely know how, and I heard a 
sermon. They are nearly all converts the clergy of that church, 
and they know how to talk to men who feel as they once felt. 
I went again and then again ; I studied and thought, and I 
came to see what you had seen as much sooner as you are 
better than I. Since then I have wondered if your prayers pre- 
vailed for me ; did you not pray for me, Althea ? Well, never 
mind ; I had no thought then of ever seeing you again. After 
I was really a Catholic I began to long at least to see you and 



1 893.] Miss ALTHEA'S CHRISTMAS GIFT. 351 

tell you what had happened. Then I set inquiries afoot, and 
learned that you had not married. I did not delay after that ; 
I set out for Harrow, and that blessed accident brought me to 
your door. Now I am cured in every sense I am cured. Al- 
thea, don't you think we might begin again ?" 

She walked away as he stretched out his arms to her, and 
stood with her back to him, leaning against the fireplace. 

He arose to follow her, but sank back with a little moan of 
pain. 

Her quick ear caught it, and it melted all her reserve. With 
a swift, gliding motion she ran to him and knelt by his chair. 

"O Jack!" she sobbed, "it is all so foolish and so bitter 
and so sweet." She ran her fingers through his button-hole ; 
how well he remembered the little caress the only one she 
ever freely vouchsafed, and the petals of the delicate roses she 
wore fell over him in a shower. 

He did not dare to touch her for fear of startling her, but 
sat quite still waiting for her to grow calm. Presently she 
raised her bowed head and looked at him. "O Jack!" she said,, 
"it can't be you!" He seized her face in his hands and kissed 
her. 

" By this token it can't be any one else," he said, and Miss 
Althea admitted the proof. 

There was a pretty but very quiet wedding in the little vil- 
lage church three weeks later. It was not like a Bellamy to 
hasten matters so, but John Ainger was impatient, and justly 
remarked that it was equally unlike a Bellamy to have a Nup- 
tial Mass, and Miss Althea yielded to his reasoning, feeling too 
that the life together had been delayed long enough. 

Kate was bridesmaid, and dressed the bride in the veil worn 
by five generations of Bradfords and Winthrops and Bellamys* 

"There never was a more beautiful bride in this home of 
traditionally fair daughters," said Doctor Longmead, as he gazed 
tenderly at Miss Althea's peaceful face, beside the loveliness of 
which even Kate's youthful bloom faded into dulness. 

And so in the blinding snow came Miss Althea's Christmas 
gift. 

Plainfield, N. /. 




352 THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN MYTH. [Dec., 



THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN MYTH. 
BY BOKARDO BRAMANTIP, 

Huxleyan Professor of Dialectics in the University of Congo. 
(From the Thirty-seventh Century Magazine, April, A.D. j66j.) 

CONCLUDED.* 

I. 

'HE first reason is based on the present state of 
the oldest record evidence. It will not be 
claimed, I suppose, that there is now extant 
any book or other document of the nineteenth 
century purporting to be a narrative of the fact 
in question. Every presumption is against the preservation of 
any such document, and its existence cannot be proved. 

In the nineteenth century no original manuscript of the 
first age of the Christian era, or of the preceding two centuries, 
was known to be in existence. 

The oldest manuscript of a date since the beginning of the 
Christian era was supposed to be the palimpsest of Cicero de 
Republica, of the second century. 

The oldest copies of Terence and of Sallust were of the 
fourth or fifth century. 

The celebrated Medicean Virgil was also of the fourth or 
fifth century. 

The oldest manuscript of the New Testament, the " Codex 
Vaticanus," was, as we learn from the article on " Palaeogra- 
phy " in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, of the fourth century. 

There was in these cases an hiatus of from three to six 
centuries between the writers and the oldest extant copies of 
their writings. 

Now, as there is no good reason why history should not 
repeat itself in this respect, it was to be presumed that no copy 
or reprint of any publication of the nineteenth century would 
be found in this the thirty-seventh century, older than from the 
twenty-third to the twenty-sixth century. 

Indeed, a far greater hiatus was to be expected between the 
writers of the nineteenth century and the oldest copy of their 

* Begun in the November number. 



THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN MYTH. 353 

writings in the thirty-seventh, than between writers of the first 
and the oldest copy of their writings in the nineteenth century. 
For before the discovery of the art of printing the difficulty of 
making copies caused it to be a matter of far greater impor- 
tance than afterwards to carefully preserve these copies. More 
durable material (parchment) was used, and copies were kept 
with the greatest care in monasteries, under the supervision of 
learned communities the Benedictines and others, who devoted 
especial attention to the preservation of the sacred books, as 
well as of the great masterpieces of Grecian and Latin history, 
and poetry and philosophy. With the invention of printing 
the ease and rapidity with which copies could be reproduced, 
and the perishable material used (paper), rendered the long pre- 
servation of first editions a matter of little or no importance, 
and practically impossible. 

Deposits in public libraries were no guarantee of long pre- 
servation i.e., for many centuries. The libraries of the British 
Museum and of the American Congress were as liable to de- 
struction by fire or mob as was the Alexandrian library, the 
largest of the ancient world. The overthrow of the Roman 
Empire, history tells us, involved in its fate the destruction or 
dispersion of all the great libraries of the empire. 

But the canker of time would inevitably obliterate printed 
books, even if they escaped the fury of fire and mob. 

The people of the nineteenth century feared the destruction 
of their printed records, and sometimes attempted to avert or 
delay this fate by deposits in corner-stones. But where has 
there been found amid the ruins of New York or Washington 
or London any record of the Emancipation Proclamation which 
can be demonstrated to date back to the nineteenth century ? 
What conclusion is to be drawn from all this ? 

Obviously, that in the hiatus between the original records 
of the nineteenth century and the oldest extant copies of them 
an hiatus of, at least, from three to six centuries, the oppor- 
tunity for fraud and mistake was so great as to render these 
copies wholly untrustworthy. 

It was in view of a similar hiatus that Professor Huxley 
declared that, in such an interval, " there is no telling what 
additions and alterations and interpolations may have been 
made."* 

* Huxley's Essays, page 265. 
VOL. LVIII. 24 



354 THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN MYTH. [Dec., 

II. 

There can be no question that the early narratives of the 
Emancipation Proclamation, those purporting to be contempo- 
raneous with this alleged event, as well as those written in the 
latter part of the nineteenth century, are all based on the same 
* ' ground-work. ' ' 

And of " the originator or originators of this ground-work " 
we know " absolutely nothing." 

This proposition is susceptible of the clearest and most con- 
vincing proof. For what was this "ground-work"? 

Beyond all controversy it was, mainly, the newspaper accounts 
of the day ; and these newspaper accounts, it will not be disput- 
ed, were anonymous. 

Even the alleged contemporary writers of formal history do 
not pretend to have had any personal knowledge of the 
proclamation, nor even to have derived their information from 
eye-witnesses. They undoubtedly obtained their information 
from this original " ground-work," and based their histories on 
these anonymous reports. It follows from this that no depen- 
dence can be placed upon a " superstructure" built upon a 
" ground-work " of whose originators we know " absolutely no- 
thing." * 

III. 

The story is wholly irreconcilable with the Constitution of 
the United States. Modern research has at last disentangled 
the knotty problem of the organization of the ancient American 
Republic. It was a complicated structure of States within a 
state ; of powers distributed between a general government 
and State governments. But it is now agreed by all scholars 
that the United States were a government of limited powers, 
specifically defined by a written Constitution, and that all 
powers not expressly or by necessary implication vested in the 
general government were reserved to the States and to the people. 

The tenth article of the Constitution provides as follows: 

" The powers not delegated to the United States by the 
Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to 
the States respectively, or to the people." 

Fortunately this Constitution, as might have been expected, 
has come down to our time intact. It is, probably, the best 
authenticated document of ancient American literature. Now 

* Compare Huxley on the "ground-work" of the Synoptic Gospels, Essays, page 265. 



1893-] THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN MYTH. 355 

there cannot be found, anywhere in the Constitution, any au- 
thority conferred on the President to abolish slavery. And as 
he could not obtain such authority from any other source, it is 
clear he had no power to issue an Emancipation Proclamation. 

The President had taken, as was required of him, an oath to 
support this Constitution. He is believed to have been, above 
all things, an honest man, and it is inconceivable that he would 
violate his oath. 

It adds greatly to the force of this argument that Lincoln 
himself, less than four months before this alleged proclamation 
(of January I, 1863), when urged to issue an edict abolishing 
slavery, replied that his object was to save the Union " under 
the Constitution," showing clearly his determination not to vio- 
late the Constitution even for the purpose of saving the Union. 

We learn from Greeley's American Conflict that as late as 
August 22, 1862, the President used the following language, in 
a letter written to Greeley himself: 

" My paramount object is to save the Union, and not either 
to save or destroy slavery." 

And again : 

" As to the policy I would seem to be pursuing, as you say, 
I have not meant to leave any one in doubt. I would save 
the Union; I would save it in the shortest way under the Con- 
stitution " (vol. ii. p. 250). The italics are mine. 

A deputation of Protestant clergymen from Chicago visited 
the President, September 13, 1862, to urge him to issue such a 
proclamation. But he argued with them at length against such 
a proceeding, saying, among other things, that such a procla- 
mation would be as idle as " a pope's bull against the comet " 
(Id., p. 251). 

There is not a scintilla of evidence, presented by Greeley, to 
show that any new light ever dawned upon the President's mind. 

Now, it is true that in the oldest copy we have of Greeley's 
book which must have been printed, as I have already shown, 
several centuries after Greeley's death the alleged proclamation 
is inserted right on the heels of the letter from which I have 
just quoted, and of his interview with the Chicago clergymen. 
And the following is the only explanation that is given for its 
abrupt appearance. 

After speaking of the President's reply to the deputation, 
which is mentioned above, the narrative is made to say: 

" The deputation had scarcely returned to Chicago, and re- 
ported to their constituents, when the great body of the Presi- 



356 THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN MYTH. [Dec., 

dent's supporters were electrified, while his opponents in general 
were only still further alienated, by the unheralded appearance 
of the following proclamation, to wit : a proclamation of Sep- 
tember 22, 1862, announcing his intention to issue the final 
Emancipation Proclamation on the first day of January, 1863" 
(Id., p. 252). 

Now, what sort of an explanation is this ? Will it satisfy 
any rational Historic Critic ? What reason does it assign for 
this " unheralded " and abrupt change of front ? None whatever. 

Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have been a man of remark- 
ably clear and strong convictions, and of great tenacity of pur- 
pose. But to credit this remarkable and sudden change, is it 
not to make him out vacillating and "infirm of purpose"? 

This is incredible. It is altogether more probable that he 
continued to maintain the position taken by him as late as 
September 13, 1862, and that the proclamations appearing in 
our copies of Greeley's book are interpolations of a later age. 
Everything indicates this. They are too abrupt, and seem out 
of place in the narrative out of harmony with the context. 

IV. 

The argument just presented may be characterized as an a 
priori reason, based upon the absence of constitutional authori- 
ty, and the improbability that Lincoln transcended his constitu- 
tional powers. 

The Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution supplements 
this with an a posteriori reason for discrediting the story. By 
this amendment slavery was abolished. The amendment was 
adopted by Congress, and ratified by the States, in the year 1865. 

Now, if slavery had already been abolished, by the Emanci- 
pation Proclamation, on the first of January, 1863, what is the 
meaning of this solemn farce of the Thirteenth Amendment? 

This amendment was adopted by a Congress composed al- 
most entirely of the devoted political and personal friends of 
the President. And yet they do not so much as allude to his 
alleged great "Proclamation of Freedom," even by way of pre- 
amble. The amendment does not purport to ratify his act, but 
to be an original enactment. 

This seems very strange. 

It puts the advocates of the proclamation in this dilemma : 
They must either admit that the Congress of 1865 knew noth- 
ing of this alleged document, or considered it of no value. But 
it may be said that Lincoln's proclamation only freed the slaves 



1893-] THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN MYTH. 357 

within the Confederate lines, while the amendment enfranchised 
them everywhere throughout the United States. But this is a 
very poor quibble. Every one knows that all but a very small 
fraction of the slaves were within the Confederate lines, and 
that, if slavery were abolished throughout the Confederacy, it 
could not survive a single year on the borders of the free 
States. So that if it had been abolished, by the proclamation, 
in the Confederate States in 1863, it would have ceased to ex- 
ist anywhere in the United States before 1865, and there would 
have been no reason for the Thirteenth Amendment, and noth- 
ing for it to operate upon. 

V. 

I come now to an argument to which I attach the greatest 
importance, and which any one familiar with Agnostic dialectics 
must see is fatal to the claim that Abraham Lincoln promul- 
gated the Emancipation Proclamation. 

This argument may be termed the argument from omission. 

It will be conceded, of course, that none of the alleged con- 
temporary narratives of the Civil War is entitled to greater 
credit for authenticity, competency, and truthfulness than the 
Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant. He was, himself, not only 
the most conspicuous chieftain of the war, but was also after- 
wards President of the Republic for two consecutive terms. His 
personal relations with Lincoln were of the closest nature. The 
" Memoirs " were carefully prepared by him toward the close of 
his life, and were published about the year 1885, less than a 
quarter of a century after Lincoln's death. 

They were looked upon by the American people as a per- 
fectly trustworthy narrative, written by the most competent of 
narrators. 

Now, there is not to be found anywhere in the two good- 
sized volumes of these Memoirs so much as a single mention 
of any Emancipation Proclamation ! What is to be thought of this ? 

The inference is inevitable, that General Grant had never 
heard of any such document. 

It is idle to suggest that this matter lay outside the scope 
of Grant's book. His work is very comprehensive and com-. 
plete. It deals not only with his own campaigns, but with those 
of Sherman and the other great generals of the war. It deals 
also with the political history of the war, including, of course, 
the slavery question. 

It is inconceivable, then, that Grant would make no allusion 



358 THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN MYTH. [Dec., 

to this great culminating act in the " irrepressible conflict," to 
this Magna Charta of the African race in the United States, if 
any such proclamation had been issued. 

The significance of this omission can scarcely be overestimated. 

For a similar reason Professor Huxley argued that the " Ser- 
mon on the Mount " is not genuine, because Mark does not 
give it although Matthew and Luke do.* 

If " logic is logic," judgment must go against the proclama- 
tion, upon the argument from " omission." 

If, now, it be asked why I insist that Grant's "Memoirs" are 
the most authentic and most credible of all the contemporaneous 
narratives of the Civil War, and why I refuse to give credence 
to other narratives which do purport to give an account of the 
Emancipation Proclamation, it is a sufficient answer to say that 
Grant's "Memoirs" conform to what I conceive to be the truth of 
history respecting the matter now in question, and that the other 
narratives do not. I give the preference to the " Memoirs " for 
the same reason that Professor Huxley appears to have given 
the preference to St. Mark's Gospel. It .best conformed, he 
thought, to the view he was advocating of the Crucifixion, and 
what " happened after the crucifixion." f 

In its brevity of narrative it omits some statements con- 
tained in the other Gospels, which would, if accepted, have 
made it impossible for him to stick to his theory. 

Indeed we find a great diversity among the advanced critics 
of the nineteenth century in this matter of preference. Some 
of them preferred Matthew, others Luke, and others again John. 

Renan appears to have varied in his preferences. 

My readers will pardon me, I trust, for citing here Mrs. 
Ward's picturesque summary of the results of German criticism 
toward the close of the nineteenth century : 

" And what is the whole history of German criticism but a 
history of brilliant failures, from Strauss downward ? 

" One theorist follows another now Mark is uppermost as 
the Ur-Evangelist, now Matthew ; now the synoptics are sacri- 
ficed to St. John, now St. John to the synoptics. Baur rele- 
gates one after another of the Epistles to the second century 
because his theory cannot do with them in the first. 

" Harnack tells you that Baur's theory is all wrong, and 
that Thessalonians and Philippians must go back again. Volk- 
mar sweeps together Gospels and Epistles in a heap toward the 
middle of the second century as the earliest date for almost all 

* Essays, pp. 324-325. t/<, p. 328. 



l8 93-] THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN MYTH. 359 

of them ; and Dr. Abbot, who, as we are told, has absorbed all 
the learning of all the Germans, puts Mark before 70 A.D., Mat- 
thew just before 70 A.D., and Luke about 80 A.D. 

" Strauss's mythical theory is dead and buried by common 
consent. Baur's tendency theory is much the same ; Renan will 
have none of the Tubingen school ; Volkmar is already anti- 
quated, and Pfleider's fancies are now in the order of the day."* 

This may at first sight suggest an intellectual Donnybrook 
Fair. But to one possessing " the historical temper " there is 
discernible in the midst of all this apparent confusion the con- 
stant struggle for conformity to theory. This is the theme which 
brings harmony out of what otherwise seems hopeless discord. 

In the first place the theory accredits the record, and then 
the record proves the theory. 

Grant's " Memoirs " conforming to my theory, I give them 
the preference over all other narratives. And his " Memoirs " 
bear out my theory. 

VI. 

There is another argument suggested by Grant's " Memoirs," 
or perhaps it would be more accurate to say another way of 
putting the same argument to wit, the discrepancies in the nar- 
ratives. 

This was a fruitful source of objection to the Gospels by 
our Agnostic forefathers in the nineteenth century. 

Thus Professor Huxley, in objecting to the story of demo- 
niacal possession in the Gadarene country, or, as he playfully 
calls it, " the Gadarene pig affair," dwells on the fact that Mark 
and Luke mention but one possessed man, while Matthew men- 
tions two.f Of course the inference is obvious there was no 
such "affair." Unfortunately I do not have at hand any of the 
histories of the American Civil War written subsequent to the 
year 1893, or I would be able, I think, to make out a pretty 
formidable list of just such discrepancies. 

But the one I have just been considering, between Grant's 
" Memoirs " and the other alleged contemporary narratives, for in- 
stance Greeley's American Conflict, is sufficient for the purpose 
of the argument. 

Attention has already been called to the fact that all these 
narratives, so far from being independent authorities, are all 
based on one original " ground-work." The " ground-work " has 
disappeared in the lapse of time. The strength of the "super- 

* Nineteenth Century, March, 1889, p. 462. \ Essays, p. 346. 



360 THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN MYTH. [Dec., 

structure " i.e., the narratives based on it depends, of course, 
on their fidelity to or conformity with the ''ground-work." 
Now, there is no way by which this conformity can be known 
to exist excepting by the agreement of these narratives with 
each other. Here we have the key by which to distinguish the 
original story from the glosses and interpolations of later 
times. 

In the respects in which they all agree we may, in the ab- 
sence, of course, of some other objection, concede that they 
reproduce the original story. But as to all matters in which 
they disagree with each other, all the narratives are to be reject- 
ed. For how are we to account for the discrepancies ? And 
which statement is to be received as true, and which rejected 
as false ? Truth is always consistent with itself ; and when wit- 
nesses tell different stones one of them must be untruthful or 
mistaken. 

The discrepancy, then, between Grant and Greeley as to the 
matter now in question Greeley purporting to give the procla- 
mation, and Grant making no mention of it warrants me in 
concluding that the story of the proclamation was no part of 
the original " ground-work " upon which both their narratives 
are built, and that it should therefore be rejected as spurious. 

It is singular how obtuse the Principal of the Law School, 
and as for that matter, lawyers in general are, to the force of 
this argument from discrepancy. 

They seem to make nothing of discrepancies in the details 
of a story, and to expect them even from witnesses whom they 
regard as honest, unbiassed, and intelligent. 

The ordinary legal view is thus stated by Starkie in his Law 
of Evidence : 

" It has been well remarked by a great observer, that ' the 
usual character of human testimony is substantial truth under 
circumstantial variety.' It so rarely happens that witnesses of 
the same transaction perfectly and entirely agree in all points 
connected with it that an entire and complete coincidence in 
every particular, so far from strengthening their credit, not un- 
frequently engenders a suspicion of practice and concert " (vol. 
i. p. 468). 

Having occasion to visit one of our courts the other day, I 
chanced to find an accident case on trial. 

A boy, some ten years old, running across the street, had 
been knocked down and killed by the horses drawing some 
vehicle. The witnesses of the occurrence, all of them, appar- 



1 893.] THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN MYTH. 361 

ently, people of ordinary intelligence and wholly disinterested, 
differed very widely in many of the circumstances. One of them 
said the boy was running from the north to the south side of 
the street. Another said he was running from the south to the 
north side. One saw only one boy running. Another saw two 
boys, one chasing the other. 

Now, in a mind properly indoctrinated with the methods of 
Agnostic dialectics, these discrepancies would raise a doubt as 
to whether there was any boy running at all or any accident. 
But, strange to say, neither lawyers, judge, nor jury seemed to 
have any trouble on these points. 

It is fortunate for the " higher historical criticism " that it 
knows nothing of legal rules of evidence. 

VII. 

What, then, is the real explanation of the story of the 
Emancipation Proclamation ? 

The earliest theory since the era of higher criticism was 
that of Dr. Dokamok, to wit : that the story was purely alle- 
gorical, having as its substratum of truth the triumph of liber- 
ty in its " irrepressible conflict " with slavery. But the rising 
Timbuctoo school considered that Dokamok had gone too far 
in his destructive criticism, and recoiled from it. 

He himself, after his beard had grown, practically aban- 
doned this theory of his nursery days. 

The theory which immediately superseded the allegorical 
was that of the famous Professor Felapton. He was probably 
the first entomologist of his age. His great work on the " Mos- 
quito " is a marvel of patient research. No one could be better 
equipped, then, for historical investigation. He unearthed the 
fact that in the American Republic there were two great par- 
ties differing, toto ccelo, in their interpretation of the Constitu- 
tion, to wit, the strict constructionists and the liberal construc- 
tionists ; and that after the close of the Civil War, which turned 
the tide towards liberalism, the advocates of liberal construc- 
tion pressed their advantage with great persistency and fertility 
of resource. It was under the influence of this liberal tenden- 
cy that the story had its origin. Told first probably to school- 
boys, as a harmless fiction, to interest the boys, and at the 
same time indoctrinate them with liberal ideas, it very soon 
came to be looked upon as the tradition of an actual occur- 
rence. 

Nothing could be more effectively cited as a precedent to 



362 THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN MYTH. [Dec. r 

extend the power of the chief magistrate beyond the letter of 
the Constitution, when it became important to invoke the ex- 
treme exercise of executive power. 

But the view which now obtains nearly universal acceptance 
among advanced thinkers is the latest theory of the new Tim- 
buctoo school to wit, that the alleged proclamation is a forgery 
of the twentieth century. 

There is no doubt that some time in the course of the twen- 
tieth century, in a very exciting contest for the Presidency, one 
of the candidates bore the name of Lincoln. His given name 
is not certainly known, nor is it entirely clear whether or not 
he was a lineal descendant of Abraham Lincoln, nor even 
whether he was of the same stock. - 

It is probable, however, that he was a lineal descendant of 
the great President. 

The American people had come to acquiesce in the law of 
heredity in the matter of public office. Thus John Adams had 
as a successor in the Presidency his son, and William Henry 
Harrison, his grandson. A son of Abraham Lincoln was, as 
early as 1896, a prominent candidate for the Presidency, and 
had already been sent as Minister to England. 

In the twentieth century the negro vote had become the 
most powerful factor in elections. It held the balance of power, 
and both parties were compelled to court its support. Nothing 
was more natural then than that a descendant of Abraham Lin- 
coln, whom the negroes, out of that tendency to "hero-wor- 
ship " of which I have spoken, were disposed to look upon as 
their " Moses," should be chosen as an available candidate by 
one of the great political parties. And to add to the strength 
of the appeal to this vote the " Emancipation Proclamation " 
was devised, and ascribed to the ancestor of the candidate. 

The story was told to a people predisposed to accept it, 
and they did accept it without question. It accorded with their 
almost idolatrous veneration for the hero of the Civil War, 
which had led, in some way, to the enfranchisement of their 
race. 

The story was a masterpiece of political strategy, and was 
completely successful. 

The descendant of Abraham Lincoln was triumphantly elected 
President of the United States. 

History informs us that forgeries of this kind were not un- 
common in former ages. 

Thus, in the Presidential campaign of 1880 a letter appeared 



1 893.] THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN MYTH. 363 

in the public press, a few weeks before the election, purporting 
to have been written by the Republican candidate, General Gar- 
field, to a man named Morey, expressing views as to Chinese 
immigration which were extremely distasteful to the people of 
the Pacific States. The letter was a forgery; but it was so 
successful that, before it was exposed, it served the purpose of 
turning the vote of California to Garfield's opponent. 

Then there was in England the case of the forged letters of 
the great Irish patriot, Charles Stewart Parnell, which the Lon- 
don Times bought from a scoundrel named Pigott, and to 
which it gave the widest publicity. 

It is not necessary to speak farther of this forgery, for my 
readers are, of course, familiar with it through the graphic pages 
of Gaboon's Decline and Fall of the British Empire. 

The famous " Forged Decretals " may also be cited. Origi- 
nating in Spain, in the ninth century, they were only finally 
shown to be false in the fifteenth. The reason for this is they 
contained nothing which was not in accord with the general be- 
lief, and so found ready credence. 

All this goes to show how readily, with the favorable condi- 
tions existing in the twentieth century, the Myth of the Eman- 
cipation Proclamation could be invented, and palmed off as gen- 
uine upon popular belief. 

It is hardly necessary, I suppose, to point out the inference 
to be drawn from this discussion. The value of the theories just 
stated is by no means to be measured by their truth. It would 
not impair their value if criticism still higher than our present 
"higher criticism" should, in the future, supersede them all by 
some theory still more " imaginative." 

As said by Huxley, " he would be a rash man who should 
assert that any solution of these problems, as yet formulated, is 
exhaustive" (Nineteenth Century, April, 1889, p. 486). 

The thing is to wipe out the old tradition, and it does not 
make much matter how this is done. The fertility of the new 
Timbuctoo school in brilliant theories, " half scientific, half im- 
aginative," leads me to hope that even if none of those thus far 
devised will " hold water," yet, in some future age, one may be 
constructed which will be altogether acceptable. 

In the meantime, and until the dawn of that millennium, 
and until all the possibilities of unheard and unheard-of theo- 
ries shall have been exhausted, the Agnostic is entitled to insist 
upon a " suspension of judgment." 



I 




364 THE SOUL OF A BOOK. [Dec., 

THE SOUL OF A BOOK. 

BY P. J. MACCORRY. 

HAVE often amused my fancy by feigning the 
spiritual existence of a good and noble book, 
apart from the tangible and ofttimes profane ma- 
terial of which it is physically composed. And 
why not ? You read of the soul of a violin some- 
times. You hear a snatch of exquisite music, and you speak in 
rapture of the soul that animated it. You stand bewildered be- 
fore the " Last Judgment " of Michael Angelo ; and will any 
one convince you that, after all, you behold but a few jars of 
paint and some square measurements of canvas ? I think not. 
11 Ah, yes ! " you will say, " I see the colors and the canvas, but 
they are not the picture. As well say that bone and sinew and 
muscle are the man. There is something of a life-principle vi- 
vifying every feature and lineament. A soul-energy, unknown 
and unknowable, illuminates its every grain and fibre ; take 
that away, and you have indeed but your canvas and your paint." 
Must you, then, deny me my fancy? 

You read a good, honest, sincere book, and by what name 
will you call that vague yet manifest impression which it leaves ? 
You recline within your boudoir, close to the borderland 'twixt 
day and dark, and the ghosts of the books you have read will 
come up before you in silent, noiseless procession veritable 
shades amid the shades and shadows, losing themselves in shadows. 
At this instant there lies before me a copy of " Hamlet." 
Let us imagine that it is the only extant version ; but you have 
read it appreciatingly so have I. We consume with strong acids 
every tracing of the type that to us symbolized the thought. 
We snatch the very thoughts themselves, and having stripped 
them of the degrading habiliments of language, we liberate them 
from all human material ties and associations. We burn to 
ashes the paper on which the book was written with the cover 
that bound it, and we scatter these ashes to the " winds and 
whirlwinds of the wilderness," and will you then tell me that 
our Hamlet is indeed dead ? Far from it ! His Psyche, so to 
say, is ever present, though his vision is of other kind than ours. 
In playing this fancy it is presumed that the volume so 
dealt with has merit and is intrinsically good. An indifferent 
writing will not admit the operation. An honest conception, a 



1 893.] THE SOUL OF A BOOK. 365 

fine image, a sincere and upright thought may, indeed, suffer in 
grace and dignity if clothed in other language ; yet it will ever 
retain its power to charm and fascinate. But how lamentably 
appears the poverty of many a pompous and pretentious phrase 
when disrobed of its fine rhetoric. " One that wraps the drapery 
of his couch about him," when all is told, " does but tuck him- 
self up in his bed-clothes "; and if the latter expression is not 
beautiful and poetic, neither is the former for beauty, in essence, 
is one and unchangeable. 

But use this picture and try to make it commonplace : 

" And this our life exempt from public haunt 
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, 
Sermons in stones, and good in everything." 

Strive as you may to vitiate or debase it, and you will have 
naught for your pains save your labor. 

There are some men who cannot read a novel without con- 
ceiving a strange association between the narrative and some 
external episode or image which to them, in an unaccountable 
way, assimilates the trend of the whole story. 

The first time that I read " King Lear " I was down in the 
heart of New England. It was winter mid-winter. And I re- 
member having closed the book, my heart fresh bleeding from 
the episodes of human suffering through which I had mentally 
passed. A beautiful December moon streamed through the 
naked vines above my casement, till I thought my lamp-light 
must seem a gross profanity, so I turned it down and out. The 
night beyond was clear, cold, merciless. I looked away from my 
window upon the hedges topped with hanging, freezing snow ; 
upon the fields long sleeping in their fleecy blankets. 

In the centre of the lawn stood an old, stately tree stately, 
indeed, but how unutterably lonely and forsaken to-night ! Its 
leafless members, chilled to the marrow, swayed and shivered 
in the heartless wind-gusts. It seemed to sob and moan and 
grow mute again, so terribly like the torture of an afflicted soul. 
It raised its branches to the hard, cold sky, but found no solace 
there. It lifted its arms beseechingly to the stars above it, but 
they only twinkled all the merrier. Then it bowed its great 
head to earth again in strangely pitiable despair, as if it had 
long since ceased to find mercy or compassion in the selfish 
breasts of men. 

" How sadly, ineffably like the poor old king," I thought. 
And ever afterwards a New England winter and the tragedy 
of " King Lear " were inseparably linked in my memory. 



366 THE SOUL OF A BOOK. [Dec., 

And the soul of " King Lear"? I find it like a disconso- 
late spirit wailing through the weary winter's night. 

"As You like It" reminds me of "June in Virginia and all 
the cherries ripe." There is something in it akin to the mono- 
tone of a half-asleep wind through the trees and grass, and the 
fresh perfume of meadows after rain. So that, were the whole 
realm of literature to instantly return to chaos, "As You Like 
It " would come to me with each advent of the honeysuckle 
and rose. 

"In Memoriam " is "the shattered fragments of a Venetian 
sunset"; "Fabiola" is "a frozen cascade tinged with a winter's 
moon" ; "The Spy " is "the flash of a sword in the darkness "; 
and so on through the whole world of books. 

Some are like the odor of beautiful flowers ; some like per- 
fume drifting from censers. 

The " Divine Comedy " assails your senses like the triple ex- 
tract of hot-house roses. " Lucile " bears with her the sweet, faint 
fragrance of new-mown hay. 

" Paul and Virginia " is a loose bunch of daisies and apple-' 
blossoms twined round a spray of willow ; while the " Lost Para- 
dise " is a basket of rare and extravagant flowers culled and 
artistically arranged by the skilled fingers of the botanist. 

I have known books whose soul seemed to be inextricably 
associated with music. The " Ode to St. Cecilia " is peculiarly 
like the "Wedding March " of Mendelssohn, while " Little Nell" 
is an old-time song, trembling and dying on the lips of a sym- 
pathetic singer, that taps gently on the inner chambers of your 
memory and bears you with it away and away. 

And so your poem or story may be like a lovely woman, a 
laughing child, a smiling school-girl, a holy hermit, a gallant 
soldier, a happy boy. Or else, a rift of sunlight, a flash of 
lightning, a northern dawn, a cloudless sky, a storm at sea, a 
peal of thunder. Or yet, the clash of arms, the roar of musketry, 
the flourish of trumpets, the shout of victory, a flag of truce. 
Or still, a cathedral by moonlight, a rainbow, a nightingale, 
a humming-bird, a precious stone, a butterfly, a frosted window- 
pane, a Christmas-tree, a caged linnet, a dead rose, a lock of 
hair, a grave, a broken heart, friendship, gratitude, childhood, 
silence, love, joy, mercy, truth, hope. 

And the soul of your book may be found in any of these 
things as your fancy first identifies it with them. 

And those dear friends of ours in fiction what of them ? 
There are faces whom we recognize at once as those of inti- 
mate associates and companions, so ever-present are they to us. 



1893-] THE SOUL OF A BOOK. 367 

Others, whom we knew as valued acquaintances, loyal hearts, 
whose benign influence has made us better men and women. 
Still more, whom we have met as ships at sea ; a signal shown, 
a shout thrown cheerily, then waves, and knots, and leagues, till 
at last they dipped 'neath the horizon of our memory, and were 
gone. Will you tell me, and must I believe it, that these in- 
deed are but dream-phantoms flimsy, airy nothings ? 

Can it be that Jane Eyre and Ben Hur, Nina, Thalaba and 
Copperfield, and the mighty host of others, with all their per- 
sonalities and individualizing characteristics, so dissimilar, so 
distinct, so unlike and peculiar in themselves ; can it be that 
after all they are but the creatures of our fancy, non-existing, 
save that they wander ever on 'mid the mazes of our fitful visions ? 

Surely not ! They live and loiter in fields Elysian, far re- 
moved from our everlasting strife. They recline near bright 
running waters. They skim in fairy shells 'cross the bosoms 
of placid lakes. They pass among trees and ever-blooming 
flowers, and languish by the side of sparkling fountains. 

Some rest upon banks of soft matted grasses and weave green 
garlands ; others play upon sweet instruments, inexpressibly soft 
and full of exquisite melody ; while above all rises the confused 
harmony of singing birds, falling waters, and human voices. 

And here it is scarcely irrelevant to mention the " great 
hereafter " of books. We perceive through the haze, with our 
imperfect intellectual vision, a Paradise and a Perdition, but no 
Purgatory. And it is well! A compromise cannot be tolerated 
in literature. A book is either good, or it is of the earth 
earthy. There is no hither-verge 'twixt these two worlds. No 
borderland whereat to rest. 

" For God and man and lettered past denies 
That poets ever are of middling size." 

In poetry and by poetry we do not here confine ourselves 
to verse one must be eminently good or he is insupportable. 
" Neither gods, nor men, nor the birds of the air " can tolerate 
an indifferent writer; so if he is not good he is necessarily bad. 

And hence, to the deepest depths of our literary Tartarus 
we straightway consign all that is foul, or gross, or unclean, or 
stupid, or profane in literature : for these are grievous sins and 
must be grievously atoned for. While to our fabled land of 
peace and blessedness we follow with Hail ! and Godspeed ! all in 
books that is good, and virtuous, and truthful, and holy, and 
sincere. 

New York, July, 1893. 




368 SANCTUARY. [Dec., 

SANCTUARY: 

A CHRISTMAS TALE OF BONNIE SCOTLAND. 
BY JOHN J. O'SHEA. 

AWTHORNDEN! Sweet, wild, classic home of 
romance and poetry, miniature epitome of Scot- 
tish scenery, sylvan enough to make one forget 
the city, near enough to the city to make one 
remember that all Caledonia is not stern and 
wild. Yes, Hawthornden, thou art pretty enough and seques- 
tered enough, and well enough provided with babbling brook 
and sombre glade and fronded arbory to suit a poet's fancy, and 
make even the poor writer of prose fancy himself Muse-inspired 
while dreaming away an hour down by thy winding braes. 

Long ago the virtues of Hawthornden as a nursing-place for 
the children of fine frenzy were discovered and seized upon. 
For there were poets in Scotland before the frosts of Puritan- 
ism had nipped the tender blossoms of its romance, and some 
struggled to find expression even under the chilling cloud of its 
gloomy fanaticism. Even Scottish royalty worshipped not un- 
worthily sometimes at the celestial shrine. Two at least of the 
Stuart kings were tolerable masters in the gentle art of poesy ; 
and at the Scottish court there were welcome and encourage- 
ment for bard and scholar no less than for soldier. Hawthorn- 
den conjures up memories of that golden era in Scottish history. 
Here resided, in later Stuart days, the poet Drummond, and 
hither came, in fraternal curiosity, mayhap not untinged with 
jealousy for poets, it is said by the malicious, are not always 
freed by their lofty calling from this weakness of ordinary 
clay a brither bard, the renowned Ben Jonson. The rival poets 
lived here in amity for a couple of months and parted with 
mutual expressions of undying regret for the separation. But, 
unhappily for the sincerity of poets' declarations, those all-per- 
vading busybodies the antiquarians have hunted up all about 
that visit, and they disclose that to outside friends at least one 
of the sons of song privately intimated the glaring faults which 
he detected in the other. Drummond thought Jonson insuffera- 
bly conceited, and he was probably right in his estimate. We 



1893-] SANCTUARY. 369 

are left to surmise what " rare Ben Jonson " thought of Drum- 
mond, for there is no other guide to help us ; but we can 
guess. 

The estimate in which the Reformers held poets generally 
may be gathered from one grim incident. One of the first acts 
of the Regent Morton, when he got full powers into his hands, 
was to seize upon two unhappy bards in Edinburgh who had 
the audacity to satirize him in verse, and, without any such 
troublesome formality as trial or inquiry, order them to be 
" hangit," as the Scotch chroniclers put it a height of fame 
to which the unlucky minstrels probably never aspired. No won- 
der that the gift of poetry in those days was not held as an 
enviable acquisition. 

Not far from Hawthornden is a beautiful poem a sonnet 
rather in stone. It is known as Roslin Chapel. It is a perfect 
gem of ornamental Gothic architecture so beautiful that even 
the withering hand of the iconoclast left its " superstitious " sym- 
bolisms in carving intact. Inside, it is a mass of delicate sculp- 
ture ; and although it is devoted to a colder worship now, 
those sculptures in many places tell of the faith and piety 
which raised this exquisite monument to the Most High. 

To the verger or sexton who acts as cicerone to the numer- 
ous visitors to the shrine the presence of these emblems of 
Catholicism is a cause of much bungling apology. To a man 
of stern Calvinistic principles it is a humiliating task to ex- 
plain why such memorials of an " idolatrous " cult should be 
suffered to desecrate the place of a purer rite ; but as this mi- 
nor proposition involves the major one, why the chapel is 
left standing at all, and why he derives a not inconsiderable 
revenue in the summer from the office of guide and lecturer in 
it, the subject is not unduly dilated upon. There is more fasci- 
nation for him and the ordinary run of visitors in the story of 
the Apprentice's Pillar than in the invocation of saints and the 
requests to pray for the pious founders which speak from the 
mute walls ; hence he dilates upon the myth of the gifted ap- 
prentice who sculptured the masterpiece and the jealous master 
who murdered him therefor, just as though there were not half 
a dozen other places throughout Europe where the same dark 
tragedy is fondly believed to have been enacted. 

To the house of Sinclair Roslin belongs, and it was in 
its possession at the time of the Reformation, and long before 
that period. The river Esk winds in and out through Haw- 
thornden, beside many a fronded bower and beneath many a 
VOL. LVIII. 25 



3/o SANCTUARY. [Dec., 

frowning crag; and in those days a tributary brook or arm of 
it formed the boundary between the lands of Roslin and those 
of the lords of Inveresk, who held sway over Hawthornden and 
the adjoining western territory for several miles. 

Neighboring families in Scotland were not always the best 
of friends ; not infrequently they were the worst of foes. The 
greatest troubles of the country arose, in fact, from inter-tribal 
feuds. The proximity of Roslin and Hawthornden to the court 
and the capital did not shut out the savageries which were 
the prevalent characteristics of the remote Highlands. An old- 
standing dispute about boundaries had resulted in the killing of 
one of Sinclair's gamekeepers by the Earl of Inveresk's men ; 
and when the murderers were brought to trial and condemned 
to execution they were rescued in the streets of Edinburgh by 
a large force of Inveresk's adherents. There was nothing very 
irregular about this proceeding. The strong hand was in those 
days the hand of the law in bonnie Scotland, and things legal 
were generally managed on 

" The good old rule, the simple plan, 
That they should take who have the power, 
And they shall keep who can." 

Such, according to one legend, was the origin of the feud. 
The Sinclair of the time took the frustration of justice in a 
philosophical way. His revenge would come in time, he was 
wont to say to his more impetuous adherents ; everything comes 
to the man who waits. Still he was not above giving the wheel 
of fortune a vigorous push whenever it came in his way ; so one 
fine morning, when he was informed that a band of gipsies, 
driven out of Edinburgh, had settled themselves and pitched 
their tents upon his lands at Roslin, he astonished everybody 
by giving imperative orders that no one was to molest or med- 
dle with the outcasts. He himself went down to their encamp- 
ment and gave them welcome, pointing out a piece of ground 
which he said was more advantageous for a settlement than 
the spot where they had first squatted. By this unlooked-for 
generosity he secured the everlasting gratitude of the tribe, and 
accomplished one of his own ends at the same time. For the 
ground upon which he got the gipsies to settle was the piece 
which was in dispute between himself and the lord of Inver- 
esk, the title to which the whole bench of Edinburgh judges 
were unable to determine. He knew that gratitude secured his 



1893-] SANCTUARY. 371 

lands from depredation by the tribe for ever ; as for his un- 
friendly neighbor, what became of his live stock was, as he said 
himself, " nae affair of his." 

And so it came to pass that the gipsy encampment at Ros- 
lin became in time a part of the recognized institutions of the 
Scottish kingdom. 

Whether the gipsies always respected the decalogue with re- 
gard to their neighbor on the Hawthornden side, or whether 
they did not, was thenceforward a polemic between them and 
the gamekeepers of Inveresk. The gipsies stoutly maintained 
the affirmative ; the onus of proving a negative fell on the lat- 
ter, and they invariably failed to do it. But one thing was 
certain ; the live stock of the latter diminished at times without 
apparent reason, but it never happened that any of the gipsy 
band was found trespassing upon the lands of Inveresk. 

Though the times were troubled, Arcadian quiet reigned over 
these peaceful scenes. The turmoil and the wrangling of 
the capital never found an echo there as yet. Although only 
a few miles from Edinburgh the wayfarer might, while paus- 
ing to rest in the glen of the Esk, fancy himself cut off 
by many leagues from the sights and sounds of the busy 
city. 

The merry ring of girlish laughter might often be heard 
from a little shady bower under a steep bank which frowned 
above the stream as it fretted and curled in and among a heap 
of little boulders which served as stepping-stones. These stones 
were worn smooth from immemorial usage. They had served 
for ages as a causeway between the two banks, and saved the 
expense of the construction of a bridge. 

Two winsome little maidens had planted here a post of ob- 
servation whence they could observe at times all who came to 
this crossing, and if any unlucky wight should chance to miss 
his footing on the slippery stones and got soused knee-deep into 
the water, his chagrin was heightened at the sounds of mirth 
which greeted him from the shady nook above, not easily acces- 
sible from below if his curiosity or his resentment should stim- 
ulate him to give chase. 

They were schoolmates, these blithe Southron lassies. Elsie 
Carr, the elder, was about sixteen. She was the daughter of 
Hamish Alpin Carr, head gamekeeper on the Sinclair property. 
She was a perfect Highland rose fair, yet with a full flush of 
health upon her delicate cheek. No red deer of the hills was 
fleeter of foot than Elsie none half so graceful in its motion. 



372 SANCTUARY. [Dec., 

Her heart was as light as her springy footstep, for no cloud of 
sorrow had as yet come to darken it. 

Janet Lyle, her favorite schoolmate, was only a few months 
younger. She, too, was gay at times ; but she was wayward 
and sensitive, and could be dour enough if she fancied she 
were slighted, or her mother, who cared the gate-lodge at Inver- 
esk, scolded her for some eccentric behavior. She was a blonde 
little beauty, too, but of a different shade from Elsie. Her 
hair had a golden glow about it which when the sun played 
through its filmy, irrepressible curls, gave one the idea of a 
saint's aureole, and her delicate cheeks were a good deal freckled 
an effect which added to rather than diminished her good 
looks. 

"Ye did no' tell me yet aboon yer trip to Edinbro' toon," 
Elsie," said Janet, as the girls met for the first time at the stile 
which was their usual trysting-place in the evenings, after Elsie's 
return from a visit to an aunt who kept a booth in the Salt 
Market in the big city. " Heich, but it's a gey lang while syne 
I've been awa' o'er there, Elsie ; I often fash to see the braw 
place again, lassie. Is there much news, Elsie ? Tell me all the 
sights ye saw there." 

" Guid sakes ! it was nae muckle, Janet," replied Elsie Carr, 
smoothing her kirtle and arranging her tartan-knot at the pro- 
per place at the shoulder. " There were a couple o' puir loons 
hangit in the Grass Market for making and passing those baw- 
bees they call false lyons or hardheads, and a wheen mair for pi- 
racy in the Solway. Twa gentlefolk of my lords of Cessford 
and Buccleuch had a bout in the streets with rapiers and pistols, 
and a' their men on baith sides joined in the fray. The pro- 
vost and the bailies ca'd out the train-bands, and haled a score 
of the brawlers to the Tolbooth, but they made the warders a* 
fu' at nichttime, and a* the lot got loose and mizzled awa'. 
Ane old guidwife was burned for haudin' converse wi' a warlock 
and raisin' a hump on the back of her next-door neighbor's 
guidman forby ; and six men were hangit beside, by order of 
the judges, for heresy." 

" Guid sakes ! And do ye ca' that only a mickle, Elsie ? " 
cried Janet, stepping back a pace and holding her friend's two 
hands out at arm's length. " I gar think it's a hail kistfu' of 
news, Elsie. And did ye see mony gay gallants o' the court 
while ye war there ? They tell me the toon is fu' of sic just 
the noo." 

" I just saw ane party riding out wi' hawks and hounds ane 



1893-] SANCTUARY. 373 

day," answered Elsie. " But they say it is a dour time at Holy- 
rood, for the queen regent, puir leddy, is sair troublit about 
the reivings and burnings of John Knox and his pack o' lazy 
limmers." 

" She maun be, guid faith," replied Janet. " St. Bride keep 
them far awa' frae Roslin ! But did none o' the braw gallants 
cast a roguish e'e at yersel', Elsie, as they rode by? I'd lay a 
wager they did. Come, now, Elsie, out wi' the truth ! " 

"Fie, get awa' wi' ye, Janet! Dinna ye think I'd nae keep 
out o' the sight o' such callants? My auld aunt, Ishbel, wadna 
let me if I had a mind till. She wadna hae me raise the 
blind even a wee bit, as they rode by." 

" I guessed it. It was nae fault o' yours, Elsie. Ye are a 
sly wee lassie I ken ye well, ye ken," laughed Janet. " But let 
us gang down to yon wee nook. I've got a dolefu' ballad here 
I'm going to read for ye, ' The Lament of Robin Oge ' he that 
was hangit for sheep-stealing last year at Stirling. Oh ! 'tis a 
pitiful rhyme, lassie 'twill make ye weep, when it don't make 
ye laugh, I trow." 

Only a brief while had the two damsels been in the little 
bower when Janet suddenly dropped her ballad with a half- 
cry. A sound from across the river caught the girls' ears a 
shuffling sound of feet springing and sliding down the stony 
side of the dell, with angry, panting mutterings and impreca- 
tions. Peering through the interlacing branches which screened 
their little den, they saw what made them turn pale and look 
at each other fearfully. 

A young man, quite a stranger to the girls in appear- 
ance, was scrambling over the stepping-stones, his feet slipping 
into the water now and then in his haste, but keeping on his 
course somehow, despite this fact, without stumbling outright 
into the stream. Only a few yards behind was another man of 
much heavier build, in the act of giving chase. He was puffing 
violently from his exertions to keep up with the fugitive, but 
he stuck to his pursuit tenaciously. 

"Tis Donald Dhu, Janet!" cried Elsie, "and he does not 
mean well to that stranger he's chasing. See, he has grippit ae 
dirk in his hand. Call to him, Janet. He'll heed ye, lassie." 

Janet, no less alarmed than her companion, thrust the branch- 
es aside, and putting her head through the leaves, cried out as 
loudly as she could : 

" Haud yer hand, Donald Dhu ! Take heed ye do that 
stranger nae hurt. Put up yer dirk, I say. Mind what I bid 



374 SANCTUARY. [Dec., 

ye, mon. If ye dinna stop, I'll ne'er ope my lips to ye again. 
What are ye fashin' yersel' for, at a', at a' ? " 

The personage thus addressed looked up in amazement when 
he heard the girl's voice. He appeared to have been totally 
unaware of the existence of such a place of surveillance until 
then. He paused as he was about to place a foot on the first 
of the stepping-stones on his side of the stream. Then, return- 
ing his gleaming blade to its leathern sheath, he sat down on a 
grassy mound on the bank and burst into a boisterous laugh. 

" And so this is what ye are at, Mistress Janet, spying on 
honest folk from yer peep-hole, instead of sitting at home 
quietly knitting stockings or mending quilts for yer good old 
grandam. 'Tis weel I found ye out at last, my lassie, for the 
next time ye ca' me an idle callant I'll know how to answer 
ye back. But I'll gie that chiel yonder the benefit of yer intru- 
sion on our little sport. Only for it he hadna got out o' Haw- 
thornden wi' a dry skin or a hail skin either. But let him go 
the noo." 

The stranger had by this time gained the opposite bank, and 
stood on a little grassy slope right under the maidens' bower, 
looking up at the two fair faces peering curiously at him, a look 
of deep gratitude plainly visible in his glance. 

" Did ye e'er see a mair beautiful face, Janet ? " whispered 
Elsie to her companion, whose gaze was no less intently riveted 
on the countenance of the stranger than her own. " He looks 
just like ane of the saints in the picture of our Lord's Supper 
in the chapel yonder St. John's, I think." 

" I' faith ye are richt, Elsie. He does in sooth look just 
like that ane only he is sae delicate-like." 

The stranger had a striking personality, despite the fact 
that he was spare and not above the middle stature of man- 
kind. His face, which was naturally pale, had become more so 
from the reaction of excitement. It had quite a womanly ten- 
derness and softness in its contour, and a smile of indefinable 
charm, which seemed habitual to it, played a/ound the mouth. 
His eyes, which were dark, were full of gentlest pity and 
charity. His garb was that of a quiet civilian sober and desti- 
tute of adornment, yet neat and well-cut. He bore no arms, so 
far as the girls could observe. 

" I am at a loss for words wherewith to thank you, fair 
maidens," he said, speaking up at the two girls. " I can only 
pray God's blessings on you for saving me from yon furious 
man. If you would now only add to your service to me by 



1 893.] SANCTUARY. 375 

telling me the nearest way to the chapel of Roslin, you would 
fill up the measure of my gratitude." 

" If ye just climb up the bank where ye see the path there 
just round yon alder-bush I'll show ye the way from here," 
answered Elsie. 

"Ye had better be quick about it too, ye milk-faced loon, 
else I may change my mind," shouted his pursuer from across 
the stream, who did not appear to have his ruffled feelings 
much mollified by the interest which the stranger had evidently 
created. 

When Elsie returned from her mission of courtesy she found 
her companion in confab with the man called Donald Dhu. The 
two were seated on the trunk of an elm-tree which had been 
blown down in a recent tempest. Janet seemed angry, and Don- 
aid Dhu looked anything but comfortable. 

" And for why did ye hunt the mon wi' yer dirk, Donald 
Dhu ? " asked Elsie, heedless of these appearances. Her femi- 
nine curiosity would not allow her to pay much attention to 
them. " He's a sweet civil gentleman, an' 'twas a shame for ye 
to draw sic a weapon upon his like." 

" Howt, lassie, ye dinna ken what ye are prating aboon ! " 
returned the culprit doggedly. " I'm fashin' now that I let 
him gang so softly awa'. Didn't he tell Bess Brownie, our 
queen's ain dochter, that she was doin' the work of auld Nick 
when she asked him to let her tell his future ? The lassie her- 
sel' wad hae ripped him up, I warrant, if I hadn't come between 
the pair and chevied him awa'." 

" Oh, ye are a nice pack, the whole tribe of ye ! " exclaimed 
the girl, her eyes flashing with real passion. " I wonder how the 
laird of Roslin ever cam' to let such a disreputable set squat 
down at his gate. Quiet .peaceable folks hae no business passin' 
by yer lazy louts even in the broad daylicht." 

" Hae a care, lassie, what ye say," muttered Donald Dhu, his 
brow darkening ominously. " The gipsies are as guid and peace- 
able as ither folks, if they be left alone ; sae keep a civil clap- 
per in yer heed." 

" Hoot, awa' wi' ye ! I dinna care that much aboon the lot 
of ye!" cried Elsie, snapping her fingers at the angry man. 
" Ye are only bullies and braggarts the best of the men of ye >' 
and as for the rest " 

Janet Lyle did not allow her irate friend to finish the sen- 
tence. She clapped her hand up to her mouth and pulled her 
away, waving her hand at the same time to the object of Elsie's 



376 SANCTUARY. [Dec., 

wrath, in token of her wish that he too should leave the scene 
of hostilities in the interests of peace, and giving him an ex- 
pressive look which plainly said, " Do not heed her now ; she is 
only angry for the moment." 

The two girls hurried away over the fields towards Roslin, 
and Donald Dhu sat down upon the tree which they had aban- 
doned and looked darkly after them. A bitter smile had suc- 
ceeded the angry flush which had been called up by the hot 
words of the impetuous girl, and a very sinister gleam in his 
eye, as he continued to gaze after her. 

" De'il gang wi' ye for a glib-tongued quean ! " he hissed 
savagely. "Ye'll come to no guid end, I'd swear. Ye'll get a 
guidman, maybe, that'll wring the neck off ye for a scoldin' 
virago." 

He was a large, well-made man, but his movements indicated 
a very indolent habit. And indeed laziness was his besetting 
sin. It was this that made him give up his farm under the lairds 
of Roslin, and throw in his lot with the tribe of gipsies who 
found a home on that estate, much to the disgust of the sur- 
rounding gentry and the general disquiet of the neighborhood. 
The tribe received him with open arms, for Donald was a man 
of standing in his way, and had a bit of money besides ; and 
such accessions to their ranks were always welcome. He still 
kept up his acquaintance with such people as he knew about 
the place, however, telling them that he had gone on a visit to 
the gipsies to study their ways, and hinting he might, as soon 
as it suited his humor, go back to his old life again. 

Janet Lyle's father and mother had been his next-door neigh- 
bors ; hence the familiarity which existed between Janet and 
himself. Since Janet had bidden farewell to her childhood days, 
however, there appeared to be another sort of magnetism for 
Donald. He was constantly hovering about the cottage, and 
always trying to snatch an opportunity of talking with Janet. 

The companionship of Elsie Carr with Janet was a matter 
which troubled him not a little. Elsie was so honest and guile- 
less, so outspoken and so hasty, that she hurted his susceptibili- 
ties not seldom. He was a sensitive man in his way, and when 
anything that involved the subject of sloth or want of energy 
on the part of any one soever was accidentally mentioned, he 
instinctively thought it a direct reflection upon himself. 

That night the stranger was closeted with Sir William Sin- 
clair and the dean of the collegiate chapel of Roslin, Father 
Francis, for several hours. He was the bearer of secret com- 



1 893.] SANCTUARY. 377 

munications of much moment from Rome, touching the preser- 
vation of such Catholic institutions in Scotland which had as 
yet escaped the ravages of the iconoclasts. At dawn the next 
morning he departed unnoticed, as he thought, and on foot, for 
Leith, where the ship which had brought him over was in wait- 
ing to convey him back to France. 

Father Seton for such was the stranger's style and title in 
religion was a typical priest of that stormy period. A disciple 
of Loyola, he was a devoted follower of that saintly and in- 
trepid son of the church. Beneath a disposition of angelic 
sweetness and overflowing sympathy, he bore a heart as brave 
as ever beat under the red cross of the crusader. By the laws 
of the new regime in Scotland it was certain death, preceded 
by the fearful ordeal of " the question," for a priest who would 
not renounce his sacred calling to be found within the realm, 
after he had been banished therefrom by legal process. Yet 
he had been twice previously engaged on missions similar to 
that which had brought him to Scotland now. His ostensi- 
ble calling was that of a dealer in precious stones ; hence he 
was able, by carrying a small case of these objects with him, 
to escape the vigilance of the authorities. Missing his way a 
little in his quest of Roslin, he had come across the gipsy en- 
campment there, and his hatred of the charlatan arts of these 
wanderers had, as we have seen, very nearly been the means of 
landing him in his first serious dilemma. It was destined to be 
the cause of still further trouble to him from the same quarter. 

Other feelings beside those of resentment had been aroused 
in the breast of Donald Dhu by the result of his rencontre 
with Father Seton. His suspicions were also awakened. The 
air was full of babble about priests and popery. Stories of pa- 
pist machinations were rife everywhere. Liberal rewards were 
offered for the apprehension of the proscribed priests. As it 
was the cupidity of the nobles which brought about " the Re- 
formation," so the cupidity of the people was appealed to to 
keep it out of the kingdom. By offering generous premiums 
for the seizure of ministers of the banished religion, the band 
of conspirators hoped to turn the common eye away from their 
own gigantic frauds in seizing upon the church lands, the pa- 
trimony of the poor, and the source whence the education of 
the young had hitherto been provided for. Now the poor were 
left to starve, and the school-house was shut up, and brigandage 
and ignorance reigned everywhere outside the strong castles of 
the plunderers. To divert men's minds from the true source of 



378 SANCTUARY. [Dec., 

those monstrous evils it was the maladroit policy of the time 
to raise the clamor of danger from popery. 

It was not only the principals in the Catholic religion 
who were thus attacked. The zeal of the informer was stimu- 
lated by the creation of a much wider field for his energy. All 
those who harbored the banned clergy were equally made guilty 
before the law, and to discover these and drag them into the 
light was made an office hardly less lucrative than the other 
pursuit. In every considerable city and town in the kingdom, 
and especially in their outskirts, there were people always on 
the watch for suspicious-looking strangers, and noting the move- 
ments of such, and where they found accommodation. Then, 
more truly than in the days of the usurping king, might the 
poet's description be justified a place 

"... where nothing, 

But who knows nothing, is once seen to smile, 
Where sighs and groans and shrieks that rend the air 
Are made, not marked ; where violence seems 
A modern ecstasy." 

Donald Dhu had no desire and no necessity to become 
a discoverer; but two motives now sharpened his faculties he 
was curious about the identity of this stranger, and he was 
angry that the incident was the means of stirring Elsie Carr's 
anger against him. As for the religious motive, he did not 
care anything. Truth to tell, he did not trouble himself much 
about religion of any kind. Born at a period when the bonds 
of religion and morality were very lax, he became cynical when 
he found men of notoriously evil and dissolute lives attacking 
the old system, persecuting its clergy, and burning its churches, 
under pretence of abhorrence of those vices which were noto- 
riously rampant amongst their own class. He had grown up 
amidst denunciations of persecution, superstition, and vicious 
luxury, only to find those who had been denouncing these 
traits of the time the most cruel of the persecutors, the most 
abjectly superstitious, the most shamelessly immoral in their 
own lives. No wonder, with such an environment, he was 
cynical. 

Still there was that in his composition which prevented him 
from doing anything to acquire wealth in the way he saw 
others acquire it. He had no aversion to getting money, 
but he did not care to have any red stain upon what he got. 



1893-] SANCTUARY. 379 

The name of blood-money earner was not a wholesome one 
to bear about with one. He was not free from the supersti- 
tions of his age ; and the traditions of his country were rich 
in tales, many of which had been told in his hearing over and 
over again by the winter fireside, of the curse which clung 
around such money, away down the ladder of time. 

Yet Donald Dhu's animosity was great, and it was all the 
more impelling now from the fact that there was a possibility 
of his being able to satisfy it. There was a relative of his who 
had no such scruples as he himself had about earning blood- 
money. This man was a notorious witch-hunter and priest-hun- 
ter; he had made a calling of the hideous business. A sort of 
human ghoul, he seemed to gloat over his sanguinary work and 
to exult in the smell of burning flesh, as it rose from the bloody 
floor of the Grass Market, with the smoke of the burning pyre, 
and the shriek of the miserable victims whom he had helped to 
consign to the torture. 

It was not long until his horrible peculiarities were noted by 
the people, and he became hated to such an extent as to make 
his public appearance dangerous. In the popular directory he 
was soon particularized as " Rab the Leech," in reference to his 
taste for blood, and whenever he was seen in the streets he was 
hooted and pelted with garbage. So that, in order to keep such 
a valuable instrument of government safe, the authorities at last 
decided on giving him a permanent home in the Tolbooth in 
Edinburgh. 

In his earlier days Rab the Leech had been a travelling ped- 
dler, and in pursuit of his avocation he had visited almost every 
part of the kingdom. This experience was an invaluable one to 
him in his new role of discoverer. It gave him so wide a 
knowledge of individuals in all ranks of society that his testi- 
mony in questions of identity was regarded as incontestable. If 
any one was likely to know who this stranger was, thought Don- 
ald Dhu, his kinsman Rab was the man. He determined to pay 
him a visit. 

He started betimes the next morning on his journey, and as 
he skirted the demesne wall of Roslin he stopped to give his 
rough Highland pony a bite of the rich grass which bordered the 
roadside for several hundred yards. As he reined in he heard 
the sound of voices beyond the wall. That curiosity which was 
a dominant trait in his composition was at once in active motion. 
He got down off the animal's back, and, by the help of his 
hands and feet and a few inequalities in the wall's surface, 



380 SANCTUARY. [Dec., 

he was enabled to get his head over the top and look be- 
yond. 

The very object of his journey to Edinburgh the strange, 
smooth-faced, gentle-looking stranger ! 

He and the pastor of the chapel were sauntering leisurely 
arm-in-arm, away toward the demesne gateway some hundred 
yards away. What they were conversing about Donald Dhu 




THE TOLBOOTH. 

would have given a good deal to know, but though he could 
hear their voices he could distinguish no more than one articu- 
late sentence spoken by the stranger : 

" You may trust me, if I am alive, to be back here before 
the feast of the Nativity with the answer to her majesty's re- 
quest ; that is the shortest time " 

This was all Donald Dhu could distinguish, but it was enough 
to excite his wonder still further. If the stranger was not what 
he suspected, he was perhaps some one of more importance still. 
He might be treading on dangerous ground, he thought, in pry- 
ing into his business but he would be cautious. 

He remounted his steed and started afresh on his journey. 

He reached " Auld Reekie" in time to get breakfast in the 



1893-] SANCTUARY. 381 

Duke of Albany's inn on the Grass Market, and then, making 
his way up the Canongate, but with no small difficulty, owing 
to the presence of an excited, yelling crowd about John Knox's 
house, he reached the dingy and foul-smelling stone pile known 
as the Tolbooth. 

He found his kinsman pacing up and down the flagged yard. 
A number of persons were doing the same-^but they all kept 
away from Rab the Leech. Thieves, drunkards, and malefactors 
of various kinds, as they were, they loathed the companionship 
of one who earned " blood-money." Donald Dhu beckoned him 
to come over to a corner. 

" I ken the chiel weel frae yer description, Donald," he said, 
with a sudden gleam of avarice and cruelty in his eye. " He's 
ane Jesuit whilk the queen used to have aboon Holyrood before 
they made them a' skip. Bide a wee, or come up the stair wi' me 
till I don ae bit beardie and ae auld cloak that I gang around 
in whiles, the pesty rabble hae grown sae troublous. Then I'll 
gang wi' ye down to Leith, and see if there be sic a body to 
be seen lurkin' round there." 

They made their way to the seaport after a couple of hours, 
but they might as well have remained at home. Leith was in 
the hands of a French garrison, and Rab the Leech was very 
near being captured by the sentries as an English spy because 
of his outlandish appearance. It required all Donald Dhu's elo- 
quence to persuade the guards that they were two liege subjects 
of the Scottish crown. 

So back to his retreat in the Tolbooth slunk Rab the Leech, 
and Donald Dhu returned to his friends, the gipsies at Roslin, 
his curiosity only partially satisfied. 

The months rolled on, and the white mantle of the North 
had spread its sheen over brae and highland. The stars glittered 
gloriously through the clear cold air, and a solemn hush lay 
over lake and valley, when the midnight of the Nativity drew 
near. It was not wont to be so in the years gone by. From 
the sweet-voiced bells of Roslin always came the notes of joy 
and adoration. Their throats were silent now, lest they might 
attract the notice of the fierce zealots of a frozen creed. 

But the faithful Catholics around knew full well that, as of 
old, the Christmas midnight Mass would be celebrated in Ros- 
lin Chapel. The secret was known, too, to a few devout and 
stalwart Catholics in and about Edinburgh, who, entirely de- 
prived of their privileges of worship there, did not shrink from 
a short night-journey to obtain them. 



382 SANCTUARY. [Dec., 

So quiet and still was the scene that one might fancy even 
an angel's whisper could be caught from below through the 
sanctified air. Over all the slumbering landscape seemed to 
rest the peace of God. None would suspect that there was 
room there for the passions of avarice, jealousy, and revenge. 

But, alas ! so it has been from the beginning. That spirit 
which roused the demon in Herod still stirs the bosoms of the 
malign. What wonder that it should be found hovering, in those 
evil days, around the forbidden altars even here in beautiful 
Roslin ? 

Donald Dhu had broken with the gipsy girl. She had 
discovered that he had apparently transferred his attentions to 
Janet Lyle, and, after a very stormy scene, he had left the camp 
for good. The fierce Zingari girl was bent on vengeance, but 
she kept her secret. Pride forbade her to speak of it to any of 
the tribe, but she was on the watch for an opportunity to vin- 
dicate her wounded dignity. 

Janet Lyle was by no means averse from the additional in- 
terest which Donald Dhu began to evince in her. She knew 
he was a young man of substance, and, save for his somewhat 
morose disposition, a likely lad enough. But an estrangement 
from her friend Elsie Carr had been the result of her acquies- 
cence in his wooing. Elsie could not bear the sight of the man. 
She was a girl of keener discernment than Janet, and she had 
little difficulty in penetrating his true character. The incident 
of his attack upon the inoffensive stranger had to her eyes 
thrown a flood of light upon it. 

There was a little social group around the table of the 
gamekeeper's cottage that night, waiting for the drawing nigh 
of the hour for the midnight Mass. Elsie Carr's foster-brother, 
Robert Blair, had come from Edinburgh to spend the Christ- 
mas with her parents. He was a modest, manly young fellow, 
and looked upon almost as a son by Carr and his wife, for his 
parents had been their dearest friends. They had died many 
years before, and at their decease the Carrs had taken the charge 
of their boy. It was a dying request of Mr. Blair, and the 
Carrs willingly undertook the responsibility, and well and faith- 
fully carried it out. 

Robert Blair was now apprenticed to a cloth merchant in 
the Salt Market in the capital, and whenever he got a holiday 
his first thought was to go over to see his foster-parents and 
to see his foster-sister, Elsie. If he loved them, he positively 
adored her. 



1893-] SANCTUARY. 383 

The yule-log burned brightly on the hearth, and as the little 
party sat in its cheerful glow the gamekeeper told many a 
pleasant story of the old-time Christmas Eves beyond in the 
" great house," when the Lord of Misrule and his merry com- 
pany were given carte blanche in the matter of festivity, and the 
mummers played pranks in the hall, and the " waits " came 
around at midnight to recall the revellers to the more solemn 
thoughts of the season. Suddenly there was a pause in the talk 
and laughter. 

There was a faint cry for help. They all heard it. Robert 
Blair snatched his hat and dashed out. The gamekeeper, not 
so nimble in his movements, followed him in a few minutes, 
and the two women sat listening with blanched, expectant 
faces. 

Some moments, that seemed ages to them, passed ere there 
was any sign from without. At last the two men reappeared, 
and with them another whom they supported. He was pale 
and gasping, and blood was flowing from a small wound on his 
forehead. 

It was the stranger whom Elsie and Janet had saved from 
Donald Dhu a few months previously. 

" I am not much hurt, my good friends," he said, in answer 
to the anxious inquiries of the two women. " I was attacked 
by an unknown man just as I neared Roslin, whither I was 
journeying, and I struggled with him as best I could. He 
overpowered me and threw me to the ground, and in the fall 
my head was dashed against a sharp stone. But the villain 
took from me my cloak, in the pocket of which was a most 
precious document. It was to retain possession of this that I 
struggled so hard, and its loss affects me more than I can well 
describe." 

"Let us go out and search for him," cried Robert Blair 
eagerly. " He cannot be very far away. Perhaps he is one of 
the gipsy band, and if that be so he will have to give your 
property up, for the lord of Roslin will have no plunderers on 
his lands, I warrant, if their guilt be proven." 

The older man agreed to the suggestion, and the two start- 
ed out in search of the marauder. Meanwhile a little scene of 
a stirring kind was being enacted outside, in the vicinity of 
Roslin Chapel. 

Donald Dhu for it was he who, muffled in a great plaid, 
had made the attack upon Father Seton had fled upon the 
approach of his rescuers. But other eyes were watching him 



384 SANCTUARY. [Dec., 

the eyes of a vengeful woman and as he turned the corner of 
the rustic laneway which led to his own home the gipsy girl, 
stepping out from behind a tree, suddenly confronted him. 

As she did so something bright in her hand gleamed before 
his eyes. Donald Dhu started back in affright and ran with 
the speed of a deer down the road towards Roslin Chapel. 

The woman was no less nimble- footed than he, and hardly 
less powerful. She instantly gave chase. 

Desperation nerved the limbs of Donald Dhu, however. 
Encumbered as he was with the heavy cloak which he had 
wrested from the priest, he threw away his plaid, and raced 
at wonderful speed. He knew the value of his prize, and was 
determined to keep it at all hazards. 

How he had become aware of this fact is simply told. The 
secret had been imparted to him by his kinsman, Rab the 
Leech. That old sleuth-hound knew from Donald of the priest's 
intention to return to Scotland. Those in power who employed 
him had told him, from knowledge gained by secret agents, of 
the departure of a messenger from Rome to the queen regent, 
and Rab had no difficulty in concluding that he must be the 
man who had previously escaped his clutches. As the time for 
his return drew near he watched the arrival of ships and stran- 
gers at Leith with almost sleepless eyes, night and day, for he 
knew the prize was worth the labor. 

At last the opportunity came, quite unexpectedly. A ves- 
sel had dropped anchor during the night-time, and as the 
spy was hastening along the quay early in the morning he saw 
the very man of whom he was in search enter an inn of an 
obscure character at the least frequented portion of the thor- 
oughfare. 

He was at a loss how to act. The port of Leith was still 
in the hands of the queen's French allies. He could expect no 
countenance from these if he desired the capture of the stran- 
ger ; more probably he would jeopardize his own skin. 

He had no resource but to go back, as fast as his legs could 
carry him, to Edinburgh and seek help there. But there was 
much delay about this. The bailie who had charge of the 
police could not be found until the afternoon, and it was not 
until night was falling that the party set out for Roslin. On 
the way the spy paid a visit to Donald Dhu, and told him to 
watch for the stranger's arrival also, and notify his coming to 
the ambushed party. This was the trap which the unlooked-for 
intervention of the gipsy had rendered futile. 



1893-] SANCTUARY. 385 

Seeing that he was not gaining anything in the race from 
his enraged pursuer, and knowing that if he continued it he 
must be driven into the midst of her gipsy friends, the fringe 
of whose camp touched the road not more than a quarter of a 
mile away, Donald Dhu bethought him of another means of es- 
cape. He knew a portion of the wall where some dilapidations 
on its surface afforded footholds and handgrips, and for this he 
made a dash and succeeded in climbing up just as Bess had 
come upon him. 

He sat on top of the wall panting for breath while the girl 
hurled fierce invectives at him from below. He thought it pru- 
dent to remain seated there as long as she was in the neighbor- 
hood, lest she might try to get over the wall too. He was de- 
termined to push her down if she did so. 

At last Bess turned to go. " You may think yersel' safe the 
noo, ye white-livered hound," she said, shaking her clenched 
hand at him, " but ye are only putting off the day. Ye'll dree 
yer weird as sure as yon stars will pale before the morn, and 
the red de'il will hae yer craven soul for aye." 

Slowly she retraced her way toward the camp, Donald Dhu 
watching her retreating figure as long as he could keep its dim 
outline in view. As he sat straining his eyes, peering into the 
night, he thought he heard the sound of a voice faintly afar off, 
and he trembled, he knew not why. His ears had not deceived 
him. Away down the road the baffled woman, as she walked 
moodily along, had been met by the armed posse from Edin- 
burgh. Rab the Leech, who was some yards in advance, planted 
himself right in her path, and demanded, in tones of wolfish 
eagerness, had she seen any one pass as she came along. 

A sudden thought shot into the girl's brain, and a wild gleam 
flashed from her eyes as she answered the question. 

" I did, sure enoo. There was a chiel lurkin' beneath the 
wall of the chapel yonder, and as I drew near he scaled the 
wall like ane squirrel and loupit awa'." 

" Heich, that's guid ! Ye're a bonnie lassie, and there's a 
merk for your news," cried Rab, in a sudden and unwonted ac- 
cess of generosity. " Come on, my braw lads, the quarry's yon- 
der, only a few yards off ! " he shouted to the squad. 

The men broke into a quick trot, their heavy boots beating 
a sort of sledge-hammer chorus upon the frost-baked road, and 
their steel breast-plates and basinets glinting swiftly in the pale 
starlight. 

At the gate of Roslin a gate of beautiful, heavily-interlaced 
VOL. LVIII. 26 



386 SANCTUARY. [Dec., 

iron-work they drew up, breathless. Then Rab the Leech gave 
the bell a tug which instantly woke a great clattering response 
within and a host of echoes without. 

An old man who acted as sacristan appeared inside the gate 
in a few minutes, demanding angrily the cause of such an ill- 
mannered summons. 

" Open the gate, in the queen's name," replied the sergeant 
of the troop. " We are in search of a traitor, and we believe he 
is in hiding here." 

" I must not open the gate without ither orders," answered 
the old man, hesitatingly. " Bide a wee there till I gang an' see 
what's to be done." 

"Open the gate, I tell ye, without delay, or I'll hold you as 
a traitor too in aiding and abetting traitors," cried the officer 
sternly. He was a zealous Puritan, and the work in hand was 
just what suited his spiritual views as well as his temporal pros- 
pects in the Edinburgh police. 

"What is the matter?" demanded another voice that of 
Father Francis, who had come hurriedly from his quarters on 
hearing the clamor. "Why all this disturbance in a peaceable 
place, at such an unseemly hour?" 

."There is resistance to the law here, which amounts to mu- 
tiny and sedition, and aiding and abetting of treason," answered 
the sergeant stiffly. " If you are the person in authority, I com- 
mand you to open this gate instantly and give up the traitor 
who is in hiding on these grounds." 

" I know of no such person, or of any one being in hiding 
here, and I do not believe it is the case," replied Father Fran- 
cis with quiet dignity. "But this is beside the question. You 
ought to be aware that there is a right of sanctuary here, and 
if any fugitive from justice claim its shelter he must not be 
given over to the civil law until it is proven to the satisfaction 
of the lord of Roslin that his case comes within the category 
of those which are outside the privilege of sanctuary." 

" I shall listen to no such claim of popish superstition," 
cried the enraged officer fiercely. " That is all swept away, and 
the law of the land is the only law now. So open the gate 
this instant." 

" It is the law of the land upon which I am standing," said P"a- 
ther Francis imperturbably. " The right of the lords of Roslin to 
the sanctuary is as firm as any of the other rights in their title- 
deeds, and no law can sweep these away, except an attainder 
for treason." 



1893.] SANCTUARY. 387 

"You refuse then to open your gates at the command of 
the law?" queried the sergeant savagely. 

" Until I shall see the legal authority which commands me 
to open them unquestionably I do," replied the priest calmly. 

" Then you will take the consequences," said the zealot grim- 
ly, putting his pistol to the keyhole and firing. 

This did not suffice to open the gate. The stout lock was 
not removed until several more shots had been fired. Then 
there remained a great upright bolt to be undone, and this was 
not accomplished until one of the men had clambered over the 
wall and got inside. 

" I protest most solemnly," said Father Francis, standing in 
front of the troop before they had formed inside the gate. " I 
protest, in the name of God and in the name of the lords of 
this soil, against this sacrilege and violation of the sanctuary of 
the precincts of Roslin Church. Now I have done my duty, 
and if you proceed in the teeth of my legal protest, you must 
abide the consequences." 

" I undertake the responsibility," replied the officer haughtily. 
" Now stand aside, whoe'er you be, and if you will not aid us in 
our search, I warn you not to offer any further opposition." 

As he spoke he rudely pushed past the priest, and went 
about making his dispositions to search the place. The party 
were scattered about the grounds, and it was not long until a 
shout from a distant corner announced that the prey had been 
secured. 

Donald Dhu was dragged into the light of a pile of furze, 
which one of the party had managed to kindle by means of a 
flint and steel. His appearance caused no little amazement. 
His attempt at explanation was by no means satisfactory to any 
of the party, and he was hurried off, a prisoner. 

He had hidden the priest's cloak and the letter it contained 
under a pile of brushwood, with the design to produce the lat- 
ter when he had perfected a tale, which he was revolving in his 
mind, as to how he had come by them. He had no intention 
of allowing his kinsman to reap the reward whilst he had run 
the risk. 

But his scheme came to naught, because when he came to 
prove his tale neither letter nor cloak was to be found where 
he said he had hidden them. In a couple of days afterwards 
his body dangled from a gibbet on the Grass Market, for 
Rab, furious at his treachery, had handed him over to the 
tender mercies of the law, set in motion by Bess the gipsy. 



388 SANCTUARY. [Dec., 

At his trial she swore how she saw Donald attack a man and 
rob him of his cloak, and the surmise was that the victim had 
crawled away and died of his wounds in some lonely corner. 

The disappearance of the cloak and the letter was a simple 
matter enough. When quiet once more reigned over Roslin, on 
the departure of the invaders, Father Francis and the sacristan had 
gone over the ground to see in what condition the foray had left 
the consecrated place for here were the tombs of the Sinclairs 
from time immemorial. When they came upon the place where 
Donald had hidden his prize, their attention was attracted by 
the marks of recent disturbance of the debris, and they made a 
search which resulted in its discovery. Great was the surprise 
of Father Francis, but, much as he would like to know what 
this document, sealed with the papal seal, but bearing no ad- 
dress on its envelope, contained, he durst not open it at least 
until he saw some reason for so doing. But his joy was deep 
when, a little later on, Father Seton, accompanied by Robert 
Blair, came over to see him and discovered his lost treasure. 

"It looks like a miracle," he said. "I thought it was gone 
for ever or at least gone into the hands of our enemies. It 
is a letter from his Holiness respecting the disposition of some 
holy relics which her majesty had come by after the sack of the 
cathedral in Edinburgh, and its loss would be great indeed, 
as well as giving our secrets to the enemy and imperilling her 
majesty mayhap, too." 

Grateful were the hearts, though few, therefore, which wor- 
shipped at the midnight hour at Roslin. The fate which over- 
hung their country and their creed was happily hidden from 
their ken. But as they walked in the starlight, and gazed through 
the blue depths at the mysterious beauty of those luminous 
witnesses to the divine power, they bethought them of the 
Star of Bethlehem long ago, and the troubled world upon 
which it gleamed. If their own time was dark they knew that 
in no event could it be hopeless, for there were hearts in bon- 
nie Scotland that no gold could buy, minds that no sophism 
could warp, and these would keep the faith as long as grass 
grew and water ran. 




1893-] THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. 389 



THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. 

BY REV. WALTER ELLIOTT. 
LINDEN. 

INDEN CITY is our name, but the city of Lin- 
den is a small village of five hundred inhabi- 
tants. 

As my friend Father George and I stepped 
*^ 4 f rom the train we were met by a little commit- 

tee of " leading men " among the Catholics, the noisy spokes- 
man being one of the four Catholic saloon-keepers who mo- 
nopolize the business of drunkard-making here. But between 
George and me, both strong temperance advocates, he and his 
associate wreckers were made aware of what these missions to 
non-Catholics mean on the score of saloons and saloon-going. 
George capped the climax as we alighted at our dear friend 
Michael's house. " Let me take your satchel," said the saloon- 
keeper. "No," answered George sharply, "the holy oils are in 
it, and it is not right to allow a saloon-keeper to carry them." 
Before this mission was over the attitude of the church towards 
drunkenness and its occasions was well developed. 

The hall was formerly a roller-skating rink, seating about 
four hundred and fifty persons. Our young people decorated it 
as if for a Fourth of July celebration, lining the walls with fine 
evergreens and adorning the little stage with bright rugs and 
carpets, the centre occupied by a large and gorgeous certificate 
of membership in the Independent Order of Foresters ! We 
had a good choir of eight or ten girls who sang the hymns 
vigorously, and helped to adorn the platform with their gay- 
colored dresses and hats. The national colors were draped and 
hung plentifully in all directions. 

The Catholics of this neighborhood entered into the spirit 
of the meetings with great ardor ; unfortunately so, I might 
almost say, for they took up much room that could have been 
filled with non-Catholics unable to obtain entrance. But what- 
ever inspires Catholics with such courage and confidence is good 
missionary work anyway. From far and near the country peo- 
ple drove in, and packed and jammed into the hall till it was a 
solid mass of humanity. 



390 THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. [Dec., 

The answering of the questions seemed to be of peculiar in- 
terest to the entire audience, savoring as it did of an exchange 
of belligerent compliments under our flag of truce. A slight 
unpleasantness with the Freemasons was occasioned by some- 
body wanting to know, through the query-box, why the church 
is opposed to Freemasonry. Among other reasons I assigned 
the death penalty invoked in the Masonic oath. This annoyed 
the Masons, who are strong here. Privately they denied the 
accusations to their Catholic neighbors, and the night following 
put into the query-box a long list of the excellences of their 
" order," taking care, however, not to deny any specific accusa- 
tion. I repeated it, and challenged denial over the signature of 
some responsible member of the fraternity. That was the last 
of it. 

There seems to be a smaller proportion of members of the 
A. P. A. here than at Beechville, though they are all too 
numerous. Anyway my audience seemed more sympathetic. 
Our literature leaflets and copies of Catholic Belief were 
greedily taken and read by non-Catholics. 

My lodging has been quite pleasant, being with the family 
of a sturdy farmer, one of the early settlers. In his parlor an 
altar was improvised by Father George, and then I heard con- 
fessions and said Mass, having every morning a house full of 
worshippers and a good many penitents. 

I leave this place with regret. The whole region about here 
is a fine field for missions of this sort ; most of the towns, 
small though they be, have some kind of a public hall adapted 
to our purposes. A missionary could get audiences two-thirds 
non-Catholic in twenty places in these three adjacent counties ; 
perhaps as many as that in one of the counties alone. It is 
not hard to interest people with what is in itself intensely in- 
teresting the truths of eternal life. 

One evening we had four Protestant ministers with us, and 
that evening there was a larger number of questions than usual, 
mostly stimulated by the topics and leaflets of the previous 
evening. So many of them were written in the same handwrit- 
ing that I suspect that one of the ministers had a hand in 
them. I give some specimens out of my box in Linden : 

When was the power delegated to the priests which you 
assume is theirs on the first page of your leaflet ? You quote 
John xx. 23 ; if you read the chapter you will see Christ was 
speaking to all the disciples. 

Can you reconcile the decrees of the Vatican Council (the 



1893-] THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. 391 

history of which is written by Dr. Vaughan) and the decrees 
of the Council of Constance, held in 1413? 

Does one of your most learned commentators, Bellarmine, 
speak truthfully when he says : Should the pope commend vice 
or prohibit virtue the church is obliged to believe vice to be 
good and virtue to be evil ? Do Romanists believe nonsense 
of this kind ? 

Does the Church of Rome ever change ? 

Is the Church of Rome to-day the Church of Rome of the 
middle ages, with all the deviltries of the Inquisition ? 

How do you reconcile your teaching in the last paragraph 
but one in your leaflet (last night) with the following passages 
of Exodus xx. 4 ; Leviticus xxvi. I ; Deuteronomy iv. 16, 5, 8, 
27, 15? 

Why do you continue to call yourselves Catholic when all 
intelligent men know the title is false ? 

Can you account for the irreverence of Dr. Vaughan, who 
when referring to the Pope (Doctor, Pastor, We, Our), he al- 
ways uses a capital letter, but when in referring to God he 
uses a small letter ? What an irreverent assumption ! 

How do Catholics manage to wink at history so as to believe 
in the monstrosity called Papal infallibility ? 

The following came on one piece of paper: 

What is the reason the priests cannot get married ? Is it not 
contrary to the teaching of the Bible, which says: " Multiply 
and replenish the earth " ? 

Do priests pardon all sins? 

Will you explain the Catholic side of the confessional? 

Why is " Mass " said in Latin ? What good is it to people 
who do not understand Latin to hear it? 

Why are all priests Democrats in politics? A PROTESTANT. 

One thing edified me much both in Beechville and Linden 
the conduct of the new generation of Catholics. The young 
men, married and single, storekeepers, lawyers, farmers, eagerly 
caught at the chance of assisting to make the lectures success- 
ful. They peddled " dodgers," they lighted up the halls, they 
were the " gentlemanly ushers," they handed out the literature, 
and they argued and talked and canvassed before and during 
and after the lectures. They are fine material. Religion may 
well place its confidence in them ; they will be, in their own 
way, most efficient missionaries, if only they are directed by 
enlightened priests. 



392 THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. [Dec., 

The expenses here have been six dollars for the hall and 
two dollars for printing. Add five dollars' worth of literature 
(exclusive of about thirty copies of Catholic Belief which Fa- 
ther George pays for), and the total is thirteen dollars. This 
was quickly made up by the Catholics of the place, with plenty 
to spare ; the surplus being expended for our literary propa- 
ganda. 

I had persuaded myself at first that my Linden audience 
was uniformly two-thirds Protestant, but further inquiry leads 
me to suppose a smaller proportion on some of the evenings. 
I regret this ; but what is one to do ? You cannot forbid Catho- 
lics attending, and if you should attempt it you would fail to 
keep them away. Anyhow, it is well worth while spending six 
evenings in addressing over two hundred non-Catholics in favor 
of the true religion, much as one regrets there were not 'twice 
as many. 

I am solicited to take up some towns in this vicinity by 
their pastors, but must go to *he other end of the diocese, hop- 
ing to return to this neighborhood before the mission year ex- 
pires. A fine young priest said that he had found the expenses 
would be more than he could stand something like one hun- 
dred dollars. He was pleased with even our Beechville figures, 
and amazed at the Linden ones. 

We have no church in this village, the Catholics attending 
that at a little railroad junction some three miles away. 

Such a Catholic baby show as Linden gave us was edifying 
in the extreme. The mothers were bound to hear the lectures. 
I regret that I must regret that such good folks did not stay at 
home and leave more room for non-Catholics. 

A curious instance of aiming at the goose and hitting the 
gander occurred at this Linden mission. One evening an ob- 
jection was given in against administering communion under one 
kind. There happened to be a careless German Catholic pre- 
sent, a piece of hickory of many years seasoning. It appears 
that he had imported that very difficulty himself from the old 
country. He declared himself well satisfied with the answer 
given, and approached the sacraments at the Forty Hours' De- 
votion opened at Father George's church the Sunday following. 

The reader will understand that I live in my dear Michael's 
farm-house as one of the family, as I also did with the Sobieskis 
at Beechville. I sit down with the household at their common 
table, and every other way I am one of them. This gives them 
the joy of feeding and lodging and entertaining a priest on 



1893-] THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. 393 

terms of familiar intercourse. They would perhaps keep me 
apart in solitary grandeur, but this would not suit me nor be 
just to them. Meantime these good souls have the gentle man- 
ners of true Christians and know how to make one happy. 

I hear that the Beechville Antis are going to have a fiery 
A. P. A. lecturer to counteract the impression of the mission to 
induce the good Protestant people to swallow back their vomit 
of religious hate. 

I also hear that the Methodist minister of Linden will give 
a lecture in the hall on Monday night to draw his people back 
into the wallow of prejudice. But Fair Play had six nights for 
the truth in each place, and has left behind many hundreds of 
good leaflets and several score of good books, a permanent 
mission which is not easily defeated, especially when backed by 
such noble Catholics and so good a priest. 

GRAPETOWN AND PEACHVILLE 

have between them a population of eleven thousand, being 
separated by the pleasant waters and reedy banks of a little 
river. They both offer the common spectacle of Protestant dis- 
union, many churches and none of them quite prosperous. The 
Lutheran confusion is strikingly shown in the first-named town, 
there being four different churches rejoicing in that holy tute- 
lage, one of them the result of lawsuits among the brethren. 

Father James resides in Grapetown, and visits Peachville 
every Sunday, where he has built a truly beautiful church. He 
met me at the cars just as the drenching rain, which the far- 
mers had been praying for, ceased to fall a very kindly man, 
a zealous priest, and actively interested in this apostolate. He 
had " billed the town," or rather both the towns, for more than 
a week beforehand. Big posters of cotton cloth were to be 
seen in conspicuous places, and dodgers were to be had every- 
where. Good notices were also published in both the little 
evening papers. The moment Father James learned that I was 
an old soldier, he got out a thousand extra dodgers for the spe- 
cial benefit of my comrades. 

A good priest like Father James is much respected by non- 
Catholics, and this helped the fair-minded editors of the local 
dailies to give us the extended and favorable reports which 
appeared each afternoon. But in one or two cases I found that 
my discourses had suffered from the editor's unfamiliarity with 
Catholic terms ; entering his quill orthodox they came out hete- 
rodox in some particulars. But the more important things I 



394 THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. [Dec. r 

wrote out myself, and these being faithfully reproduced enlarged 
my auditory by some thousands every day. 

It seems that I am never to speak in anything less than an 
opera house or academy of music everywhere I go I find these 
names given to the public halls. The hall in Grapetown is a 
good one, accommodating nearly six hundred. The stage was 
tastefully draped with the national colors, a fine picture of Co- 
lumbus forming a centre-piece. The church choir sang pleasant 
hymns, and the first evening the seats were well filled and some 
persons standing, more than a majority being non-Catholics. I 
had preached at the High Mass on the missionary spirit, finding 
the people an agreeable and intelligent-looking congregation, 
dominantly of German stock. I feared that they would attend 
the Academy of Music too well. 

But we did not surfer here from embarras des richesses ; three- 
fourths of our congregation are farmers, and many being Ger- 
mans, there was always room to spare after Sunday night. Tues- 
day's meeting was a full audience or nearly so, and the other 
evenings the attendance was good enough. But the place is 
quite a summer resort, the towns-people read the big city's morn- 
ing papers before noon, and amusements are plenty; altogether 
not the best environment for our work. But some of our people 
exerted themselves zealously. 

One French Canadian farmer living nine miles from town, 
and who had suffered from the taunts of his Protestant neigh- 
bors, challenged them to come into the lectures. They agreed 
for one night, and so he transformed his big hay-wagon into a 
carryall and brought in seven of them besides his own family. 
It is likely that some of them never heard a priest's voice be- 
fore. Voice enough they certainly heard, and brought home 
with them the printed truth besides. 

The query-box gave me a thriving trade in both these cities, 
and at the risk of wearying the readers of my preceding article 
I give a pretty full selection. As all of my four missions have 
been given in hot-beds of A.-P.-Aism, inquiry has centred mainly 
on the question of civil allegiance and the public schools ; also 
concerning convents, which have been most villanously slan- 
dered all through the West by travelling ex-priests and ex-nuns. 
But some other points are curiously touched in the following 
questions : 

Was Solomon inspired to have three hundred wives and seven 
hundred concubines ? 



1893-] THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. 395 

Why do Catholics hate Tom Paine? 

Why are there so many different denominations, all keeping 
the same day and professing to serve the same God ? 

What is your idea of Spiritualism (as a religion) as a means 
of saving one's soul ? 

Can a Protestant go to heaven ? 

If the Catholics believe in the Bible why don't they let the 
laity read it? A CITIZEN. 

Why do Catholics never invite Protestants or non-professors 
to their meetings ? 

Does the church believe that an infant dying without baptism 
can be saved ? 

When were the crucifix, scapular, and rosary instituted in 
the church? and give the religious significance of each. 

Give the significance of the vestments worn by the priests 
and bishops. 

Give the reason why the Catholic Bible contains more books 
than the Protestant. 

Why is it that nine-tenths of the saloon-keepers are Roman 
Catholics, and claim to be Christians ? A CITIZEN. 

Why does the Catholic Church allow saloon-keeper* in the 
church, when all lodges do not allow them ? 

In your delivery last evening you would have the saloons all 
closed at all times. Why is it the saloon-keepers of this town and 
others are Catholics, while they are not allowed in the Protes- 
tant church unless they have reformed ? 

Why do Catholics hold a wake over their dead and have 
whiskey and tobacco ? 

Why do the Catholic priests, or fathers, grant absolution, 
instead of asking God to pardon our sins, as the Bible directs?' 

If sin is a matter between man and his God, how can a pope 
or any other man forgive sin ? 

Why do Catholics object to free schools ? 

In what country, or otherwise nation, of this civilized world 
will you find the most ignorant people ? and what is the pre- 
vailing religion ? 

Why don't your church hire Protestants to teach in the paro- 
chial schools? 

Why is it that they have to pay ten dollars to pray a soul 
through Purgatory ? 

Why do you charge for Masses for the dead ? 

Do you mean to say that no Catholic priest ever received 
money for praying souls out of Purgatory ? 



396 THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. [Dec., 

Where is Purgatory situated ? What authority have you that 
there is such a place? 

Why cannot a priest marry as well as any other man ? (This 
question was asked four different times.) 

Please explain why priests, as a rule, wear no beard, and why 
you have a full beard ? 

Why are Catholic priests so arrogant? 

What right has the church to have officers called " Fathers " ? 
It is written "ye shall call no one your father but God." 

Why are not convents open to the inspection of the 
public ? 

Which is worse to go to, a convent or to states prison ? 

(Signed) STRICT OBSERVER. 

Please answer why a sister, when she takes the black veil, 
<:an't see her dearest friends? 

A woman once being admitted to a convent, can she leave 
of her own accord ? 

Why are members of some convents prohibited from speak- 
ing? 

What is the real object of a convent? 

What is the real mission of Satolli ? 

Is it not true that seventy-three per cent, of Catholic sol- 
diers in the late war with the South were deserters? and what 
proof have you if not so, and why the pope sent his blessing 
to the South and not to the North ? 

To which power does a true Roman Catholic, who is also 
a citizen of the United States, owe the highest allegiance in 
temporal affairs, to the Pope of Rome or to the government of 
the United States? 

Are the Catholics of this country arming? 

Why did you not answer the above question last Friday 
night by yes or no ? 

Why is it that all Catholic priests are Democrats, and why 
do they preach to Catholics to vote Democratic ticket, not Re- 
publican or Prohibition ? 

In vol. iii. Ecclesiastical Sermons, page 83, Cardinal Man- 
ning says : " Why should the Holy Father touch any matters of 
politics at all ? For this plain reason, because politics are a part 
of morals. Politics are morals on the widest scale." If this is 
true will a good Roman Catholic say : I take my faith from 
the pope, but I will not take my politics from the pope? 

Are you not bound to receive, believe, and disseminate the 
word of the pope as to what he decrees in matters of faith, 



1893-] THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. 397 

morals, and politics so far as politics have to do with the 
church ? 

Are not all Catholics bound to accept the creed of Pius IV. ? 

Is it the teaching of the church, that purely secular schools 
are not good for Catholic children ? 

Protestantism is a heresy condemned by your church, is it 
not? 

Does not the pope claim allegiance from every Catholic ? 

Has not the pope the right to give countries and nations 
which are non-Catholics to Catholic regents, who can reduce 
them to slavery ? (See St. Thomas, vol. iv. page 91 ; also Dr. 
S. F. Von Schulte, Laws of the Church of Rome.) 

Does the Roman Catholic Church teach that the pope is a 
supreme sovereign over the world ? 

Your dogmas teach that Protestantism is a heresy and a 
mortal sin, do they not ? 

The dogmas of your church teach that the church is superior 
to and not dependent on the state, do they not ? 

When the Pope speaks ex cathedra is he not supposed to be 
obeyed as the voice of the Holy Ghost ? 

Is not the temporal power of popes acknowledged by the 
church ? 

Do you believe in restricting immigration ? 

Should the pope command one thing from the chair, and 
the laws of the state another, every good Catholic would have 
to obey the pope, would he not? 

Please answer this question plainly, concisely, and without 
any qualifications, in the same spirit that it is asked : Reason 
is God's greatest gift to man, and without it man is unable to 
judge of what is right and what is wrong ; therefore, if man 
cannot in the exercise of this gift reason agree with the 
Christian doctrine, is he therefore eternally condemned ? in other 
words, which is better and more justifiable, an honest infidel or 
a hypocritical Christian according to the teachings of the church ? 

AN HONEST INQUIRER. 

Loud applause greeted some of my answers to queries the 
second night in Grapetown, and as it came from the Catholic 
portion of the audience, I requested that henceforth there should 
be no more of it, as it might not be pleasing to our non-Catho- 
lic friends. 

All the time I could possibly spare from the principal dis- 



398 THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. [Dec., 

course was devoted to answering the queries, in some cases ex- 
tending to forty minutes. Golden opportunities were thus found 
for teaching just what Catholicity is, in our outer and inner 
lives. The quotations from Cardinal Manning gave occasion 
for a momentary indulgence in a modest flight of rhetoric about 
that noble character. He was indeed a citizen of the world 
and a Catholic of the Leonine type. 

Catholic convents and sisterhoods stimulate questioning to a 
high degree of activity. This is owing to the great flood of 
filthy lying which has poured over this section, leaving in some 
minds the most incredible delusions, and in not a few the direst 
suspicions. The misfortune is that multitudes have never seen 
a Catholic sister or convent; and also that the sisters' demure 
appearance and singular attire, as well as the walled-up seclusion 
of their convents, have anything but a missionary influence. In 
a community penetrated with the suspicion that the church works 
her ends by underhand means, by deceit, hypocrisy, and secret 
conspiracy, Catholic life must sacrifice some of the privileges of 
holy solitude if it would enter upon an apostolate. Our Pro- 
testant brethren will not allow one of themselves to lead a se- 
cluded life ; such a one is voted a miser, or has bad antecedents, 
is a misanthrope, and certainly is selfish. How narrow the area 
of inalienable personal right becomes when one begins to bar- 
ter for souls ! One is reminded of old St. Serapion, who several 
times over sold himself into slavery to heathen families and there- 
by converted them to Christianity. 

By the time our four meetings in Grapetown were over 
Peachville was eager for us. Thursday night we opened at the 
opera house with a splendid attendance and a shower of ques- 
tions. The next two nights our audience was hardly half-sized, 
a terrific storm prevailing, one of the worst this lake country 
has known for years. But even those evenings we had a fair 
share of the most intelligent Protestants of the town, and sev- 
eral prominent members of the A. P. A. The place is new and 
full of an adventurous, active-minded element. Sunday night 
we closed with a splendid audience, numbering more than six 
hundred. We always had a large preponderance of non-Catho- 
lics, except perhaps the nights of the storm a bright, inquisi- 
tive kind of people. The men outnumbered the women at the 
meetings in both places. 

I must beg the printing of the following challenge, which 
was the incident of the Peachville mission. " Professor " Sims 



1 893.] THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. 399 

is an A. P. A. lecturer, one of a band in the regular employ of 
the organization. He has a voice of much power and is a speci- 
men of the vulgar sort of stump-speakers. Our more elderly 
readers will remember the professor's book of reference, Dens' 
theology, as figuring extensively in the Hughes and Breckenridge 
controversy. There is no use denying that the old Adam in me 
longed to accept the challenge. I regretted, for a brief moment, 
that I was not Dennis Kearney, the sand-lot orator. I think 
I could have outyelled my antagonist, and outcavorted him. 
But I should have hurt my office and my cause in stooping to 
such fisticuffs. So, in substance I told my audience in Peach- 
ville : neither peace of mind, nor the business of persuasion 
of the truth, nor mutual understanding and good will, would 
be helped by " the joint debate." But I answered all the pro- 
positions and questions in the challenge, and condescended to 
the pun that the main reliance of the professor was not Dens' 
theology, but dense stupidity on the part of some of his fellow- 
citizens. I also said that the difference between my work and 
his was that between a law-court and pugilism. But read the 
challenge : 

" QUESTIONS FOR PRIEST ELLIOTT TO ANSWER. 

''On Thursday evening, October 12, Rev. Father Elliott com- 
menced his first of a series of lectures in the opera house. He 
advertises to answer all questions concerning the Roman Church 
and its attitude toward our free institutions. 

"Professor Walter Sims, of Bay City, Mich., has repeatedly 
challenged any bishop, priest, Jesuit, or any person who will 
produce authority as representative of the Roman Catholic Church, 
to discuss this question before an intelligent American audience. 
Now, why don't Father Elliott accept this challenge? It is re- 
spectfully tendered. He would confer a great favor upon his 
Catholic admirers if he had the bravery to face Mr. Sims, George 
P. Rudolph, Evangelist Leyden, or Major Ryan before a repre- 
sentative assemblage of citizens in this city. 

"A large majority of the laity of the Roman Catholic Church 
do not believe what is contained in the following questions, and 
for their benefit we ask Father Elliott to answer, as he has 
.agreed to do : 

" Do not the canonized dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church 
demand of every Roman Catholic unquestioning belief in, and 
obedience to the following inexorable rules for the guidance of 
political, social, and religious life? 



400 THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. [Dec., 

" That the pope is both an infallible spiritual and temporal 
sovereign. That the will of the pope is the supreme law of all 
lands. That the pope has the right to annul state laws, treaties, 
and constitutions, etc., and to absolve from obedience thereto. 
That the pope can annul legal relations of those in ban, espe- 
cially their marriages. That the pope can release from every 
obligation, oath, and vow, either before or after being made. 

"That the pope can ignore the government of non-Catholic 
countries and give them to Catholic sovereigns. That the official 
voice of the pope is the Holy Spirit. Does not the pope com- 
mand, dogmatically, obedience to the following unchangeable la\\s 
of the church ? 

" That she has the right to require the state not to leave every 
man free to profess his own religion. That she has the right 
to exercise her power without permission or consent of the state. 
That she has the right to deprive the civil authority of the en- 
tire control of public schools. That she has the right of perpetu- 
ating the union of church and state. That she has the right to re- 
quire the state not to permit free expression of opinion. That 
the education outside the Roman Catholic Church is a damnable 
heresy. That the constitutions of states are not superior, but 
subordinate, to the constitutions of the church. 

" Are not its members organized into societies, arming and 
drilling under priestly direction ? Does it not demand of its 
members obedience to the pope as to God ? therefore, how 
can they be true citizens ? Does it not teach that oaths are 
not binding, except when made subject to its laws ? Does not 
your church offer rewards for the persecution of heretics? Does 
not your church rob and oppress its own people, keeping them 
in the bonds of delusive ignorance and superstitious fear? 
Did not your church cause you to take an oath containing the 
following extract, at your ordination to the priesthood : ' I do 
renounce and disown any allegiance as due to any heretical 
king, prince, or state, name Protestant, or obedience to any of 
their inferior magistrates,' or words to that effect ? 

" Now the question arises, What will Mr. Elliott do in re- 
gard to answering the foregoing questions, which are asked 
merely for the benefit of the members of his church ? Every 
well-informed Protestant knows how to answer them. The 
pope of Rome, in 'every official document emanating from ' his 
high chair,' either admits or does not deny but what they are 
the laws and teachings of his church. Therefore, Mr. Elliott 
would not dare brand them as false accusations. Will he admit 



1893-] THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. 401 

they are the laws and teachings of his church ? No, certainly 
not ; because every intelligent Catholic who desires to become 
an American citizen would be compelled to leave the church, 
and thereby ruin Rome's chances of subjecting this free country 
to her un-American laws and superstitious teachings. . . . 

"The above questions are some of the momentous ones 
which are at the present time causing alarm and widespread 
dissatisfaction among the enlightened and loyal American citi- 
zens of this country, and so considered by them to be a menace 
to our government ; therefore we challenge Rev. Father Elliott 
to discuss these questions with Professor Walter Sims, of Bay 
City, before a representative audience of our citizens, a suitable 
place to be determined upon by a committee from both sides, 
on October 17, 25, or even at a later date. An official notice, 
either by letter or in person, accepting this challenge, will be 
earnestly and hopefully looked for at this office." 

The journal printing this is a weekly Democratic sheet re- 
cently gone over to the anti-Catholic party. 

In another column of the paper appeared the following : 
"The Roman Catholics of America are prepared for conflict. 
Everywhere they have formed or are forming secret and mili- 
tary companies, under the names of Hibernians, St. Patrick's 
Cadets, St. Patrick's Mutual Alliance, Knights of St. Peter, 
Knights of Columbkill, the Sacred Heart, etc. These secret 
societies are not only drilled but they are well armed, some of 
them with arms bought by themselves, some got from the State 
governments. They parade our streets several times a year 
under the name and mask of State militia." 

On the Wednesday following our closing Sunday the great 
challenger delivered an afternoon address in the Grapeville 
Rink he was refused the Academy of Music and one in the 
evening. In spite of a brass band parading the streets his au- 
dience was almost nobody in the afternoon, but a better atten- 
dance was secured for the evening. 

The speaker had been introduced by a prominent citizen of the 
town, who boasted that the A. P. A. had in a short time secured 
a membership of two thousand voters in this county. Consider 
this as a specimen of hundreds of counties in the United States, 
and consider the rubbish these multitudes are content to be fed 
with, and tell us if it is not time we had some representatives 
of Catholicity foot-free to go here and there and anywhere, to 
expose this gigantic confidence game? And consider whether 
prelates and priests and laymen are not right in " making the 
VOL. LVIII. 27 



402 THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. [Dec. 

American Eagle scream " in the interests of Catholic love of 
country. 

Some complained that the lectures were in part " too deep," 
though I fear a professor would say that I was too superficial 
in my arguments. But in truth one may deal with deep things, 
" aye, the deep things of God," before a haphazard American 
audience, but he must use common language and forswear 
scholasticism syllogizing. The people can cross high mountains, 
but they cannot fly across. 

The expenses for both missions were $12 for printing, about 
$5 for my literature, and the Peachville Opera House cost us 
$24, the Grapetown Academy of Music being free: total $41. 

The effect produced was distinctly repressive of the A. P. A. 
ferment. Prejudice certainly was lessened, and many non-Catho- 
lics, including the editors of both the dailies, expressed them- 
selves as pleased with our religion, shown to .them in its true 
colors. Here is a clipping from the Peachville Palladium : 

" Rev. Walter Elliott, the Catholic priest who is delivering a se- 
ries of lectures in this city on the Roman religion, took occasion 
Friday evening to answer some of the attacks made on his church 
by recent speakers, and his replies were fair, courteous, and dig- 
nified. The assertions of this priest, who is doubtless qualified 
to speak the truth regarding his denomination, will go far to 
allay any fears that may yet exist as to an uprising of Roman 
Catholics." 

And what a lovely time I have had here ! The balmy 
breezes of the American autumn, the glorious sky, the sparkling 
waters of the lake, this whole region a sanitarium for all life 
human, animal, and vegetable the stalwart race of men and wo- 
men, the fervent Catholics, the delightful company of Father 
James how pleasant the life of the missionary, sure enough ! 




CHURCH OF THE ROSAKY, BOYESGADE, NEAR FREDERICKSBERG. 




A SKULL, A PRINCESS, AND A BLACK FRIAR. 

BY V. C. HANSEN. 

FRENCHMAN who has been watching with sym- 
pathetic interest the striking progress of the Catho- 
lic Church in Denmark during the years in which 
Monsignor Johannes von Euch has been at the 
helm, recently wrote to his friends in France: 
" Doubtless the monsignor is a scholar and a diplomat, be- 
sides being a priest of eminent piety ; but all his accomplish- 
ments would have gone for naught had it not been for the 
skull, the princess, and the Black Friar. These three gave him 
his opportunities, which, I admit, he seized and utilized with 
the skill of a master." 

The skull was that of King Canute of Denmark, who some 
time toward the close of the eleventh century weeded out the 
last remnants of heathenism within his realms, enforcing obedi- 
ence to the church with such persistency that at last some of 
his subjects rebelled against him, and killed him in a church 'in 
front of the altar. Subsequently he was canonized, and to the 



404 A SKULL, A PRINCESS, AND A BLACK FRIAR. [Dec., 

church in the city of Odense, in which his murder had taken 
place and his body was preserved, was afterwards given the 
name of St. Canute's. Along with all the other Danish churches, 
at the " Reformation " in the sixteenth century it passed into 
the hands of the government, and was henceforth used as a 
Lutheran place of worship. The late king, Frederick the Sev- 
enth, had the remains of the saint enclosed in a casket of iron 
and glass, and placed in the crypt of the church. 

In spite of great weakness, King Frederick was a man of 
bright intellect and a big heart, and he became more popular 
than any other Danish monarch for the last two centuries. One 
day in 1863 he entertained at one of his country seats a German 
bishop who was visiting Denmark, the then Prefect-Apostolic, 
Dr. H. Griider, and the present Bishop von Euch, at the time 
Dr. Griider's curate. The king was very affable and good- 
natured to both. 

" Do you know," he suddenly said, " that I enjoy your com- 
pany exceedingly. My regard for Catholic clergymen is very 
great. To tell the truth, I should like to be a Catholic myself, 
only you know the Danish constitution, the constitution I have 
myself granted my people, contains the clause that the king 
must always be a Lutheran. But if there is anything I can do 
for you just tell me, and be sure you'll get it." 

The prefect then suggested that the skull of St. Canute be 
removed from its present place and turned over to the Catho- 
lics. 

" It was not until your majesty's reign," said Dr. Griider, 
" that we Catholics obtained freedom of worship here in Den- 
mark. Would it not be a crowning act of justice if you re- 
stored the relic of the only saint among your illustrious prede- 
cessors to us to us who share the faith he died for, and who 
alone among your subjects honor his memory in the way in 
which his and our church prescribes that it should be done." 

" Certainly," replied the king, " that is a perfectly just and 
sensible request. The next time I go to Odense I will see 
that the skull is handed over to you." 

But only a few months later the king was a corpse, having 
had no chance to visit Odense before his sudden and unforeseen 
death. 

Thus the Catholics did not get the skull; but they remem- 
bered their saint just the same, and a few years ago they made 
up their minds to celebrate the eight hundredth anniversary of 
his death with as much solemnity as their small number (not 



1893-] 



SKULL, A PRINCESS, AND A BLACK FRIAR. 405 



fully four thousand out of in all two million Danes) would per- 
mit. It was Prefect von Euch's wish that the widest publicity 
possible be given to the celebration, and the press willingly 
published the information he caused to be sent to it. Through- 
out his career Dr. Cruder had sedulously avoided anything 
ostentatious or demonstrative, and probably his individuality, 
which was markedly that of a scholar and an ascetic, made this 




BISHOP JOHANNES VON EUCH. 

seclusion a necessity. Monsignor von Euch, no less learned and 
pious, but possessed besides of the inborn dignity and ease of 
manner of a German nobleman, step by step trod a new path, 
and events have proved it the one that leads to success. 

One feature of the celebration was to be a visit to the relics 
of the saint. Application was made to the Lutheran church 
authorities, and permission was granted on condition that no 



406 A SKULL, A PRINCESS, AND A BLACK FRIAR. [Dec., 

speeches be held, hymns sung, or any other devotional utter- 
ance made by the Catholics while in the church. 

There is a little Catholic chapel in Odense, and from that, 
on the day appointed for the visit, a procession marched out, 
wending its way to St. Canute's. The tall, commanding figure 
of the prefect-apostolic at once attracted the attention of the 
many Protestants who had come just to see what a Catholic 
celebration was like. At the entrance of the church a surprise 
was sprung on all present. The Lutheran provost of the city 
suddenly appeared in front of the church facing the procession, 
thus forcing it to stop short, whereupon he began reviling 
Catholicity in general and the worship of saints in particular. 

The present writer has always regretted that he did not wit- 
ness the scene, but one of his friends, a Protestant, who did see 
it, afterwards rendered his impression of it in something like the 
following words : 

" It was decidedly an unfair match. Our provost is a short, 
thin man, who tries to make up for his physical deficiencies by 
standing on tiptoe and raising his squeaky voice to an unna- 
tural pitch, while your prefect has the physique of a Prussian 
officer of the guards, and a certain faint smile of quiet irony 
hovering in the corner of his mouth, which is more crushing 
than a harangue of an hour's length. For five or six minutes 
Monsignor von Euch listened to the provost's invectives, where- 
upon, with a firm step, he passed by the angry little man, fol- 
lowed by the procession. They immediately went down into 
the crypt, spent some moments on their knees in silence, and 
then returned in as orderly and dignified a way as they had 
come. The provost had disappeared. And now the next time 
please send us somebody not over six feet ; we should like that 
a great deal better ! " 

"And still better would it be for you," I added, "if we 
should send one that has not the law with him." 

This was the point. Everybody admitted that the Catholics 
had done nothing but what was their full and clear right, while 
the provost had allowed his temper to get the better of him in 
a way which even his friends must deplore. 

The conservative papers, which in Denmark are all wedded 
to Lutheranism, showed indirectly how indefensible was the 
conduct of the Protestant clergyman by passing over the event 
in absolute silence. But some of the liberal journals candidly 
ridiculed the zealous little dominie, and, although nothing fur- 
ther occurred in direct connection with the case, as a matter of 



1 893.] A SKULL, A PRINCESS, AND A BLACK FRIAR. 



407 



fact from that day the impression got abroad that Monsignor 
von Euch was what the French call " un homme fort " a man 
of strong character and firm purpose, of whom one might rea- 
sonably expect to hear more some day. 

And something was heard. Now and again it would leak 
out that the conversion of some distinguished person had been 
effected, chiefly through Monsignor von Euch. It is true the 
aggregate number of these converts was not large, but each and 




PRINCESS MARIE OF ORLEANS. 

every one was in some way or other remarkable, be it for 
charity, for noble birth, or for learning, and their social stand- 
ing and private life were universally recognized to be unimpeach- 
able. 

Doubtless by this time the cause of Catholicism in Denmark 
was furthered, indirectly at least, by the marriage of Princess 
Marie of Orleans to the youngest son of the Danish king, Prince 
Vlademar. The princess, a bright and talented woman, has 
succeeded in attaining a degree of popularity exceeding by far 
that of any other of the royal ladies at Copenhagen, and this 



408 A SKULL, A PRINCESS, AND A BLACK FRIAR. [Dec., 

she has accomplished against very heavy odds indeed. More 
distinguished-looking than beautiful, with a somewhat forbid- 
ding expression on her strong features, she did not at once 
attract the sympathy of the Danes. But it soon became mani- 
fest that with sundry eccentricities amazing at times, harmless 
always she possesses a tender heart, a great sense of the 
humorous, and an inflexible will. She was fully aware that 
her religion was distasteful to her new countrymen, nor could 
she be kept in ignorance of the venomous attacks on the Catho- 
lic Church for which her arrival in Denmark was the signal ; 
and recalling the lukewarm attitude towards their persecuted 
church of other Catholic princesses, whose lot by marriage had 
become cast with Protestants as, for example, a certain Swed- 
ish queen in this century the student of matters human would 
hardly have had reason for surprise had he seen this young 
woman evince more diplomacy than religious zeal. But nothing 
of the kind took place. With firm and quiet dignity, as remote 
from ostentation as it is from half-heartedness, the Princess 
Marie never misses an opportunity to testify to her sincere 
Catholic faith. Strictly observant of her regular religious duties, 
she does not confine herself to this she visits Catholic hospi- 
tals, is present whenever a corner-stone is laid for a new church 
or a Catholic structure is dedicated, attends Catholic lectures, 
and calls at Catholic schools. As, at the same time, her chari- 
ties extend to the deserving of all denominations, with no dis- 
crimination whatsoever, it need cause no wonder that at the 
present hour she may not only be said to have conquered all 
prejudice against herself on account of her religious allegiance, 
but that to her must be ascribed a considerable part of what 
has of late been accomplished in Denmark in the line of break- 
ing ground for the Catholic propaganda. 

Be this not misunderstood : to this day Danish converts to 
the church suffer, and for a long time to come they will have 
to suffer, serious inconveniences as a consequence of their act- 
ing up to their convictions ; the hour has not yet struck may 
it never strike ! when a conversion may be suspected of hav- 
ing been brought about by worldly considerations. But, on the 
other hand, what has already been said will be sufficient expla- 
nation of the fact that nowadays, outside of the ranks of the 
Lutheran clergy themselves, few Danes only would be found 
willing to denounce and abuse the church which numbers among 
its most devout members the beloved Princess Marie. 

Thus had the Danish mind been gradually prepared for the 



1893-] ^ SKULL, A PRINCESS, AND A BLACK FRIAR. 409 

momentous event which took place now three years ago the 
coming of a French Dominican, one of the "Black Friars" as 
were designated the sons of St. Dominic in the North during 
the middle ages. 

Why to invite just this man Pere Lange to preach at St. 
Ansgar's in Copenhagen should, with no exaggeration, be 
styled a master-stroke of Monsignor von Euch's, the reader will 
presently be made to understand. For years the Danish mis- 
sion has been almost exclusively in the hands of German priests, 
secular and religious the latter Jesuits only. But in this fact 
itself lies the explanation of the scant success said mission has 
until very recently encountered. By a strange coincidence the 
very year in which religious liberty (including, of course, free- 
dom of worship for Catholics) was restored to Denmark 1849 
was the second of a bloody war, in which Germany abetted 
those subjects of the Danish king whose desire it was to sever 
the connection with the government at Copenhagen, and set up 
an independent state formed of the two duchies, Schleswig and 
Holstein. Denmark came out successful, but none the less em- 
bittered against its southern neighbor ; and for years the weak- 
nesses and oddities real or pretended of the German people 
constituted the stock-in-trade of political pamphleteers, news- 
paper men, dramatists, and the editors of humorous weeklies. 
No new farce was possible without at least one character dis- 
porting itself in broken German, no issue of a " funny paper " 
without some cartoons and verse caricaturing German politics, 
manners, and language. The war of 1864 depriving, as it did, 
Denmark of the duchies, of course only deepened and sharp- 
ened the resentment, and altogether it is more to be wondered 
at that the German priests were at all able to make Danish 
proselytes than that the latter were few and far between. 
Imagine Russian missionaries trying to win over Poles, or Jews 
preaching a new religion to anti-Semites, or, for that matter, 
English ecclesiastics exerting themselves to change the convic- 
tions of Irishmen, during the worst years of misrule and sup- 
pression in the Island of Saints! 

Lately, to be sure, the mutually hostile feeling between Danes 
and Germans has abated considerably, owing chiefly to the judi- 
cious efforts of certain liberal writers and politicians, whose 
organ is Politiken a daily of the highest ability. But it will 
take long before a Dane will be able to listen, without an occa- 
sional smile, to a sermon in which for the Ks in the end of a 
syllable are substituted the softer German ch ; while on the 



410 A SKULL, A PKINCESS, AND A BLACK FRIAR. [Dec., 

other hand the soft Danish d, which should be pronounced much 
the same as tJi in "that," is invariably made to sound as hard 
as the initial d of a popular English oath. 

And now consider the advantages of a French preacher with 
a Danish audience ! The friendship between Denmark and 
France dates back as far as the time of the first Napoleon, 
when the little northern nation shared the fortunes and the 
ill-luck of the great conqueror long after everybody else had 
forsaken his standard, and throughout the nineteenth century 
French literature, French plays, and French paintings have been 
studied and imitated in Copenhagen more industriously and 
systematically than, perhaps, anywhere else. Sarah Bernhardt 




PERE LANGE. 



and the elder Coquelin, while sedulously avoiding the Father- 
land, may always count on large audiences in the Danish capi- 
tal, where the show-windows of the bookstores are continually 
glowing with yellow-covered French novels, a museum is devot- 
ed exclusively to French sculpture, and no cafe" or restaurant 
that makes claim to anything above the lowest standing would 
dare be without, at least, Le Figaro and Le Monde Illustrd. 

Fully aware of this state of things, and considering the 
moment for decisive operation to be at last there, Monsignor 
von Euch three years ago caused the French Dominican Pere 
Lange to begin a series of lectures conferences at St. Ansgar's. 



1893-] A SKULL, A PRINCESS, AND A BLACK FRIAR. 411 

It soon became evident that something unusual was stirring up 
the religious life ordinarily not Over-active of the city. Not 
only was the church crowded as often as Pere Lange was ex- 
pected to speak, but the papers over and over again comment- 
ed on his discourses; Lutheran ministers denounced him from 
their pulpits ; parents refused their children permission to go and 
hear him. 

As might have been expected, by all this the interest in the 
Black Friar was only augmented ; numerous persons called on 
him, he could hardly answer all the queries that came to him 
through the mail, all sorts of associations vied in inviting him 
to lecture before them. A highly significant fact was that not 
only the professedly liberal students' club, but even its elder 
rival, the union of conservative students, who for the greater 
part support the state church, applied for the honor of seeing 
the Dominican within its walls. 

Of course to obtain such a success a man even a French- 
man has to be something above the average ; nor would even 
the most embittered enemy of Pere Lange deny that the abilities 
of this monk are of a high order. His ascetic frame and some- 
what careworn features offset, to be sure, by a pair of brilliant 
dark eyes, beaming with humor and kindliness were of no little 
advantage among a people with whom 4< the bloated monk " is 
a standing figure in novels, plays, and pictures. But above all 
it was his eloquence that charmed all and convinced not a few 
an eloquence of a peculiar direct sort ; never turgid or loaded 
with imagery, hardly even strongly pathetic, recalling less the 
thunder-like efforts of famous orators and demagogues than the 
discourse of a man anxious to convince a friend in the matter 
that is dearest to his soul a discourse welling straight from 
the heart, yet tempered with intelligence cool and circumspect, 
enforced with an array of learning that seems inexhaustible, 
and a skilful taste in the choice of words that, like that of the 
best prose writers of his countrymen, seems as nearly flawless 
as anything purely human can possibly be. 

For the last three winters Pere Lange has been lecturing, 
and his success has been continually on the increase, as the 
most telling testimony to which may be cited the confirmation 
last spring, by Bishop von Euch, of over a hundred converts. 
The significance of this number will be better appreciated when 
it is kept in mind that, with some four hundred thousand in- 
habitants, Copenhagen contains not fully two thousand Catholics. 

Another circumstance should be dwelt upon in particular: 



412 A SKULL, A PRINCESS, AND A BLACK FRIAR. [Dec. 

with hardly an exception these one hundred men and wo- 
men all represent the highest education and enlightenment of 
their people, all of them being not only conversant with the 
French language, but capable of following and grasping fully 
a theological argument in that idiom. Consequently their con- 
version could not have been one of a purely emotional charac- 
ter, such as at times occurs with people of muddled brains 
and limited knowledge, and is not to be relied upon with 
absolute confidence. 

Of the honors paid to Pere Lange by non-Catholics none 
could have been more flattering than the reception which the 
liberal students tendered him at the close of last winter's course 
of lectures. It was preceded by a brief speech by the Domini- 
can, and an ensuing discussion, of which a passage-of-arms be- 
tween him and Dr. Georg Brandes was the most noteworthy 
feature. Later in the evening, at the reception, Dr. Brandes the 
famous rationalistic critic, the friend of Renan and Taine, the 
literary adviser of Henrik Ibsen, Bjornson, and the entire 
younger school of radical northern authors again stood up, this 
time to express in simple, heartfelt words his profound respect 
and admiration for the monk, adding that the latter might be 
assured of a sympathetic hearing whenever and as often as he 
would return to Denmark. 

No one doubts that Pere Lange will return. 

As for Monsignor von Euch, already a year ago the Pope 
acknowledged his wise and faithful service by making him a 
bishop the first Catholic bishop north of the Elbe river for 
fully three centuries and a half, his spiritual jurisdiction extend- 
ing not only over the Danish Catholics, but over those of Swe- 
den and Norway as well. Since then considerable work has 
been done by way of erecting schools and churches, but much 
more is yet to come. The recent action of the Norwegian min- 
ister of worship, in forbidding the singing of Cherubim's Stabat 
Mater at a concert in a Norwegian church, solely because it was 
a "Catholic composition," has only, by the universal ridicule 
with which it was received in the press, served to bring out 
still more markedly the fact which is day by day becoming 
more manifest, that the time of the undisputed sway of big- 
otry in the northern kingdoms has passed away for ever. 

Copenhagen , Denmark. 




ROME UNDER THE C^SARS. 



THE TWO CITIES. 




BY JOHN JEROME ROONEY. 

I. 

OME, throned beside the Tiber, in the blaze 

Of boundless power and glory world-complete, 
Beheld the nations prostrate at her feet ; 
She saw with joy, thro' burning cities' haze, 
Chained bands of bondsmen drag along her ways ; 
She saw the ravished fields, the trampled wheat, 
The wreck of homes, her haughty foes' defeat 
Swelling the pomp of thrice-victorious days. 
And seeing these her heart was filled with pride 
The fierce pride of the soulless conqueror 
As to her cheeks a flush of triumph came ; 
Nor reckoned she how trodden peoples died 
The graveless victims of red-handed war, 

While countless millions cursed the Roman name. 



II. 

High noon has struck ; in robes of purest white 
The crownless Lady of the Lake appears; 
Beneath her many a stately palace rears 

Its glittering domes in marbled height on height : 



1 893.] 



THE Two CITIES. 



Far, far below a silvered thread of light 

Winds thro' the green ; the pigmy boatman steers 
His tiny craft, and, like dull thunder, hears 
The millions' voice hum in its smothered might. 
Within the stretches of the giant halls 
In noblest riot of magnificence 
Arise the marvels of the land and sea, 
Until from rush of wonders wonder palls 
And Reason, in her fairy-house, cries " Whence, 
Whence may the fulness of this glory be ? " 

III. 

The white-robed Lady gazed again ; she saw 
Not India's bales of precious merchandise, 
Nor ocean's gems, nor mountain's golden prize ; 
But, as a vision, shone the love and awe 
Of banded freemen for the reign of law, 
The new-world answer to the ancient lies 
That honor fails and human progress dies 
Beyond the sacred circle monarchs draw. 
Yet vaster tidings spoke the under-soul 

That glowed beneath the outer show of things, 
Flooding with meaning the majestic plan : 
The blended units form the mightiest whole 
Where Love is king and blessed Justice brings 
The triumph of the brotherhood of man ! 





416 WORKS OF SUPEREROGATION. [Dec., 



WORKS OF SUPEREROGATION. 

BAR NY BRYCE'S VIEW. 

BY CLARENCE A. WALWORTH. 

:N a pleasant village in that beautiful valley which 
lies between the Hoosick and the Taconic moun- 
tain ranges, through which the Housatonic flows, 
dwelt Squire Hubbel and his amiable lady. The 
squire was a lawyer of some considerable note, 
with a taste also for farming. When recreating he sometimes 
drove a good horse and sometimes talked politics. Mrs. Hubbel 
was a good housekeeper and looked well after her children. She 
was noted for her piety and a great exactitude in all religious 
duties ; a good neighbor, moreover, and with a kind heart for the 
poor. She was a great reader of the Bible, and it would be 
difficult indeed to point out to her any passage in it which she 
had forgotten. She was in no way especially remarkable for 
self-conceit, but if anything in her character approached to it, 
it was a persuasion that there was very little in the way of re- 
ligious doctrine, either false or true, which she did not sufficiently 
understand. With this brief description of the good lady we 
venture to introduce her to our readers, as, with her shade-hat 
on her head, one fine summer morning she descended the steps 
of her back piazza to take a look over the garden. Although 
fond of horticulture, her object was not so much just then to 
inspect the garden-beds as to sow good seed in the mind of 
the gardener. Barny Bryce was there working very busily but 
very cheerfully, and little expecting to be himself overhauled by 
the good lady, for whom he had a most profound respect and 
to whom he had good reason to be grateful. 

After a few words had passed between the two concerning 
the flower-beds and trees, Mrs. Hubbel said, opening a small 
book which she had in her hand : 

" Barny, what do you think of works of supererogation ? " 

" Faix, madam," said Barny, " that's something I never 
tried yet, and I don't know if I should be able to do it." 

" It's no garden-work, Barny. It's a Catholic doctrine, you 
know." 

" Oh, well thin, Mrs. Hubbel, if it's anything accordin' to 



1893-] WORKS OF SUPEREROGATION. 417 

good Catholic doctrine, I'll try my hand at it, if you'll only tell 
me what it is." 

" I said it was a Catholic doctrine, Barny. I didn't say it 
was good doctrine." 

" Oh ! never mind, Mrs. Hubbel, if it's Catholic, I'll run my 
risk on the goodness of it. Tell me what it is you would like 
to have me do, and I'll set about it at once." 

" I see you don't understand me yet, Barny. Let me read 
you something from this little book, and you'll understand what 
I mean better. It is * The Book of Common Prayer,' used by our 
friends the Episcopalians. I am not an Episcopalian, you 
know, but what I am going to read explains very well what 
the doctrine of works of supererogation is. The Episcopalians 
have a profession of faith which they call ' The Thirty-nine 
Articles of Religion.' I am going to read the fourteenth article 
to see what you think of it." 

" Please, ma'am, don't," said Barny. " I never dealt in them 
articles, and I don't want to." He had already begun to per- 
spire from head to foot. 

"It won't hurt you," said Mrs. Hubbel. "I'll read it slowly, 
and then you tell me what you think of it." She then read as 
follows: "Voluntary works, besides over and above God's com- 
mandments, which they call works of supererogation, cannot be 
taught without arrogancy and impiety. For by them men do 
declare, that they do not only render unto God as much as 
they are bound to do, but that they do more for his sake than 
of bounden duty is required : whereas Christ saith plainly, 
'When ye have done all that are commanded to you, say, we 
are unprofitable servants.' I suppose you understand that, 
Barny." 

" Super-irrigation is a big word, madam ; I can't remember 
that I ever heard of it before, and I don't feel like handling it. 
Couldn't ye tell me what it means, ma'am, in shorter words, 
and then maybe I can tell you what I think of it." 

" Why, Barny, do you believe that we can do more for God 
than we ought to ? " 

"No, ma'am, I don't. On that pint you can put my name 
down square as voting in the negative." 

" Well, if you are a good Catholic, you are bound to believe 
that. That's what your church teaches and what all your 
priests preach." 

" Troth, my leddy, if ever a Catholic priest preached the 
likes o' that it was some Sunday when I stayed at home." 
VOL. LVIII. 28 



4i 8 WORKS OF SUPEREROGATION. [Dec., 

" Do you believe that you can keep all the commandments 
of God ? " 

" I'm sure of one thing, Mrs. Hubbel. I haven't kept them 
all not always. And you may take my word for it, that I 
never heard any man or woman of my religion say that he had 
done it." 

" But your saints, Barny your canonized saints. Perhaps 
some of them may have done more for God than they ought 
to, with an overplus of good works laid up to their credit." 

" If I should have the luck to meet a rale saint I shouldn't 
like to hear one of them say so, madam, and I don't believe he 
wud, aither." 

" Do you believe that it is possible to keep all the command- 
ments of God ? " 

" With the help o' God's grace, you mean, my leddy ?" 

" Well, yes anyway." 

" Troth then, Mrs. Hubbel, I do believe it. What for would 
God be giving us commandments when he knows that we've no 
chance to keep them ? " 

" But our Lord Jesus Christ' teaches us to say, that after all 
we do we are still unprofitable servants. Doesn't that show 
that no man can keep all the commandments ?" 

" I think you've left something out, my leddy. If I remem- 
ber right, there's something else he said in that little book you 
have in your hand that might make it clearer." 

Mrs. Hubbel then opened the Book of Common Prayer, 
and read the text again : " When ye have done all that are 
commanded to you, say, we are unprofitable servants." 

" Wait a minute, Mistress Hubbel," said Barny, scratching 
his head. " Give me time to think a bit. Doesn't the Blessed 
Master tell us to howld ourselves for unprofitable servants afther 
that we've kept all his commandments? It seems to me that 
we have his own words for it, that if we don't keep thim, it 
isn't for the reason that we can't. And even if we did keep 
thim all, he deserves better work from us still. It seems to me, 
thin, that God doesn't command us to do all that he'd like to 
have us. There's more that might be done yit. If the Holy 
Church teaches what that little book calls super-irrigation, 
isn't that what she means by it ? I remimber very well, for 
I've seen it in our catechism, that there's such things as pre- 
cepts that is, commandments of God that no Christian can 
neglect without being punished for it ; and that there be other 
things called counsels of perfection which he puts us up to do, 



1893-] WORKS OF SUPEREROGATION. 419 

gently like, advising us kindly for our better good, without 
threatening us with damnation or any other punishment if we 
should fall behind, so to speak." 

" Now, Barny," said Mrs. Hubbel, " you're going a little too 
far. Do you pretend to say that anything and everything that 
we can do to please God is not a commandment for us ?" 

" Troth, madam, with all respect for your better judgment, I 
think that's about the size of it." 

" O Barny, Barny ! isn't that lowering the commandments of 
God ? " 

" Well now, Mistress Hubbel, it's not meself that 'ud wish 
to make too little of any commandment. But isn't it, perhaps, 
God himself that's plaised not to make too many command- 
ments, and that out of regard for our weakness ; and isn't 
it perhaps himself that will be all the better satisfied wid 
us when we do some things to plaise him widout being or- 
dered ? " 

" There's some show of truth in what you say, Barney ; but 
it has a dangerous look, too. Is it not safer to look upon 
everything we can do to please God as a law ?" 

" Faix, madam, that would be the ruin of me entirely. And 
sure, if it isn't true, what's the use of thinking it ? I'd rather 
trust my soul to the mercy of God than to be saving it by any 
tricks of my own raison. And so would you, my leddy I know 
you would." 

" I would, indeed," she replied. 

"And now I do be thinkin' of it, I'm minded to ax ye, How 
do you like the traitment I've given to that corner of the gar- 
den over by the back fence there, where nothing seemed to 
grow and nobody cared to go like ?" 

" I like it well, Barny. Those lilies-of-the-valley thrive ad- 
mirably ; and how tastefully the paths are laid out ! I meant 
to have thanked you for that before. You must have worked 
out of hours, Barny, to get all that done so quick. And the 
iilies are special favorites of mine." 

" I knew that, Mrs. Hubbel, and then I bethought me there's 
nothing else would grow so well in that shady corner. I'm 
glad they plaise you. I've been waitin' for you to say it. 
There's some other flowers there that I thought 'ud plaise you. 
It's far I wint to find some o' them." 

" I'm perfectly delighted with them, Barny ; they are just 
what I would have ordered if I had known where they could be 
got." 



420 WORKS OF SUPEREROGATION. [Dec., 

"You didn't order them, madam?" 

" No, Barny, I did not." 

" You wouldn't have been displaised wid me, then, if I 
hadn't done it?" 

" No, indeed." 

" And you do be plaised now, Mistress Hubbel, that it is 
done ?" 

" I am indeed pleased, and I thank you with all my heart." 

"Wud it plaise you better to remimber that I had done it 
all by your own express orders ?" 

" In that case I should have been satisfied, of course ; but I 
am better pleased as it is." 

" O bedad ! thin, madam," said Barny, " I do belave I've 
super-irrigated the garden; and I'm safe out of it, too, and I 
knew I wud be." 

Mrs. Hubbel laughed in spite of herself and said : " Barny, 
you're a great rogue, whatever one may think of your doctrine." 
Barny himself, -however, looked serious, which the good lady 
noticed, and asked him what he was thinking of. 

" If I were to tell you that, ma'am, it might spoil all I've 
gained by the super-irrigation." 

" How so ?" she inquired. 

" To be honest wid you, thin," said he, " when I look 
back over the long time I've served wid ye, I've had orders 
from ye, betimes, that I haven't carried out ; and considering 
all the kindness I've had at your hands, and considering the 
kind words you've said to me the day, I'm a long way back in 
my accounts wid you. I'm willing to take all you'll allow, 
madam, to the super-irrigation." 

" I am well satisfied, my good friend, with yourself and with 
the garden, and would not willingly change you off for any one 
else." 

After a pause of a few moments, during which Mrs. Hubbel 
seemed lost in reflection, while Barny hoed away vigorously 
at his garden-beds, the former recommenced the conversa- 
tion. 

" There seems to be something reasonable in what you have 
told me, Barny," she said, " but at the same time I find it 
hard to believe that any one, however good he may be, can 
keep the commandments of God so perfectly that he can get 
beyond that and accomplish more." 

" Faix, ma'am," replied Barny, " I am not saying that any 
man does that. All I meant to say was, that there be some 



1893-] WORKS OF SUPEREROGATION. 421 

necessary things that are commanded, and that there be other 
good things that there's no commandment for, that God would 
be pleased to see us doing, all the same. These be what we 
call in our church counsels of perfection, ma'am. That's not 
to say that one must be perfect before he can do them, but 
only that its more perfect to do them than to let them alone. 
Am I making it clearer, ma'am?" 

" I don't know," the lady replied, " perhaps it might be 
made clearer." 

" Well, thin," said Barny, " here goes for a venture, though 
I may bring up in a fog. Did you ever, my leddy, hear of 
a sister of mine that's in a convent? They call her Sister 
Ann." 

"Yes, Barny, I've heard you speak of her more than once, 
and from what I hear you must have reason to be proud of 
her." 

" Troth she was always a good girl, was Ann ; and if ever 
she broke a commandment of God that is in the middle of it 
I never saw the pieces nor heard of it. But when she came 
to be seventeen or eighteen years old, she tuk it into her head 
that she wasn't good enough, and nothing would suit her but 
to be a sister. We all tried to keep her to home, but she 
wouldn't be set by us. Leastways, we made her so unhappy 
that we had to let her go. We tould her there was no com- 
mand for it, and she allowed there wasn't. She would be glad, 
said she, to stay wid her friends at home and do as they axed 
her. But then God was calling to her on the other side, said 
she. But then for all her waitin' and waitin' and listening to 
the likes of us, he never seemed to let go this hould and so at 
last the priest give in to her, and we all give in to her, for fear 
we might be crossin' the Lord that wanted her all to himself. 
Maybe, ma'am, that's one of the works of super-irrigation. Not 
a commandment, you know, with a threat behind it, but a 
friendly advice like from the Lord above. It seemed like as if 
he was plaised wid her, too, that she did more than there was 
any commandment for. She's been there twenty years or more, 
and the longer she stays the happier she gets. She had a good 
deal to give up, poor child, and it must have cost her more 
than a little ; but it would have cost her more to resist what 
was drawing her the other way. If God doesn't give her back 
more than he gets from her, I'm much meestaken. And maybe 
he'll turn over some of the good she does, and some o' the 
sacrifices she makes, to our account that she's left behind her. 



422 WOKICS OF SUPEREROGATION. [Dec., 

For, as I look at it, Mistress Hubbel, if super-irrigation is what 
I takes it to be, it's something that the Lord will let pass 
around without any emptying of the bucket it comes from." 

"Without any emptying of the bucket it comes from ! What 
do you mean by that, Barny?" 

"You've heard, Mrs. Hubbel, of the Apostles' Creed? It's 
something we Catholics learn when we're little. It's something 
we Catholics often say over, not to forget it. Oh, yes! you 
must know it yourself, ma'am, and belike you believe it, too." 

" Indeed I do know it, and believe it with all my heart." 

"Well, then, Mrs. Hubbel, every time we repeat it we have 
to say ' I believe in the communion of saints.' Now, that's a 
doctrine, my leddy, that I make great account of, and this is 
my idea of what it means. Everything good that the Holy 
Church has is a sort of common property among us. The church 
is a holy family like, and whatever good thing one Catholic has 
belongs, afther a fashion, to the whole of us. Some are good, 
very good, and some are not so good, and some are so far from 
being good that they're a shame to all the rest. The best of 
all is our Lord Jesus Christ himself. Great as he is, and good 
as he is, he's one of the family all the same ; and I'm sure of 
this, ma'am, that there isn't a single Catholic amongst the whole 
of us, let him be a saint, or a common Christian, or an out-and- 
out blackguard, but he's all the better off for having the Blessed 
Master at the head of the family. Isn't it one of the holy apos- 
tles you'll remember yourself which one it is that says, ' of 
his fulness we all have received grace for grace ' ? The goodness 
that's in him runs over like, for the good of all. And the same 
thing, I'm thinking, may be said of every good Christian in the 
Holy Church. The goodness that's in him and the good things 
he does comes all, of course, from the good Master, but it doesn't 
stop with him. It keeps flowing over. It couldn't help it. It's 
a way wid all things in this world, good or bad. Now, don't 
you see, my leddy, how in this way the Holy Church gets to 
be very rich. It seems to me that the Holy Church gets filled 
up in this way wid great blessings. It's a great treasure like, 
that the Holy Church has the keeping of. It's her business to 
look after us all, and in this way the good Master fills her lap 
full to help her to do it. The Holy Church is a great corpora- 
tion, ma'am, so to speak, and we all have a chance to get our 
share of the dividends. It's a poor way I have of expressing 
myself, Mrs. Hubbel, but I think you ought to have some idea 
of my meaning. Isn't it yourself that I've heard singing from 



1893-] WORKS OF SUPEREROGATION. 423 

the window betimes a beautiful song ? I can almost give you 
the very words of it : 

" ' Refreshing showers of grace divine 
From Jesus flow to every vine, 
And make the dead revive.' 

I don't think we ought to be far apart, Mistress Hubbel, on the 
pint of super-irrigation. The principal difference between us, I'm 
thinking, is nothing more than this : that all this great irrigation 
of holy grace and good works and merits goes on in the Holy 
Church though I'm not denying that outsiders may get some of 
the spillings of it, and I'm not the man to grudge them all they 
can get. You don't make so great account, ma'am, of the church 
as I do, but when I repeat the holy creed, ma'am, I find the 
three articles of faith coming close together : ' I believe in the 
Holy Ghost, the Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of 
Saints.' The Holy Church stands right in the middle, ma'am, 
between the Holy Ghost and the Communion of Saints." 

" Well, Barny, your faith is strong, and your heart is in all 
that you have said. I came here thinking that I might teach 
you something, but I've got more instruction for myself than I 
was able to give to you. Good morning, Barny," she said, and 
walked away slowly and thoughtfully towards the house. Bar- 
ny's eye followed her stealthily from under the broad brim of 
his straw hat, until her form disappeared beyond the closed 
door. Then, pausing from his work, he laid down his hat upon 
the ground with a deliberation which was simply emphatic, and 
crossing both arms upon the handle of his hoe, he gave utter- 
ance to his thoughts as follows : 

"Did any one ever see the likes of her? There be many 
ways, I am towld, that lead to the Holy Church, and if she 
don't get her pretty feet into one of 'em before the year gets 
much older, then I don't know what the blessed angels are 
thinking about." 

Albany, New York. 




424 A PLEA FOR THE WAGE-EARNER. [Dec., 

A PLEA FOR THE WAGE-EARNER. 
BY WILLIAM I. SIMMONS. 

HE prosperity and happiness of the wage-earners, 
the workers of skilled industry, is one of the im- 
portant questions in the welfare of a country, 
because with the farmers they compose the in- 
telligent masses of the community. 
With the farmer there is no difficulty. He is the most inde- 
pendent man in the nation, and also, probably, the most patri- 
otic. He is more independent than the business man, the ban- 
ker, or the railroad magnate, for he owns the land, and is not 
at the mercy of any stagnation in trade or fluctuations in stocks. 
In fact, all these commercial agents, to a great extent, depend 
upon him, and the wage-earner, though indirectly, yet more 
completely than all. If the harvest is abundant, the railroads 
prosper ; the farmer spends his money and business increases ; 
he invests in new farm implements and improvements, and an 
impetus is given many industries. If the crops fail, the railroads 
are dull and there is a general stagnation in trade. But the 
farmer is the independent man. He has his home and enough 
to live upon. He simply has to curtail in the superfluities 
and pleasures of life. This is especially true of the farmer 
who has no encumbrance and has cleared his farm of all 
mortgage. But it also holds good of the farmer who may be 
under the weight of debt, while the prosperity of the banks 
and investment companies, and through them the general com- 
merce of the country, depend upon the farmer's ability to meet 
his obligations. 

But it is not the same with the wage-earner. As a rule he 
is dependent upon his weekly earnings, and if that source of 
revenue is cut off, he seldom has much to fall back upon. Even 
if he is trying to own his own little home, his economy is all 
invested in that, or is regularly consumed in paying interest and 
taxes. And his less thrifty neighbor, who is paying rent, is no 
better off, for he has squandered his surplus, over and above 
the requirements of the family each week, in drink or some 
other foolish way. So the wage-earner, whether he is a prudent 
or an improvident man, has little or no reserve fund and is cer- 



! 



1 893.] A PLEA FOR THE WAGE-EARNER. 425 

tain to feel hard times most keenly. As a result he is inclined 
to be a discontented, and sometimes a dangerous, element. He 
sees the capitalist getting richer and richer every year out of his 
toil, he chafes under the large profits which he is making for 
others, until he conceives that he should have a share of them ; 
then he demands higher wages, and a "strike," with generally an 
ignominious defeat, follows. This does not put him in any better 
mood, and, unable to see any way towards bettering his con- 
dition, he remains always dissatisfied with the existing state of 
things and ready to become a breeder of discord. 

The farmer, on the other hand, is contented. If he has to 
work hard, he reaps the benefit of his toil. There are no vexed 
socialistic questions to trouble him. He is a peaceful, law-abid- 
ing citizen ; patriotic in time of war because he has his home to 
defend. 

Yet the farmer's condition was not always such a happy 4 one. 
The present farmer is an evolution of modern progress and civ- 
ilization. Formerly he was little better than the serf of the 
landed prince or baron. But by degrees he began to acquire 
possession of the land, and interested legislature, seeing that in- 
stead of a menace he was a bulwark to the state, began to con- 
firm him in his holdings, until now we find the farmer the most 
potential factor in every nation. 

There has been considerable talk, and perhaps some little 
action, with regard to reviving the industries in Ireland. There 
is only one way to successfully renew Irish industries, and that 
is to let the people own the land. Just so soon as it shall be- 
come possible to divide up the land and we have the Irish far- 
mer in the true sense of the term, in place of the Irish tenant, 
the Irish industries will be born again. They cannot be nursed 
or developed by any forced patronage. The farmer will develop 
them, and they will have a natural life and growth in direct 
atio to the farmer's prosperity. We do not mean by this that 
he farmer will make all the demand for the home industries, 
he Irish industries must compete with other markets, and this 
they could do with the opportunity in many branches. But the 
opportunity will never come until Ireland can sell in open market. 
And she cannot sell in open market until she can export her 
goods. But ships will not go to her ports to carry away her 
goods unless they can enter with a cargo. Our railroads pene- 
trating into the remote interior have developed this country. 
But the railroads would never have been built to carry the pro- 
ducts of our West to the seaboard if they had to return with 



426 A PLEA FOR THE WAGE-EARNER. [Dec., 

empty cars. It is the farmer who has developed the West, and 
the great industries that have sprung into existence all over the 
West, and which made such an astonishing exhibit at the Chi- 
cago Fair, have followed the farmer, and are in direct ratio to 
his prosperity. In like manner it must be in Ireland. The Irish 
farmer must first exist, and put into circulation in his own coun- 
try the earnings of his labor, instead of sending them to land- 
lords across the channel, before the dawn of her industries shall 
begin in Ireland. 

But what is the solution for the wage-earner's difficulties? 

Place the wage-earner on the same footing as the farmer, 
and his difficulties will disappear. Make him a proprietor like 
the farmer. It is true that he cannot become a proprietor in 
exactly the same sense as the farmer, but he can become a 
profit-sharer. Make it possible for him to become a share- 
holder in the industry in which he is engaged. He is intelli- 
gent now ; he will become responsible then. The troubles with 
regard to wages, hours of labor, and strikes will disappear. 

Let the operatives in our large mills, for instance, have the 
opportunity to become, to a certain extent, part of the corpora- 
tion. In the first place, they would become stable employees, 
and consequently better citizens. They would be interested in 
the profits of their mill, and therefore in the quality of the 
product, and they would become better workmen. The ques- 
tion of wages would resolve itself into the question of cost of 
production in order to make a reasonable profit. The profits 
would not have to be so great, and the wages could be pro- 
portionately larger. The hours of work would be settled by 
the demands of trade and the capacity of the mill ; not by the 
capacity of the human machine for endurance. 

The same would hold good for all other large industries. 
If the wage-earners participated in the proprietorship they would 
become more industrious, more interested in their work. They 
would enjoy a sense of security in their employment, and 
would be stimulated to possess their own homes and settle 
down permanently in the locality. Thus they would learn les- 
sons of economy, and a noble ambition would replace their 
feeling of uncertainty and discontent. They would make better 
citizens and take a deeper interest in the welfare, improvement, 
and prosperity of their town. 

Another advantage which would accrue from a participation 
of the wage-earners in the ownership of the industries would be 
to exclude foreign capital. The syndication of our industries 



1893-] A P^EA FOR THE WAGE-EARNER. 427 

by foreign capital, which has been going on the past few years, 
if it be not checked, will eventually prove a serious detriment 
to our financial prosperity, if not a national menace. No na- 
tion can afford to be owned by those who have no interest in, 
not to say sympathy with, her government and institutions. 
The wonderful growth of our industries, and the enormous 
profits reaped from them, has attracted the attention of foreign 
capitalists who could obtain only a small rate of interest from 
their home investments. The greatly increased earnings which 
their money would bring them in this country has made it a 
good business investment for them to offer such large prices 
for our industrial plants, that the offer has generally been too 
tempting for American owners to refuse. As a consequence, 
not only are English syndicates buying up our industries one 
after another, but they are even getting possession of the land 
in the large Western farms and ranches. With this state of 
things ever on the increase, what should we expect for the 
future of the country ? The farmers would gradually descend 
to the present level of the wage-earners, except that instead of 
laboring for those who were identified with the interests of 
the country, the greater part of the toilers of the nation would 
be little better than bondsmen of foreigners, who cared noth- 
ing for their prosperity or welfare, who would have no interest 
in them except to get out of them the greatest amount of 
labor for the least amount of compensation. And so long as 
money could have any influence in legislation we could look 
for only those laws which would aggrandize our fortign owners. 
This may appear like an exaggerated picture, and we have too 
great a confidence in the stability of our institutions to believe 
that such a state of things will ever happen. But the changes 
that take place in the destinies of a nation are generally 
wrought by small and slow beginnings. And this capitalization 
of American industries, if it be not diverted, may lead even- 
tually to serious distress among the working-classes, if not to 
grave political divisions and complications. 

The resources of this country are so vast and the develop- 
ment in modern machinery so great that the question of capi- 
tal requisite for our mining, agricultural, and industrial interests 
may be a serious one. But is it necessary to go outside of our 
own country ? Is not the constantly increasing need of more 
capital an opportunity to enlist the earnings of the many wage- 
earners ? They would be content with a much smaller interest 
on their investment than would pay foreign capitalists, and 



428 A PLEA FOR THE WAGE-EARNER. [Dec., 

this would drive the latter out ; at the same time, with a de- 
creased profit, wages could be maintained at their maximum 
standard, while competition with foreign countries would be at 
an advantage. 

The objection will be advanced that the wage-earners are not 
competent to control as shareholders large industries. Those 
who plead this objection know little of the intelligence of the 
workers of skilled industries. Many of the owners and superin- 
tendents of the large mills here in New England have risen from 
the ranks. In all industrial centres (we except such cities as 
New York and Boston) the wage-earners control and direct by 
their votes the municipality and its care of the town. If they 
want certain improvements they elect the men who will inau- 
gurate them. Witness how the politicians of all parties bend 
their chief energies for the wage-earners' votes. They are con- 
sidered sufficiently intelligent to exercise their influence, so far 
as it may go, in the national administration. But one of the 
best instances in proof of their ability as safe and prudent busi- 
ness managers is the building associations, by means of which 
the wage-earners have been securing for themselves homes. 
Everywhere these associations have been conducted on safe 
lines, and everywhere they have prospered ; the few failures were 
where they were not managed by the working-people them- 
selves, but were organized as purely business speculations. It 
is a noteworthy fact, that during the panicky times through 
which we have just passed the distress and stringency were felt 
less in Phtfadelphia than any other city. The savings-banks 
were not jeopardized, and altogether there was a feeling of se- 
curity which was not seen elsewhere, and all because Philadelphia 
is a city of homes ; from the lessons of prudence and responsi- 
bility taught by these building associations. 

We do not claim that this state of things would bring about 
a millennium. It would not make every wage-earner a sober, in- 
dustrious, upright man. But it would be a factor towards that 
end. It would tend to develop the better qualities in the in- 
dustrious workman. It would put an ambition before him in 
life, it would lessen the temptation to spend his earnings in 
drink, and help to elevate him morally and intellectually. 

Already we see this same idea developing in a small way 
among the large business firms. The proprietors have found it 
to the advantage of their business to interest those in charge 
of different departments, and these have been taken into the firm 
as stockholders. Everywhere, instead of "Smith and Jones," 



1893-] A PLEA FOR THE WAGE-EARNER. 429 

we see now "The Smith and Jones Company." Let our large 
industrial corporations take up with this same idea and extend 
the privilege, not merely to the heads of departments but to 
the wage-earners themselves, on some such principle as the 
building associations, by which the investor gradually becomes 
possessed of a certain amount of stock, and we shall have no 
more danger from the intrusion of foreign capital, and no lack 
of funds with which to enlarge our present plants and build 
new ones. 

This does not reach the question of the laboring classes it 
is true. And there will always be those who do not want to 
work, and whose only ambition in life is to foment trouble. 
But with the farmers and wage-earners well provided for and 
contented, the most intelligent classes of the masses, the steady- 
ing power, the balance-wheel of the nation, will be safe. The 
more you increase the responsible citizen, the more you strength- 
en the state. 

This is the age of the masses. In every nation this fact is 
becoming more emphatic each year. The masses are demanding 
the control of affairs. Wherever it is not granted them a revo- 
lution is the result. They have numbers, they have strength. 
All they need is more systematic and regular organization, and 
intelligent guidance. More and more they are feeling their 
power. They do not always know just what they want ; or we 
should rather say, that they know what they want, but do not 
always know how to obtain it. But they are gradually learn- 
ing. They must necessarily make many mistakes, and they will 
constantly be led into excess by unprincipled leaders. But, as 
they find them out, these leaders will go by the board, and 
conservative and sound principles will guide their actions. The 
revolution which is going on in all the nations for the rule and 
control by the masses will be gradual and fraught with many 
)litical vicissitudes where their will is opposed. The murmur 
is heard throughout Europe ; it is constantly overturning the 
governments in South America. In the end there need be no 
fear that the principles of anarchy will prevail. In every great 
movement there are always extremists, and the anarchists are the 
extremists. The masses do not want anarchy; the principles 
of the anarchists are not held by the masses anywhere. There 
are always some who do not want to work for a living, who 
want to destroy. 

We may give all due acknowledgment to the condition of 
the wage-earner now, in comparison to his condition in former 



430 



A PLEA FOR THE WAGE-EARNER. 



[Dec., 



times ; yet that does not alter the fact that he is a mere tool 
for the capitalist, no better than the machinery which is con- 
stantly displacing him in his work. We are suffering from that 
unjust development of legalized privileges known as the corpora- 
tion. The capitalist will not easily give up his hold on the in- 
dustries. But it will be well for him to look to the future, and 
take the initiative in that, which sad experience may wrest from 
him in the end. The wage-earner is becoming a thinking power. 
The masses are content to labor, but they are no longer will- 
ing to be slaves. They are demanding more and more a voice 
in their own government, and a share in the fruits of their 
labor. 

The idea of profit-sharing has already had its birth and is 
destined to grow. It has an organization and a quarterly or- 
gan, and it will, probably in a very few years, form an impor- 
tant element in our political parties. 

Make the masses responsible, or they will destroy. Let them 
own, let them have a personal interest in their nation and coun- 
try, and they will not want to destroy ; they will build up and 
protect. 

Providence, R. I. 





1893-] THE GOTHENBURG SYSTEM. 431 



THE GOTHENBURG SYSTEM OF REGULATING THE 
LIQUOR-TRAFFIC.* 

HAT the United States Commissioner of Labor 
should be responsible for the publication of a 
report on the Gothenburg System of Liquor- 
Traffic may, at first sight, seem incongruous. 
The law under which his office is constituted 
provided that he should acquire and diffuse amtmg the people 
information relating to the means of promoting their material, 
social, intellectual, and moral prosperity. It argues well for 
Colonel Carroll D. Wright's insight that among those questions 
he regards the regulation of the liquor-traffic as of an impor- 
tance at least equal to that of any other. Hence we have this 
volume of two hundred and fifty-three pages devoted to what 
is commonly called the " Gothenburg System " and published 
under the auspices of the department of which he is the head. 
Its author is Dr. E. R. L. Gould, a statistical expert of the de- 
partment, who collected the materials on the spot. Although 
a great deal of attention has been paid to this system in Great 
Britain, on account of several attempts to introduce it in a more 
or less modified form in that country, the report of Dr. Gould 
forms the fullest and most accurate account of the system which 
has yet been published. We propose to call our readers' atten- 
tion to some of the characteristics of this method, and to the 
most important and crucial point the results of its working ; 
for in the matter of temperance legislation success in diminishing 
Irunkenness is the criterion of excellence. 

Prior to the introduction of the system in Norway and Swe- 
len there was practically free-trade in spirituous liquors, private 
>ersons being allowed to distill the common drink of the coun- 
try, called brauvin, and to sell it almost at their pleasure, there 
jing scarcely any restriction and but a trifling excise-tax. In 
ict, the liberty to produce and to consume spirituous liquors 
id come to be regarded as one of the natural rights of man ; 
le brandy of the country was considered absolutely necessary 
for domestic use. While it is true that the drunkenness which 
naturally resulted from this state of law, or no law, was treated 

* Fifth Special Report of the Commissioner of Labor. The Gothenburg System of Liquor- 
Traffic. Prepared under the direction of Carroll D. Wright, Commissioner of Labor, by E. R. 
L. Gould, Ph.D. Washington : Government Printing-Office, 1893. 



432 THE GOTHENBURG SYSTEM. [Dec., 

as a crime, and strict regulations were made against it, the re- 
sults which followed upon free-trade were disastrous. Dr. Sig- 
frid Wieselgren, to whose exertions the adoption of the new 
system is largely due, thus describes the practical consequences 
of "liberty": 

" The very marrow of the nation was sapped ; moral and 
physical degradation, insanity, poverty, and crime, family ties 
broken up, brutal habits all those grim legions that ever range 
themselves under the banner of intemperance took possession 
of the land. It was bleeding at every pore, yet seemed unwill- 
ing to be healed. The legislators complained of the vast in- 
crease of crime caused by drunkenness; the king charged the 
public functionaries to exert their utmost influence to check the 
evil ; patriots joined together in temperance societies ; the diet 
made creditable efforts in the same direction." 

Nothing less, as is clear from what we have just quoted, 
than a complete change in national habits was required in or- 
der to reform evils so wide-spread. And yet a vast improve- 
ment has taken place, and the way in which it has been accom- 
plished is full of instruction for those living in other countries 
who are at times tempted to despair, although the state of things 
is not so hopeless. The first step in the direction of improve- 
ment was due to the efforts of ministers of religion and the for- 
mation of a Total-Abstinence Society. And as illustrating the 
extent to which drinking habits prevailed, it must be mentioned 
that total abstinence did not mean abstinence from wine or 
beer, only from spirituous liquors wine and beer being then 
and at the present time, we believe, looked upon as temperance 
drinks. For twenty years the advocates of total abstinence 
worked on under great discouragement, and with but little pros- 
pect of success. Things, in fact, grew worse and worse, but 
when they became unbearable the temperance advocates met 
with their reward. In 1855 a law was passed which was so suc- 
cessful in its effects upon the rural districts as to cast doubt 
upon the frequently-made assertion that people cannot be made 
temperate by legislation. "In 1855," Dr. Wieselgren says, "bran- 
dy could be bought in almost every cottage ; in 1856 one might 
travel through whole provinces without finding a single place 
where it was sold. . . . There was but one opinion about 
the immense benefit which the rural population derived from the 
new act." This benefit, however, was not shared in by the towns. 

The right given by the law of 1855 to every community to 
forbid within its limits all traffic in liquor in quantities under 



1893-] THE GOTHENBURG SYSTEM. 433 

forty-one and one-half quarts did not extend to them. In fact, 
their position became worse, for in proportion as the traffic was 
shut out from the country it was naturally concentrated there. 
Although 88 per cent, of the population belonged to the coun- 
try, and only 12 per cent, to the towns, of 11,846 persons sentenced 
for drunkenness in the year 1856, 10,507 belonged to the towns 
and only 1,339 to the country. It was soon made clear by ex- 
perience that so far as the towns were concerned the new laws 
did not fulfil their desired object. 

The Gothenburg system was adopted in order to supply the 
defects of the legislation which had been the outcome of the 
previous total-abstinence movement, and to do all that was pos- 
sible for the inhabitants of that town. It started with recog- 
nizing the fact that it was idle to attempt entirely to suppress 
the manufacture and the sale even of spirituous liquors. Nor 
did its authors try to obtain additional legislation ; they made 
use of the law as it existed, and by availing themselves of its 
powers they carried into effect a plan which has spread in a 
more or less modified form from town to town, not only in Swe- 
den but also in Norway and Finland. In 1864 the municipal 
council of Gothenburg appointed a committee to inquire into 
the condition of the pauperism of the town. This committee 
consisted of persons who were most deeply interested in the 
question and best qualified to find the means of amelioration. 
It found that the greater part of the misery and ruin then ex- 
isting was due to the consumption of brandy, and declared that 
if the community really wished to find an efficacious remedy it 
must exert its utmost energy to overthrow the enemy which 
had brought poverty, destitution, and crime into their midst, 
'he committee accordingly proposed that the authorities, making 
ise of the right accorded to them by the existent law, should 
hand over the licenses hitherto disposed of at auction to a 
:ompany consisting of persons who would engage in the under- 
iking, not for the sake of profit, but solely for the good of the 
working-classes; the shareholders were not to derive the slight- 
est profit from the concern beyond the ordinary rate of interest 
on capital invested, and all the profits accruing therefrom should 
be devoted to the welfare of the working classes or paid over 
to the town treasurer ; that the premises hired by the company 
were to be clean, light, and roomy, and at the same time to 
serve as eating-houses for the working-classes ; the food depart- 
ment and sale of beer, ale, and coffee, with the profits arising 
from them, were to be put into the hands of a manager, who 
VOL. LVIII. 29 



434 THE GOTHENBURG SYSTEM. [Dec., 

would have to account for the sale of all spirituous liquors ; and 
lastly, that no such liquors were to be sold on credit or pawn-ticket. 

Such is, in outline, the Gothenburg System. As will be seen, 
it is a scheme for regulating the sale of brandy, and does not 
interfere with the sale of wine or beer. The sale of these is regu- 
lated by ordinary legislation, an account of that for Norway 
being given in this report. The committee of which we have 
spoken were not satisfied with merely making suggestions and 
forming a plan ; they made arrangements for putting it into ex- 
ecution. Through their efforts the company was formed ; its 
offer to assume all the public-house licenses was accepted by the 
authorities, and on October i, 1865, operations were begun. Its 
starting point and basis were found in the existing law the 
law of 1855. This law provided that licenses should, as a rule, 
be sold by auction, but a clause empowered the authorities to 
grant all the licenses which would otherwise have been thus 
sold to any company which might be formed for the purpose 
of acquiring them. 

The characteristic feature of the Gothenburg plan is that 
the company did not aim at making more than the ordinary 
interest on the capital invested. The surplus had to be handed 
over to the town. Inasmuch also as it had a monopoly, there 
could be no competition, and no temptation to put down prices. 
Neither was it a matter of importance to multiply licenses, or 
even to use all the licenses granted by the authorities the 
moderate gain aimed at being secure in either case. No doubt, 
however, the success attained is in large measure due to the 
character of the projectors and controllers of the system ; these 
being men who really had at heart the advantage of the com- 
munity. Had it fallen, or should it fall, into the hands of those 
in whom greed of gain is dominant, no doubt a way would be 
found to multiply the desired good. The success it has met 
with hitherto proves that this has not yet happened. However, 
in Norway it has generally been thought better to apply the 
profits, which in Gothenburg are given to the town for the 
diminution of the rates, to other purposes, such as asylums, 
museums, homes. In Bergen, for example, no less than seventy- 
eight different institutions have had a share in these profits. 
This was done because it was feared that the desire to dimin- 
ish the rates might be a strong temptation to the company to 
promote the sale of its goods. 

The plan has been adopted in seventy-seven out of the 
ninety towns of Sweden, and in almost all the towns of Nor- 



1893-] T HE GOTHENBURG SYSTEM. 435 

way, although it has encountered opposition of the most des- 
perate nature. The interests of the distillers were seriously 
threatened, and they made the strongest efforts to repeal the 
law of 1855, which forms the basis of the system. Not succeed- 
ing in this, they tried to enlist the working-men on their side 
under the pretext of supplying cheap food. In the report is 
found a record of the long and the ultimately successful battle 
which it has been necessary to fight a record which will afford 
encouragement and instruction to the opponents of the liquor- 
traffic in other countries. For this and for precise and technical 
details of the plan we must refer our readers to the report itself. 
We will conclude by briefly indicating some of the results to 
the country at large, so far as they can be ascertained, of the 
working of the plan. First as to the diminution of the number of 
licenses. In the ten years 1881-90 bar-trade licenses declined abso- 
lutely about thirty per cent, in Sweden, while the total number 
of retail privileges was brought down from 83 to 39. The num- 
ber of inhabitants in proportion to both kinds of licenses ad- 
vanced thirty-five per cent. The average annual consumption 
of spirituous liquors has fallen from 10.3 quarts per individual 
in 1856 to 7.42 in 1890, although it must be stated that this 
decline has not been regular and continuous, the amount having 
reached 12.47 quarts in 1875. In Norway, however, there has 
been a fairly regular decline from 7.00 quarts per individual in 
1876 to 3.3 quarts in 1890. Passing from drinking to its effects, 
drunkenness, we find that in 1855, during nine months of which 
year the trade in drink was free, 138 persons in every thousand 
were convicted of drunkenness, and only 44 in 1891. This diminu- 
tion must, however, be credited to the law of 1855 rather than 
to the Gothenburg system, for no decline appears to have taken 
ace since its adoption. In Stockholm, however, the number 
f convictions has been reduced from 49 to 33 per 1,000 inhabi- 
tants. For other details as to crime, pauperism, and deposits in 
savings-banks, as well as for a discussion as to certain places 
where there has been an increase in drunkenness, we must re- 
fer our readers to the report, students of which will, we be- 
lieve, come to the conclusion that the Gothenburg System has 
contributed largely to the raising of the Scandinavian countries 
from the abyss of crime and degradation to which free-trade in 
spirituous liquors had brought them. On the whole, the report 
affords great encouragement to the advocates of temperance, 
for it shows what great good may be done by their efforts even 
in the most adverse circumstances. 




LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY has taken down from 
" some friendly door where weary travellers love 
i to call" A Roadside Harp* some notes of which 
'have been heard before and are remembered pleas- 
antly. She sweeps the golden chords with cunning 
'fingers, and her music has certainly the claim of individuality. 
She is no conventionalist, and cares little for treading the an- 
cient ways, choosing rather to lay down roads or by-paths for 
herself in virgin territory. There is about her work a flavor of 
Browning mystery at times, when the gem of thought must be 
sought for with pickax -and lantern; but it is certain to be 
found in the end, clear and polished beyond cavil. 

To minds which delight in treading intellectual labyrinths 
without a clew to guide them but their own mother-wit this 
class of poetry, rich in idea, is no doubt grateful ; and very often 
the more recondite the meaning the keener the zest with which 
it is sought. The non-cryptic order of song verse that can be 
read " at sight " is the chant which will catch most ears just 
now, though whether or not it is that which will live the long- 
est is a proper subject for learned speculation. As we grow 
in refinement we may advance in subtility of thought and ex- 
pression, and the judgment of the future may say, lo ! this is 
perfection. Such a process has taken place more than once 
before, and though the critics of the succeeding age have 
dubbed it decadence, who shall decide what Olympians in the 
olden time were unable to settle ? 

There are two conspicuous positive qualities about Miss 
Guiney's poetry, apart from her occasional obscurity those, 
namely, of variety in thought and freedom from mannerism and 
affectation. The iris of her song is many-hued. Now her theme 
is solemn to the sublimest flights of thought ; anon she sings 
of the lowliest flower of earth as tenderly as Burns did of his 

* -A Roadside Harp. By Louise Imogen Guiney. New York and Boston : Houghton, 
Mifflin & Co. 



1 893.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 437 

modest daisy. In the poem entitled " Vergniaud in the Turn- 
bril " we find strains of patriotic feeling more elevated, though 
less theatrical, than in Byron's " Two Foscari." Again, in " Sher- 
man : an Horatian Ode " we have an example of the produc- 
tion of the most impressive effect from the use of the simplest 
diction and the unplastic staccato in verse. A dozen of sonnets 
on "London" give some graphic pencillings, as full of color as 
Turner's pictures, of the great city and its impressions. 

We fain would cull examples from this choice bouquet of 
song, but that an arbitrary circumscription forbids the tempta- 
tion. This morceau, however, from its seasonableness, cannot be 
denied : 

TRYSTE NOEL. 

" The Ox he openeth wide the Doore 
And from the Snowe he calls her inne, 
And he hath seen her Smile therefore, 
Our Ladye without Sinne. 
NO.V soone from Sleepe 
A Starre shall leap, 

And soone arrive both King and Hinde ; 
Amen, Amen: 
But O, the place co'd I but finde! 

" The Ox hath husht his voyce and bent 
Trewe eyes of Pitty ore the Mow, 
And on his lovelie Neck, forspent, 
The Blessed lays her Browe. 
Around her feet 
Full Warme and Sweete 
His bowerie Breath doth meeklie dwell ; 
Amen, Amen : 
But sore am I with Vaine Travel ! 

" The Ox is host in Juda's stall, 
And host of more than onelie one, 
For close she gathereth withal 
Our Lorde her littel Sonne. 
Glad Hinde and King 
Their Gyfte may bring 
But wo'd to-night my Teares were there, 
Amen, Amen : 
Between her Bosom and His hayre !" 



438 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Dec., 

Miss Guiney dedicates her book to two young poetical 
friends, Dora and Hester Sigerson, daughters of Dr. George 
Sigerson, of Dublin, in whom the poetical and literary faculty 
ought to be hereditary. 

A more fascinating book for boys than the Claude Light foot * 
of Father Finn we have rarely, if ever, had the pleasure of 
reading. We do not mean to compare it with such treasures of 
the time when we were juvenile and curly as the immortal Rob- 
inson Crusoe, or that prodigy of mendacity, he of Munchausen, 
or the romances that delighted the soul of Scheherezade. Com- 
parisons in such cases are of no value. But for a real bright, live 
book of the present day, redolent of youthful life and gaiety, 
faithful as the reflection of a mirror to the originals of modern 
boy life as beheld in many of our Catholic institutions, we have 
not as yet seen any one which approaches this fine work of 
Father Finn's. The second title of the book is How the Pro- 
blem was Solved. Well, in this tale the author has solved a pro- 
blem which has often vexed the minds of other writers the 
problem how to make a religious book as interesting to the 
average literary cormorant, boy or girl, as pirate or high- 
wayman, or love-smitten imitator of Romeo. The humor in the 
story abounds, too, from cover to cover delicate, refined hu- 
mor, such as leaves no soreness in the mind, or sharpens the 
edge of one's cynicism. The climax is, it must be confessed, 
somewhat daring, but yet not impossible. To teachers, no less 
than pupils, this work must be of great interest, as a study of 
youthful characters, and the way of dealing successfully with 
unusual ones for Father Finn is evidently a close obser- 
ver of youthful idiosyncrasies. There must be many boys like 
Claude Lightfoot, whose mission on earth must seem to most 
teachers merely to be to torment the soul and test the patience 
of the unhappy pedagogue, and yet who if only taken in hand 
by one who really understands human nature, may turn out to 
be the rarest jewels in humanity. Claude is a delightful crea- 
tion. He is a merry little cricket, so full of animal vitality 
that he cannot sit still for two consecutive seconds, and this 
quicksilver quality of his is the means of getting him into many 
a scrape, from each of which he emerges in a more or less de- 
moralized manner physically and sartorially, but with highly 
creditable results ethically and morally. We are sure he will 
be an immense favorite everywhere, once he is known. 

* Claude Lightfoot ; or, How the Problem was Solved. By Francis J. Finn, S.J. New 
York, Cincinnati, and Chicago : Benziger Brothers. 



1893-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 439 

The cause of truth in history is bound to be a gainer by 
the publication of a new edition of one of the most valuable 
works of the distinguished Irishman, the late Thomas Davis. 
This is a history of "the Irish Parliament of James II.,"* an 
assembly about whose transactions the cloak of mystery has 
been wrapped by English historians and Irish ones of un-Irish 
proclivities. One of the first acts of that model of civil and re- 
ligious liberty, William III., when he got a firm hold of his 
father-in-law's seat, was to cause the records of the Parliament 
over which he presided in Dublin to be destroyed. Having 
thus burked the evidence for the defence, the next step was 
to blacken the character of the defendants, and this has been 
done most unsparingly by the Williamite historians ever since 
the days of the Dutch avatar. 

Thomas Davis was a Protestant, and his father was a Welsh 
gentleman who held a commission in the English army. Hence, 
although young Davis was born at Mallow, in the south of Ire- 
land, he can hardly be described as an Irishman. Yet he was 
intensely Irish in his sympathies passionately anti-Saxon. In 
this respect he was almost a phenomenon. His name in Ire- 
land has been, is, and will be the synonyme of purity in the 
too often selfish field of patriotism. As a poet and prose-writer 
Davis occupies an exceptionally high rank. This work of his 
on the Parliament of James II., if not the most brilliant, is per- 
haps one of the most useful of his literary achievements. 

It was not easy to get the materials for it, owing to the de- 
struction of the parliamentary records, but Thomas Davis's posi- 
tion, as a student of Trinity College in Dublin, gave him ac- 
cess to the materials for his work. He has left a record of the 
proceedings, following an introduction of his own, the value of 
which is freely attested by Mr. Lecky. 

A popular reproduction of this work of Davis's has now 
>een given to the world, thanks to the patriotic efforts of a new 
literary association whose object is the publication and popu- 
larization of Irish prose and poetry. At the head of this asso- 
:iation stands Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, and the work under 
lotice has another introduction, written by him, but mainly 
lade up from a previous work of his own, A BircTs-Eye View 
of Irish History. Whether the super-imposition of this retro- 
spect on Davis's work was relevant or in good taste, is a ques- 
tion very much open to debate. There is no use in any one, 

* The Patriot Parliament of 1689. By Thomas Davis. London : T. Fisher Unwin. 
New York : P. J. Kenedy. 



440 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Dec., 

even Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, attempting to bracket Thomas 
Davis and Charles Gavan Duffy together, for Davis was a sort 
of secular saint in the '48 movement, while Duffy only proved 
himself a very able writer about it. 

This much-abused parliament of King James's was the first 
one in Ireland which was anything like what a real parliament 
should be. It was presided over by the king, and it was duly 
summoned from the two estates of the realm. It was non-sec- 
tarian. The fact that the greater bulk of its members, Lords 
and Commons, were of the Catholic faith takes nothing from 
the impartiality which characterized its convening. Many of the 
Protestant lords who should have been there were absent in 
England helping on the rebellion against their lawful king, and 
many of the commons who could have been there held aloof 
for the reason that they were waiting for the opportunity to re- 
bel in Ireland. 

King James is held up to odium as a bigot, a despot, and a 
would-be foister of " brass money and wooden shoes " upon a 
people of unstained integrity and irreproachable fairness in mat- 
ters of creed. Those who after his defeat proceeded to prove 
both, by the wholesale confiscation of their neighbors' estates 
and the enactment of the most ferocious penal laws against their 
religion that the malign ingenuity of man could devise, do not 
want to know what James's Parliament really did ; but the out- 
side freedom-loving world may. It passed thirty-five acts, and 
at the very forefront of these is one making perfect freedom 
of conscience and worship the law of the land, and to carry 
this out it was ordained that the Protestant clergy were to be 
supported by Protestant tithes and the Catholic by Catholic 
tithes. Another act declared the charter of Irish freedom for 
which Grattan and his fellow-patriots had to struggle for so many 
years, a century later, to wrest from the defenders of " civil and 
religious liberty," and only wrested from their fears and not from 
their sense of equity. Another of these statutes provided for 
the putting of the coinage of the country on the basis of stan- 
dard value. So much for the popular bogies about unfortunate 
James and his rule. 

A more serious question is discussed by Davis the dealing 
of this Parliament with that atrocious instrument of his brother 
Charles known as the Act of Settlement, by means of which 
those who had helped to send his father to the scaffold were 
confirmed in their plunder of the unhappy Irish gentlemen who 
had laid down their lives and their fortunes for that father's 



1893-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 441 

defence. We would strongly commend to Messrs. Higginson 
and Channing a perusal of Thomas Davis's work on this sub- 
ject before they write any more English history for American 
readers. When Mr. Lecky acknowledges his indebtedness to 
this work for a great deal of his illumination on this stormy 
period, as he does very handsomely, they need hardly be diffident 
if they be earnest in the search for truth. 

M. Paul Du Chaillu, who has lately been dining with the 
Fiji Islanders in the Midway Plaisance, seems to wish to give 
a taste of the indigestion which he, perhaps, experienced as the 
result thereof to the believers in what some now regard as the 
Anglo-Saxon Myth. Hengist and Horsa now take rank with 
Homer and Prester John and Napoleon Bonaparte as dubious 
entities, and it is M. Du Chaillu's purpose in his new work, 
Ivar the Viking* to show that the hardy Norseman is the true 
progenitor of the modern John Bull. It is due to the distin- 
guished traveller to say that^ he has thrown himself into the 
task of demolishing the antique superstition with characteristic 
earnestness. He gives us a picture of viking life full of detail 
and bearing every evidence of painstaking research. In doing 
this he goes beyond the belief of earlier archaeologists in cloth- 
ing his heroes and heroines in gorgeous vestments of silk and 
other refinements of early civilization. Mr. Charles Kean, the 
actor, who was an eminent authority upon these matters, says, in 
the introduction to some of his Shaksperean plays, that silk and 
velvet were unknown in Northern Europe at the period taken 
by Shakspere for " Macbeth" and " Hamlet." It may also be 
noted that his picture of ancient Scandinavian life is calculated 
to give the reader a much higher opinion of the pagan civiliza- 
tion of Scandinavia than the contemporary records of the peo- 
ples who suffered from the ravages of the vikings usually con- 
ey. To the unfortunate inhabitants of the Scottish, the Eng- 

, and the Irish coasts they never appeared in any other light 
han as a race of unmitigated savages, cruel, barbarous, and in- 
imical to progress beyond any other scourges which ever made 
piracy and brigandage their usual means of livelihood. They 
positively revelled in the destruction of the monuments of Chris- 
tian civilization and learning, whether pagan or Christian. Their 
inroads were the means of retarding civilization by many cen- 
turies in those countries which they made their hunting-grounds. 
There is no doubt that they formed a large component part of 
the successive waves of conquest which swept over England, but 

* Ivar the Viking. By M. Paul Du Chaillu. New York : Charles Scribner's Sons. 



tha: 



442 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Dec., 

whether that proportion was smaller or larger than is generally 
believed is now a question which hardly interests the modern 
world to the extent that M. Du Chaillu would seem to estimate. 
Still it is only fair to the travelled and erudite author to say 
that he has produced a work of much value, both from a 
literary and antiquarian point of view, and has thrown a flood 
of light, as the result of his patient researches, upon the 
mode of life, the religious practices, and the social conditions 
of the early inhabitants of Ultima Thule. 

Those who love the realistic in literature could hardly have 
a better instance of its felicitous use than that afforded in the 
unpretending little volume entitled The Flight into Egypt* by 
Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich. This gifted lady acquired 
such a reputation for sanctity during her lifetime that the process 
of canonization in her behalf has been set on foot. Her literary 
work is hardly less worthy of the laurel wreath. The pictures 
of the trials of the Holy Family during the painful ordeal which 
she depicts are marvellously impressive. To a faultless purity 
of diction, and profoundly womanly sympathy with the human 
and spiritual aspects of her theme, she has joined a painstaking 
study of localities and the mode of life in the East at the time 
treated of which makes it read as though it were the chronicle 
of an absolute eye-witness. Her volume, small as it is, is enough 
to stir the reader, no matter how indifferent or case-hardened, 
with an irresistible pity, the ordinary Christian with a still more 
intense devotion and love of the three already so dear to their 
hearts Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. 

It is pleasant to behold the self-complacency of age in its 
introspection over a well-spent life. In the case of those so 
fortunately circumstanced it appears a providential arrangement 
that the limitation of their years is kept out of view by the de- 
mands of a still-active career, the deference of friends, and the 
devotion of their immediate circle. The Rev. Dr. Deems, the 
respected pastor of the Church of the Strangers, appears to be 
singularly favored in this respect. He has passed the supposi- 
titious limit of man's earthly existence, and this fact has im- 
pelled him to put his sentiments over his survival into print, in 
the pages of a handsome volume which he calls My Septuagint.\ 
It seems to have been a presentiment with Dr. Deems that he 

* The Flight into Egypt. From the Meditations of Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich. 
Translated from the French by George Richardson. New York : Benziger Bros.; London : 
Burns & Gates. 

t My Septuagint. By Rev. Charles F. Deems, D.D. New York : Cassell Publishing 
Company. 



1893-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 445 

was not destined to outlive that span, and his pleasure on find- 
ing that he is still good for something is manifest. He gossips 
very pleasantly over it, and he writes of many things besides 
theology, evolution, the higher criticism, etymology, Christian 
communism, and other matters. We may not agree with his 
letter on some of those topics, but we cannot help agreeing 
with their spirit. It is evidently that of a good man, seeking 
to do and say the best thing he can according to his light. 
The literary style of these essays, malgrt their occasional par- 
donable egotism, is exceedingly pleasing. 

A new literary venture, entitled the Hour-Glass Series* has 
been begun, in the hope of winning for American authors some 
of that patronage which it is the fashion now to lavish upon 
European literary men whose chief object seems to be to exalt 
public men of the Old World at the expense of those of the New. 
The series begins with some excellent short studies of Ameri- 
can statesmen, Fisher Ames, Henry Clay, and others, by Daniel 
B. Lucas, LL.D., and J. Fairfax McLaughlin, L-L.D. The 
character of the literary work in these short studies is admira- 
ble, and their historical value high. Political questions are dis- 
cussed in them in an impartial spirit, and none can fail to rec- 
ognize the high plane upon which the authors place the quali- 
ties of morality and personal honor as essentials in public men. 
They form a very valuable addition to our stock of historical 
literature, and we trust that the authors shall meet with such 
success as may encourage them to persevere in their praise- 
worthy task. 

The Birthday Book of the Madonna f is a compilation of 
appropriate passages from the works of the fathers and the 
poets who have made the Blessed Mother an especial theme of 
>raise. The selection displays taste and judgment ; and the fact 
:hat the proof-sheets were revised by Rev. Matthew Russell r 
>.J., the editor of the Irish Monthly, gives them a literary 
ill-mark which cannot be questioned. 

An exceedingly tasteful gift-book has been produced by 
Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. It is a selection of Long- 
fellow's poems of the home ; ^ and each of these is illustrated 

* Hour-Glass Series : Fisher Ames, Henry Clay, etc. By Daniel B. Lucas, LL.D., and 
Fairfax McLaughlin, LL.D. New York : Charles Webster & Co. 

t The Birthday Book of the Madonna. By Vincent O'Brien. New York : Benziger 
Bros. ; Dublin : Gill & Son. 

\ The Hanging of the Crane, and other Poems of the Home. By Henry Wadsworth 
>ngfellow. Boston and New York : Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 



444 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Dec., 

with a choice steel engraving. The volume is daintily bound 
in cream-colored linen with gold embellishments. 

The dialogue form of argumentation is very effectively util- 
ized in a discourse against secret societies * by the Rev. J. W. 
Book, R.D. The secret society is the deadliest enemy to 
religion and social order, and just now the world is get- 
ting an object-lesson in its evils by the revival of the Know- 
nothing spirit in many parts of the United States. The Catho- 
lic who gives countenance, under such circumstances, to the 
principle of secret association is either a weakling or a traitor 
to his faith. It is desirable that this little volume of Father 
Book's be as widely read as possible by the Catholic communi- 
ty at large. 

A good book is always interesting; a good book which 
makes its appearance at a timely moment has a rare value. 
The appearance of such a book as the story of The Brother- 
hood of Charity^ at this especial juncture has, to our mind, a 
peculiar significance. It was out of the storm of the Revolu- 
tion in France that this notable fraternity sprang originally ; it 
was in the glare of the burning convents in Boston, in the ear- 
lier Know-nothing days, that it sprang into existence there, un- 
der the inspiration of a New England Puritan mind just con- 
verted to the Catholic faith. The story of Father Haskins's 
conversion and the founding of the House of the Angel Guar- 
dian in Roxbury, Boston, is one of the most remarkable chap- 
ters in the whole history of the Catholic Church on this con- 
tinent. It affords another instance of the wonderful power of 
the simple but sincere piety of the poor over minds of the 
highest training whose early bias has not obliterated their na- 
tive love of truth. To Father Raskins the people of Boston 
owe the introduction of the Brothers of Charity, whose unsel- 
fish labors have done so much to solve many grave social prob- 
lems in that city. The narrative of how this was accomplished 
reads more like a chapter of mediaeval romance than a sober 
page of modern history. It is well told by Mr. Thomas Dwyer, 
the work being introduced by a preface by the Rev. Father 
Nilan, D.D., of Poughkeepsie. There are some fine plates scat- 
tered through it, and the typography is an excellent example 
of the training which is given in the printing-house of the An- 
gel Guardian establishment. 

* Thousand and one Objections to Secret Societies. By Rev. J. W. Book, R.D. Pub- 
lished by the author at Canneltown, Ind. 

t Glimpses of the Brotherhood of Charity. By Thomas A. Dwyer, B.A. Boston, Mass.: 
Press of the House of the Angel Guardian. 



1893-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 445 

I. CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY.* 

" The best scholastic authors " whom Brother Louis has fol- 
lowed are, he tells us, " Goudin, Sanseverino, Liberatore, Kleut- 
gen, Frisco, Gonzalez, Taparelli, and others." The translator 
commends especially the works of Liberatore and Zigliara. 
Brother Louis' work has received the highest commendations 
in Europe. How far the translator has modified it we are un- 
able to say, not having seen the French original. The author 
aimed to compose a compendium representing in a brief and 
concise form the doctrine of those larger text-books which have 
been most approved by the highest authorities in the church, 
and are in general use. 

Our criticism is confined to the mere expression of an opin- 
ion on the success of the author, as we have his work in the 
English adaptation, in fulfilling his purpose. We abstain from 
pronouncing any critical judgment on the particular parts of 
the work, its propositions, and its arguments. As a presenta- 
tion in a compendious form of the system taught in the most 
approved large text-books it is most eminently successful, and 
superior to any other similar work in the English language. 
Used as a manual in the intermediate schools, and supplemented 
by the oral instructions and explanations of a competent professor, 
it must be a most useful work. We congratulate the Christian 
Brothers for their very necessary and also very difficult achieve- 
ment in making this excellent contribution to the study of scholas- 
tic philosophy. The mechanical execution of the book is in good 
style. 



2. WEISMANNISM.f 

This work merits an extended notice on account of the 
ability of its author, shown abundantly here as well as elsewhere. 
And yet a thorough and adequate notice of it could hardly be 
written without producing a book about equal in size to the 
volume itself. It is difficult to condense ; for it is much con- 
densed already. One cannot give the sum and substance of it 
without giving pretty much the whole thing. 

It may, however, be worth while to state as briefly as possible 
what " Weismannism " (so-called from its author, Professor Weis- 
mann) is. It is a theory of heredity, which leads to and im- 

* Elementary Course of Christian Philosophy. Based on the principles of the best Scho- 
lastic Authors. Adapted from the French of Brother Louis of Poissy, by the Brothers of 
the Christian Schools. New York : P. O'Shea. 

t An Examination of Weismannism. By George John Romanes, M.A., LL.D., F.R.S. 
Chicago : The Open Court Publishing Co. 



446 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Dec., 

plies a new theory of evolution ; speaking, that is, of evolution 
strictly, as applied to biology. According to this theory the set 
of cells in all organisms which reproduce in what may be called 
the ordinary way, and not by simple division or breaking up, 
which cells are manifestly distinct from those of the rest of the 
body, are not formed or generated in each individual from the 
other cells, but are absolutely separate, simply an inheritance 
from the parents, who have similarly received their own from 
their parents. In each body they remain unchanged in their 
character during the life of that body, receiving change only by 
the combination required for the formation of a new body. 
As Dr. Romanes well puts it, these germ-cells are, as it were, 
parasites in the body, nourished, it is true, by it, but not adapt- 
ing themselves to it ; so that changes in the body, such as the 
loss of a leg, would be a matter of indifference to them, and 
would not, therefore, affect the new body which results from 
their combination ; which indeed corresponds well with observed 
facts. Congenital peculiarities of the parent are apt to be re- 
peated in the child ; acquired ones are not. 

Evolution by natural selection, then, according to this theory, 
becomes simply evolution of the germ-plasm. Variations in it, 
however, produced prior to the period of development, in the 
course of ages, of the organism at which its manner of repro- 
duction changed, are produced subsequently simply by combi- 
nation ; advantageous variations being preserved, disadvantageous 
ones perishing. According to Weismann, the variations in the 
earlier period were produced by the pressure of external circum- 
stances, according to the theory of Lamarck ; now it is sheltered 
from such action, and only natural selection operates, at any 
rate in ordinary cases. The new method of reproduction once 
brought in has, by producing exceptionally advantageous combi- 
nations, the advantage over the old, and tends to be perpetuated 
in spite of the death of the individuals produced by it. 

So much for the theory in general. It is hardly worth while 
to state the subsequent modifications that Professor Weismann 
has given it, to meet arising difficulties, or to account for phe- 
nomena more perfectly. For the fact is, that it is too speculative 
in its character to be at present, if indeed ever, of much impor- 
tance. It is, for the credit of science, a pity that there should 
be so much of this kind of theorizing, which has to be retracted 
more or less extensively as real knowledge progresses, and which 
does not serve materially to guide or direct observations or ex- 
periments. 



1893-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 447 

Dr. Romanes, though professing great regard for Weismann, 
hacks away so lustily at his theory as to leave very little of it 
standing ; all, as he says, for the benefit of the theory ; but 
really his pruning goes almost to the roots of the tree. 



3. MESSITER'S HYMNAL.* 

The high reputation which Dr. Messiter justly enjoys as the 
efficient choir-master of Trinity Church in this city would war- 
rant our assurance that any selection of tunes he might make 
for congregational use would be marked by correct taste and 
good judgment ; and in the main the present collection does not 
disappoint us in our expectations. He has borrowed largely 
from well-known hymnals published in England, many of their 
effective tunes being already familiar to the congregations of 
Episcopalian churches in this country at least to those who 
have been able to sustain choirs possessed of more than com- 
mon musical ability. As a book to be used by all classes of 
persons, old and young, the strong and the weak-sighted, we 
think its typography, both for the notation of the music and 
for the words, is lacking in distinctness, especially when one 
considers the prevailing dimness of light in very many churches. 
The half-note employed for the unit of measure, as a rule 
throughout, and that in very light-faced type, is very trying to 
the eyes. It hardly becomes us to criticise the collection of 
words adopted. We may say that looking it over it impresses 
us with the conviction that, if it is to be taken as expressing 
the doctrinal sense of the ecclesiastical powers in the Episcopal 
Church, then the Low Church element is yet decidedly the 
dominant one. 



R4. POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY.f 
Not only has the notion once entertained of poets, that, from 
intellectual point of view, they were poor creatures, imagina- 
tive dreamers, gone by, but in this age we are accustomed to 
regard them as philosophers of considerable merit. We have 
come to expect from them not only beauty of expression and 
the intuition of hidden relations, but a master's skill in treating 
problems of life and nature. Accordingly we read meanings in 

* The Hymnal. Revised and enlarged, as adopted by the General Convention of the 
Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, with music, as used in Trinity 
Church, New York. Edited by A. H. Messiter, Mus. Doc. 

t Problems of the Nineteenth Century. Essays by Aubrey de Vere, LL.D. ^ Edited by J. 
G. Wenham. New York : Benziger Brothers. 



448 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Dec., 

and into their verses a line often serves for a precept, a poem 
is the inspiration of lives, and they are not seldom made the 
equals of the great teachers and thinkers whose names are iden- 
tified with a school or a system. Thus we witness, sometimes 
not wisely, to what is, however, a great truth, viz., that poetry 
and philosophy are twin sisters. It is, however, on occasions 
like the present, when a poet of note steps into the arena of 
controversy and reasoning ; when he lays aside the embellish- 
ments, and, let us say, the obscurities of metrical diction, when 
he attempts the conduct of serious arguments in every-day 
prose, that we can better judge the extent and solidity of his 
powers, and Mr. De Vere's contribution to truth by means of 
these essays, though small in compass, is considerable in its pow- 
er, its reasoning, and its opportuneness. Two of the five essays 
which make up this little volume deal with theism in general, 
the other three are more specially Catholic. In the former he 
shows the extent and power of the appeal which religion makes 
to a man's whole nature, to the will as well as to the intellect, and 
hence the falsity of many current subjective difficulties. Men mis- 
conceive the nature and force of religious truth because often it 
is not producible in words and arguments, their narrow view 
of its scope, their scientific predisposition to the visible, the out- 
wardly forcible and demonstrable, makes them blind or impa- 
tient or suspicious of the extent and far-reaching subtlety of 
religious arguments. In the three latter essays he shows the 
fallacy of private judgment as the rule of faith, and the con- 
sequent unsettlement of minds who fain would believe but find 
no solid support in themselves for their opinions and tenets. 
We have but indicated in a most general way the nature of 
matters treated of ; they merit careful perusal for their intrinsic 
importance as well as for the clear-cut and masterly treatment 
given them. 

5. DIURNAL POETRY.* 

The present volume forms one of what is now a very large 
class a selection of passages for every day of the year and is 
a very good specimen of that class. The author is well versed 
not only in the literature of recent times, but also in the spiri- 
tual writings of earlier days. We find passages from Bocthius, 
Richard Rolle, Fra Thome de Jesu, Blessed Henry Suso, and 

* The Day Spring from on High. Selections arranged by Emma Forbes Gary. Boston : 
and New York : Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 



1893-] NEW BOOKS. 449 

a thing specially worthy of notice from several Saxon wri- 
ters. The bulk of the work is derived from Catholic sources, 
and will not fail to suggest holy and elevating thoughts, and to 
enlighten the darkness which the daily concerns of life tend to 
create. 



NEW BOOKS. 

ROBERT CLARKE & Co., Cincinnati : 

The History of Illinois and Louisiana under French Rule. By Joseph 
Wallace, Counsellor-at-Law. 

LONGMANS, GREEN & Co., London and New York : 

The True Story Book. Edited by Andrew Lang. English History for 
American Readers. By Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Edward 
Channing. Politics in a Democracy. By Daniel Greenleaf Thompson. 
Glimpses of Eskimo Life. By Fridtjof Nausen, translated by William 
Archer. The Outdoor World, or Young Collector's Handbook. By 
W. Farneaux, F.R.G.S. Practical Essays on American Government. 
By Albert Bushnell Hart, Ph.D. Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey. By 
Henry Parry Liddon, D.D. Edited by Rev. J. O. Johnston, M.A., and 
Rev. Robert J. Wilson, M.A. Vols. I-II. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN& Co., Boston and New York: 

Thomas Harvard son of Robert, called College Tom. By Caroline Hazard. 
Rachel Stanwood. By Lucy Gibbons Morse. 

PRESS OF THE HOUSE OF THE ANGEL GUARDIAN, Boston: 

Glimpses of the Brotherhood of Charity. By Thomas A. Dwyer, B.A. 

FR. PUSTET & Co., New York and Cincinnati: 

Blessed Gerard Majella, Lay Brother. Translated from the Italian by a 
Priest of the same Congregation. Ordo Divini Officii Recitandi Missce- 
que Celebrandce, juxta rubricas emendatas Breviarii Missalisque Romani, 
cum votivis Officiis ex Indulto pro Clero Sasculari, Statuum Fcederatorum 
officiis generalibus hie concessis utente, concessus. Pro anno Domini 
MDCCCVIC (1894). 



BROTHERS, New York : 

Connor D'Arcys Struggles. By Mrs. W. M. Bertholds. Purgatory. By 
Rev. F. X. Schouppe, S.J. 

BROTHERS & KORTH, New York: 

St. Luke : Thoughts on St. Luke's Day. By a Daughter of the Church. 

iiLL & SON, Dublin: 

Smiles and Sighs. A Volume of Poems, by Michael Francis Sheehan, with 
an Introduction by Rev. Michael P. Hickey, C.C. 

PAMPHLETS. 

T he Standard of Value and Legal-Tender Money. By William Richards. 
Washington, D. C. : The Church News Publishing Company. 

r he Journal of Prison Discipline and Philanthropy. Philadelphia: 1705 Chest- 
nut Street. 



VOL. LVIII. 30 



450 EDITORIAL NOTES. [Dec., 

EDITORIAL NOTES. 



THE PROGRESS OF THE CATHOLIC WORLD. 

TT will be a source of profound gratification to the wide circle 
^ of our readers to know that the magazine whose career 
they have faithfully followed has had a well-merited success. It 
is only a little over two years since the responsibility of pro- 
ducing the magazine, apart from the editorial work, was assumed 
by the Paulist Fathers. To them the undertaking of making 
the magazine was one of no small weight and anxiety. It in- 
volved the erection and management of a printing and pub- 
lishing establishment, and much subsidiary business, requiring 
not only close attention but technical knowledge attainable 
only by expert training. 

During these two years many difficulties have been so far 
surmounted as to enable them to carry out their initial design 
with regard to the magazine. This is to make it a representa- 
tive organ of Catholic thought to keep it abreast with the times 
and, without lowering its standard, make it truly popular in the 
best sense of the word. 

After one year in its new home, at the beginning of the 
Columbian celebrations of last year, there was added the fea- 
ture of pictorial illustrations. Among religious magazines THE 
CATHOLIC WORLD was the pioneer in this movement. 

These various improvements have been so well received, and 
the popularity of the magazine has manifested itself in such an 
increased subscription list that the publishers feel that the time 
has come for another forward step. This is made in the nota- 
ble reduction of the subscription price from $4.00 to $3.00 a 
year. This reduced price will secure for it a still more extend- 
ed circulation. 

It has never been our purpose to conduct this magazine as 
an enterprise for making money. We have always looked on 
the Apostolate of the Press as a vocation too sacred to degrade 
to mere financial ends. The vast importance of making our in 



1893-] EDITORIAL NOTES. 451 

fluence felt in as wide a field as possible has been a growing 
sense with us ever since the beginning. 

The sun of a new day for the Church in this country is al- 
ready high in the heavens. The black clouds of designing con- 
spiracies lying athwart its face, obscuring no little of its light, 
have moved away. The policy of Leo is inspiring the leaders 
and moving the masses. The clarion note of Mgr. Satolli, to ad- 
vance " with the Gospel of Truth in one hand and the Constitu- 
tion of American Liberties in the other," is leading the way. 
The general mobilization of the Catholic army along the lines of 
reconciliation with national aspirations, and the bending of all 
the energies on the human side of the Church towards the 
infusing of a deeper sense of the Gospel into the masses, is 
stirring the most lethargic into an unwonted activity. 

Momentous questions, whose far-reaching consequences will 
be felt for weal or for woe in the generations to come, are pro- 
posed for a definite solution. A false science is searching every 
thread of the seamless garment to find out a flaw. The tempest 
of irreligion blows strident and strong. Above all, there is a 
deluge of pernicious literature constantly flowing. Where it is 
not deemed advisable strategy to assail directly the main forces, 
it is sought to corrupt the hangers-on by insidious approaches 
and to disaffect their devotion to their leaders. We were never 
lore in want of a sound popular literature for the family or 
higher literature for the teachers in Israel than at present. 
r e feel called upon, as far as we may, to do our share in sup- 
lying these intellectual and moral forces which will make for 
le greater good of the church and for the country. 

Keeping steadily in view the dictum of Father Hecker, that 
itween the Catholic Church and the American Spirit and as- 
piration there is no possible antagonism, THE CATHOLIC WORLD 
has never lost an opportunity of impressing on the Catholic 
body 'the truth that the good Catholic cannot but be the good 
citizen, and that there is no more effectual barrier against a false 
socialism and the other dangers threatening the civil order than 
the ever-widening influence of the organized Christianity, whose 
voice is heard with respect among the masses. The first spir- 
itual democracy of the Christian age wherein the sole passport 



EDITORIAL NOTES. [Dec., 

to advancement is the claim of intellect and piety, where here- 
ditary rights have no weight in ecclesiastical preferment, must 
of a necessity sympathize with the great civil democracy where- 
in intellect and integrity are the only qualifications for the high- 
est of civil offices. The practical spirit of this country sees in 
the true practice of Catholicism nothing but an effectual help 
towards the solution of the enormous social problems, and these 
problems are destined to be in the near future the most for- 
midable difficulties with which the civil government will have 
to deal. It is the purpose of the Editor of THE CATHOLIC 
WORLD to lose no time or opportunity in discussing such 
problems as they arise, in a practical way, with a view to help- 
ing in the work of their solution. 

THE CATHOLIC WORLD by this new and latest step will en- 
large the scope of its influence, and, working on the lines laid 
down in the beginning by its founder, will endeavor to do its 
share in bringing about the reconciliation of the Church with 

the Age. 



THE appeal made in the October and November numbers to 
assist the heroic efforts of Bishop Paul of Tarsus to revive the 
faith among the Catholics in the native city of St. Paul and 
the surrounding country, and to enable him to resist the prose- 
lytizing efforts of inimical missionaries, is calling out many 
generous offerings. 

We subjoin a partial list handed to us by Very Rev. A. F. 
Hewit, C.S.P. : 

Paulists, $100.00 

'John B. Richmond, M.D., .... 5.00 

Walter F. Atlee, M.D., . . . . . 5.00 
Rev. T. J. Jenkins, ...... 9-7O 

H. L. Richards, 10.00 

Louise Saniweska, ...... 5.00 

A Friend, 10.00 

Charles P. Romadka, 10.00 

Our Lady of Perpetual Help Council, No. 90, 

C. B. L., 7.20 

Annunciation Council, No. 71, C. B. L., . 5.00 

Rev. D. L. Murray, 5.00 

Mrs. E. Macauliff, i.oo 

Mrs. Anderson, ....... 5.00 

E. E. S. Eagle, 5.00 

Frances M. Scott, i.oo 

Rev. J. J. Pike, 5.00 

Genazzano Council, No. 164, C. B. L., . . 5.00 
Presentation Council, 228, C. B. L., . . 5.00 



1893-] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 453 



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. 

n^HE Milwaukee public library has an energetic superintendent of the circulat- 
1 ing department, Miss Stearns, who is desirous of reaching not only the 
better educated class of readers, but also the poorer people. She wishes to make 
the public library an educational centre, and to have it advertised as much as a 
store. New plans are to be put into operation to extend the circulation of books in 
the schools. At present every public-school teacher is allowed to take as many 
books from the library as she thinks she can use among her pupils, who draw 
them out by cards, as is done at the library. Every eight weeks the stock of 
books is renewed by the library. The plan has been so successful that it is im- 
possible to supply the demand for books, and the library board has recently 
appropriated five hundred dollars to buy juvenile books to meet the needs of the 
year. As soon as the number of books increases efforts will be made to intro- 
duce the system into the parochial schools as well. There are now twenty-eight 
hundred books out in this kind of circulation. 

The advantages of the library will be extended also to the scholars of the 
evening schools, many of whom are grown men and women trying to master the 
rudiments of an education, or to make up deficiencies of their early school-days. 
Miss Stearns is taking three evenings every week to visit the night-schools in order 
to find out what sort of books are required. As soon as she ascertains this 
each school will be supplied on the same plan as the day-schools. Another in- 
novation is the establishment of a case of books at the rooms of the Young 
Woman's Christian Association, so that girls who patronize the " noon rest " 
may be able to exchange their books without going so far out of their way. 
These books will be selected with a view to meeting and educating the tastes of 
the young women who will read them. When one reflects that the average girl 
who patronizes the " noon rest " works from eight to six, with only an hour at 
noon, the advantages of a system that will permit her to get library books with- 
out taking any of the precious minutes between closing-up time and bed-time will 
be perceived. Miss Stearns thoroughly believes that one of the reasons why a 
great many people do not read library books is because they are too tired at 
night to come to the library after them. That is why she is so anxious for the 
library to go to the people. 

* * * 

We are pleased to know that the notice of the Cathedral Library of New 
York City, which appeared last month in this department of THE CATHOLIC 
WORLD, was highly appreciated by those devoted to its welfare. The success it 
has had is entirely due to a few workers who have given time and labor in a 
field of activity which is much neglected. With regret we learn that considerable 
debt has been contracted, that with the exception of gifts from a few friends, 
amounting to about seven hundred dollars, no considerable donation has been 
received since the library was organized. Wealthy patrons have not yet fur- 



454 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [Dec., 

nished the means to secure the perpetuity of the good work, and there is reason 
to fear that unless speedy aid is obtained from generous benefactors the hopes 
entertained for future developments cannot be realized. 

* * * 

An article in a recent number of the Forum, by C. B. Tillinghast, gives the 
experience of the Massachusetts Free Library Commission, composed of five per- 
sons serving without salary, though appointed by the governor of the State 
During three years a careful study was made of the intellectual wants and tastes 
manifested especially in rural communities. People have been encouraged to 
make suggestions as to the character of the books most useful and desirable for 
their town, and to furnish lists of such works as they considered of special value. 
It was found that the patrons of the library are almost entirely young people. 
The farmer depends for his reading largely upon the newspapers of the day and 
the agricultural journal, and seldom visits the library. It is probably due to his 
reading of the excellent periodical literature upon the subject of agriculture, and 
to the fact that this and the newspaper consume all the time he has available for 
reading, that books upon the science and art of agriculture are, as a rule, seldom 
called for and are likely to remain upon the library shelves unread. The young- 
er members of the family not only use the library, but are liberal patrons of it ; 
hence the study of their preferences and the guidance and moulding of their 
taste are among the most interesting, and certainly the most profitable, duties of 
the librarian or trustee. 

Eliminating from consideration the class of special students who naturally 
cluster around the larger libraries, more people will read books of a high class in 
the country town than in the great city. The books that have been suggested by 
the towns for purchase have almost without exception been good books, showing 
a tendency to healthy and useful literature. It is probable that the era of cheap 
publication has modified to some extent the use of libraries, in both urban and 
rural communities. It is well known that the best of non-copyright literature can 
now be purchased in a variety of editions and in fairly good type at a merely 
nominal price. This may in part account for the fact that while there seems to 
be a relative increase in the use of the reference over the circulating department 
in the larger libraries, a better class of reading is also demanded for home use. 
The effort of the modern newspaper to supply the demand for general reading by 
the publication of syndicate stories written by the most popular authors ; the 
marvellous development, especially upon the artistic side, of the illustrated 
magazine ; and the liberal discussion of the live questions of the day in politics, 
sociology, and economics by the higher grade of serials and reviews all of the 
greatest educational value are at the same time indications of what the people 
will read. 

It seems to be a fact, much as it is to be deplored, that the good old classics 
of English literature are not so widely read as they were a generation ago. 
Graces of style do not appear to have the charm for the present that they exercised 
over the preceding generation. Whether this apparent fact is in any degree due to 
a diminishing literary spirit and enthusiasm in the atmosphere of our higher in- 
stitutions of learning, is a question which may be suggested as worthy of thought- 
ful consideration by those upon whom the great responsibility of education rests. 

Fun is appreciated in the long winter evening by the country fireside, and 
every library should supply the best that literature affords to drive dull care away, 
and to direct attention to the humorous side of a life that at its best is likely to 
have too many serious hours. 



1893-] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 455 

The State of Massachusetts has only forty-seven towns that are without free 
libraries. There are three hundred and five libraries in towns and cities embrac- 
ing about ninety-seven per cent, of the population, from which the people are en- 
titled to take books for home reading free of expense. The circulation is five 
millions per annum. New Hampshire has established a library commission, and 
Connecticut recently provided for the same work to be done by a committee ap- 
pointed by the State board of education. 

* * * 

The Catholic Reading Circle Review, published at Youngstown, Ohio price 
two dollars per annum has now reached its fourth volume, which begins with 
many notable typographical improvements. It has a strong claim on every one 
who desires the permanent extension of the new intellectual movement that has 
awakened so much dormant talent among Catholics, as indicated by the work 
accomplished in our Reading Circles. Our best wishes are again extended to the 
editor, Mr. Warren E. Mosher, with the hope that he may have the gratification 
of speedily enlarging the circulation of his excellent magazine. What he needs 
more than good wishes is to have the substantial encouragement that comes only 
from subscribers who pay in advance. 

The official report of the second session of the Catholic Summer-School, 
held at Plattsburgh, N. Y., is now ready, price twenty-five cents. It contains a 
graphic account, illustrated with numerous portraits, of more than fifty lecturers, 
with abstracts of the addresses delivered at the teachers' conferences, the meet- 
ings of Reading Circle representatives and Sunday-school teachers. The badge 
of the Summer-School is also a choice souvenir, which may be obtained for 
twenty-five cents. At the Catholic Congress many were heard to express good 
wishes for the Summer-School on Champlain. Their good wishes may now be 
put into practical shape by sending for the pamphlet,which contains the only com- 
plete narrative yet published of the proceedings at Plattsburgh. Orders should 
be sent, with cash in advance, to Mr. Warren E. Mosher, Youngstown, Ohio. 

One of the Reading Circles in New York City has already paid for and dis- 
tributed fifty copies of the Summer-School's official report. Perhaps others can 
do better, or as well. 

* * * 

Rev. Francis J. Finn, S.J., has reached the foremost place among writers of 
fiction illustrating Catholic boy-life at school. His characters are true to nature, 
id the dialogue is incessant. We wish every Catholic boy could have among his 
iristmas presents at least one of the four volumes by this most successful writer 
iblished by Benziger Brothers, New York City. 

By a friend of young readers we are informed that Charles Scribner's Sons, 
lew York City, have some excellent books on their juvenile list, among which 
lese are especially noted : Westward with Columbus, by Gordon Stables ; Ivar 
Viking, by Paul du Chaillu ; David Balfour, by Robert Louis Stevenson ; 
:k Hall and Jack in the Bush, by Robert Grant. 

* * * 

The priest who received the following letter will be pleased to meet the sailor 
rhose habit of careful reading is indicated in his own words : 

DEAR FATHER : You will please look over this book, and if you deem it fit 
lace it, or a copy of it, in your library. The volume is in bad condition, but this 
because my brother loaned it, while I was away at sea, to persons who do not 
enow much about books. I have never seen another copy of the book, and I 



456 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [Nov., 1893. 

bought this one while in Cork Harbor. I have read the book five times, and find 
it lively and interesting. I have not much fault to find with it, save in chapter xvi. 
pages 231-239. But this is fixed up in coming chapters. I remain, 
Very respectfully yours, 

A SEAMAN, 
Late of Barkentinc Toboggan. 

The above letter, together with the volume to which it refers, was handed 
me by the Rev. Director of our Reading Circle. It was like meeting an old friend 
to have the novel Shandy Maguire placed in my hands, for it was the first Catho- 
lic book I ever read. In the year 1870 I was a pupil of the high-school in a West- 
ern city. The desk across the way from my own was occupied by a red-haired 
Celt of my own age. It was his wont to pile his books on his desk and against them 
lean his open geography, and behind this to place his light literature for reading 
out of sight of the professor. His continued laughter made me curious to see 
his book, and on petition he promised me the volume just as soon as he had fin- 
ished. Thus Shandy Maguire came into my hands. Needless to say I enjoyed it 
as much as my quondam friend of the high-school. Father Boyce Paul Pepper- 
grass was pastor of St. John's Church at Worcester, Mass., when Shandy Ma- 
guire was written. Recently I was in the room where he wrote it. The only 
relic of Father Boyce, save the affectionate remembrance of him by his people, that 
I discovered were some old-fashioned solid silver spoons engraved with his 
name, which are still in use on the table of the present pastor of St. John's, Mon- 
signor Griffin. There is wit and pathos in Father Boyce's stories. Alas ! that 
tragedy and comedy should always so strangely mingle in all true stories of 
Irish peasant life. A gentleman from the North of Ireland told me that Father 
Boyce's books contain perfect specimens of northern Irish dialect. I wonder if 
our friend of the " barkentine Toboggan " has seen J. Jeffrey Roche's Life of John 
Boyle O' Reilly. He would find it a most entertaining volume, just the book for 
the long hours of sailing in quiet weather, especially that part descriptive of 
Boyle's own voyages en route to America. We do not wonder that our friend of 
the Toboggan makes complaint of the manner in which his book was used. A 
certain Bridget O'L. has written her name no less than nine times on one page. 
And then, as if in compensation for this, she has written " God save Ireland " as 
many times, and adds these lines of poetry : 

" Thy face is always near to me, 
Though thou art far away ; 
It is a beacon light and fair." 

Doubtless she was thinking of a lover lad away out here in America. Ap- 
parently she was too much overcome to finish the lines. Many others have left 
their autograph on the blank pages of the book. To all members of Reading 
Circles who would like to look upon a natural picture of peasant life in Ireland we 
recommend Shandy Afagiiire, or Father Boyce's other book, The Spa Wife. 

N. 




(Borbam 



an& I9tb Street, 

NEW YORK CITY. 



lEccIesiastical 
Hrt /Iftetal 



EVERY DESCRIPTION, 



PHOTOGRAPHS, DESIGNS, AND 
ESTiriATES OF WORK AL- 
READY EXECUTED 
SENT ON REQUEST. 



THE 



CATHOLIC WORLD, 



VOL. LVIII. JANUARY, 1894. No. 346. 

THE COMING CONTEST WITH A RETROSPECT. 

BY REV. ALFRED YOUNG. 

Says the Congregationalist in its issue of October 26 : " The battle between 
Protestantism and Romanism (sic) is yet to be fought ; and, if we do not wrongly 
read the signs of the times, it is to be fought on this continent sooner, perhaps, 
and with more terrible earnestness than we have thought." 

E it so ; we are agreed ; but, in the name 
of justice and of our enlightened civiliza- 
tion, let the duel be one between reason 
and reason, history and history, doctrine 
and doctrine, principle and principle a 
fair, honest, open fight, and, if Protes- 
tantism dares to accept the condition, 
with no favor. Let us have no fraud, no 
forgery, no un-American, secret, skulk- 
ing methods of the midnight assassin, no 
firebrands of the incendiary, no social 
ostracism or political disfranchisement of fellow-citizens for 
conscience' sake, no violations of a freeman's right of domicile 
by Massachusetts " smelling committees," no combinations to 
effect a nullification of the constitutional guarantee of the free- 
dom of religion, no setting up of a tyranny in this free land 
which would hamstring the opponent by depriving parents of 
their inalienable rights ; in a word, no resort to methods of 
warfare which are damnable in the sight of God and of man, 
and which would stain the records of American history, 
whether successful or not, with an ineffaceable blot of dis- 
grace. 

Copyright. VERY REV. A. F. HEWIT. 1894. 
VOL. LVIII. 31 




458 THE COMING CONTEST WITH A RETROSPECT. [Jan., 

But we fear it is not a high-minded and honest contest for 
intellectual and moral superiority that the Congregationalist is 
alluding to. The signs of the times point to quite another 
kind of battle as imminent the contest inaugurated by various 
Protestant attempts to hamper us Catholics in the free enjoy- 
ment of our civil and religious rights as guaranteed to us, as 
well as to others, by our common Constitution. As is general- 
ly the case in warfare, whether of swords or words, one is the 
unprovoked or the provoking aggressor. Who is the aggressor 
in this impending conflict ? Everybody knows it is Protestant- 
ism of a peculiar stripe. It is an unprovoked aggressor. It 
cannot be shown that we have ever attempted to obstruct or 
deny to Protestants their full and free civil and religious liber- 
ty. They have not dared, among all their misrepresentations of 
us and unfounded charges, even to accuse us of having done 
so. This Protestantism is the provoking aggressor. This arti- 
cle will rehearse enough evidence to prove that fact. Our self- 
constituted enemies dare not attempt to show just cause for 
the kind of conflict in which they are set upon forcing us to 
take the defensive part. 

The intellectual and moral contest has always been waged 
ever since Protestantism came into existence. It is a necessary 
and, in its nature if it has not been in its methods, an honor- 
able struggle for the vindication of truth, and must go on. 
The result does not cause us any anxious fear. Magna cst veri- 
tas, ct prcevalebit. If Protestantism possesses intellectual and 
moral superiority, if it surpasses Catholicism in its harmony 
with truth, justice, and charity, if it be a safer and more 
powerful defender of the rights of God and the rights of man, 
then we must go to the wall. If the contrary, then Protes- 
tantism must disappear. 

Put forth your hand here, Brother Congregationalist, and 
attach your sign manual to the above, and we are with you 
ready for such a contest. And now, if you are an honest an- 
tagonist, lift up your voice and unite it with ours in calling out 
Hands off! For, don't you see, standing out there on the 
field, and a little too close too, that Pharisaical hypocrite the 
" National League for the Protection of American Institutions " 
(pace the high and mighty Independent, who really cannot stom- 
ach such vulgar, naughty words as Pharisee and hypocrite, 
though fitly spoken now as they were aforetime by the mouth 
of One yet higher and mightier). And cannot you see lurking 
behind him the League's secret, masked auxiliary, " The Ameri- 



1894-] THE COMING CONTEST WITH A RETROSPECT. 459 

can Protective Association," with hands already " damned for 
forgery and dripping with deceit," fumbling in his breast for 
the stiletto, and eager to rush out and stab us in the back? 

You may say of this last-named miscreant, He is no hired 
masked assassin of ours. Well then, pray tell us, whose hired 
assassin is he ? Won't you ask your Protestant brother, the 
Baptist Christian Inquirer, who lauds this satanic agent's politi- 
cal platform, including its call for the appointment of legislative 
" smelling committees," to " officially inspect convents and 
monasteries," and who, in these words, expresses its pious hope 
of the assassin's success : 

" Well, theirs is a much better platform than either of the 
great political parties can get up. It is a platform of ideas, 
and not words merely. The order is said to number one 
million voters. A party with the above principles will go to 
victory like wild-fire " (issue of October 5). 

Perhaps the Baptist Christian Inquirer may be able to tell 
us who it is that pays the blood-money. 

You are shocked, no doubt, Brother Congregationalist, at 
hearing such an opprobrious epithet as Pharisaical hypocrite 
applied to the League for the Protection of American Institu- 
tions, of which the Rev. Dr. James M. King, Methodist preach- 
er, is the active promrter and trusted secretary; whose pro- 
gramme is enthusiastically endorsed and repeatedly urged upon 
:heir readers by the entire Protestant religious press of the coun- 
ry ; and on whose roll of members are to be found the names of 
lany most respectable persons of unquestioned personal integrity. 
Jut the epithet is well merited all the same. A Pharisaical 
lypocrite is a false religious pretender, seeking, under the guise 
>f an apparent zeal for the right and true, the accomplishment 
of base and unrighteous purposes. Such is the league whose 
hypocrisy we denounce. And here are our proofs. 

The league is an assc elation of Protestant religionists. The 
names of some infidels, agnostics, and indifferentists may be 
found among its adherents, but only because they are willing 
to run with the hounds, if perchance they may aid in capturing 
the hated prey. 

The hated prey is the Catholic religion now prosperously 
speeding on its way of divine truth and charity, peacefully, 
righteously, full of self-sacrifice, infringing on the rights of no 
man, obedient to the laws, patriotically loyal to its heart's core, 
the friend, protector, and comforter of the poor, the weak, and 



460 THE COMING CONTEST WITH A RETROSPECT. [Jan., 

the ignorant equally with the rich, the powerful, and learned, 
in all their manifold sorrows and sufferings of body and mind ; 
whose doctrines are not only in perfect conformity with the 
fundamental principles of American liberty and rights, but also 
most vigorously uphold and defend them. 

" Capturing the hated prey " means to obstruct the progress 
of the Catholic religion ; to nullify its beneficent influence, and 
to hinder its numerical increase. Its enemies, interested in pro- 
curing its weakness or destruction, have hitherto failed in effect- 
ing their purpose, despite all the moral and intellectual influ- 
ences they have unceasingly brought to bear, added to their 
practical faithlessness to the political contract expressed in the 
Constitution, Article vi. : " No religious test shall ever be re- 
quired as a qualification to any office or public trust under the 
United States." The fact of this faithlessness of Protestants is 
notorious. There is plenty of evidence if called for. 

The obstructive force of ignorant prejudice has been no less 
well understood and diligently fostered by calumnies and mis- 
representations of Catholic doctrine and practice uttered in Pro- 
testant pulpits, in their religious newspapers, and through the 
active circulation of the vilest defamatory books and tracts. 

They have received with open arms, and made use of, a horde 
of disgraced apostate priests and monks, and other disreputable 
characters posing as escaped nuns, whose pretended exposures 
of Catholic practices and convent life have befooled and de- 
bauched whole sections of the country. Protestant pulpits have 
been open to them from which to vomit forth their lies and in- 
decencies before crowded audiences whose eagerness to drink in 
the salacious recitals, and readiness to have their puerile fears 
and vindictive passions aroused, show to what a base intellectual 
and moral level their religious teachers have already reduced 
them. Even at this day the unholy welcome which this sort of 
literature receives at Protestant hands has been taken ad- 
vantage of by the A. P. A.'s, who advertise and industriously 
circulate the vilest publications to defame the most sacred 
institutions of the Catholic Church. 

Working to secure the same end are the well-known efforts 
of sundry Protestant societies of benevolence, established chiefly 
in favor of poor and abandoned Catholic children, to whom they 
gave bodily succor at the price of the loss of all knowledge of 
their sacred religion. Do you not blush, O Congregationalist, 
at the sight of all these dishonorable manoeuvres of your un- 
worthy brethren? 



1894-] THE COMING CONTEST WITH A RETROSPECT. 461 

Failing in all these efforts to down the Catholic religion, we 
are now confronted with this Pharisaical League which has pre- 
cisely the same end in view under the thin guise of patriotism 
and the defence of American institutions. They carefully avoid 
mentioning either the name of the Catholic religion or their pur- 
pose to subject it to social and political persecution in any of 
their official documents. The omission is hypocritical. 

But no one is deceived by the assertion that their association 
is neither partisan nor sectarian, saying it indeed, but meaning 
just the contrary. It is founded and inspired by anything but 
pure patriotic motives, and is plainly intended to inaugurate a 
Protestant, sectarian, religious and political crusade against 
Catholics, as the frank, undisguised interpretation of its spirit 
and aims by the entire Protestant pulpit and press proves be- 
yond all question. 

Their affectation of patriotic defence of what is neither 
threatened nor attacked as the end of their association is Phari- 
saical. Everybody knows the pretence is false. Overcome in 
every intellectual and moral contest, thwarted in all their at- 
tempts to put us under the ban by misrepresentation, calumny, 
and efforts to capture the rising generation of Catholics, they 
turn for help to the state, in the hope of bringing about, through 
the enactment of obstructive and tyrannical laws, what their mali- 
:ious and ignorant religious bigotry has not been able to effect. 

In the pretensions of this League, and in all the support of it 
given by the united Protestant press and pulpit, we see the 
lost evident proof of its Pharisaical, hypocritical character. 
They first raise a false alarm. " There must be no union of 
church and state ! " Which implies that some one is attempt- 
ing to bring that about. It is false. No such attempt is made 
or even thought of by any church or any political organization ; 
unless, indeed, it be this disguised venture of theirs to renew 
the attempt made by the Evangelical Alliance in 1889 to unite 
the power of the state with their Protestantism in putting down 
the Catholic Church, as we shall prove further on. 

Of course this League means, as abundantly evidenced by its 
friends and supporters in journals, sermons, Fourth-of-July ora- 
tions, and by every other means of catching the ear of the 
public, that the Catholic Church is planning and plotting to bring 
about a union between itself and the state. Protestants ignor- 
antly suppose that we would count such an union as an advan- 
tage greatly to be desired. They know what help it would be 
to them if they could succeed in establishing it in their favor. 



462 THE COMING CONTEST WITH A RETROSPECT. [Jan., 

So they charge us with coveting the same support. There 
could not be a greater mistake. The only kind of union pos- 
sible to effect would be such as Protestants seem quite satisfied 
to enjoy, and what they struggle to maintain in England, Ger- 
many, Norway, Sweden, and smaller principalities in Europe ; 
one that reduces their churches to the position of a mere crea- 
ture and tool of the state. We have no such slavish ambition. 
We are working to establish the kingdom of God and of his Christ 
in the hearts and minds of men, a kingdom of free souls who, 
" knowing the truth, are free indeed." No state shackles for us, 
if you please. 

It must be owned, however, that the League and its friends 
have succeeded but too well in arousing the suspicions and fears 
of the unthinking multitude that the charge is somewhat founded 
in truth, especially among the more ignorant classes of the 
South and West. With this false hue and cry industriously cir- 
culated, the malevolent spirits at the head of the League's secret 
ally, the A. P. A. anti-Catholic order, have been able to draw 
into line a great number of dupes to serve their base purposes 
at the polls, there to politically assassinate their Catholic fellow- 
citizens, and thereby shamelessly violating the constitutional 
guarantee against the subjection of any candidate for public 
office to a religious test. In vain may the voices of the most 
trustworthy and eminent Catholics vehemently deny seeking any 
union of church and state. These conscienceless enemies go on, 
and will go on, shouting the old lie just the same. But Truth 
shall have her day. The Catholic Church is no creature of the 
hour, and she can afford to wait till that day shall dawn, bring- 
ing glory and exultation to herself and confusion of face to 
her enemies. 

This hypocritical League has raised a second false alarm, to 
wit : For the state to aid sectarian educational and charitable 
institutions is to contribute to the destruction of social peace, 
of c!vil and religious liberty, and of the stability of the state 
itself. We first call attention to the deceptive use of the term 
" aid." It is false to say that the state was ever asked for or 
ever gave one dollar to aid educational or charitable institutions 
under the control of religious bodies. We are not quite pre- 
pared to say no Protestant religious body was ever so aided 
(their journals acknowledge they have been), but we unhesitat- 
ingly deny that the Catholic Church or any of her religious 
communities have been. We make this apparently surprising 
assertion in order to expose the hypocrisy of the League in em- 



1894-] THE COMING CONTEST WITH A RETROSPECT. 463 

ploying the word "aid" in a false, misleading sense. Religion 
or sectarianism has never asked for aid as such, and never gotten 
it. All so-called " aid " by grants of money has been asked for, 
given, and applied solely to pay for the work the state declares 
itself bound in justice to pay for : an obligation founded on its 
own claims, from which arises a duty to do certain educational 
or charitable work itself, or to have it done by worthy agents 
among its citizens, whether religious bodies or not. Paying one's 
just debts of duty to honest laborers in one's own field is not 
granting them or their religion "aid." And they who falsely 
confess that they have been receiving such " aid " to their re- 
ligion, in order to bring odium upon others, are hypocrites. 

If the state has consented to engage religious bodies, Pro- 
testant, Catholic, or Jewish, to act as its responsible agents, it 
has done wisely and justly, knowing that thereby the same end 
is fully as well accomplished as by its secular officers, without 
just offence to any one, and all state interference with or 
abridgment of the religious rights of its citizens is avoided. 

'he state abstains, as it should, from questioning the conscien- 
:ious claims of its citizens. It admits them as presented, and so 

grants them what it has a perfect right to grant in considera- 
tion of those claims. The conscientious claim of the Catholic, 
tnd of some Protestants too, is that all parents, no matter 

rhat their faith, have a right to see that their children are edu- 
:ated in the religion they profess, that crime or poverty or 
>ther social disability cannot confer upon the state or any 

>ther organization or person the right to disbar any man, wo- 

lan, or child from receiving the religious ministrations of their 

>wn faith, or the right to force other such religious ministra- 
:ions upon them. All the efforts of this un-American League 
ire flatly in contradiction of these principles of equal conscien- 
tious liberty. 

If Protestants are prepared to forego the exercise of their 
ights in this matter let them, but the state has no right to de- 
mand that they should ; and if ever we Catholics were to use 

>ur power through the state to force them to do so, contrary 
:o their will, as they are now, at the beck and call of this 

.eague and its confederates, are trying to force us to do, 
then we should richly deserve what they now deserve the con- 
tempt and execration of every honest man who calls this free 
country his own. 

But just look at the hypocritical anxiety of this League for 
the safety of the state. It calls out that the state must "save 



464 THE COMING CONTEST WITH A RETROSPECT. [Jan., 

itself" (with the League's help, of course) from the threatening 
encroachments of " sectarianism." Does or does not that term 
mean " religion " ? They dare not answer, for such an admis- 
sion would make them show their hand. Dare they assert that 
the prosperity and general practice of religion is a " standing 
menace to the state " ? Do they take American statesmen or 
the enlightened voters of this country for a lot of fools ? What 
is to be gained by lying to the people like that ? Is it not past 
all question that no influence is equal to that of religion to se- 
cure national peace, freedom, and permanence? Are Protestants 
not sectarian? What so despicable as this hypocritical fawning 
upon the state at the expense of their own self-condemnation? 

These double-tongued persecutors so manipulate their accu- 
sation about the state giving "aid" to sectarianism as to make 
it say to the popular audience : " These Catholics want the 
state to do what it cannot lawfully do to teach religion in the 
schools." What schools? In the state schools? It is false. 
In our parochial schools ? It is false. We protest against the 
right of the state doing anything, by word or mouth, by books 
or teachers, or by grants of money ad Jwc, to have any control 
or power or voice in the teaching of religion in any school. 

But who did want, if they say they do not want now, that 
the state should take upon itself the teaching of religion in the 
public state schools? Who tried their utmost to induce the 
state to adopt Protestantism as the State Religion, and force 
the children of all other and no creeds, Catholic, Jewish, and 
Nullifidians of every sort, to be daily indoctrinated with a reli- 
gious principle they repudiate as false " The Bible is the only 
infallible rule of faith and practice " ? These very jealous spirits 
we are denouncing. Feeling themselves unable to hold even 
their own against the fast-increasing intellectual and moral influ- 
ence of the Catholic Church, and the active opposition to Chris- 
tianity shown by the millions, we may say, of agnostics and in- 
fidels nearly all the apostate children of Protestant parentage 
they began years ago to force their " broad Christianity," as 
they called it, down the throats of those whose consciences re- 
jected such a " broad humbug," as the Hon. Stanley Matthews, 
of the Supreme Court, styled it Protestant as he was. How 
did they try to do this? By trying to force the reading of the 
Protestant Bible in the public schools, with the aid of the 
state law and the state policeman. One must have been a fool 
not to see the trick they were playing ; to compel all children 
to hear the Bible read every day, so that they should be taught, 






1894-] THE COMING CONTEST WITH A RETROSPECT. 465 

and come to believe, that the only way to learn the true Chris- 
tian faith and how to worship God is to read the Bible. It 
was an infamous outrage upon the religious liberty of Catholics, 
Jews, and unbelievers, all free and equal American citizens, free 
from all domination over and interference with their conscien- 
tious convictions. 

Catholics felt and resisted this covert attack upon the funda- 
mental principles of the faith of their children. It was not the 
mere reading of the Bible, or even of the Protestant version, 
that aroused their opposition ; it was the assumption of the 
Protestant, anti-Catholic principle taken for granted as the rea- 
son for having it read at all. And to enforce this principle 
they appealed to the then universal respect in which Protes- 
tants held the Bible, and in the same breath denounced our 
objections with the old falsehood, that we did not believe in 
the Bible ; that we were not allowed by the church to read it 
one of the most astounding lies that was ever perpetrated. 
" Rally to the support of the Blessed Book which these papists 
fear and would burn ! " was their war cry. And surely their 
success in humbugging their ignorant people, so effectively and 
for so long a time as they did, is one of the most astounding 
icts in the history of their dishonest attacks upon us. If any 
mse of shame is left in them, with what confusion of face must 
tey to-day look back upon this iniquity ? Who now is shown 
be the friend, the true believer in and guardian of the 
lible ? 

They utterly failed in this attempt to make a practical and 
lost effective union of the Protestant " church " and state as 
everybody knows. Their real intentions being exposed, the 
:lear-headed and fair-minded American people of all and of no 
tith scorned to dishonor themselves by collusion with such a 
icfarious design. But what a wail of disappointment and spite- 
ful incrimination of the motives of Catholics went up through 
the length and breadth of the land from Protestant pulpits and 
ic Protestant press! 

Then they began their plot to secure the same end in an- 
other way, leaguing themselves together in politico-religious 
secret lodges, and in bands with high-sounding, patriotic Ameri- 
can titles, to bring pressure upon the government to pass laws 
and constitutional amendments which would block the progress 
of the Catholic Church, and hamper us in the free exercise of 
our parental rights and religious liberties. For many years 



466 THE COMING CONTEST WITH A RETROSPECT. [Jan., 

previous the Evangelical Alliance had been doing this dirty 
work, and attempted to drive just such another amendment to 
the Constitution through Congress under the leadership of the 
same man, Rev. Dr. James M. King, Methodist minister, who 
is the real founder and master-spirit of the National League. 
This was in 1875, and James G. Elaine presented the bill in 
the house, but he slyly kept silence when the vote was taken. 
The Alliance tried it again in 1889, and we have before us a 
printed stenographic report of the hearing given its advocates 
before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Henry W. 
Blair being its chairman. The whole report is occupied with 
virulent and calumnious attacks upon the Catholic Church, the 
Papacy, the Jesuits, and our educational and charitable institu- 
tions by the active agent of the Alliance and other Protestant 
ministers. They did not scruple to make use of garbled and 
even out-and-out forged "extracts" from eminent Catholic 
writers. In their speeches both Rev. Dr. King and Rev. Philip 
S. Moxom, of Boston, offered in evidence of their absurd 
charge that the Catholic parochial schools " produced " a vast 
majority of the illiterates, paupers, and criminals of the coun- 
try the fraudulent table of statistics manufactured by Dexter 
A. Hawkins, and still more fraudulently tinkered by the Hon. 
John Jay. This fraud had been already exposed in THE 
CATHOLIC WORLD, April, 1884, of which magazine their speech- 
es showed they were lynx-eyed readers. A further and more 
minute exposure was made by the writer of this article in the 
Freeman s Journal, November 29, 1890, and in the Independent, 
January 15, 1891. 

The report proves beyond all doubt that the amendment 
they then proposed was an artful attempt to compel the state 
to teach the vague " principles of the Christian religion," as so 
formulated in their proposed amendment ; which Protestants 
would be satisfied to have taught in the public schools, and 
thus either disbar all Catholic children from entering them or 
expose themselves to the danger of being Protestantized, just 
as now they are in danger, in common with Protestant chil- 
dren, of being secularized and alienated from their Christian 
faith in the state schools in which all religion is tabooed.* 

* Religion and Schools. Notes of Hearings before the Committee on Education and 
Labor, United States Senate, February 15 and 22, 1889, on the joint resolution (S. R. 86) 
proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States respecting establishments 
of religion and free public schools.. Washington : Government Printing-office. 



1894-] THE COMING CONTEST WITH A RETROSPECT. 467 

We copy this provision embodied in the proposed amend- 
ment : " Section 2. Each State in this Union shall establish and 
maintain a system of free public schools adequate for the edu- 
cation of all the children living therein, between the ages of 
six and sixteen years, inclusive, in the common branches of 
knowledge, and in virtue, morality, and the principles of the 
Christian religion'' 

Then follows the prohibition against any State according 
money to any " sectarian school or institution." 

These fiery, unscrupulous bigots discovered that they had 
overleaped the mark. A certain Rev. J. O. Corliss, a Protes- 
tant minister, and a Professor Alonzo T. Jones, of Michigan, 
quoting largely from the Hon. Stanley Matthews all Protes- 
tants pricked the beautiful bubble the Alliance was blowing; 
and it was quite evident, when the committee rose, that the 
whole thing was an ignominious fiasco. The foundation of the 
League immediately after, proposing a new amendment with the 
provision obliging all States to teach the " principles of the 
Christian religion" left out, proves that the game for uniting 
church and state by Protestants was up ; all their fatuous lying 
labor lost. And now they shamelessly turn round and falsely 
accuse us of just what'they were foiled in attempting to do in 
their own favor. Before the struggle comes at the polls we 
Catholics should reprint and circulate that damning report over 
the whole country. Nothing could more effectually expose 
their base hypocrisy. 

But who shall worthily picture the pitiful dismay, the woe- 
begone countenance, the snarling, disappointed rage of these 
plotters, defeated of their cherished hopes, and with all the venom 
of their calumnies and forgeries, intended to defame the Catholic 
Church, poured out to the last drop, to be obliged to listen to 
the following "unkindest cut of all" from the Hon. Justice 
Matthews, quoted by Professor Jones, who, with Rev. Dr. 
Corliss, exposed their designs and opposed the amendment, 
backing up their argument with the names of two hundred and 
fifty thousand petitioners opposed to its adoption. Justice 
Matthews, after taking unnecessary pains to affirm his Protes- 
tant faith, thus discoursed, as quoted by Professor Jones: 

" I know the Protestant prejudices against the Roman Cath- 
olic hierarchy and the Roman Catholic system of faith. But I 
am bound to look upon them all as citizens, all as entitled to 



468 THE COMING CONTEST WITH A RETROSPECT. [Jan., 

every right, to every privilege that I claim for myself ; and fur- 
ther, I do in my heart entertain the charity of believing that 
they are just as honest and just as sincere in their religious 
convictions as I am. I will say further, that from the study I 
have made, as time and opportunity have been given to me, 
of the doctrinal basis of the Roman Catholic faith, I am bound 
to say that it is not an ignorant superstition, but a scheme of 
well-constructed logic, which he is a bold man who says he can 
easily answer. Give them one proposition, concede to them 
one single premise, and the whole of their faith follows most 
legitimately and logically, and that is the fundamental doctrine 
of what the church is, what it was intended to be, by whom it 
was founded, by whom it has been perpetuated, being the cas- 
ket which contains to-day, shining as brightly as before the ages, 
the ever-living, actually present body of God, teaching and 
training men for life here and life hereafter. 

" Now, that is the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church ; 
that is the doctrine that is believed in by the Roman Catholic 
people ; believed in sincerely, conscientiously, under their re- 
sponsibilities, as they understand them, to answer at the bar of 
Almighty God in the day of judgment, according to the light 
they have received, in their own reason and their own conscience ; 
for you must bear in mind that the process by which a Roman 
Catholic attains his faith is the same by which we do. We 
seem to make a difference, in that respect, as if a Roman Cath- 
olic believed in his church in some other way, by some other 
organs than those which a Protestant uses when he comes to 
his convictions. Why, there is no compulsion about it ; it is a 
voluntary matter : they believe or not, as they choose ; there is 
no external power which forces them to believe. They think 
they have sufficient reason for their belief ; it may be an insuf- 
ficient reason, but that doesn't make any difference to you and 
me ; it is their reason, and that is enough. 

Now, they have at any rate so far as the impersonal spirit 
of jurisprudence is concerned, so far as the presiding genius of 
the civil law is affected with jurisdiction, so far as that artifi- 
cial reason which consists in the collective wisdom of the state 
can take any notice civil rights and religious rights equal to 
yours and mine. 

" Protestants have no rights, as such, which do not at the 
same time and to the same extent belong to Catholics, as such, 
to Jews and infidels too. Protestants have a civil right to en- 
joy their own belief, but they have no right in this respect to 
any preference from the state or any of its institutions. It is 
not a question of majorities against minorities, for if the con- 
science of the majority is to be the standard, then there is no 
such thing as right of conscience at all. It is against the pre- 
dominance and power of majorities that the rights of conscience 
are protected, and need to be." 



1894-] THE COMING CONTEST WITH A RETROSPECT. 469 

Poor Senator Blair, the chairman of the committee, suffer- 
ing from an aggravated attack of Jesuitophobia, and his worthy 
compeers, the Rev. Drs. King, Moxom, Gray, Dunn, Morris, 
and the rest of the defeated plotters how they must have 
squirmed as they sat there forced to listen to such plain, 
honest, just, straightforward, unhypocritical, upright, and true 
American doctrine as that ! No wonder they hadn't another 
word to say, and that, when the quoted words of Justice 
Matthews were ended, we should read : " The committee then 
adjourned." 

Failing to force their Protestantism into the common schools 
and to establish Protestantism as a state religion, now, in their 
fixed determination to obstruct and, if possible, overthrow the 
Catholic Church in America, they are willing to pay the Judas 
price of betraying the faith of their own children and sacrificing 
them to the Moloch of secularism, provided they may thereby 
stop by ever so little the favor which the Catholic Church is 
evidently gaining in the eyes of fair-minded Protestants and un- 
believers ; and thwart the astounding and unlooked-for advances 
she is making, not only in numbers and religious influence, but 
in all the fields of social, scientific, intellectual, and moral life 
and progress. 

In their despair they cry out : " Stop the Catholic Church ! 
Come, O state, to our aid ! Secularize all schools, all prisons, 
all reformatories, all charitable institutions, even the hospitals 
of the sick and dying ! Shut out from them their God and 
their faith ! They won't take our Protestantism. Well, then, they 
shall not have any religion at all, and we are prepared to take 
the plunge and go down into the abyss of atheism, with all that 
is ours, if we can only drag the Catholic Church along with us 
to the same fate ! " 

It was evident that the failure of the attempt to make a 
union of church and state by the Evangelical Alliance, through 
its efforts to pass a constitutional amendment obliging the 
teaching of the " principles of the Christian religion " in all 
schools, was precisely due to that provision. It was the second 
attempt made by this body, as we have shown. Why did it 
not make a third ? Because they knew that their attempt as 
Protestants to throttle the Catholic Church had been detected, 
the Alliance being undisguisedly Protestant and anti-Catholic in 
all its aims and methods. So they resolved to drop the pre- 
tension to gain their ends as religious antagonists, and pose 






470 THE COMING CONTEST WITH A RETROSPECT. [Jan., 

simply as a band of loyal patriots shouting out that the Ameri- 
can state and its institutions were in danger, and that the Pope, 
the bishops and priests of the Catholic Church were attacking 
them and bent on their destruction. That accounts for the 
foundation of the " National League for the Protection of 
American Institutions," organized the same year, immediately 
after the signal defeat and discomfiture of the Alliance. We 
say again, as has been well proved, that their title is the pro- 
clamation of a false and unfounded issue. Nobody is attacking 
American institutions, and no "League" is needed to protect 
them. The verbal concealment of their religious animosity and 
aim, and their pretence of being inspired solely by patriotic 
motives, is a cloak of hypocrisy. Their own aiders and abettors 
have boldly torn aside the mask and shown them up in their 
true colors. Tne League is nothing else but the Evangelical 
Alliance under another name. It is true they have realized how 
futile would be the hope to bring about the constitutional 
adoption of Protestantism as the state religion, to be forced, 
willy-nilly, down the throats of the people, and so they content- 
ed themselves with framing a new proposed amendment, quietly 
leaving out the provision obliging the teaching of the principles 
of " Protestant " Christianity, or, as Mr. Blair put it in com- 
mittee, " the principles of the Christian religion so limited as 
to specifically and emphatically exclude the Christian principles 
of one or two sects." 

So we have their original plan of attack upon the Catholic 
Church by invoking the aid of the state modified and disguised 
in this fashion : 

" No State shall pass any law respecting an establishment 
of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or use its 
property or credit, or any money raised by taxation, or author- 
ize either to be used, for the purpose of founding, maintaining, 
or aiding, by appropriation, payment for services, expenses, or 
otherwise, any church, religious denomination, or religious so- 
ciety, or any institution, society, or undertaking which is wholly 
or in part under sectarian or ecclesiastical control." 

Further comment upon their definite purpose than we have 
already made is unnecessary to prove that they have none other 
but to make an organized attack upon the rights and privileges 
of Catholics. Since its foundation the League has not been idle ; 
circulating documents by the tens of thousands, securing arti- 



1894-] THE COMING CONTEST WITH A RETROSPECT. 471 

cles in newspapers, and sermons from preachers, who have in- 
dustriously poisoned the minds of their hearers with such 
calumnies against the Catholic religion as might serve their 
purpose. 

Are {these petitioners honest in the self-sacrificing proposals 
they offer in order to thwart the Catholic power? We think 
no one is so silly as to believe it. If they could once succeed 
in having religion tabooed as a dangerous element to the safety 
of the state, under the title of "sectarian schools, churches, or 
institutions," everybody knows that they would not scruple to 
so manage their own schools, churches, and institutions, as they 
have already done, by the absence of any distinctive religious 
title, and by placing them under the control of secular boards 
and other officers, so as to still be able to claim the aid and sup- 
port of the state all the same, not as sectarian, but as secular 
or undenominational institutions, knowing well that Catholics 
will not, like themselves, sail under a false flag, but will boldly, 
at all costs, and under every tyranny, still confess the name of 
Christ, and never deny that their schools, their churches, and 
their works of charity all belong to God. 

See how cunningly also these real sectaries appeal for help 
in their nefarious designs to the voice and power of the infidel, 
who despises them as cordially as he hates what is true Chris- 
tianity. There is to be, as they hope, no aid to what is " sec- 
tarian." 

They are quite willing to apply to themselves this odious, 
opprobrious term if they can fasten it also upon Catholics. 
They do not dare to use the words " religious " or " Christian." 
That would likely shock the fair-minded American non-Catholic 
and non-persecuting public into a realizing sense of their ras- 
cally intent and methods in plotting against the ' free exercise 
of religious rights ' which none have ever yet dared to openly 
deny to every man living under the protection of the American 
flag. 

So they use the term "sectarian." " We Protestants will 
put on a secular dress and be of no * sect ' before the law. 
Catholics won't secularize either their name or their dress, and 
so we will have them on the hip, claiming, as they will continue 
to do, to be 'religious' bodies and churches and schools. We 
will take care, then, to have ' religious ' read ' sectarian.' Thus 
they will be forced out into the cold, but we shall draw from 
the state funds just the same, being before the law only secular." 

So much for the " National League for the Protection of 
American Institutions," its parent, the Evangelical Alliance, and 
its secret ally, the A. P. A. "order": worthy co-laborers in 
the meanest piece of work that any American citizens ever un- 



472 THE COMING CONTEST WITH A RETROSPECT. [Jan., 

dertook. Our brother the Congregationalist will please take no- 
tice that in the honorable and fair coming contest for intellec- 
tual and moral superiority that is to be waged between Protes- 
tantism and what it, with maliciously false pretence, styles 
" Romanism" thus persistently reiterating the unfounded 
charge that " Catholics are politically subject to the domination 
of a foreign potentate " all such un-American and un-Christian 
leagues, alliances, and hired bravos must be first drummed off 
the field. We need no such help. Why should Protestantism? 
To be forced to call in such vile, discreditable aid, or to toler- 
ate their presence, looks very much like showing the white fea- 
ther at the start. Off with them, or your honor is lost! 

In the language of the National League itself language ver- 
bally honest but to be condemned as hypocritical in its mouth 
by all the methods it has resorted to in order to gain Protes- 
tant ascendency 

" In this country denominational advantages should be gained 
and triumphs should be won by moral suasion, not by legisla- 
tive influence, or by an appeal to political majorities." 






A VIEW FROM THE VALLEY SUGGESTS A WATCH-TOWER COLD, GRIM, AND DEFIANT. 



STARVED ROCK. 
BY REV. FRANK J. O'REILLY. 

HEN the early landmarks of the church in the 
United States come to be fully outlined few 
will be found of more peculiar interest, none 
surely more unique in setting, more picturesque 
in background, than Starved Rock. The very 
name now begets an interest which research, however prolonged, 
fails to exhaust. Religious and military annals each give the 
VOL. LVIII. 32 



474 STARVED ROCK. [Jan. 

historic spot names which time seems to have forgotten in the 
interest of its present and suggestive one. As if human nature 
were ever loath to part with memories of brave deeds and noble 
daring even when such are to be chronicled of savage tribes ; 
for they at times rise to an appreciation of what, to them at 
least, is home, and are willing to stand between it and the ruth- 
less invader. Whatever else Thermopylae may convey, it will 
always stand for the bravery of the Spartan band who there 
asked for burial place rather than their country be encroached 
upon. Balaklava can never again tell so interesting a story as 
" the wild charge of the Light Brigade." 

Little wonder, then, when a fair September day, 1673, saw 
Pere Marquette, Joliet, five oarsmen, and two Indian interpre- 
ters forcing their way up the stream now known as the Illinois 
river little wonder when they came suddenly upon the great 
Illinois town, La Vantum, situated near the present site of Old 
Utica, the Indians, who never before had seen the face of white 
man, were quick to believe them from unseen worlds sent for 
wrathful purposes by the Great Manitou. Measurably disabused 
of false impressions, the wampum displayed by Joliet, with the 
pipe of peace in one hand and a small cross in the other, Pere 
Marquette approached to tell the Indians of Him who first 
brought peace on earth to men of good will. The preaching^ 
truly responsive to the apostolic injunction of teaching all na- 
tions, was not without early and lasting fruit. Chassagoac, the 
head chief of the Illinois Indians, continued in the faith till 
death, in 1714. A large mound, back of the town of Old Utica, 
still marks his resting-place ; and a life-sized portrait showing 
him to have been a fine specimen of physical and mental man- 
hood is among the interesting collections of the Jesuits claiming 
the attention of the western traveller at Rouen, France. 

FIRST MISSION IN THE GREAT WEST. 

In the spring of 1675 Marquette returned with two compan- 
ions. The warm welcome extended to him by Chassagoac and 
his five hundred inferior chiefs was a bright augury for the 
work of the cross. The sequel proves how the signs of augury 
did not fail. At Marquette's suggestion the Indians tore down 
the temple to the god of war and erected in its stead the chapel 
of the Immaculate Conception, a name which he had already 
given to the Mississippi River, a name, too a link in the long 
chain of traditional evidence is it not ? showing how general 
then, and tender, was the belief in the dogma of spotless con- 



476 STARVED ROCK. [Jan., 

ception, which upwards of two centuries later found its way into 
the realm of fixed belief. Easter day witnessed him telling the 
new converts of the fruits of the Resurrection. His stay, how- 
ever, was destined to be brief : worn out by zeal and exposure, 
he felt the end coming. Desiring to return to Mackinac, he 
called his spiritual children about him and tearfully told them 
his race was run. His work was ended ; at best only a few 
days remained to him. How reluctantly the Indians parted 
with him and how tenderly they cared for him is evidenced by 
the journey of five hundred of them as far as Lake Michigan. 
On the eastern shore of this great body of water, not yet hav- 
ing reached their journey's end, in May, 1675, departed the spirit 
of one whose thirty-eight years show life to consist not so much 
of length of years as of wealth of deed, and of whose memory 
a grateful country, now awakening to an appreciation of her 
heroes, will yet bear fitting, permanent testimony. 

La Vantum the Indian for a place of importance, capital of 
a tribe was given to the great Illinois town by the French and 
half-breeds at Peoria. The Jesuits and early explorers speak of 
it as the great Illinois town, where chiefs and warriors from a 
distance were wont to meet in council. Joliet called the place 
Kaskaskia; hence the confusion occasionally arising when refer- 
ence is made to the place which now bears that name. Here 
lived, at different times, from eight to twenty thousand Indians. 
The town stood on the site of Old Utica, although some anti- 
quarians mistakingly locate it near Buffalo Rock, an eminence 
seven miles to the north-east known to later history as Fort Des 
Miamis. From the discovery of Joliet and Marquette we note 
the lapse of nearly a hundred years until the last of the Illinois 
tribe, taking refuge on Fort St. Louis and succumbing only 
after a most dauntless fight, have left us the memorable story 
of Starved Rock. 

LA SALLE AND TONTI. 

Late in the year 1679 La Vantum was visited by La Salle, 
the explorer whose name is written everywhere throughout the 
great West. We see and read of him in every enterprise until 
his cruel, untimely death in the wilds of Texas. The Jesuits 
Hennepin, Gabriel, and Zenobe were among the visitors here ; 
and Tonti, a name connected with all the memories of this re- 
gion where his remains have long since rested. 

Tonti is an historical synonyme for deathless devotion to a 
leader. u The finest fact," remarks Mrs. Catherwood, " in the 



1 8 9 4-] 



STARVED ROCK. 



477 



Norman explorer's career is the devotion he commanded in 
Henri de Tonti. No stupid dreamer, no ruffian at heart, no be- 
trayer of friendship, no mere blundering woodsman as La Salle 
has been outlined by his enemies could have bound to himself 
a man like Tonti. The words of this friend and the words this 
friend has left on record thus honor La Salle. And we, who like 
courage and steadfastness and gentle courtesy in men, owe much 
honor which has never been paid to Henri de Tonti." While 




ITS SIDES OF GRAY SANDSTONE. 



strolling through the Louvre, at Paris, a few years ago, the 
writer happened to find himself gazing intently upon a figure 
unique, tall, graceful. Some artistic hand, some sympathetic 
mind, mused I, has made the country of his adoption treasure 
up the memory of one of the half-dozen men whose names 
are linked not only with the history of Starved Rock but with 
the opening up of the great West. Beneath that picture were 
written these simple words : " Henri de Tonti, la Voyageur des 
Amerique." 



478 STARVED ROCK. [Jan. 

FIRST COLONY IN THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. 

Fort St. Louis, Rock Fort, Le Rocher are names synony- 
mous with the subject of our meagre sketch, whose peculiar 
surroundings, favorable to defence, made it occupy a position 
unique and distinctive in the early Western explorations. A 
natural fortress, like some impregnable castle overlooking the 
Rhine, sullen and perpendicular it rises from the water's edge. 
A deep chasm separates it from the neighboring cliffs on the 
east. The view from the valley, showing three sides of gray 
sandstone, suggests a watch-tower cold, grim, defiant. To-day 
its summit is covered by occasional tufts of grass, straggling 
wild flower, growth of cedar, with just a hint of ivy creeping 
over the edges as if to preserve it from the blasts, which seem- 
ingly, however, have made little impression upon it. Stands it 
conscious of the distinction, one thinks, of being the most pic- 
turesque, the most romantic, the most historic spot in the ex- 
plorations of the mighty West. 

Upon the rock as early as 1682 La Salle built the fort 
around which gathered the first colony in the Mississippi val- 
ley. Here journeyed Allouez ; in 1692 came Sebastian Rasle, 
whose brutal martyr-fate upon the Kennebec remains the 
disgrace of early New England. Father James Gravier, suc- 
ceeding Rasle, built a chapel within the fort just eighteen years 
after Marquette had established the mission of the Immaculate 
Conception at La Vantum, distant three-fourths of a mile to 
the north-west. The Jesuit Charlevoix, who visited this locality 
in 1721, tells of the chapel being in ruins: it was destroyed by 
fire three years previous. The fort which La Salle and his 
forty soldiers built and placed under the protection of the 
French flag stood thirty-six years, and the colony dwelling there 
was named Louisiana in honor of Louis XIV. In 1683 La 
Salle, leaving the fort in command of Tonti, sailed for France ; 
thence to the mouth of the Mississippi, whither in an unknown 
spot his remains still lie unburied. Twice, indeed, did the 
faithful Tonti go in search of his master to bear back the body 
to the Rock, at whose feet some thirty-three years later, broken 
in health and fortune, he himself was destined to find last resting- 
place. 

THE ROCK OF REFUGE. 

We again look to the rock in 1769. In a passionate 
moment Kineboo, chief of the Illinois Indians, stabbed Pontiac. 
The chief of the Ottawas was a man whose strong personality 




FRENCH CANON, IN THE REAR OF STARVED ROCK. 



480 STARVED ROCK. [Jan. 

made him a leader, not merely among his own tribe but of all who 
yearned for a guiding force. History rightfully calls him the 
greatest of the North American Indians. Over his dead body 
vengeance was vowed. War, not of conquest but unto exter- 
mination, was declared. The Miamis, Kickapoos, Shawnees, 
Chippewas, and remnant tribes which had fought under Pon- 
tiac came forward to avenge his death. The villages of the 
Illinois were destroyed, their property carried off. La Vantum 
alone remained. Within it were gathered ten thousand souls, a 
fifth of whom being warriors. Throwing up fortifications on 
three sides, the river protecting them in the rear, the Illinois 
now made their last stand in defence of home. Thus passed 
the summer. The early autumn grew apace, when in the midst 
of festivities the result of seeming security the united enemy 
suddenly bore down upon them. A hand-to-hand conflict en- 
sued ; those who scaled the new-made fortifications fell within 
the breastworks. Seeing the fate of their companions in arms, 
the avengers of Pontiac retreated to Buffalo Rock. Repulsion 
served to madden them the more ; eagerly awaiting the dawn, 
they renewed the battle. For twelve hours furiously on went 
the contest. Night gathered to witness its continuance, till at 
length, interrupted by a blinding storm, the Illinois, quickly 
launching their canoes, crossed the river and ascended the rock 
where Tonti with his hundred and fifty followers had once put 
to flight two thousand Iroquois warriors. History, sad to relate, 
was not destined to repeat itself. True, like Schamyl on Ghu- 
nib's height, ninety years later, they looked serenely down up- 
on the enemy. But what traitors or new-found paths could not 
do, hunger and thirst wrought. Twelve days of siege sufficed 
to witness the twelve hundred souls who climbed the rock die 
of famine. Rather than yield, they nursed hunger and thirst. 
Mindful of this steadfast deed, even if in savage warfare, 
thoughtful sentiment has journeyed to the scene and written 
clear and large the words : Starved Rock. 

Matson in his Pioneers of Illinois says : " Whoever will take 
the trouble to examine the soil on Starved Rock will find in 
many places a peculiar dusty sediment among the dirt showing 
decomposed animal matter, which without doubt is the re- 
mains of human beings." " I have," he adds, " visited the 
catacombs belonging to different Italian cities, also those around 
Jerusalem, and walked over the dust made from the remains of 
human beings, and find the sediment among the dirt on Starved 
Rock to be of the same kind." 




THE MOST ROMANTIC SPOT IN THE WEST. 



482 STARVED ROCK. [Jan., 

THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH. 

The same fort-like walls remain, the same cedars. A hun- 
dred and fifty yards to the south the traveller is still pointed 
out the high knoll called Devil's Nose, where after the tragedy 
of Starved Rock the Indians, connecting its memories with the 
voice of the storm, thought they could hear the Prince of 
Darkness freeing his nostrils. Eastwood across a deep chasm 
is a high cliff known as Maiden's Leap. The name perpetuates 
the hopeless deed of an Indian maiden who, crossed in love, 
sought the yawning gulf below. All else has undergone a change. 
Where once starvation dwelt, the tourists flock to be refreshed. 
The enterprising summer-hotel man is loath to leave the rock 
longer to the past. The great meadow to the north is occu- 
pied by farms in close succession. The cement mills and 
potteries of the busy little town of Utica tell how accurately 
Joutel in 1714 described the mineral worth of the surrounding 
country. 

This, then, is the historic rock of the Mississippi Valley. 
At its base still laps the rippling waters abreast whose flow 
Pere Marquette all whose paths were peace first went, scarce- 
ly dreaming even he in his great prophetic heart, which never 
quailed nor lost hope amid the scenes of primeval nature, that 
within the borders of that State, to a great city by the unsalted 
seas, two centuries later, would come the envying stranger from 
all the climes come to ask recognition from the newer civiliza- 
tion of which this early missionary was the veritable " hewer 
toward the light." Standing here to-day under the stars and 
stripes one beholds the setting sun making luminous the gilded 
crosses of the church of many nationalities, whose industry has 
made the valley a smiling plenty, and is content to forget the 
shout of " Vive le roi" which in the past re-echoed from the 
height, for in its stead we have a Union strong, a people free. 
Recently standing there, however, the writer could hardly sup- 
press the wish, if fuller details be now wanting, that before the 
modern spirit has entirely invaded it some South Sea idyller 
may come to perpetuate in fitting phrase the half-forgotten 
memories of Starved Rock. 

Peoria, III. 



1 894-] 



A GREAT FORWARD MOVEMENT. 



483 



A GREAT FORWARD MOVEMENT. 




BY ALICE T. TOOMY. 

OCTAL settlements are an outgrowth, of the real- 
ization that all classes of society are interdepen- 
dent. Want, suffering, or injustice prevailing in 
the lowest stratum of society will invariably make 
its results felt in the uppermost crust. The spread 
of the spirit of democracy has made it evident to practical ob- 
servers that we need not only to believe in the brotherhood of 
man, but also to live our belief. If we would save souls we 
must treat the bodies as not beneath or unworthy our social 
contact. Political democracy, with moral and social ostracism, 
can bring but little elevation to the masses. The enfranchise- 
ment of contact with 
higher thoughts and con- 
ditions will do more to 
make good citizens than 
ven the ballot itself. 
The first notable social 
ttlement was establish- 
ed at Toynbee Hall, Lon- 
don. At this place some 
ung Oxford graduates 
termined to devote not 
ly their substance but 
emselves to the moral 
nd social elevation of 
the poor. These young 
men built a large house 
in one of the most de- 
graded districts of the 
great city of London, and 
invited the poor of the 
neighborhood of all ages 
and nationalities to pass 
their spare time within its walls. Here a coffee-room, gymna- 
sium, debating club, etc., offered recreation and instruction, as 
well as refreshment, to all who chose to visit its hospitable 



in 



do 

i 

an 






THE GREAT PRINCIPLE OF "ALL FOR EACH AND EACH 
FOR ALL" is THE SECRET OF HARMONY. 



484 



A GREAT FORWARD MOVEMENT. 



[Jan., 



quarters. The success of this method of helping the poor was 
so quickly manifest in good order and law-abidingness, where 
disturbance and even danger to life had been the rule, that 
social settlements soon sprang up elsewhere. 

The first social settlement in America was begun some years 
ago in Chicago by Miss Jane Addams, a lady of great refine- 
ment and culture, who 
has inspired several other 
noble women to devote 
their lives to the moral 
and social elevation of 
the needy. Describing 
the motives which con- 
stitute the subjective 
pressure towards social 
settlements Miss Addams 
writes : " The first is the 
desire to make the entire 
social organism demo- 
cratic, to extend demo- 
cracy beyond its political 
expression ; the second is 
the impulse to share the 
race life, and to bring 
as much as possible of 
social energy and the 
accumulation of civili- 
zation to those portions 
of the race which have 
little ; the third springs 
from a certain renaissance of Christianity, a movement toward 
its early humanitarian aspects." Miss Addams' description 
of this social settlement will find many of its needs dupli- 
cated in all large cities. Hull House is a roomy old residence 
whose parlors are open for varied instruction and amusement. 
One ample room receives a weekly assemblage of working-men 
to debate on the current topics of the day. One evening each 
week is here devoted to the entertainment of Germans, when 
whole families assemble and recreate, using their native tongue 
and amusements. On another evening the Italians meet and 
recreate in a similar way. Attached to Hull House is a restau- 
rant and coffee-house, where deliciously cooked food is sold at 
cost price either to be used on the premises or carried home. 




THE CLUB is COMPOSED OF WOMEN OF DIFFERENT 
RELIGIOUS BELIEFS. 



1894-] A GREAT FORWARD MOVEMENT. 485 

Attached to the settlement is a day-nursery and kindergarten, 
where working mothers may leave their children to be well cared 
for and taught while they labor in the family support. In con- 
nection with this is a mothers' club which meets weekly for 
discussion, and to receive lessons in hygiene, domestic economy, 
and the care of children. There are classes of instruction at Hull 
House in every department of knowledge from the kindergarten 
up to college extension. Public baths and a gymnasium are 
open at different hours to boys and girls, men and women. Per- 
mission has been obtained to fence in a large vacant lot near by, 
which, covered with a deep layer of sand, is provided with 
swings, seesaws, climbing poles, and swinging rings ; thus con- 
stituting a delightful playground for the youth of the vicinity. 
A branch of the Free Public Library has been secured for Hull 
House, to which is attached the usual reading-room and supply 
of newspapers from many countries. 

These efforts at moral and social elevation are responded to 
as the dry earth welcomes and absorbs the rain. Good order 
and self-control mark all its assemblies. Many a strike and griev- 
ous injustice has been averted by the influence of these gentle, 
noble women of Hull House. Nor are they unaided in their 

rork. Many men of culture and social distinction devote their 
evenings and best efforts to teaching and entertaining this hith- 
jrto neglected class of humanity. 

Many guilds and organizations of working-women have 
lad their origin in Hull House. Out of the moral strength 
gained by organization has developed a co-operative home 
:omposed of nearly fifty young women who live under 
me roof in harmony and comfort. This " Jane Club " 
begun by an energetic young Catholic woman, Miss 

[ary Kenney, who with a few companions commenced the 
:lub in a flat of seven rooms ; they have gradually added 
:o their numbers and space until they now use nearly all 

ic flats in two adjoining houses. They employ a cook and 
:hambermaid, and elect their officers, namely, a president, 
r ice-president, steward, secretary, treasurer, and librarian, from 
their own body every six months. The president and steward 
form the house committee, buying and paying bills. Every 
week there is a business meeting of the whole, when all 
complaints and dissatisfactions are discussed and submitted to 
the household, thereby silencing the usual grumbling; finances 
and all family rules are considered by all. They have nice par- 
lors and dining-room, piano, books, pictures, all the appliances 



486 



A GREAT FORWARD MOVEMENT. 



[Jan, 



of ease and comfort, well-furnished bed-rooms accommodating 
from one to four persons according to size, bath-rooms on each 
floor, and they keep an excellent table, all at the cost of three 
dollars a week each. The club is composed of women of dif- 
ferent religious belief, but the majority are Catholics. So well 
has the lesson of respect for the rights of others been learned 
through organization that, as courtesy to the Catholic mem- 
bers, they have con- 
cluded that meat 
should not be cooked 
in the house on Fri- 
day. This rule was 
made on the hygienic 
basis that a total 
change of diet was de- 
sirable on one day in 
the week. On the 
other hand, in defer- 
ence to the prejudices 
of some of the inmates, 
it was resolved that no 
dance music should be 
played on Sunday. 
This great principle 
of all for each and 
each for all is the se- 
cret of the harmony 

of this co-operative 
THE CLUB WAS BEGUN BY ENERGETIC CATHOLIC WOMEN. , 

home. 

The purpose of this paper is to show that, with similar 
elements, such co-operative homes can be established everywhere. 
Most of the members of the " Jane Club " work in factories, 
but are affiliated with labor unions. It is the consciousness of 
the support of organization that gives them their moral stamina 
resulting in the harmony of fair play to all. This dignity of 
self-help and self-government dispels the theory of the need of 
matrons or patrons to manage homes for working-women. The 
woman who can, during eight to ten hours daily, so conduct 
herself as to protect her morals against factory inspectors, fore- 
men, and shop-walkers of doubtful or of no morality, ought in 
the common sense of things be able to take care of herself in 
her home, be it large or small, without guardianship or custo- 
dian. Statistics tell us that there are one hundred thousand 




1 894-] 



A GREAT FORWARD MOVEMENT. 



487 



women earning their living in New York alone. Of these more 
than one-half are without a family home. What a boon and 
missionary work it would be to show and teach them that by 
combination and the exercise of good sense they can secure for 
themselves comfortable homes and kindly companionship at a 
cost of three dollars a week! 

Two essentials are needed for establishing such homes : a sum 
of money obtained by loan, without interest, payable in small in- 







THEY HAVE NICE PARLORS. 

>tallments, wherewith to purchase furniture and household outfit, 
md a nucleus of club members, composed of women belonging 
to labor leagues, who have acquired the moral backbone of or- 
ganization. The money ought to be easily obtainable, because 
every city where such homes are needed there are to be found 
good men and women able and willing to promote true inde- 
pendence. Such a loan would involve no further gift than the 
loss of the interest on the sum loaned. Payment would be 
guaranteed by a lien on the furniture. Reduction of rent 
might be secured through philanthropy or the sense of cer- 
tainty of payment and of good care of the premises. Given 
the money to buy the outfit for housekeeping and women 
trained in harmony through unity of interest, and this sys- 
tem of co-operative homes at three dollars a week can be- 
come general throughout our country. What women have 



488 



A GREAT FORWARD MOVEMENT. 



[Jan., 



succeeded in doing in Chicago can be done anywhere else 
with similar conditions. In order to secure the completest 
economy it is important that the person who cooks should be 
a club member. Thus her interests become identical with the 
general need of carefulness. It is well known to all housekeepers 
that the most dangerous economic leakage starts in the kitchen. 
Since cooking is coming to be recognized as an art there need 
be no sense of inferiority because the club membership is ful- 
filled over the cook-stove. Carefulness in purchasing as well as 
judicious estimate of quantity of supply are necessary to balanc- 
ing accounts. The suggestion that members should not take on 
their plates more than they are sure to consume constitutes a 
large element of saving. With the vast increase of artificial 
wants, and the dense ignorance of domestic economics, we are 
being driven to becoming a nation of boarding-houses, where 
home-life is unknown and, worse still, undesired. It would seem, 
therefore, that every success like the "Jane Club" which offers 
the elements of home-life in unity of interests and purpose 
should be known and promulgated by all lovers of humanity. 







WILLIAM HAZLITT: 

A CHARACTER STUDY. 
BY LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY. 

I. 

HE titles of William Hazlitt's first books bear 
witness to the ethic spirit in which he began 
life. From his beloved father, an Irish dissent- 
ing minister, he inherited his unworldliness, his 
obstinacy, his love of inexpedient truth, and 
is interest in the well-being of his fellow-creatures. Bred in 
air of seriousness and integrity, the child of twelve an- 
nounced by post that he had spent " a very agreeable day " 
reading one hundred and sixty pages of Priestley and hearing 
two good sermons. A year later he appeared, under a Greek 
signature, in the Shrewsbury Chronicle, protesting against secta- 
rian injustice : an infant herald in the great modern movement 
towards free play. The roll of the portentous periods must 
have made his father weep for pride and diversion. William's 
young head was full of moral philosophy and jurisprudence, 
and he had what is the top of luxury for one of his tempera- 
ment : perfect license of mental growth. Alone with his pa- 
VOL. LVIII. 33 



490 WILLIAM HAZLITT : A CHARACTER STUDY. [Jan., 

rents (one of whom was always a student and a recluse), and 
for the most part without the school-fellows who are likely to 
adjust the perilous effects of books, he became choked with 
theories, and thought more of the needful repeal of the Test 
Act than of his breakfast. He found his way at fourteen into 
the Unitarian College in Hackney, but eventually broke from 
his traces, saving his fatherland from the spectacle of a unique 
theologian. During his same year of revolt, 1795, he saw the 
pictures at Burleigh House, and began to live. Desultory but 
deep study, at home and near home, took up the time before 
his first leisurely choice of a profession. His lonely breedings, 
his early love for Miss Railton, his four enthusiastic months at 
the Louvre, his silent friendship with Wordsworth and with 
Coleridge ; the country walks, the pages and prints, the glad 
tears of his youth, these were the fantastic tutors which formed 
him ; nor had he ever much respect for any other kind of train- 
ing. 

BOOKS IN THE RUNNING BROOKS. 

The lesson he prized most was the lesson straight from 
life and nature. He comments, tartly enough, on the sophism 
that observation in idleness, or the growth of bodily skill and 
social address, or the search for the secret of power over people 
is not in anywise to be accounted as learning. Montaigne, who 
was in Hazlitt's ancestral line, was of this mind : " Ce quon 
sgait droictement, on en dispose sans regarder au patron, sans 
tourner les yeulx vers son livre" Hazlitt insists, too, that 
learned men are but " the cisterns, not the fountain-heads, of know- 
ledge." He hated the school-master on principle ; and has 
said as witty things of him as Mr. Oscar Wilde. Yet his little 
portrait-study of the mere book-worm, in the Conversation of 
Authors, has a never-to-be-forgotten sweetness. His mental nur- 
ture was a noble one ; it was of his own choosing ; it fitted him 
for the work he had to do. Like Marcus Aurelius, he congratu- 
lated himself that he did not waste his youth " chopping logic 
and scouring the heavens." Hazlitt once entered upon an 
" Inquiry whether the Fine Arts are promoted by Academies "; 
the answer, from him, is readily anticipated. 

" If arts and schools reply," 
he might have added and it is a wonder that he did not 

" Give arts and schools the lie !" 
Mr. Matthew Arnold left a famous essay on the same topic, 



1894-] WILLIAM HAZLITT : A CHARACTER STUDY. 491 

and some readers recollect distinctly that his verdict, for Eng- 
land, was in the affirmative ; whereas it was no such thing.. 
Now, no man can conceive of Hazlitt allowing himself to be 
misunderstood, especially upon so vital a subject. He pas- 
tured ; he was not trained ; and therefore he would have yoir 
and your children's children scoff at universities. Indeed, 
though the boy's lack of discipline told on him all through 
life, his reader regrets nothing else which a university could 
have given him except, perhaps, milder manners. Hazlitt was 
perfectly aware that he had too little general knowledge ; but 
general knowledge he did not consider so good a tool for his 
self-set task in life as a persistent, passionate study of one or 
two subjects. Again, he is pleased to remark, with bluntness, 
that if he had learned more, he would have thought less. (Per- 
haps he was the friend cited by Elia, who gave up reading to 
improve his originality ! He was certainly useful to Elia in 
delicate and curious ways: a whole ore of rich eccentricity 
ready for that sweet philosopher's working.) Hear him pro- 
nouncing upon himself at the very end : " I have, then, given 
proof of some talent and more honesty ; if there is haste and 
rant of method, there is no commonplace, nor a line that licks 
ic dust. If I do not appear to more advantage, I at least 
>pear such as I am." The complaint may be made that a 
:mark such as this is rhetoric and not history. But divorce 
lat remark and the truth of it from Hazlitt, and there is na 
[azlitt left. 

LOVE OF INDIVIDUALISM. 

He stood for individualism. He wrote from what was, in 
the highest degree for his purpose, a full mind, and with 
that blameless conscious superiority which a full mind must 
needs feel in this empty world. His whole intellectual stand 
is taken on the positive and concrete side of things. He 
has a fine barbaric cocksureness ; he dwells not with althoughs 
and neverthelesses, like Mr. Symonds and Mr. Saintsbury. " I 
am not one of those," he says concerning Edmund Kean's first 
appearance in London, " who, when they see the sun breaking 
from behind a cloud, stop to inquire whether it is the moon !" 
And he takes enormous interest in his own promulgation, be- 
cause it is inevitably not only what he thinks, but what he has 
long thought. He delivers an opinion with an air proper to a 
host who is also master of his own vineyard, and can give name 
and date of every flagon he unseals. 



492 WILLIAM HAZLITT : A CHARACTER STUDY. [Jan., 

HIS ELIZABETHAN LECTURES. 

His conservative habit, however, seemed to teach him every- 
thing by inference. In 1821, familiar with none of the elder 
dramatists save Shakspere, he borrowed their folios, and shut 
himself up for six weeks at Winterslow Hut on Salisbury Plain. 
He returned to town steeped in the sixteenth century, and 
with the beautiful and authoritative Lectures written. Apprecia- 
tion of the great Elizabethans is common enough now ; seventy 
years ago it was the business only of adventurers and pioneers. 
Here is a critic indeed who, without a suspicion of audacity, 
can arise as a stranger to arraign the Arcadia, and " shake hands 
with Signer Orlando Friscobaldo as the oldest acquaintance " 
he has. Who is ripe for a like feat? 

" Oh, when shall Englishmen 
With such acts fill a pen ? " 

The thing, exceptional as it was, proves that William Hazlitt 
knew his resources. His devoted friend Patmore attributes his 
" unpremeditated art," terse, profound, original, and always 
moving at full speed, to two facts : " first, that he never, by 
choice, wrote on any topic or question in which he did not, 
for some reason or other, feel a deep personal interest ; and 
secondly, because on all questions on which he did so feel, he 
had thought, meditated, and pondered, in the silence and soli- 
tude of his own heart, for years and years before he ever con- 
templated doing more than thinking of them." Unlike a dis- 
tinguished historian, who, according to Horace Walpole, " never 
understood anything until he had written of it," Hazlitt brought 
to his every task of appreciation a mind violently made up, and 
a vocation for special pleading which nothing could withstand. 

HIS LOVE FOR THE HIDDEN. 

He was continuously drawn into the by-way, and ever in 
search of the accidental, the occult ; he lusted, like Sir 
Thomas Browne, to find the great meanings of minor things. 
The " pompous big-wigs " of his day, as Thackeray called them, 
hated his informality and his enthusiasm. He had, within pro- 
scribed bounds, an exquisite and affectionate curiosity, like that 
of the Renaissance. " The invention of a fable is to me the 
most enviable exertion of human genius : it is the discovery of 
a truth to which there is no clue, and which, when once found 
out, can never be forgotten." " If the world were good for noth- 
ing else, it would be a fine subject for speculation." It is his 



1894-] WILLIAM HAZLITT : A CHARACTER STUDY. 493 

deliberate dictum that it were "worth a life" to sit down by an 
Italian wayside, and work out the reason why the Italian supre- 
macy in art has always been along the line of color, not along 
the line of form. 

A WONDERFUL MEMORY. 

He depended so entirely upon his memory that those who 
knew him best say that he never took notes, neither in gallery, 
library, nor theatre ; yet his inaccuracies are few and slight, 
and he must have secured by this habit a prodigious free- 
dom and luxury in the act of writing. He would rather 
stumble than walk according to rule ; and he was so pleasantly 
beguiled with some of his own images (that, for instance, of 
immortality the bride of the youthful spirit, and of the proces- 
sion of camels seen across the distance of three thousand 
years) that he reiterates them upon every fit occasion. He 
cites, twice or thrice, the same passages from the Elizabethans. 
He is a masterly quoter, and lingers, like a suitor, upon the 
borders of old poesy ; but one of his favorite metaphors " like 
the tide which flows on to the Propontic and knows no ebb " is 
>rosody and fatalism purely of his own making. 

AS A PAINTER. 

The events of his life count for so little that they are hard- 
ly worth recording. He was born into a high-principled and 
intelligent family at Mitre Lane, Maidstone, Kent, on the tenth 
of April, in the year 1778. His infancy was passed there and 
in Ireland, his boyhood in New England and in Shropshire. 
Prior to a long visit to Paris, where he made some noble copies 
of Titian, he came in 1802 to Bloomsbury, where his elder 
brother John, an advanced liberal in politics and an excellent 
miniature-painter, had a studio ; and here he worked at art for 
several joyous years, finally abandoning it for literature. The 
portraits he painted, utterly lacking in grace, are fraught with 
power and meaning ; few of these are extant, thanks to the 
fading and cracking pigments of the modern school. The old 
Manchester woman in shadow, done in 1803, and the head of 
his father, dating from a twelvemonth later two things to 
which Hazlitt makes memorable reference in his essays are no 
longer distinguishable, save to a very patient eye, upon the 
blackened canvas in his grandson's possession. The picture of 
the child Hartley Coleridge, begun at the Lakes in 1802, has 
perished from the damp; that of Charles Lamb in the Vene- 



494 WILLIAM HAZLITT : A CHARACTER STUDY. [Jan., 

tian doublet survives since 1804, in its serious and primitive 
browns, as the best-known example of an English artist not in 
the catalogues. Its historic value, however, is not superior to 
that of two portraits of Hazlitt himself : one a study in strong 
light and shade, with a wreath upon the head, now very 
much time-eaten ; and another representing him at about the 
age of twenty-five, with a three-quarters front face turned 
towards the right shoulder, which appeals to the spectator like 
spoken truth. It is all but void of the beauty which charac- 
terizes the striking Bewick head (especially as retouched and 
reproduced in Mr. Alexander Ireland's invaluable Hazlitt book 
of 1889) no less than John Hazlitt's charming miniatures of 
William at five and at thirteen ; and therefore can deal in no 
self-flattery. It is fortunate that we have from the hand which 
knew him best the lank, odd, reserved youth in whom great 
possibilities were brewing ; thought and will predominate in this 
portrait, and it expresses the sincere soul. It would be idle to 
criticise the technique of a work disowned by its author. Haz- 
litt had, as we know from much testimony, a most interesting 
and perplexing face, with the magnificent brow almost belied by 
shifting eyes, and the petulance and distrust of the mouth and 
chin ; but a face prepossessing on the whole from the clear 
marble of his complexion, remarkable in a land of ruddy 
cheeks. His lonely and peculiar life lent him its own hue ; the 
eager look of one indeed a sufferer, but with the light full up- 
on him of visions and of dreams : 

Chi pallido si fece sotto lombra 

Si di Parnaso, o bevve in sua cisterna f 

In 1798 Hazlitt had his immortal meeting at Wem with 
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He described himself at this period 
as "dumb, inarticulate, helpless, like a worm by the wayside," 
striving in vain to put on paper the thoughts which oppressed 
him, shedding tears of vexation at his inability, and feeling 
happy if in eight years he could write as many pages. The 
abiding influence of his First Poet he has acknowledged in 
an imperishable chapter. For a long while he still kept in " the 
o'erdarkened ways " of Malthus and Tucker, or in the shado\v, 
a dear one to him, of Hobbes; but in 1817 the flood-gates 
broke, the pure current gushed out ; and in the " Characters of 
Shakspeare's Plays " we have the primal pledge of Hazlitt as we 
know him, " such as had never been before him, such as will 
never be again." 



1894-] WILLIAM HAZLITT : A CHARACTER STUDY. 495 

LECTURER, REPORTER, AND CRITIC. 

In London, as soon as he had abandoned painting, he became 
a parliamentary reporter, and began to lecture on the English 
philosophers and metaphysicians. Later, he furnished his famous 
dramatic criticisms to the Morning Chronicle, the Champion, the 
Examiner, and the Times, and acted as home editor of the Liberal. 
He married on May-day of 1808, at St. Andrew's, Holborn, Miss 
Sarah Stoddart, who owned the property near Salisbury where he 
afterwards spent melancholy years alone. He fulfilled one human 
duty perfectly, for he loved and reared his son. A most singular 
infatuation for the unlovely daughter of his landlady ; a second 
inauspicious marriage, in 1824, with a Mrs. Isabella Bridgwater ; 
a prolonged journey on the Continent ; the failure of the pub- 
lishers of his great Life of Napoleon, which thus in his needful 
days brought him no competence ; a long illness, heroically 
borne, and a burial in the parish churchyard of St. Anne's, un- 
der a headstone raised, in a romantic remorse after an estrange- 
ment, by Richard Wells, the author of Joseph and his Brethren 
these round out the meagre details of Hazlitt's life. He died 
in the arms of his son and of his old friend Charles Lamb (who 
lad been his groomsman, " like to have been turned out several 
times during the ceremony " for his laughter, twenty-two years 
before) on the i8th of September, 1830, at 6 Frith Street, Soho. 

MARRIAGE A FAILURE. 

His domestic experiences, indeed, had been nearly as extra- 
ordinary as Shelley's. Sarah Walker, of No. 9 Southampton 
Buildings, is a sort of burlesque counterpart of that other 
"spouse, sister, angel," Emilia Viviani. Nothing in literary his- 
tory is much funnier than Mr. Hazlitt's kind assistance to Mrs. 
Hazlitt in securing her divorce, going to visit her at Edinburgh, 
and supplying funds and advice over the tea-cups, while the 
process was pending, unless it be Shelley's ingenuous invitation 
to his deserted young wife to come and dwell for ever with 
himself and Mary! The silent dramatic withdrawal of the sec- 
ond Mrs. Hazlitt, the well-to-do relict of a colonel, who is hence- 
forth swallowed up in complete oblivion, is a feature whose 
like is missing in Shelley's romance. Events in Hazlitt's path 
were not many, and his inner calamities seem somehow subor- 
dinated to exterior workings. It is not too much to say that to 
the French Revolution and the white heat of hope it diffused 
over Europe he owed the very impetus within him, and fed 



496 WILLIAM HAZLITT : A CHARACTER STUDY. [Jan., 

with this new liberty his moral probity, his mental vigor, and 
his physical cheer. 

A VERY THIN CUTICLE. 

Hazlitt's erratic levees among coffee-house wits and politicians, 
his slack dress, his rich and fitful talk, his beautiful fierce head, 
go to make up any accurate impression of the man. Mr. P. G. 
Patmore has drawn him for us, a strange portrait from a steady 
hand: in certain moods "an effigy of silence," pale, anxious, 
emaciated, with an awful look ever and anon, like the thunder- 
cloud in a clear heaven, sweeping over his features with an in- 
describable still fury. He was so much at the mercy of an ex- 
citable and extra-sensitive organization, that an accidental failure 
to return his salute upon the street, or, above all, the gaze of a 
servant as he entered the house, plunged him into an excess of 
wrath and misery. Full of generosity at other times, he would, 
under the stress of a fancied hurt, say and write malicious 
things about those he most honored. He must have been a 
general thorn in the flesh, for he had no tact whatever. " I love 
Henry," said one of Thoreau's friends, " but I cannot like him." 
Shy, splenetic, with Dryden's " down look," readier to give than 
to exchange, Hazlitt was a riddle to strangers' eyes. His deep 
voice seemed at variance with his gliding step, and his glance, 
bright but sullen ; his hand felt as if it were the limp, cold fin 
of a fish, and was an unlooked-for accompaniment to the fiery 
soul warring everywhere with darkness, and drenched in altru- 
ism. His habit of excessive tea-drinking, like Dr. Johnson's, was 
to keep down sad thoughts. For sixteen years before he died, 
from the day on which he formed his resolution, Hazlitt never 
touched spirits of any kind. 

II. 

With all this fever and heaviness in Hazlitt's blood, he had 
a hearty laugh, musical to hear. Haydon, in his exaggerated 
manner, reports an uncharitable conversation held with him once 
on the subject of Leigh Hunt in Italy, during which the two 
misconstruing critics, in their great glee, " made more noise than 
all the coaches, wagons, and carts outside in Piccadilly." His 
smile was singularly grave and sweet. Mrs. Shelley wrote, on 
coming back to England, in her widowhood, and finding him 
much changed : " His smile brought tears to my eyes ; it was 
like melancholy sunlight on a ruin." A man who sincerely laughs 
and smiles is somewhat less than half a cynic. If any there be 



1894-] WILLIAM HAZLITT: A CHARACTER STUDY. 497 

alive at this late hour who question the genuineness of Hazlitt's 
high spirits, they may be referred to the essay *' On Going a 
Journey," with the paean about "the gentleman in the parlor," 
in the finest emulation of Cowley ; but chiefly and constantly 
to " The Fight," with its lingering De Foe-like details, sprinkled, 
not in the least ironically, with gold-dust of Chaucer and the 
later poets : the rich-ringing, unique Fight, predecessor of Bor- 
row's famous burst about the "all tremendous bruisers " of " La- 
vengro "; and not to be matched in our peaceful literature save 
with the eulogy and epitaph of Jack Cavanagh, by the same 
hand. 

SOME ODD PARADOXES. 

Divers hints have been circulated, within sixty-odd years, 
that Mr. Hazlitt was a timid person ; also that he had no turn 
for jokes. These ingenious calumnies may be trusted to meet 
the fate of the Irish pagan fairies, small enough at the start, 
whose punishment it is to dwindle ever and ever away, and 
point a moral to succeeding generations. Hazlitt's paradoxes 
are not of malice prepense, like Mr. Oscar Wilde's ; they are 
the ebullitions both of pure fun and of the truest philosophy. 
The only way to be reconciled with old friends is to part with 
iem for good." " Goldsmith had the satisfaction of good-natur- 
lly relieving the necessities of others, and of being harassed to 
leath with his own." " Captain Burney had you at an advantage 
>y never understanding you." Scattered mention of " people 
live on their own estates and on other people's ideas "; 
>f Jeremy Bentham, who had been translated into French, 
when it was the greatest pity in the world that he had not 
>een translated into English "; of the Coleridge of prose, 
me of whose prefaces is " a masterpiece of its kind, having 
leither beginning, middle, nor end "; and even of the " singular 
animal," John Bull himself, since " being the beast he is has 
made a man of him ": these are no ill shots at the sarcastic. 
Congreve himself, with all his quicksilver wit, could not outgo 
Hazlitt on Thieves, videlicet : " Even a highwayman, in the 
way of trade, may blow out your brains ; but if he uses foul 
language at the same time, I shuld say he was no gentleman ! " 
How was it this same sense of humor, this fine-grained reticence, 
which wrote, nay, printed, in 1823, the piteous and ludicrous 
canticle of the goddess Sarah ? 



498 WILLIAM HAZLITT: A CHARACTER STUDY. [Jan., 

MENTAL AND BODILY PABULUM AT ONCE. 

Hazlitt was a great pedestrian from his boyhood on, and, 
like Goldsmith, a fair hand at the game of fives, which he played 
by the day. Wherever he was his pocket bulged with a book. 
It gave him keen pleasure to set down the hour, the place, the 
mood, and the weather of various ecstatic first readings. He 
became acquainted with Love for Love in a low wainscoted 
tavern parlor between Farnham and Alton, looking out upon a 
garden of larkspur, with a portrait of Charles II. crowning the 
chimney-piece ; in his father's house he fell across Tom Jones, 
"a child's Tom Jones, an innocent creature"; he bought Mil- 
ton and Burke at Shrewsbury, on the march ; he looked up 
from Mrs. Inchbald's Simple Story, when its pathos grew too 
poignant, to find " a summer shower dropping manna " on his 
head, and " an old crazy hand-organ playing ' Robin Adair'." 
And on April 10, 1798, his twentieth birthday, he sat down to 
a volume of the New Elo'ise, a book which kept its hold upon 
him, " at the inn of Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a 
cold chicken ! " The frank epicurean catalogue, as of equal 
spiritual and corporeal delight, is worth notice. 

AS A METAPHYSICIAN. 

Hazlitt would have set himself down, by choice, as a meta- 
physician. Up to the time when his Life of Napoleon was well 
in hand, he used to affirm that the anonymous Principles of 
Human Action, which he completed at twenty years of age, was 
his best work. He was rather proud, too, of the Characteristics 
tn the Manner of Rochefoucauld's Maxims, his one dreary and 
deliberate book, which contains a couple of inductions worthy 
of Pascal, some sophistries, and a vast number of the very pro- 
fessorisms which Hazlitt scouted. Maxims, indeed, are sown 
broadcast over his pages, which, according to Alison, are yet 
better to quote than to read ; but they gain by being in- 
cidental, and imbedded in the body of his fancies. His vein 
of original thought comes nowhere so perfectly into play 
as in its application to affairs. His pen is anything but ab- 
struse, 

" Housed in a dream, at distance from the kind." 

He did not recognize that to display his highest power he 
needed deeds and men, and their tangible outcome to be criti- 
cised. His preferences were altogether wed to the past. 



1894-] WILLIAM HAZLITT : A CHARACTER STUDY. 499 

LITERARY STYLE. 

His manner is essentially pictorial. His sketches of Cobbett, 
and of Northcote, in the Spirit of Obligations; of Johnson, 
in the Periodical Essayists ; of Sir Thomas Browne and Bishop 
Taylor ; and of Coleridge and Lamb, drawn more than once, 
with great power, from the life, will never be excelled. His 
philippic on the Spirit of Monarchy, or that on the Regal Char- 
acter, is a pure vitriol- flame, to scorch the necks of princes. 
His comments upon English and Continental types, if gathered 
from the necessarily promiscuous Notes of a Journey, would 
make a most diverting and illuminating duodecimo ; the se- 
vere analysis of the French is especially masterly. The Spirit of 
the Age, the Plain Speaker, the Northcote book, the English Comic 
Writers, and the noble and little-read Political Essays are 
packed with vital figures. This lavish accumulation of mate- 
rial, never put to use according to modern methods, must ap- 
pear to some as a collection of incomparable interest awaiting 
the broom and the hanging committee ; but until the end of 
time it will be a place of delight for the scholar and the 
lover of virtue. Hazlitt's genius for assortment and sense of 

Native values were not developed ; he was in nowise a con- 

:ructive critic. 

A SELF-DEPRECATORY EGOTIST. 

It is very difficult to be severe with William Hazlitt, who 
s so outspokenly severe with himself. Every stricture upon 
lim, as well as every defence to be urged for it, may be taken 
>ut of his own mouth. The Liber Amoris itself, as the best 
)irits have always discerned, illustrates the essential uprightness 
md innocence of his nature. His vindication is written large in 
Depth and Superficiality, in the Pleasures of Hating, in the Dis- 
advantage of Intellectual Superiority. His "true Hamlet" is as 
much a sketch of the author as is Newman's celebrated defini- 
tion of a gentleman. Hazlitt says a kind word for Dr. John- 
son's prejudices which covers and explains many of his own. 
Who can call him irritable, recalling the splendid indictment of 
merely selfish content, in the opening paragraphs of the essay 
on " Good Nature " ? Yet, with all his lofty and endearing quali- 
ties, he had a warped and soured mind, a constitutional dis- 
ability to find pleasure in persons or in conditions which were 
quiescent. He would have every one as gloomily vigilant and 
mettlesome as himself. His perfectly proper apostrophe to the 
lazy Coleridge at Highgate to " start up in his promised like- 



500 WILLIAM HAZLITT: A CHARACTER STUDY. [Jan., 

ness, and shake the pillared rottenness of the world," is some- 
what comic. Hazlitt's nerves never lost their tension ; to the 
last hour of his last sickness he was ready for a bout. Much 
of his personal grief arose from his refusal to respect facts as 
facts, or to recognize in existing evil, including the calamitous 
perfumed figure of Turveydrop gloriously reigning, " part of 
the mechanism for producing good." He bit at the quietist in 
a hundred ways, and with beautiful venom. "There are persons 
who are never very far from the truth, because the slowness of 
their faculties will not suffer them to make much progress in 
error. These are persons of great judgment ! The scales of the 
mind are pretty sure to remain even when there is nothing in 
them." He was a natural snarler at sunshiny people with full 
pockets and feudal ideas, like Sir Walter Scott, who got along 
with the ogre What Is, and even asked him to dine. In fact, 
William Hazlitt hated a great many things with the utmost en- 
thusiasm, and he was impolite enough to say so, in and out of 
season. The Established Church and all its tenets and tradi- 
tions, were only less monstrous in his eyes than legendry, me- 
diaevalism, and " the shoal of friars." 

INSENSIBILITY TO CHRISTIANITY. 

Hazlitt had no apprehension of the supernatural in any- 
thing ; he was very unspiritual. It is curious to see how he 
sidles away from the finer English creatures whom he had to 
handle. Sidney repels him, and he dismisses Shelley with an 
apt allusion to the " hectic flutter " of his verse. Living in a 
level country with no outlook upon eternity and no deep in- 
sight into the human past, nor fully understanding those who 
had wider vision and more instructed utterance than his own, 
it follows, that beside such men as those just named, then as 
now, our great and joyous Hazlitt has a crude villageous mien. 
He had his poetic elements ; chief among them, his surpassing 
love of natural beauty. But he relished, rather, the beef and 
beer of life. The normal was what he wrote of with " gusto " : 
a word he never tired of using, and which one must use in 
speaking of himself. Despite his weakness for Rousseau and 
certain of the early Italian painters, most of the men whose 
genius he seizes upon and exalts with unerring success are the 
men who display, along with enormous acumen and power, noth- 
ing which betokens the morbid and exquisite thing we have 
learned to call modern culture. Hazlitt, fortunately for us, was 
not over-civilized, had no cinque-cento instincts, and would have 
groaned aloud over such hedonism as Mr. Pater's. Home-spun 



I 

ar 

I 



1894-] WILLIAM HAZLITT: A CHARACTER STUDY. 501 

and manly as he is, who can help feeling that his was but a 
partial and arrested development ? that as Mr. Arnold said so 
paternally of Byron, " he did not know enough " ? He lacked 
both mental discipline and moral governance. 

III. 

A SEEKER AFTER TRUTH. 

Hazlitt boasts, and permissibly, of genuine disinterestedness: 
" If you wish to see me perfectly calm," he remarks somewhere, 
" cheat me in a bargain, or tread on my toes." But he cannot 
promise the same behavior for a sophism repeated in his pres- 
ence, or a truth repelled. In his sixth year he had been taken, 
with his brother and sister, to America, and he says that he 
never afterwards got out of his mouth the delicious tang of a 
frostbitten New England barberry. It is tolerably sure that the 
blowy and sunny atmosphere of the young republic of 1783-7 
got into him also. Liberalism was his birthright. He flourishes 
his fighting colors ; he trembles with eagerness to break a lance 
with the arch-enemies ; he is a champion, from his cradle, against 
class privilege, of slaves who know not what they are, nor how 
to wish for liberty. But he cannot do all this in the laughing 
oratian way ; he cannot keep cool ; he cannot mind his ob- 
ct. If he could, he would be the white devil of debate. There 
are times when he speaks, as does Dr. Johnson, out of all rea- 
son, because aware of the obstinacy and the bad faith and the 
eakness of his hearers. Quick to enthusiasm, he is as ready 
inder to scorn. Morals are too much in his mind, and, after 
their wont, they spoil his manners. Like Henry More, the Pia- 
nist, he " has to cut his way through a crowd of thoughts as 
ihrough a wood." His temper breaks like a rocket, in little lurid 
smoking stars, over every ninth page ; he lays about him at ran- 
om ; he raises a dust of side-issues. Hazlitt sometimes reminds 
ne of Burke himself, gone off at half-cock. He will not step 
circumspectly, from light to light, from security to security. 
Some of his very best essays have either no particular subject, 
or fail to keep to the one they have. Nor is he any the less 
brilliant and absorbing if he be heated, if he be swearing 

" By the blood so basely shed 
Of the pride of Norfolk's line," 

or settling accounts of his own with the asinine public. When 
he is not driven about by his moods, Hazlitt is set upon his 
fact alone; which he thinks is the sole concern of a prose- 
writer. Grace and force are collateral affairs. " In seeking for 



5O2 WILLIAM HAZLITT : A CHARACTER STUDY. [Jan., 

truth," he says proudly, in words fit to be the epitome of his 
career, " I sometimes found beauty." 

Hazlitt's prejudices are very instructive, even while he 
bewails Cobbett's, or tells you, as it were with a tear in his 
eye, when he has done berating the French, that, after all, they 
are Catholics; and as for manners, "Catholics must be allowed 
to carry it, all over the world ! " His exquisite treatment of 
Northcote, a winning old sharper for whom he cared nothing, 
is all due to his looking like a Titian portrait. So with the 
great Duke : Hazlitt hated the sight of him, " as much for his 
pasteboard visor of a face as for anything else." One of his 
justifications for adoring Napoleon was, that at a levee a young 
English officer named Lovelace drew from him an endearing 
recognition : " I perceive, sir, that you bear the name of the 
hero of Richardson's romance." If you look like a Titian por- 
trait, if you read and remember Richardson, you may trust a 
certain author, who knows a distinction when he sees it, to set 
you up for the idol of posterity. Hazlitt thought Mr. Words- 
worth's long and immobile countenance resembled that of a 
horse; and it is not impossible that this conviction, twin-born 
with that other that Mr. Wordsworth was a mighty poet, is re- 
sponsible for various jibes at the august contemporary whose 
memory owes so much, in other moods, to his pen. 

He is the most ingenuous and agreeable egoist we have, out- 
side the seventeenth-century men. It must be remembered how 
little he was in touch outwardly with social and civic affairs; 
how he was content to be the detached and always young 
looker-on. There was nothing for him to do but fall back, un- 
der given conditions, upon his own capacious personality. The 
entity called William Hazlitt is to him a toy made to his hand, 
to be reached without effort ; and, in itself, the digest of all 
his study and the applicable test of all his assumptions. "His 
like was of humanity the sphere." His " I " has a strong con- 
stituency in the other twenty-five initials. In this sense, and in 
our current cant, Hazlitt is nothing if not subjective, super- 
personal. His sort of sentimentalism is an anomaly in northern 
literature, even in the age when nearly every literary English- 
man of note was variously engaged in baring his breast. 

HIS SECOND LOVE. 

Hazlitt threw away his brush, as a heroic measure, because 
he foresaw but a mediocre success. Many canvases he cut into 
shreds, in a fury of dissatisfaction with himself. Northcote, how- 

^*r*>f I* ri 01 1 nr n t* r\ i c 1 i r* \r f\r r\ n i f* r r* e* n o /A o t~\ r\ 1 1 f* A o rrff^Qf" t"l 3 1 T1 T f t*.. 



1894-] WILLIAM HAZLITT : A CHARACTER STUDY. 503 

He was too full of worship of the masters to make an attentive 
artisan. The sacrifice, like all his sacrifices, great or small, left 
nothing behind but sweetness, the unclouded love of excellence, 
and the capacity of rejoicing at another's attaining whatever he 
had missed. But the sense of disparity between supreme intel- 
lectual achievement and that which is only partial and relative, 
albeit of equal purity, followed him like a frenzy. Comparison 
is yet more difficult in literature than in art, and Hazlitt could 
take some satisfaction in the results of his second ardor. He 
felt his power most, perhaps, as a judge of actors and acting; 
the English theatre owes him an incalculable debt. He was 
reasonably assured of the duration and increase of his fame. 
Has he not, in one of his headstrong and lofty digressions, 
called the thoughts in his Table-Talks " founded as rock, free as 
air, the tone like an Italian picture " ? Even there, however, 
the faint-heartedness natural to every true artist troubled him. 

A PETTY DESPAIR. 

He went home in despair from the spectacle of the Indian jug- 
gler, "in his white dress and tightened turban," tossing the four 
brass balls; "to make them revolve round him at certain inter- 
vals, like the planets in their spheres, to make them chase one 
another like sparkles of fire, or shoot up like flowers or meteors, 
to throw them behind his back, and twine them round his neck 
like ribbons or like serpents ; to do what appears an impossi- 
bility, and to do it with all the ease, the grace, the carelessness 
imaginable ; to laugh at, to play with 'the glittering mockeries, 
to follow them with his eye as if he could fascinate them with 
its lambent fire, or as if he had only to see that they kept time 
to the music on the stage, there is something in all this which 
he who does not admire may be quite sure he never really ad- 
mired anything in the whole course of his life. It is skill sur- 
mounting difficulty, and beauty triumphing over skill. . . . 
It makes me ashamed of myself. I ask what there is that I can 
do as well as this ? Nothing." A third person must give another 
answer. The whole passage offers a very exquisite parallel ; for 
in just such a daring, varied, and magical way can William Haz- 
litt write. The astounding result " which costs nothing " is 
founded, in each case, upon the toil of a lifetime. 

EFFECT WITHOUT EFFORT. 

His style is an incredible thing. Its range and change incor- 
porate the utmost of many men. The trenchant sweep, the sim- 
plicity and point, of Newman at his best, are in the essays on 



504 WILLIAM HAZLITT: A CHARACTER STUDY. [Jan., 

Cobbett, on Fox, and On the Regal Character ; and there is, to 
choose but one opposite instance, in the paper On the Uncon- 
sciousness of Genius, touching Correggio, a fragment of pure 
eloquence of a very ornate sort, whose onward bound, glow, 
and ring can give Macaulay's pages a look as of sails waiting 
for the wind. The same hand which fills a brief with epic 
cadences and invocations overwrought throws down, often with- 
out an adjective, sentence after sentence of ringing steel : 
" Fashion is gentility running away from vulgarity, and afraid 
of being overtaken by it." Or he supplies, from his own re- 
search, an aphorism of Roman terseness, fit to be in letters of 
gold among the advocates of " local color," and upon the 
scholastic walls of the future : " It is not the omission of indi- 
vidual circumstance, but the omission of general truth, which 
constitutes the little, the deformed, and the short-lived in art." 

UNCONSCIOUS INSPIRATION PERHAPS. 

The man's large voice in these brevities is Hazlitt's unmistak- 
ably. If it be not as novel to this generation as if he were 
but just entering the lists of authorship, it is because his won- 
derfully fecundating mind has been long enriching at second- 
hand the libraries of the English world. He comes forth, like 
Rossetti, so far behind his heralds and disciples that his man- 
nered utterance seems familiar, and an echo of theirs. For it 
may be said at last, thanks to the numerous reprints of the 
last seven years, and thanks to a few competent critics, whom 
Mr. Stevenson leads, that Hazlitt's robust work, hitherto persist- 
ently underrated or misread, is in a fair way to be known and 
appraised by the public which is a little less unworthy of him 
than his own. His method is entirely unscientific, and therefore 
archaic. If we can profit no longer by him, we can get out of 
him endless cheer and delight : and these profit unto immor- 
tality. Meanwhile, what mere " maker of beautiful English " 
shall be pitted against him there where he sits, the despair of a 
generation of experts, continually tossing the four brass balls? 

It has been said often by shallow reviewers, and is said 
sometimes still, that Hazlitt's style aims at effect ; as if an effect 
must not be won, without aiming, by a " born man of letters," 
as Mr. Saintsbury described him, " who could not help turning 
into literature everything he touched." The "effect" under 
given conditions is excessively obvious. Once let Hazlitt speak, 
as he speaks ever, in the warmth of conviction, and what an 
intoxicating music begins ! wild as that of the gipsies, and 
with the same magnet-touch on the sober senses : enough to 



1894-] WILLIAM HAZLITT: A CHARACTER STUDY. 505 

subvert all " criticism and idle distinction," and to bring back 
those Theban times, when the force of a sound, rather than 
masons and surveyors, sent the very walls waltzing into their 
places. 

SOURCE OF HIS POWER. 

In the face of diction so victoriously clear as his, so sump- 
tuous and splendid, it is well to remember, with Mr. Ruskin r 
that " no right style was ever founded save out of a sincere 
heart." It can never be said of William Hazlitt, as Dean 
Trench well said of those other " great stylists " Landor and 
De Quincey that he had a lack of moral earnestness. What 
he himself was determined to impress upon his reader, during 
the quarter-century while he held a pen, was not that he was 
knowing, not that he was worthy of the renown and for- 
tune which passed him by, but only that he had rectitude and 
a consuming passion for good. He declares aloud that his 
escutcheon has no bar sinister : he has not sold himself, he has 
spoken truth in and out of season, he has honored the excel- 
lent at his own risk and cost, he has fought for a principle, and 
been slain for it, from his youth up. His sole boast is proven. 
In a far deeper sense than Leigh Hunt, for whom he forged 
the lovely compliment, he was " the visionary of humanity, the 
fool of virtue," and the captain of those who stood fast, in a 
hostile day, for ignored and eternal ideals. The best thing to 
be said of him, the thing for which, in Haydon's phrase, " every- 
body must love him," is that he himself loved justice and hated 
iniquity. Zelus domus tua comedit me. He shared the groaning 
of the spirit after mortal welfare with Swift and Fielding, 
with Shelley and Matthew Arnold, with Carlyle and Ruskin ; 
he was corroded with cares and desires not his own. Beside 
this intense devotedness, what personal flaw will ultimately 
show? The host who figure in the Roman martyrology hang 
all their claim upon the fact of martyrdom, and, according to 
canon law, need not have been saints in their lifetime at all. 
So with such souls as his : in the teeth of a thousand acknow- 
ledged imperfections in life or in art, they remain our exem- 
plars. Let them do what they will, at some one stroke they 
dignify this earth. It is not Hazlitt " the born man of letters" 
alone, but Hazlitt the outrider of universal freedom, who be- 
queaths us, from his England of coarse misconception and 
abuse, a memory like a loadstar, and a name which is a toast 
to be drunk standing. 
VOL. LVIII. 34 




506 DEATH OF ST. JOHN, THE BELOVED. [Jan., 

DEATH OF ST. JOHN, THE BELOVED. 

BY "VERITAS." 

'M growing very old. This weary head 

That hath so often leaned on Jesus' breast, 
In days long past that seem almost a dream, 
Is bent and hoary with the weight of years. 
These limbs that followed Him my Master oft 
From Galilee to Juda ; yea, that stood 
Beneath the cross and trembled with his groans, 
Refuse to bear me even through the streets 
To preach unto my children. Even my lips 
Refuse to form the words my heart sends forth. 
My ears are dull, they scarcely hear the sobs 
Of my own children gathered round my couch ; 
God lays his hand on me yea, his hand, 
And not his rod the gentle hand that I 
Felt, those three years, so often pressed in mine, 
In friendship such as passeth woman's love. 
I'm old : so old I cannot recollect 
The faces of my friends ; and I forget 
The words and deeds that make up daily life ; 
But that dear Face, and every word he spoke, 
Grow more distinct as others fade away, 
So that I live with him and holy dead 
More than with living. 

Some seventy years ago 
I was fisher by the sacred sea. 
It was at sunset. How the tranquil tide 
Bathed dreamily the pebbles ! How the light 
Crept up the distant hills, and in its wake 
Soft purple shadows wrapped the dewy fields ! 
And then He came and called me. Then I gazed 
For the first time on that sweet Face. Those eyes, 
From out of which, as from a window, shone 
Divinity, looked on my inmost soul, 
And lighted it for ever. Then his words 



1894-] DEATH OF ST. JOHN, THE BELOVED. 507 

Broke on the silence of my heart, and made 
The whole world musical. Incarnate Love 
Took hold of me and claimed me for its own ; 
I followed in the twilight, holding fast 
His mantle. 

Oh, what holy walks we had, 

Through harvest fields, and desolate, dreary wastes ! 
And oftentimes he leaned upon my arm, 
Wearied and way-worn. I was young and strong, 
And so upbore him. Lord, now I am weak, 
And old, and feeble ! Let me rest on thee ! 
So, put thine arm around me. Closer still ! 
How strong thou art ! The twilight draws apace. 

What say you, friends, 

That this is Ephesus, and Christ has gone 
Back to his kingdom ? Aye, 'tis so, 'tis so ; 
I know it all ; and yet, just now I seemed 
To stand once more upon my native hills, 
And touch my Master. Oh, how oft I've seen 
The touching of his garments bring back strength 
To palsied limbs ! I feel it has to mine. 
Up ! bear me once more to my church ! Once more 
There let me tell them of a Saviour's love ; 
For, by the sweetness of my Master's voice 
Just now, I think he must be very near 
Coming, I trust, to break the veil which time 
Has worn so thin that I can see beyond, 
And watch his footsteps. 

So, raise up my head : 
How dark it is ! I cannot see 
The faces of my flock. Is that the sea 
That murmurs so, or is it weeping? Hush, 
My little children ! God so loved the world 
He gave his Son. So love ye one another. 
Love God and man. Amen. Now bear me back. 
My legacy unto an angry world is this. 
I feel my work is finished. Are the streets so full ? 
What call the folk my name? The holy John? 
Nay, write me rather Jesus Christ's beloved, 
And lover of my children. 



508 DEATH OF ST. JOHN, THE BELOVED. [Jan., 

Lay me down 

Once more upon my couch, and open wide 
The eastern window. See ! there comes a light 
Like that which broke upon my soul at eve 
When, in the dreary Isle of Patmos, Gabriel came 
And touched me on the shoulder. See ! it grows 
As when he mounted towards the pearly gates. 
I know the way. I trod it once before. 
And hark ! It is the song the ransomed sang 
Of glory to the Lamb ! How loud it sounds ! 
And that unwritten one ! Methinks my soul 
Can join it now. But who are these that crowd 
The shining way? Say! joy! 'tis the Eleven 
With Peter first! How eagerly he looks! 
How bright the smiles are beaming on James' face ! 
I am the last. Once more we are complete 
To gather round the Paschal feast. My place 
Is next my Master. O my Lord ! my Lord ! 
How bright thou art ! and yet the very same 
I loved in Galilee. 'Tis worth the hundred years 
To feel this bliss! So lift me up, dear Lord, 
Unto thy bosom. There shall I abide for ever. 





1 894.] WOMAN'S WORK IN RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES. 509 

WOMAN'S WORK IN RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES.* 

BY F. M. EDSELAS. 

'O compass within the prescribed limits an account 
of Woman's Work in Religious Communities is 
not less difficult than "to do" the Columbian 
Exposition in the few months allotted for its 
existence, remembering, as we are told, that al- 
lowing three minutes for each exhibit, one hundred years would 
hardly suffice for the task. In either case only a cursory view 
can be taken, leaving the rest to be inferred. 

Monachism, or the state of religious seclusion, more or less 
complete, antedates Christianity, being found among the Jews 
in the time of Elias. It is also a prominent feature of Brahman- 
ism ; even to-day the lamaseries of Thibet exceed in number the 
monasteries of Italy or Spain. China too has its cloisters of 
Buddhistic nuns ; Kuanyim, the goddess of mercy, being their 
patron saint. 

Its primitive form among Christians dates from the persecu- 
tion under the Roman emperors, when converts took refuge in 
caves and deserts. Later on preference for seclusion continued 
what necessity commenced, developing the community life, at 
first purely contemplative, then combined with the active. 
Within the last century the latter far outnumbered the former, 
the spirit of the age, one of active zeal for human welfare, 
largely shaping vocations for such service ; or, with fuller mean- 
ing, God thus guided means and instruments towards creation's 
destined end. 

Nature is indeed a great diversifier ; she " never rhymes her 
children or makes two alike," thus meeting the ever-varying, 
never-ending needs of humanity. Vocations for so many differ- 
ent orders, and for the myriad duties of each, show how Infinite 
Wisdom ever adapts the demand to the supply, constantly giv- 
ing us new orders, or modifications of the old, using the fee- 

* The above paper, though read at the Catholic Congress, is published here by request. 
We accede in this instance to the request because, through the pages of THE CATHOLIC 
WORLD, the paper will reach a large class of non-Catholic readers, for whom it was more or 
less intended. ED. C. W. 



510 WOMAN'S WORK IN RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES. [Jan., 

blest instruments for the greatest designs the poor and insig- 
nificant of earth being founders of our most efficient orders. 
" The weak things of this world . . . hath God chosen to 
confound the mighty." 

Our great discoveries and inventions equally prove this fact, 
and we hold our breath at the outcome. We say this or that 
man, almost by chance, perhaps, originated such an idea, 
wrought out a new principle in science. Galileo, grinding his 
lenses in a fortunate way, gave us magnifiers, then the telescope, 
our first refractor being from the brains and hands of the great 
Italian. The experiments of Galvani upon the nervous condi- 
tion of cold-blooded animals revealed their electricity, which 
Volta's genius utilized as an agent of wondrous importance. 
Later on, still further developments were made by Franklin, 
Ampere, Davy, Faraday, Bunsen, and others down to our own 
Edison, who have caught and chained the lightning's bolt, mak- 
ing it the electric motor in our economic and other arts. 

How wonderful, we say, these discoveries through man's 
skill and genius. And so it is, of material things we take only 
a material view, always, always on the same dead level; thus is 
our material nature stamped and reflected in opinions uttered 
or unexpressed. 

But look higher ; give the spiritual forces a chance, awaken 
their latent powers ; then what a change ! Before " we saw 
only through a glass darkly, now face to face," revealing the 
divine Master behind Galileo, Newton, Herschel, and their con- 
freres, giving inspiration and guidance. He was compass, rud- 
der, and barometer for Columbus and other early navigators, 
sending their rude barks over unknown seas to this " land of 
the free and the home of the brave." 

Alas ! that we should lose sight of this fact in our mad 
rush for we hardly know what. Weak man originates an idea, 
when he cannot even create a single grain of sand ! 

" O judgment ! thou art fled to brutish beasts, 
And men have lost their reason." 

Through these mistaken views of life and its bearings, through 
our false standards of right and wrong, the greater part of our 
time is spent in making and unmaking ourselves, in unlearning 
that " wisdom which is foolishness before God." 

Standing proudest to-day among earth's nations, since we 
welcome them all as friends and brothers to our shores as they 



1894-] WOMAN'S WORK IN RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES. 511 

come laden with marvels of genius and industry never before 
dreamed by poet, painter, or prophet, we shall still trace through 
all the great Master carrying out his designs. 

In God's creation each sentient being stands in an allotted 
niche, a spectacle to angels and men. Rightly measuring the 
scope of her being with the means at hand, the Catholic Ameri- 
can woman will work out that true mission. 

Animated with these ideas, we see that by no other means 
could the work of the sisterhood be accomplished. How simple 
the origin, how grand the consummation ! Prayer for the sal- 
vation of their own and others' souls initiated the plan ; giving 
relief to the poor, sick, and outcast opened a broader field for 
devoted charity; bodily wants supplied, ignorance must be en- 
lightened and religious truths inculcated. Thus, education, 
through the progressive spirit of the age, rounded up the reli- 
gious life in its beauty and completeness. 

Viewed in this light, sisters are before the world as repre- 
sentative women in its best sense, not as relics of a buried 
past, as fossils for spiritual geologists to examine, classify, and 
put behind glass doors to be labeled " Foot-prints of Crea- 
tion " the first, perhaps, after the Azoic age. No, none of this ; 
let them be the incarnate idea of the Golden Rule, the eleventh 
Commandment clothed in flesh and blood, to whom its great 
Author gives this consoling assurance : " Inasmuch as ye have 
lone it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it 
into me." 

The history of different religious orders and of the houses 
branching therefrom reads more like some legend of remote 
jes, or tale coined from the brain of a Jules Verne, than a 
jality ; so utterly opposed do methods and results appear. 

The laws of finance or of the most ordinary business forms 
seem utterly ignored by sisters in general ; the plans of archi- 
tects and contractors set at naught to follow their own 
sweet will. Wading up to their eyes in seas of difficulty per- 
sonal, social, and financial, even in spite of these, by ways and 
means past finding out, save to the great-hearted and never-to- 
be-rebuffed nuns, they manage to come out of the fray with 
flying colors. Sacrifices that few would face count for nothing 
with them ; to see a need is to meet it, urged on by that su- 
preme motive, the salvation of souls at any cost. 

Unlimited confidence is the backbone of their success. Call 
it presumption, a tempting of God, if you will, yet none the 
less effective is the result. Look at Mother Irene, in charge of 



512 WOMAN'S WORK IN RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES. [Jan., 

the largest foundling home in New York. In her simple faith 
she says : 

" Father, please make a memento for my intention. I just 
want this piece of land adjoining our grounds." 

" That property, mother ! Why, do you know its worth ? A 
quarter of a million at least." 

" Yes, father, but I must have it as a play-ground for our 
little orphans." 

" Well, mother, how much money have you now ?" 

" Not a cent yet ; but never mind, prayer will win the day." 
And it did. Every religious house is more or less the fruit of 
earnest, confiding prayer. 

To understand this the better we must deepen and intensi- 
fy the true conception of a sister's life and work by a fair and 
critical examination, making due allowance for the defects and 
defections that more or less mark every organization, perfec- 
tion never being found this side of heaven. 

What, then, are the qualities insuring a sister's vocation ? 
While the purest and holiest motives should be the animus of 
her work, a large fund of common sense, a practical matter-of- 
fact shrewdness must supplement the higher instincts ; for re- 
member, your real Sister of Charity is not an angel plumed 
for her heavenward flight ; she isn't expected to spend the day 
in perpetual adoration while her orphans and pupils, the poor 
and the sick, are she doesn't know where. As the handmaid 
of our Lord, he won't do his work and hers too. She must 
be a minute-woman, ever on the alert, ready for the Master's 
call. She realizes that the highest aim and purpose, love being 
the exponent, are sent through her the lowest organ. Herein 
lies her true sanctity ; none other will pass current. Intense 
activity, without the enthusiasm of impulse ; constant devotion 
to present duty with a sort of fiery patriotism, so loyal and un- 
swerving as to care for naught save winning souls from their 
great enemy, mark the high and perfect aim of her whole 
life. 

Do not mistake means for end, the shadow for the substance ; 
the whole is always greater than a part. It is not because of 
her high or low estate ; it is not place, surroundings, and cir 
cumstances, prosperous or adverse ; not her brilliant qualities, 
her this or that, which perfect a sister's life. It is herself the 
great soul incarnate tJirougJi and tJirough, that does the work ; 
it is the assurance of certain conviction and the eternal peace 
of an unshaken faith; it is her inner life, with its principles 



1894-] WOMAN'S WORK IN RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES. 513 

stable as a rock, pure as the diamond, that make her proof 
against any hindrance. No difficulty can be an obstacle to such 
a soul, when that noble aim and high endeavor surcharge her 
whole being. 

Let duty call her to the battle-field or the halls of science, 
to the leper's hut or to the palace of princes, it is all one to 
her. A true religious still carries the self-same purpose every- 
where. God behind her, as his instrument, she is what she is, 
does what she does, and her end is gained. Hers is the repose 
of a heart set deep in God. 

Let the world fully realize this, and ceasing to criticise and 
cavil, it will admire and imitate. 

We live in an age of thought, deep, critical, far-reaching, 
and sisters are no small factors here. Everything is on the 
alert. What has been, is, and yet shall be, are questions forc- 
ing themselves upon us, not as mere isolated events, like sepa- 
rate blades of grass in a field, but as links in God's great 
chain, girdling humanity and reaching from eternity to eternity. 

It is an every-day wonder, both to those within and with- 
out the church, that persons of sense and judgment should 
leave the world and all that it holds dear for a convent life, im- 
>elled, as cynics say, by an ascetic whim, a sentimental notion, 
>roof of a soft, weak spot somewhere. Passing strange indeed 
rould it be if this were all ; and believe me, none would decry 
such a step more than religious themselves. ' Let any one thus 
impressed step into a sister's shoes, and look through her eye- 
jlasses ; a few whiffs of convent air would soon show the mis- 
:ake. 

A mere passing whim stand the test of a religious vocation ! 
r hy the very assertion defeats itself, since the indispensables 
ire wanting intellectual power, moral force, and an intense, 
icred purpose that never counts the cost. Flesh and blood 
with sentimental notions are spurned beneath their feet, utterly 
unworthy of notice. Call the sisters cranks and idiots if you 
will, their work a sham ; but remember, soft-brained people are 
liable to dub as a sham that which they cannot grasp. Tell 
me, could the mind of a crank plan and perfect such enter- 
prises as we daily see carried on, year in and year out, century 
after century, to the remotest corner of God's universe ? Their 
ideas mere pretension ! Show me one solid, noble act ever 
built on a pretension, and it will be the first of its kind ; far 
easier to base the great pyramid of Gizeh on a basket of eggs 
or a bag of feathers. 



514 WOMAN'S WORK IN RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES. [Jan., 

Sham ideas never started the first steam-engine, never 
stamped our alphabet in type-metal, never laid between Wash- 
ington and Baltimore the first electric wire that now in long- 
drawn threads and cables is our master of masters and servant 
of servants. Still less could pretension lay the foundation of 
schools and orphanages, asylums and hospitals. Look a little 
farther, dig a little deeper before laying such a charge at the 
door of the sisterhood. Little wonder that Job's comforters, 
predicting a failure, soon with astonishment say, How is this? 
How do they manage it all ? Though puzzled ignorance may 
still jeer and laugh, thank God the number of censors is rapid- 
ly diminishing. Experience and sound judgment are fast grind- 
ing the yeas and nays of old-time prejudice, giving a favorable 
verdict and above appeal. That which is seen with the eyes, 
heard with the ears, and which our hands have handled is suffi- 
cient refutation. In letters of light, stamped by the Almighty, 
may be read their sacred purpose, noble work and its marvel- 
lous results. 

The admission of non-Catholics, even though tardy and 
almost perforce, only the more surely confirms this. 

" Don't know how it is," says one; " make up my mind a 
hundred times that I'll say 'No' to the sisters' appeals; but they 
always get the better of me, and I'm a V or an X poorer each 
time." Richer, would it not be better to say? "And now, 
would you believe it, I actually stop them on the street." 

Motives measure actions ; real character stamps one for bet- 
ter or for worse ; there is your true gauge, my friend, for the 
worth of a religious. It must out ; if valuable, it will be valued ; 
if estimable, esteemed. It is the whole court of heaven speak- 
ing through the heart of mankind and saying, " Well done, good 
and faithful servant." 

Nor is this so strange after all ; for taking an all-around 
view of womanhood, she seems possessed with an insatiable de- 
sire to have a finger in every benevolent pie, whether it's rub- 
bing goose-oil on Mrs. Neighbor's croupy baby or working out 
some great plan for the world's reformation. This master-pas- 
sion of her nature defies all restraint ; bluff it on one side, 
sniff it on the other, hydra-headed, it still crops out, and we 
who know its blessed effects thank God for it. The work of 
religious communities through all its ramifications represents 
the practical wisdom, intensified by critical observation, varied 
experience, and well-tried sanctity, of generations upon genera- 
tions, whose traditions become in turn stepping-stones for their 
successors. 



1894-] WOMAN'S WORK IN RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES. 515 

What have they done? Far easier to tell what they have 
not done. 

Put your finger upon any spot of the habitable globe and 
there will they be found. It is a corner of God's earth, they 
say, his footprints are already there ; since he leads the way 
shall we not follow ? 

In an interesting series of articles running through THE 
CATHOLIC WORLD may be found a history of the principal re- 
ligious houses of the country specially devoted to teaching. 

An epitome of almost the entire work of the sisterhood will 
be seen in the unique, wonderful establishment founded at 
Turin, Italy, by the Venerable Joseph Benedict Cottolengo. It 
is rightfully named the " Little Refuge of Divine Providence," 
the founder, who died in 1842, having commenced without a 
farthing, depending solely upon Providence for the means to 
carry on his work. Fourteen religious communities, two for 
men, twelve for women, which he also founded, conduct the 
affairs of the institution. None are duplicates or offshoots of 
any other religious order. They number some fifteen hundred 
members, who, with five thousand inmates under their care, re- 
side within the precincts. 

The latter are classified in families according to their necessi- 
ties, and occupy separate ranges of buildings, the whole form- 
ing a complete village. The only passport for admission is utter 
destitution. 

" Here are received waifs and strays of humanity, outcasts 
from society of every kind, the blind, the halt, the lame, the 
deaf and dumb, orphans, foundlings picked up in lanes and slums, 
imbeciles and idiots, monstrosities in human form, persons de- 
crepit from age or incurably diseased, who from the nature of 
their disease cannot be admitted into existing asylums and hos- 
pitals ; lepers even all can here find a home without distinction 
of nationality, sex, or religion." 

Those able to do so give assistance in the general duties. 
The little ones are taught whatever will render them useful or 
creditable members of society. 

Read, meditate, and draw conclusions. 

Look at that little band of sisters going forth on a mission 
to some desert or barbarous land. 

" How can you venture ? Privation, danger, persecution, 
even death, may await you." 

" Yes, yes," is the brave and cheerful response, " we have 
weighed and counted the risks; nothing can deter us, for God 
is there above them all." 



5i6 WOMAN'S WORK IN RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES. [Jan., 

In a cheerful letter written some years since by the advance 
guard of St. Vincent, sent to make the foundation of one of our 
largest charitable institutions in St. Louis, the writer says : 

" We have been here a month, and for three weeks I used 
a stick of wood for a pillow, yet sleeping as sound as the log 
itself ; a board on two barrels formed my bed ; table ditto, 
only three boards instead of two. Nothing like consistency, you 
see. We are all as merry as larks, working hard for our dear 
Lord." 

This, then, is the open secret of their invincible courage, 
and of its wonderful triumph too. Here is true heroism. On- 
ward, upward, ever and for ever, even to the portals of the 
tomb, go the brave sisters harvesting souls for eternity. 

Is it not the same motive which directly or indirectly touches 
the hearts of our great benefactors, that loosens the purse-strings 
of our Drexels and Creightons, of Poland and Cahill, of Ar- 
mour, McCormick, Rockefeller, Stanford, Pratt, and thousands 
more ? 

It is these who make poverty's pulses leap for joy, and the 
hearts of the widow and orphan sing for gladness ; their grate- 
ful prayers ascending to heaven, return in tenfold blessings upon 
their benefactors. 

The great success attending sisters' work, with means so 
limited, is unquestionably due to the admirable system marking 
the plan of each founder as meeting the special ends in view. 
With wisely-directed foresight the rules and constitutions enter 
into minutest and most essential details ; each department has 
its special staff of officers and aids, directly responsible to the 
superior for efficiency. An interchange of these from time to 
time is of mutual advantage ; latent talent thus brought out adds 
to the general good of the community. Convent life is, indeed, 
a wonderful developer. No delicately sensitized plate of the 
photographer ever evolved more marvellous effects. 

Out of an embryo sister, seemingly inefficient every way, a 
shrewd novice-mistress and wise superior will develop a woman 
fitted for many and varied duties. Sudden emergencies throw 
the novice upon her own resources, and necessity quickly be- 
comes the mother of invention. One of these, timid to excess, 
left in charge of her first class, thus relates her experience: 

"They were only little tots to be sure, but none the less 
did I quake when meeting that row of eager faces. One glance 
told me they were ready for frolic if I gave them half a chance; 
that wouldn't do. I must ' head them,' as the boys say, and I 



1894-] WOMAN'S WORK IN RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES. 517 

did, gaining a victory over them ; but still better over my weak, 
foolish nature, making me a woman from that day to this." 

Through such perfected system the work seems to do itself. 
Each new-born day, of course, is consecrated by the baptism of 
prayer, which with other spiritual exercises is renewed at inter- 
vals, closing with the same benediction ; otherwise the routine is 
similar to that in any well-regulated family. Each member, ani- 
mated by the spirit of her order, feels in a measure responsible 
for its success, doing all she can to insure it. No honors what- 
ever are attached to any appointments. If there are no mean 
offices in the courts of kings, much less should there be in that 
of the King of kings. Merit and ability must mark the posi- 
tions held, which, being interchangeable, preserve that perfect 
equality. 

This practical view of a sister's life will, no doubt, sadly dis- 
appoint many who regard it as a sort of saintly romance, an 
ethereal existence encircled by a mysterious halo. 

Let such remember that only out of these plain, every-day 
materials are. wrought the saints whom we daily meet by hun- 
dreds and thousands, ever intent on some errand of mercy, since 
through all the spiritual life and motive give their touch and 
spur to every duty. They are the visible conductors of God's 
magnetism and electricity : charged with this they must do his 
bidding. 

The work accomplished by orders specially devoted to chari- 
ty, as the Franciscans, Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul and Mercy, 
Grey Nuns, etc., is familiar to all. Their foundling houses, or- 
phanages, industrial schools, asylums, and hospitals dot every 
hill-side, nook, and corner of the world. Many of these also 
conduct flourishing academies. A wide range indeed, but fully 
compassed, as results prove. 

These various orders, experimental at first, now permanently 
established, are part and parcel of our social and national or- 
ganization. With every new settlement the cross marking a 
Catholic Church soon appears, followed by bands of sisters 
ready for any call, the supply ever meeting the demand. From 
this as a nucleus other foundations are made, spreading far and 
wide like the rippling circles of the sea. The inmates of chari- 
table homes are not only housed but clothed and fed, the chil- 
dren being so taught and trained as to become their own bread- 
winners, instead of burdens to themselves and to the world. 

All this is daily before our eyes ; but beyond the bounds of 
civilization, of which we know so little, the same lines are fol- 



518 WOMAN'S WOKK IN RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES. [Jan., 

lowed. Among the Indians of the North-west, again, we find the 
Benedictines, with others already mentioned, facing every hard- 
ship, being one with them whose children they clothe and 
teach as their very own. For such service qur government al- 
lows the sum of nine dollars per month for each child. That 
terrible scourge the small-pox, sweeping away five thousand In- 
dians in one season, was rather an incentive than a hindrance to 
more devoted care of the poor victims ; the sisters paused not 
till the danger was over, or their turn came and they were 
called up higher. 

The Benjamin of orders in the church, that of the Blessed 
Sacrament, founded by Mother Katharine Drexel, solely for the 
care and education of Indians and negroes, is full of promise in 
the wisdom of its plan and in the means employed to insure 
the same. Breadth of view, devoted love for the poor outcast, 
and heroic self-sacrifice on the part of its members are the sa- 
lient features of this new order. 

Leaving our own country, go to the leper settlements of the 
Mediterranean, and to those of Molokai in the Pacific sanctified 
by the labors of that martyr-priest, Father Damien, whose 
greatest consolation on his death-bed was the arrival of the 
Franciscan Sisters for his hundred leper children, and for the 
seven hundred adult victims of the disease. 

With tender, motherly care do they nurse, teach, and toil for 
these unfortunate outcasts. Those morally infected are not less 
the objects of care ; the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, as is 
well known, making it their special work, manifesting wonder- 
ful tact in dealing with the weaknesses of our frail humanity. 
Places of refuge for the unprotected enable them to elude the 
tricks and snares of the evil one. Indeed no trouble of soul or 
body is overlooked by these devoted women. 

The broad field of education here too finds able and earnest 
workers. Alive to the needs of their pupils, they equip them- 
selves accordingly. The first purely educational institution un- 
der the care of religious was established at Georgetown, D. C., 
in 1799, by the so-called Pious Ladies, soon after merged into 
the Visitation Order, whose academies, with those of the Loretto 
Sisters, of St. Vincent, the madames of the Sacred Heart, etc., 
etc., have sent forth thousands of young ladies as leaders in 
church, domestic and social life. No longer, then, can the sisters 
be called old fogies or breathing mummies. 

Here at our Great Exposition are they seen, pencil and 
note-book in hand, harvesting the ripened fruit and grain for 



1894-] WOMAN'S WORK IN RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES. 519 

their pupils. Tangible proofs of what they do for education are 
before your eyes. Go to the south-east corner of the gallery in 
the Liberal Arts Building, next to the French exhibit, and see 
for yourselves that not only the practical side of life receives 
its due attention but the aesthetic as well. The Dominican Sis- 
ters of New Orleans, Sisters of the Precious Blood, of Charity, 
of Notre Dame, etc., give an exhibit that only true artists can 
furnish ; and yet these are merely types of what may be seen 
in nearly every convent throughout the world. 

Art is indeed innate, intuitive with the sisterhood ; the love 
of the beautiful, as a reflection of its divine Author, must ever 
be linked with the love of him to whom their lives are conse- 
crated. 

The mere alphabet of the work done in religious communi- 
ties is thus outlined, as a few samples of wheat, grain, and 
vegetables serve only as hints of the broad ranches, miles in ex- 
tent, that through skilful culture have become so productive. 

Gladly would net results be given were it possible, yet a brief 
estimate will serve as a clue to the rest, the lowest average rates 
being above the valuation presented. 

Here in the United States are 3,585 parochial schools, 245 

hanages, 463 other charitable institutions, besides 656 acade- 
mies ; total, 5,975 buildings, which, valued at $3,000 each, repre- 
sent an investment of $14,847,000. 

To this must be added the running expenses of these estab- 
lishments, except the academies, which are supposed to be self- 
supporting, making a total of at least $25,579,000. 

Besides thus providing for the common and higher education 
of the children, a large number of whom are taken from the 
slums, many a reformatory, jail, and penitentiary, with their 
staff of officers, would be a further tax upon the public purse. 

t this not be overlooked in our estimate of results. 

However extensive this material work, linked with it, and 
far more effective, is the higher and spiritual life infused into 
those under the sisters' care, from the frail infant on to the 
highest prelate, whose first lessons in the principles of theology 
received from them became the impetus and underlying current 
of their whole life. 

The great question of religion or no religion, God or no God 
in our school system, agitating, dividing, and colliding educa- 
tional leaders, here finds its solution in the sisters' work. The 
grand motive urging, driving them on is that the life of Christ, 
in its fulness and beauty, in its strength and sanctity, and in 



, 



u 



520 WOMAN'S WORK IN RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES. [Jan., 

its sublime perfection as far as possible, may be first implanted 
and then wrought out of those who otherwise might know little 
of Christianity beyond a few formulas, and a code of morals 
shaped too often by human ideals and interests. 

Tell me in all sincerity will your child be the worse for such 
training? 

Yet more : Side by side with each lesson, and running through 
it, the sisters aim to put Jesus Christ, making him the inspiration, 
life, and motive of whatever is thought, said, and done. Finding 
how blessed is this constant living of that divine life, they de- 
sire nothing less, yea, can give nothing more to these lambs of 
his flock. 

In moulding the character of every child comes in the direct 
and divine power of Christ, above and far more effective than 
the greatest of all human influences. We know that the atmos- 
phere of our lives makes us what we are : the more pure and 
cultured the one, the more complete and perfect the other. 
Hence, to make this good Master the friend, companion, and 
counsellor of childhood, to shape inclinations and habits on this 
divine Model, is to set the spring of every desire and give the 
spur to every aim and action of the sisters. With clearer vision 
than others less intuitive, they realize that all the good they do 
can come alone from Christ ; hence their solemn, imperative 
duty to infuse this divine life into all with whom they are in 
contact. 

The mystic asceticism attributed to them is " only this and 
nothing more." Here, then, is revealed the great meaning of the 
work done by every true woman in religious communities, prov- 
ing that they are in truth God's benedictions to the human 
race. 

Indeed, there can be no more interesting study for the theo- 
rist and the reformer, the optimist and the pessimist, the con- 
servative and the liberalist than the origin, growth, and marvel- 
lous results of the sisters' work. In noting the varied lines in 
which duty leads their way, this fact may well be emphasized 
as a clue to their marvellous success ; that in singleness of aim 
and purity of intention all unite in the one endeavor of making 
the world better, wiser, and happier through their efforts. Thus 
do they help on the federation of the human race, that glorious 
ideal of to-day to be merged into a more glorious reality to- 
morrow. 




1894-] A SABBATH OF THE HEART. 521 

A SABBATH OF THE HEART. 

BY JOHN J. A. BECKET. 

:T had been an experiment. It was resulting in an 
emotion. He had purposely come under condi- 
tions which were almost identical with those of 
twenty years ago. It was after sunset, and twi- 
** light was mellowing the summer's color on land 
and sea. The place had not changed. Henderson knew that 
the otherness of it was subjective. It was he who had changed, 
he and those closely enough connected with him to have what 
affected them also reflect itself in him. His senses yielded up 
the same impressions they had received in this quiet old spot 
on Staten Island in that summer twilight of the past. 

The sea-air wandered over the flat fields and stole along the 
broad country lane with the same salty freshness that it had 
borne with it then. Yet he reflected that now it bent the slen- 
ler grasses that grew upon his parents' graves, side by side up 
;here on the slope of the hill. There was a mournfulness to 
lim in this stolid activity of nature. It seemed* soulless rather 
ian without sympathy. 

There was the old house with its long, sloping roof and 
ibles, and the branches of the large elm overshadowing it. It 
lid not look an hour older. And there was a perfume exhal 
ig from the spot which also recalled that evening, though there 
ras a heavy richness in it far in excess of the faint breath of 
ie roses which had then lain above Ruth Harnden's heart, 
[er heart ! He smiled faintly to himself as he caught his 
lemory putting this touch to the picture. He had learned to 
tis cost, then, the quality of Ruth Harnden's heart. 

But that romance of his boyish soul had encysted in his 
being. How unrighteously it had clung to him and played a 
part in his life so vastly more important than it deserved ! 
What shame that the blighting of a boy's eager dream should 
have left a tinge of gray in all the after years ! He felt that 
but for the influence of that early wound he might have gath- 
ered the harvest of a man's love. As it was, although nearly 
forty, he was unmarried, and had the sense of treading the 
downward slope of life. 
VOL.LVIII. 35 



522 A SABBATH OF THE HEART. [Jan., 

And here in this isolated spot to him, an ardent boy of 
eighteen, had come the moment whose shadow had fallen 
athwart his after years! He could recall so vividly how the 
passion which, charged his being had given new meaning to the 
earth, the air, the sea. They were larger and brighter in that 
palpitating rapture to which the enamored soul stirs the universe. 
Then he had looked forward in proud possession of fruitful 
years to be, through which led the ever-sweetening pathway of 
life, which he and Ruth were to tread in unuttered joyful- 
ness. 

And she had told him with such composure, there on the 
little porch, that she could not marry him, for she loved Brock- 
way. He remembered that, boy as he was, he had grown hot 
with wrath that the girl could serenely turn from the hardy 
freshness of his young love to accept this man of twenty-eight, 
with his smart clothes and still smarter looks. He had felt then 
what tinsel his rival was. 

But she had married Brockway, and he had heard nothing 
of her since. Soon after he had left the old place, which 
chafed him beyond endurance, and now he saw it again for 
the first time after this long interval. He had succeeded in the 
way which he cared for least. He had worked hard, and the 
years to come were well assured of every physical comfort, but 
so bare of life's higher gifts. 

He had not even blood-ties. His parents had died when he 
was too far away to return. He had seen other girls, other 
women, fairer and infinitely worthier than Ruth Harnden. But 
his soul had never invested them with that atmosphere of love 
which his boy's heart had breathed about her. Had his pure, 
vigorous nature been one which could have forgotten or out- 
grown that intense passage, this frivolous girl, with her peach-like 
beauty, would not have dominated his life as she had done. 
And the thought was an irksome one to John Henderson. No 
strong man can feel without regret that the substance of his 
years has been wasted on a dream. It had not been choice. 
It was the law of his intense, ardent being. 

And now, in this self-same spot whence the shadow had 
arisen, there was a heavier chill in it than he had felt for years. 
He resented the loneliness of his life. His rectitude rose in 
protest against the libation of life's precious wine upon so cheap 
an altar. It was an immolation without dignity or value. He 
had come here to see what effect the spot would have upon 
him. There had been the half-hope that it might act as an 



1894-] A SABBATH OF THE HEART. 523 

exorcism and dispel the film of gray which Ruth Harnden had 
breathed about his soul. 

But it had not. He only absorbed deeper melancholy from 
this personal contact with the scene. He wandered slowly on, 
passed the house, and looked at the stretch of land behind it. 
The sight which met his eyes was almost a shock. When he 
had turned away in indignation at Ruth's rejection, the broad 
meadow had stretched before him in sober tameness till its 
green had met the violet gray of the sea. 

Now, the immense tract which met his sight was one broad 
flush of pink ! In the quiet evening tones this radiant glow 
seemed an incongruous passage. He understood now why the 
air was so charged with perfume. Thousands of roses kissed 
the moist sea wind with fragrant lips. It was like a dream, 
this wilderness of exotic blooms. Only under the magic sky 
of the orient could such a royal carpet lie upon the bosom of 
the earth with any sense of fitness. Was it a trick of his 
imagination, abnormally quickened? No! He knew it was 
real, for the sensuous sweetness enfolded him like a luxur- 
ious mist, and the field of swaying roses had sharply defined 
limits. 

Yet as he turned his wondering gaze from their sumptuous 
>lendor to the small back porch he felt he must surely be the 
^ictim of an hallucination, one cruel in its mockery. There she 
it in her slender grace, her small head resting on one hand, 
rtiile the other lay in her lap sat there as if reflecting on the 
rords which had torn their souls apart in the long ago. 

He, the most direct of men, to be the subject of such a vis- 
>n as this! It controlled him. He could not throw it off. 
form was softened by the twilight, but it was clear enough 
and substantial in its semblance. With the feeling of a man in 
>me opium dream he slowly approached the figure. It might 

a portent, presaging he knew not what, but he would draw 
lear, until this apparition of his boy's love, this phantom born 
of memory and an air bewitched with roses, should melt 
away. 

His foot-fall on the grass made no sound ; the figure of soft 
maidenly sweetness there on the old wooden bench was abso- 
lutely motionless in its attitude of pensive repose, but it did 
not fade as he approached ; the brown hair became a more dis- 
tinct aureole to the delicate oval of the face ; the faint color 
in the cheeks might be a pale reflection from the sea of roses. 
It was a softened Ruth, one with the robustness of her beauty 



524 A SABBATH OF THE HEART. [Jan., 

chastened to a spiritual refinement, as if the world of rarer air 
from which she had emerged had purged the slight leaven of 
material coarseness which had clung to the girl when she sat 
there in the flesh and said him nay. 

And as he found that the dainty vision did not melt away, 
constrained by his emotion, he murmured in almost a whisper: 
" Ruth ! " There was no movement, no change in this wraith 
which had come to revive the quick intensity of his boyish soul 
in John Henderson. 

With throbbing temples and the weird sense of consorting 
with a phantom, projected by his own mind, he drew near, un- 
til at last he paused with labored breath and fixed eyes. Oh, 
what a fair ideal Ruth was this ! Those sweet lips could not 
have uttered such harsh words. The sweet face with its clear 
tints and the slim, rounded figure in its vesture of white was a 
reincarnated Ruth, one fit to live in the warm afterglow 
steeped in the breath of flowers, the Ruth of his boy's pure 
dream. 

And as he gazed at her, with his yearning eyes, the vision, 
as if moved by some psychic force in his concentrated glance, 
slowly turned toward him. At the sight of a thick-set man, 
with pale face and glowing eyes, so near her she sprang to her 
feet with a movement of fawn-like terror, and a low cry of 
fright broke from her. Then she sank back upon the wooden 
bench, her dilated eyes still upon him, and her slight figure 
trembling. 

For the flash of a second's thought Henderson wondered if 
the jugglery of his excited brain had created a phantom so 
vivid that it was destined to a logical sequence of phenomena. 
But the terror of the girl was too palpably human to leave him 
in a moment's doubt. His big, manly heart felt a quick re- 
proach at creating in this lonely girl an agony of fear. He re- 
covered himself by a strong effort, and, taking off his hat, said 
in his sympathetic voice : 

" Pray pardon this intrusion. Do' not be alarmed. I can ex- 
plain everything if you will calm yourself, and permit me to 
talk with you a little." 

She was almost too weak to speak ; her large, sorrowful 
eyes hurriedly took in every detail of the man before her. His 
dress, manner, appearance, were reassuring. He remained motion- 
less, with an air of kind consideration which she felt. Finally 
she spoke rather hurriedly : 

"You startled me. I was so busy with my thoughts that I 



1894-] A SABBATH OF THE HEART. 525 

did not hear you, and when I saw some one so near I was 
frightened." 

Her voice trembled, though it was soft and clear, different 
from Ruth's voice as she differed from Ruth, despite such like- 
ness of her. 

"You will forgive me for my rudeness when I tell you that 
I was so startled by this whole strange scene that I had really 
lost control of myself," Henderson replied, speaking quietly and 
with a faint smile lighting up the gravity of his face. "This 
spot was a most familiar one to me in my boyhood. I have 
not seen it until now for twenty years. Nothing has changed, 
except that wonderful field of roses, which seems like a fairy 
touch. I half expect it will fade away at any moment." 

He smiled again, faintly. The color had come back to her 
cheek, and though she was still breathing quickly, the frightened 
look had died out of her eyes, and one of interest had taken 
its place. She said to him with more command of voice : 

"Yes, that must be a change from the bare meadow. I 
have only been here a short time myself. It seems that some 
large manufacturers of perfume bought several acres of this land 
and they have set it all out in roses. It is exceedingly practi- 
cal, you see, although it does look like a piece of fairy luxu- 
ance. We get the full benefit of it here. It is very pleasant, 
he wind from the sea blows over it, and I am sure the per- 
me is far nicer than any they will ever make from the leaves. 
But is there anything you wished to know about the old place ? 
Or did you simply want to -see it again ? " 

She was now restored to the quiet composure evidently na- 
tural to her. Henderson at once replied : 

" I came merely to see the old place. I was born here, and 
lived here till I was eighteen. Then I left it and have not seen 
it since until this evening. I know you must be Ruth Harn- 
den's daughter. The fact that I find you here, and that you 
are so marvellously like her, is proof enough of that. But it is 
something I had not counted on," he said with his gentle gravity, 
" and it startled me. I was an old acquaintance of your mo- 
ther's," he added. 

The girl had assumed an air of the closest attention. When 
he finished speaking she exclaimed impulsively : " Is it possible 
that you are John Henderson ?" 

" Yes," returned Henderson. " You have heard your mother 
speak of me ?" 

" Oh, how strange this is !" she cried, with a slight break in 



ca 

I 



526 A SABBATH OF THE HEART. [Jan., 

her voice. She paused, her eyes fixed upon the grave face of 
the man before her. Henderson felt as if a sudden moisture 
had sprung to her eyes. 

" Sit there," she said after a moment, motioning to the 
wooden bench which ran along the other side of the narrow 
porch ; " I must tell you something, and you will see how won- 
derful this meeting seems." 

Then, as Henderson quietly took his seat on the bench, still 
holding his hat in his hand, she sat up and, with her white 
hands crossed in her lap, went on : 

" I do not know if you are aware that my mother is dead. 
It is not three months since she died. That was out in Mon- 
tana. My grandfather was not pleased with her marriage, but 
before he died, last December, he wrote to her and forgave her. 
He left this old place to her. But my poor mother was too 
ill then to come on, and she never rallied. 

" Shortly before she died," the girl went on with a cadence 
of sadness in her voice, "my mother seemed to go back to 
thoughts of this place. She told me that when she was a girl 
she had a friend whose value she had not known. That friend 
was you," she added, after a slight pause. ' Where he is now 
I do not know,' my mother said. * He may be dead, he may 
be married. But if you ever meet him, if he has not changed 
from the true-hearted boy I knew, tell him that I learned to 
know him too late, and ask him to forgive me for any pain I 
ever caused him. And if you need a friend, you can trust 
him.' 

" Does it not seem strange that I should meet you so soon, 
and on the only visit you have ever made to your former 
home ? I have been here only a week myself. I was taken ill 
after my mother's death, and did not leave there until the 
school where I taught closed for the summer vacation. I came 
here then, and this old home and place have seemed such a 
haven of rest. So I give you this message from my mother, 
Mr. Henderson. She seemed to think that she had pained you. 
If she did, you will forgive her, will you not? Poor mother! 
You would if you knew how hard and troubled her life had 
been. And to think that this rest and peace should have come 
to her too late." 

She turned her face toward the stretching wilderness of 
roses. Henderson was deeply touched. It was so much stranger 
than she dreamed. He had come back to this spot where the 
most momentous epoch of his life had been his rejection by 



1 8 9 40 



A SABBATH OF THE HEART. 



527 



the girl Ruth, the idol of his boyish dreams, and in his some- 
what weary manhood found here in her daughter the full real- 
ization of all that he had falsely pictured in the mother. 

" There is nothing to forgive," he said softly. " But if 
there is, I forgive it from my heart. There was no fault any- 
where. There was nothing worse than a mistake, and there 
may not have been even that. And now I must go, for I am 
afraid this has been a strain on you. But you will let me come 
to-morrow and see you, will you not ? I feel as if I knew you 
well." 

"Yes," said the girl simply. "I shall be glad to see my 
mother's friend at any time. You are the onl " But she 
checked herself as if her emotion threatened to overcome her, 
and rising, extended her hand. He felt her fingers close on 
his with a nervous pressure, quick, and full of speech. 

And as Henderson walked slowly up the old lane in the dusk 
with the perfume of the roses about him it seemed to him as 
if the stone had been rolled from the sepulchre, and that his 
soul was awakening to a Sabbath of the heart. 





528 FATHER LIVINGSTON ON LONGFELLOW. [Jan., 



FATHER LIVINGSTON ON LONGFELLOW. 

BY J. FAIRFAX MCLAUGHLIN, LL.D. 
B* 

E may look in vain outside of the household of 
Sir Thomas More, as described by Erasmus, for 
a more beautiful scene of domestic happiness 
than that presented in the home of the poet 
Longfellow. Spreading from there the influence 
of this sweet singer entered other homes, and made him the 
fireside favorite of the English-speaking race. Of all his poems 
his own life was the noblest and best. 

He is the poet of the people, said Cardinal Wiseman, re- 
ferring to his popularity in England, where he holds a similar 
place, added his eminence, to that which Goethe holds among 
the peasants of Germany. Hawthorne expressed substantially 
the same opinion, and said that the English universities regarded 
him as the first poet of the age. Holmes calls Longfellow " our 
chief singer," and after extolling his genius, dwells upon what 
he styles his " sense of the music of words, and skill in bring- 
ing it out of our English tongue, which hardly more than one 
of his contemporaries who write in that language can be said to 
equal." Tennyson was probably the one peer whom the Auto- 
crat of the Breakfast Table had in his thoughts when he ex- 
pressed this opinion. Indeed Tennyson himself, in the opening 
lines of In Memoriam, pays lofty tribute, not only to the rare 
power but to the religious soul of Longfellow : 

" I held it truth, with him who sings 
To one clear harp in divers tones, 
That men may rise on stepping-stones 
Of their dead selves to higher things." ' 

Although the admirers of the late James Russell Lowell were 
anxious to have some memorial of that poet placed in West- 
minster Abbey, the honor was withheld, and indeed has never 
been extended to any foreigner with the solitary exception of 

*The Laureate borrows this sentiment from " The Ladder of St. Augustine," a poem of 
Longfellow. 

NOTE. Since the above was written a memorial to Mr. Lowell has been unveiled in the 
Chapter House of Westminster Abbey. It consists of two stained-glass windows, containing, 
among appropriate devices, a medallion portrait of the American scholar. Thus Lowell, 
who succeeded Longfellow at Harvard as professor, now joins him in memoriam at West- 
minster Abhpv. 



1894-] FATHER LIVINGSTON ON LONGFELLOW. 529 

Longfellow, whose bust was enshrined in the English Valhalla 
with touching and beautiful ceremonies. 

But our present object is not so much to review the army 
of Longfellow's admirers, a host that embraces the whole of 
America and Europe, and many far countries and islands of the 
sea beyond, but rather to advert to sharp criticism of the poet 
recently made in eminent Catholic Circles. At the very suc- 
cessful second session of the Summer-School at Plattsburgh 
Father William Livingston, of St. Joseph's Seminary, Troy, read 
two papers upon Longfellow, a meagre synopsis of which ap- 
peared in the New York Herald and the September number of 
the Catholic Reading Circle Review. 

The first (July 26) was on the life and lyric poetry of Long- 
fellow ; and the second (August 3) upon his narrative poems, 
and dramatic and prose works. " In religion," said Father Liv- 
ingston, according to the Reading Circle Review, " Longfellow 
was a Unitarian. He did not believe in the divinity of Christ ; 
consequently to us his religious aspirations were not as sublime 
as people usually suppose. He was a sweet singer. He saw 
the beauty of the Catholic Church from the outside, but his 
words of admiration were the work of an artist, and merely for 
artistic effect." In his second essay Father Livingston found much 

admire in " Hiawatha " and " Evangeline " as sweet pictures. 
But after all," we again quote from the Reading Circle Review, 
they are pictures painted by an artist's hand, not by a lover's. 
r ather Livingston then presented evidences from among the 
'ales of a Wayside Inn,' and other poems, as well as from 
lavanagh,' that Longfellow could express popular anti-Catho- 

calumnies against the church with as much sympathy as he 
mid express otherwhere appreciation of her beauty." 

The reverend gentleman does not seem to regard Longfellow 

a great poet of the first rank, but as a word-painter who used 
itholic topics as mere accessories of art, praising by formula 
of words, without believing that his praises were true. He ad- 
monished his hearers that they might spend their time more 
profitably in reading genuine Catholic poets, where the beauties 
of religious thought, which they would seek for in vain in Long- 
fellow, might readily be found. But his most serious accusation 
was that our poet did not believe in the divinity of Christ. 
This is the first time that such a charge, so much at variance 
with received opinion, was ever made against Longfellow. It is 
in conflict with the poet's own reiterated utterances throughout 
his writings, especially in the " Divine Tragedy of Christus," and 
we take it for granted that Father Livingston's lectures contain 



530 FATHER LIVINGSTON ON LONGFELLOW. [Jan., 

whatever of evidence he possesses to verify his alleged dis- 
covery, which, with all respect, we must regard as a veritable 
mare's nest. 

We have read criticisms before now from the Agnostic quar- 
ter deploring the fact that Longfellow was a traditionalist of 
the Thomas Aquinas school, complaints that he was too Catho- 
lic in tone, too much immersed in the literature of the Middle 
Ages, its monkish miracle plays and minnesingers' chants an 
extract from one of the most notable of these complaints we 
shall presently quote but this is the first time we have ever 
heard of a critic who opens fire on the other side, and rejects 
as a Catholic those splendid tributes to the church to be found 
so frequently in Longfellow. 

Father Livingston regards them all as a mere baseless fabric 
of figures and tropes", or, as the Reading Circle Review puts the 
matter, " Longfellow could express popular anti-Catholic calum- 
nies against the church with as much sympathy as he could 
express otherwhere appreciation of her beauty." 

But is not our chivalric church champion putting his lance in 
rest against an imaginary foe when he culls isolated phrases from 
the tale of " Kavanagh," and narrow verbal deviations from a rigid 
orthodoxy in some of the poems, as evidences against the poet's 
candor, sincerity, and truth ? Dr. Brownson could afford to smile 
at the sentimental absurdities, viewed in a theological light, that 
induced the hero of Longfellow's tale to change his religion. A 
wife and an establishment figured largely in Kavanagh's weak 
apostasy ; but even in that very story the great Catholic reviewer 
discovered much to commend as a churchman, and much to 
encourage the hope that its author would never be found 
among the enemies of Catholicity. If Kavanagh preferred 
Arius, the heretic, to St. Athanasius, and left the Catholic 
Church to become a Unitarian parson and marry a rich wife 
because Servetus was burned through the wicked machina- 
tions of Calvin, let him go and welcome. Conversions to the 
Catholic Church from the Protestant denominations will never 
be retarded, nor will apostasy among Catholics ever be hastened, 
by anything in the way of argument contained in the pages of 
"Kavanagh." Father Livingston will find Dr. Brownson in conflict 
with him in his opinion of that book. 

"Tales of a Wayside Inn" also furnished room for cavil. But 
wherefore fret over " Torquemada " when in the self-same volume 
" King Robert of Sicily " and " The Legend Beautiful," those 
truly Catholic gems, illuminate its pages ? The mission of a 
ereat ooet is not to be circumscribed and condemned because 



1894-] FATHER LIVINGSTON ON LONGFELLOW. 531 

he occasionally nods. So does Homer. We cannot exact from 
a singer of songs an exhaustive definition of Christian doctrine 
or an exegetical treatise on original sin, such as Father Living- 
ston would have a right to expect from a student of St. Jo- 
seph's Seminary in his second or third year of dogmatic theology. 
Longfellow might not have carried off a doctor's hat in the 
Congregation of the Propaganda, but might well know, and pro- 
bably did know, more about the art of poetry than the sound- 
est theologian of them all. Ars Poetica and the Athanasian 
Creed are two subjects, not one ; the author of the " Summa ' r 
and the author of " Evangeline " are masters who move in dif- 
ferent spheres, and hold distinct places, where the one expounds 
an exact and divine science, and the other pours forth an un- 
premeditated but divine lay. Sed nunc non erat his locus, ex- 
claimed Horace against some critic of the Augustan age, and 
the Horatian maxim holds equally good to-day. 

We do not concede the point that Longfellow, even under 
the hard conditions to which he is subjected, has sinned against 
the doctrines of Christianity, or assailed the church with calum- 
nies. His writings, both prose and poetical, are full of proofs 
to the contrary. We must read and weigh the evidence from 
lis writings and utterances in order to decide between him and 
lis critic. When Father Livingston asserts that Longfellow 
lid not believe in the divinity of Christ the burden of proof 
his, since the poet has proclaimed repeatedly his reverent be- 
ief in that sacred and august truth. 

But the vindication of Longfellow is away beyond all special 
leading, which is utterly beside the question. There are and 
lave been for ages two schools of poetry in the world, the one 
>agan and the other Christian. That our poet, who drank 
leeply at the fountains of Catholic art in France, Spain, Italy, 
id Germany, was in this broad division a Christian poet, a 
lere glance at his life and works abundantly proves. 

A Puritan by birth but a Cavalier by nature, he became a 
traditionalist of the scholastic school by education and choice, 
and ever shunned the protean brood of false doctrinaires and 
atheistic philosophers. Logically, therefore, his poetry is per- 
vaded by the true Catholic sentiment of the Apostolic and 
Middle Ages. Of Dante, the greatest of all Christian poets, he 
naturally became the enthusiastic disciple and translator, and 
the closest scrutiny of Longfellow's poems will fail to discover 
the least tinge of infidelity or the slightest flavor of paganism 
to poison the well-springs of his muse. It is Chateaubriand 



532 FATHER LIVINGSTON ON LONGFELLOW. [Jan., 

who draws the true distinction between the handling of reli- 
gious themes by a great poet, and the treatment of the same 
themes by a religious writer who is not a great poet. The 
former subordinates religious and supernatural agencies into in- 
cidents and accessories, and brings into greater prominence the 
natural and human aspects of his subject ; while the latter with 
pious hand makes the marvellous the chief part of his work, 
mingles divine themes and the things which are God's in over- 
shadowing profusion with natural subjects and human senti- 
ments and affections, until his composition becomes trite with 
truisms and trivial with commonplaces. 

Plutarch says, " There can be no good poetry where there is 
no fiction," an opinion which Chateaubriand adopts, and even 
goes farther than Plutarch, for he tells us that epic poetry 

" Is built on fable and by fiction lives." 

Human sympathy must be awakened if the poet expects to 
hold his readers. " In every epic poem," says Chateaubriand, 
" men and their passions are calculated to occupy the first and 
most important place. Every poem, therefore, in which any re- 
ligion is employed as the subject and not as the accessory, in 
which the marvellous is the ground and not the accident of the 
picture, is essentially faulty. . . . We must not ascribe to 
Christianity the languor that pervades certain poems, in which 
the principal characters are supernatural beings ; this languor 
arises from the fault of the composition. We shall find in con- 
firmation of this truth that the more the poet observes a due 
medium in the epic between divine and human things, the more 
entertaining he is, if we may use an expression of Boileau. To 
amuse for the purpose of instructing is the first quality re- 
quired in poetry."* 

Old Thomas Warton, in his wonderful History of English 
Poetry, has traced its rise, growth, decay, and revival with pro- 
digious labor and accurate hand. Bishop Percy's Reliques and 
Dr. Johnson's Lives of the Poets, together with the profound 
commentaries since the middle of the eighteenth century upon 
the text of Shakspere, have all contributed immense information 
relating to the poetry of Europe, and have enabled us to know 
what is pagan in it, and to point out what is Christian in its 
origin and sources. 

After the downfall of the Roman Empire a new system of 
arts and letters took root in Europe. It grew slowly, for it 
had to contend against Goth and Vandal, but it grew surely 

* Genius of Christianity, White's translation, p. 212. 



1894-] FATHER LIVINGSTON ON LONGFELLOW. 533 

and well, for its foundations were divine. St. Paul preached a 
new system on Mars Hill. Calvary, and not the groves and 
lanes of the Greek Academy,lor the domus aurea of the Caesars, 
was its life-giving source. It was leading the generations of 
man from the pyramids to the cathedrals, for it was a system 
of civilization and literature whose symbol was the Cross, whose 
life and light were Christianity. 

Between the shattered edifice of paganism and the new 
system stands Dante, the great poet of the Middle Ages, mas-, 
ter of Christian poesy, unrivalled and unapproachable, as secure 
in his supremacy as Homer is securely master of pagan song, or as 
Shakspere, last of the mighty triumvirate, is lord and master of 
the poetry of feudalism. Dante was the model of Longfellow, his 
guide in the days of study and growth, his solace and refuge 
in the days of sorrow and advancing age ; and Dante is as little 
akin to the paganism of Homer as he is to the pagan renais- 
sance which reached its highest fruition in Shakspere. " It was 
paganism," frankly declares Taine, a half-pagan himself, " which 
reigned in Elizabeth's court, not only in letters but in doctrine* 
From some all Christianity was effaced, like Marlowe and 
Greene. With others, like Shakspere, the idea of God scarcely 
makes its appearance."* 

tThe family feeling common to all Christians is never stirred 
ithin us or afforded a particle of comfort by Shakspere. It is 
phantom God, or at best a platonic God, which he always 
raws. His vesuvian genius sees heaven as an abyss of doubt, 
from which he averts his frightened gaze. The future state is 
but "the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller 

turns." Not so Dante. He was a Christian in every fibre. 

is terza rima is a symbol of the Trinity. But not only the 
triple rhyme symbolizes Christian theology, the whole " Divine 
Comedy " enforces it. There are three parts, Hell, Purgatory,, 
and Paradise ; there are thirty-three cantos to each part, con- 
formable to the thirty-three years upon earth of our Divine 
Lord, for although the " Inferno " has thirty-four, the first one is 
merely a prologue and not properly a canto. Everywhere 
Christian types and symbols are found, and no other poet has 
ever lived whose ideas of God are so purely Christian as Dante's 
both in form and spirit. Such was the mighty genius after 
whom Longfellow modelled himself. He loved him intensely > 
turned to him at all times with evident joy, translated him 
into English with literal fidelity, and enriched the text of Dante 
with a body of notes bristling with patristic learning, with Chris- 

* Taine's English Literature (i. 207). 



534 FATHER LIVINGSTON ON LONGFELLOW. [Jan., 

tian hagiography here St. Augustine and St. John Chrysostom, 
there St. Francis Assisi and the Angel of the Schools, every, 
where doctors, confessors and martyrs, and the whole consti- 
tuting a vast store-house of mediaeval Catholic literature and 
primitive Christian lore. 

Nor were these the only channels of learning vexed by this 
profound American poet. The gleemen, the minnesingers, the 
sonneteers, the minstrels, the troubadours of the Crusades, the 
authors of the miracle plays, Archbishop Turpin's wonderful 
chronicle of Charlemagne, the learned Welsh monk Geoffrey of 
Monmouth's rendering into classic Latin of the life of King 
Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table these were among 
the prolific sources, not Protestant, not pagan, but all Catholic, 
of Longfellow's muse. What other poet of the nineteenth cen- 
tury has made such use of the Catholic poetry of the Middle 
and Apostolic Ages ? None whatever. Read his " Divine Tragedy 
of Christus," the " Golden Legend," the poem on Walther von 
der Vogelweide the minnesinger, the noble ballad " King Robert 
of Sicily," paraphrased from the nameless old Catholic minstrel 
of the days of Edward the Second, his prologues and epilogues 
to Dante, the " Elevation of the Host," the posthumous drama on 
Michael Angelo, the incomparable " Evangeline," the masterful 
monotheistic edda of " Hiawatha" ; and then tell us how any 
Catholic can find it in his heart or head to say a single word 
against the Catholic spirit of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow! 
It seems impossible. 

Deliberately, and with no fear of his being dislodged by 
any other poet, we make the unequivocal claim for Longfellow, 
that as Dante was the mightiest poet of Christianity, so his great 
American disciple is the foremost poet of the Christian renais- 
sance in this nineteenth century. In the course of a clever but 
superficial sketch of Longfellow, in the Encyclopedia Britannica, 
the writer raises this question sharply by the following remarks : 

" For an American while still in a plastic state to spend much 
time in Europe is a doubtful and not unfrequently a disastrous 
experiment, unfitting him for a useful, contented life in his own 
country. The effect of Longfellow's visit was two-fold. On the 
one hand it widened his sympathies, gave him confidence in 
himself, and supplied him with many poetical themes ; on the 
other it traditionalized his mind, colored for him the pure light 
of nature, and rendered him in some measure unfit to feel or 
express the spirit of American nature and life. His sojourn in 
Europe fell exactly in the time when in England the reaction 
against the sentimental atheism of Shelley, the pagan sensitivity 



1894-] FATHER LIVINGSTON ON LONGFELLOW. 535 

of Keats, and the sublime, satanic outcastness of Byron was at 
its height ; when in the Catholic countries the negative exaggera- 
tions of the French Revolution were inducing a counter-current 
of positive faith, which threw men into the arms of a half-senti- 
mental, half-aesthetic mediaevalism ; and when in Germany the 
aristocratic paganism of Goethe was being swept aside by that 
tide of dutiful, romantic patriotism which flooded the country 
as soon as it began to feel that it existed after being run over 
by Napoleon's war-chariot. . . . He [Longfellow] was essen- 
tially a poet of the past, not like Lowell, a grasper and moulder 
of the present, or like Whitman, a John the Baptist of the future." 
Mr. Davidson, the writer of the scoffing sketch from which 
the preceding extract is taken, fairly states the truth when he 
says Longfellow's mind was " traditionalized." But what mean- 
ing does he intend to convey by the slighting words, " he was 
essentially a poet of the past," and the strange comparison of 
Longfellow with Lowell and Whitman ? Who commissioned 
Whitman ? Lowell a grasper and moulder of the present ? What 
did he mould ? Are we to understand that, compared with this 
grasper and moulder and that prophet, Longfellow is " essen- 
tially" outranked? Let us ponder this for a moment. 

There can be no new John the Baptist, as there can be no 
other Messias. The flavor of classical paganism, if not of down- 
right infidelity, pervades this figure of speech, and it is redolent 
of the spirit of an age of unbelief. Your inventors and specu- 
lators in psychological problems are not poets. Poets are nar- 
rators and delineators ; that is to say, writers on the past, de- 
scribing what has happened and not what is to happen. Hence, 
Whitman, whatever his merits, leaves the field of poetry when 
he assumes the place of some one to come. Though an angel 
from heaven tell us things we believe him not. In these latter 
days false prophets abound. Mr. Lowell was a highly accom- 
plished, and in some respects a great writer, but just so far as 
he turned to grasping and moulding the present, in that far he 
departed from Parnassus. A philosopher has to do with subtle 
speculations and logical and scientific processes; a statesman 
grasps and moulds the present. Webster, Clay, Calhoun are 
better graspers and moulders of contemporaneous history than 
a poet, just as in war times Napoleon, Washington, Grant know 
better how to solve the problems of the present than your poet, 
be he never so wise a moulder. Longfellow, like Dante and 
Shakspere, was a narrator, a delineator of events past, whether 
real or ideal, and that, be there no doubt, is the province of 
the true poet. 



536 FATHER LIVINGSTON ON LONGFELLOW. [Jan., 

But the Britannica regrets further that his mind was "tradi- 
tionalized " in Europe. Does it repudiate the teachings of St. 
Paul to the Corinthians and Thessalonians, whom the apostle 
exhorted to hold fast to the traditions ? Does it prefer the 
Carmagnole and the Ca Ira of the French Revolution to the 
Psalter of David? the shallow philosophy of Rousseau to the 
City of God of St. Augustine ? the scoffs and sneers of Vol- 
taire to the sublime faith of Dante? Where literature is want- 
ing, says a weighty writer, tradition, whatever its imperfections, 
" is the great bond between the present and the past, and one of 
the great distinguishing marks between man and the brutes, 
which latter have no tradition, and therefore no history."* The 
traditions of nations are, if understood aright, a more faithful 
reflex of their true character than the written page of history. 
He who solves them and narrates or sings them faithfully places 
the world in his debt for an invaluable service. Old Fletcher 
of Saltoun spoke well when he said : " If a man were permitted 
to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the 
laws of a nation." The aphorism will never be forgotten, be- 
cause it is true, because a ballad is the musical voice of tradi- 
tions which outlast the law. History, like the civil law, is a re- 
cord ; traditions, like the common law, are the weightier. witnesses 
for not being a record. Priests are their oracles, poets their 
interpreters. 

But let us cite Mr. Longfellow's own incomparable lines from 
the " Christus," in which the value of traditions is set forth, 
and which repel the scoffs of the Britannica on the one hand, 
and disprove Father Livingston's criticism on the other, where 
he says that our poet only " saw the beauty of the Catholic 
Church from the outside " : 

" Great is the Written Law ; but greater still 
The Unwritten, tne Traditions of the Elders, 
The lovely words of Levites, spoken first 
To Moses on the Mount, and handed down 
From mouth to mouth, in one unbroken sound 
And sequence of divine authority, 
The voice of God resounding through the ages ! 
The Written Law is water; the Unwritten 
Is precious wine ; the Written Law is salt, 
The Unwritten costly spice ; the Written Law 
Is but the body; the Unwritten, the soul 
That quickens it and makes it breathe and live ! ' 

* The Catholic Dictionary. 



1894-] FATHER LIVINGSTON ON LONGFELLOW. 537 

The divine commission to the Twelve stamps them for all 
days witnesses of truth. The wings of imagination, Dantean, 
Shaksperean, creative imagination, make of poets God's chosen 
interpreters of the works of nature and of man, born witnesses 
of secrets which the Greeks called Eleusinian mysteries, and 
Christians call traditions. Raphael, when he traced his immor- 
tal allegory upon the walls of the Vatican, wisely represented 
Poetry with- wings which he denied to Philosophy. 

Traditionalized forsooth ! The Introitus of that same " Divine 
Tragedy of Christus " incontestably proves the deep religious 
soul of Longfellow, and ought to satisfy Father Livingston that 
the poet did mean what he said, and that it was no hollow formula 
of words that came welling up from his fervent heart. It is Chris- 
tian faith taught in all his poems. Pagan classics it is not ; 
Voltairean unbelief it is not ; to Darwin it is not akin, nor Lub- 
bock, nor Tylor, nor any of the congeners in the Serbonian bogs 
of science and delusive human progress from protoplasm to per- 
fectability ; neither of Valhalla nor of Olympus is it an offspring. 
But it is as a voice crying in the wilderness, " Make straight 
the ways of the Lord ! " If not of the body, who can truly say 
irther that Longfellow belonged not to the soul of the church ? 
Read this sweet poet as he rises to the height of his great 
leme: 

" Alas ! how full of fear 

Is the fate of Prophet and Seer! 

For evermore, for evermore, 

It shall be as it hath been heretofore ; 

The age in which they live 

Will not forgive 

The splendor of the everlasting light 

That makes their foreheads bright, 

Nor the sublime 

Forerunning of their time ! " 

That is Longfellow's answer to the charge of being tradition- 
alized, preferred against him by the Agnostics on one side, and 
to the imputation of not being in earnest but a mere word- 
painter, which is heard now for the first time on the other or 
Catholic side. If ever poet's soul was inebriated with divine love, 
while his scholar's brows were being crowned with the bays of 
the Academe in two hemispheres, forerunning his time by voic- 
ing aright the Traditions of the Elders, Longfellow was that 
man by pre-eminence. Salve et vale. 
VOL. Lvnii 36 





538 THE NEW C(ENACULV$A*YORK. [Jan., 

THE NEW CCENACULUM FOR NEW YORK. 

BY JOHN J. O'SHEA. 

S Christ himself is the builder of his church on 
earth, his apostolate, it is manifest, devolves upon 
his priests. They are the successors of those to 
whom he gave the command, " Go forth and teach 
all nations." The necessity of having a priest- 
hood fit to carry on his work continuously is so obvious that 
it were a waste of argument to endeavor to maintain it. It 
would be as difficult to imagine a beautiful building resting on 
earth without support from below as to imagine a church with- 
out a priesthood. God's priests have a two-fold duty. They 
are the agency by which his grace is ministered to men, and 
they are the teachers who show the way in which the children 
of men are to walk to earn c that grace. These are but the pri- 
mary conditions of the Catholic priesthood ; the training for 
their sacred calling involves many correlative considerations con- 
nected with almost every problem of human life both in its 
spiritual and in its moral and physical conditions. 

Hence the provision of an adequate priesthood has always 
been the subject of the most anxious solicitude to those on 
whom the responsibility devolves. It is the most important 
duty of the Catholic episcopacy. It touches the very existence 
of the church. The devotion of its priesthood is, next to the 
living spirit of God within her, the life of our holy church. It 
was from the blood of the martyred priests and confessors that 
it arose ; if it have not the same martyr-spirit present in it still,, 
if that spirit had not always been existent in it, it would not be 
here with us to-day. Every bishop, from the occupant of the 
chair of Peter downward, is ready to lay down his life, to make 
every earthly sacrifice demanded of him, for the salvation of 
his flock and as a testimony to the truth of God. He has 
pledged his faith in the most solemn manner to do so, on ac- 
cepting the awful dignity of his episcopate ; and we know how 
steadfastly the Catholic bishops have always, in the hour of 
trial, redeemed their pledge. We need not go back to the Tu- 
dor age or the age of the catacombs for examples ; within the 



1 8 9 4-] 



THE NEW C&NACULUM FOR NEW YORK. 



539 



memory of many living two archbishops of Paris have redeemed 
their pledges with their lives. 




There is that in the constitution of the church here be- 
low which necessitates the maintenance of an exact proportion, 
so far as human endeavor can secure it, between all its parts. 



540 THE NEW CCENACULUM FOR NEW YORK. [Jan. 

There must be pastors wherever there is a flock. The human 
family is a microcosm of the church in this respect. There 
can be no family where there is no head and no direction ; no 
family where there are head and direction alone. Though this 
simile be weak, it may serve to show the logical impossibility 
of the existence of a church without an adequate priesthood. 
If the emphatic mandate of the great Pastor, "Feed my lambs, 
feed my sheep," is not to remain a dead letter, the hands to 
administer the heavenly food of which he spoke must always 
be here. 

Let it not be supposed that because the times have altered 
so far as the forms of persecution and struggle go, the urgency 
of having a true priesthood has in any whit lessened. The con- 
flict continues unabated ; it is only the character of the warfare 
that has undergone a change. Though persecution for conscience' 
sake have no statutory sanction, it exists under myriad forms, 
and has to be faced and overcome by priest and flock. The 
conflict is now waged in the moral and intellectual field, and 
the gladiators must be well trained ere they enter upon it. 
Under the old conditions perhaps they fought with greater ad- 
vantage, as they enlisted the sympathies of the liberal-minded 
and the gentle, of whatever persuasion, by their sufferings. 
They have now to prove the worth and the truth of their cause 
by the force not alone of virtuous example but by solid, irre- 
futable argument and appeal to human reason and conscience. 
The fierce light of a universal free press is turned full upon their 
daily lives and words ; the subtlest intellects are examining the 
church's doctrine under the cold microscope of science. And 
as the years advance all these modern difficulties will grow and 
multiply with them. No Catholic who knows the history of the 
past and the tendency of modern thought will venture to say 
that the conflict is likely to grow less strenuous, although the 
church gain in adherents. On the contrary, there is every 
reason to believe that this very fact will lend an additional 
bitterness to the struggle, as the losing side generally becomes 
the more desperate from the sense of approaching defeat. 

We have to consider how the metropolitan diocese is situate 
in this regard. The enormous growth of the Archdiocese of 
New York since the early years of the century has made the 
question of supplying its spiritual needs one of ever-increasing 
perplexity. 

For sixty years the Catholic Seminary has been an inter- 
mittent nomad. Its first location was at Nyack, on the Hud- 






t 



p 

I 

I 




542 THE NEW CCENACULUM FOR NEW YORK. [Jan. 

son, where, in 1833, its foundation was laid by Bishop Dubois. 
The building was accidentally burned before it was quite fin- 
ished, and an attempt was made to found another, not on the 
same site, with which for some reason the bishop was then not 
satisfied, on ground in Brooklyn offered by a generous New 
York Catholic, Mr. Cornelius Heeney. But whilst the negotia- 
tions over the settlement were pending, Bishop Hughes, the co- 
adjutor of Bishop Dubois, had fixed upon a site for the new 
seminary. It was at Lafargeville, in Jefferson County. 

The new buildings were completed in 1835, their cost being 
about thirty thousand dollars, and the establishment bore the 
name of " St. Vincent of Paul's Seminary." It was not a very 
pretentious affair, and the small beginnings from which the pre- 
sent magnificent fabric of New York Catholicism grew may be 
estimated from the fact that when the new seminary began 
operations its teaching staff numbered only three professors and 
three tutors, and the scholars six young men and two boys. 

It was the idea of the founders of St. Vincent's that remote- 
ness from the attractions of a great city was the first requisite 
for a theological seminary, and as Lafargeville is three hundred 
miles from New York this desideratum was fully realized there. 
This view as to the virtue of remoteness would not appear to 
have been widely shared in, however, as the institution never 
prospered, and in a short time Bishop Hughes sold the place 
to his brother, and, reversing the policy of distance, began 
building a new seminary at Fordham, in Westchester County, 
then ten miles from New York City. The site chosen was a 
spot named Rose Hill. The place had a memorable historical 
record. Around it had raged for a considerable time the fury 
of the Revolutionary struggle, and a mound of earth on the 
grounds of Rose Hill itself covered the bones of some gallant 
fellows who had laid down their lives for American freedom. 

It is noteworthy that the new Seminary at Valentine Hill 
is also rich in such bracing patriotic stimulus. The hill was oc- 
cupied, it is believed, by the Massachusetts militia under Gen- 
eral Lincoln, in the movement of the American army from 
Harlem Heights towards the position near White Plains, in 
the campaign of 1776. It was on Valentine Hill that Wash- 
ington established his headquarters previous to the battle of 
White Plains, and from that hill to Chatterton Hill a line of en- 
trenchments extended, along the western side of the Bronx River. 
At that time the British had several ships of war and transports 
on the Hudson, and the operations of the American force were 



$44 THE NEW CCENACULUM FOR NEW YORK. [Jan. 

directed so as to make any attempt at landing these ineffectual. 
All the ground, as far as the eye can see, around Valentine 
Hill is sacred and memorable. It is good to grow up in such 
a spot as this good for men whose lives are to be one long- 
enduring sacrifice, from a temporal point of view, to grow up 
amid the scenes of heroic suffering and devotion on behalf of 
fatherland. 

In 1841 the former seminary was opened at Fordham, under 
the presidency of Father John McCloskey (afterwards Cardinal 
Archbishop) ; the superior of the institution being the Rev. 
Felix Vilanis. The seminary, which numbered thirty students, 
was dedicated to St. Joseph ; the lay college in connection with 
it, which had fifty pupils, was placed under the patronage of 
St. John the Baptist. In 1845 the State Legislature granted to 
the college the recognized university privileges. In the suc- 
ceeding term it passed under the management of the Jesuit 
order, the Rev. Auguste The"baud being its first president. 
Meanwhile another seminary had been founded in the city, on 
the present site of St. Patrick's Cathedral ; and thither the theo- 
logical students were brought for their better ecclesiastical train- 
ing. The college at Fordham remained open until 1862, when, 
in consequence of the unsettled state of affairs arising from the 
outbreak of the Civil War, it was found advisable to close it. 

So rapid was the growth of the Catholic population of the 
New York diocese during these years that it was soon found its 
seminarian wants could by no means be met with the existing 
resources. Seeing this state of affairs, Archbishop Hughes early 
begun casting about for a means of meeting the difficulty. A 
great educational building founded by the Methodists at Troy, 
he ascertained, was in the market, and he conceived the bold 
project of acquiring this and turning it into a Catholic semi- 
nary. The building was situated upon a charmingly em- 
bosomed hill named Mount Ida. It commanded a magnificent 
prospect of diversified beauty for many miles around, embrac- 
ing the sylvan Mohawk Valley and bordered by the bold blue 
ridges of the gnome-haunted Catskills. The building alone had 
cost the Methodists nearly two hundred thousand dollars ; the 
archbishop purchased the entire place for sixty thousand dol- 
lars. Yet, although the most advantageous of the several sites 
which had offered up to that date, the Troy seminary was far 
from being all that was desirable. It was, in the first place, 
outside the bounds of the archdiocese ; it was, again, at a great 
distance from the metropolitan city ; and a very grave objec- 



1 894-] 



THE NEW CCENACULUM FOR NEW YORK. 



545 



tion to it lies in the trying character of the climate of the dis- 
trict in severe weather. Lastly, notwithstanding its consider- 
able size, it was totally inadequate for the number of students 
which the ever-increasing needs of the archdiocese necessitate 
to be kept in training for the sacred ministry. 




These drawbacks were discussed by the clergy at the fourth 
diocesan synod, and a memorial on the subject was presented 
to Archbishop Corrigan. Upon this his Grace took speedy 
action, the importance of the subject brooking no unnecessary 



546 THE NEW CCENACULUM FOR NEW YORK. [Jan. 

delay. There is no bishop more sensible of the gravity of his 
duty in this regard than Archbishop Corrigan ; and the zeal 
and constancy with which he has followed out the recommenda- 
tions of the synod afford convincing proof of this. He lost 
no time in acting on the suggestion made to him. A commit- 
tee of priests and laymen was quickly appointed, and, after 
examining a number of available sites, the plot of ground near 
Yonkers, on which stands Valentine Hill, was chosen as fulfill- 
ing all the requisite conditions. 

Valentine Hill is only a portion of the property. The 
whole lot was long known as the Valentine Farm, and contains 
as much as fifty-three thousand acres of land. It was originally 
held under the British crown by Frederick Philipse, and the 
estate was known as the Manor of Philipsburg, and dates as 
such from the year 1693. Philipse was attainted in 1779, and 
the property was confiscated to the State, by whom it was sold 
in 1786 to Thomas Valentine. From thence, until its purchase 
three years ago by the archbishop, it had remained in the 
hands of the Valentine family. The purchase money was only 
sixty-four thousand dollars. 

The choice of a site was in every way felicitous. On grounds 
of healthfulness, convenience, propinquity to the metropolis, and 
adequacy of extent the tract at Valentine Hill presents advan- 
tages which could not be excelled. It is only about an hour's 
journey from New York. On days of special service at the 
Cathedral this advantage will be fully appreciated by the semi- 
narians and the clergy. Let us look at the Seminary as it 
appears now. 

Spreading out upon the brow of a majestic plateau which 
rises by a gradual elevation to a fine height above the valley 
of the Hudson and the shores of the Sound, the great pile of 
building stands out, a strikingly prominent object amidst an im- 
posing landscape. You come upon it rather suddenly, owing to 
a sharp curve in the ascending road from Yonkers, and its 
stately lines and far-stretching facade impress you in the inex- 
plicable way that large buildings unexpectedly come upon do. It 
looks like a great fortress, seated calmly on the brow of that piece 
of table-land, watching in the security of conscious strength the 
advance of some beleaguering enemy. And in truth so it is 
a peaceful fortress, a training camp whence shall issue in time 
the hosts who shall do battle against ignorance and infidelity. 

A stroll along the edge of the broad terreplein on which 
the edifice stands is refreshing at once to .lung and eye. The 



548 THE NEW CCENACULUM FOR NEW YORK. [Jan. 

elevation is such as to insure a grateful breeze at most seasons, 
a delightfully bracing one at the neutral periods of the year. A 
great sweep of landscape lies beneath one's feet, beautifully wood- 
ed and full of color and melting gray mist, away to the right, 
where the valley of the Hudson and the heights of Harlem 
spread themselves in panoramic charm. On the left and east- 
ward, the heights of Mount Vernon and the windings of Long 
Island Sound make a picture of a different but not less fascin- 
ating kind. Such a combination of wood and river, sea and 
city, all comprised within a radius easily discernible from one 
spot by the unaided human vision, is rarely found. The envi- 
rons of New York possess a peculiar attraction because of this 
kind of combination of scenic beauty and conveniences of 
modern life; and the founders of the new Seminary have been 
fortunate in securing a locale in which this desirable juxtaposi- 
tion is most strikingly exemplified. 

Without an actual view of the Seminary as it stands, it is 
difficult to realize its great extent. It is no exaggeration to 
say that its proportions are those of a university, and its ex- 
ternal aspect in keeping with such an idea. When it is con- 
sidered that it is only a couple of years since the first stone 
of the great fabric was laid by the Archbishop of New York, 
the wonder is, how such a vast undertaking could be pushed so 
far forward in that comparatively brief span. The main build- 
ing presents a stretch of three hundred and sixty feet to the 
view of the beholder approaching it from the front, and a 
height of about one hundred feet from the ground to the roof- 
ridge. 

A wide gravelled walk and drive, with an ample grassy 
level behind it, leads up to the principal entrance, and from 
this open space the noble proportions of the structure can be 
fully taken in, as no intervening objects break the lines of 
perspective. The arts of the landscape gardener will be effec- 
tively employed about here, as well as in one of the enclosed 
squares which is being laid out as a place of secluded outdoor 
exercise and relaxation. Extreme simplicity and solidity are 
the characteristics of the architecture. In fact it may be said 
that the idea of ornament is altogether eschewed, as likely to 
mar the effect rather than add any grace. There is a faint 
attempt at Renaissance outline in the shape of a few of the 
windows on the upper stories at certain points ; but this, it is 
evident, is only introduced for the purpose of preventing utter 
monotony in the long line of roof and coping. The roof rises 




ITS PROPORTIONS ARE THOSE OF A UNIVERSITY. 



550 THE NEW CCENACULUM FOR NEW YORK. [Jan., 

steeply over the block which is marked out, flanked by two 
pointed towers, as the main entrance, as well as over the wings 
which abut in front and form a sort of courtyard there. 
These towers are of the French Gothic style, and seem some- 
what out of harmony with the few half-ornamental windows 
referred to, as these are not pointed but arched. The style of 
architecture adopted throughout is a sort of early Renaissance 
which entirely shuts out the idea of columns and pilasters 
features which certainly add dignity to long lines of buildings 
without detracting from their simplicity. That extreme simplic- 
ity is secured in this style, there can be no question ; but the 
severity of the character produces the effect of bareness as well. 
The adoption of a different style in a building of such vast 
extent might, however, involve very considerable additional out- 
lay, and this in itself is no unimportant consideration, as the 
cost of the building and its fittings, when completed, will 
probably run up to nearly a million dollars. 

Right across the corridor, when the great entrance hall has 
been passed through, will be found the chapel of the Seminary. 
Here the architecture which may be disappointing outside will 
entirely justify its adoption by the uses to which it can be put 
within. There is no style, in the judgment of critics, better or 
so well adapted for interior embellishment as this early Renais- 
sance, and this advantage will be fully utilized in the decora- 
tion of this portion of the structure the only one, after all, 
which needs any decoration, if we go on the architectural for- 
mula that the building must always harmonize externally with 
the purpose which it is erected to subserve. 

Although the new Seminary may be regarded in its entirety 
as a memorial of the labor and generosity of Archbishop Corri- 
gan and his flock, the chapel in especial is the Archbishop's 
monument. It is he who has furnished the funds for this por- 
tion of the edifice, and over its erection and embellishment he 
has exercised a loving supervision. 

Only the outer shell of the chapel had arisen when we beheld 
the building, and all that could be noted was its ample size and 
the gracefulness of its lines and its rows of fine windows; but 
enough was visible to show that in this building the ancient 
maxim of the architects would be respected. Externally it bears 
every distinctive mark pertaining to a temple of God ; in time 
the hand of the artist and the sculptor will make these now 
rugged and bare walls and pillars and ceiling glow and shape 
themselves into lines of beauty and forms of life such as made 



1894-] THE NEW CCENACULUM FOR NEW YORK. 551 

the psalmist exclaim, " Lord, I have loved the beauty of thy 
house and the place where thy glory dwelleth ! " It is not his 
own home, but the home wherein his Master resides, that the 
priest of God desires to see enriched by the hand of art. 

In the disposition of the interior the Seminary will show 
that those who planned its details made ample provision for air 
and space and light. The loftiness and width of the corridors 
and the ample size of the rooms strike the visitor immediately 
as remarkable. The corridors run the entire length of the main 
parallelogram and then branch off without break into the wings. 
A walk through them all is in itself no trifling pedestrian feat r 
so that in inclement weather there need be no apprehension on 
the score of means of exercise. The entire extent of the ground- 
floor is to be occupied by the lecture-halls, reception parlors, 
public rooms, refectory, and kitchen. It will besides give space 
for recreation rooms, a gymnasium, and other suitable apart- 
ments. A cloistered court-yard, which will be tastefully laid out 
with fountain and parterres, will afford a sheltered recreation 
ground in the warmer days. 

On one of the upper floors of the building will be found 
the accommodation necessary for the library of the Seminary ; 
d the quarters of the professors will be near this. The labo- 
.tory will be near the lecture-halls on the ground-floor. 

Every precaution which human ingenuity can devise has 
been taken to insure the safety of the new building. Nearly 
all the materials used in its construction are absolutely fire- 
proof, while the boiler-house for the heating of the structure 
will be detached. Wood has been used in the building as 
sparingly as possible chiefly in the flooring. Even the parti- 
tion walls in the dormitories, and indeed throughout the whole 
seminary, are of brick. Besides these precautions, care has been 
taken to have a copious water-supply always available, in suit- 
able tanks and reservoirs. The modern large building, with its 
iron girder-work and its substitution of brick-work where wood 
was formerly used, gives little chance for the spreading of fire 
wherever it breaks out ; in this case the danger has been re- 
duced, through the adoption of every known safeguard, down 
to its lowest decimal. 

It will be noted by the visitor that the outer walls of the 
Seminary are of granite. By a singular piece of good fortune a 
quarry of this valuable stone, of an extremely fine quality, was 
found on the land when it was acquired, and from this quarry the 
solid masonry of the Seminary has been supplied. There is 



UK 

: 



1894-] THE NEW CCENACULUM FOR NEW YORK. 553 

something peculiarly appropriate in the utilization of this pro- 
verbially durable material, imperishable as the truths which this 
institution is set up to teach. It is to be hoped, too, that it 
may be an augury for the permanency of it in its new abode 
on Valentine Hill. 

When completed the new Seminary will form a commanding 
feature in suburban development. It will be a fair sight for 
Catholic eyes to rest upon. It is in some respects a type of 
the antique church whose faith it is destined to promulgate. 
It is built on a rock, and it stands erect in the face of earth 
and heaven. It looks toward the East, where that church had 
its beginning ; the sun of the West, as he sinks in grandeur 
away behind the line of the Palisades, smiles a welcome upon 
its stately brow, which glistens like a tiara of rubies in his 
fervid light, and seems to say, Esto perpetua ! 




VOL. LVIII. 37 




554 ADIRONDACK SKETCHES. [Jan., 

ADIRONDACK SKETCHES. I. 
BY WALTER LECKY. 

" But think ye nae my heart was sair 
When I laid the mould on his yellow hair ? 
Think ye nae my heart was wae 
When turned about away to gae ? " 

COUNTRY doctor leads a strange life; that is a 
saying of one of them. His life is one of sacri- 
fice." Those words I wrote in my diary long 
ago, before these wild hills became my friends. 
It is an opinion of mine that to enjoy Nature 
you must be on speaking terms with her. Toby, my good gray 
nag, seems to know this. No sooner does he come to a lovely 
snatch of scenery than his usual quick jog becomes a sedate 
walk. A friend of mine called Toby a brute ; it was strange 
on my part to resent it why I could not explain. Perhaps I 
was thinking of Toby being able to feast his eyes on nature, 
while so many men, so far removed from the brute I follow 
the moralists would find in these same scenes nothing to de- 
light. When I was a younger man I had written, as I have 
said, that a doctor's life was one of sacrifice ; now that I have 
passed the fifties, I see no reason to change that entry in my 
diary. My life has been a hard one, full of peril. Our little 
village lies in these mountains isolated from railways "which 
means," said a New-Yorker, Dr. Jenks, " from civilization." 
The nearest town lies twenty miles to the south, and that by a 
narrow mountain road. In winter this road is snow-bound, and 
Snipeville for that is the name of our village settles down 
to cut logs : some logs, such as spruce and balsam, for Dixon's 
pulp-mill ; others for Parker's saw-mill. The village store has 
been well supplied in the autumn with teas, sugars, coffees, 
and canned fruits, so there is no want of what we call here the 
luxuries of life. Every family has killed its fat hog and salted 
him, filled the cellar with potatoes, cabbages, turnips, carrots, a 
few beets, and stacked the yard with piles of fuel. We are 
poor, it is true, but our poverty is of a different sort from that 
felt by the toilers in the city. Jamsey Duquette sold his farm 
three years ago and went east. He was glad to come back to 



1 894.] 



ADIRONDACK SKETCHES. 



555 



the mountains. " Doctor," says he, " when you have to buy 
everything, even the water, and live in three rooms not as big 
as a hencoop, and never see a hill, or bit of grass, or anything 
that you were brought up to, you get your senses back and 




"A COUNTRY DOCTOR LEADS A STRANGE LIFE." 

long to see Snipeville." I had this thought of Jamsey's in my 
mind when Toby passed Slippery Creek, as he rounded Owl's 
Head. As was his wont, he became sedate. I lay back in my 
sleigh, cosy in my furs, chatting with the snow-crowned hills 
and the frozen Salmon River. Now and then that inner Me, one 



556 ADIRONDACK SKETCHES. [Jan., 

of the most loving of companions, suggested that if my life was 
hard the pleasure of such scenes as lay before me, and the ro- 
bust health to enjoy them, more than repaid the sacrifice. 

From behind a few straggling choke-cherry bushes came a wild, 
plaintive laugh. Toby stopped. William Buttons, of Squidville, 
avows that my horse knows when some one needs my service. It 
is the old story : if a man or brute shows some signs of intelligence 
more than the ordinary our imagination supplies the superna- 
tural. 

"Who's there?" And I peered into the cherries. "It's me, 
doctor," she answered ; and crazed Jenny Sauve jumped from 
her hiding-place, patted Toby's head, gave him a few dried 
brown leaves to eat, and then seated herself beside me. 

"Jenny's a good girl to-day?" Jenny shook her head. 

" Where was Jenny going ? " 

Another wild, plaintive laugh. " Jenny was a pretty girl." 
The handsome face, with the strange, fiery, wandering blue eyes, 
curved in suppressed laughter. It has always been a strange 
thing to me, the pleasure that idiots take in being praised. 
This reminds me that more than twenty years ago I prepared 
a paper on the " Sensibility of Idiots to Flattery." I read it to 
Jenks ; he laughed at it, called it unscientific. Jenks is a New 
York specialist, which means unbounded egotism, linked with 
scepticism of other men's works. 

"Will I drive* Jenny to the store?" 

" No, no, doctor ; go to Skinny Benoit's. Skinny is sick." 

"Very bad, Jenny?" 

" She cry much ; one tooth " ; and laughing, Jenny, opening 
her mouth, beat time on her pearly teeth with the long nail of 
her index finger. Here I admit that I am no specialist, to use 
a phrase of Blind Cagy's. I am an all-round man. Tooth-pull- 
ing is one of my arts, and it was easy to see, by Jenny, that 
my service as a dentist was required at Skinny Benoit's. I 
gave Jenny a few pennies and told her to sing me a song. 
She clutched the coins in her right hand, hiding them in the 
folds of her bare-worn calico gown, while she used the left 
hand to brush back the long, unkempt vagrant yellow curls, 
tossed to and fro by the sharp, snappy breeze. A quick shake 
of the head, like a high-bred horse setting out to win, and she 
sang in a jerky, sad way : 

" J'ai vu la fille du meunier 
Comme est belle? 



1894-] ADIRONDACK SKETCHES. 557" 

Avec son bonnet de dentelle 

Qui voltige au vent printanier 
J'ai vu la fille du meunier, 
La belle fille 
Au gai 
Au gai 
Chantait le long de la charmille." 

I turned Toby's head and took the narrow wood road that 
leads to Skinny's. 

* 

CHAPTER II. 

Henriette Benoit better known as Skinny on account of her 
emaciated form lived in a little maple-grove that yielded enough 
syrup to smear her morning buckwheat cakes. The house was 
a log one, the usual kind to be met with in these mountains. 
Before the door lay a few half-rotten logs, with an axe care- 
lessly stuck in the butt-end of one of them. I drove to the 
rickety door, that had been years ago smeared with common red 
paint, and jumped from the sleigh. Jenny, with the grace and 
ease of a fawn, had preceded me, and while I tied Toby to 
the half-rotten logs she threw affectionately over his shoulders 
my big buffalo-robe, and went in search of dry leaves, the only 
dish the poor thing was able to procure for him. I pulled the 
latch-string and entered Skinny's house. There is no ceremony, 
no " bowing and scraping," to use a phrase of William Buttons, 
about a country doctor. The women folks are always glad to 
see him, either on account of present or impending ills. 

Skinny sat near the stove, with a huge towel tightly drawn 
around her head. As she rocked herself on her rickety chair 
she muttered "Ah me! ah mi! ah mo !" ending in a long-drawn 
sigh. This reminded me that I had written in the medical pa- 
per, tabooed by Jenks as unscientific, " that a great deal of sor- 
row escapes by way of music." 

" What's the matter, Mrs. Benoit ? " I asked, and put my 
medical chest on the plain deal table, littered with dishes and 
broken crockery that Jenny had got from the neighbors. 

" Take a seat, doctor, and warm yourself ; it's blustering 
out "; and Skinny rose from the only chair she possessed, and 
sat on a low stool. The chair, stool, and rough deal table 
were the only furniture that she owned. For a bed she had 
placed some oat-straw in one corner of the cabin. On this 



558 ADIRONDACK SKETCHES. [Jan., 

was thrown a worn mattress of dried shavings, a few old 
quilts, whose faded colors told of long-gone splendor, and a 
threadbare spread. Despite the scanty furnishings of her home, 
there was about it an air of neatness and cleanliness. 

On the walls were hung a few religious pictures, gotten from 
a Jewish pedlar in exchange for maple syrup, and a large 
framed picture of a country store in Canada, with a young man 
and woman standing in the door full of smiles and happiness. 
It required some effort to believe that that fair young bride 
was no other than the towelled Skinny. " Fact is a harder pill 
to swallow than fiction," is the truest thing that Buttons spat 
out. 

" You're a great one, Granny Benoit, to make such a fuss 
about a stump." 

I opened my chest. Skinny took no notice of my banter, 
but slowly unfolded the towel from her head ; this done she 
pityingly glanced at me with her little bloodshot eyes, and in 
evident pain opened her mouth. I held the forceps in my right 
hand, behind my back, while I curved my left, making a rest 
of it for her old white head. 

" Take the chair ; sit higher and lean back your head in my 
arm, granny." 

" Anything you say, doctor," said Skinny, following my com- 
mands. A look into the mouth was sufficient to reveal the 
cause of her pain. The one tooth the only reminder left of 
the pearly row so prominent in the framed picture had got to 
go. To use one of our mountain phrases, " For years it had 
stood there alone, like a burnt pine log in a bit of cleared 
land." 

"Are you ready, granny?" 

" No, doctor, not yet ; let me see him before you pull him 
he's the last," and a tear wriggled down, winding its way 
through the brown drooping wrinkles of her face. 

Skinny rose from the chair, pulled out the table-drawer and 
brought out a broken looking-glass. She opened her mouth and 
gazed long and wistfully at the solitary stump, the cause of all 
her woe. I leaned against the rickety chair and this thought, 
which I intend to put in my diary as soon as I go home, came : 
" Man's a queer animal wedded to his infirmities." 

" I'm ready now, doctor," and Skinny was in her old posi- 
tion. "The poor fellow has got to go," said granny! "and 
the sooner the better. I won't flinch an inch, doctor; but for 
heaven's sake don't break it, do your job thorough." 






1894-] ADIRONDACK SKETCHES. 559 

I nodded assent a quick jerk and the decayed stump, the 
last bit of her beauty, as Skinny called it, lay in the palm of 
her hand. A sad smile hovered over her face as the gaunt fin- 
gers lovingly rolled it in a gingham rag and put it away in a 
little wallet that she carried in her bosom. 

" Faith, granny," said I as I wiped my fingers with a piece 
of batten, " you think more of your enemies than I would. 
You take them to your heart." Skinny made a feint to smile. 
Looking up at the framed picture, " I once was proud of these 
same teeth," said she, " and of this old face. God forgive my 
vanity ! That was long ago in the days of the framed picture. 
I was not a bad-looking girl either, if I do say it, ugly as I 
am now ; but what's the use of filling strangers' ears with the 
things that made Skinny as she is ?" She buried her head in 
her towel and was silent. 

It seems to me that gossip is half the life of a country phy- 
sician. I know it is the fashion of writers to hurl hard names 
against gossip ; but take it out of life, and surely then life is not 
worth living. The philosophers have been great gossippers ; that, 
by the way, is worthy of my diary. I like to gossip. Open 
confessions, says the moralist, are good for the soul. My curi- 
osity was excited, my appetite whetted by granny's words and 
way. It was not for nothing that she burrowed in the towel. 
I had extracted granny's tooth. Could I not extract through 
gossip the story of her early life, and know something of the 
framed picture? 

The neighbors had declared that granny came to the log- 
cabin years ago, when the crazy girl was but a baby ; from 
where she was never known to tell. I pulled the stool nearer 
the stove, and sat down by Skinny 's side. 

" Will I get cold without that towel ?" said Skinny. 

" No, granny ; the old stump drawn, all will be well." 

" Ay, the old stump," muttered Skinny, as she told me un- 
asked the story of the framed picture the story of a life. 

It may be a weakness of mine to listen to my neighbors' 
business, but it is one that has given me much pleasure. 
Women are as supple as ivy-plants, is a mountain saying. They 
want to lean on something. There is no oak like a sympathetic 
listener. Skinny's tale was full of interest to me, and I take 
it for granted that there are a large class in this world with 
the same kind of feeling as a country doctor. To them I will 
owe no apology for telling the tale, and that in Skinny's home- 
ly way. 



560 ADIRONDACK SKETCHES. [Jan., 

" My father came from Lyons," said she, resting her head 
on the shut knuckles of the left hand, " and settled in Mon- 
treal. He had not been long in that city when he fell in love, 
and married the Widow Le May, that kept the baker-shop in 
Notre Dame Street. Madame Le May's first-born was me," and 
Skinny laughed a little broken, sorrow-fringed laugh. " She was 
the woman for you, doctor; she could bake more bread than 
half a dozen men. You don't believe it ; mats cest vrai. A 
few weeks after my birth she died." Her voice was tremulous, 
and tears ran down her crumpled face. " I often shut my eyes 
and think I see the kind of a woman my mother was. She had 
long black hair that I am sure and her eyes, they were as 
bright as coals, but black, black. Her mouth was small, and 







"SOME LOGS, SUCH AS SPRUCE AND BALSAM, FOR DIXON'S PULP-MILL." 

her cheeks as round and ' fat as a plum.' I described her 
one day to my father. ' Mon Dieu, Henriette ! it's your mother. 
She must be hovering round you like a butterfly ; she did like 
you uncommon well.' After poor mother's death my father, 
who was a dancing master and could make nothing out of the 
baking, sold it, and opened a little school of dancing on St. 
Catherine Street. Here I remained until my sixteenth year, 
when the life-struggle became too great for my father. One 
day, it seems like yesterday, I was standing over the tub 
washing some shirts for him (he was always particular about his 
linen), when a young man opened the door and handed me a 
letter. I laid it on the dresser-shelf, thinking it meant a new 
pupil. 



1894-] ADIRONDACK SKETCHES. 561 

" As soon as father entered I gave him the letter. He slowly 
read it, spelling out the words, and hung down his head. 

" ' Are you sick, father ?' I asked. 

" ' Not sick, but tired, Henriette.' 

" I thought I saw a tear run down his cheeks. 

" ' You are crying, father '; and I dropped on his knee, put 
my arm about his neck, and we both cried. 

"'Henriette,' said my father, drying his tears, 'you are a 
foolish child ; you must not cry ; we may be happy yet.' 

" * You are not happy now, father I know you're not '; and I 
pressed his old gray head to my bosom. 

"'No, not happy,' he said ; his voice was like his own old 
fiddle when a couple of strings were broken, 'and you may as 
well know the cause. My little school has been shut for the 
last year. I could find no pupils ; the sacred art of dancing is 
dead in Montreal. A fellow called Fournier teaches what he 
calls a complete course in six lessons. No one wants to study 
and know a thing thorough in these times, so all my pupils have 
gone to Fournier. Whenever I seek a pupil madame says : * M. 
Bourbonnais, you are too old and stiff to teach mam'selle.' 

" ' Mon Dieu, Henriette, it maddens me Bourbonnais, that 
ught in the chateaux of the Faubourg St. Germain ; Bourbon- 
nais that danced before the empress and was complimented by 
Taglioni.' He jumped from his seat, and, crumpling the letter 
in a solid piece, threw it into the fire, and stood there watch- 
ing it burn. 

" * What have you been doing, father ?' I said ; and I pulled 
down his head and kissed him. 

" ' Doing, Henriette ? Earning a poor living for all that is 
eft to me in this world that's you, dear. A poor living in- 
deed, but working hard for it. Every morning before you were 
awake I took my fiddle, kissed you, dropped a tear on your 
pretty face, and went out fasting to earn our poor breakfast. 

" ' I went into the back streets, where I was unknown, and 
danced and played for a sou.' 

"'Some, the poorest, were glad to see Henri Bourbonnais. If 
they could not give him money, they gave food, which I carried 
home in the pillow-slip that I sewed one night, while you were 
asleep, in the inside of my old threadbare coat. The rich passed 
me by in scorn. Not a few jibed me and made fun of my mu- 
sic, and laughed at my dance. Ah, Henriette, it is so easy to 
make fun of the unfortunate ! Every noon I came home smiling, 
lest you might guess the truth, but sad of heart. On my way 



562 ADIRONDACK SKETCHES. [Jan., 

I visited a little church, attracted by its flickering little altar- 
lamp. The lamp seemed always to be going out, yet managed 
to live on ; it was so like your old father for the last twelve 
months. In that little church, to the right-hand side of its main 
altar, you can see in yellow letters : ' Come to me all ye that 
labor and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you ? ' I have 
knelt for hours before those yellow letters, saying, I am heavy 
laden ; and asking God to keep his promise. Will he do so ? 
My poor old shoulders ache. Fiddling and dancing will soon be 
beyond me, and then, Henriette ' 

" His voice broke in pieces ; a big clump of sorrow choked 
him. I turned away my head ; I could not speak. 

" ' Give me my fiddle, child ; if we speak your old father will 
act silly about these things, and you will ruin your pretty face 
with tears. Let the fiddle do the talking.' 

" The tune he played was one my mother taught him ; it is 
pretty common in Canada with the Scotch. The best I can re- 
member, they call it ' Highland Mary.' Big Donald McKinnon 
said it was written by one of his father's chums. He must have 
been smarter than Donald, or his father either, to have picked 
out of his head such a sweet song. My father liked the tune 
on account of mother. He used to say he had lost every- 
thing belonging to her but that bit of a tune. When he finished 
I took his fiddle and put it in the old green baize bag my first 
piece of needle-work. I have that fiddle yet, doctor, and I would 
starve rather than part with it. 

" He leaned his head on the chair-back and drew a long, 
broken, heavy sigh. Tears ran down my cheeks as I gazed 
on his pinched and worn old face. The old clock that he 
called Willy-Wag-tail was the only thing I could hear in the 
house, and its tick was as loud as the stroke of a: hammer. I 
became afraid and ran to my father. I tried to kiss him, but 
his face was freezing cold. I spoke to him. I watched his 
mouth for an answer. Everything was so quiet except the 
clock. ' God ! ' I cried, ' you keep your promises my father is 
dead ! ' 

" I must then have fallen to the floor. The first thing I re- 
member was a feeling of strange pains, like the jags of a thou 
sand needles plastered over my body. I tried to raise myself; I 
could not. Then, with all my strength, I tried to turn on my 
side, thinking to shake off the pains. Strength, did I say? 
I had none ; and so I lay like a log. Now and then I could 
hear a voice, a sweet voice, telling me to open my eyes, and I 



1 894.] 



ADIRONDACK SKETCHES. 



563 



could feel a soft hand pressing my cheek. The hand moved to 
my burning eyes, and I felt something soft, cooling, strengthen- 
ing falling into them, something loosening the eyelids, putting 
out the fire and bidding me see. How strange was that see- 
ing ! It was as if I had been dead for years, and suddenly 
awoke. I was in a large room full of little white beds, in every 
one of which was a woman. Some were as young as me, others 
younger, some middle-aged, many old. What were they doing 
here ? For by the light that fell on my bed, through the big 
red-curtained window, I 
knew it was mid-day. I 
tried to speak ; I could 
not. I wanted to say 
one word : ' Father.' My 
mouth moved, but no 
sound came to my ear. 

" Dazed, full of fear 
that I was mad, I shut 
my eyes, and again I felt 
the soft pressure of that 
hand on my cheek. I 
pened my eyes. Lean- 
ing over the head of my 
bed was a sweet face, 
ith a big white frame 
around it, like the wings 
of a bird. I knew by 
the voice it was living, 
and that I was not mad. 
'Henriette,' it said, 'do 
not fear, I am only Sis- 
ter Marie. You are in the 
Hotel Dieu. I will take 
the best of care of you 

until you are better.' Ah, doctor! when you're sick there's no 
music like a kind woman's tongue. The voice of Sister Marie 
was worth the full of your sleigh of pills and medicine. It gave 
me strength then and there to turn on my side, and it thawed 
my tongue. I was astonished at my own speaking, it was so 
strong and my tongue was so easy. 

" ' Where is my father ? ' was the first question. The sister 
bent down her head, and in a soft way whispered in my ear, 
'At rest, child'; then, turning her head, 'Yes, my old master, 



:<; 




HENRIETTE AND I ARE ENGAGED. 



564 ADIRONDACK SKETCHES. [Jan., 

Henri Bourbonnais, good old soul, lies in Mount Royal. It is 
a trial, Henriette, the first mile-stone of sorrow in your life ; 
but accept it. It is the hand of the Lord.' My eyes filled with 
tears ; the sister faded away like a bit of chimney smoke. I 
saw an old man surrounded by a noisy crowd of boys, jeering 
and laughing at his threadbare coat. He played a fiddle and 
attempted a dance to its music. A window opened, a sunburnt 
hand tossed him a sou ; he painfully stooped and picked it out 
of the mud, bowed his old white head and muttered ' Merci, 
madame ' ; passing to another door. I followed him from door 
to door, from street to street, until he entered a little chapel 
and I heard him cry his burden was heavy. A white figure 
passed and touched his forehead. The little chapel faded from 
view. I opened my eyes. I heard a voice saying, ' The Lord 
keeps his promises.' It was that of Sister Marie. 
" ' To be left so young, and no friends, sister.' 
"' The Lord giveth and taketh as is his will,' said she: 
' happy are they who submit.' 

" ' Happy, Sister Marie ? ' And I closed my weary eyes ii 
sleep." 

CHAPTER III. 

" St. Henri is a little town a few miles outside of Montreal.' 
The very name brought tears to granny's eyes. Her story was 
gaining in interest. I threw a big pine log on the smouldering 
coals, while Skinny continued : 

" Doctor, you don't know how much I love that little town. 
As soon as I was well the sisters found me a place there with 
a family called Cartier. It was so lonely at first that I wanted 
to die and be with father. One day Dr. Cartier sent me to 
Napoleon La Flammes' for a loaf of bread. Napoleon kept his 
little shop a few doors distant. It was a neat little place, and 
Napoleon, if I do say it, was such a bon gargon. Look at his pic- 
ture, doctor, beside me. It's as like him as two peas on the 
one bush. My picture has changed for the worse. 

" When I went into his shop he was all smiles. He left half 
a dozen of his customers waiting and came to me. ' Comment sc 
vous, Mam'selle Bourbonnais,' he said ; and then I saw all the cus- 
tomers winking and shaking their heads. I would have cried 
then had not Jenny Lavoie said to Victoria Borsu, ' I don't 
see what Napoleon sees in that black thing.' That was me. 
After that I was mad, and made up my mind to spite them. 



1894-] ADIRONDACK SKETCHES. 565 

4 1 am very well, Mr. Napoleon La Flammes,' said I ; 4 and how 
be yourself ? ' ' Between fairly and middling,' said he, ' Mam'- 
selle Bourbonnais ' ; and he wrapped my loaf in white paper, 
that was the best kind he had in the store, and tied it with a 
red string. 

"'That will hold, I'll warrant you, Mam'selle Bourbonnais.' 
I took my loaf and went out. Victoria and Jenny made faces 
at me ; even Mrs. Chapuis, that lives next door to Cartiers and 
goes to church every morning, called me Montreal boue. When 
I was on the front step I could hear Napoleon saying, ' Girls, 
she's a rattler.' I was so proud that I let the loaf fall on the 
ground. Only for the red string and the white paper, the loaf 
would have been destroyed outright. Dr. Cartier was a little 
bit of a man, always scolding about things that did not concern 
him. Mrs. Cartier was a big, raw-boned woman, that spent 
her time lying on a sofa reading novels that kind of books 
with yellow covers. I was to do all the house-work, besides 
washing two dirty-looking dogs, Gyp and Fan, in the suds every 
Saturday. One Saturday I put Gyp in the tub and turned the 
kettle-spout on his back. I reckon it was a little warm, for he 
did what he never done before jumped from the tub yelling 
like a scalded young one, and ran to Mrs. Cartier, spotting all 
her book, as she said, with dirty water. My mistress called the 
doctor and told him that I had warmed Gyp up to boiling. 
Then, shaking her finger at me and turning to her husband, she 
said, ' Love, attend to that asylum girl ; this book is so inter- 
esting.' The doctor ran at me like a bear, danced all around 
me, called me hard names, threatened me with prison, and 
ended by slapping my face. As soon as he left the kitchen I 
took my hat and went down to Napoleon's shop. There was 
nobody in but Napoleon. As soon as I saw him I began to 
cry and wish myself dead. 

" ' Henriette,' said Napoleon, fixing me a seat on a cracker- 
barrel and sitting down by my side, ' these Cartiers are a low 
set. They sprung from nothing, as you can easy see. They have 
killed a dozen girls, and they'll kill you if you don't get out. 
Now, I'm lonely. I have a good store, five hundred dollars 
in bank, two cows and a year-old heifer, all in tip-top condi- 
tion. I have a home, you're out of a home ; let us strike a 
bargain. If you're in it, let me kiss you to seal it'; and he 
stretched his neck under my mouth. 

" I do not know how it happened, but law me, doctor, what a 



566 ADIRONDACK SKETCHES. [Jan., 

powerful kiss Napoleon gave me ! * My brand is on you now,' 
says he, ' and you need have no fear for the Cartiers.' 

" Just then Jenny Lavoie came in with a terrible face on her. 
' Shake,' says Napoleon ; ' Henriette and I are engaged. Take a 
bid to the wedding.' Jenny walked up to me and kissed me, 
whispering in my ear that it was her that put Napoleon's mind 
on me, as just the thing he wanted. You don't know, doctor, 
how much deceit* and lying there is in Canada. The wedding 
was a grand affair. Everybody was asked and everybody came. 
It lasted three days, with a new fiddler every night. That first 
year was all joy, doctor." And Skinny, possibly comparing it 
with the gloomy years that followed it, used the towel on her 
reeking, bloodshot eyes. 

" They say that every calm calls a storm ; it was so with 
me," continued Skinny. " About a year after the birth of my 
son Frank there came what Napoleon called a crash. Money 
left the country all at once, and Napoleon's books were filled 
with trust. The best farmers had not a sou. On an evil day 
Napoleon received a letter from James Weeks him that tuns 
the Eagle's Nest in Squidville. The prospects, wrote Jim, are 
on the ups, and a good thing might be made by logging it on 
the Salmon River. So Napoleon sold his little shop that's the 
picture of it that's framed and came to Squidville. Work was 
scarce that winter, so in the next fall Napoleon went to guid- 
ing." 

Her voice was low, passion-tossed, and tremulous. " Jim 
Weeks got him a party from New York ; their name was 
Jenks. There was in that party Dr. Jenks, his wife, and his 
son a young man of twenty-three or thereabouts." 

Tears were flowing freely from granny's eyes. 

"The first day's hunt was started in the direction of Mud 
Pond, Blind Cagy putting out the dogs, as he knew the lie of 
the country better than Napoleon. At the burnt hill Cagy 
came on a doe and two fawns. The dogs tracked the fawns ; 
and you know how fawns fool a dog, scooting here and there ; 
so Napoleon, thinking to help the dogs a bit, crept through the 
brush, keeping his eye peeled, as Cagy said, for the old one, 
that was pretty nigh the youngsters. Young Jenks, who was 
watching one of the runways, saw him, and, having no learning 
about hunting, thought he was a deer. He took aim and fired, 
killing poor Napoleon on the spot. 

"That's what there is to that picture, doctor." 



1894-] ADIRONDACK SKETCHES. 567 

Just then laughing Jenny came in singing: 

" Monsieur d'Marlbrook est mort, 
Mironton, mironton, mirontaine ; 
Monsieur d'Marlbrook est mort, 
Est mort et enterre." 

" What about Jenny?" I asked. 

Skinny was wiping her eyes with the towel. Looking out 
on the coming darkness, in a broken way she muttered : 

"The night's a bad one; the wind is up, and there may be 
a drift ; besides Toby has the shivers. Go home, doctor ; that's 
another story to be told some other day." 

" Come, Jenny," said Skinny, turning to the child, " the big 
black dog is out ; get to bed, or he'll eat you up." 

The sweet voice was silent ; the mirth had flown. Crouched 
in a corner, with wild glittering eyes and painful face, was 
Jenny Sauve. 

I went out, jumped into my cutter, wrapped myself in fur, 
and away went Toby. 





THE REV. EDWARD BOUVERIE PUSEY, D.D. 



From a Portrait by Miss Rose Carder. 




1894-] THE GREATEST RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT. 569 



THE GREATEST RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT OF THE 

CENTURY.* 

R. PUSEY'S life by Canon Liddon will form, when 
finished, the most complete record of the great- 
est religious movement of the present century. 
The importance of the Oxford movement and 
the interest still felt in it are shown by the large 
number of works which have recently appeared, and which throw 
light upon it from various stand-points. Not to mention the 
Apologia of Cardinal Newman, to which the revival of this in- 
terest is chiefly due, we have had Dean Church's The Oxford 
Movement 1833-1845, the Letters of Cardinal Newman to 1845, 
the Autobiography of Isaac Williams, Mr. Wilfrid Ward's W. G. 
Ward and the Oxford Movement, Mr. Lock's recent Life of 
Keble, and the Memorials of Mr. Serjeant Bellasis. None, how- 
ever, will compare in completeness with this Life of Pusey, of 
which two volumes of one thousand pages in all have now been 
published, and two more are to follow. Canon Liddon devoted 
the latter years of his own life to the preparation of this work, 
resigning for that purpose his professorship at Oxford. For 
me nine years he was thus occupied, and before his labors 
sre concluded death came upon him too. He left his work in 
a state not, in his judgment, at all fit for publication. All the 
materials, however, had been fully arranged, and an elaborate first 
draft up to the year 1856 prepared. The editors have not ma- 
terially altered the character, the scale, or the plan of the work. 
These two volumes bring the narrative down to the middle of 
1846, about a year after Newman's conversion. 

That so much should have been written about a life so bar- 
ren of mere events as was Dr. Pusey's, shows that Canon Lid- 
don's aim has been thoroughly to explain the causes of the 
movement with which Dr. Pusey was associated. Of that move- 
ment Cardinal Newman is fully recognized as the true author, 
and for Catholics the main and a melancholy interest in these 
volumes is found in the explanation they afford or attempt of 
the method in which, when Newman departed, his companions 
made themselves able to stay. That so many did in fact re- 

* Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey. By Henry Parry Liddon, D.D. Edited and prepared 
for publication by Rev. J. O. Johnston and Rev. Robert J. Wilson. London and New York : 
Longmans. 1893. 

VOL. LVIII. 38 



570 THE GREATEST RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT. [Jan. y 

main behind was due, without doubt, chiefly to the influence of 
Dr. Pusey, although Keble's efforts contributed in no small de- 
gree to the same deplorable result. We do not think that the 
explanation here given will afford strength to those who have 
refused to follow to their logical conclusions the principles which 
gave to the Oxford movement its power and life. While the 
existing predominance of what is looked upon as Catholic teach- 
ing and practice in the Anglican Establishment is really due to 
Newman, these volumes show that Dr. Pusey had no reason, 
grounded upon the principles which he shared with Newman in 
defending, for refusing to follow him into the church, but 
yielded to a sentiment of misplaced loyalty and affection for 
the communion in which he had been brought up. However 
praiseworthy such sentiments may often be, they can never 
serve as safe rules for the ascertainment of religious truth, and 
may be, and in fact are, appealed to by the members of every 
sect as proofs not merely of the divine presence with individuals, 
but also of the claim of their respective organizations to be at 
least a part of the church founded by Christ. In fact, this ap- 
peal forms the chief bar to the attempts now being made to 
secure union among the various denominations. They have had 
evidence of God's working in their own souls, and have seen 
evidences of the same in the souls of others, through their re- 
ligious ministrations ; from these religious ministrations they have 
derived support and consolation, and gratitude forbids their 
abandoning an organization in which they have found such marks 
of the divine favor. This it is which prevents devout Metho- 
dists, Baptists, and Congregationalists from accepting the claims 
of the Church of England, and this it was and nothing more 
which prevented Dr. Pusey from following his master for such 
he admitted Dr. Newman to have been out of what he gener- 
ally speaks of as " our " church into the Catholic Church. " He 
has not forsaken us, who, in fruits of holiness, in supernatural 
workings of his grace, in the deepening of devotion, in the 
awakening of consciences, in his own manifest acknowledg- 
ment of the 'power of the keys,' as vested in our church, 
shows himself more than ever present with us. These are not 
simply individual workings. They are too widespread, too 
manifold." This is what Dr. Pusey wrote immediately after 
Dr. Newman's reception into the church, to keep himself and 
others where they were. Dr. Newman had written a few months 
before: "Why should I believe the most certain and funda- 
mental doctrines of our faith if you cut off from me the 
ground of development. But if that ground is given me, I 



1894-] THE GREATEST RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT. 571 

must go further, I cannot hold precisely what the Church of 
England holds, and nothing more. [I] cannot take [people] a 
certain way in a line, and then without assignable reason stop 
them/" But this is what Pusey did, not without an ostensible 
reason, but for the mere semblance of a reason just given. 

How weak such a reason is appears clear from what Catho* 
lies hold about the workings of divine grace. No Catholic thinks 
of limiting its operations to the church. No one believes that 
God founded his church to be a bar to his own workings out- 
side of her visible limits. On the contrary, we recognize these 
workings with gratitude and joy a gratitude and a joy equal 
to that of those who experience them. But we maintain that 
they are given to lead up, step by step, to the fulness of grace 
which dwells in the church. If there is anything in evolution, 
it is the manner in which it shows that God's works are gradual, 
step by step leading up from the less perfect to the more per- 
fect a truth recognized by St. Thomas in its general outlines 
ages ago, and by Him who said : " First the blade, then the ear, 
then the full corn in the ear." It would be absurd to believe that 
the supernatural order was formed in an entirely different way to 
the natural ; that the Church of God possessed not merely the 
fulness of grace, but that outside its visible limits there was sim- 
ply nothing but vice and iniquity, or at best merely natural 
virtue. But what we do maintain is that all supernatural work- 
ings of grace place one in a line towards the church, and will 
lead to it that there is no valid reason to prevent this con- 
summation. 

And these volumes nil us with wonder that Dr. Pusey did 
not see this, and gave no reasonable explanation why he did 
not see it. For, as Dr. Liddon says, his unswerving love and de- 
ference for Newman was so great that he " could not bring him. 
self to allow that Newman was doing wrong," either subjectively 
or objectively, we presume, when he joined the Roman Church. 
He looked upon him as a prophet, called by God with a 
special mission in the Roman Church for its reformation 
and amendment. What he had done was not indeed to be 
imitated or followed that would be wrong. How much is 
involved in such an admission ! The wonder grows from 
what is shown of Pusey's attitude to the church. To Dr. 
Hook, who, in the year before Newman's conversion, had written 
about Newman being " blinded to the soul-destroying errors of 
the Romish sect," and who called Rome a forerunner of Anti- 
christ, Pusey wrote in strong deprecation of such a view, and 
declared that "the sects were right in classing 'Popery' and 



572 THE GREATEST RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT. [Jan., 

what they call * Puseyism ' together. . . . Protestantism is 
infidel or verging towards it, as a whole . . . The churches 
and what submits to authority will be on the one side in the 
end, the sects and private judgment on the other." 

To Cardinal (then Archdeacon) Manning, who in a charge 
had said much that was harsh of the church, Pusey wrote in 
general commendation of his charge, but asked, " Is there quite 
enough love of the Roman Church ? . . . I desiderate more 
love to Rome." In a letter to the Rev. B. Harrison, written with- 
in a month of Newman's conversion, the feelings of Dr. Pusey 
towards Rome and towards his own church are expressed still 
more clearly. Mr. Harrison had written to him suggesting that 
it would be an opportune time for making a pronouncement 
against Rome, and it is understood that the suggestion really 
came from the Archbishop of Canterbury. To his honor Dr. 
Pusey replied that he could not. 

" I cannot any more take the negative ground against Rome. 
I can only remain neutral. I have, indeed, for some time left 
off alleging grounds against Rome, and whether you think it 
right or wrong, I am sure it is of no use to persons who are 
really in any risk of leaving us. I should say that their diffi- 
culty is two-fold : the weight of Roman authority as supported 
by miracles, by the high life of her saints; the tendency of pro- 
phecy both as to the visible unity of the church and the emi- 
nence of St. Peter (interpreted as it is, of old, of the See of 
Rome) ; their oneness in all great points of doctrine, the depth 
of their spiritual system, their greater zeal and success in mis- 
sions, the superior devotion and instruction of the poor, their 
greater fervor, the greater love and devotion in their spiritual 
writings. On the other hand are our numberless divisions, the 
plague of division following us everywhere; the direct and un- 
rebuked denial of fundamental truths of the faith, the toleration 
of all heresy, while truth has been impugned by different au- 
thorities in the church, and no one protested against it ; our 
fraternizing with Protestants, the tone of our Articles, our proud 
-contempt of everybody except ourselves, and the hatred of 
Rome so general among us. ... Again, there is the want 
of individual guidance, the infrequency of services and com- 
munions, the continual denial of truths they hold by the very 
ministers who teach them or by our bishops, the difficulty of 
.knowing what is truth." Then referring to their succession and 
to the workings of God in the Establishment as being the con- 
siderations which held him in his place, Dr. Pusey proceeds to 
the following: remarkable declaration: "I can do nothing 



1894-] THE GREATEST RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT. 573 

to reassure people in the way you speak of. I am afraid lest 
I fight against God. From much reading of Roman books I am 
so much impressed with the superiority of their teaching; and 
again, in some respects, I see things in Antiquity which I did 
not (especially I cannot deny some purifying system in the in- 
termediate state, nor the lawfulness of some invocation of saints), 
that I dare not speak against things. I can only remain in a 
state of abeyance, holding what I see and not denying what I 
do not see. I should say that wherein I have changed it has 
been through Antiquity." 

We have made this long quotation in order to show how 
near Pusey was to the church at this time when the call to 
enter it was, perhaps, the clearest he ever received. The judg- 
ment of the Establishment as it was in 1845, which Pusey 
passed, or which he could not combat, remains substantially 
true of it in 1893. While not denying that there exists at the 
present time very great activity and zeal and devotion among 
its members ; that vast sums have been expended in church 
building and church restoration ; that among the clergy, at all 
events, the High-Church doctrines and Ritualistic practices 
have spread ; that services and communions have become more 
Frequent ; that colonial and even extra-colonial bishoprics have 
icreased and multiplied, the character of the Church of Eng- 
ind remains unchanged. Let any one read the account of the 
recent meeting of the Church Congress at Birmingham, and he 
see how true this is. There he will see how the Eucharis- 
tic Sacrifice, which the president of the Church Union declared 

be the life of the soul, is declared by the representative of 
the Church Association to involve a condonation of idolatry 
>ure and simple. While one speaker wishes to strengthen the 
lurch by increasing the power of the clergy, another finds the 
mly hope of doing so in giving to the people as a people a 
share in the government. While the episcopate is, in Mr. Gore's 
opinion, the divinely appointed form of the church, and one of 
the means by which the scattered sects are to be brought to unity, 
the Episcopal president of the congress declares that in no 
authorized formula of the church is episcopacy declared to be 
of absolute necessity, and justifies its maintenance only on the 
ground of proved success. 

These are but specimens of divergent and opposed teach- 
ings which might be largely multiplied, and which exist upon 
even more important points, such as the inspiration of Holy 
Scripture and future punishment. Enough has been said, how- 
ever, to show that as things were when Dr. Pusey wrote this 



574 THE GREATEST RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT. [Jan., 

letter nearly fifty years ago so they are now. Nay, even in 
the eyes of friends of the Establishment, the state of things is 
worse now than ever it was. " Our divisions," the Bishop of 
Liverpool said a few weeks ago, " in the present day appear 
far more serious than any we have ever had to face in the 
Established Church since the era of the Reformation, and to 
threaten very dangerous consequences. Causes of difference, 
which at one time only existed in solution, are now crystallized 
and solidified. The gulf between opposing schools of thought 
'seems wider and deeper. It is impossible to repress the anxious 
thought, ' What will the end of these things be ? "' Few 
things are clearer than the fact that if private judgment is as 
wrong as Dr. Pusey says it is, the members of the Establish- 
ment have great reason for anxiety, for how can they ascertain 
the teachings of their church except by its exercise? What 
else have they as their guide ? Nay, more : in what other body 
of Christians is its power so absolute ? In fact, if Catholic 
doctrines are held, it is upon Protestant principles. 

We have devoted so much space to the attitude taken by 
Dr. Pusey towards the church on the occasion of Newman's con- 
version that we are forced to omit even a reference to the numer- 
ous most interesting and important matters fully treated of in 
these volumes. It would take many articles to exhaust the sub- 
ject, for the religious life of the century in one or another form 
comes under review. We must be content with indicating the 
religious influences under which Dr. Pusey's youth and early 
manhood were spent until his ordination, these being the 
less known parts of his life. 

Dr. Pusey was on both his father's and his mother's side of 
noble birth, and therefore belonged to a class farther removed 
than it is easy for us in this country to realize from the great 
middle class which makes up the English nation. His father 
was a Tory of so vehement a type that he generally placed 
Whigs and atheists in the same category. He withheld his 
consent for four years to the marriage of his eldest son with 
the daughter of the Earl of Carnarvon, because that family was 
then attached to the Whig party. A more attractive feature in 
his character was his serious and systematic attention to the 
wants of the poor ; in fact, he made the care of them one of 
the chief occupations of his life. In religious matters his 
opinions are not clearly indicated ; although he was an admirer 
of the Evangelicals he seems to have had a distrust of their 
doctrine of justification by faith. It was upon his mother, 
however, that Dr. Pusey's early religious education devolved. 



1 894.] THE GREA TEST RELIGIO us Mo YEMEN r. 575 

" All that I know about religious truth," Dr. Pusey used to say, 
41 1 learned, at least in principle, from my mother." Whether 
she was High or Low Church we are not told ; the staple of 
her instruction was our Lord's words and acts and the church 
catechism. Dr. Pusey makes the surprising statement that he 
learned the doctrine of the Real Presence from her " explana- 
tion of the catechism, which she had learned to understand from 
>lder clergy." The private school to which he was sent did 
nothing for his religious convictions, there being, Dr. Liddon 
;ays, no energetic recognition of religion as prescribing motives 
ind governing conduct. The same is to be said of the system 
at Eton, to which he was sent. After leaving Eton he was 
>laced with a private tutor, whose influence, so far as it went, 
uld tend to Latitudinarianism. 

While an undergraduate at Oxford disappointed love seems 
;o have been his predominating characteristic, his father having 
placed a veto on the desire of his son to marry a Miss Barker, 
and it was not till after nine years that he was able to gratify 
iis wishes. He sought a refuge from his grief in hard work, 
md thus acquired a habit which he preserved through life, 
'he two men by whom he was most influenced were his tutor, 
>r. T. V. Short, afterwards Bishop of St. Asaph, and Dr. Lloyd, 
then Regius Professor of Divinity. To the latter was due the im- 
mlse which led Pusey to devote himself to the study of Scripture 
ind to its defence from rationalistic attacks. At Lloyd's sug- 
gestion he went to Germany in order to make acquaintance on 
:he spot with those who were leading the attack on the Word 
f God. There he attended the lectures of Eichhorn, Pott, 
'reytag, and others, and made the acquaintance of Tholuck, 
^wald, Neander, Hengenstenberg, and Schleiermacher, to the 
itter of whom Pusey owed the beginnings of some features of 
iis subsequent devotional life. His visits to the birthplace of 
'rotestantism confirmed him in his determination to study the 
)ld Testament in order to defend England from rationalistic 
issaults on Scripture, which it was quite unprepared to meet, 
[n all Germany it was thought that the number of professors 
who contended for the truth of the Gospel as a supernatural 
revelation supported by miracle was only seventeen. What Dr. 
Liddon says of Eichhorn was true of the vast majority of the 
professors: " the religious question 'what after all is true?' 
would have seemed an impertinent interference with the purely 
literary and critical question ' what was thought or felt ? " It 
is interesting to learn that the first work which Pusey under- 
took in execution of his purpose was a translation of the intro- 



576 THE GREATEST RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT. [Jan., 

duction to the New Testament written by a professor at the 
Catholic University of Freiburg. He found himself anticipated,, 
however, by Dr. Wait, and .consequently did not proceed with 
his translation. 

Pusey's resolution to devote himself to the defence of Holy 
Scripture against the attacks of rationalism made it necessary 
for him to learn Hebrew, and this in its turn led him, in order 
to get a perfect mastery of that language, to the study of Ara- 
bic, Syriac, and the cognate languages. In Hebrew he came to 
be ranked among the foremost of European scholars. His visit 
to Germany had largely familiarized him also with the history 
of modern Protestant speculation on religious subjects. 

The direct references to Pusey's opinions on matters of 
Catholic faith and practice in these early years are few, doubt- 
less, because, like all Protestants, he was living in another 
world. The references that are made show how long a road he 
had travelled in order to reach the point attained in 1845 to 
which we have already referred. His father's extreme Tory- 
ism made Pusey a Liberal and he advocated Catholic Eman- 
cipation ; but as late as 1828 he wrote that Catholics, while 
they had retained the foundations of the faith and that in 
their number there were hundreds of thousands of sincere 
men, had yet fallen as a body into practical idolatry, and that 
" good works " had a merit ascribed to them which interfered 
with the merits of Christ. On the other hand, when his brother 
died, in 1827, Pusey writes to Newman : " Dare one pray for 
[the departed] ? . . . Nothing, I am sure, can be found in 
Scripture against praying for the dead." 

On June I, 1828, Pusey was ordained deacon by Dr. Lloyd, 
who had become Bishop of Oxford. Eleven days after he was 
married. 

And here we must leave the reader to learn for him- 
self from Dr. Ltddon's volumes the subsequent development of 
Dr. Pusey's opinions and the course of the Oxford movement. 
It would be almost an impertinence for us to praise the way in 
which the work has been done. It is not often that a great 
man finds a biographer so well fitted to write his life. Dr. 
Liddon was Pusey's friend and disciple, and any one who is 
in the least degree familiar with Anglican theological litera- 
ture knows the place which he holds in it. The one thing to 
be regretted is that only a small part of the volumes which 
are to follow will be from his pen. 



1 894.] DEATH OF THE OLD YEAR. 577 




DEATH OF THE OLD YEAR. 

BY JOHN M. COONEY. 

D Year, thou'rt dying ! Fare thee well. 

Sweet were the joys thou gavest me ; 
But will they, when thy latest bell 

Shall ring thy parting, go with thee ? 



Old Year, I feel thou art my friend ; 

Though not so long, thou knowest me well 
My joys thou knowest, end to end, 

And all my sorrows thou canst tell. 

Why dost thou leave me, sweet Old Year ! 

I know my secrets thou wilt keep ; 
But who, thou gone, shall wish to hear 

My laughing joys my woes that weep ? 

Another one shall come, Old Year ; 

May bring new joys and please me well ; 
But oh ! the past to me is dear, 

And it is hard to say farewell. 

Old Year, thou goest I know not where ; 

Thou leavest, but I'll think of thee ; 
I'll bless for joys that thou didst share, 

Nor blame for what thou takest from me. 

Old Year, good-by ; thou goest now ; 

Ere long I'll follow thee, and there 
Where naught has end, oh ! let thy brow 

Frown not, but meet me smiling fair. 




578 THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. [Jan., 

THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. 

BY REV. WALTER ELLIOTT. 
THE MISSION AT CENTRAL. 

ERE we tried the experiment of beginning in the 
public hall and continuing in the church. It was 
not a success. We had the Opera House Sunday 
afternoon full, two-thirds of the six hundred per- 
sons present being non-Catholics, and represent- 
ing the more intelligent classes of this town of four thousand in- 
habitants. A strong invitation to the other meetings in the 
church, plenty of publicity otherwise given, the church a gem of 
architecture, the pastor a public-spirited priest, highly respected by 
all everything failed to bring out more than a sprinkling of non- 
Catholics for the three other lectures given from the Catholic 
pulpit. They had rather come to a Catholic church " unbe- 
knownst " than at stated invitation. But our one big meeting 
in the opera house did just so much good. The subject was 
the church and the republic, and the audience was still as mice 
throughout. I called at the office of the weekly Statesman, and 
secured a first-rate report of the lecture, as well as a long talk 
with the editor on vital questions. Just corner a country edi- 
tor for a half-hour, and you will sift much truth through him 
to the earnest souls of his three or four thousand Granger sub- 
scribers. We also got good notices from the tiny evening 
paper. 

From Central we went to the pretty rural village of 

HOMER. 

There are two or three Catholic, or half-Catholic, families 
here among twelve hundred Protestant people. There have been 
no public shows of any kind in the place for years ; the near- 
est approach being an occasional lecture in one of the three 
Protestant churches. Hence there is no hall worthy the name. 

The Methodists have a large membership, the Presbyterians 
almost as many, and the Episcopalians cultivate a small 
" branch." A fairly good hall, with the custom of attending 
public entertainments, would have given us a fair audience to 
start with, for our lectures were well advertised. But when 



1894-] THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. 579 

Patrick and I entered the dirty, badly-lighted " Firemen's 
Hall," fifteen minutes of the advertised hour, it looked as if I 
should have to reproduce Dean Swift's " Dearly beloved Roger." 
But soon a Methodist deacon strayed in, a strong member of 
the Presbyterian church followed, half a dozen Catholics from 
the country arrived, some boys and girls tramped in and then 
tramped out, and so after we had all sat and talked around 
the old-fashioned wood stove till we were ten minutes late, I 
ascended the " stage," and, embowered in ridiculously diminu- 
tive and very ragged pieces of scenery, opened the proceedings 
with the "Our Father." We had about thirty present all told. 
Next morning we got out an extra dodger, and had copies 
placed in the stores and houses and on farmers' wagons. The 
reader will perceive that it is more direct in tone than previous 
ones : 

LECTURES 

ON LIVING SUBJECTS BY A CATHOLIC PRIEST, 

REV. WALTER ELLIOTT, NEW YORK CITY. 

FIREMEN'S HALL, 7:30 P.M. 

Friday Eve. Intemperance : Why I am a Total Abstainer. 
Saturday Eve. What becomes of our dead ? The doctrine of heaven and hell. 
Sunday Eve. Can we get along without the Bible ? 

These subjects, which engage the thoughts of all serious minds, I will 
;at reasonably, without offence to any, addressing members of all churches, 
id of none. 

I will be glad to answer all questions on moral and religious topics a 
lery-box being placed at the entrance to the hall. Personal conference invited. 

No Controversy! No Abuse! Admission Free! 

It had a good effect that evening. I boomed away against 
Irunkenness to the delight of some sixty auditors, the best 
len of the village, the females being scant in number. I saw 
a couple of ladies open the door, and, after a disgusted look at 
our dilapidated room, vanish away. That same night, just as we 
'were ready to start, thirty or forty big Wolverines stamped up- 
stairs and informed us that they must hold their meeting they 
must do so, as they were the fire company ; the law required 
it. I pleaded and they argued. The result was they bisected 
the hall by closing the folding-doors, shutting in the stove with 
them. But the good-natured fellows, with their chief and their 
"" president," soon got through a minimum of routine, ad- 
journed, threw open the doors, and at my solicitation most of 



580 THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. [Jan., 

them remained for the lecture, giving us our first sizable audi- 
ence. That night, as already said, we had intemperance for 
our subject, and the cold water as usual started the fires of in- 
terest. Saturday night we had what looked like a full audi- 
ence ; Sunday night, though the church members stayed away r 
we had a hundred persons present, and that meant a good 
many standers. I was much pleased with my hearers ; they 
were full of intelligence, and totally empty of any knowledge 
of our religion. The last two nights a few strong-minded 
women ventured in, over and above the three or four faithful? 
women from the little group of Catholic families six miles north- 
west. For some reason we attracted the doctors of the place, 
three being present at one of the meetings. 

I boarded at the Commercial House, a temperance hotel 
and a pleasant resort of "drummers." It was enjoyable to 
listen to the high politics talked there, not so much with the 
hope or even desire of aiming at agreement, as of evidencing 
independence of view and no small variety of sentiment on the 
present financial crisis. The landlord being an old soldier, we 
quickly proceeded to an exchange of reminiscences. He is a 
thoroughly good fellow of the unreligious kind, and charged me 
only half-price. God bless him, and lead him and his family 
to the true religion ! Amen. 

Patrick and I managed to distribute a great amount of 
literature. Not only did we use leaflets generously, but our 
zealous pastor furnished us with a couple of dozen copies of 
Catholic Belief. Everything was greedily taken, and will cer- 
tainly be read. 

Patrick by name and American by nature, my factotum 
combines the Irish and American traits in an enlightened 
Catholicity enlightened and most actively zealous. Patrick is 
the terror of all anti-Catholics in his neighborhood. He talks 
religion, Granger politics, and crops indiscriminately ; knows 
what he is about on all topics, and has a well-developed appe- 
tite for rural ministers. He challenged one of them to mortal 
controversy in the man's own church, presented himself with an 
armful of books for reference and for convenience of thump- 
ing, and won a victory by his antagonist's default. He lives 
six miles from the village, but was present with a delegation 
from the few Catholic families in his vicinity every evening. I 
used his big family Bible for reference. 

Saturday evening after the lecture Patrick drove me out to 
his home. " Have you any children, Patrick ? " I had asked 



1894-] THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. 581 

him. " Only twelve," he replied. What a lovely home and 
what a charming family ! In came the young lady daughter, a 
school-teacher in the big town nine miles away, and the mar- 
ried daughter and her husband and baby, and from other fami- 
lies we had about twenty grown persons and a whole troop of 
children. Sunday morning they heard my Mass and listened 
to my sermon in Patrick's parlor, most of the adults receiving 
Communion. Back we came to the village Sunday evening for 
the last lecture, which was our crowning success. 

Nothing of special interest came out of the query box, unless 
it be that one old deacon asked on a single bit of wrapping- 
paper for the scriptural authority for transubstantiation, Purga- 
tory, Mass, worshipping images, the sale of indulgences, infalli- 
bility of the pope, and celibacy of the clergy. As I was leaving 
the hall on the last night a gentleman accosted me : " Can you 
tell me whether it is a law among the Jews to put a headstone 
on the graves of their dead within a year of the funeral?" I ex- 
pressed my regret at not knowing. Patrick informed me on our 
way to his house that the questioner is a dealer in grave-stones, 
being partner in a marble-yard in the village ! 

The neighboring country is curiously divided up on religion, 
iere being little societies of Free-will Baptists, Free Methodists, 
died howling Methodists, Dunkards, or feet-washers, a new de- 
lomination of emotionalites calling themselves the Church of 
rod, who are strong in some sections of Indiana, and the as- 
>rtment of regular Methodists and Baptists usual in country 
listricts. 

One of the ministers proclaims it a sacrilege to put up wind- 
lills, waving defiance, as he says, against God's right to do as 
pleases with the wind. He also condemns fire insurance as a 
in of mistrusting God. Remember that this whole section was 
ittled fifty years ago from New England and New York State, 
id is full of a bright people. Yet such eccentrics get a fol- 
lowing for a while, then lose it and move elsewhere, their places 
being taken by other eccentrics. But why not try this people 
with the true religion thoroughly and systematically? 

Patrick and I discussed the question of a school-house apos- 
tolate. It is feasible, and would, if properly persevered in, re- 
sult in a wonderful spread f of the knowledge of Catholic truth 
among the farmers. Both law and custom give the country 
school-houses free for the use of lectures and meetings of all 
kinds, religious and secular. They are often large enough to 
accommodate a hundred persons, and can be filled nightly by 



582 THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. [Jan., 

wholly non-Catholic audiences if the roads are not very bad and 
ordinary publicity is given to the lectures. I hope to demon- 
strate all this before the winter is over. 

The expenses at Central and Homer were not great. Apart 
from the literature, we paid less than three dollars for hall rent, 
three dollars hotel fare, one dollar and fifty cents railroad fare. 
Barring our mistake we must learn by blunders in using the 
church at Central the two missions left me full of consolation. 

COLLEGEVILLE. 

Forebodings about this mission have been turned into joy. 
We thought that the majority, of six thousand non-Catholics, 
would ignore us because the town is like a suburb of the big 
city forty-five minutes distant, and neither curiosity nor fervor 
of interest in Catholic questions was, we thought, to be ex- 
pected ; and there is no good hall here, a cyclone having within 
a year destroyed the opera house. But the priest knows how to 
advertise, as well as how to do everything else, and there is 
more honest interest in religious matters than we anticipated. 
The hall we were forced to use seats very nearly six hundred, 
and every one of the six nights it was filled ; the last three we 
could have filled twelve hundred sittings with non-Catholics 
alone. 

Besides good notices in the evening Journalette, we had many 
hundreds of little bills distributed at the houses. But the two- 
hundred and fifty non-Catholics of our first audience seemed the 
most efficacious means of advertisement, bringing their friends 
in plenty the subsequent evenings. 

Sunday at High Mass I preached to our people on zeal for 
souls, and at night on Intemperance and Total Abstinence. 
Monday evening I opened in the hall with Types of Christian 
Character, distributing that morning to the public a special an- 
nouncement of the subject, with a brief synopsis of its divisions. 
The view taken is the variety of God's providence in shaping 
men's characters by epochal and racial influences, while main- 
taining Catholic unity of doctrine, worship, and discipline among 
all nations, and perpetuity through the ages. The topic was 
chosen mainly to attract, and succeeded well. The other nights 
we followed the usual lines with some changes of names, such 
as Three Infallibilities, Reason, Bible, Church ; the Confessional, 
its origin and object ; God and Conscience, etc. 

How sorry we were to see our hall nearly half-full of our 
own people every night. The pastor sent word, through his 



1894-] THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. 583 

school children, for the Catholics to stay at home, and doubtless 
many did so. But hundreds of non-Catholics were unable to 
enter. 

My query box was nearly swamped. One evening it took 
me an entire hour to answer the questions ; they were the main 
interest of each meeting, and took us over the entire Catholic 
field. They were in many cases sharply put, and often in a 
spirit more belligerent than inquisitive, and this gave an addi- 
tional spice of interest. The college is large, having eight hun- 
dred pupils, mostly young women, and well equipped with pro- 
fessors. Three of the latter were with us one evening, and I 
think we had one or two every evening. Towards the end of 
the six days' course the pupils were well represented, deeply in- 
terested, especially in the give and take of the query box. I 
unwittingly gained a point of much value by refusing to an- 
swer one question, which was designed to provoke an attack on 
the Episcopal Church ; I said that I would not answer anything 
given me with the intention of inducing me to assail any Pro- 
testant denomination ; I wanted objections to Catholicity, or 
inquiries about it. This was spread around, appearing in the 
ifternoon paper, and helped the attendance. We distributed a 
irge amount of literature here. 

Altogether the pastor and I have been full of gratitude to 
rod for our fine audiences. " It has helped us every way," said 
ic ; " it has shown up Catholicity publicly to Protestants, a-nd 

has strengthened the faith of the weak-spirited among our 
>wn people." 

We had to pay eight dollars a night for the hall, and the 
)ther expenses, will amount in all to twelve or fifteen dollars, 
total outlay was almost made up by the pastor asking his 
people to substitute silver for nickel in the collection the open- 
ing Sunday. 

Here are a few of the many questions given in. One indivi- 
dual wrote seventeen pages of a question. I remarked in com- 
ment that we must draw the line at bound volumes of questions. 
Of all the questions only two or three were insulting, and but 
few were frivolous considering the " early disadvantages " of 
the generality of Protestants. A rank Prohibitionist turned up 
nearly every night. I was not very sorry, for he gave me a 
chance to further and further develop the attitude of the church 
towards saloons as decreed by the Third Plenary Council a great 
surprise to Protestants. 

If a man disbelieves the inspiration of the Bible and the 



584 THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. [Jan., 

plan of salvation as taught by Catholics, as well as other Chris- 
tian denominations, will he be lost or go to hell simply for 
that unbelief? 

If Catholics do not attribute divine power to Mary, why do 
they, in the invocation opening the Litany of the Blessed Vir- 
gin, say, " deliver us from all danger " ? Would not these words 
imply the same homage as that paid to God in the close of the 
Lord's Prayer, " deliver us from evil " ? 

Why is it said by the priests that Catholics cannot under- 
stand the Bible? 

Why do priests forgive the sins of a saloon-keeper ? Maybe, 
if this was deprived them, they would discontinue the evil work. 

How does saying " Hail Mary " a number of times give an 
indulgence for sin? (Key of Heaven?) 

For what purpose do Catholics count beads? 

Why is it that as a rule priests are cleanly shaven and you 
are not ? 

Why do you say that no attention should be paid to the 
words of an ex-priest? 

Interrogation Points for Father Elliott. Why may a priest 
tell a lie and swear t it to conceal the abominations of auri- 
cular confession ? (See Peter Dens, vol. vi. pp. 22-28 ; F. P. 
Kenrick, vol. iii. p. 172 ; St. Liguori, vol. vi. p. 276, etc., for 
proof that the moral (?) theology of the Roman Church author- 
izes equivocation, mental reservation, to conceal the hidden 
mysteries and criminal intercourse of auricular confession.) Do 
you deny that the moral (?) theology of your church so teaches ? 

WHATNOT. 

This is not even a village. There is a little box of a rail- 
road station, some charcoal kilns, a small saw-mill, a Lutheran 
Church and a German Evangelical one, besides our little St. 
Joseph's, three small stores, and a busy drinking saloon, together 
with a score of dwellings. The outside world is reached by 
farmers' " rigs " and a train called the Plug, in derisive com- 
parison with a slow old horse ; a way-station of the most out- 
of-the-way kind. But do not mistake us. Our Plug brings us 
the daily papers of the city thirty-odd miles away, and the 
country is fertile, being reclaimed from the bullfrogs by the 
country ditch system, all the creeks and brooks for many miles 
around being man-made. 

Less than forty families worship in St. Joseph's Church and 
are visited once a month by the Collegeville priest. They are 



.1894-] THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. 585 

Germans and Irish and Polaks, all well-to-do farmers. My quar- 
ters are next door to the church with a farmer's family, Ger- 
man by race, American by tongue and sentiment, and Catholic 
every way, a teeming houseful of white-haired children, and 
John and his wife genial and hospitable, and glad to serve re- 
ligion and the priest. I said Mass and heard confessions every 
morning, having quite something to do in a modest missionary 
way. The saloon is the curse of the place, and drunkenness is 
common enough, but we have helped the pastor's efforts to 
overcome the evil. The lecture on intemperance and total absti- 
nence gave the opportunity. 

Good preparation had been made for the lectures. I had 
preached to our people some days before the beginning, and a 
plentiful supply of dodgers had been given to the non-Catholic 
farmers of the vicinity. We used the town hall, paying fifty 
cents a night for lighting and fuel and the services of the jani- 
tor, who said to me, " Anything I can do for you, Elder, just 
let me know." Two hundred was about our audience nightly, 
and that is pretty nearly all the room accommodates, half, and 
sometimes two-thirds, being non-Catholics. As usual, the moth- 
ers brought their children. On the opening evening one of 
icm, and she a Protestant, sat right before me, with her three 
ittle ones slumbering peacefully about her. A loud squawk, 
llowed by the usual attempts at quieting and then by a re- 
;at into the open air, sometimes interrupted the meeting. 
My last audience was a brimful town hall, who listened ever 
intently to, Why I am a Catholic. Much good literature 
s circulated, and will be read, together with a yet larger 
lount in the near future, provision for which the pastor has 
ready made. It was not possible to have music at the meet- 
ings, thus increasing the fatigue to the lecturer and the monoto- 
ny of hearing one and the same speaker each evening. 

As this was a wholly rural experience, a few selections from 
the numerous queries are given as samples of what one may 
expect from such an audience. With reference to the first one, 
the reader will understand that I did not say what the ques- 
tioner said I did, but I gave the usual statement about invin- 
cible ignorance as a palliative of guilt. 

According to your statement last night, whosoever dies think- 
ing he is all right is saved. Do you think an infidel is saved ? 
They think they are right. 

Do you believe in a personal devil ; a wholly malignant be- 
ing, less than God in power and yet capable of assuming all 
VOL.LVIII. 39 



586 THE EXPERIENCES OF A MISSIONARY. [Jan. r 

forms and appearing almost simultaneously in all parts of the 
earth ? 

Do you believe in repenting after death ? 

Must a person be born again to become a member of the 
Catholic Church, according to our Saviour's words, " Except a 
man is born again he cannot see God?" In short, do you hold 
to the doctrine of regeneration ? 

Please explain the meaning of the word " merit," as used in 
the Catholic Church. 

Suppose that a man should prowl around drinking, swear- 
ing, degrading his parents, brothers, sisters, and so on, living 
a brutal life ; and this being should find, in the last part of 
his life, that the grave would soon be his doom, and earth 
had no more fun and merriment for him ; and would, on this 
last day, say, Now I must save my soul ; and we will suppose 
he goes direct to God, or to a priest, and asks forgiveness, will 
he be found with the angels in heaven? 

Why is it that a Catholic priest wears a gown ? 

Why is it that the Catholic Church is called Roman Catho- 
lic ? 

If one should wish to become a Catholic what process would 
he have to go through in other words, what would be the pro- 
ceedings ? 

If there is a personal devil how did he originate ? 

Were the edicts of the bad popes erroneous ? 

Explain the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. 

As an example of how the resources of civilization may be 
utilized for our purposes, I may mention that my pastor paid 
me a visit on his bicycle, making the eight miles in thirty-five 
minutes over average country roads and in bleak wintry weather. 
Mr. Jack Frost also paid us his first visit during this mission, 
freezing up everything pretty tight, and keeping at home some, 
but not many of my former auditors. 

O for some arrangement by which this and like places could 
be visited again and over again, and the first impressions in fa- 
vor of Catholic truth deepened into final convictions ! Who will 
say to his bishop, Try me ? 



i8 9 40 



THE POPULAR USE OF THE BIBLE. 



587 




THE POPULAR USE OF THE BIBLE. 

BY REV. KENELM VAUGHAN. 

T is not an infrequent charge that the Catholic 
Church has designedly withheld the Holy Scrip- 
tures from the laity ; and as THE CATHOLIC WORLD 
is engaged in the spread of the knowledge and 
love of the Holy Scriptures, these few words 
which I have been asked to write on the discipline of the Catho- 
lic Church with regard to the popular use of the Bible will be 
very much to the point. Indeed a plain statement of the disci- 
pline of the church, in view of the recent publication* of a 
popular manual for the use of both clergy and laity, will be very 
opportune. 

CHRIST IS THE TRUE WORD OF GOD. 

This seeming innovation is only a renewal of the ancient 
practice of the church. Jesus Christ, the Eternal Son of God, 
ime down from Heaven more than eighteen hundred years ago, 
lot only as the Redeemer of the world, but also as the Divine 
[essenger to announce his Father's will to men. "The Father," 
>ays our Lord, "who sent me, gave me a commandment what 
should say" (St. John xii. 49). "All things whatsoever I 
ive heard of my Father I have made known to you " (xv. 16). 
The things that I speak, even as the Father said unto me, so 
lo I speak " (xii. 50). And how did he, the Heavenly Messen- 
ger, make known his Father's will to man ? He did so through 
conventional signs invented by men to convey ideas one to an- 
other through language spoken and written. " God, who at 
sundry times and in divers manners spoke in times past to 
the fathers by the prophets, last of all in these days hath spo- 
ken to us by his Son " (Heb. i. i). And his Son now, since his 
entrance into his sacramental mode of existence, speaks so that 
all may hear, by his Holy Spirit in the church, of which he 
says, " He that heareth you heareth me." But as an artist paints 
on canvas the conception of his mind, in order to draw and 
fix the eyes of men upon it, so the Divine Messenger, in order 
to concentrate the world's attention upon his Heavenly Father's 
will, inscribed that will upon the enduring and imperishable 

* The Divine Armory of Holy Scripture. Catholic Book Exchange, 120 W. 6oth St., New- 
York. 



588 THE POPULAR USE OF THE BIBLE. [Jan., 

monument of the written Word. Out of the human family he 
chose thirty-nine persons to be his special notaries and scribes; 
through these men, in various ages and to meet different re- 
quirements, the Eternal Word unfolded and chronicled his Father's 
will to men. And so intensely did the church love the Divine 
Writings of her Founder, that early in her history she gathered 
together into one volume the scattered portions of the inspired 
writings, stamped her indelible seal of authority upon it, and 
called this divine volume the Bible. 

When this Divine Messenger arrived on earth, his appearance 
was like that of other men ; in like manner his book bears the 
outward appearance of any other book, as being composed of 
paper, ink, and verbal signs. But let us penetrate beyond its 
mere accidents ; let us look upon its substance ; we must then 
confess that, as the heaven is exalted above the earth, so is this 
book above all those of human invention. For the ideas and 
sentiments therein enshrined are the outpourings of the Infinite 
Mind, the revelation of his Divine Intelligence, the effluence of 
his wisdom and his love. As the face of him that looks therein 
shines on the water, so the love of the Sacred Heart of our 
Lord is laid open on the pages of that Divine Book. Thus the 
Scriptures, so considered in connection with the personal Word 
himself, have as close a relationship to Jesus Christ himself as 
our words have to us. They are, in fact, the emanation of his 
Divine Mind, and partake of the nature of his attributes. 
Hence the church, in her solemn services, next to the worship 
which she pays to the personal Word himself, renders to the 
impersonal word of Scripture the highest veneration. 

When the Eternal Word bequeathed to the human race this 
treasury of his wisdom, he left it not open to the ravages of 
time and the wicked handling of men. He committed it to the 
safeguard of the Jewish church. There it was safely kept with- 
in the golden ark ; and the high-priest, the rabbis, and the 
scribes were the witnesses of its divinity, its guardians, and its 
preachers. Then, in later times, it was entrusted by God to the 
safe-keeping of his divinely-protected church ; and he assigned, 
as the witnesses of its divinity, the expounders of its meaning, 
and the guardians of its integrity, the bishops and pastors of 
his church. His church therefore it is who regulates and deter- 
mines the economy of its use. The inspired words she uses in 
all her offices enter into the composition of her breviaries, 
her missals, her rituals, her prayers in fact, the whole liturgical 
ministration of her services. They form the witness of her 
ministry, the vade mecum of her priests, and the text-book of 



1 894-] THE POPULAR USE OF THE BIBLE. 589 

her teaching. For the faithful laity also they are a treasury 
where they seek, not their creed, which is taught them by the 
infallible church, nor the regeneration of their souls ; but strength 
in faith, support in hope, and increase in charity. But as this 
gift of God, like all his other gifts, has been open to abuse, the 
church has been compelled, from time to time, to draw up cer- 
tain laws and regulations with regard to its popular use. Let 
us consider the history of her legislation on this matter. 

LEGISLATION OF THE CHURCH. 

The first, fundamental law relating to the use of Scripture 
was laid down by St. Peter, and is this : " No prophecy of 
Scripture is made by private interpretation " (2 Peter i. 20). 
This law is not directed against its use, but its abuse. For a 
thousand years or more no other law was needed. During this 
course of ages the Bible was left as an open fountain in the 
midst of the one fold, unguarded by decrees of councils or briefs 
of popes. Thither went the thirsty flock to drink the waters of 
eternal life. Thither went the afflicted for solace, the tempted 
for counsel, the wearied for refreshment, and the disconsolate 
for hope. History abounds with instances of the universality of 
the study of Scripture. Priscilla, a noble lady, is immortalized 
in the Acts for her proficiency in the Sacred Writings. We are 
told that she was wont to expound its pages to Apollo, who 
himself was "one mighty in the Scriptures." To Demetria, a 
lady of rank, St. Jerome thus writes : " When you close your 
eyes and open them, may you be found with the Holy Scrip- 
tures in your hands." To Eustochium also he wrote : " When 
sleep overtakes you, let your face fall upon the pages of that 
sacred book." History also speaks of St. Monica, St. Cecilia, 
St. Martha, St. Anatolia, Clotilda, Flavia Domitilla in fact, of 
the lay element of the church of those days as being pro- 
foundly conversant with Scripture lore. In the schools also, 
from the earliest times, children were grounded in the Scrip- 
tures. Timothy " from his infancy knew the Scriptures." His- 
tory says that when Julian the Apostate rebuked St. Cyril for 
teaching in his schools so unclassical a book, he replied : " If 
my pupils learn not therein to be eloquent, they learn at least 
to be virtuous." The psalmist says : " The stream of the river 
rejoiceth the city of God." This river, according to St. Gre- 
gory, is the Holy Scriptures, " which contain shallow places and 
deep, where the lamb can walk and the elephant can swim." 
This river, the source of which is from above, flows freely over 
the Christian Church, invigorating and rejoicing both young and 



590 THE POPULAR USE OF THE BIBLE. [Jan., 

old who drink in its saving waters. They alone who abandon 
those life-giving waters bring forth no fruit, but droop, wither, 
and die. St. Chrysostom attributes the moral corruption of his 
day to the disrelish and neglect of Christians for the Holy 
Scriptures. These are his words : " No one relishes the Scrip, 
tures ; if the public mind were given to them, we should be 
free, not from errors only, but from the very source of them. 
A terrible precipice, a profound abyss, is the ignorance of Holy 
Scripture. A great obstacle to salvation is not to know the 
Divine Law. This ignorance has given rise to heresies, corrupted 
morals, and disturbed the whole supernatural order of things." 
It was by the revival of Scripture study that this great doctor 
of the church brought about the increased fervor of those 
times. 

THE SECOND LAW OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY. 

The second law regarding the lay use of Scripture was made 
in the twelfth century. At that time a tribe of false teachers 
arose in France the Albigenses and Waldenses by name. 
They strove to revive the pagan philosophy of Manichaeism ; to 
give their pagan theology an appearance of orthodoxy, they 
armed themselves with the forbidden weapon of private judg- 
ment, broke into the sanctuary of the Bible, mutilated the 
sacred texts, and clothed their unholy doctrines with the holy 
words of the Gospel. The ever-vigilant eyes of the church be- 
held this unprecedented aggression on the written Word. And 
was she unconcerned ? No ; as a governor of a certain Spanish 
city, seeing the Moors strive to poison its fountains, set up a 
wall of defence round about them, and proclaimed certain re- 
strictive laws against approaching them, so the church, seeing 
her enemies striving to poison the fountain of wisdom, called 
together her bishops and in that memorable Council of Tou- 
louse in 1229 passed a law which forbade laymen to read the 
Scriptures in the vernacular without the permission of their 
bishop. This law served not as a prohibition, but rather as a 
bulwark of defence against popular perversion and abuse. But 
mark, this law was only local, and prescribed to meet local 
dangers. It was only provisional. For when St. Dominic, with 
the irresistible sword of the Word, hurled back into the abyss 
that demon of the night, Manichaeism, and restored peace to 
the church, then ceased this disciplinary law of Toulouse. 
This fortification was then taken down, for it was needed no 
longer, and the laymen of the church again had free access to 
that fountain of living waters. 






1894-] THE POPULAR USE OF THE BIBLE. 591 



OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 

The third time the church legislated on the lay use of Scrip 
ture was in the fifteenth century, when another attack was 
made on the written Word an attack fiercer and more perilous 
than the former. The aggressors were the unprincipled philoso- 
phers of northern Europe. They armed themselves with the 
false doctrines of " private judgment " and " individual inspira- 
tion." With these destructive weapons they broke into the 
sanctuary of Scripture, drove out from that sacred temple the 
books of Wisdom, Judith, Tobias, Ecclesiasticus, and the Macha- 
bees ; endeavored to deprive them of divine life by declaring 
them non-canonical, and consigned them to the tomb of the 
Apocrypha. They held up to ridicule the book of the Lamen- 
tations and St. James's Epistle, nicknaming one " the weeping 
ape of Jeremias " and the other " the epistle of straw." And 
why ? Because upon their pages, inscribed by the Divine Hand, 
stood their own condemnation the condemnation of their own 
unscriptural and unchristian doctrines. The books which they 
vouchsafed to retain they perverted and profaned. Taking ad- 
vantage of the art of printing, they published and circulated 
spurious and faulty editions of the Holy Scriptures ; indeed, 
:he present edition of the Bible in use by the Protestant 
hurch of England so abounds with errors that its ministers 
Lave appointed a special commission for its revision. 

Did the Catholic Church, the faithful guardian of the Bible, 
'itness these doings unconcernedly ? No. With dismay she 
icheld this monstrous aggression on the Word of God. With 
;rief she saw these new religions disturbing and poisoning those 
tallowed waters with their feet with the human doctrine of 
irivate judgment. With sorrow she beheld her children unable 
to distinguish the true from the false doctrines, and many of 
them wounding their souls with that holy instrument of salva- 
tion. In her zeal and anxiety for the integrity of the Bible 
and the safety of her children, she legislated in the Council of 
Trent against these deplorable evils. The bishops therein for- 
mally declared that the books banished by these heretics from 
the Bible belonged to the Canon of Holy Scripture, and that 
they who gainsaid their divinity were to be anathematized. 
The Council of Trent also passed laws inhibiting any person 
from printing the Bible without a special license,* and any lay- 

* Even in England the exclusive right of printing the authorized Protestant version has 
been claimed by the crown ever since its first publication. 



592 THE POPULAR USE OF THE BIBLE. [Jan., 

men even from reading it in the vernacular without a written- 
authorization from ecclesiastical authority. 

THE HISTORICAL CUSTOM. 

These disciplinary laws may appear, perhaps, arbitrary and un- 
necessary in these days of free thought and self-indulgence ; but 
in those days of intellectual revolt there was a stern necessity for 
such strict discipline. So alarming, indeed, were the moral dis- 
orders and social anarchy which arose in England at that time 
from the universal abuse and private interpretation of Scripture^ 
that the head of the Protestant Church himself enacted the follow- 
ing statute : " That a penalty of a month's imprisonment should 
be inflicted for each offence upon any woman, husbandman, arti- 
ficer, serving-man, apprentice, or journeyman who should read 
the Scriptures to themselves or to others, privately or openly'^ 
(34, 35 Hen. VIII.) So despotic a law was never enacted by 
the Catholic Church, and I merely cite it to show the necessity 
that existed in those days for a stricter discipline with regard 
to the universal use of Scripture. By the intervention of her 
legislation the Scripture war abated, the outburst of Biblio- 
mania subsided, the novelty of private judgment died away, 
and the church was able, by means of the new art of printing, 
to multiply popular editions of the sacred writings, and to 
guard them with notes from popular abuse. She then modified 
the stringent laws of the Council of Trent relating to the lay 
use of Scripture; and in 1757, under the pontificate of Bene- 
dict XIV., she sent forth to the world the following decree : 
" Versions of the Bible in the vernacular tongue which are ap- 
proved of by the Apostolic See, or published with notes drawn 
from the holy fathers of the church or from learned Catholic 
men, are permitted." Henceforth no special application for 
leave to read vernacular editions of the Bible was necessary. 
Every layman or laywoman might read a Bible at will, provid- 
ed that that Bible was published under the sanction of the 
church. Later, in 1779, new dangers arose which called for 
new regulations with regard to the popular use of the Bible. 
Infidelity in all its hideous forms began to lift up its head in 
Europe, and to strike a deadly blow against Christianity. To 
combat this monster of modern days, the church earnestly 
called upon her children to make a new crusade, and to arm 
themselves with that holy and irresistible weapon the Bible. 
A brief sent by Pius VI. to Martini, Archbishop of Florence, 
will illustrate this statement. "At a time," he says, "when a. 
vast number of bad books, which grossly attack the Catholic 



1894-] THE POPULAR USE OF THE BIBLE. 593 

religion, are circulated even among the unlearned, to the great 
destruction of souls, you judge exceedingly well that the faith- 
ful should be excited to the reading of the Holy Scriptures ; 
for these are the most abundant sources which ought to be left 
open to every one to draw from them purity of morals and of 
doctrine, and to eradicate the errors which are so widely spread 
in these corrupt times. This you have seasonably effected by 
publishing the sacred writings in the language of your country 
suitably to every one's capacity." From this brief we gather 
that the church not only leaves the Scriptures open to every 
one, but she does more : she excites her children to fly to that 
armory in which "are hung a thousand bucklers," and there to 
equip themselves for the battle against modern scepticism and 
unbelief. 

THE LAY USE OF SCRIPTURES. 

Again, Pius VII., writing to the English bishops in the 
year 1820, exhorts them to encourage their people to read 
the Holy Scriptures : for " nothing can be more useful, 
more consolatory, and more animating ; because they serve 
to confirm the faith, to support the hope, and to inflame 
the charity of the true Christian." These pontifical briefs 
ix definitely beyond a doubt, if words have any meaning, 
the actual discipline and spirit of the Catholic Church re- 
jarding the lay use of Scripture. This discipline is clearly set 
forth by a learned English theologian, Father Waterworth, in 
the following concise words : " If the Bible be Catholic, and 
:ontain explanatory notes, everything has been done which the 
church prescribes, and every person, as far as the church is 
concerned, is at liberty to read modern and vernacular transla- 
tions." At the time of the Catholic emancipation certain mem- 
bers of Parliament accused the Catholic Church of withholding 
the Bible from the people. This false charge, so often per- 
versely repeated in these our days, was met in a celebrated 
speech by Bishop Doyle, in which he gave utterance to the 
following declaration : " We [Catholics] have no aversion to the 
Bible. The possession of it by the laity of our church is best 
proved by the great many editions it has gone through in Ire- 
land under our express sanction. We prefix to our English 
editions of the Bible a rescript of Pius VI., thereby showing r 
that not we only, but the head of our church is joined with us 
in exhorting the faithful to read the Word of God ; so that of 
all the things said against us, there is not anything said of us 
so opposed to truth as that we are averse to the circulation of 



594 THE POPULAR USE OF THE BIBLE. [Jan., 

the Word of God." In America also the laity are exhorted to 
the reading of Holy Scripture. This is evident from the following 
passage which we read in the pastoral letter addressed by the 
American bishops of the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore to 
the clergy and laity : " It can hardly be necessary for us to 
remind you, beloved brethren, that the most highly-valued trea- 
sure of every family library, and the most frequently and loving- 
ly made use of, should be the Holy Scriptures. . . . We 
hope that no family can be found amongst us without a correct 
version of the Holy Scriptures." 

So far for the sketch of the church's legislation on the lay 
use of the Bible. From it the following deductions may be 
drawn : 

I. The Catholic Church has never closed the Bible to her 
people : as an open fountain it has ever stood in the midst of 
her fold. 

II. The church permits any person to possess and read the 
Bible, provided that the version be a Catholic one. 

III. The church encourages and excites in clear and em- 
phatic terms the faithful to the reading of the Holy Scriptures. 

IV. The church has, however, in her wisdom, made from 
time to time certain restrictive laws with regard to the popular 
use in the vulgar tongue ; not by way of prohibition, but as a 
bulwark of defence against popular abuse. 

Now let me ask, Do we avail ourselves of the full liberty 
given us by the church to read the Word of God ? How few 
of us can say we do. Daily we pore over the human words of 
men in books and journals, and weigh and speculate on their 
fallible and oftentimes vain and deceitful words. But, alas ! 
how rarely do we take up the Book of Divine Wisdom and of 
Love, and allow its wise, just, sweet, comforting, and life-giving 
words to sink deeply into our hearts. Alas! this coldness to- 
wards the written Word arises from the fact that the charity 
of many has grown cold towards the Person of the Incarnate 
Word Himself. 

WHY CATHOLICS SHOULD READ THE BIBLE. 

Let us consider some of the reasons why the church 
would have her children, in these days especially, familiar with 
the Bible. We are living in an age when faith is rare and 
weak, and when men's minds have to meet and struggle 
against intellectual immoralities which are marching daringly 
over the earth and striving to overthrow the faith of Christian 
nations. The church therefore earnestly invites her children 



1894-] THE POPULAR USE OF THE BIBLE. 595 

to draw near to the table of the New Testament, and there 
to partake of that divine " Bread of understanding," in order 
to strengthen and confirm them in the faith. She exhorts them 
to give themselves to the study of Scripture, in order to be 
able to give a reason of the faith that is in them to truth-seek- 
ing minds ; and also to defend the truths of revelation against 
infidelity, against which we have to carry on a hand-to-hand 
fight. For "he who has not the authority of Holy Scripture," 
says St. Gregory, " is easily overcome." Again, we are living 
in a sensational age, when the deafening noise and din of world- 
liness without stuns the ears of men, and hinders them from 
listening, and catching the still small voice of Jesus speaking 
from his altar-throne as well as from his tabernacle in our hearts. 
To meet this obstacle to interior hearing and contemplation 
the church directs our eyes to his words engraved on the 
pages of Holy Scriptures. Thus she gathers up our wandering 
minds and hearts, and centres them in the personal subsisting 
Word. "Learn," she says, in the words of St. Jerome, "the 
heart of God in the words of God." 

The world is steeped in immorality, and inundated with 
literature of an immoral tendency; and one of the principal 
remedies which the Catholic Church points out for this crying 
:ial evil is the dissemination of the great moral book, the 
Kble. From that fountain of grace she calls upon mankind to 
Iraw " purity of morals " and holiness of life. Origen calls that 
icred Book, " the pharmacy where are to be found remedies for 
jvery evil " ; and St. Jerome says that by the reading of its 
icred words all vices are washed away. Ecclesiastical history 
iars out this fact ; for it tells how St. Augustine was converted 
From a life of libertinage to a life of heroic virtue, by taking 
ip casually and reading that sacred Book ; and how St. Antony, 
>t. Francis, and innumerable other saints of God were regen- 
erated in heart by reading and meditating upon the chaste 
words of Him who is sanctity itself. 

CARDINAL GIBBONS ON THE USE OF THE BIBLE. 

Indeed there is no better disinfectant against the poisonous 
atmosphere of the world than the reading of Holy Scripture. 
This truth Cardinal Gibbons forcibly brings out in the following 
touching words, which one day fell from his lips when preach- 
ing on "The Word of God" : 

"St. Charles Borromeo said that the Holy Scriptures should 
be the garden of the priest. I may add : it should also be the 
garden of the layman. But how few there are who visit this 



596 THE POPULAR USE OF THE BIBLE. [Jan. 

garden, how few cultivate it, how few pluck its flowers, how 
few taste of its fruit ! I see the Bible lying on the parlor 
table. But I fear it is there more for ornament than for use. 
Visit this garden for ten minutes each day, and it will be a 
sweet recreation. Cultivate it, and your soul will be strength- 
ened. Eat of its fruit, and you will be nourished. Take home 
with you a bouquet of its flowers. Let others flaunt their fad- 
ing flowers in their breast. Do you bear in your heart these 
spiritual flowers, and you will enjoy their delicious fragrance ; 
they will be the best disinfectant to counteract the poison of 
the worldly atmosphere which you will have to breathe." 

The times are dark and troublous, and the church points out 
to us the Scriptures as a refuge whither we should fly, to seek, 
in the loving words of Jesus, strength, hope, and rest for our 
weary soul. If we would but fly thither, we should then be 
able, like the Machabees, to endure all things, come what may, 
" having for our comfort the Holy Scriptures which are in our 
hands." 

"It is certainly then the spirit of the church that the sacred 
volume be in the hands of all her children, and she urges her 
children to. dedicate at least some portion of the day to the 
reading of the sacred page, if not on bended knees as St. 
Charles Borromeo did, at least with a mind bent in humility, 
with a heart striving after love, and a will prompt to obey its 
holy inspirations. Put aside all timidity and foolish scruples as 
regards its too familiar use, remembering that its disuse is as 
blamable in us as it abuse. Unstable souls, lacking faith in 
the divine teaching mission of the church, pervert, alas! and fal- 
sify the sense of Holy Scripture, and thus mortally wound their 
souls with the "sword of the spirit," that blessed instrument of 
our salvation. But this unhappy fact should not lead us to ab- 
stain from its salutary use ; as well might Christians abstain 
from meat and drink because there are some persons who vio- 
late the law of temperance. 

Let us, therefore confiding more in the help of the Holy 
Spirit and of Jesus who sends him enter daily into the taber- 
nacle of Holy Scripture, and listen there to the loving words of 
the Word ; for thereunto " you do well to attend as to a light 
that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawns and the day- 
star arises in your hearts" (2 Peter i. 19). 




IT is one of the fads of the modern utilitarians 
that it is a waste of time to study the dead lan- 
guages. The contention is, that the time which is 
'occupied in the acquisition of Greek and Latin 
might be put to advantage in learning French or 
German, or any of the more widely-used Western languages of 
the present day. This is the dollar view of the case ; from that 
point of view the contention may be right. 

We are reminded that even from the utilitarian point of view 
something may be urged for the opposite side of the argument 
by the publication of Professor Jebb's lectures on Greek poetry.* 
'he series were delivered last year in the Johns-Hopkins Uni- 
versity, in connection with the Percy Turnbull Memorial foun- 
lation. As a contribution to modern literature these lectures 
>ssess a high value. Their style is chaste and their method 
idmirable. They exhibit a wide erudition, and a full mastery 
>f the subject. With the didactic portions of them we may not 
it all times agree, and we are not tied to many of the opinions 
they formulate, or the reasoning upon which these opinions are 
ised. But there can be no two opinions about their scholastic 
ralue. They show very plainly how necessary it is for a student 
joing through a course of even English literature to have a 
:nowledge of that early civilization out of which most of the 
European literature sprung. The influence which the Hellenic 
lind still exercises over civilization is great and manifold, 
tough perhaps often imperceptible. Without a knowledge of 
Greek language it is hardly possible to comprehend what 
tat mind was. How idle, then, to say that it is a waste of 
:ime to endeavor to gain such a knowledge ! It is a Philistine 
irgument, pure and simple. 

It seems to us that in many respects there is an analogy be- 



* The Growth and Influence of Classical Greek Poetry. 
lew York : Houghton, Miffiin & Co. 



By R. C. Jebb. Boston and 



598 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Jan., 

tween the genius of Greece and the genius of America. In the 
love of freedom and in the practical bent of their intellect there 
are unmistakable points of similarity between the respective 
peoples. It was by applying the practical principle to art that 
the Greeks attained that excellence which the judgment of ages 
has ratified as the standard of superiority. They discarded the 
fantastic and the superornate. The natural beauty of the hu- 
man form and the unapproachable grace of nature, in tree and 
fruit and flower, in color and effect, were the standards their 
mature judgment settled on. A like rule was developed in their 
poetry. They rejected the transcendental, and sought their sources 
of inspiration in human feeling. Even the heroes of their myths, 
half demi-gods as they were, had an immense deal of this hu- 
manity about them. Achilles, wandering discontentedly about 
Hades and murmuring that he would rather be a bondsman on 
earth than a ruler over spectres in the realm of shade, gives a 
forcible illustration of this aspect of Greek thought. 

We might commend these lectures of Professor Jebb's on 
other grounds beside those of a scholarly tracing of the genesis 
of the Greek drama. Incidentally they touch on many phases 
of Greek national life which have a high historical value ; and 
history, when it is looked at in its bearing upon literary and 
artistic culture, becomes intensely more interesting than when 
regarded as history merely. Those who take them up as an in- 
tellectual recreation, from whatever motive, will find them a 
pleasant and a useful pastime. 

Simultaniety in literature, in regard to theme and period, is no 
longer phenomenal, but regarded as the natural effect of men- 
tal laws operating over widely-extended areas. Oriental history 
offers so many temptations to the skilful in romance that the 
wonder rather is why there should be so few coincidences than 
that there should be any. Still, a pair of such coincidences, 
coming within a very brief cycle, does seem a little unusual. In 
one case there was actual identity of theme. The appearance 
of General Wallace's Prince of India, which deals with the fall 
of Constantinople, was immediately preceded here by the publi- 
cation of a serial story on precisely the same theme in one of 
our Catholic weeklies. Now we have two books coming within 
the same month treating of the Jewish people in pre-Christian 
times, and dealing with many similar developments of Jewish 
life and worship. Hence either our time is distinctively remark- 
able or we are at the beginning of a period when such coinci- 
dences will cease to be marvelled at. 



1 894.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 599 

In Sephora, or Rome and Jerusalem* we have the study of 
one of those frequently-recurring transition periods in Jewish his- 
tory when the weakness of the national character led the peo- 
ple into a state of moral and physical decadence which foresha- 
dowed the ultimate ruin of the nation. The particular epoch 
here dealt with is that just preceding the Roman subjugation 
of Judea, when the internal canker had eaten its way irretrievably. 
There was neither valor in the army, wisdom in the council, 
nor honesty in the people. Antigonus, the king, was a sensu- 
alist and a coward ; the army was a horde, led by tinselled 
fops ; the spurious morality of the Pharisees had poisoned the 
moral wells of the nation ; and the blight of slavery was over 
all. The awful shadow of the Crucifixion and the subsequent 
destruction of the doomed city and race was, in a word, flung 
broad on the face of the worn-out world of paganism and hypo- 
crisy. 

As a romance the story of Sephora is a simple affair enough. 
It is indeed little more than a thread upon which to string many 
fine pearls of depiction of a memorable time. It brings the 
reader on to Alexandria and Rome, and back to Jerusalem, and 
some famous historical personages are encountered in the 
:ourse of the tour. Cleopatra, Mark Antony, and Octavia are 
successively met with ; and in the glimpses of the characters 
if each of these which we get we find a general adherence to 
the impressions of history rather than any bold theories of 
the author himself ; and in this respect the work presents a 
>leasing contrast to The Prince of India, wherein the author's idea 
>f his principal characters seemed to have been inspired by the 
'nical motto that history in general is a conspiracy against 
truth. 

As a series of grand pictures of the gorgeous barbarism of 
the time, worked out with mosaic painstaking, Sephora is a work 
rhich will readily stand comparison with any of that class of 
literary achievement. In its arrangement and panoramic effect 
it reminds us a good deal of Gustave Flaubert's Salammbo ; but 
it is altogether free from the sometimes rank and repulsive de- 
tail which the great master of realism deemed necessary for the 
production of his literary effects. 

The story is an adaptation from the French work of Adrien 
Lemercier. How far the learned author, Father O'Donohue, has 

* Sephora; or, Rome and Jerusalem. Adapted from the French of Adrien Lemercier. 
By Rev. James Donohue, LL.D. Brooklyn, N. Y.: Rev. James Donohue, St. Thomas Aqui- 
as' Library, 145 Ninth Street. 



6oo TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Jan., 

been indebted to his model we cannot say, as we have not 
seen it ; but we are inclined to think he is entitled to more 
than the credit of an adapter. The style of the book at least 
is his own, and it is marked by an elegant simplicity. We 
cannot but regard such books as the best means, in many cases, 
of presenting history to the ordinary reader, for its impressions 
are likely to remain on the mind far longer than bare historical 
record. 

The Son of a Prophet * is a work which goes back to earlier 
Israelite days, and has its rise in a more ambitious purpose. 
The conception may be described as Miltonian in its boldness. 
To give form and vitality to the shadowy and (to some) imper- 
sonal figure which utters its plaints of woe in the Book of Job 
is the design which the author essayed to carry out. Whether 
or not such a task should have been attempted in a prose form 
is a question which may be seriously raised ; to our mind, prose 
is hardly the proper vehicle for the materializing of so sublime 
a type of heroism as he who speaks from the pages of this im- 
mortal book. Taking the work as it is given us, however, it 
must be owned that the author has shown himself well equipped 
for the undertaking. A profound sympathy with his subject, for- 
tified by a manifestly ample acquaintance with the historical 
surroundings, were the chief conditions which he brought to 
the task. The lesson which the author appears to read from 
the Sacred Book is that form and ceremonial have little to do 
with religion, or rather that in the period dealt with they were 
losing their importance in the shadow of the coming fulfilment 
of the law and the many lapses into idolatry of the priests and 
people of Israel. In the endeavor made by the author to ex- 
plain the apparent inconsistencies in the earlier and later parts 
of Job's outpourings there is shown great power of dealing 
with mental problems, and the treatment of the subject as a 
whole displays a large and varied sympathy. As a general rule 
the diction is of a high and dignified order, in consonance with 
the character of the theme ; but one is startled now and then 
by the cropping up of such sayings as " making a record," as 
if the terms of modern athletics or sport were known in an- 
cient Judea. This fact shows how easily even our writers of a 
superior class become infected with the spirit of slang. 

Mr. Andrew Lang, whose versatile accomplishments in litera- 
ture ought to make any task in that field facile for him, has 

* The Son of a Prophet. By George Anson Jackson. Boston and New York : Houghton, 
Mifflin&Co. 



1894-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 60 1 

given the world a new work for juveniles. The True Story Book* 
deals with the world of fact, and must prove to its youthful readers 
that the world of reality is quite as full of the marvellous as the 
realm of the imagination. All the tales here given are not the au- 
thor's own ; several others have contributed to the store-house ; but 
they have all been produced under his own supervision. They 
deal with hair-breadth escapes and maritime adventures of many 
kinds, and are told in a simple and effective style. We fear, how- 
ever, that the national predilections of the editor have influenced 
some as, for instance, his narrative of the fight between the 
Shannon and the Chesapeake. The latter ship is represented as 
having been the superior in armament and numerical strength 
in that famous combat. This has been shown by documentary 
evidence not to have been the case. Moreover, the fact is care- 
fully kept out of sight that Captain Lawrence's crew was enor- 
mously inferior to his opponent's in the matter of training. The 
ship was deficient in many other ways, and besides was regard- 
ed by the sailors as an u unlucky " vessel, from the fact of her 
having been beaten before. It is well known that Captain Law- 
rence was the reverse of sanguine about his success on these 
accounts, when he accepted Captain Broke's challenge to fight. 
r e hope all the " true stories" are truer than this one. 

An interesting gift-book is an itinerary through Longfellow's 
Lcadia,f by Jeannette A. Grant. Were it not that the poet se- 
icted the place as the theatre of his affecting drama, Annapolis, 
the place is now called, would not be more noteworthy 
in many another region wherein the tragedy of early settle- 
ment was played out. Indeed in many respects it must yield 
point of interest to many the Wyoming Valley, for instance, 
the districts over which the exploits of Pontiac and Uncas 
inged. Longfellow himself did not deem it necessary for the 
mrposes of his epic to go over the ground. There are many 
forms of literary mind, however, and some of these will 
find comfort in the supplying of a manifest deficiency in the 
Evangeline legend. The author of this pretty book has gone 
over the whole ground in the spirit of a true pilgrim, and her 
observations on the physical features, social conditions, and gen- 
eral history of the place are those of a cultivated mind. A large 
number of plates scattered through the work enables the reader 
to realize still more what " Acadia " looks like at the present day. 
The orator's voice is a mighty power, no doubt, as the poet 

* True Stories for Boys. Edited by Andrew Lang. New York : Longmans, Green & Co. 
t Through Evangeline's Country. By Jeanette A. Grant. Boston : Joseph Knight Co. 

VOL. LVIII. 40 



602 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Jan., 

declares, but it is very, very often an evanescent one as well. 
Many a speaker whose words were as capable of making men 
rush to arms as those of the great Athenian has but writ his 
name in water, for want of chronicler. It is commendable to 
find filial affection striving to avert such a fate in the case of 
a man who in recent years played a very notable part in the 
public affairs of the Union, and more particularly in those of 
South Carolina at a very critical time in her fortunes we 
mean the late Mr. M. P. O'Connor,* whose biography, to some 
extent, is now presented to the world by his daughter. 

That eloquence which seems to be an especial gift of the 
Celt Mr. O'Connor possessed in no ordinary degree, and he 
was enabled to make it felt at a moment when the fate of the 
American Union was quivering in the scales. Brought up to 
the profession of the law, he was enabled early to develop his 
natural gift ; a place in the State Legislature soon gave him an 
opportunity of displaying his power. He spoke in a house 
which had often thrilled with the fire of a race of speakers 
whose fame is widespread, and his first effort on behalf of the 
maintenance of the Union flag, on such a floor, created a pro- 
found admiration. From this time forward Mr. O'Connor's re- 
putation as an orator was progressive ; and his strength lay in 
the fact that it was not merely for eloquence' sake he spoke ; 
he was acting his part in the making of history all the time. 
A good many of Mr. O'Connor's political and forensic speeches 
were reported in the local journals, but as a rule only in an 
imperfect state. Were it not for their rescue and presentation 
by Miss O'Connor, they might just as well be buried in the 
vaults of a museum. They are for the most part so bound up 
with the great political tragedy of the time as to form an in- 
tegral part of its record. Hence they will be valuable to the 
historian. The book is, indeed, from many aspects an impor- 
tant contribution to the literature of a most absorbing era in 

our national development. 

, 

I. NEW FIVE-MINUTE SERMONS.f 

The preaching of these short but carefully prepared sermons 
at all Low Masses on Sundays and festivals by the Paulist 
Fathers was first inaugurated by them in 1876, to which custom 
they have adhered to the present day in their church. Their 
plan has been to prepare the matter of the sermon for publica- 

* Life and Letters of M. P. O'Connor. Written and edited by his daughter, Mary 
Doline O'Connor. New York : Dempsey & Carroll. 

f Five-Minute Sermons for Low Masses on all Sundays of the Year. By the Priests of 
the Congregation of St. Paul. New Series. Vol. I. New York : Catholic Book Exchange. 



1894-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 603 

tion in a weekly newspaper, and to have the sermon read at 
every Low Mass from an advanced proof-sheet. 

The need of some such doctrinal and moral instruction be- 
ing given to the people, the majority of whom are not able to 
attend a High Mass, was fully recognized by the hierarchy, and 
at the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore a decree was made 
enjoining upon pastors the duty of reading the Gospel and 
preaching a " five-minute " sermon at Low Masses. A copy of 
this decree is given in the preface to this present volume ; 
which is, in fact, the third volume of discourses of this kind 
selected from those already preached in the Paulist church. 

The present selection offered in this first volume of a new 
series compares most favorably with the former ones. We think 
that in some respects it will be found superior to them. There 
are one hundred and fifty sermons in all under almost as many 
especial titles, conveying in clear, simple language instruction 
in doctrine and morals, accompanied with brief and forcible 
exhortations to the practise of the Christian virtues and the 
shunning of those vices which in these days call for vigorous 
reprobation. 

We are especially pleased with the very happy and appro- 
priate titles given to these sermons, which the reverend clergy 
will find most suggestive for their own use in preparing longer 
and more elaborate discourses, especially when taken in connec- 
tion with the apt treatment they receive in the brief sermons 
themselves. 

The Catholic Book Exchange in the typographical prepara- 
tion of this volume has made a decided improvement upon the 
former volumes. 

2. DOMESTIC ECONOMY.* 

This work ought to be in the hands of every housewife. It 
is thoroughly practical, and in a very small space gives valuable 
and reliable information and instruction on many points about 
which, although of great importance, the greatest ignorance too 
often prevails. Food and clothing receive careful consideration, 
and to the various branches of domestic sanitation full treat- 
ment is given. To the votaries of fashion we commend the il- 
lustrations of the effect produced upon the organs by tight 
lacing, in juxtaposition to which the author has placed, with not 
a little art and perhaps some malice, an illustration of the foot 

*A Text-Book of Domestic Economy. By F. T. Paul. London and New York : Long- 
mans, Green & Co. 



604 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Jan. 

of a Chinese lady. Of the two sets of victims the latter is the 
more sensible, for the less important part of the body is made 
to pay the penalty. In the second part, yet to be published, 
the causes and prevention of disease, home nursing, and first 
aid in emergencies, will be treated. 

3. PURGATORY.* 

Any work which tells us of the love and the mercy of God must 
be very acceptable in these days, when these motives for doing 
penance need to be more enlarged upon than they have been 
in former times. This book on Purgatory is a collection of an- 
ecdotes, with devout reflections thereon, for those who are in 
the habit of making frequent spiritual reading. 

We gladly commend it to such readers ; and to others, with 
the hope that their devotion to the suffering holy souls may be 
increased, and that they may reap from that devotion all those 
aids which come from the assistance that we can give them. 

[NOTE. A large number of book-notices are unavoidably held over, although in type, 
until next month's issue. ED. C, W.] 

NEW BOOKS. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & Co., Boston and New York : 

Poems. By William Thomas Parsons. Rachel Stanivood. By Lucy Gib- 
bons Morse. 
LONGMANS, GREEN & Co., New York : 

A Gentleman of France. By Stanley J. Weyman. The Communion of 
Saints : A lost Link in the Chain of the Church Creed. By Rev. Wyllys 
Rede, M.A. 
FR. PUSTET & Co., New York and Cincinnati: 

Suffering Souls. By Right Rev. Monsignor Preston, D.D., LL.D., Proto- 

notary Apostolic. 
BENZIGER BROTHERS, New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago : 

A Book of Novenas. By the Very Rev. John Baptist Pagani. Simple 
Prayers for Children. The Comedy of English Protestantism. In three 
acts. Edited by A. F. Marshall, B.A. Oxon. Skeleton Sermons. For the 
Sundays and Holydays in the Year. By Rev. J. B. Bagshawe, D.D. The 
Catholic Music Book. Appropriate and easy pieces for the services of 
the Church. Henry VIII. and the English Monasteries. By F. A. 
Gasquet, O.S.B., D.D. Our Separated Brethren. By Rev. L. Riving- 
ton. Lead, Kindly Light ! Some Notes for those in Search of Truth. By 
Rev. E. L. Taunton. 
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, New York: 

Wayside Music. By Charles H. Crandall. 
CROTHERS & KORTH, New York: 

St. Luke: Thoughts for St. Luke's Day. By a Daughter of the Church. 
GEORGE H. ELLIS, Boston: 

The Spiritual Life: Studies in Devotion and Worship. Uplifts of Heart 
and Will. Religious Aspirations in Prose and Verse. By James H. 
West. 
THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING Co.: 

Primer of Philosophy. By Dr. Paul Carus. 

* Purgatory : Illustrated iy the Lives and Legends of the Saints. By Rev. F. X. 
Schouppe, S.J. New York : Benziger Brothers. 




AT Washington, on Thanksgiving Day, Monsig- 
nor Satolli delivered a memorable speech. It was 
in effect a plea for more Catholic schools. The 
more the government and public opinion favor Catholic education, 
for which he pleads, the safer will they be making the basis of the 
American Republic. This is the sincere conviction of the arch- 
bishop's mind, he emphatically declares, and the frank profession 
of his faith. Only those who do not know the Catholic schools, 
he is convinced, are opposed to them. The question thus raised 
is rapidly coming to the front, and all the forces of bigotry will 
be found marshalled against the Catholic claims. If the matter 
could be looked at dispassionately, and argued from a practical 
stand-point, a solution could easily be arrived at. The American 
people are at heart an honest and fair-dealing people, and they 
must soon see the injustice of compelling one class of citizens 
to pay twice over for their children's education for this is how 
the case really stands at present. Catholics will not have their 
children brought up in ignorance or indifference to their religion. 
If some accommodation will not be made whereby the school 
education will be the reflex of the home education, and the par- 
ents will have something to say concerning the way their chil- 
dren are to be educated, they must eschew the public education, 
make the sacrifice, and provide for themselves what they want. 
To put the question in a nutshell, Christian education there will 
be for Catholic children, whether the bigoted like it or not ; 
and this being so, will the American public, with its love of fair 
play, insist that an injustice against Catholics continue to be 
perpetrated by the state ? 



Anarchist outrages are becoming things of terrible frequency. 
The latest is one of the most daring, if not the most frightful 
in its effects. A man named Vaillant got admission by a sub- 
terfuge into the French Chamber of Deputies, and from a gal- 
lery flung a bomb amongst the legislators, with the intention, 
as he afterwards admitted, of killing the prime minister. He 



606 EDITORIAL NOTES. [Jan., 

only succeeded, however, in killing an attendant and injuring a 
lady. The Spanish anarchists are more successful in their dead- 
ly work. It is not more than a few weeks since a desperado 
flung a bomb into the midst of a crowd of people sitting in a 
theatre, by which thirty persons were killed and many more 

injured. 



The nefarious A. P. A. movement has reached a serious and 
tangible phase. It is alleged that it has been used effective- 
ly to influence elections to Congress, and the Legislature is 
asked to investigate the circumstances in at least one specific 
case. Mr. Youmans, who was the representative of the eighth 
district of Michigan, but was defeated at the last election by 
Mr. Linton, has laid a petition before Congress praying for an 
investigation into the circumstances under which his adversary 
succeeded in getting the plurality. His charges are very circum- 
stantial. He sets forth a category of accusations of a very 
grave character, amongst others that his opponent utilized the 
conspiracy styling itself the American Protective Association 
against him, on the ground that the petitioner is a Roman 
Catholic, or in sympathy with Roman Catholics. It is eminently 
desirable that the prayer of this petition be acceded to. 

The time is certainly ripe for dragging this abominable con- 
spiracy into the light of day. Such a conspiracy is treason to 
our Constitution, whose glorious corner-stone is liberty of con- 
science to every citizen and no religious disability for any one, 
Turk, Jew, or heathen, The Roman Catholics of this country 
will not suffer their citizen rights to be filched from them by 
any sneaking conspiracy. They have as big a stake in it as any 
other denomination. It has been cemented with their blood and 
built up by their unselfish sacrifices, and they will not allow any 
skulking slanderers to fasten any undeserved reproach upon 
them by whispering doubts about their loyalty. Let us have 
the whole truth out by all means, and have it speedily. 



On the I4th of December a bronze statue of the late Father 
Drumgoole was placed in position in front of the institution at 
Lafayette Place, which owes to him its foundation. The statue 
is a faithful likeness of the saintly priest. We have already 
given an engraving made from a photograph of the work. Long 
may it endure, to perpetuate a great and good man's memory ! 



1894-] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 607 



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 poet has put in the mouth of a vanquished nation, mourning for the death 
of a leader whose life would have been their deliverance, the oft-repeated 
refrain, Oh ! why did you leave us ? Something of the same cry comes to us, 
mourning the death of Brother Azarias. His loss was great to his Catholic 
countrymen. Just at the moment when his maturity of thought and diction had 
been recognized by those to whom things Catholic are far from palatable, just at 
the moment when his influence was a paramount specific against prejudice, to be 
taken from us, is one of those inscrutable things of God ; we simply bow the head 
and say: " Thy will be done." Yet to us younger men Azarias is not dead ; he is 
still a living force a name to conjure with. It is true we may never again be- 
hold the black figure with the strong intellectual face a face of positive beauty 
when the play of thought hovered over it. Yet in his books have we the Azarias 
that he would have asked us to cherish. These books are his life-work, his legacy 
to his young Catholic countrymen. In this age's mad rush for lucre do we ever 
ask ourselves what kind of a legacy it is ? 
Keats has given us the answer : 

" A thing of beauty ... a joy for ever ! 
Its loveliness increases ; it will never 
Pass into nothingness." 

It is of the kind that lives, for it has none of the garishness and noise of the 
age, but what Hazlitt so well calls the " silent air of immortality." It is not the 
literature that is the name now given to the crudest offspring of the press that a 
runner reads but that quiet, unobtrusive, meditative, thought-provoking kind, so 
dear to the hearts of the good and true, a boon to every Christian and household. 
Azarias worked not for the day, but for time. 

He could not be carried away by the cant of the hour, or the intellectual fash- 
ion of the period. As he has so well said : " Disease is catching, not health." His 
life-work was for truth, hence it will live. " All else is imbued with the seeds of 
death and destruction." Azarias peculiarly appeals to the young as a guide. Let 
us be candid and admit that, prior to his coming, we were wanting in a critic 
broad and masterly. The few who had essayed the role were hopelessly unfitted ; 
they had a few stupid canons of criticism, and that, with their limited view, made 
their work useless to the student. How different was Azarias, with his broad- 
minded, rich scholarship, a thinker who had learned how to assimilate the best 
thought of the best writers and make them fructify in his own mind. His books 
are the full fruitage of this fructifying. To accept such a mind as a guide is to 
journey through a stately granary, viewing bin after bin of the choicest flour. 

The chaff has been cast aside, and years of student labor saved. This may 
be best seen by his Phases of Thought and his critical literary papers, as " Amiel 
and Pessimism," published in THE CATHOLIC WORLD, October, 1889. With a 
few masterly strokes he places before the student the man or his system, hiding 
nothing. No style can baffle him in his hunt, no claptrap delude him. The 
subtle poison of a writer is extracted from the flowers placed to conceal it, and its 
venom shown to the reader. Owing to the constant use of this subtle poison, 



608 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [Jan., 1894. 

by even our most eminent writers, it behooves the Catholic youth of America to 
have a guide, a preventive rather than curative one. This Azarias has done for 
us in his books. The young man who reads them intelligently will be well equip- 
ped to give battle to the Don Quixotes who are daily riding from the press ; to 
respect and recognize a thinker, to avoid sham and shoddy, fads and fallacies, to 
love his church with a passionate love finding therein, as Azarias found, the 
truths that make men free. WALTER LECKY. 

* * * 

While at Plattsburgh, N. Y., last summer Brother Azarias had the opportunity 
of meeting, for the first time, Walter Lecky, whose articles on Catholic literature, 
published in the Montreal True Witness, he praised very highly, expressing the 
hope that they might speedily find a larger public in book form. The tribute 
from Walter Lecky which we publish indicates his keen appreciation of the work 
done for our Catholic young people by Brother Azarias. He has given a chart for 
their guidance in literature, especially in the articles on " Books and How to Use 
Them," published in THE CATHOLIC WORLD, June and July, 1889. These ar- 
ticles were revised and enlarged for his volume entitled Books and Reading. 

In the Columbian Reading Union our Reading Circles have often been favored 
with plans and methods of study sanctioned by Brother Azarias. It was the priv- 
ilege of the one upon whom has fallen the burden of conducting this department 
to live within easy reach of the De La Salle Institute, where Brother Azarias 
taught for several years, and to find him always willing to discuss the question of 
how to increase and diffuse more widely the writings of Catholic authors. He 
felt most keenly that the intellectual strength of Catholics has not been sufficient- 
ly concentrated ; that each Reading Circle can be made a nucleus of strength for 
its members, and a centre of light for those outside the fold. Most joyously he 
welcomed the growth of the new 'movement in defence of Catholic authors as 
shown in the accounts of meetings gathered month by month for the Columbian 
Reading Union. M. C. M. 

$1,000 FOR PAUL OF TARSUS. 

THE appeal made to help the struggling Bishop of Tarsus 
has been responded to by one very generous giver, who has 
donated the munificent sum of one thousand dollars ($1,000) to 
help the poor bishop to preserve his flock against the inroads 
of the enemies of the faith. 

We append the various sums received so far by Very Rev. 
A. F. Hewit, C.S.P.: 

Already acknowledged, $198.90 

Eagle Council, 116, C. B. L., . . . . 2.20 

Gramercy Council, 114, C. B. L., . . . . 16.25 
Otsego Council, 130, C. B. L., . . . . 5.00 

Our Lady of Lourdes Council, 307, C. B. L., . 1.50 
Our Lady of Grace Council, 82, C. B. L., . 3.00 

St. James' Council, 39, C. B. L., . . . . 10.00 
Father Drumgoole, 236, C. B. L., . . 2.70 

Chicago Council, 138, C. B. L., . . . . 2.05 

P., 20.00 

Mary A. Synan, 2.00 

Archbishop Grace, ...... 25.00 

A Friend, 1,000.00 




(5orbam 



Silversmitbs, 



JBroaDwag anfc 19tb Street, 



NEW YORK CITY. 



lEcclesiastical 
Hrt /Ifoetal 



OF" 



EVERY DESCRIPTION, 



PHOTOGRAPHS, SPECIAL DE* 

SIGNS, AND ESTIHATES ON 

RECEIPT OF PARTICU= 

LARS. 



Jewelled Candlestick. 



THE 




CATHOLIC WORLD. 



VOL. LVIII. FEBRUARY, 1894. No. 347. 

HOW CANADA SOLVES THE PROBLEM WE SHIRK. 
BY HON. T. W. ANGLIN. 

F those who are opposed to the establishment of 
a system of denominational schools in the United 
States, because they believe that the inevitable 
tendency of such a system is to lower the stan- 
dard of education, and to intensify those racial 
and sectarian animosities which prevent that blending of the 
various peoples composing the nation that is so generally de- 
sired, probably few are aware that such a system has been in 
successful operation for many years in the two most populous 
provinces of Canada Quebec and Ontario. 

A MODERN ALEMANNI. 

In Ontario, as in several of the United States, the popula- 
ion comprises many nationalities: descendants of the French 
who, after the conquest, remained in what was then the ex- 
treme west of the province ; French who have since immigrated 
from Quebec; descendants of the Royalists who left the United 
States after the war of the Revolution, and of Pennsylvania 
Germans and others who soon after were induced to avail them- 
selves of the advantages which a territory so fertile and pos- 
sessed of such magnificent forests offered to industrious, intelli- 
gent settlers ; immigrants from England, Ireland, Scotland, 
Germany, and Scandinavia, and the descendants of such immi- 
grants. And, as in many of the States, the Catholics French, 
Irish, Scotch, and German form less than a fifth of the whole 
population. 

Copyright. VERY REV. A. F. HEWIT. 1894. 
VOL. LVIII. 41 



6io How CANADA SOLVES THE PROBLEM WE SHIRK. [Feb., 

EFFECTS OF UNION WITH QUEBEC. 

To its legislative union with Quebec, in which the French 
Catholics were at least six times as numerous as the Protestants 
of all nationalities, Ontario owes its Separate School system. 
For some years after the province was created, by what is 
known as the Constitutional Act, no attempt was made to es- 
tablish a public-school system. In 1807 a public school, after- 
wards called a grammar school, was established in each of the 
great political districts into which the province was then divided. 
In 1816 an act to promote the establishment of common 
schools was passed, and an annual appropriation of twenty-four 
thousand dollars, a large sum in those days, was made in aid of 
such schools. It was provided that when the inhabitants of any 
town, township, or place elected trustees, provided a school- 
house, engaged a teacher, and made other arrangements neces- 
sary for the maintenance of a school, they would become en- 
titled to a share of this appropriation. The attendance at the 
school must be at least twenty. The mode of apportioning the 
grant and supervising the schools so established was also pro- 
vided. The law which left such freedom of action to the sup- 
porters of the schools continued in operation, with some modi- 
fications, until the legislative union of the two provinces. The 
legislative appropriation was not always so large. 

SOME MIXED SCHOOLS. 

In Lower Canada now the Province of Quebec the schools 
of the majority were always Catholic, and the schools of the 
minority were Protestant for many years before the union. It 
would seem that there were in that province a few schools which 
were attended by Catholics and Protestants, and were known 
as mixed schools. 

PROTESTANTS DEMAND SEPARATE SCHOOLS. 

In the first session of the united legislature, held in 1841, an 
act framed for the purpose of establishing one school system all 
over Canada was passed. It provided that a common-school 
fund should be established, made up of the interest on the pro- 
ceeds of public lands to be appropriated for the purpose, and 
of a legislative grant sufficient to make the annual income two 
hundred thousand dollars. This was to be apportioned in the 
manner prescribed amongst the schools of every township in 
Upper Canada and every parish in Lower Canada. All the 



1894-] How CANADA SOLVES THE PROBLEM WE SHIRK. 611 

schools were to be under the management of one superinten- 
dent. The Protestant minority of Lower Canada would not con- 
sent to be placed in a position less favorable than that which 
they had occupied before the union, and to satisfy them liberal 
provision was made for the establishment of Separate Schools. 
It was necessary to make this general in an act the avowed 
principle of which was uniformity, and thus the Separate School 
system was established in the upper province. 

THE MODE OF ADMINISTRATION. 

The importance of the change thus wrought was probably 
not perceived at first. Only one Separate School was estab- 
lished in Upper Canada in 1841, and the total number in 1850 
was only twenty-one. It was also provided that " Brothers of 
the Christian Doctrine " should be exempt from the examina- 
tion which others seeking employment as teachers must pass. 
A board of examiners was to be appointed by the governor in 
council for each county, city, or town. The duties of this board 
were to examine teachers, recommended by the municipal cor- 
poration, as to their competency and character, and to regulate 
the course of study to be pursued, and the books to be used in 
the schools. In a city or town this board was to consist of 
fourteen members, one-half of whom should be Catholics; and 
to be divided into two departments, one composed exclusively 
of Catholics, to have charge of the Catholic schools, and the 
other composed of Protestants, to manage the Protestant schools. 
Such schools as were attended by Protestant and Catholic pu- 
pils indiscriminately were to be under the control of the whole 
board, of which the mayor was to be ex-officio chairman. 

FAILURE OF THE " CONSCIENCE CLAUSE " PLAN. 

The attempt to create a system suitable to the two sections 
soon proved a failure. In 1843 an act was passed to apportion 
the annual school-fund between the provinces according to 
population. Until a census was taken Lower Canada was to get 
one hundred and twenty thousand dollars, and Upper Canada 
eighty thousand dollars a year. Another act repealed several 
sections of the act of 1841, in so far as they affected Upper Cana- 
da, and made other provisions which greatly changed the sys- 
tem in that province. The sections authorizing the establishment 
of Separate Schools in that province were not altogether elimi- 
nated, but they were so changed as greatly to impair the legal 
rights of the minority. Under this law a Separate School, 



612 How CANADA SOLVES THE PROBLEM WE SHIRK. [Feb., 

Catholic or Protestant, could be established only when " the 
teacher was of a different religious faith "; and the application 
for such school must be signed by not less than ten heads of 
families who were freeholders or householders and residents of 
the school section. A conscience clause was introduced, which 
provided that " no child should be required to read or study 
from any religious book, or to join in any exercise of religion 
or devotion, objected to by his parents or guardian." The ob- 
ject of this was to make the common schools less objectionable, 
at least in seeming, but it was found to afford little protection 
to Catholics. 

RIGHTS OF MINORITIES CONCEDED. 

An act passed in 1846 gave more perfect form to the system 
of Lower Canada, which had thereafter its own superintendent 
and board of education. This act confirmed and enlarged the 
legal rights of the Protestant minority. During the struggles of 
after years the Catholics of Upper Canada never asked more 
than that " the law which regulated Separate Schools on behalf 
of Protestants in Lower Canada should be extended to the 
Catholics of Upper Canada." 

THE SYSTEM OVERTURNED. 

Dr. Ryerson, a Methodist minister, was appointed superin- 
tendent of education in Upper Canada, and was sent abroad to 
ascertain whether in the systems of other countries there was 
anything to be found that could be introduced into the Ontario 
system with profit. He strongly disapproved of the Separate 
School system, and was disposed to insist on having the Bible 
read and religious instruction given in the common schools, a 
conscience clause, he contended, affording to the minority at- 
tending such schools all the protection to which they were en- 
titled. A bill framed by him and passed in 1846 changed the 
whole Upper Canada system materially. A board of education, 
composed of the superintendent and six others appointed by 
the governor in council, was empowered to recommend or disap- 
prove of books to be used in the schools, and no portion of the 
government grant was to be given to any school in which a 
book disapproved of by the board was used. The Catholic 
bishop of Toronto was offered a seat on the board ; this he 
accepted in the hope that, despite the changes made and the 
hostility of the superintendent, substantial justice could be 
obtained. 



1894-] How CANADA SOLVES THE PROBLEM WE SHIRK. 613 

RIGHTS OF PARENTS RECOGNIZED. 

In 1850 the law was so amended as to provide that no for- 
eign books in the English branches of education should be used 
without express permission of what was then called the Council 
of Public Instruction, and to the conscience clause was added 
" provided always that within this limitation pupils shall be al- 
lowed to receive such religious instruction as their parents or 
guardians shall desire, according to the general regulations which 
shall be provided according to law." It was also provided that 
an application for the establishment of a Separate School must 
be signed by twelve heads of families. 

CONFUSION. 

It would occupy too much space to state at any length all 
that was done on one side to render the maintenance of Separ- 
ate Schools impossible, and on the other to obtain justice. In 
many districts twelve Catholic freeholders or householders could 
not be found to sign an application, and Catholics living in ad- 
joining sections could not unite with their neighbors for this 
purpose. The law required that the application must be ad- 
dressed to the reeve of the municipality, or to the chairman of 
the common-school board, and these were often bitter oppo- 
nents of the Separate School system and found means to baffle 
the applicants, so far at least as to delay the establishment of 
the school. It was found also that the law did not provide for 
more than one Separate School in one city or town, and that 
Catholics were liable to taxation for the erection of common- 
>chool buildings and the establishment of common-school libra- 
ries. A change in the mode of raising money for their sup- 
port seemed for a time to threaten the destruction of nearly 
all Separate Schools. The act of 1841 provided that each 
municipal district should raise by assessment an amount at least 
equal to the amount apportioned to it from the legislative grant, 
and the supporters of Separate Schools were entitled to receive 
from the district treasurer their due proportion, according to 
their numbers, " of the moneys appropriated by law and raised 
by assessment for the support of the schools in the district in 
which they resided." This was changed, and the trustees of the 
Separate School were authorized and required to raise what was 
necessary in addition to their share of the legislative grant by 
a rate which they assessed on the supporters of the school or 
by subscription. The amount thus obtainable was less than 



614 How CANADA SOLVES THE PROBLEM WE SHIRK. [Feb., 

what they received from the district treasurer under the law of 
1841, not only because the supporters of Separate Schools were 
generally people of small means, but also because many of them 
when a second tax-bill was presented to them imagined that 
they had to pay more than those who sent their children to 
the common schools. 

CATHOLICS AGITATE FOR JUSTICE. 

Catholics were forced to organize and agitate if they would 
obtain justice ; and because they agitated a few of the more 
glaring wrongs were redressed. But their agitation served also 
to excite an anti-Catholic spirit, and the abolition of Separate 
Schools was fiercely demanded by a party which rapidly became 
powerful. Promises were made to the Catholics at a general 
election, and great expectations were entertained by them when 
it was found that the members of the government who made 
those promises had a majority in the newly elected legislature : 
but the bill introduced in the session of 1855 in fulfilment of 
these promises was so mangled in committee that Bishop de 
Charbonnel felt it to be his duty to resign his seat in the coun- 
cil of public instruction, giving as his reason that the govern- 
ment had preferred the advice of Dr. Ryerson to that of the 
Catholics and their bishops in a matter of such vital interest to 
them. The agitation continued, and in 1860 Mr. Scott, a Cath- 
olic member of the legislature, introduced a bill to remedy 
some of the evils which were found so intolerable. This mea- 
sure was bitterly opposed and was defeated. In 1861 it was 
again introduced, and although it passed the second reading by 
a large majority it did not become law. A change of govern- 
ment having taken place, Mr. Scott in 1863 introduced his bill,, 
somewhat modified at the instance of Dr. Ryerson. The 
Liberal government, led by Mr. Sanfield Macdonald, declared in 
favor of the bill, and it passed. 

MODERATION OF THE CATHOLIC DEMANDS. 

It is surprising now to see what were the provisions of a 
measure which encountered such fierce and prolonged opposi- 
tion. Mr. Scott only asked that the supporters of the Sepa- 
rate Schools be not required to notify the clerk of the munici- 
pality more than once; that not more than five head's t> of fami- 
lies be required to sign an application for a Separate '^chool ; 
that all Catholics within the radius of three miles frVm the 
school-house may unite in supporting a Separate School, and 



1 894.] How CANADA SOLVES THE PROBLEM WE SHIRK. 615 

that Separate Schools should receive a due share of all legisla- 
tive appropriations made for elementary education. The Catho- 
lics were not satisfied with so meagre a measure, but they were 
willing to try how the law so amended would work. The 
agitation subsided, and at the next general election little was 
heard of the school question. 

FEDERATION AND MINORITY RIGHTS. 

When the population of Upper Canada became larger than 
that of the lower province a demand for representation accord- 
ing to population was raised, and this became so strong that it 
must be satisfied. The means proposed was the substitution of 
a federal for a legislative union. The other provinces of Brit- 
ish North America were invited to become members of the 
proposed confederacy. When the delegates assembled at 
Quebec to consider the proposal it was found that to satisfy 
Upper Canada a very large measure of provincial self-govern- 
ment must be given to it, including the power to make the 
laws respecting education ; that Lower Canada would not be 
content with less, and that an agreement would be impossible 
if some means of safeguarding the rights of the minorities 
in relation to education were not provided. The minority of 
Lower Canada, although they never had had cause to complain of 
the treatment they received from the majority, were most ear- 
nest in demanding such protection. They were unwilling to 
>ecome dependent upon the sense of justice and the good will 
>f the legislature of a province in which the Catholic majority 
ras so large. Sir A. T. Gait, who was regarded as the repre- 
sentative of that minority, insisted, it is said, that the rights in 
this respect which they then enjoyed must be made absolutely 
secure. Any security giveri for the rights of the Protestant 
minority in one province could not be refused for the smaller 
rights enjoyed by the Catholic minority in the other. The re- 
sult of the deliberations on this subject is the ninety-third sec- 
tion of the British North America Act, which is the constitu- 
tion of the Dominion (p. 93). " In and for each province the 
legislature may exclusively make laws in relation to education, 
subject and according to the following provisions : 

" I. Nothing in any such law shall prejudicially affect any right 
or privilege with respect to denominational schools, which any 
class of persons have by law in the province at the union. 

" 2. All the powers, privileges, and duties at the union by 
law conferred and imposed in Upper Canada on the Separate 



6x6 How CANADA SOLVES THE PROBLEM WE SHIXK. [Feb., 

School and school trustees of the queen's Roman Catholic 
subjects shall be and the same are hereby extended to the dis- 
sentient schools of the queen's Protestant and Roman Catholic 
subjects in Quebec. 

" 2. When in any province a system of separate or dissentient 
schools exists by law at the union, or is thereafter established 
by the legislature of the province, an appeal shall lie to the 
governor-general in council from any act or decision of any 
provincial authority affecting any right or privilege of the Pro- 
testant or Roman Catholic minority of the queen's subjects in 
relation to education. 

" 4. In case any such provincial law as from time to time 
seems to the governor-general in council requisite for the due 
execution of the provisions of this section is not made, or in 
case any decision of the governor-general in council on any 
appeal under this section is not duly executed by the proper 
provincial authority in that behalf, then and in every such case, 
and as far only as the circumstances of each case require, the 
parliament of Canada may make remedial laws for the due 
execution of the provisions of this section and of any decision 
of the governor-general in council under this section." 

The first subsection is the most important, as it renders 
void and of no effect any act of a provincial legislature that 
may prejudicially affect any right or privilege with respect to 
denominational schools which any person had by law at the 
union. The value of the other subsections the Supreme Court 
of Canada has recently been asked to determine. Changes that 
enlarge or do not impair the rights of the minorities may, how- 
ever, be made. In 1877 the Ontario legislature, all parties con- 
curring, made amendments in the mode of electing Separate 
School trustees, the powers of the board of trustees, the mode 
of assessing and collecting Separate School rates, and the crea- 
tion of Model Schools which a few years before would have 
provoked the most violent resistance. In 1886 other amend- 
ments were made which have not been found to be of much 
practical value. In 1890, yielding to a clamor raised for party 
purposes, the government passed a bill declaring that the law 
required that any person desiring to become a supporter of a 
Separate School must give a written notice to that effect to the 
clerk of the municipality ; and directing assessors to ascertain, 
from a list to be prepared by the clerk, whom they should rate 
as supporters of such schools. 



1894-] How CANADA SOLVES THE PROBLEM WE SHIRK. 617 

HOW THE LAW NOW STANDS. 

The laws relating to Separate Schools have been codified. 
As the law now stands the provisions in regard to Roman 
Catholic schools are, that 

" Any number of persons not less than five, being heads of 
families and householders or freeholders resident within any 
school section of any township, incorporated village, or town r 
or within any ward of any city or town, and being Roman 
Catholic, may convene a public meeting of persons desiring to 
establish a Separate School for Roman Catholics in such school 
section or ward for the election of trustees for the management 
of the same." 

A majority of the Catholic resident householders present may 
elect three trustees. When notice in writing that such meeting 
has been held and such trustees have been elected has been 
served upon the reeve, or head of the municipality, or upon 
the chairman of the board of public-school trustees, and copies 
of such notice, endorsed by such head of municipality or chair- 
man, has been given to each of the trustees so elected, these 
trustees become a body corporate, clothed with all the powers 
for establishing, maintaining, and regulating such . Separate 
School provided by the law. After a school has been estab- 
lished an annual election of trustees is held under the control 
and management of the board of Separate School trustees, at 
which only the supporters of the Separate Schools whose names- 
appear on a list or on lists furnished by the clerk of the muni- 
cipality are permitted to vote. The trustees hold office for two- 
years, one-half retiring at the end of every year, but being 
eligible for re-election. 

In cities, towns, and incorporated villages divided into wards- 
two trustees are elected for every ward; and in incorporated 
villages, not so divided, six trustees are elected. In rural dis- 
tricts three trustees are elected who hold office for three years, 
one retiring each year. The mode of holding the annual elec- 
tion meeting, of holding the poll when there is more than one 
candidate for a seat, and of settling disputed elections is pre- 
scribed. When a vacancy occurs an election is ordered by the 
board of trustees. All the trustees for each city, town, or vil- 
lage form a board which is a body corporate, and at the first 
meeting in each year elect one of themselves chairman, who 
acts in that capacity until after the next annual election. Sub- 
sequent meetings are held at such times and places as are ap- 



618 How CANADA SOLVES THE PROBLEM WE SHIRK. [Feb., 

pointed by resolution of the board. A majority of the mem- 
bers of the board constitute a quorum. The board, when or- 
ganized, appoints a secretary and treasurer. Both these officers 
are usually combined in one person. 

The board of trustees are empowered and required "to pro- 
vide adequate accommodation, according to the regulations of 
the Education Department, for all the children of Separate School 
supporters, between the ages of five and twenty-one, resident in 
the ward, village, or town as the case may be." 

To purchase or rent school sites and premises; to build, re- 
pair, furnish, and keep in order the school-houses and their ap- 
pendages, and " to procure registers, suitable maps, apparatus 
and prize books, and, if they deem it expedient, school-libraries. 

"To determine the number, kind, grade, and description of 
schools (such as male or female infant, central or ward schools) 
to be established and maintained ; the teachers to be employed, 
the terms on which they are to be employed, the amount of 
their remuneration, and the duties which they are to perform. 

"To prepare from time to time, and lay before the munici- 
pal council of the city, town, or village, on or before the first 
day of August, an estimate of the sums which they think re- 
quisite for all necessary expenses of the schools under their 
charge. 

" To prepare and transmit annually, before the fifteenth day 
of January, to the minister of education, in the form prescribed 
by him, a report signed by the chairman, containing all the in- 
formation required by the regulations of the Education De- 
partment." 

Power is given to the board " to borrow money for school 
purposes, and to make valid mortgages and other instruments 
for the security and payment of such borrowed money, or of 
any moneys payable or to be paid for school-sites, school-build- 
ings, or additions thereunto, or the repairs thereof upon the 
school-houses or other property held by the board, or upon the 
Separate School rates." 

All payments are made by the treasurer on order of the 
board. 

It will be seen that the powers thus conferred upon the 
board of trustees are very important. They are authorized 
to provide all necessary school-buildings and apparatus, to de- 
termine of what kind and grade each school shall be, what shall 
be the course of studies in each, and what text-books shall be 
used, and to make all necessary regulations for their manage- 



1 894.] How CANADA SOLVES THE PROBLEM WE SHIRK. 619 

ment ; to engage teachers and determine what their remunera- 
tion shall be, and to raise the money for all these purposes by 
rates levied upon the supporters of Separate Schools, or by 
loan on mortgage when money is required to pay for school- 
sites or school-buildings. However, because a large proportion 
of the supporters of Separate Schools are people of small means, 
it is found difficult in many cases to raise money enough to es- 
tablish and maintain the schools in as efficient condition as 
could be desired. Indeed, it would be impossible in many cases 
were it not that the members of religious teaching communities 
ask in remuneration of their services only what will procure the 
bare necessaries of life. If it is the right and the duty of the 
state to provide for the education of the whole people it should 
provide for all alike, doing as much for the child of the day- 
laborer as for the child of the millionaire. That principle was 
recognized in Canada by the law of 1841, but it was abandoned 
when the cry was raised that Protestant money must not be 
spent in teaching papist doctrines. 

The law provides that " the teachers of any Separate School 
under this act shall be subject to the same examination and 
receive their certificates of qualification in the same manner as 
public schools generally ; but the persons qualified by law as 
teachers either in the province of Ontario, or at the time of 
the passing of the B. N. A. Act in the province of Quebec, 
shall be considered qualified teachers for the purpose of this 
act." This is held to exempt the members of religious teach- 
ing communities from the requirements of undergoing examina- 
tions and receiving certificates. Such exemption has often been 
vehemently denounced as a favor to Catholics, and therefore an 
injustice to Protestants. Indeed, it is frequently asserted, even 
to this day, that the exemption was sought in order that the 
ignorance or incapacity of the religious may not be exposed. 
But those who care to inquire may easily ascertain that the re- 
ligious hold high place amongst the very best teachers of the 
whole province. 

One of the latest amendments of the law provides that "the 
Education Department may authorize a Separate School in any 
county to be constituted a Model School for the training of 
teachers for Separate Schools, subject to the regulations of 
the department." The persons trained in such schools must 
undergo the same examinations as those seeking certificates to 
qualify them as teachers in the common schools ; but where 
such Model School exists the lieutenant-governor in council may, 



620 How CANADA SOLVES THE PROBLEM WE SHIRK. [Feb., 

on recommendation of the minister of education, appoint one 
additional member of the " Board of Examiners of the County," 
who presumably would be a Catholic. 

The duties of teachers prescribed by the act do not differ 
materially from the prescribed duties of teachers of common 
schools. 

The mode of assessing and collecting the school-rate is de- 
fined in several sections. 

Only the property and income of those who are duly regis- 
tered as supporters of Separate Schools may be taxed for the 
support of such schools. The school-taxes on property occu- 
pied by Catholics as tenants, although owned by Protestants, 
belong to the Separate School fund. For many years those 
who desired that their school-taxes should go to the support 
of Separate Schools were required to give notice in writing to 
that effect annually to the clerk of the municipality, and even 
this did not relieve him from liability to taxation for public- 
school buildings and libraries. In course of time the law was 
amended so as to make one notice sufficient, and to relieve the 
person giving it from bearing a share of any common-school 
expenditure. When it became the duty of the municipal offi- 
cials to assess and levy Separate School rates, they entered on 
their rolls as supporters of Separate Schools all who were known 
to be Catholics. This, it was said, led to a neglect of the pro- 
vision requiring that in each case a written notice be given to 
the clerk of the municipality, and it was denounced as a favor 
to Catholics, whom it seemed to place on a level with Protes- 
tants. 

PROTESTANTS ANXIOUS FOR CATHOLIC RIGHTS. 

It was asserted that the priests were thus enabled to coerce 
many Catholics who would prefer to support common schools, 
and it was demanded, in the name of Protestantism and of 
" equal rights," that Catholics be driven back to the position 
of dissenters and that the power of the priests be curbed. Those 
assertions were manifestly very absurd ; but the provincial gov- 
ernment bowed before the storm raised by their political op- 
ponents, who hoped to carry the elections then approaching by 
exciting the intolerance and fanaticism of the majority. An 
act was passed declaring that the law, as it stood, required that 
no one should be rated as a Separate School supporter until 
he had given written notice of his desire to the clerk of the 
municipality, and directing assessors to so rate only those whose 



1894-] How CANADA SOLVES THE PROBLEM WE SHIRK. 621 

names they found on the indexed list which the clerk was di- 
rected to prepare. 

The law, as it stands now, provides that any company may 
require that a part of the taxes levied on its real and personal 
property for school purposes, proportionate to the number of 
the shares of its stock held by Roman Catholics, should go to 
the support of the Separate Schools ; but this is inoperative in 
many cases. 

MODE OF DEALING WITH THE SEPARATE TAX. 

The Separate School board had for some years to levy, assess, 
and collect the Separate School taxes. The law does not ex- 
pressly deprive them of this power now; but it provides that 
" It shall be the duty of every municipal council, if so requested 
by the trustees of any Separate School, at the proper time to 
cause, through their collectors and other municipal officers, to be 
levied all sums of money for rates or taxes legally imposed in 
respect of Separate Schools by competent lawful authority in 
that behalf." Other sections direct how such taxes are to be 
assessed and collected, and in this way Separate School rates 
are assessed and collected everywhere. The law directs that 
the amount collected, less the costs, be paid over to the school 
trustees, and that the municipality advance whatever part of 
the taxes on real estate remains uncollected at the end of the 
year. The board, estimating what is required for school pur- 
poses during the ensuing year, determine what the rate of 
taxation shall be ; but it has been found impolitic to make the 
rate higher than the rate fixed for common-school purposes. 

Any Separate School board and the council of the munici- 
pality may, in order to avoid the trouble and expense of sepa- 
rate assessments and account-keeping, agree that for a term of 
years one school-tax shall be levied, and that from the proceeds 
of this a fixed proportion shall be paid to the Separate School 
board. 

SOME UNSATISFACTORY RESULTS. 

The system does not work quite satisfactorily. Many of 
those who would prefer to support Separate Schools neglect to 
give the written notice required. In cities some assessors are 
full of strong anti-Catholic prejudices, some are careless and 
take no pains to ascertain what property belongs to Separate 
School supporters. Appeal may be made to the Court of Re- 
vision ; but although efforts are made to correct the errors of 



622 How CANADA SOLVES THE PROBLEM WE SHIRK. [Feb., 

the assessment, which are nearly all on one side, many escape 
notice, and the income of the Separate School Boards, which 
even if full justice were done would be all too narrow, are 
materially lessened. 

The board appoints an auditor. 

THE RURAL SCHOOLS. 

The duties of boards of rural schools are, mutatis mutandis,. 
the same as those of the trustees of urban schools. Each 
board elects one of its members as chairman. The same per- 
son must be secretary and treasurer. All business must be done 
at meetings regularly convened. The trustees may " borrow 
on their promissory notes, under seal of the corporation, at 
interest not exceeding eight per cent, per annum, money to pay 
the salaries of teachers until the taxes imposed therefor shall 
have been collected." Besides submitting their accounts and 
vouchers to the auditor, they are required to prepare and sub- 
mit to the annual meeting of the supporters of the school a re- 
port containing a summary of their proceedings during the year, 
and a full and detailed account of all receipts and expenditures 
of school money during the year, signed by the trustees and 
the auditor. 

THE MINISTER OF EDUCATION. 

By an act passed in 1876 a minister of education, who must 
be a member of the provincial government and a member of 
the legislature, and be directly responsible to the legislature for 
all his acts and omissions, was placed at the head of the De- 
partment of Education. Except with regard to text-books and 
to religious instruction and devotional exercises, he has authority 
to make regulations for the Separate as for the Common 
Schools ; to cause inspection to be made and returns to be 
furnished to his department ; the supervision and control of the 
State being as full and complete as could reasonably be re- 
quired. The minister apportions the annual legislative grant to 
Public and Separate Schools according to the number of pupils 
attending each school. Two inspectors (both Catholics), ap- 
pointed by the minister, visit all Separate Schools periodically 
and report to the department. The minister of education, all 
judges, members of the legislature, the heads of the municipal 
bodies in their respective localities, the inspector of public 
schools, and the clergymen of the Roman Catholic Church are 
ex-officio visitors of Separate Schools. 



1894-] How CANADA SOLVES THE PROBLEM WE SHIRK. 623 

THE ANIMUS OF THE COMMON-SCHOOLS' ADVOCATES. 

Such, in outline, is the Separate School system of Ontario, 
as it has been in operation since 1863, when for the first time 
the system introduced in 1841 and mutilated in 1843 an ^ 1846 
was made fairly workable. All the trouble and difficulties of 
the intervening period were caused by the systematic attempts, 
sometimes crafty and covert, sometimes open and direct, to 
force the Catholic children of the province into the common 
schools ; and by the fierce anti-Catholic agitation which the 
writings of the superintendent, Dr. Ryerson, and the malignant 
ranting of several newspapers did much to excite and inflame. 
The objections made to the existence of Separate Schools, the 
reasons given by those who would abolish them, were almost 
precisely the same that are now used in the United States. It 
was alleged that the Canadian people could never become 
homogeneous unless all children attended the common schools, 
and opportunity was thus given for the creation in youth of 
those kind and friendly feelings whose influence must be so 
beneficent in after life. Separate Schools, it was said, would 
strengthen and intensify the animosities of race and creed 
which set neighbor against neighbor and caused so much ill-will, 
contention, and strife. A Separate School system, it was as- 
serted, must lower the standard of education, because if Catho- 
lics were allowed to establish such schools the several Protes- 
tant denominations would claim the same right, and several 
weak, inefficient schools, with incompetent teachers, would be 
established where one or two really good schools would supply 
the wants of the district and afford a good secular education to 
all. In many districts, even though the division were only of 
Catholic from Protestant, neither alone would be able to sup- 
port a good school. Catholics themselves must suffer most. 
They were comparatively few in number, and were generally 
of small means. In many cases they could not put up proper 
school-houses or pay competent teachers, and their schools 
must therefore be inferior. Indeed, it was alleged that they 
actually were inferior, and many went so far as to assert that 
members of a religious community must be incompetent teach- 
ers, and that in schools in which time was given to religious in- 
struction and to prayer the pupils could not have a fair oppor- 
tunity of acquiring as much knowledge as they should possess. 
The state, it. was contended, should discountenance, if not sup- 
press, a system that would doom so large a portion of its people 



624 Ho w CANADA SOLVES THE PROBLEM WE SHIRK. [Feb., 

to a condition of intellectual poverty which would prevent the 
full development of their faculties and render them less useful 
to themselves, to others, and to their country. But the asser- 
tion which had most weight was, that the Catholic laity did not 
wish for Separate Schools ; that these schools were forced upon 
them by their clergy, whose commands they dared not disobey ; 
and that it was the duty of all good liberty-loving Protestants 
to rescue those priest-ridden people from the thraldom which 
themselves had not the moral strength to shake off. 

FALSIFICATION OF EVIL PREDICTIONS. 

Time has shown how groundless, indeed how absurd, these ob- 
jections and assertions were. The settlement of the school ques- 
tion in favor of Separate Schools, instead of creating strife and 
disorder, allayed ill-will, and was followed by a general feeling 
of peace and harmony such as had not been known in Ontario 
for many years. This is acknowledged now by some of those 
who most bitterly opposed the system. No Protestant denomi- 
nation has demanded Separate Schools for itself. Even in dis- 
trict schools in which Catholics are few in number and excep- 
tionally poor, the Catholic Separate Schools are not essentially 
inferior to the common schools in similar districts. And there 
is abundant evidence to prove that the teachers belonging to 
the religious communities take rank with the very best teachers 
of the common schools, and impart to their pupils an education 
at least as extensive, sound, and valuable. Pupils of the De La 
Salle Institute, of Toronto, whenever they attend the examina- 
tions of the Collegiate Institution, take high positions. A few 
years ago, at one of the examinations, the greatest possible 
number of marks attainable being, as the examiners supposed, 
one hundred, one pupil of the De La Salles obtained one hun- 
dred and four marks and another one hundred and three. The 
institute and several other Catholic schools sent specimens of 
their school-work to the Ontario section of the World's Fair at 
Chicago, and these certainly were not inferior to the specimens 
sent from the common schools. The calumny which, because 
it was incessantly repeated, some Catholics were inclined to 
credit, was there completely and, let us hope, finally refuted. 
Catholics have shown, thanks chiefly to the religious teachers, 
who accept for their services salaries scarcely sufficient to pro- 
cure coarse food and scanty raiment, that they can do as much 
work, and at least as good work, with their small means as those 
who manage the common schools can do with their ample revenues. 



1894-] How CANADA SOLVES THE PROBLEM WE SHIRK. 625 

A RIDICULOUS SHIBBOLETH. 

To say that it is necessary to the welfare of a country that 
it should have but one school system, and that in all its 
schools the same religion or no religion should be taught, is 
tantamount to saying that a country should have but one 
church or no church at all. 

Without the earnest, constant efforts of the Catholic laity 
Catholic Separate Schools, instead of increasing, as they have 
done, in number and efficiency, must have languished and 
withered under the blighting influence of adverse legislation and 
of a superintendence directed to their destruction. Taking all 
the circumstances into account their growth has been marvel- 
lous. In 1841 there was but one Separate School in Ontario; 
in 1850, there were* 21 ; in 1860, there were 115 schools, 162 
teachers, and 14,708 pupils; in 1870, there were 163 schools, 
236 teachers, and 20,652 pupils; in 1880, the schools numbered 
196, the teachers 344, and the pupils 25,311. In 1891, the last 
year for which the official returns have been published, the num- 
ber of schools was 289, the number of teachers 639, and the 
number of pupils 36,168, of whom 34,675 were taught arithmetic; 
34,184 writing; 26,546 geography; 21,781 grammar, and 31,798 
drawing. And 13,351 studied what the minister of education 
describes as temperance and hygiene. The total amount re- 
ceived by the boards managing those schools was $320,386, and 
the total expenditure $278,687. 

Some Catholic children still attend the public schools, as 
they are now called, in districts in which Catholics could not 
support Separate Schools without great difficulty. This is made 
less objectionable than it formerly was by the regulations which 
now enforce a strict and honest observance of the conscience 
clause. The facility with which a Separate School may now be 
established also affords much protection to the minority even in 
sparsely settled districts. In several school districts the inhabi- 
tants are all or nearly all Catholics, and in these the establish- 
ment of Separate Schools is scarcely necessary, unless for the 
purpose of securing teachers of some religious community as 
the Catholics can elect Catholic trustees who can employ duly 
qualified Catholic teachers and one of the provisions of the 
public-school act is that : 

" Pupils shall be allowed to receive such religious instruction 
as their parents or guardians desire, according to any general 
regulations provided for the organization, government, and dis- 
VOL. LVIII. 42 



626 Ho w CANADA SOLVES THE PROBLEM WE SHIRK. [Feb., 

cipline of public schools." The regulations are framed with 
the honest intention of protecting the rights of minorities, but 
they afford opportunity of imparting religious instruction. Cath- 
olics find, however, that Separate Schools are to be preferred 
because of the perfect freedom for religious instruction and 
training which is afforded in them, and the number of these 
schools increases constantly. 

HOPES OF THE MISCHIEF-MAKERS. 

The peace which prevailed after 1863, and which the Cana- 
dian constitution seemed to place on a permanent basis, was dis- 
turbed a few years ago by a number of politicians who, hav- 
ing failed to gain power in Ontario by other means, imagined 
that an appeal to the ignorance which prevails so widely, de- 
spite all that the much-lauded public-school system has done 
for public enlightenment, and to the intolerance and fanaticism 
which they believed were smouldering in many parts of the pro- 
vince, would increase their political strength sufficiently. They 
have succeeded in exciting much ill-feeling and making some 
noisy demonstrations, but so far they have not increased their 
strength in the legislature. Before the last general election 
they established what seemed to be a formidable organization, 
whose shibboleth was " Equal Rights," the abolition of Sepa- 
rate Schools, strange to say, being the right on which they es- 
pecially insisted. Another provincial general election is now at 
hand, and they hope that the new anti-Catholic organization, 
which in the United States calls itself the A. P. A., and in 
Canada the P. P. A., will give them the strength they require. 
The chief demand of both wings of the faction is the abolition 
of Separate Schools. They do not any longer attempt to ar- 
gue that Separate Schools are inferior to the public schools, or 
that the intellectual equipment of the eleves of these schools is 
not as ample or as serviceable as that of the pupils of the com- 
mon schools, or that Separate Schools promote dissension and 
strife. They merely assert that Canada must be thoroughly 
British, and that to become thoroughly British it must only 
have " one language and one school." Their leaders pretend 
that means can be found to get rid of the guarantee of the 
rights of the minority which the B. N. A. Act provides, or of 
rendering it worthless. What the strength of the P. P. A. is 
can only be conjectured, so silent has been its progress hitherto, 
so secret all its proceedings. Probably its power for evil is 
overrated, and this latest effort to enthrone fanaticism, intoler- 



1894-] How CANADA SOLVES THE PROBLEM WE SHIRK. 627 

ance, and hypocrisy will also fail. Were the constitutional pro- 
vision by which the rights of the minorities in Ontario and 
Quebec are secured removed from the foundation of the Domi- 
nion the superstructure must soon fall to pieces. But no in- 
telligent man in Canada can seriously imagine that its removal 
is either probable or possible, or that it would cease to be of 
value if the fiercest enemies of Separate Schools succeeded in 
their efforts to become the government of Ontario. 

TENDERNESS FOR PROTESTANT MINORITIES. 

The Protestant minority in Lower Canada have, at all times, 
been treated with justice, not to say liberality. No attempt 
has ever been made to force them to send their children to 
schools of which they did not approve. No obstacle has ever 
been placed in the way of their establishing such schools as 
they preferred. Since confederation they have found the legis- 
lature of Quebec as willing to do them justice as the legisla- 
ture of United Canada always was. And to-day the position 
of the Protestant minority in Quebec in all that relates to 
their schools is much better than the position of the Catholic 
minority in Ontario. 





" BISHOP HAID ENTERED INTO ALL THE PLANS." 

THE SACRED HEART IN THE MOUNTAINS. 

BY DOROTHY GRESHAM. 

I. 

E speak of the promises of the Sacred Heart, we 
pray with apparent faith, and yet we are so 
astonished when we are heard. 

Last May, by the merest accident, I found 
myself in one of the wildest and most beauti- 
ful mountain villages of the Blue Ridge. I came for a day, 




1894-] T HE SACRED HEART IN THE MOUNTAINS. 629 

and left well, you shall hear. Week followed week, and still 
I lingered ; the mountain world, the negroes, the Southern life 
and scenes were delightfully new, and I learned to love them. 

Sunday was the only black cloud on this sunny horizon ; 
no Mass, no priest, no Catholics as far as I could find out. 
Writing to an invalid friend of mine, then staying in Asheville, 
I mourned over the sad state of affairs ; all it wanted here was 
a statue of Our Lady or some wayside shrine to give my sur- 
roundings all the historic, holy atmosphere of the Tyrol. My 
letter was like a trumpet to a war-horse, as I suspected ; but 
I thought that prayers would and could be all the assistance 
my appeal would receive. Miserable in health, far from home, 
and utterly unknown, what else could one expect ? 

But, with years' experience of all that a truly apostolic heart 
can accomplish when God's work is to be done, the following 
note, a week later, fairly took my breath away : " Get a cottage 
on the hills for me suitable for Mass. The bishop has pro- 
mised to send a priest for the feast of the Sacred Heart. I 
shall be with you on Tuesday ; there is one Catholic family 
let them know !" No time for delay after that. I succeeded 
luckily about the house it was all that could be desired gath- 
ered the barest necessities to make the same habitable, hunted 
up the " only Catholic family," and found them full of Irish 
faith, so amazed at my news that they could scarcely believe 
me. They told me there were some more through the moun- 
tains, lukewarm and indifferent, and others whom they only 
suspected were Catholics. Not encouraging to greet my friend, 
but we must only hope. 

She came, feeble in body and strong in mind, now slowly 
recovering from a long illness, sent down to Asheville as a last 
resource to save her life, and this is how she goes about it. 
The good bishop, who is also the mitred abbot of the Benedic- 
tine monastery, has fully entered into all her hopes and plans, 
promising her Mass through the summer months. To do this 
he must needs send one of his hard-worked monks, who, with 
the dust of the schools thick around him, comes forth to preach, 
teach, and toil among those hardy mountaineers, winding up 
his journeys each Sunday at fashionable Asheville. This the 
vacation of a North Carolina missionary this the rest he takes 
for the summer ! 

Those brave Benedictine fathers came here six short years 
ago, poor in money, friends, and pupils, to find only a frame 
hut and log chapel, innocent of paint. The altar decorations 



630 THE SACRED HEART IN THE MOUNTAINS. [Feb., 

were pictures, cut from papers and magazines. The first act of 
the abbot and his young monks was to arm themselves with 
paint buckets and brushes and begin ornamentation. Their trials 
and vicissitudes would fill volumes. How they began with thir- 
teen pupils ; to-day they have over a hundred ! How the lord 
abbot himself milked the cows, until he had instructed a negro 
boy to take his place. A magnificent college to-day replaces 
the old log building, and the foundation was laid one year ago 




" I TROT AROUND THE PlAZZA AND PREPARE FOR A CLIMB UP THE HlLLS." 

for the finest church in the South, to take the place of the lit- 
tle frame cathedral of North Carolina. 

Over the mountain-tops the sun is climbing, with Southern 
brilliancy ; down through the trees he pours, and gleams in 
golden streaks through my shuttered windows. I rub my sleepy 
eyes, and see by the clock it is half-past five high time that I 
should be up and doing. My first emotion is one of joy, even 
before I remember what it comes from : as is often the case, 
the last thought at night is usually the first in the morning 
then it slowly dawns on my drowsy senses. 

I jump from my cot, now all animation ; my encounter with 
the soap-bubbles is short and decisive, and dressing the work 
of moments. I throw wide the outside shutters the windows 
are never closed night or day and step out on the piazza. 
How beautiful it is sweet, fresh, and enchanting ! Who would 
lie abed with such a feast awaiting them ? Through the trees 



1894-] THE SACRED HEART IN THE MOUNTAINS. 631 

the mountains do their best to peep at me, and I return the 
compliment by admiring glances ; which seems to please them, 
for the more I smile the bluer, lovelier, loftier they look down 
at me. I trot around the piazza, down the deep steps, and pre- 
pare for a climb up the hills. Not a sound save the cow-bells 
in the woods, which keep up a steady jingle ; not a human be- 
ing in sight ; up amid these solitudes men are few and far 
between ; the village street lies beyond the woods still slumber- 
ing. Nature has a bright, joyous awakening air ; birds, flowers, 
and forests seem to cry out in one glad voice " Vivat Cor Jesu /" 
It is the feast of the Sacred Heart, and I am on my way to 
the temporary chapel for this first Mass of promise. 

The sun is rising higher, and I tramp along up the winding 
road through the woods ; the trees are so dense that I lose my 
beloved mountains, but now and then catch a passing glimpse 
of cosy farm-houses peeping through the pines. It is so pure, 
so unworldly, so heavenly up here, all alone with God and the 
mountains ; and I think of this great gift awaiting me at the 
end of the road. Who would believe that our Lord would 
crown all his blessings to us by this much-longed, much-prayed- 
for favor. " Vivat Cor Jesu /" I echo with rejoicing nature this 
morning. 

A turn in the road brings me in view of the Swiss chalet 
on the hills, its red roof shining through the trees, its pictur- 
esque gables and angles racy of the Alps. Through the open 
gate, by the rugged, steep avenue, I reach the steps ; the win- 
dows opening to the ground are flung back ; through the first 
I enter and find myself in the chapel. How shall I tell you of 
it ? One side is all windows, the other the altar ; one's first 
impression is great branches of oaks banked against the walls, 
flinging out in soft colors the blazing roses and flickering lights 
on the altar. A picture of the Sacred Heart crowns the 
whole. 

I kneel among the small congregation, who are evidently as 
impressed as myself. At that moment the father arrives, and 
what a greeting he receives ! An old Irish patriarch meets him 
at the steps with a genuine " Cead mille failthe"; a great Saxon 
giant, the village blacksmith, seizes his hand and kisses it with 
deep veneration, while his reverence comes in the door-way 
bright and joyous as a school-boy home for the holidays. 
What a beautiful spirit those Benedictines seem to have, al- 
ways working, always smiling ! The confessions begin ; in and 
out through the open windows the penitents come and go from 



632 



THE SACRED HEART IN THE MOUNTAINS. 



[Feb., 



the chapel to the confessional the father's room next door. 
How memorable that Mass ! Priest and people are lost in 
prayer at that one great Sacrifice. Down the long, wide corri- 
dor, through the open door, rising and falling comes " There's 
no Heart like thine, sweet Lord "; and the mountains take up 

the strain and echo back 
their great exulting " Vivat 
Cor Jesu /" 

Every one goes to Holy 
Communion. For many it 
is their Easter duty, for 
some it is their first in five 
years, for others even more ; 
the Sacred Heart has gath- 
ered them all in. 

The father says a few 
words on the feast, and 
begs the little flock to thank 
the Sacred Heart for the 
great blessings of to-day, 
and to ask him to give 
them, though deprived of 
the comforts of religion, a 
living, loving, burning Cath- 
olic faith. By the door sits 
Aunt Mattie, in her Sunday 
cap and gown, drinking it 
all in, her black eyes roll- 
ing with the deepest inter- 
est. She is wife of the colored Baptist preacher, and asked if 
she too might not assist at the Mass. She is radiant, and de- 
clares she will never miss that fine " service " no more " if de 
white folks don't hab no 'jections." The father, she' goes on to 
say, " is jest booful, he acts so nice, speaks so pretty, and looks 
so lovely." As the congregation troop down the steps one en- 
thusiastic lady exclaims, " Oh ! was it not like the first Christians?" 
but is brought down from the clouds by the cool rejoinder 
of a mountaineer, " No, ma'am ; it was more like the late sin- 
ners /" However, fervor marks them as they move away, and 
time will prove the efficacy and power of this first Mass of the 
Sacred Heart. Before leaving the father had asked them to 
send their children each Sunday for instruction to their new 
friend, and he would say Mass here every Thursday through the 




" BY THE DOOR SITS AUNT MATTIE, IN HER 
SUNDAY CAP AND GOWN." 



1 8 9 4.] 



THE SACRED HEART IN THE MOUNTAINS. 



633 






summer. The news seemed too wonderful, and at first they 
could not realize it. 

The work begins ; two small boys and a girl put in an 
appearance, then the older ones, finally the whole congregation, 
numbering eighteen souls, assemble. The catechism lesson 
develops into the beads, then some hymns are introduced, the 
Epistle and Gospel are read, and then eleven o'clock is decided 
on, to be in spirit with the Mass then being said in Asheville, 
and the Sunday devotions and reunions become a precious in- 
stitution. Under the broiling Southern sun they come down the 
mountains, many walking miles with the greatest enthusiasm ; 
generosity seems to be the spirit of this little flock. 

II. 

The bishop, hearing of the fidelity of his new-found moun- 
tain flock, sent word that he himself would come and confirm 
them in the faith ; and then they did think that heaven had 
come down to them ! He arrived for the feast of the Assump- 




ACROSS THE MOUNTAINS TO SEE THE BISHOP. 

tion, and it was a great day truly; nothing was spared to make 
it a memorable one. To all the bishop was a stranger this 
was his first visit. 

The little chalet on the hill seemed suitable for every emer- 



634 THE SACRED HEART IN THE MOUNTAINS. [Feb., 

gency ; the parlor had long been abandoned as too small, and 
here was the novel and perfect chapel. The hall ran the whole 
length of the house, wide, lofty, and handsome, over seventy 
feet long and ten broad. At the main entrance there was a 
deep recess, the large oak door being flanked by long French 
windows. This was turned into the sanctuary. The altar 
stood against the door, and draperies caught up by the papal 
colors made a soft and effective background ; two large pine- 
trees, the bishop's seal, stood graceful sentinels on either side 
of the altar, which shone in the gorgeous coloring of the 
sunny South. Flowers, wreaths, and plants were brought in 
triumph by the children, the court-house benches did duty as 
pews, and the whole was unique. 

The bishop's first request on his arrival was to see the 
"chapel," and he pronounced it "perfect." 

From early morning the people gathered across the moun- 
tains, and the place began filling up fast. The First Communi- 
cants in white knelt reverently near the altar. The Mass be- 
gan. Not a sound ; awe and wonder seemed to take possession 
of them all, over a hundred people seemed as one ; many from 
the lower States up for the summer, and some Protestants who 
had come to see what a Catholic bishop was really like ; the 
colored preacher knelt, the most interested spectator of all. 
Five received their First Communion from the hands of the 
bishop, their ages ranging from ten to twenty-four years. 

His lordship's instruction sank deep into the hearts of his 
hearers. He said the ceremony of to-day must remind them 
strongly of the First Confirmation ; it was in a house the Holy 
Ghost had come on the apostles, as he had on those children 
just now. There were no churches in those days, as there were 
none here in those beautiful mountains ; but as the apostles 
were then in their spiritual infancy, so to-day we do not know 
what great things God has in store for us here in the moun- 
tains and the faithful people gathered round his altar this 
morning. 

When all was over the congregation went slowly and quietly 
homeward, winding down the long drive through the trees. The 
Methodist preacher stood looking longingly at the large crucifix 
above the altar, and then turning away, he said solemnly, " If 
dere be any true church, that's she," pointing back at the pa- 
thetic white figure on the cross ! Aunt Mattie was there, and 
her spouse, the Baptist pastor. Before Mass she came to me, 
radiant, with some colored friends of hers, to know if she might 



1894.] 



THE SACRED HEART IN THE MOUNTAINS. 



635 



not bring them to see " de bishup" Her pride as she led them 
forward was indeed great, her back expressive of the deepest 
satisfaction. Once I caught her glance during Mass, and it was 
a beaming one, as much as to say all was going on just as she 
desired and thought proper. . . . 

Golden autumn has settled down the mountains ; the Bene- 
dictine father has gone back to the abbey, and the old priest 
from Asheville has promised to come as long as the weather will 




A MOUNTAIN SPRING BY THE WAY-SIDE. 

permit through the winter, and well does he keep his word. For 
twenty-three years he has been through the Blue Ridge minis- 
tering to the few Catholics, and is worn out after his labors. 
Five churches and seven presbyteries in this State are the work 
of his hands, or rather his head, for he has preached in almost 
every large city in the North begging for assistance to build 
them. It is a beautiful picture to see the venerable white-haired 
father surrounded by his people before they leave for their 
homes after Mass. Bohemians and Irish are one in heart and 
mind, and seem like a little family, listening to his pleasant 



6 3 6 



THE SACRED HEART IN THE MOUNTAINS. 



[Feb., 



greetings, and his Celtic wit and story, the young people 
especially hanging on every word. 



It is Christmas morning, bright and radiant, with a lingering 
crispness in the air after the slight frost of the night. The 
village church-bells are calling all to worship the new-born King, 
and the mountaineers come down the hills in merry groups. 
Up the avenue the little flock are hastening to their first Christ- 
mas festival. 

In the chapel they gather joyously, and stand amazed at 
the decorations. Laurels and rhododendrons are massed behind 

the altar ; up above a large 
scroll hems them in, with 
Gloria in Excelsis blazing 
from its crimson ground- 
work. The altar itself 
sparkles with lights and 
colors, while the pines 
shelter all in their soft 
feathery embrace. 

For the first time the 
Adeste is heard in these 
solitudes. To the younger 
ones who have never been 
inside a Catholic Church it 
is new ; to the parents its 
well-remembered tones were 
listened to long years ago 
among the wild and rugged 
mountains of Bohemia, and 
in the humble chapel under 
the shadow of the crumb- 
ling cloisters of the Island 
of Saints. Tears come un- 
consciously and unbidden, but they are harbingers of joy and 
hope to-day, as well as gratitude for all the happiness God at 
last has sent them. After the devotions they cluster around her 
whom they love and reverence as heaven-sent. Every one has 
brought her some little gift, the small boys revelling in their 
selections, while she, little dreaming of their intentions, has 
surprises for them all. 

The parents receive a large mounted picture of the Sacred 




AUNT MARGARET AND COLUMBUS. 



1894-] THE SACRED HEART IN THE MOUNTAINS. 



637 



Heart, especially blessed for their homes to remind them of 
their fidelity, and the young people something they particu- 
larly sighed for. Loving words develop into gay ones, and 
broken German, snatches of the almost forgotten brogue, and the 
mountain dialect all strangely jumble together in joyful ex- 
citement. It was indeed the day the Lord had made, and one 
that will never be forgotten. 

This is the last of the sunny weather, and for weeks follow- 
ing the north wind comes shrieking round the mountains, with 
ice in its breath and snow-flakes on its wings. Six times they 
all assemble for Mass, only to be disappointed ; the old priest 




IN A SOUTHERN TOBACCO-FIELD. 

left home, but the elements drove him back. Not a murmur 
from them ; all their sympathies seemed to be for the good old 
man, up at five tottering through the icy streets to reach the 
train, and never succeeding. Some of the mornings were 
almost unbearable ; the wind swept up those peaks as if off the 
North Pole. One family driving in the early morning, nearly 
frozen, came across the village doctor, almost hidden in furs, on 
his way to a dying man higher up the mountain. In sheer 
amazement he asked them where they were going at this hour. 
" To Mass ; our priest has to come twenty miles for us, and we 
ought to go a few miles to meet him." "Well," he said, 



638 THE SACRED HEART IN THE MOUNTAINS. [Feb., 

whipping up his horse, "let me tell you no one but a Catholic 
would come out on Such a day as this for church ; I shouldn't, I 
know ! " It was only after six of such morning trips, fasting 
each time, hoping for Holy Communion, they were at last re- 
warded. How they listened to the old father's apologies, and 
account of his disappointments owing to runaway electric cars, 
roads blocked with snow, besides numerous falls on the shining, 
slippery streets. 

Happy Easter has come and gone, and to-morrow will be a 
sad day in the mountains ; the little flock are in desolation at 
the parting that lies before them. 

She who had come so strangely amongst them is called 
North by other claims and duties. 

At the little wayside station they stand close to her ; the 
children first, who have been up since daybreak to be in time 
to see her to the last. The men show their grief unblushingly. 
It is hard work to keep back the tears, but when they do ap- 
pear they are not the least ashamed of them. 

The mothers have determined to reserve all sadness for an- 
other day, as her last sight of them must be joyous. 

" We shall never have Mass again," they wail, " if you leave 
us." But she promises them better things and she means it. 
One Englishwoman, full of caustic humor, says with a mournful 
face : " I always said when God made this place he forgot it 
ever belonged to him, until you came to remind him of its ex- 
istence ; and now, if we are left again, God will never think of 
us any more." " Never ? " she smiles ; " if only you are faithful 
he will be always with you. If you promise to go to Holy 
Communion every chance you get, I promise, in return, that 
you will have monthly Mass : the Sacred Heart does not begin 
a work and then forget it." And they promise. 

The train comes tearing in, the bell rings, broken voices, 
warm farewells and she passes out of their lives as quietly as 
she came into them. 

And now for the fidelity. Has the tiny seed sprouted for a 
time and then withered away ? 

A year has passed since that first Mass of the Sacred Heart, 
and early last June we find them gathered once more for Mass, 
in a lonely farm-house buried in the mountains. The old priest 
has kept his word, and once a month, and oftener when he can, 
he comes amongst them. From far and near they have walked 
this morning ; some Protestant neighbors being interested listen- 
ers to the good priest's simple instruction on the ceremonies of 



1894-] THE SACRED HEART IN THE MOUNTAINS. 639 

the church. The master of the house, one year ago a luke- 
warm Catholic, is to-day the proudest man in North Carolina; 
his wife the happiest ; and his five children, who did not know 
how to make the sign of the cross, are now monthly commu- 
nicants. The servants of the wealthy Southern families up for 
the summer are strong in numbers, glad and grateful. One 
faithful Irishwoman lifts up her voice with exultation, saying : 
" I've been coming up here for thirty years, and this year is the 
first time we ever heard a Mass. Now, praises be to God, we'll 
see a priest at last." 

There is always general Communion when the father comes. 
The little flock have not forgotten their promise, and the visit- 
ors, seeing, go and do likewise. When Mass is over they tell 
the father how they have succeeded since his last visit, how they 
never miss meeting on Sundays for the beads and catechism 
at one house or another, and he stirs them on to fresh efforts. 

Not many weeks since did I tear myself away from this little 
mountain mission, its poetry and faith, its never-to-be-forgotten 
scenes. Back into the humdrum, bustling life of the North, 
where, absorbed in the world and its ways, I can only steal 
passing moments to live once more amid all those happy days 
and charming, simple souls, whom I have learned to know and 
love through that first Mass of the Sacred Heart in the moun- 
tains. 





640 5T-. COLUMBAN AND THE WOLVES. [Feb., 

ST. COLUMBAN AND THE WOLVES.* 

BY P. J. HIGGINS, M.D. 



JUT thro' the castle gates of Annagray, 

His frugal repast herbs and wild fruits 

o'er, 
The Abbot Columban, at close of day, 

Came with bare head and sandaled feet to 

pore 
O'er parchment leaves from Scotia's f holy isle, 

Writ in quaint script ;f by Bangor's lonely shore. 
Wan were his features, yet a tender smile 

Lit their stern lines when met his upward glance 
The Roman walls, where pagan sword and lance 
So long had glinted in the day-god's rays, 

But now gave place to cross and clanging bell, 
While vesper hymns supplanted Bacchus' praise, 
And matin chime the sentry's "All is well!" 

Into the forest turned the sandaled feet, 

Where, in the stillness of the eventide, 
His soul might linger in communion sweet 

With thoughts endearing of the Crucified. 

Upon a mossy log, beneath a tree, 

He sat in shadow ; spread upon his knee 
The dingy parchment, and in silence read. 

*St. Columbdn [pronounced Cullumawn ; Latin form Columbanus] was born in Ire- 
land, in A.D. 539. In his youth he was educated by Senile ; afterwards in an abbey on one 
of the islands in Lough Erne probably Devenish and finally under Saint Congall in the 
famous Bangor, one of the three great Irish monasteries of that epoch. At the age of fifty 
he started on his mission to the Franks, accompanied by twelve assistants. He established 
the first Irish monastery in Europe at Annagray. It .was a Roman castle situated in the 
Vosges Mountains, which was given to him by the Merovingian king. He afterwards found- 
ed Luxeuil, Fontaines, and Bobbio the latter in Italy and one of his disciples that of St. 
Gall, in Switzerland all famous institutions of learning for centuries. In the face of the 
greatest trials and difficulties his mission was crowned with wonderful success. The inci- 
dent with the wolves is narrated in his biography by the Abbot Jonas of Bobbio, where St. 
Columban died, November 21, 615. His coffin, chalice, holly staff, and Irish missal are still 
in existence. 

f Scotia. The name by which Ireland was known at that time and for long afterwards. 

J Quaint script. The letters used by the Irish monks were not the same as those on the 
Continent, where the Roman style prevailed. 



1894-] S T - COLUMBAN AND THE WOLVES. 64! 

Around him hopped the birds, and daintily 
Picked up the crumbs his gentle hand had spread. 
Down from the boughs a frisking squirrel came, 
And, fearless, hid within his cowl so tame 
His winning voice and loving looks had made 
The wild and timid creatures of the glade. 

Led by his zeal to win whole tribes to God 
To spread the faith among the pagan hordes 
Of Gaul the abbot left his native sod, 

To live in exile 'mid the clash of swords 
And rude contentions of half-savage Franks, 
Whose arrow-points and spears in serried ranks 
Would wrong the right as oft as right the wrong. 
The tide of passion surged and flowed ; the strong 
Despoiled the weak ; while murder, rapine, lust 
Made victims of the peaceful and the just. 

.He paused, with finger on the parchment sere, 
And gazed around him with a labored sigh : 

"Alas!" he thought aloud, "that man should here, 
Alone of all God's creatures, live and die 

Unfaithful to his being's end and aim. 

The lowly brute puts lordly man to shame ; 

Its rage is sinless, lacking reason's guide, 

While sinful man is swayed by passion's tide." 

The abbot rose, and with impatient feet 

Strode deep into the forest's leafy shade, 
Until he reached a favorite retreat 

A clearing bordered by a thorny glade. 
Here he would come at eve to meditate 
Upon his mission and his soul's estate. 
Lost in deep thought, while pacing to and fro, 

He heard, but heeded not, the rustling near ; 
Till, from all sides, a growling fierce and low 

Awoke his instinct to a sense of fear; 
When, looking up, he saw, to his dismay, 

A pack of wolves approaching, fierce and gaunt, 
Their white fangs glistening as they scent their prey 

A sight the bravest human heart to daunt. 
No one was nigh on whom for aid to call ; 
No voice could reach the distant castle wall ; 

VOL. LVIII. AT 



642 ST. COLUMBAN AND THE WOLVES. [Feb., 

No weapon but a crucifix of wood ; 

No room to fly they closed on every side 
Yet rigid and immovable he stood ; 

" Deus in adjutorium ! " * he cried. 

With hands upraised he looked beyond the stars, 

To plead for succor, where alone it lay, 
As if his soul would burst the prison bars 

That closed it in its tenement of clay. 
"Deus in adjutorium ! " Oft before 
He drew that weapon, when temptation sore 

Beset him, and he triumphed in the fray; 
But would that cry a ravening wolf arrest, 
And soothe the pangs of hunger in its breast ? 
Not one alone a dozen, at the least, 
Were closing round a long awaited feast. 

Closer they came he felt their panting breath ; 

Their muzzles touched his robe ; now, undismayed, 
The victim stood before approaching death, 

While with calm voice and simple faith he prayed 
41 Deus in adjutorium ! " Gaunt and grim, 
With gaping jaws they rushed and sniffed at "him : 
When, lo ! as if from carven stone, 
They turned and left the saint alone ; 
And, in the twilight dim and gray, 
Back to the forest slunk away. 

The danger past, the grateful abbot fell, 

With outstretched arms, prostrate upon the ground 
In mute thanksgiving, as the convent bell 
Awoke the echoes of the forest 'round. 
The summons brought him not ; the monks in quest 
Set out with torches, trist and fearful, lest 
Mishap detained him. When they found him there, 
They thought him dead, and wailing filled the air, 
Which roused him from his orisons. In tears 
He told them of faint-heartedness and fears 
Of failure in his mission, when he spied 
A pack of wolves approaching, and he cried 
To Heaven for succor then the beasts of prey 
Sniffed at his robe and meekly turned away ! 

* Deus in adjutorium meutn intende. "O Lord, incline unto my aid." An expression in 
frequent use in religious life even to the present day. 



1 8 9 4-] 



ST. COLUMBAN AND THE WOLVES. 



643 



" Back to the convent ! Let us fast and pray ; 

Live holy lives, that God our toil may bless ; 
Win men by love to walk the righteous way," 

Advised the saint ; " give alms and help distress ; 
Show by example first that love divine 
Transforms the heart ; then will our precepts shine 
As lofty beacons guiding men to light 
From out the darkness of eternal night. 
Despair not ; for the Mighty One who stayed 
The wild wolf's hunger when your abbot prayed 
Will touch the sinner's heart, if we but preach 
With faith and fervor the great truths we teach." 





644 ON THE CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE [Feb., 



Ott THE CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE OF THE 
CATHOLIC CHURCH. 

BY RALPH ADAMS CRAM. 

'URING the last quarter of this century has oc- 
curred a change in the fortune of the Catholic 
Church in America which is almost a transfor- 
mation ; a change which possesses certain of the 
outward aspects of the miraculous, of the super- 
natural. Nor is this new fortune visible in America alone ; in 
England it has been more brilliant, more spectacular, though no 
more vital ; and the same is true, in a minor measure, in France. 
The tempest of materialism and agnosticism and atheism has 
spent its force, and though it has wrought ruin in many places, 
the sunlight already bursting through its drifting and exhausted 
clouds, fleeing on the wind of their own suicidal violence, is 
fast turning its flood and wreck into enormous agencies for re- 
cuperation and renewed life. Everywhere are the signs of fresh- 
ened growth and new and splendid strength, and nowhere are 
these evidences more clear and convincing than in the United 
States. 

English Catholicism, under the exalted guidance of the four 
great cardinals, has signalized her release from legal persecution 
by stepping to the very front, not only in her first and most 
glorious duty of winning back a world weary of the follies of 
materialism to the faith, but in all vital matters of social and 
economic reform, and of artistic education and direction. 

Here also in the United States the torch of the new life is 
passed from hand to hand, and already the Catholic Church is 
assuming her prerogative of leadership. Within the last fifty 
years she has advanced from a position of comparative numerical 
weakness to the primacy ; she is claiming the right of arbitra- 
tion between capital and labor; she is slowly solving the com- 
plex question of Christian education, where the state is con- 
fronted, after four decades of experiment, with but partial suc- 
cess ; she is even winning a sullen respect from the sects, to- 
gether with the oblique tribute of their fear, where formerly 
was only the hatred of bigotry and ignorance. Thus far she 
goes hand-in-hand with the Catholic Church in England ; but 



1894-] OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. 645 

in one important province she has done, and is doing nothing 
less even than nothing ; for her influence thus far is unfortunate, 
her action grievously injurious to herself. 

In England, since the Catholic Emancipation Act, and espe- 
cially since Newman's " second spring," she has steadily striven 
to stand visibly beautiful and august in the eyes of men ; her 
churches have been of the very best that the capacity of the 
architects and artists of the country allowed, and even in dis- 
tricts comparatively poor in worldly wealth she has built sanc- 
tuaries which compared as favorably with the glorious monu- 
ments of her old life, now in the hand of others, as was pos- 
sible in an atmosphere weakened and impoverished by three 
centuries of aesthetic as well as ethic folly. Since the raising of 
the present Archbishop of Westminster to the Sacred College 
his Eminence has shown that this quality of leadership was by 
no means to suffer under his guidance, and that the destiny of 
the Catholic Church as the restorer of Christian beauty was, 
with the aid of God, soon to be accomplished ; and such ad- 
vance as England makes in the next half-century in the domain 
of art will be, unless all signs prove futile, through the exer- 
tions of the Roman Catholic Church and of the " Catholic " 
party in the Established Church. 

Therefore, one by one, in town or city, the new churches of 
the old faith in England stand designed by the most capable 
architects available, enriched by the work of the most ingenious 
craftsmen that offer, showing to the world in every noble line 
and mass the devotion and the intelligence that have created 
them. 

How utterly, how lamentably different is the case in America! 
Advancing day by day towards moral honor and dominion, the 
Catholic Church in our country is represented in her architec- 
ture and her art by the most inartistic and unpardonable struc- 
tures that anywhere rise as insults to God and hindrances to 
spiritual progress. 

This may seem violent language, but nothing is to be gained 
by a sensitive glozing of facts ; and the truth is that, judged 
by her churches as a whole, the Catholic Church in the United 
States of America verily appears what Puritan bigotry declares 
her to be, not what she is in fact. 

It is true that ecclesiastical architecture is at a lower ebb in 
America than anywhere else in the world, Germany alone ex- 
cepted. But we do not ask for work which shall compare with 
the London Oratory and St. George's, or other beautiful sanctu- 



646 ON- THE CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE [Feb., 

aries reared under different conditions, in England ; we do ex- 
pect, however, work which shall at least equal that of the Pro- 
testant denominations, and that we do not find. On the con- 
trary, if a Catholic who knows something of art and loves beau- 
ty goes into an unfamiliar town or city, he is perfectly well 
aware that he has but to pick out the barest, commonest red 
brick and granite structure that thrusts itself on to the side- 
walk, and he will have found his own church. It is possible to 
lament this fact, not to deny or palliate it. 

Let me describe two Catholic churches with which I am ac- 
quainted in our Eastern States ; they represent very accurately 
the average in this region. The first is in one of the largest 
cities of a vast diocese. It is in no architectural style whatever, 
but of a quality of design which any educated architect would look 
on with horror. It is shapeless and monstrous, built of a smooth 
face-brick with cheap brownstone trimmings ; bands of black and 
fancy brick deface its walls ; the arches of its gaunt windows 
are double segmental, in the vulgar fashion of 1870; trivial but- 
tresses, weak and useless columns, ready-made carvings insult 
the intelligence at every point. Outwardly it is bald and vul- 
gar ; it has the appearance of a grain elevator overlaid with 
ready-made impertinences which delude themselves into thinking 
that they are ornaments. 

Inside the effect is worse : the columns are cylinders of pol- 
ished Scotch granite and Quincy granite alternately; the capi- 
tals are of cast iron, painted with bronze paint ; the walls are 
stencilled in olive-green and a reddish magenta, in the foolish 
and violent patterns which fifteen years ago were, in some quar- 
ters, considered " high art " ; the windows are filled with loud 
Munich glass, in colors which set one's teeth on edge. From 
the garishly-frescoed ceiling which follows the slope of the high- 
pitched roof, and is broken by frivolous trusses, the iron por- 
tions of which are painted with bronze powder, hang the chan- 
deliers of stamped brass, vividly lacquered ; the pews are of yel- 
low chestnut, their ends sawed into fantastic patterns, with discs 
of cheap imitation marble set in. In the sanctuary stands the 
high altar of bluish white marble, ready-made, looking, alas! 
like a glorified soda-fountain in its frantic elaboration. The al- 
tars of the Blessed Virgin and St. Joseph are in the same foolish 
style, and over each stands an image painted in the crudest 
colors. 

I took a Unitarian to this church once, for the rector is a 
noble priest, eloquent and benign ; while the music, though ex- 



1894-] OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. 647 

cessively modern, is perfectly rendered. Afterwards he said : 
" You may as well stop trying to convert me from Unitarianism 
unless you can take me to some place where I am not struck 
deaf and blind by artistic horrors." And he would never go to 
this particular church again. 

The second example stands in one of the most beautiful sub- 
urbs of Boston. Money was certainly not wanting for an excel- 
lent church ; there was an extraordinary amount appropriated. 
This is what exists : A high, narrow barn of bright-red brick laid 
in black mortar ; the trimmings of white granite, the jig-sawed 
window-tracery painted gray and sanded. The roof is of red, 
green, and black slate, laid in crazy patterns ; the absurd tower 
at the west end turns at the top into a frenzy of galvanized iron ; 
and the high spire is covered with elaborate metallic shingles. The 
interior is a desert, with its little iron columns, fantastical arches, 
bare walls, all painted and kalsomined a staring white, then lined 
off with black to represent marble. The Stations of the Cross 
are inconceivably hideous. A large and most remarkable copy 
of Titian's "Assumption " hangs over the high altar, which is made 
of imitation marble, picked out with gilding, and perennially de- 
secrated with artificial flowers. 

As one drives through the green woods of the village the ap- 
parition of this monstrous structure, standing in a dusty quad- 
rangle, is simply shocking, and the effect of the interior so garish 
that the devotional spirit of the average mortal is instantly 
extinguished. 

In the city where the first example stands there are many 
other religious edifices almost as bad ; notably a Baptist chapel 
and two belonging to the Methodists. But these were all 
built twenty years ago, while the Catholic Church is but a few 
years old ; built at the very time when the local Episcopalians 
and Presbyterians were testifying in stone, no whit more ex- 
pensive, to their own sagacity and the supreme genius of their 
architects. 

In the village where the second example turns the harmony 
of a beautiful landscape into grating discord there is nothing 
comparable to it, while there is an Episcopal church that might 
have been built in the fifteenth century in Warwickshire, an-d a 
Unitarian structure which is a perpetual delight, and which 
draws every Sunday scores of people who care nothing for the 
particular tenets of the denomination, but who find a certain 
happiness in its cool and chaste interior, and its ivy-covered 
walls rising amid great elms. 



648 ON THE CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE [Feb., 

These two churches are fair samples of what one may find 
in New England, a section of the country which is weary of 
Puritanism and its reaction, and is reaching out towards Catholi- 
cism again. Can such temples help to convince these searchers 
after God of the majesty of the Catholic Faith ? can they draw 
the brilliantly educated, refined, travelled infidels and agnostics 
through appeals to their cramped and starved emotionalism? 

If the Catholic architecture of to-day represented exactly the 
Catholic Church of to-day, silence might be commendable ; but 
it is the very fact that it does not do so, but that on the con- 
trary it misrepresents it maliciously and fatally, which makes 
scorn and invective the only resort of a critic with an honest 
heart. 

To the traveller fresh from Europe, filled with the memory 
of the immortal Gothic monuments of the Catholic faith in the 
British Isles (empty, swept and garnished, it is true, but still 
ineffably beautiful with the beauty of the sleeping princess in 
the fairy tale), filled also with the memory of the harmonious 
new structures which the intelligence of what Archbishop Ben- 
son is pleased to call " The Italian Mission " is building on 
every hand ; or to him who comes back with the vision of Mass 
or Vespers in St. Mark's at Venice, or in the cathedrals of Se- 
ville or Sienna, or in St. John of the Lateran, still lingering 
with him to such an one the Catholic churches of the United 
States are let it be said plainly a fear and a scandal. He 
may go to the cathedral in the City of New York, and find 
much that he loved across the water : for glorious St. Patrick's, 
consecrated by real artistic reverence and thoroughness, is no 
unworthy pile ; or he may go with great edification to St. 
Paul's, massive, restful, solemn, a memorial before God of hu- 
man honor and sense of beauty ; he may find two or three 
other churches where he can worship without utterly shutting 
himself up, for duty's sake, from outward impressions; but 
what will he suffer in nine cases out of ten? A novel shock to 
his devotion and veneration; an offence to every aesthetic sense 
which God has given him. The same is doubly true of Boston. 
The cathedral has outward dignity and reserve ; and but for 
its gas-pipe columns and very ugly windows and sad-colored 
walls, would be altogether majestic and beautiful, a worthy seat 
for the cathedra of the saintly prelate who glorifies the few weak- 
nesses of the structure. Despite its unfortunate site, despite 
the fact that, like every other cathedral in our Republic, it has 
no proper choir and chancel, it is yet a noble and worthy build- 



1894-] OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. 649 

ing. But apart from this, is there one Catholic church in all 
Boston which glorifies God by its material worth, and spreads 
the faith by its charm ? I do not know of one ; and I do know 
of many poor cultured souls who, attending High Mass here 
and there, hungry for the food of spiritual beauty, have sorrow- 
fully gone away, repelled, not more by the. operatic music, the 
loud unlovely vestments, than by the stucco and the imitations, 
the tawdry ornament, and the harsh, violent decoration. 

And as for the country churches, where can one be found 
which can compare with the little churches and chapels that 
delight every one, as does the Episcopalian St. Peter's, Morris- 
town, New Jersey, or the Unitarian church in Weston, Massa- 
chusetts ? 

Now this condition of things can only be looked on as bad 
in the extreme, and for these reasons : In the first place, it is 
disobedient, irreverent, sometimes almost blasphemous ; in the 
second place, it is libellous and misleading ; and, in the third 
place, it defeats in large measure the ends the Catholic Church 
prays for and labors to attain. Let me say a word on each of 
these three points. 

By divine command, as well as by all the higher instincts of 
our nature, we are told to render unto God of our best, to 
give him of our treasure and of our riches; nor will he accept 
that on which we lay little value, or which is inferior and 
second-rate. The best that we have is poor and insufficient 
enough ; how then can we come before Him bringing in our 
hands those things which we ourselves know to be merely ex- 
pedient, and representing in nowise what we can afford and 
obtain ? Moreover, does not our sense of fitness, our rational 
instinct, teach us that in the tabernacle wherein God himself is 
content to enter and dwell, where daily in the presence of 
saints and angels are celebrated the divine mysteries of the 
Catholic Faith, where is repeated for the saving of men the 
awful Sacrifice of Calvary does not Our instinct teach us that 
hither should be brought only the choicest that we possess, the 
highest art, the most precious ornaments, the most costly trea- 
sure that we can afford, all the wealth of noble art and crafts- 
manship, the fruit of the ripe genius of the truest architects 
and sculptors and painters alive ? 

Such was always the belief and the action of the historic 
Church of God from the days of the building of the Ark of 
the Covenant and the Temple, down through the first years of 
Christianity, the splendors of Byzantium and the solemn glories 






650 ON THE CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE [Feb., 

of mediaevalism, unto the majesty and luxury of the Renais- 
sance. It was not until the time of the so-called Reformation 
that the old habits of the people, which had their natural ex- 
pression through loving sacrifice and precious gifts, changed, in 
a portion of the world, to a barbarous iconoclasm and a penu- 
rious selfishness. As the house of God became the house of 
man, there were born the bare and ugly meeting-houses, the 
parsimony and grudging doles of money wrung from greedy 
purses, where once had been eager generosity and noble emula- 
tion in doing honor to the incarnate Lord. That in Protestant 
countries Christian art should have ceased, and anything in the 
way of architecture be found good enough for God, is perhaps 
natural ; but is it logical that the Catholic Church should adopt 
the evil practices of the heresy and schism she condemns? Since 
the reaction to a higher and more spiritual religion which be- 
gan in England with the Oxford movement, there has been a 
great advance ; and now the majority of the Established church- 
es, empty since the pestilence of Puritanism swept through 
them, are daily growing rich and sweet with new treasures of 
art, heralding the return of a great people toward the ancient 
faith. The Catholicism of the present century has wrought ex- 
quisitely in England, in Belgium, and in France ; Protestantism 
has fallen far behind it. It is only in America that we find the 
descendants of the iconoclastic schismatics laboring together 
with the American representatives of the Anglican Church to 
make their houses of worship or religious instruction more ac- 
ceptable in the sight of God, more attractive to men, while the 
Catholic Church, who should lead by good rights, hangs in the 
rear, content with shameful structures that would be looked on 
as a disgrace by our fellow-Christians. 

Is not this a scandal and a reproach? 

In the second place, the present condition of Catholic 
architecture is belying and misleading. Art is always the gauge 
of civilization, the flowering of an age, the culmination of its 
highest power. " Show me the art of a time, and I will tell 
you its life." The gorgeous, semi-oriental spirit of Byzantium, 
with all its splendid mysticism, its splendid cruelty, is just as 
clearly seen in Aya Sophia as is the noble emotionalism and 
lofty justice of Venice found in St. Mark's, the chivalry and 
faith of the thirteenth century in Notre Dame de Paris, the 
dead formalism of the post-Reformation in St. Paul's. " By their 
fruits ye shall know them." We can read the large, empty 
mockery of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the 



1894-] OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. 651 

churches of Wren and Inigo Jones ; what should we judge the 
Catholic Church in America to be, were we to judge her by 
her churches of the last ten years? 

A conviction formed in this way would be very far, would 
it not, from the truth? for we all agree that the church is 
neither pretentious nor tawdry, shallow nor false, cheap nor 
second-rate. Yet judged as history justifies us in judging, these 
would be her characteristics; and these are the very character- 
istics attributed to her by those who, through their own igno- 
rance, know her only from without. Therefore it is that her 
architecture is false and misleading, in no way representative of 
her ; unworthy of her glorious annals, her fame as the mother 
and guardian of the arts, or of her evident destiny as the di- 
rector and restorer of civilization. 

How these conditions came about would be hard to say, 
neither is it under consideration here ; the fact remains that the 
architecture of the Catholic Church slanders her in every detail,, 
and that she owes it to her own past nay, more, to her own 
future, to correct so grievous a misrepresentation. 

In the third place, contemporary Catholic architecture,, 
through its visible contradictions of the essential nature of the 
church, defeats- the very end of missionary labors. 

Art is the most powerful agency for the influence of emo- 
tions in the world ; it is indeed, in its highest manifestation, 
the sensible expression of religion itself. It has always been 
one of the most mobile and potent factors in the advancement 
of religion ; and the failure of Puritanism, as a vital system, 
has been due, not alone to the crudeness and bitterness of its 
peculiar theology but, as well, to its short-sighted antagonism 
to beauty in all its forms. Again, the great success of the 
High-Church movement in the Establishment in England and 
among Episcopalians in America, is due as well to its restora- 
tion of sumptuous ritual and inspiring architecture as to its 
return to the truths of religion without which the world has 
found it could not live. 

For the Catholic Church carelessly to reject the gigantic 
and eager aid of art and beauty is therefore not alone irrever- 
ent and misleading ; it is deliberately injurious as well. Thou- 
sands of men and women, awaking from the disillusions of 
their brief fancy for the self-sufficiency of agnosticism, are 
standing in hesitation, and looking with wistful eyes toward 
the old faith, but repelled, at the first step of advance, by the 
surroundings which their culture tells them are illiterate, assum- 



652 ON THE CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE [Feb., 

ing often that behind the disenchanting exterior is only an out- 
worn or retrograde system. Can we blame them ? 

Is it not strange indeed to see the Roman Catholic Church 
deliberately rejecting the means the Established Church in 
England, the Presbyterians in Scotland, and the Episcopalians 
in America are finding, to their great and perpetual profit, so 
potent ? To continue blindly to build churches which outward- 
ly repel the enthusiasm of would-be converts ? Not every brain 
can beat out its path to truth by right reason, apart from asso- 
ciations with its accidents. For we are all fallible ; we infer 
the unseen from what we see. 

I have cited England as an example to be followed. She 
has many advantages over our own country. First of all, she 
has magnificent models before her ; she has Westminster and 
Wells, St. Mary Redcliffe and St. Albans, Tintern and Foun- 
tains ; the eye which looks on these, the heart which loves 
them, is already trained. Again, English Catholics have been 
and are the flower of the nation ; belonging chiefly to the aris- 
tocratic classes, they have always had influence, culture, and 
wealth, in striking disproportion to their limited number. They 
are an illustrious and successful household, whose methods, per- 
fected by long thought and in peace, are superior at every 
point to those here, interrupted perforce by the crying prob- 
lems of ignorance and poverty, and hampered by the difficulty 
of welding together the heterogeneous immigrated flock of the 
present century. Why should not American Catholicism be 
willing at last to admit all this, and, following the classic axiom, 
think it expedient to learn something from an enemy ? For 
the English are infinitely to the fore in all matters of church 
reform, thanks in great measure to the initiative of Cardinal 
Manning ; their prayer-books, their singing, their popular even- 
ing devotions, above all their buildings, are beautiful and right. 
The charm and distinction of their modern churches are not 
to be realized but by those who have examined them. They 
are quiet in tone ; the side-chapels are usually retired in a 
niche or behind a screen ; wood is wood, bronze is bronze ; 
every stall, carving, mosaic, lectern is what it professes to be 
no more, no less ; there are no paper roses in the vases, no 
gas jets in the candelabra. The surpliced choir of men and 
boys occupies its legitimate place. The pews, or better yet the 
chairs, are thoroughly comfortable ; there is almost always a 
little shelf for the convenience of each person, and a small 
separate kneeling-cushion, to be affixed afterwards to a peg be- 



1 894.] OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. 653 

longing to the seat in front ; sometimes the seats themselves 
are reversible, as in the Paulist Church in New York, so that 
when the pulpit stands in the third or even fourth bay of the 
nave, those who are near the altar may turn and face the 
preacher. 

Now, can any Catholic familiar with his own ill-constructed 
churches, especially with those in sea-side and rural districts, 
conceive of himself as dwelling in such luxury of a Sunday 
morning? as utterly free to give his whole mind, as he fain 
would do, to the Divine Presence before him ? Would not his 
children maintain unconsciously more attachment to a church 
where they do not grow sore at Sunday-school from the hard 
benches, where they cannot kneel on the sharp angles of the 
wood without at the same time sitting down, and praying 
against nature in a perpetual fidget ? Is it not difficult to im- 
press upon a none-too-Spartan generation that " this is none 
other than the house of God and the Gate of Heaven," while 
it feels so much more like another locality- altogether ? In all 
seriousness, the time has come to consider these things. Per- 
haps one vital cause of the discomfort of such churches is the 
utter absence of lay co-operation in their erection. It is to be 
observed that the sanctuary chairs are generally soft and ample 
enough ! But in England, again, the building of the church is 
the concern of an architect of genius, chosen by the close and 
friendly conference of priest and people; or better yet, it is the 
concern of some one liberal and enlightened founder. 

It is undeniable that piety is not the robust thing it was of 
old. It endures less ; it has to be coaxed upon the way of life. 
The most seemly and decorous circumstances are needed to-day 
to support our public worship. Effeminate furnishings are not 
asked for ; only ordinary ease, and freedom from distraction and 
sour moods ; whereby much benefit unto eternity would accrue 
to Christian souls, most of all to the casual soul who hovers 
upon the threshold and has not the corporal courage to come 
in. Inside, indeed, is salvation. Inside also is an apotheosis of 
the ugly and annoying. That it should be so is, with no ex- 
aggeration, the greatest pity, the greatest blunder in the world. 

It is hard to urge any possible excuse for this mournful 
condition of things. It is not because competent architects and 
artisans are wanting, for that they exist is proved by the occa- 
sional good structures which appear in the midst of the horrors 
that stand for Christian architecture in America. It is not be- 
cause no capacity exists in the Catholic Church for appreciating 



654 CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE. [Feb., 

able work. It is not because she is unable to purchase the 
best, for she has always money to give to God's service. Be- 
sides, it costs not one cent more to build a fine church than a 
poor one. How much was spent, for instance, on St. Sylvia's 
at Bar Harbor? It is a simple rustic chapel ; the material is of a 
common wood ; but it is good ; it was planned with taste and 
love. The best churches, architecturally, in America are pre- 
cisely those that cost small sums of money ; often it is the very 
lavishing of money on unnecessary and plebeian embellishment 
which spoils so many of them. 

Any architect will testify that skill, not dollars, is the means 
whereby good work takes the place of bad; and for this reason 
this last excuse is precisely the least defensible which may be 
offered. Again, the fact that few of our noted architects are 
Catholics does not debar the church from availing herself of 
their talents ; for it is surely better to glorify the Almighty by 
the hands of unbelievers than to wrong him by the incompe- 
tence of those in the fold. In fact, no apology offers itself 
which can be listened to for a moment ; and the abuse certainly 
seems one which on every account demands prompt and vigor- 
ous battle. 

Surely it is most desirable that the powerful and noble alli- 
ance between the church and art should be restored, after its 
lapse of two or three centuries. All over the Union art, 
materialized and hardened by Puritanism and consequent agnos- 
ticism, cries for the aid of faith and idealism. By sagacious in- 
fluence, judicious guidance, it may be for the Catholic Church 
to create in America not only a new religious art, but by 
social and economic reform to make art once more universal 
and omnipresent, the property of all men. But even if this 
may not happen, yet the church can, nevertheless, hasten the 
final achievement of this great end by rejecting, once for all, 
the present pitiable and mendacious makeshifts wherewith she 
now hides her light, and by accepting from none but the great- 
est architects, sculptors, and painters nothing but their best 
work, and by making her churches, however simple, worthy 
tabernacles of the living God, visible manifestations of the 
solemnity and primacy of the power which has created them, 
irresistible agents, through the ministry of their thoughtful and 
impassioned beauty, of the reunion of Christendom and the 
restoration of the Catholic faith. 



1 894.] 



LlSETTE. 



655 



LlSETTE. 




BY HARRIET AGNES ANDERSON. 



I. 



ISETTE sped with light feet down the path lead- 
ing from the Mer de Glace. The snow of last 
winter had long since melted away, and the 
beauty of full summer gladdened the hearts of 
the crowds of Alpine tourists who had come to 
make the ascent of Mont Blanc. The small stones clattered 
softly down before her, and rolled gently to a stopping place, 
a short space whence they had started. The hem of her gown 
swept the flowers and the young blades of grass as she ran, and 
they bent tenderly and respectfully towards her. Her pale face 
was upheld to the breeze, and the sunlight that quivered and 
shook through the green leaves fell on the brown of her hair 
and kissed it to a glinting gold. The blue of the heavens above 
smiled down upon her. Lizette's upraised eyes held a sweet, 
troubled look. She felt vaguely the vast beauty of those skies. 
Her lips trembled in a half smile. There was a bit of the poet- 
ess in Lisette, which showed itself in the quiver of her fine nos- 
trils as she gazed. 

But Lisette must look to her steps. Rough stones, half 
sunk in the earth, stood in the way ; but she sprang from one 
to another with swift, sure leaps, each one graceful as the flight 
of a bird. 

A party of American tourists going up, some on mules, others 
walking, stared at her in mild surprise. One of them turned 
around, clapped her hands delightedly, watched her as she 
sprang away, and exclaimed : 

" Look ! she is like a chamois. Have you ever seen anything 
so light, so sure-footed, so quick ? " 

"That is the wife of Ambroise Martin," said one of the 
guides. " He is one of those who are to go on the expedition 
the day following to-morrow, mademoiselle." 

Their voices became soft and distant as they mounted up- 
wards, and finally were lost altogether. But Lisette heard not 
one word ; she sprang away, flinging her slight shape forward, 



656 Li SETT E. [Feb., 

or, at some especially steep point, bracing herself sturdily, with 
sliding feet. Sometimes one hand held her thin, short skirts 
away from gnarled root or jagged stone, but her speedy steps 
took on ever a quicker pace. Soft-curled tendrils loosed them- 
selves from the severely smooth hair and brushed against her 
face, and forehead, and long, brown neck. Her cheeks took on 
a soft flush which deepened as she neared the bottom ; it was 
easy to jog along the broadened path, the head tilted back a 
little, the arms swinging loosely at the sides. When she had ar- 
rived at the foot she was quite warm and panting ; but she 
stopped only to say a few words of greeting to some peasants 
who were looking through a little telescope at a number of peo- 
ple coming down Mont Blanc. When she had gained the broad 
path that led to her house her pace slackened a bit, but her 
steps were still rapid. 

Lisette was hastening to get back to her little son, Pierre, 
whom she had left in the morning with an ailment ; so she had 
placed him under the charge of her young sister Berthe. Mme. 
Louise Simond, the woman at the half-way house on the way 
to the Mer de Glace, she who had always been so kind to 
Lisette, was ill, and Lisette had taken her place in order to aid 
Mme. Simond's youngest daughter, who was not much more 
than a child ; but in the afternoon the second daughter had 
come, and Lisette was free. Not, however, before she had been 
able to see Ambroise Martin, her husband, who was taking a 
party of English ladies up to the Mer de Glace. 

The day, though fair, was quite close and sultry, and she 
felt, with her running, very warm and uncomfortable. But now 
and then a truant breeze would spring up which was delicious, 
and which fanned her flushed cheeks and somewhat disarranged 
her neat hair. She brushed back with an impatient hand the 
stray little locks which would caress the eyes.* 

But when she reached the house she was rejoiced to find 
that Pierre had quite recovered her sister Berthe had taken 
very good charge of him. In fact he was well enough for her 
to take him with her to meet Ambroise at the Hotel Royal et 
de Saussure, where the English ladies were stopping. 

Lisette was accustomed to lead the mules home while Am- 
broise arranged his affairs with his employers. Pierre was ex- 
tremely fond of riding home on one of the mules, and he almost 
invariably accompanied his mother. 

To-day, as usual, Ambroise lifted him up in his strong arms 
and placed him on the saddle, and Pierre, delighted and beam- 



1894-] LlSETTE. 657 

ing, rode off ; his mother leading the mules, while he shouted 
and waved aloft one sturdy arm. Ambroise stood gazing after 
the figures of his wife and Pierre, and the two mules, until they 
had disappeared around the corner. There was a happy look in 
his eyes, and he forgot for a moment his negotiations with his 
English ladies. 

A question from one of the Englishwomen recalled him from 
his dreams. 

"It is my wife," he answered, "and our little boy Pierre"; 
and there was a proud, contented ring in his voice as he spoke. 

But Ambroise had good reason to be contented and proud 
of all that belonged to him. He was proud of his two brothers 
who were doing so well in the world, one a soldier in the army, 
the other a distinguished gentleman's valet and quite an educated 
man, as Ambroise had informed one of the Englishwomen that 
afternoon. He was proud, very proud of his wife, Lisette, who 
was so good and so pretty proudest of all of his small son 
Pierre, who was such a strong little lad. Pierre was now four 
years old and a veritable child of heaven, and he intended to 
have the boy educated like his brother, so that he should be- 
come a splendid man. He was proud, too, of Lisette's younger 
sister Berthe, who lived with them, and was growing up to be a 
fine, brave girl ; proud of the two mules, proud of the cow La 
Grise. 

Ambroise had not always lived in Chamounix. He had moved 
there from a neighboring town, with his aged widowed mother, 
when he was a long, lanky youth of eighteen, and he had later 
taken up the occupation of guide, and soon gained the reputa- 
tion of being one of the best in Chamounix. 

The parents of these two were now dead ; and with their 
share of money which the old people had left, besides the 
goodly revenue always coming in from Ambroise's skill as guide, 
they were able to provide for all their wants, and more, for 
these were simple and few. They owned the two mules and 
La Grise, the stately cow which in summer-time Lisette, or 
perhaps Berthe, would each morning drive to pasture. This 
dignified La Grise, walking with demure forefeet planted firmly 
forward, really did not need a single touch of the stick beneath 
Lisette's arm to guide her, so well she knew her way ; so that 
Lisette could knit while walking, or perhaps say her rosary, 
while the bell at La Grise's neck clanged quaint music on the 
fresh, early morning air. 

Now, on this Saturday afternoon, Ambroise had been spe- 
VOL. LVIII. 44 



658 LISETTE. [Feb., 

cially engaged by the English ladies for their little expedition 
to the Mer de Glace. They had made an earnest solicitation for 
him, so anxious were they for his services, and had obtained 
him, though the guide-chef was bound to employ each guide 
in turn. And on Monday he was to go on an expedition to 
the top of Mont Blanc. Lisette, as she walked homewards that 
day, remembered the time of Ambroise's first ascent up this 
Mont Blanc, and smiled at the recollection. For then she had 
been dreadfully averse to his going, and had clung to him at 
the moment of parting with frightened tears in her sweet gray 
eyes. But Ambroise had laughed at her fears and had consoled 
her. 

"Afraid ! thou, a woman born and brought up in Chamounix 
thou knowest there has been no accident there for years and 
years, and then that was in the early spring and it had rained. 
Nothing ever happens, no one knows that better than myself." 
Notwithstanding, she had gone that day to the church in the 
village and had prayed not a little ; and she had prayed still 
more in thanksgiving when Ambroise had returned safe and 
sound. Since then he had made the ascent many times, and 
she no longer experienced these fears ; indeed, she was re- 
joiced whenever the opportunity offered itself, for it would bring 
in a neat little sum. 

On Monday Lisette, with Pierre, saw Ambroise off as usual. 
He was to meet at their hotel a party of Americans who were 
to go on the expedition. Lisette's eyes followed him until he 
had disappeared down the road. Pierre stood, his little hand in 
his mother's, his sturdy bare legs glistening in the sun, and 
watched his father, too, until he strode away out of sight. 
Pierre's rosebud of a mouth, which showed character and deci- 
sion even at that early age, was screwed up now into a funny 
little smile ; his blue eyes gleamed. He adored his father. 
When he grew up into a man, he, Pierre, intended to become 
just such a man as his father. And he would be a soldier, and 
fight for his country, and do brave deeds, and perhaps become 
a very great person. And he would always say his prayers 
night and morning, so that his papa would be very proud of 
him. 

Tuesday was a gloomy, drizzling day a contrast to the 
bright Monday. On Wednesday, however, it cleared again, 
and in the afternoon Lisette had occasion to go to the village 
of Chamounix. She expected Ambroise home that evening. 
When she arrived in the town she noticed the unemployed 



1894-] LlSETTE. 659 

guides standing about in groups, and talking very earnestly and 
seriously, with here and there one or two women. To be sure, 
the unemployed guides usually stood about thus in little groups, 
but in a manner lazier, more indifferent, and not in this sol- 
emn, absorbed fashion. Passing, Lisette heard the words, 
" Mont Blanc accident," and her heart stood still. Not hesi- 
tating an instant, she went straight up to the man standing 
nearest her, who was talking with a woman. 

"What is the matter," she said, "and what is this I hear 
about the Mont Blanc and an accident ?" 

Then this fellow did a cowardly thing ; yet he could scarce- 
ly be blamed, for with Lisette coming suddenly upon him in 
this way without a word of warning, he lost his head and could 
not tell her the truth. He was frightened, and he stammered 
out the first thing that came to him. " There has been an 
accident an accident on the Mont Blanc it was an avalanche, 
and the rope broke ; two were killed." " O my God ! who ?" 
" The German gentleman of the party and one guide, Alphonse 
Michel the guide, Alphonse Michel. That is all, that is all. 
The rest are safe and are coming down. They have recovered 
the body of the guide, and are coming down. One, in recover- 
ing it, has been a little hurt that is all not seriously but they 
are all perfectly safe." 

But he lied ; for it was Ambroise Martin, Lisette's husband, 
who had been killed, and not Alphonse Michel. And fearing 
more questions, the man moved away with the woman with 
whom he had been talking, who was his wife, and who had 
been too dumbfounded to say a word. 

Now, Lisette believed him, but she determined, nevertheless, 
to make further inquiries at the Hotel Royal, whence the party 
had started. Then a strange thing happened. For the gargon 
to whom she put the questions unknowingly made the same 
mistake that the man in the village deliberately had made. 
" There has been an accident to the party who started from 
here to make the ascent of the Mont Blanc," he said. And he 
went on to tell her how on Tuesday they had started from the 
Grands-Mulets, and were on their way to the top, when an ava- 
lanche had come and two had been swept away before the 
others could draw a second breath. The others were safe, how- 
ever. It was only these two the German gentleman in the 
party of Americans and one guide Alphonse Michel. They 
had succeeded in recovering the body of the guide almost im- 
mediately, and it had been at the Grands-Mulets over night, 



660 Li SETT E. [Feb., 

and now they were bringing it down. He did not know 
whether they had yet found the German gentleman. One of 
the men had come down immediately with the news. It was 
a terrible thing, indeed ; but it was fortunate that no one 
else had been killed. One of the other guides he who had re- 
covered the body, had been a little hurt, but not seriously. 
What is the name? One Ambroise Martin. 

Lisette started. " Hein Ambroise Martin that is my hus- 
band "; and she stepped out of the hotel with her brows puck- 
ered into a little worried expression ; she did not like to hear 
that Ambroise had been hurt. But it was brave of him, was it 
not, and like him to have recovered the dead guide's body? 
And just at that moment, as if to verify the waiter's statement, 
Rose Michel, the wife of Alphonse Michel, passed, weeping, on 
another woman's arm. 

Lisette having accomplished her errand, then walked home- 
ward, meditating seriously on all that had happened. Was it 
not strange the will of the good God ? He did what was for 
the best, certainly ; but those two had been married only a 
year. It was very sad. She must see if she could comfort or 
aid this poor Rose Michel in her great trouble. 

Musing on many things, she at last saw coming towards her 
a little procession of men, two of them bearing between them 
an ugly thing the litter with the body of the guide. 

" But they have passed Rose Michel's house it is strange," 
thought Lisette ; and then she saw them stop at her own home, 
which stood a little way down the road. *' Why, why are they 
stopping there oh !" 

Lisette stood perfectly still. An iron hand, cruel and 
merciless, grasped her heart, and seemed to squeeze upward in 
a rushing flood all the blood therein, choking her, dyeing her 
throat and face crimson, so that her heart was left dry and 
sere ; and then, did not that crimson flood fall back into 
it again slowly, drop by drop, each like some ponderous weight ? 
And she turned ghastly white. She felt herself growing deadly 
cold from top to toe, and for a moment she could not move 
she was as one paralyzed. Then with all her might she ran to 
where that ugly procession had stopped at her own door, and 
there lay Ambroise, beautiful and smiling, but dead dead ! 

Lisette uttered not a shriek not a sound. She sank on her 
knees. She bent forward staring, her arms hanging down stiff- 
ly a little back from her body, with strenuously closed fists. 
She had the look of a hypnotized person : the mouth open in 



1894.] LlSETTE. 66 1 

a round O, the eyes wide, distended, glassy. Like the head of 
a Marie Antoinette after the execution, she wore an expression 
of bewildered astonishment and surprise, rather than of terror 
or pain. And she knelt motionless for thirty dreadful seconds, 
gazing at the inanimate object which lay before her. Those 
about her stood as if mesmerized, in complete silence, and 
stared in a frightened way at the tragic, fascinated form. 
Those thirty seconds seemed interminable, and they thought 
she would never move. But as the knowledge of what had hap- 
pened grew within her, her gaze changed, becoming less stupe- 
fied, more wild. And with the horror growing unbearably, she 
upraised her arms, which sought the air with hands clenched in 
fierce anguish. The half-closed lids showed the intense pain in 
the gray eyes ; deep furrows came between the brows ; the head 
was thrown back ; the open mouth took an agonized droop. It was 
an attitude expressive of deepest despair. She swayed once, and 
fell forward without a moan prone on the earth with extended 
arms. All this happened in less than a minute, and not an out- 
cry was uttered, nor a single sound. The quiet of the grave 
reigned ; and they picked her up and carried her into the 
house, following slowly with their other burden lying frozen 
horridly stiff and still. It was terrible ; shriekings, and shriek- 
ings again and again, they would not so much have minded. 
They had come prepared for loud outcries and wailings ; they 
had expected a painful scene ; but nothing they had expected 
seemed so dreadful as this dumb and tortured agony and 
despair. 

II. 

Poor Lisette! After Ambroise's funeral they could not do 
much with her. She lay on the bed with wide-open eyes, in her 
little black dress, and she neither moved nor said a word. 
They spoke to her, she did not heed them ; they brought her 
food, she would not touch it. The good cur came to see her, 
but it was not of much avail. So did the old Mere Payot who 
was so wise, and to whom everybody ran when there was sick- 
ness or trouble. But even the Mere Payot's wisdom did not 
suffice this time. Not even to Pierre, her little boy, would she 
respond. Pierre knew at first that something terrible had 
happened, and was very sad and cried. But his baby mind 
could not fully grasp that his father had gone away for ever. 



662 LISETTE. [Feb., 

He could not understand that it was death, nor, in fact, what 
"death" was. And Berthe, when she saw that he could do his 
mother no good, kept him away and gave him his toys to 
play with and sweets to eat. It broke her heart to see his little 
face so sad and pale, as it was breaking already at the sight of 
her sister Lisette, added to the sorrow and shock of her good 
brother-in-law's death. 

That evening Berthe, who was untiring in her devotion to 
her sister, said to the Mere Payot : " If she would but cry ; but 
she has not shed a tear since it all happened." 

But the Mere Payot sagely nodded her head. " Do not 
fear," she said, " she will soon sleep. She will become exhaust- 
ed and sleep without knowing it. Else if she does not and 
does not cry, she will go out of her mind. Do not look so 
startled, my child. As I know Lisette, that will not happen. I 
tell thee she will soon sleep. And when she does, do thou go 
thyself and take some rest, as thou hast need of it. Thou wilt 
be where thou canst hear her if she makes the slightest sound, 
or calls thee. But she will not, for it will be the sleep of ex- 
haustion. Then, when she wakes, have ready a bowl of hot 
porridge, and something before her eyes a statue of our Bless- 
ed Lady, Lisette is so religious or something that will touch 
her, so that she will be moved to tears, for tears will be the 
best medicine in the world for her." 

The Mere Payot had been very good and kind, and had 
helped put Pierre to bed, and Berthe believed all she said, for 
she had implicit faith in her wisdom. As it was growing late, 
the Mere Payot took her departure, and left Berthe alone with 
her sister. And now it seemed that it was all going to happen 
as she had prophesied. Berthe noticed a change in Lisette. 
Her eyelids fluttered and drooped. Then the gray eyes closed. 
She opened them again afterwards, but looked at Berthe dreami- 
ly, the hard expression gone, and Berthe imagined there was 
almost a half-smile in them, and presently they closed again. 
A little later, while jumping up to arrange the dripping candle, 
Berthe was surprised and shocked to see them open and staring ; 
but after a minute the lids drooped. 

And then it seemed that Lisette really was sleeping at last. 
By-and-by, when the early hours of the morning began to creep 
in, Berthe arose and said quietly, " Lisette." No answer. And 
there was still no answer when she bent over her and touched 
her softly, saying again, " Lisette, Lisette." Then, rejoicing, she 



1894-] LlSETTE. 663 

tip-toed her way across the floor, where she paused to take a 
last glance at Lisette, listening to her regular breathing. When 
she had gained her room she undressed and said her simple 
prayers. She intended to rest only a little, and to listen to 
any sound from her sister; but, exhausted from long watching, 
without knowing it she was soon fast asleep. 

But Lisette was not asleep. It is true that for some time 
after her sister had left her she lay quite motionless. But 
when all was very quiet she arose suddenly to a sitting pos- 
ture. Her face was gray with pain. Never before had she 
locked as she then did. Her mouth was long and drawn, her 
cheeks haggard, her eyes stony and staring. She sprang from 
the bed and rushed to the closed door that led into the road. 
And she opened it quite softly, so as not to make any sound ; 
but this she did only through instinct, for Lisette, in her frenzy, 
but partly knew what she was about. For an instant she stood 
under the stars, the cool night-wind blowing in her face. Then 
like a wild creature she flew down the road, running like a 
hunted deer, swift and straight. 

Where she ran the trees cast black shadows across the 
whiteness that the moon shed. The night odors, sweet, fra- 
grant, dewy, hung in the air. The night was glorious ; its 
magic was incomparable. Where that glimmering, shimmering, 
mystic light was not, dense dark was thrown by the trees and 
shrubs that of themselves stood out bright and silvered in out- 
lines pure and firm. There reigned a deep stillness, not a sound 
was heard, and a mystery brooded over all. Above, in the air, 
near the blessed, star-strewn skies, perhaps that wondrous white- 
ness was the light from the eyes of the spirits of the holy dead ; 
who knows ? 

When Lisette came out upon an open space there stretched 
away the interminable line of snow-mountains, radiant now and 
dazzling, with the Mont Blanc rising above them all, majestic, 
like death itself like death itself, so calm, and cold, and white, 
and still, serene, indifferent, beautiful. Above it sailed the sweet 
fair moon, holy and calm, untroubled by a single cloud ; near 
by a great star gleamed. It was a sight to make one go down 
on one's knee with the hand pressed against the throbbing 
heart, and with a cry of joy to thank God for creating on earth 
such beauty. But Lisette heeded it not she heeded not this 
strange and marvellous beauty. She stood there in the silvered 
road and flung aloft her arms, and shook them in angry de- 



664 LiSETTE. [Feb., 

fiance at the smiling Mont Blanc. Treacherous! treacherous! 
It was terrible, indeed, to see that black figure, so pitifully hu- 
man in its aspect with uplifted, frantic arms and impassioned 
face, marring the loveliness of that unearthly and magical night. 

Behind her, a few paces on, stood a little shrine. Lisette, 
turning, saw it, and she ran to it, and stood before it, her head 
held back defiantly. At its foot was laid a little bunch of 
flowers. 

Lisette's devout hands had placed a bunch there each day 
as she walked behind La Grise ; but now this one was quite 
faded and dead, as she had not passed for three long mornings. 
She snatched it up, and flung it fiercely afar ; then, as if in 
contrition, she began hastily pulling up the sleeping flowers that 
stood near, making them into a bunch, thrusting them crazily, 
in her half-delirium, at the foot of the shrine. Now, this shrine 
was very well carven, and really beautiful ; something there was 
so strange and sad in the figure upon the cross, with its droop- 
ing head, and mouth drawn and agonized in pain, and half-closed, 
weary, dying eyes. 

Suddenly Lisette, overpowered, fell upon her knees ; and she 
beat her fists against her temples, her face cruelly distorted ; 
and at last an agonized cry broke from her lips : " O my God, 
my God ! let me die ah je souffre Jesu-Christ, ayez pitie de 
moi ! " 

She sank at the foot of the cross ; and the figure that hung 
upon it with arms outstretched for the whole world He who 
had suffered and died for all poor sinners seemed to look down 
upon her in sorrow, and yet with infinite love. 

Lisette lay quite still. Indeed, she felt utterly powerless to 
move ; her head fell upon her arm ; her eyelids drooped weari- 
ly. What was this odd feeling stealing over her, benumbing 
her senses this torpor ? 

She could not notice, in truth, so very imperceptible was 
it, that the glorious moonlight was dimming ; yet it was true 
it was dimming. Now, a strange stir broke the silence a whis- 
per, a murmur soft and gentle, and so faint as to be scarcely 
heard, yet a sound that broke the spell of that intense quiet. 
" The leaves on the trees have moved," thought Lisette, and 
she opened her eyes, which had closed. 

What was that queer thing afar in the skies of the East ? 
It was not light, nor was it shadow it was nothing ; yet some- 
thing was there. What was it? Pierre's laughing eyes? Ah, 






1894-] LlSETTE. 665 

Pierre ! she must go to him her poor little son ; she should not 
have left him. But this deadly feeling of fatigue she could 
not move. Why, there was Pierre himself sitting on the grass 
near her ! He was roughly pulling up the flowers and flinging 
them about. " Pierre, thou shouldst not throw the flowers about 
like that ; they must be treated gently, most tenderly, my little 
one. They are beautiful, and are God's flowers." But now he 
was making them into a little nosegay to bring home to his 
father ; but his father his father Ambroise was dead dead 
dead ! Ah, God ! this sharp, stabbing pain in the heart, like a 
knife like a two-edged knife oh, do not stab so ! And 
well but this pressure on the eyelids ! There was Berthe and 
the Pere Fourier standing and looking at her with serious eyes. 
What were they saying ? Now they were coming towards her, 
smiling. No, they were really not there at all. But there again 
was that strange thing in the skies of the east ! It was color 
no, only the shade of a color no, it was certainly light ! 
Why what is this ? Had the light in the skies taken a shape ? 
Oh, what is this ? Mary, sweet Mother, what is this ? . . . 

Quite long ago, when Ambroise and Lisette had been first 
married, they had made a little visit to Paris. On Sunday they 
had gone to Mass in a little church where there was a beauti- 
ful stained-glass window. It represented figures of men and 
women, children even, who seemed bowed down by sorrow or 
sickness or suffering. But it was the central figure standing 
alone, strong and beautiful, that had held Lisette so awed and 
spell-bound. On the foot of the window were the words 
" Christus Consolator," and it went on further to say that it 
had been erected to the memory of one Marie Elise Le Due. 
And the power and strength and majesty of that figure Lisette 
had never forgotten ; nor its sweetness, nor its peace. Ambroise 
had liked it, too. And now here stood the same the very 
same. The serene, sweet, steadfast eyes held within them infi- 
ite mercy and love, and they shone with a light that gleamed 
out from within, steady and strong ; compassionate and calm ; 
all-seeing, all-knowing ; the upheld arm was raised as if in bene- 
diction ; one hand lay quietly on the breast of the white, glis- 
tening robe. And the glory of the moon seemed not of itself, 
but to come from the figure, from the shining countenance and 
hair ; and he said not one word, but those pitying eyes, with 
their glorified gaze, were bent upon her. 



666 LISETTE. [Feb., 

Overwhelmed, she fell on her face in mute adoration. 

When she dared look up again that marvellous figure had 
gone. That she knew, but he had left another in his place. It 
was Ambroise. Now she was not at all frightened, not even 
surprised. It seemed quite natural. Only she could not move, 
nor speak only kneel there, staring, with outstretched hands. 
And she felt completely, indubitably happy ; for it was her 
husband her own tall, strong, brave Ambroise. He came up 
to her and took her outstretched hands in his, and began to 
talk in his same old happy way very rapidly, slurring over his 
words at the end of his sentences. Only he said beautiful 
things which sank deep, deep into her soul. 

He told her she must not wish to die ; that was cowardly 
she who had always been so brave in hours of trial and dis- 
may and she had much for which to live. There, first of all, 
was the little Pierre, who must be brought up to become a fine 
man. There was her young sister, Berthe ; and, though she 
might not know it, many others. And after the first bitterness 
of her grief had passed away she would be again quite happy 
yes, very happy. Who could expect to live long in the world, 
and go through life without suffering without keen and bitter 
disappointments, or without grief ? No one. It was but the 
common lot. Some experienced more, some less ; but those 
who thought to escape it were fools. . . . " Let thy heart 
be strong. Do not turn and fly in life's battle ; be not a coward, 
but fight and conquer. There are those who do not believe in 
God that is sad and terrible ; but scarcely so sad and terrible 
as those who do believe in him, and who, when he sees 
best to send his burdens upon them, turn against him and 
rebel ; as thou hast almost done, my poor Lisette. I have 
loved thee. I have never loved thee as I do now. But, loving 
thee, though it means separation for years, I can only wish to 
see thee living upon the earth until thy work on it is nobly 
done, and well. There is Pierre ; he will grow from childhood 
into boyhood, from boyhood into manhood. And life ah, life, 
Lisette, is filled with terrible dangers, snares, and temptations ! 
Pierre will need a mother's hand. Thou must be his guardian 
angel upon earth, and see that he grows up to be a good man, 
no.ble and brave. And now good-by good-by until " 

He bent and kissed her forehead with infinite tender- 
ness and was gone. There followed for her a period of dark- 
ness. 



1894-] LlSETTE. 667 

That low, continuous murmur grew noisier. And the waning 
of the glory of the moon, at first so imperceptible, was now 
quite apparent. The dense black shadows about began to grow 
faint and gray. The trees and shrubs that had looked in the 
weird light so strange took on bolder outlines, became more 
natural, at last stood out fresh and green. In expectancy of 
that which was to come, the shy stars paled ; one by one they 
quietly withdrew. Down the heavens crept the moon, timid, 
too, before the coming of one mightier than she, hiding her 
fairness behind a veil of mist and light. A few little clouds, 
white and fleecy, sailed across the sky. And the leaves on the 
trees were still rustling. A shy little breeze timidly invited 
them to play. Then, gaining courage, it rushed joyously among 
them, so that they quivered and shook in tremulous delight at 
the advent of so boon a playfellow, and turned from him 
saucily with soft laughter was it not their sweet laughter, that 
low, happy murmur ? The atmosphere was gray and fresh and 
cool. Afar in the eastern skies that shadow of a color had 
flushed and deepened and flamed to a red, at first dull, then 
vivid and brilliant red banners unfurled there in the east to 
herald the coming of the mighty one. Now little birds, unseen, 
unheard before, began to appear ; they rumpled their feathers 
sleepily, for, they were not yet fully awake. Then they began 
to twitter and to hop about from twig to twig. Suddenly one 
winged high up into the air, straight as an arrow ; another 
broke into jubilant song. O glad, O blessed, joyous song of 
praise ! It was Sunday morning. 

III. 

When Lisette awoke to consciousness the sun had quite arisen ; 
but it was yet very early morning. The little fleecy clouds had 
turned to gold ; some, lower down, glowed a deep rose. Like 
good ships before the breeze, swiftly they sailed across a sea of 
blue. And the young day was deliciously cool. 

A bird, flying low, and brushing its wings across her face, a 
gleam of sunshine in the eyes, had awakened Lisette. At first 
she was bewildered and shocked to find herself lying on the 
damp ground ; then it all came back to her how she had run 
out there in the night in a half-frenzy ; how, exhausted, she 
had fallen in the road ; and the wonderful and beautiful hap- 
pening. That she could never forget ! Its memory brought to 



668 LISETTE. [Feb., 

her a feeling akin to the serene and perfect happiness that 
sweet, rapturous music, heaven-like in its felicity, brings to those 
who love it. She arose to her knees ; she rubbed her hands 
across her eyes and looked up into the sky. Then her gaze fell 
upon the cross ; and a sudden pain shot through her heart such 
as she had not before felt. 

For there was One who had endured infinite tortures and 
wrongs, who had borne upon his shoulders the weight of all 
human woes for the sake of ungrateful human kind. And this 
One-Only Sacrifice had been done in expiation for their wrongs 
and crimes, and through an infinite divine compassion for all 
who sin and who suffer he who had suffered so much and had 
sinned never. And this had been done for her and her sins, 
which had but added to this great suffering, compared with 
which hers was not even as a grain of sand to the great round 
earth. O bitterest pain ! O deepest grief unparalleled ! What 
had she done what had she done ? 

All this this peasant woman thought. She burst into a tor- 
rent of tears. She buried her face in her hands. Great sobs 
shook her slight frame from head to foot. Now, it was fortu- 
nate that no one chanced that way, else they might have been 
dismayed at the sight of a woman weeping in the road. But it 
happened that not a soul had passed during the whole time 
that she had been there. 

But she was weeping, not for her sorrow, but for a cause 
sent her from Heaven. And, as in summer-time the rain descends 
purifying the overcharged and overweighted atmosphere, so did 
those chastening tears fall upon Lisette's soul, overcharged, 
overweighted with pain. And there arose within her infinite 
peace, as the sun shines forth after the storm and all is calm 
and quiet. Her sobs checked, her tears dried, she knelt for a 
moment with clasped hands, praying simply for forgiveness for 
any rebellious thoughts she had had in the first great anguish 
of her grief and pain ; for strength to bring up the little Pierre 
as Ambroise wished him to be brought up; in thanksgiving for 
the wonderful thing that had happened to her. Then she arose 
and turned her steps homeward. 

Berthe awoke early, and quickly made her toilet. Then she 
went to the bedside of her sister to see if she still slept, and 
she found her gone. She stood dumbfounded for an instant, as 
immovable as a statue of stone. Then she began running hastily 
from room to room, calling, " Lisette, Lisette, Lisette!" 



1 894.] 



LlSETTE. 



669 



She called quietly at first, pausing, as though confident of a 
response ; but when no answer came, her voice rose higher and 
higher into one long, frightened scream. Tears of terror stood 
in her eyes ; she panted, and uttered with her screaming little 
ejaculations of prayer. When she again reached Lisette's room 
she saw Pierre sitting up in his little bed in the room adjoin- 
ing, and calling pitifully for his mother. The big, wondering 
baby eyes were blurred ; drops trembled on their lids, and 
trickled slowly down the round cheeks. 

In her panic Berthe was about to run out of the house and 
arouse the neighbors, when Lisette stood in the door. Pierre 
saw her first, and clambered down with a delighted cry, running to 
her with outstretched arms. Lisette caught him up and strained 
him to her heart, and he laughed aloud merrily, pulling her 
cheeks and kissing her. Berthe's expression of mingled fear, re- 
gret, reproach, relieved anxiety, and sisterly commiseration 
changed to one of wondering awe. For Lisette stood in the 
sunlight, smoothing with a swift, tender, motherly stroke the 
boy's tossed and tumbled hair. And she smiled, and her smile 
was as the Morning Star. 





670 THE ANN ARBOR STRIKE [Feb., 



THE ANN ARBOR STRIKE AND THE LAW OF 

HIRING. 

BY GEORGE MCDERMOT. 

[INCE the decision in the Ann Arbor railroad 
strike great interest has been awakened among all 
classes. In this case Judge Ricks seems only 
to have declared the law passed to make inter- 
state communication effective, notwithstanding the 
rules of certain labor unions. His judgment apparently amounted 
to nothing more thai* a declaration of the law intended to se- 
cure the continuity of traffic between one State and another, no 
matter what union rules are adopted by the employees of a 
railway company calculated to prevent or hamper it. We do 
not criticise the policy of the law in this particular matter. We 
barely suggest that the public at large have an interest in effi- 
cient railway service, as they have in their food-supplies, coal- 
supplies, intelligence, illumination, and so on; and that they 
are not likely to brook a course of action interfering with the 
enjoyment of it. 

THE LAW ON PUBLIC CARRIERS. 

For the advantage of the public exceptional duties and lia- 
bilities have been imposed upon common carriers from time im- 
memorial. It would be beside the question to discuss how far 
and under what conditions such carriers may contract themselves 
out of their liabilities. But as, even in special contracts of ex- 
emption, they must prove that they were in no way to blame ; 
that it is not sufficient simply, as it would be in any other class 
of cases, to throw down the special contract and rest their case 
upon it, it must be conceded that they lie under burdens to 
which no other class is subject, or at least to anything like the 
same extent. 

It therefore would seem somewhat fair that such carriers 
should not be altogether barred from fulfilling their obligations 
because of the insufficiency of assistance from the law. The 
law imposes duties upon them which, to put it broadly, must 
be fulfilled at any cost. It casts liabilities upon them which, 
in broad terms, cling under all circumstances save a visitation 







1894-] AND THE LAW OF HIRING. 671 

of God. It seems, then, equitable enough that the legislature 
should not leave them without the means of compelling their 
servants in certain cases to enable them to discharge the duties. 
If railway servants could fly off when a train was about to 
start, or abandon the train upon its way, there would seem to be 
no remedy to the company for the losses to which they would be- 
come immediately liable to passengers and consignees of goods.* 
To say that they had a remedy against the revolting em- 
ployees, is of course true, technically ; but in fact it is the 
sheerest nonsense. The employee would be as good a security 
for the damages and costs as the common vouchee of the old 
fines and recoveries for the value of the lands he vouched, or 
as the justice of a Turkish pasha for the restoration of the 
goods of a plundered Christian. 

THE OTHER 'SIDE OF THE CASE. 

All this so far seems fair dealing enough. But then if the 
legislature steps in to aid railway companies to fulfil their en- 
gagements, we see no reason why it should not interfere, within 
proper limits, on behalf of the employees. Turn about is fair 
play, the sages of antiquity and all other old women of the 
kind tell us. We think that this turn about can be de- 
manded on principles so straight and authoritative that they 
cannot be disputed. We think that an enactment to amend 
the interpretation of contracts of hiring would meet a great 
deal of the difficulty that now besets the labor question. And 
when we say that the interpretation of such contracts should be 
amended, we mean no more than to apply principles often ap- 
plied in courts of law, and which stand as the basis of the 
matchless equitable jurisprudence of England and this country. 

I must not be supposed to limit this proposal to contracts 
between railway companies and their employees. All labor 
contracts should have terms imported into them by implica- 
tion of law which would protect the weaker party against ad- 
vantage arising from his necessity, his ignorance, or from the 
fraud, overreaching, and undue influence of the other party. 
No doubt there might be some difficulty in the practical working 
of this in many cases of individual employers. The horrible 
system of sweating and subcontracting generally might be hard 
to reach by an enactment that would depend for its working 
in some degree upon publicity. Yet even here I do not think 

* The contract is made with the consignee by implication of law, and not with the con- 
signor, though the latter sends the goods. 



672 THE ANN ARBOR STRIKE [Feb., 

the difficulty insuperable ; but I am very clearly of opinion that 
such a course would be successful in the case of employees of 
large companies and corporations. I shall show this by and by. 

WHY THE LATE STRIKES WERE UNSUCCESSFUL. 

It has been observed that the working-men have been de- 
feated in most of the recent strikes. This is the case. Various 
causes have been assigned for the want of success of the men. 
So far as I can judge and the same view is taken by persons 
eminently fitted to pronounce upon the subject there was an 
error arising from impatience or impracticability in the initiation 
of the strike or in some subsequent stage of it. No doubt the 
notion has gone abroad that for the most part the strikes were 
entered upon wantonly and capriciously, and conducted with a 
reckless and domineering spirit which made it incumbent upon 
the employers to spare no expense, to suffer every loss rather 
than submit. 

I do not, of course, take this view. That strikes have been 
entered upon unadvisedly I think is abundanjly evident. They 
have been begun often without due regard of the means to the 
end ; sometimes without a clear idea on the part of the strikers 
of what they wanted. But the latter part of this statement cer- 
tainly does not apply to the failure in the Ann Arbor case, 
though perhaps the first does pretty distinctly. On the authori- 
ty of the Grand Master of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Fire- 
men, we find that the grievance was stated with the utmost 
clearness and precision to the proper officials of the railroad. 
I think, upon the whole, it will be found that the failure of 
strikes depends as much on the staying power of the strikers 
as on the justice of their cause. 

If I am right, this becomes a serious consideration in dealing 
with the entire controversy between labor and capital. I can- 
not and I will not believe that strikes have been entered upon 
causelessly. The few cents in a wages dispute never represent 
all the elements and influences at. work in the controversy. 
They are often the occasion of the outbreak prepared by the 
seething of deep and dangerous passions. 

I fear that some time, when least expected, a threatened re- 
duction of wages or a demand for increased wages, or some such 
cause ruffling the surface of society, will be the herald of a peril 
as surely as the white waves above a reef tell the dangers hid- 
den under them. It is the duty of public men to watch such 
indications now. There is no question for governments that 






I 894.] AND THE LA W OF HIRING. 6/3 

bears any proportion to this labor question in the vastness of 
the consequences flowing from neglect of dealing with it. 

FATUITY OF GOVERNMENTS AND CAPITALISTS. 

From Tyler's rebellion to the labor strike, every outbreak of 
working-men, every menacing display of strength directed to- 
wards the privileged or fortunate orders of society, sprang from 
some apparently trivial cause. Their long-suffering has been mis- 
understood by employers and rulers alike. The selfishness of 
the first, the blindness of the last, have between them imperilled 
society. 

The aspect of the labor question in this country in the pre- 
sent hour is grave and menacing. Judge Rick's decision, cap- 
ping the series of disasters to the trade-unions, has had an 
ominous effect on the more extreme of the labor circles. Any 
one who accepts the confident opinion of some capitalists since 
that decision, that strikes and boycotts are at an end, will find 
himself wofully mistaken. Those capitalists themselves had bet- 
ter bear in mind that the defeated strikers, all union men in 
fact, say the same ; but they say it with the fierce significance 
of men with the future for good or evil in their hands. Strikes 
and boycotts are at an end, the workmen echo ; but they add, 
We will pursue our ends by some weapon that shall not break 
short in our hands like the old exploded one. 

UNWISDOM OF HASTY ACTION. 

Undoubtedly the most prudent of the leaders consider the 
present the most critical period that has arisen in the history 
of the labor question in America. The opinion seems a reason- 
able one when we regard the troubles which environ labor or- 
ganizations everywhere. But when they assert that a short 
time must decide whether capital or labor shall go to the wall, 
they prophesy without inspiration and confessedly without the 
power of bringing their predictions to pass. As things look 
now, one. fails to see the nearness of the prospect. Forcing a 
crisis would be simply disastrous ; it would hand the victory to 
capital for a long time to come. 

But, on the other hand, the capitalists reckon without their 
host if they think they are going to win. The conflict has been 
going on almost from the dawn of the world. But they would 
not be wise to judge of the future by the past. Except in the 
guilds of the middle ages the laborer had to bend because all 
social influences combined to depress him. But now he is edu- 
VOL. LVIII. 45 



674 THE ANN ARBOR STRIKE [Feb., 

cated he belongs to that brotherhood to which education lifts 
mankind. The future shall see no cycles of Cathay for the 
toilers. Men prefer progress at any risk they prefer the rush 
of the torrent, even with its danger, to the slow safety of the 
pool. But progress can be combined with safety for those who 
build the prosperity of states, as well as for those who enjoy it 
without the toil. 

Some well-meaning people complain that employers regard 
the working-man as a mere machine from which the most work 
is to be got at the least expense. I am inclined to think that 
much time is wasted in attempts to show that he has a 
mind and rights and feelings. This is not the way really to 
cope with the hard and tyrannical intelligence that presides 
over the employment of labor in great enterprises, and often 
enough in small ones. These men say a bargain is a bargain. 
They don't care a straw about the workman's rights or feelings. 
They bring to the discussion the arguments and heart of Shy. 
lock. They regard talk of the rights of the workman, his feel- 
ings, and the dignity of labor, at the best as ad captandum 
appeals to laborers or pious platitudes for Sunday display. If 
they condescend to reply to such rhetoric at all, they do so 
by a retort : How do you treat your own servants ? Do you 
abate one tittle of the rights the contract gives you ? 

INSENSIBILITY OF CAPITALISTS. 

When a good, earnest man, overflowing with ill-directed 
benevolence, threatens the plutocrat with the judgments of God, 
he replies with the story of the man who made a fortune by 
minding his own business. Those moneyed people, though they 
lack the repose that marks the caste of Vere de Vere, can 
often speak with as much cynical scorn of enthusiasm as if their 
plebeian puddle were the bluest blood in the universe. Plati- 
tudes and theories which might make the world of labor an 
Eden are not the methods to convince these men. Strikes 
have been, clumsy as they are, better arguments than the finest 
sentiments from poets and preachers. 

THE LEVER OF PUBLIC OPINION. 

Much may be done by enlisting the public at large upon 
the side of labor. They have not been sufficiently appealed to 
in the past, although they have in the last resort the ruling 
power over all controversies. If the conditions which embitter 



1894-] AND THE LAW OF HIRING. 675 

the lives of the laboring classes are fully and honestly stated 
to the public, it seems to me impossible that pressure of an 
irresistible character would not be put upon the legislature. 
No one can deny that among the broad mass of American citi- 
zens a love of liberty and justice prevails. Perhaps in no coun- 
try in the world is there a more genuine sympathy with man 
abstracted from the special relations of race or creed. No- 
where since the Catholic Church informed the old world with 
the spirit of charity is such tenderness manifested to suffering 
as in the benevolent institutions of the United States. In a 
dim but not unhopeful manner the regard for the great human- 
ities, which one finds here, moves in the path of the splendid 
charities of the ages of faith. Protestant America approaches 
nearest to the church that covered Europe with asylums for 
every form of mental and physical disease until the bandits of 
the Reformation despoiled or destroyed them. 

I therefore think that the public can be trusted to secure 
justice for the working-man if they are made acquainted with 
his true position, if they are told all that the present condi- 
tions of labor mean in certain avocations, and to some extent 
in all. It may be said that the labor question is and has been 
before the people just as much as that of abolition years ago ; 
that it has been viewed in all aspects and presented with ar-. 
gument, menace, demonstration, and deeds of violence in forms 
as various as any great question of the century in the countries 
of Europe. This, in truth, is not the case. It was the discon- 
tent of a class, or rather of an interest, within the state 
making an eddy on the surface. The movement of the indus- 
trial classes was only understood to be an accident causing a 
very slight, partial, and temporary heaving of the waters. The 
bursting of a reservoir, the failure of a crop in part of a State, 
a fire in a city would be regarded as more serious matters than 
the discontent of working-men. Their complaints were pooh- 
poohed by every one. Why, it was a pleasant way of masters 
to meet the complaints of a union by saying that the men 
wanted handsome houses furnished at great expense, cups by 
Cellini, and pictures by the old masters, or at least copies hardly 
distinguishable from the originals, yachts and horses. " Sir, I 
myself have all these things now," this Bunderley would say; 
" but I began in the gutter and worked my way up. Let my 
servants do the same and they will all be as I am." * 

*The word " servants " is a familiar one among English employers when speaking even 
of clerks at a high salary. 



676 THE ANN ARBOR STRIKE [Feb., 

The fact is that the grievances of workmen were only formu- 
lated in strikes. This was unfortunate in many respects. First, 
a strike reveals nothing or very little. Frequently it is more 
calculated to enrage the public than to win their sympathy. If 
a great city is left in darkness, or deprived of food, or compelled 
to shiver for want of coal when the mercury is down to zero, I 
venture to say that it will discuss the situation in language 
as warm as that of the speakers at a temperance meeting. 
The public feel the inconvenience arising from the strike ; they 
think the matter at issue is a bagatelle, and they naturally get 
furious. The superior resources and craft of the masters take 
advantage of the public attitude. 

THE REALITY OF THE QUESTION. 

But the labor question is there for all that a spectre menac- 
ing and terrible, not to be laid by old-fashioned economic crot- 
chets, nor by the commonplaces of a pluralist incumbent waving 
perfume from his pocket-handkerchief while the squire snores in 
the family pew, nor by imperial armies. The sooner the public 
know this the better for society : that neither the legions of 
Caesar, nor the maxims and teaching fables of Menenius, no 
more than the bowed head of Lazarus, can solve the question ; 
but solved it shall be. The dragoons of a despot would be 
more likely to succeed in settling the dispute between labor 
and capital than those good souls who tell masters that they 
should be kind spelling the word " kynde " and the men that 
they should be good spelling it with unlimited o's. 

Thinking of these soft-headed philanthropists, one is tempted 
to say that the people are right to disregard their advice. For 
my part, I have always heard that hungry men will not be fed 
by words, and I believe it. Be content with your station ; do 
your appointed work ; inequalities shall be redressed hereafter ; 
meanwhile I shall speak to Dives, the mill-owner, on your 
behalf! This is the sort of twaddle addressed to men with 
low pay, hard work, and large families. 

What have they for all that but a famine from the cradle 
to the grave ? What are starvation wages ? what the foul sur- 
roundings of childhood, of youth, of middle and old age? 
what the inheritance of all that is sordid and revolting? what 
this doom of unlovely life ? life made hideous, life that had 
better not have been what is it all but a hunger of the soul 
and body that must drive wise men mad ? 



1894.] AND THE LAW OF HIRING. 677 

WHAT THE STATE HAS DONE FOR LABOR. 

If the laboring classes were to be kept- at the galley-oar 
for ever they should have been kept in ignorance. By educat- 
ing the children of the poor the state has raised them to a 
sense of their dignity, increased their needs, and roused their 
ambition. A civilized life, a life in some degree of comfort, is 
the second term of the public school. The state must accept 
the logical result of enabling the laboring classes to understand 
their capabilities and enlarging their wants. Every artisan in 
fairly good times can now live with more of the comforts and 
conveniences of life at his hand, and in some respects with 
better food, than great nobles three centuries ago. An Eng- 
lish, Scotch, or Irish nobleman who could then bring ten thou- 
sand men into the field lived under more unsanitary conditions 
than a well-to-do tradesman to-day. Under his armor, under 
his buff, under his velvet, under his ermine he concealed more 
than his own nakedness. The wife of a mechanic with decent 
wages to-day is incomparably cleaner in her person than a 
court beauty of the last century. 

It is with people so advanced in their conceptions of what 
is due to themselves and to their families that the state has to 
deal if the employers will not. I am very well aware that all 
workmen do not possess the advantages just mentioned. But 
very many of them do. Almost all American workmen possess 
the education of the first and more favored class, and naturally 
desire to possess the other good things too. And one way or 
other, sooner or later, they will possess them, or know the rea- 
son why. Can this state, this great country, neglect them as the 
peoples of Europe have been neglected, until we find all its 
governments swaying to and fro on their uncertain seats? 

A GOOD EXAMPLE IN ENGLAND. 

There certainly is one very promising sign in the principles 
of the new English school of political economy. It is a return 
to reason from the aberrations of the last hundred years. 
Though its exponents are non-Catholics, they recognize society 
as a living body a whole which must control the life of each 
component part if the parts are to remain healthy ; assure to 
each its fitting function instead of permitting, and still less aid- 
ing, some parts to obtain an abnormal development at the ex- 
pense of the rest. This has been the teaching of the Church 
against the Academy and the Portico, and her action when 



678 THE ANN ARBOR STRIKE [Feb., 

moulding the young governments of Europe as they rose from 
the ashes of the fallen civilization. This is her teaching 
now. 

The pretence so often put forward against interference by 
the state in private enterprises really has no weight. It con- 
founds judicious interference with mere meddling. If the objec- 
tion were well taken, it would include education as well as 
other individual rights. On the ground that such interference 
destroys enterprise and checks prosperity, private contracts 
should be unfettered in all their phases and conditions. There 
should be no supervision over factories or industries where 
work has been so long done in circumstances prejudicial to 
health, dangerous to life. The employers never contemplated 
in their contracts that they should provide safeguards against 
disease or against peril to limb or life until the state stepped 
in and, as it were, imported a new clause into the contracts. 

The right of interference by the state is so far admitted. 
Why, then, should it be limited to such supervision ? No one 
can give a reason why it should not adjust wages so as to give 
sufficient food, save self-respect, and provide a fund for old 
age, when it will not allow an employer to enforce his contract 
at the expense of the laborer's health. When it requires the 
observance of certain imported conditions in the fulfilling of 
contracts of hiring, it so far diminishes the employer's profits. 
Where is the line to be drawn ? I think at beneficial inter- 
ference. 

PARTIAL STATE INTERFERENCE. 

Again, why should particular industries be protected while 
others are not attended to by the state? Why does it require 
that a factory must be conducted with some regard to the laws 
of hygiene, but will not interfere with contracts between rail- 
ways and their employees which make the service of these more 
perilous than service in an European army? 

In certain States of the Union the law requires that wages 
shall be paid weekly. It is at present immaterial that this 
requirement is evaded by employers, immaterial by what fraud 
and oppression they make the law a dead-letter. The material 
thing for my purpose is that the state so far interferes with 
freedom of contract between the parties. I am presenting these 
considerations, of course, for the purpose of showing that there 
is nothing in the objection so often and so contemptuously 
brought forward by capitalists, and by the older school of eco- 



1894-] AND THE LAW OF HIRING. 679 

nomtsts, that state intervention in private contracts is an im- 
proper interference with personal liberty and economically inde- 
fensible. 

SHIBBOLETHS OF THE ECONOMISTS, 

I very decidedly take issue on both points. I am quite 
ready to admit that capricious, meddling interference would be 
a check on industry, and retard or prevent the prosperity of a 
country. But so also might undue state favor to certain kinds 
of industry. Yet capitalists always demand this, economists 
often. We are very much in the habit of taking opinions on 
trust when they are advanced by persons supposed to have a 
reputation in a branch of study. I remember well when every- 
thing was settled by political economy. I also know that many 
very dull men had very good names as authorities on this so- 
called science. But one thing is very clear: that the disciples 
of Adam Smith, the founder of the science, revolted from the 
teachings of their master; and the new school now ruling the 
universities of England are at right angles with the old. 

I therefore beg respectfully to dispute any a priori pro- 
nouncements of the old political economists on the advantage 
or disadvantage of state control over industry. ^1 shall take the 
arguments at their intrinsic value. I shall not attribute one 
iota of value to the opinions independently of the arguments. 
With regard to the view of the capitalists, I dismiss it for the 
present by reminding the public that they always praise state 
intervention exercised on their side, and only denounce it when 
used on the side of their opponents. 

THE CASE IN POINT. 

At this point we again turn to the judgment in the Ann 
Arbor case, and the influence attributed to the decision in lead- 
ing up to the close of the conflict between labor and capital, 
by the blow it is said to have given to strikes. Employers in- 
fer from the judgment there that Judge Ricks gave expression 
to a belief rooted in the conscience of society, that contracts 
are inviolable. As a matter of fact, no one ever disputed 
the inviolability of contracts worthy of the name. If people 
ever examined the character of a contract with a view to deny 
its obligation, they did so from the persuasion that in one or 
more respects it was inequitable, and therefore not binding 
upon conscience. 

Now, in the case above the learned judge seems to have 



680 THE ANN ARBOR STRIKE [Feb., 

done no more than interpret the law applicable to the naked 
circumstances before him. No lawyer worthy of the name can 
be ignorant that the greater part of the jurisdiction of our 
courts of equity arose from the fact that there were classes of 
contracts enforceable at law which were contrary to good con- 
science. I need not go beyond certain contracts within the 
statute of frauds for an illustration of my meaning contracts 
binding in law which would be set aside in equity. 

NECESSITY FOR AN EMENDATION IN THE LAW. 

Here we have the example of the courts of equity relieving 
against the strict letter of the law. We suggest that the state 
should intervene by legislation on principles analogous to those 
applied in equity. We recommend nothing revolutionary. Our 
suggestions, if adopted, will not shake the security of a single 
stock; will not affect the stability of the republic; will not cause 
Pluto to leap in terror from his throne. 

ARGUMENTATIVE SOPHISTRY. 

It is a very obvious fallacy to suppose that a starving artisan 
stands on equal terms with the employer who takes advantage 
of his necessity to make him work for a wage which would not 
long keep body and soul together. It is idle to say that it is 
unjust to compel an employer to pay more than the price for 
which he can get his work done. It is rather too like the 
enforced benevolences which royalty wrung from its subjects a 
few centuries ago, the employers say. The laborer, so it is 
argued, offers his commodity in open market. The purchaser 
buys it as cheaply as he can buys it as he would an ox or an 
ass, a load of potatoes or a load of hay. It does not matter 
that the laborer sells at a low price because he can get no 
more, for that is the case with every other producer. The 
purchaser does him no injustice by taking it at that price. 
Nay, he does him a kindness. 

The argument has that degree of plausibility that sort of 
verbal exactness which when spoken it is very hard to com- 
bat, but when written is as gross, palpable as a mountain. Of 
course it rests on an utterly false analogy. Agricultural produce, 
productions in general, are not human beings. It is himself 
he hires or sells, and not a production, when the laborer comes 
to an employer. If the view so insolently put forward by 
capitalists, that they were purchasing a commodity in no way 
different from anything produced by labor, were pushed to its 



1894-] * ND THE LAW OF HIRING. 68 1 

legitimate issue it would justify any contract however infamous. 
It would be the right answer of the fraudulent ship-owners who 
found men reckless enough to go on board their heavily-insured 
coffin-ships. When Mr. Plimsoll stirred the mind of England 
against the atrocious contracts by which the lives of wretched 
seamen were gambled for he had very little to do. The sailors 
were ready to take the risk for the pay. They could not get 
employment elsewhere. When the labor market is glutted of 
course wages will be small. If Jonathan or Paddy will not 
work below a certain price, Carl or Luigi will. There are 
Russians, Poles, Scandinavians, Hungarians, besides Carl and 
Luigi. The market is ruled by capital because labor is super- 
abundant. Such arguments would justify the sale of a man's 
honor, of a woman's virtue. 

It is quite possible that the consequences just mentioned 
would not disturb the equanimity of many capitalists. It appears 
to me that Sir Pertinax MacSycophant expresses their views 
of morality pretty well. Disgusted with his son's tutor for not 
advising the young man to play the villain, he predicts that he 
will never rise in the church. Sir Pertinax naturally thought 
that the conscience of a young clergyman should be at the ser- 
vice of his patron. If the patron of a living buys the incum- 
bent's conscience for the consideration of presenting him to the 
living, good people will be shocked at the simony, sacrilege, and 
heaven knows what. But those who reduce a laborer and his 
hire to the level of a commodity dependent on the fluctuations 
of the market cannot object to the profligate contract between 
the patron of a living and his presentee. 

CYNICAL PHILOSOPHY. 

Are the public at large, is society, is the state, wise in allow- 
ing such a philosophy to regulate its life? It is the reduction 
to practice of the notions of those sciolists and sophists who 
referred everything to political economy, because they dabbled 
in it with some appearance of success and failed in everything 
else. Just as the worst tradesman in a village is always the 
tribune of the pot-house club, as men who fail as doctors 
usually become men of science ; so the dull man of his year, 
of his profession, of parliament was wont to become a political 
economist. 

These philosophers are the men who tell us that the indivi- 
dual conscience is nothing more than an accidental evolution 
from some ancient superstition, the origin of which is as hidden 



682 THE ANN ARBOR STRIKE [Feb., 

as the sources of the Nile. Consequently there is no such thing 
as public spirit, no duty to society or to the neighbor. Supply 
and demand, land, rent, wages, capital are the words to conjure 
with. They contain all wisdom, all morality. 

These impudent pretenders yelled from the house-tops that 
their crude theories were rigid and inexorable as the conclusions 
of mathematics. They obtained such influence over clubs, cote- 
ries, and drawing-rooms that their words were law. A man 
might deny every truth of revelation, but he was an infidel if 
he questioned the generalizations of these teachers. Yet no two 
of them agreed in the definition of any term of economic science, 
although every conclusion rests upon the definitions. No two 
of them agreed in the scope and application of the science, 
although the limit and utility of an experimental science should 
be easily ascertainable. 

Consequently when they maintained that society was an ag- 
gregate of atoms, or a tumultuary crowd localized and shaped 
somewhat by environment, they could very easily infer that 
society was not a necessity of man's nature, but an advantage 
to the individual ; that the individual in society preserved all 
the rights of his savage state, subject to the restraint which the 
common safety put upon their exercise. Then a man might cheat 
and swindle and extort as long as he could do so with impu- 
nity. Capitalists thought the political economist a second 
Daniel. They will soon find him far less enlightened and inter- 
esting than Balaam's ass. 

All the same, these opinions produced to some extent, and 
undoubtedly perpetuated to a large extent, the frightful evils 
under which the laboring classes suffered in England and Scot- 
land during some decades of the last century and the earlier 
part of this. This influence was hardly less felt in the United 
States among the wealthy and leisured class which sprang from 
trade, still preserves close relations with it, and in a manner forms 
the social opinion of the great employers of labor. 

THE NEW SCHOOL. 

As I have said, these opinions are discarded in England by 
the rising thinkers. How far the new school owes its origin to 
the increased power and menacing attitude of the industrial 
masses I do not profess to judge. I think, however, it is gen- 
erally admitted that the labor organizations are a more powerful 
influence in the mother country than here. This system, upon 
the whole, seems better adapted to the work they are doing, to 



I8Q4-] AND THE LAW OF HIRING. 683 

fit with more harmony into the framework of the social hierarchy 
amid which they are placed, than the American unions. At the 
same time there is no reason why the latter should not acquire 
the same standing as the English organizations. 

I think this is the best time for such an improvement of the 
unions as will bring them more closely to the level of the English. 
The possession of influence in the press and the legislature, 
and thence upon the entire public, will be the result. In this 
effort every man of public spirit every man must sympathize 
who desires the welfare of his country, and the preservation of 
society from evils the magnitude of which no one can measure. 
We are standing, perhaps, upon a narrow isthmus between the 
old order of ideas, with its strong bias towards obedience to 
authority and law, and the new order, which tends to make 
authority and law subservient to an industrial activity and en- 
terprise to be fostered in every member of society at any cost. 
If the state takes the lead in the movement, if society helps 
working-men over the hard road before them, there seems no 
reason why the whole difficulty of their relations with employers 
should not be arranged. If society is scornful, if the state is 
negligent in the supreme crisis approaching, the result will be 
beggary among the masses, vast fortunes among a few, national 
bankruptcy, out of which the country will emerge in a condi- 
tion discredited as Italy or the republics of South America. 

FORCE NO REMEDY. 

These are startling words. But they contain the true fore- 
cast of the steps of national decline. Whoever regards lightly 
this conflict in the midst of us whoever supposes it can be 
settled by the proverbial whiff of grapeshot in Parisian boule- 
vards, or the serried ranks sent forth from a German slaughter- 
house, or by additional conspiracy statutes, or unlimited Pinker- 
ton detectives, knows nothing of the danger and difficulty of the 
time. 

It is not long since in England a strike would fall within the 
meaning of a criminal conspiracy. The reasonableness of the 
demand would not be taken into account, concerted action was 
evidence of conspiracy, and as the effect was in some degree to 
injure a person it was criminal. A strike may now take place 
accompanied with circumstances of force, numbers, and parade 
such as have been held sufficient to convert a political meeting 
into an unlawful assembly. The Sixmile Bridge massacre dur- 
ing the tithe agitation in Ireland, and the Peterloo massacre 



684 THE LA w OF HIRING. [Feb., 

during the great reform agitation in England, took place in put- 
ting down meetings not one-tenth as formidable as the assem- 
blies and processions of the London dock-laborers a few years 
ago. 

We see a like advance in the United States in the legal 
recognition of unions and their demonstrations. Trade organi- 
zations are powers that cannot be ignored. Perhaps it would 
be better if the different organizations were made subject to a 
central executive, and the grievance of any particular trade 
or calling were made the business of all union men. But the 
number of societies and their membership constitute a powerful 
factor among the moral forces of the present ; so that I am at 
a loss to see how their needs or their rights for I regard the 
words as interchangeable can be disregarded by any govern- 
ment mindful of its responsibilities to the public. All that 
seems required to render the unions irresistible in enforcing the 
rights of labor is such a solid and united front as can be pre- 
sented by masses of members subject to a common control. 
Men of character and prudence should constitute the executive, 
men who will carefully weigh all complaints and demands be- 
fore sanctioning them ; but when once sanctioned will press them 
to the last. 

We hope that we have presented an important aspect of this 
controversy in a practical manner. It is the interest of every 
one, the duty of every one who has a place in this great coun- 
try, to lend as best he can, however little that may be, some 
aid in removing or diminishing the danger which now hangs 
over society from this very labor question. And sure am I that 
efforts of the kind will stand those who make them in good 
stead when all controversies, all things around us, shall have 
me*lted into the infinite azure of the past. 





1894-] LOVE-SONGS OF THE TUSCAN PEASANTRY. 685 

LOVE-SONGS OF THE TUSCAN PEASANTRY. 
BY HENRIETTA CHANNING DANA. 

HERE is a modern Italian proverb, "The foot- 
path leads to Paradise, the carriage-road to 
Purgatory, the steam-railroad to Hell"; and 
this saying may be applied, not to virtue and 
vice only, but also, and far more truly, to the 
poetry and song of the people. 

The modernized cities and towns of Italy are fast losing 
their individuality. The commonplaces of civilization and the 
rush of business traffic have effectually sapped in them the 
root of poetry and song in destroying the simple and picturesque 
customs and holy ideals of a primitive people. In their streets 
we hear little music but the military band and the piano-organ, 
no songs but operatic airs, comic songs, and trivial ballads 
nothing that is elevated in sentiment or of any value in litera- 
ture. The smaller towns of the interior, which are off the di- 
rect railroad routes and little visited, preserve more of individ- 
ual aspect, tradition, and song. But it is in the little fortified, 
mediaeval villages, perched on mountain-sides and hill-tops, and 
in the rude hamlets of the mountain valleys and forests, acces- 
sible only by zigzag foot-paths or steps cut in the side of 
the hill, that one sees the unadulterated Italian, living as he 
has lived for a 'thousand years, and singing the songs that his 
ancestors sang in the days of Dante, Cino, and Petrarca. It is 
here, among these primitive, innocent, and laborious people of 
the mountain and forest among wood-cutters and charcoal- 
burners, chestnut-gatherers and vine-growers, cultivators of corn 
and mushrooms and olives, shepherds and fishermen, carvers in 
wood, and makers of those plaster images which find their way 
to the distant streets of the most modern cities of the world 
that all that is most tender in song, most poetic in sentiment, 
and most graceful in tradition has survived. Among the Apen- 
nine forests and the Sabine hills, from the mountains and plains 
of Tuscany and Umbria to the coasts of the Adriatic, on the 
hills and in the valleys about Siena, Lucca, Pistoia, Assisi, and 
Ancona, if we hear a song of love it is in the language of the 
Rispetti and Stornelli, the Strambotti and Inserenate of the age 



686 LOVE-SONGS OF THE TUSCAN PEASANTRY. [Feb., 

of bards and knights and troubadours. Modern ballads and 
love-songs have no place in the repertory of the peasant, but 
the Rispetti or love-ditties of the thirteenth and fourteenth cen- 
turies handed down by oral tradition from generation to gen- 
eration among a people coming little in contact with the 
changes and chances of modern life are sung to-day by father 
and son, mother and daughter, in the pure Tuscan dialect of 
the days of 1'Alighieri. And the unlettered mountain youth 
still sings to his sweetheart to-day the very words which Tasso, 
in a later age, borrowed from his rustic ancestors of six cen- 
turies ago. 

The words of many of these traditional love-ditties have 
been gathered and committed to writing by lovers of folk-lore 
within this generation. It is true the people are averse to singing 
before strangers ; but if one mingles with the peasantry in their 
rude life, and finds the way to the confidence and affection of 
these ingenuous and lovable natures, one will have frequent op- 
portunity of hearing and making one's own the simpler and 
more familiar of the Rispetti. These are usually in the form 
of dialogue between youth and maiden, and the singers, men 
and women, answer each other in alternate strophes. Though 
the home of this poetry is Tuscany, yet traces of it may be 
found all over the peninsula, on the plains of Lombardy, and 
among the Tuscan hills, on the coast of the Adriatic, and on the 
canals of Venice. Let but the forester or the gondolier raise 
his voice in one of these love-strophes, and soon an answering 
voice will respond from valley or lagoon. The sentiment of 
this poetry is always of the most refined character, the images 
are all taken from nature as it surrounds th^em, and the lan- 
guage is simplicity itself, but extremely graceful. There is a 
certain monotony in the character of these songs. No story is 
woven in with them, no romance, no tale of adventure. It is 
simply the outpouring of the sentiments of the heart as called 
forth by the different emotions of the lover : joy, sorrow, court- 
ship, the delights of song, homage to beauty and goodness for 
they never separate beauty and goodness ; to them goodness in 
itself is beauty, and beauty without goodness remains unsung 
absence, return, parting, reunion, jealousy, trust, reproaches, 
reconciliation, faithful love, false love, promises, good wishes, 
prayers. Let us suppose them to be singing some strophes de- 
scriptive of the sentiments of rural courtship and mutual affec- 
tion. It is true that these offer less variety in language, less 
scope for the emotions, than those called forth by intenser 





1894-] LOVE-SONGS OF THE TUSCAN PEASANTRY. 687 

moods ; but, in spite of their gentle monotony and tender sim- 
plicity, the verses have a special interest and charm from hav- 
ing served as a medium of courtship for six centuries of Tuscan 
lovers. I have gathered a score or so only out of the many 
hundreds in their treasury. 

THE YOUTH 
(Seeing his love approaching on the mountain-side) : 

Fairest! thou art risen from the East 
The moonbeams on thy snowy forehead rest ; 
And wheresoe'er thy footsteps bear thee on, 
The splendor of the day with thee is gone. 
While o'er the pathway where thy footstep strays 
No evil darkens and no shadow plays ; 

But love and joy and peace and daylight fair 
Bloom on the hill for thou hast passed there. 

Thou, gentle maid, hast robbed the sun of light, 
And a new paradise to earth hast given ; 

The moon's enchantment round thy brow is bright, 
And angels smile and sing to thee from heaven. 

1 dare not lift my eyes to thy dear face 
With love for thee my humble heart is riven ; 

Thy form is clothed with an angel grace, 

And my poor heart has found in thee its heaven. 
Like to God's angel is thy lovely face 
In thy sweet sight may humble I find grace. 

And now they meet ; and both are seized with sudden embar- 
rassment. 

HE. 

O God of Heaven ! who madest her so fair, 
How shall I win her how to woo her dare ? 
How speak to her who stands in silence bound 
Her downcast eyes ne'er raising from the ground ? 
O gentle earth ! lift from thy lowly breast 
Those eyes, that in their look I may find rest. 
Blest stones of earth ! those glances you receive 
Return to me, I pray, that I may live. 

And she turns her head aside and whispers in ingenuous confi- 
dence the explanation of her bashfulness : 



688 LOVE-SONGS OF THE TUSCAN PEASANTRY. [Feb., 

THE MAIDEN. 

When first I saw thee in the path appear, 
The sun fell blinding on my dazzled eyes 

I cast them down, for thou wert drawing near, 
And I would hide the love that in them lies. 

Yet, since the love is there in very truth, 

I pray thee, love me also, gentle youth ! 

Her confession unlocks his lips, and who shall say now that he 
dares not woo ? 

HE. 

Thou, sweetest, with a chain hast bound my hands 

I love thee so I feel not I am bound ! 
I wear so cheerfully the loving bands, 

I know not that they hang my wrists around ! 
Garlands of roses do they seem to be 
That sweetly bind my arms, dear love, to thee ! 

I love thee, dear, with every love that lives. 
A brother's love to thee my true heart gives ; 
I love thee as a father loves his child ; 
I love thee as a mother wise and mild ; 
And as a husband loves his tender wife, 
So love I thee and will love all my life ! 

The next stanza in the original is worthy of Tasso : 

And I will love thee always ; scoff who will, 

To me love seems a glory all divine ! 
And when the golden dawn breaks o'er the hill, 

I know not day has come until I see 
Upon the pathway that fair form of thine, 

I know not that the sun has risen till 
Thou shinest, love, upon this world of mine, 

Until thy radiant eyes speak hope to me ! 

But she still holds her lover at a distance, for her ideals of 
manly worth and purity are high and must be satisfied. The 
next two stanzas have a quaint formality in the original : 

SHE. 

Ah, gallant youth ! preserve a kindly heart. 
Of woman's tenderness to win a part 



1894-] LOVE-SONGS OF THE TUSCAN PEASANTRY. 689 

Thou must have virtue and benignity, 

A mien of courage and of dignity, 
All purity and truth and manliness, 

The light of laughter shining in thine eyes 
All piety and grace and kindliness, 

With lips and eyes where mirthful laughter lies. 

But our youth is a true son of the mountains in traditional 
piety and innocence of life. 

HE. 

My lady, drive suspicion from thy heart : 
Never in me has evil had a part. 
Firm confidence in me thou may'st repose ; 
Sin I rejected and the good I chose. 
My love is perfect and my love is pure, 
Blessed of God and destined to endure. 
Such honest love a woman's blessing is, 

give me thine, and God shall give us His ! 

Now, indeed, she is ready to encourage him shyly, but not 
yet quite prepared in her mind to walk down Beacon Street 
arm-in-arm with him. 

SHE. 

Shall I betray the silent ways of love ? 

It needs no words its loyalty to prove, 

For when we meet a single glance will tell 

The object of our love that all is well. 

With eyes downcast and footstep something slow, 

The secret of each other's heart we know. 

The world heard naught, and yet a word was spoken ; 

The world saw naught, yet we exchanged a token. 

Dear youth, whene'er we one another meet 
We do not show our hearts to all the street! 

1 bow my head and thou inclinest thine, 
And cheerfully we say "The day is fine!" 
But every feast returneth once a year, 
And one shall be our wedding, never fear ; 
And once a year returneth every feast 
Our wedding-day shall come among the rest. 

She is about to pass on, thinking that she has given him 
enough encouragement for one day ; but he is of a different mind. 
VOL. LVIII. 46 



690 LOVE-SONGS OF THE TUSCAN PEASANTRY. [Feb., 

HE. 

Where art thou going, who hast stolen away 

The heart and soul of me with those dark eyes ? 

O turn those shining eyes ! one moment stay ! 
While I, with hopeful gaze, seek if perchance 

My faithful image therein mirrored lies! 

little robber ! with one traitor glance 
Thou stolest from me both my soul and heart ! 

Thou wert too hasty with thy thievish art ! 
Had I but known that thou didst wish them, sweet, 
My willing hands had laid them at thy feet. 

And now she relents, for she trusts him truly. 

SHE. 

How often have I feigned, love, to be 

Annoyed with thee when yet I was not so ; 
But now I know that thou art true to me 

1 tell thee all, nor fear my heart to show. 
And now I know thou true and faithful art 

I have no fear but show thee all my heart. 

When first I see thee coming on thy way 
A splendor fills the air with sudden glow ; 

But when I know thou canst no longer stay 
A shadow falling fills my heart with woe; 

And when I feel thou art already gone, 

With downcast eyes I know the day is done ! 

gentle forester ! I love thee so, 

1 go to church and know not where I go! 
To such a pass am I by love brought low, 
I cannot say my creed, nor fast nor slow ; 
The prayers I knew I now no longer know, 

Such mischief hath love wrought, for weal or woe ! 

And when I see thee coming on thy way 
A sigh I breathe for every step of thine ! 

How many sighs, dear love, I pray thee say, 

Have gone to thee from this poor heart of mine? 

Tell me, dear love, which were the most to-day 
The sighs I breathed, or those steps of thine ? 

Thy gallant footsteps, or my tender sighs ? 

I counted both with loving heart and eyes! 



1894-] LOVE-SONGS OF THE TUSCAN PEASANTRY. 6gi 

Her lover has been well brought up in the traditions of the 
patriarchal life of the hills ; he knows who a maiden's first con- 
fidant should be, and reminds his love of this before asking 
any further promise of her. 

HE. 

My little maiden, we must tell our love ! 

Go to thy mother ask if she approve. 

If she should laugh, then heed not her reply ; 

But if she silent stand, turn joyfully 

And follow thy own heart's sweet beckoning : 

Thou walkest sure and hast true reckoning. 

Ah ! when shall come that joyful, happy day 

When thou shalt mount the step with footfall slow 

That leads unto my cottage door, and lay 

Thy wedded hand in mine, with head bent low? 

When shall the moment be that we shall stand 

Before God's blessed altar, hand-in-hand ? 

And when the day be that, with gentle grace 
And true affection, thou shalt turn thy face 

To where my mother stands and whisper " Mother ! " 
And she shall clasp thee to her loving heart ? 

And thou wilt yield thy hand unto my brother, 
And call him " brother " with a sister's art ? 

And, as my kindred all around thee stand 

To welcome thee and take thee by the hand, 

Thou'lt turn to me and murmur: " Husband mine, 
This day has made thee mine, as I am thine ! " 

And now they make their vows of eternal fidelity. 

SHE. 

Together will we tread the path of life, 
Together will we share its toil and strife; 
Sorrow and love and joy together share, 
Sunlight, shadow, and death together bear ; 
Laughing or weeping, always hand-in-hand, 
In all things loving, side by side to stand. 
And if God wills it that thy loved one die, 
With downcast eyes walk pure and godlily ! 
When in the churchyard low thy loved one lies, 
To Virtue give thy hand, with downcast eyes ! 



692 LOVE-SONGS OF THE TUSCAN PEASANTRY. [Feb., 

HE. 

If thou shouldst leave me I will follow thee, 
I come to thee if thou abandon me ! 
Over the ocean or around the earth, 
I leave thee not, but by thy side go forth ! 
And if thou cross the sea of pain and death, 
I take thy hand and yield to God my breath ! 
And if thou cross the sea of death and pain 
I follow thee to meet in heaven again ! 

This is the spirit of the courtship of the mountain youth. 
They have no other love-songs than such as these. The peasant- 
girl is his " lady and mistress " now, and he is her " loving servant " 
to-day, in these far-off mountain valleys, even as in the courtly 
serenades of six centuries ago. 

But, alas ! it seems that in the garden of paradise the course 
of true love does not run smooth, any more than in the evil 
world below. It seems that even there maidens can once in a 
while be fickle, or parents unkind, or I hate to say it young 
men false. And even when lovers are true and parents kind 
sometimes brave Domenico must leave his Rosina to do his 
five years of soldiering, or gallant young Beppo must bid fare- 
well to his Luisa and seek his fortune laboring in the unhealthy 
plains of the Maremma, and their songs contain many touch- 
ing stanzas of sorrow, of forsaken love, of separation, and of 
death. The absent Domenico in camp or city writes tender 
letters to his waiting Rosina, charming effusions in rhyme, 
differing in rhythm from the songs but much the same in senti- 
ment. And the maiden wanders through the forest day by day, 
pouring out her heart in song to the lonely hill-tops. Then 
comes a day when he hurries back to his mountain home, and 
there is no one to meet him on the hill-side. The honest peo- 
ple of the valley tell the anxious lover that she is on her way 
to heaven, and is waiting for him to bid her farewell. Does 
he reach her in time, or does she die of a broken heart before 
his eye meet hers ? This is what she is singing on her cot by 
the window as the evening shadows gather and have not brought 
her lover : 

SHE. 

The sun has sunk, the night has come amain ? 
My love, when shall I see thy face again ? 
The pains of death have seized on every limb, 



1894-] LOVE-SONGS OF THE TUSCAN PEASANTRY. 693 

My members failing and my eyes grow dim, 
And the cold sweat of death is on my brow ! 
The weary day has seemed a year till now ! 
And on my brow I feel the chill of death 
God help my soul ! to Him I yield my breath. 

And this is Domenico's lament : 

HE. 

O lovely pilgrim through earth's weary waste, 

Thine eyes the joys of Paradise foretaste ! 

And must J part from thee, thou sweet, white flower ? 

O day of grief! O sad, O weary hour! 

How dark and lonely is the valley grown 
Deep shadows fallen and the sun gone down ! 
The lily folded in the sleep of death ! 
My perfect love has given to God her breath. 

My love has gone to God and I am left 
No " farewell " whispered to my heart bereft. 
My love has gone, and has not said " farewell " ! 
No words my grief and loneliness can tell. 

O widowed casement ! and O darkened room ! 
Where sunshine was are shadow, pain, and gloom. 
There was the radiant face and laughing eye, 
And now the very stones weep silently ! 
Shadowed and still are chamber, stair, and floor 
The lonely window and the darkened door. 

Where is the angel voice that once we heard ? 

where the song that through the wood was ringing ? 
The hillside answering the forest bird 

That glorified all nature with its singing 
The mountain echoing the lovely tone, 
Bearing it upward to the crystal Throne ! 

O honest people who surround me here, 

1 pray you listen for her song divine ! 
Whispering amid the chestnut and the pine 

That sweet, upsoaring, angel voice I hear 
Ringing from peak to cliff, from sphere to sphere, 
Piercing sev'n heavens to the throne of love 
God's angel calling me from heights above ! 




694 THE COMING CONTEST [Feb., 



THE COMING CONTEST HAVE CATHOLICS A 
POLITICAL ENEMY? 

BY REV. ALFRED YOUNG. 
SECOND ARTICLE. 

E have abundantly proved in a former article that 
the spirit of the present anti-Catholic movement, 
inaugurated years ago by the Evangelical Alliance, 
and now being vigorously pushed by its alter ego, 
the National League for -the Protection of Ameri- 
can Institutions, and its secret ally, the A.-P.-A. " order," is a 
spirit of religious intolerance and jealousy. There is no blink- 
ing that truth. If they avoid verbally acknowledging their per- 
secuting intent in their official documents, it is fully confessed 
for them by all their orators, writers, and agents. But the pre- 
tence, made from the beginning, has been that the question is 
a purely political one, and that they have had no purpose in 
view except to save the country from dangerous political en- 
croachments made by the Roman Catholic Church in the per- 
sons of its spiritual rulers and its people. As we proved, they 
had the audacity to accuse us of being political plotters for 
union of church and state in the very same breath they were 
spending to make Protestantism the religion, "as by law estab- 
lished," to be taught in all the public schools of the country. 

Any question involving the safety and well-being of the state 
evidently belongs to the domain of politics. But if there be 
any truth whatsoever in this cry of " danger and menace to the 
state," we may well ask : Where, then, are the politicians, the 
statesmen, all this while ? It is now many years since these 
cries were first heard. Are they deaf, or are they so lost to 
all sense of their duty to their country that they can stand by 
and see our glorious Republic and its institutions totally destroyed 
without making any effort to save them? 

" WE ARE SEVEN." 

Who are the only true patriots left in the land to raise the 
warning cry? Who are the only wise to realize the danger? 
Who are the only brave to rush forth, and with their own arms up- 



1 894.] HAVE CATHOLICS A POLITICAL ENEMY? 695 

hold the tottering " palladium of our national liberties"? Who are 
they? Only some Protestant ministers; and of that ministry of 
what sort are they ? Are they its noblest men, its most learned 
theologians, its most acute philosophers, and the most eminent 
before the nation for their patriotic words and deeds? Very 
far from it. 

The only hope to save the country, say these religionists, is 
to amend the national and state constitutions. 

The Constitution of our country is its very heart ; the source 
of its unity and strength. The danger to the political life and 
health of the Republic must be grave indeed when that supreme 
source of its vitality needs doctoring by tonic or sedative 
amendments. And certainly should there be need, the work of 
diagnosing the gravity of the case, of administering the proper 
remedies should be committed, as it rightly belongs, to states- 
men of competent science, of long and tried experience, of un- 
questioned honor and justice, and net to a self-constituted ca- 
bal of politico-religious quacks. Nobody has appointed them as 
watchmen on the ramparts of the citadel of American liberty. 

And yet just such have been the men who have for years 
arrogated to themselves the right and duty to judge of 
the national need, and to take upon themselves unasked the 
work of tinkering the Constitution of these United States; pes- 
tilent intermeddlers with high and grave duties not within their 
competence, whose advice nobody has sought, and whose forcible 
intrusion of it into the halls of Congress was an insult not only 
to the country's accredited, honored and worthy statesmen but 
to the whole nation. It was this class of would-be Constitu- 
tion-tinkers who stirred up General Grant to recommend an 
amendment to their taste in his message to Congress in 1875, 
and who got James G. Elaine to propose such an one for them 
in the House of Representatives, which was defeated in the 
Senate. We have also already noted their second attempt in 
1889, and showed how they then endeavored to make a union 
between the Protestant " church " and the state. 

In the official report of the hearings given the advocates of 
this second proposed constitutional amendment, which we see is 
honestly entitled as being a report of hearings before the com- 
mittee on the "joint resolution proposing an amendment to 
the Constitution of the United States respecting establishments 
.of religion and free public schools," we find that not one states- 
man of the land appeared to say a word in its favor. 

Passing strange, we say again : the very life of the country 



696 THE COMING CONTEST [Feb.,. 

in imminent danger a danger so grave as to call for the most 
heroic of all remedies un dernier ressort a change in the 
national Constitution of the United States and not one states- 
man, not even a pot-house politician, to be found in the length 
and breadth of this mighty and vast country who was brave 
enough, loyal enough, self-sacrificing enough, everything-else 
enough, to stand up and say one word to avert the peril. 
Who were the chosen spokesmen for the alleged body of dis- 
tinguished, learned, and patriotic representative citizens to 
reveal to the supreme governors and lawgivers of the nation 
the threatened danger to the state, and to teach them how to 
perform their duty? No one but these self-appointed alarmists 
themselves. And who were they, pray? 

All were Protestant ministers of no eminence, except as 
being notorious religious bigots, and a woman from Boston. 
Here are the names of these self-elected saviours of the coun- 
try : 

Rev. T. P. Stevenson, of Philadelphia; 

Rev. James M. King, of New York ; 

Rev. George K. Morris, of Philadelphia ; 

Rev. Philip S. Moxom, of Boston ; 

Rev. James M. Gray, of Boston ; 

Rev. James B. Dunn, of Boston. 

We leave the Bostonian Amazon to name herself. 

What an array of master minds ! How grateful the whole 
people should be to these noble, self-sacrificing patriots, these 
eminent scholars in jurisprudence, in constitutional law, and in 
the science of political economy, for their generous efforts to save 
the country! But alas! to what a deplorable condition of 
abject supineness and indifference to the threatened destruction 
which they wofully prophesied would come upon it if their 
advice was not heeded must the Home of the brave and the 
Land of the free be reduced when, despite all their plaints and 
threats, their prayers and imprecations, their display of cal- 
umnious and fraudulent documents, the country refused to be 
saved by them, sent them about their business, and isn't saved 
yet ! 

SOME REAL CONSTITUTIONALISTS. 

What eminent jurists, men of superior learning and wisdom r 
men of calm, unprejudiced judgment have thought of similar 
proposals for tinkering the Constitution is to be found in the 



1894-] HAVE CATHOLICS A POLITICAL ENEMY? 697 

pages of the Independent for January 10, 1889. Among the 
communications it received from such prominent and worthy 
persons in reply to an editorial query on this subject we quote 
the following: 

Hon. George Bancroft said : 

" I have your letter asking what changes had better be made 
in the Constitution. I know of none ; if any change is needed 
it is in ourselves, that we may more and more respect that primal 
law." 

Justice Bradley, of the Supreme Court, said : 

" I beg leave to say that I would have no change in the 
Constitution. I think it a most happy arrangement that sudden 
whiffs and gusts of popular feeling are not always able to exe- 
cute and carry out the rash purposes with which they are in- 
spired." 

Justice Gray, of the United States Supreme Court, said : 

" I am so old-fashioned as to think that the Constitution, 
administered according to its letter and spirit, is well enough 
as it is. And I am of the opinion of the late Governor An- 
drew, that it is not desirable to Mexicanize our government by 
proposing constitutional amendments as often as there is sup- 
posed to be a disturbance in its practical working." 

Justice Blatchford, of the same Supreme Court, said : 

"I am satisfied with the Constitution as it is; it cannot be 
bettered. Constitution-tinkers are in a poor business." 

Both the other two correspondents, Mr. John W. Burgess, 
professor of constitutional law in Columbia College, and Fran- 
cis Wharton, LL.D., expressed their views in similar terms. 

A question similar to the present one was up before the 
United States Senate in 1829, when the Senate committee re- 
ported as follows : " It is not the legitimate province of the 
legislature to determine what religion is true or what is false. 
Our government is a civil and not a religious institution. 
What other nations call religious toleration we call religious 
rights. They are not exercised in virtue of governmental indul- 
gence, but as rights of which government cannot deprive any 
portion of citizens, howeve'r small. Despotic power may invade 
those rights, but justice still confirms them." 

In the report of the hearing given the would-be tinkers of 
the Constitution sent in 1889 by the Evangelical Alliance and 
other self-constituted defenders of the country to petition Con- 
gress against the encroachments of " Romanism," we find Sen- 
ator Payne asking the Rev. Mr. Corliss : 



698 THE COMING CONTEST [Feb., 

" Have any of the prominent men that you have spoken of 
advocated the proposed change in the Constitution ?" 
Rev. Mr. Corliss replied " None." 

A BACKING IN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY. 

But this assertion of ours, that there have been no states- 
men in it, would seem to be flatly contradicted by the array of 
highly respectable names these Protestant ministers of small 
repute exhibit on their rosters of the common rank and file in 
their Alliance and League battalions ; and more especially by 
the notorious fact that the Republican party, as such (the evi- 
dences of which we shall give further on), endorsed their cry of 
danger to the state ever since 1875, and agreed with them as 
to the source from whence the peril was to be apprehended, 
as expressed both in its national and state conventions, and by 
the voice of three of its elected presidents. Did not the Hon. 
James G. Elaine introduce their constitutional amendment bill 
in the House ? Have there been no statesmen worthy of the 
name in the Republican party all these years ? 

The explanation of this apparent proof to the contrary of 
our assertions is not difficult. 

As for the boastful list of respectable names they parade, 
the number of such as cannot be easily certified as well-known 
religious anti-Catholics, subscribing as such, or as being Repub- 
licans induced to give their adhesion for politically partisan 
motives, is insignificant. Some have no doubt given their names 
from pure patriotic motives, deceived as to the real intent of 
the League. They boast of having secured the name of one 
Catholic. It is not the first time persecutors have found his like 
as willing to serve their ends. As for the sympathy of the 
Republican party, it first of all held in its bosom these mis- 
chief-making preachers, and a contingent of no small number of 
those like unto themselves commanding the useful political 
service which the entire Protestant religious press could render. 
United to this literary propaganda we to-day see added a lot 
of fanatical sheets, clamoring for the enactment of un-American 
penal laws as the only remedy for real or fancied abuses, rival- 
ling their compeers in their calumnious attacks upon the Catho- 
lic Church, and in the proclamation of false, unfounded issues. 

The leaders of the Republican party were not slow to see the 
advantage of the support offered, and to make use of it as a 
political expedient, especially as it was to be bought at the 
very low price they intended to pay for it a pitiful price, in- 



1894-] HAVE CATHOLICS A POLITICAL ENEMY? 699 

deed, as events have shown. They were willing to re-echo the 
cries of " Danger to the state !" " Down with foreign, ecclesias- 
tical, ignorant, won't-be educated, superstitious, ambitious, fanati- 
cal, pope and priest-ridden Catholics who are set upon its 
destruction !" 

" Oh, yes ! cry aloud and spare not ! " was the encouraging 
response of the Republican party. " Count upon us. We will 
back you." And the rest of the cheap price for their votes 
was paid by furnishing James G. Elaine to introduce their 
amendment bill in the House, and putting Henry W. Blair as 
chairman of the committee to sit and listen for a few hours to 
the slanderous outpourings of six Protestant ministers, and a 
petulant exclamation from a Boston woman. Not one repre- 
sentative or senator of either party showed his face before the 
committee to endorse the appeal of these calumniating preach- 
ers. No ; not one, even, to make a faint show of appearing to 
have remembered their party's pledges. How shamefully in- 
decent of them to slink out of sight and leave these poor and 
mean-souled advocates to fight the whole battle in its most 
critical hour all alone ! 

What Mr. Blaine thought of the necessity of rallying to the 
support of the country against Roman Catholic aggression was 
seen when he numbered himself among the " silent ones " at 
the vote in the House taken on August 4, 1876. The whole 
business has been nothing but buncombe on the part of the 
Republican party. The very large vote of the House in favor 
of the amendment, despite Elaine's silent company and the 
absentees, was only buncombe. Its defeat in the Senate was 
well understood beforehand. 

HUDIBRAS WITHOUT HIS CHARGER. 

These befooled ministers and their followers and claqueurs 
never seemed to realize what sort of a dangerous weapon they, 
in their arrogance of attempting to drive the country into satis- 
fying their religious bigotry, had ventured to handle. Such as 
they, indeed, to take upon themselves the framing of a con- 
stitutional amendment which would impose a limitation to their 
individual sovereign rights upon the several States! The whole 
thing was an absurd farce. They were, however, permitted to 
play their little game to keep them in good humor, and hope- 
ful of riding down their religious adversaries seated upon victor- 
ious chargers which the Republican party pledged itself to supply 
to them at government expense. But, when booted and spurred 



700 THE COMING CONTEST [Feb., 

they were ready to mount, lo ! the steeds were not forthcoming. 
The Republicans astutely worked the scheme for all it was worth, 
and it cannot be denied that they made good political capital 
out of it ; but talk is cheap very cheap, Brother King and 
company, and we hope you are beginning to find it out. 

The whole country now knows full well that the question 
these jealous enemies of the civil and religious liberties of their 
Catholic fellow-citizens have excited and forced upon its notice 
is not a political, but a religious one. Religious jealousy and 
sectarian animosity are at the bottom of the whole movement. 
They would stir up and foment a religious persecution if they 
could, without regard to the consequences. They would sacri- 
fice the national peace, the national freedom of conscience, the 
very existence of the Republic itself, upon the altars of their 
fiery religious bigotry, sooner than be foiled of their infamous 
purpose. 

A DISHONEST QUEST. 

All their talk about the possible danger to the state from 
any doctrine, purpose, or institution of Catholics (and that is 
the only source of danger they pretend to have found), is a 
mere cloak to hide their persecuting intent. They know their 
charges are false. They have been confronted time and again 
with proofs of the fraudulent character of the statistics and 
other false and garbled documents they have adduced in evi- 
dence to bolster up their slanders. All to no purpose. We 
have wasted our breath. They go on just the same, repeating 
the same old exploded lies. They will admit nothing we say 
of ourselves, or in denial of their accusations, as truth. And 
for the best of reasons : they are not in search of the truth. 
If those to whom the appeal for help to carry out their de- 
signs were to say to them: "We will fully investigate your 
charges. We will examine these accused Catholics, their reli- 
gion, the policy of their spiritual government in a word, we 
will find out first all about tJieni, for we hold that no man 
should be condemned unheard and untried," that would be the 
last of their appeal to such just judges ; knowing well that 
their iniquity would be discovered and their malicious intent 
laid bare. Calm, free, fair, just investigation is what they fear. 
That was a dangerous piece of advice for the interests of Pro- 
testantism which the Congregationalist of October 26 last gave 
to its clerical readers, at least to those whose animosity to the 
Catholic Church is simply due to their ignorance of it : 






1894-] HAVE CATHOLICS A POLITICAL ENEMY? 701 

" Our pastors ought to make themselves familiar with the 
nature, extent, and purpose of this new (sic) movement in the 
Roman Catholic Church. They ought to study the literature 
of Romanism, to read its magazines and papers, to make them- 
selves acquainted with the organizations of the church, their 
methods of working and their spirit." 

Would to God that not only their clergy, but that their 
people too, would take that advice, and study us well ! That 
would soon end all contest between Protestantism and " Ro- 
manism." We say it, and are as sure as the sun shines in the 
heavens, that Protestantism, as claiming to be the true exposi- 
tor and guide of Christianity, and as the system upon which 
our civilization is to be advanced to a higher intellectual and 
moral plane, dare not admit Catholicity to an equally full, free, 
and fair investigation. Ignorance of the Catholic Church is its 
only hope of self-preservation. 

WE HAVE NO STAR CHAMBER. 

False as we know all their accusations to be, despicable as 
is their whole stock in trade industriously deployed before 
the gaze of the ignorant multitude they find themselves only 
too successful in deluding ; sure as we are of the ultimate 
triumph of the right and true, to their everlasting confusion of 
face; nevertheless we Catholics are ever ready for the deepest 
scrutiny of all that we are, all we believe, all that we have at 
heart for life and death. We have no fear of anything but 
ignorance, prejudice, and deep-seated malice. Turn on the light ! 
we cry. We are all open to view. We have no oath-sworn 
secret orders or council chambers impenetrable to the public 
gaze. We say all this inviting, and even courting, criticism ; 
grievous and abhorrent as it is to one conscious of his unstained 
honor to feel called upon to prove it. So we, conscious of the 
sanctity of our faith, of our unblemished consciences in face of 
the bitterly unjust accusations made against us by such unscru- 
pulous enemies as this age has brought upon us to meet, feel 
overwhelmed with shame and indignation as might an innocent 
maiden throttled by a drunken policeman on the charge of be- 
ing a street-walking prostitute, haled to the police-court, and 
commanded under threats of imprisonment with filthy criminals 
to submit to the intolerable outrage of a medical examination 
to prove her unviolated virginity. 

So it is with us. Nothing but the deeply reverential respect 
in which we hold our most sacred and pure religion, and our 



702 THE COMING CONTEST [Feb., 

determination to shield it from being dragged as a criminal 
into the arena of politics to be examined by these indecent 
brawlers, can explain the heroic silence we have imposed upon 
ourselves in face of the most exasperating assaults upon our 
civil rights, and maddening insults to our honor. And no pol- 
luting hand shall touch it now with impunity. 

POLITICAL BABY-FARMERS. 

A most important fact now deserves a thorough ventilation ; 
viz.: that from the beginning of the efforts of the Evangelical 
Alliance down to the latest manoeuvres of the National League, 
in combination with the avowed politico-religious assassins, the 
order of the A.-P.-A.'s, the Republican party first of all acted as 
godmother to this anti-Catholic crusade, has since nursed and 
fostered it, and is to be held responsible for the power that it 
has been able to wield at the polls up to the election just 
passed. 

The Alliance and the League solemnly declare that they are 
non-partisan. Although in fact they deserve to be looked 
upon as mere tools for the use of the Republican party, we are 
disposed to believe that, while serving that party's ends, they 
are not averse to welcoming into their ranks any anti-Catholic 
Democrat who will help them to serve their own. There are 
plenty of such, as experience has shown, who have ruthlessly 
slaughtered their own Catholic candidates at the polls, and 
lent their votes to down any state legislative measure looking 
to the enfranchisement of Catholics and the removal of obstruc- 
tions to the full and equal enjoyment of their civil and reli- 
gious rights. Our readers who are interested in knowing the 
proofs of this assertion are referred to an article in the Ameri- 
can Catholic Quarterly Review, January, 1881, by the late Dr. 
John Gilmary Shea. 

THE POSITION OF GENERAL GRANT. 

That the Republican party made good use of the popular 
anti-Catholic prejudice and ignorant fears skilfully fostered for 
many years by the Protestant religious press and pulpit is be- 
yond question. In his message to Congress, December 7, 1875, 
President Grant earnestly recommended just such a constitu- 
tional amendment as the League is pushing for now, and in his 
notorious Des Moines speech in 1876, though the Catholic 
Church is not mentioned by name, the universal Protestant in- 
terpretation of the same, and the enthusiastic hurrahs given in 



1894-] HAVE CATHOLICS A POLITICAL ENEMY? 703 

their religious press, show that they had given him the cue for 
his attack upon it. When he prophesied, as our brother the Con- 
gregationalist has just done as his echo, that there would be an- 
other contest in the near future for national existence, his own 
personal religious bigotry, and the fact that he was speaking 
for the accepted anti-Catholic policy of his political party, need- 
ed no Daniel to interpret which combatant he credited with 
possessing all the patriotism and intelligence of the country, 
and which one he was base enough to calumniate as " super- 
stitious, ambitious, and ignorant." When further on in his 
speech he called upon the people to "resolve that any child in 
the land should get a common-school education, unmixed with 
atheistic, pagan, or sectarian teachings. Keep the church and 
the state for ever separate," he was accepting for himself and 
his party the hypocritical innuendo that "sectarian" teaching in 
schools was dangerous to the state, and that Catholic religious 
teaching was especially so ; and further, that we were working 
to secure a union between church and state. 

THE POSITION OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY. 

The Republican Convention at Saratoga, September 8, 1875, 
resolved : 

"The free public school is the bulwark of the American 
Republic. We therefore demand the unqualified maintenance 
of the public-school system, and its support by equal taxation. 
We are opposed to all sectarian appropriations, and we denounce, 
as a crime against liberty (sic) and republican institutions, any 
project for a sectarian division or perversion of the school fund 
of the State." 

There we have the same false issues brought up again to 
hoodwink the "intelligent voter." 

The Republican National Convention at Cincinnati, June 15, 
1876, declared : 

" The public-school system of the several States is the bul- 
wark of the American Republic, and with a view to its security 
and permanence we recommend an amendment to the Consti- 
tution of the United States, forbidding the application of any 
public funds or property for the benefit of any schools or in- 
stitutions under sectarian control." 

President Hayes, in his letter of acceptance, said of that 
resolution : 

" It should receive the hearty support of the American 



704 THE COMING CONTEST [Feb., 

people. Agitation upon this subject is to be apprehended un- 
til, by constitutional amendment, the schools are placed beyond 
all danger of sectarian control or interference. T/ie Republican 
party is pledged to secure such an amendment" 

President Garfield, in his letter of acceptance, July 12, 1880, 
said : 

" It would be unjust to our people, and dangerous to our in- 
stitutions, to apply any portion of the revenue of the nation or 
of the States to the support of sectarian schools. The separa- 
tion of the church and state in everything relating to taxation 
should be absolute." 

In all these pronouncements we see the same old bid for 
votes made by the Republican party, founded on the same old 
calumnies and false issues. The temper of the people in 1876 
had been so successfully aroused by the constant exhibition of 
these religious bugaboos that even the Democrats were afraid 
to keep silence, and their national platform, adopted at St. 
Louis June 28, 1876, while avoiding the attack upon States' 
rights by recommending the proposed national constitutional 
amendment, echoed the Republican clap-trap about the pre- 
servation of the public schools and " No union of church and 
state " ! 

THE BOYS WHO CHALKED UP "NO POPERY." 

As already stated, James G. Elaine introduced this constitu- 
tional amendment adopted as the war-cry of the party in the 
House, December 14, 1875, while General Grant's Des Moines 
speech and 4iis message were yet fresh in men's minds. This 
amendment passed the House, August 4, 1876, by the vote of 
1 80 to 7. Ninety-eight m-embers hadn't the courage to say aye 
or nay, among them Elaine himself, the introducer of the bill, 
and thirteen were absent. We recommend to any one inter- 
ested in knowing the proportion of Republicans and Democrats 
in this vote to consult the Congressional Record. 

On August 14 the vote of the Senate stood yeas 28, nays 
16, absent 27. The Republicans refused to honor their own 
draft, made payable, .on demand to the Evangelical Alliance 
and Co. 

We cannot bring ourselves to omit giving our readers the 
learned opinion of Senator Blair, the Irrepressible, for the de- 
feat of the amendment in the Senate, the bill not having a 
two-thirds majority. One would hardly expect to find anything 



1894-] HAVE CATHOLICS A POLITICAL ENEMY? 705 

so immensely funny in the grave pages of the Congressional Re- 
cord. His reason there alleged is this : 

" A friend of mine pointed out to me upon that floor nine 
Jesuits. I did not know. He claimed to know them, and he 
pointed them out, NINE at one time ! " Congressional Record, 
February 16, 1888, p. 1264. 

Poor Senator Blair senator no longer, alas ! there is some- 
thing pathetic, after all, in his tristful Jesuitophobia ! 

It is quite sufficient to refer to the long struggle made by 
Catholics in this State for " Freedom of Worship " in penal, 
reformatory, and other institutions receiving State money, to con- 
vict the Republican party of collusion with those who had their 
own base ends to serve by defeating our just claims to equal 
rights before the State. The hypocritical National League for 
the Protection God save the mark ! of American Institutions 
is now agitating to nullify the meagre measure of justice we 
at last obtained by their attempts to politically enslave all re- 
ligious bodies through a restrictive constitutional amendment ; 
and we say it with bold assurance of speaking the truth, it would 
have no hope of success unless it can succeed in getting the 
Republican party to make a partisan issue of the question, 
counting upon the adhesion of enough bigoted Protestant Demo- 
crats to offset the sure defection from the ranks of the Repub- 
lican party of every Catholic now its political friend and voter. 
We cannot be easily persuaded that the Republican party can 
be brought to make that venture. 

There is one other significant fact. Republican party organs 
and such of the Protestant religious journals as are avowedly 
Republican have kept their editors, contributors, and paragra- 
phers hard at work booming this politico-religious attack " No 
union of church and state." " No State aid to sectarian schools 
and institutions." " Hands off the Public School!" " Patriots to 
the rescue ! " These are the watchwords of the present allies 
of the Republican party, the National League and the A.-P.-A.'s, 
whose infamous aid it has seemed willing to accept at the price 
of its own historical disgrace. 

BOOMERANG POLITICAL WEAPONS. 

It is very far from the intention of the writer of this article 
to attack the political principles of the Republican party. With 
pure politics he has nothing to do more than falls to his right 
as an American citizen. But his purpose has been to set before 
the minds of that party that we are fully aware of its past ac- 
vou LVIII. 47 



706 THE COMING CONTEST [Feb., 

ceptance of, and the partisan support it has given to the lead- 
ers of, this un-American religious crusade against the civil and 
religious rights of all Catholic citizens, Republican or Democratic. 
Various reasons have been assigned for the action of the Re- 
publican party in allowing itself, as such, to be identified with 
the aims of these religious politicians. It seems quite evident 
to the writer that it cannot pretend to justify itself on any other 
ground than that of pure political " expediency," a plea in jus- 
tification which does not justify. Political expedients are dan- 
gerous weapons to handle. More than one such a missile has 
proved a boomerang in the hands of reckless combatants. 

We say again, lest we should be misunderstood, that we are 
not attacking the principles of the Republican party. We are 
endeavoring to compel it to take notice of, and cleanse its hon- 
orable escutcheon from, a shameful stain. 

What has any political party to do with favoring or oppos- 
ing religious jealousies and animosities ? Are we to understand 
that the Republican party has taken a brief to support the 
cause of these malicious, persecuting Protestant ministers? If 
so, the sooner we know it the better. 

Politics and religion are both free in this country, but neither 
has the ghost of a right to use the other as a tool for its own 
ends. Each is bound, moreover, to see to it that in no way 
does it attempt to hinder or nullify the full freedom of the 
other. But if Politics ventures to trespass upon the free soil of 
Religion, then Religion has a right to resist its encroachments 
and thrust it back upon its own ground, and vice versa. 

Religious bodies have an unquestionable right to take care of 
their own interests and as well to use all moral means to gain 
adherents, but they have no right to call upon any political 
party, as such, to help them. 

Political parties, too, have as true a right to honestly sustain 
their own existence, and are free to assert and labor to secure 
acceptance of their specific political doctrines by any of the 
citizens of the Republic, be they of any condition, color, class, 
or religious creed. But they have no right either to exist or to 
gain adherents at the price of the violation of the constitutional 
guarantee of the freedom of any citizen from being subjected 
to a religious test. 

THE LIE DIRECT. 

Whatever may be true of other religious bodies, it is beyond 
all cavil true of Catholics that they are absolutely free to give 



1894-] HAVE CATHOLICS A POLITICAL ENEMY? 707 

their suffrages to any political party whose principles or definite 
policy on any purely civil question they may feel convinced are 
to be preferred. That Catholics, by virtue of the spiritual obe- 
dience they owe to their religious superiors, priests, bishops, or 
pope, are obliged in any sense to look to them for either direc- 
tion, advice, or command how they are to vote or to what poli- 
tical party they are to give their adhesion, is false. It is a 
calumny, however, which our envious religious adversaries have 
not scrupled to spread far and wide for the purpose of stirring 
up the ignorant fears of their people which it is so much to 
their advantage to stimulate. It is a dastardly libel upon the 
honesty and purity of our patriotism, and it is our duty to 
fling the lie back into their faces as forcibly as we can. 

If respectable representatives of any religious body should 
feel obliged by the prevailing condition of things to appeal for 
the protection of the state against interference with or open 
attack upon their civil and religious rights, their demand for jus- 
tice ought to receive a purely non-partisan consideration. It is 
equally true that if any such body of religionists should ven- 
ture to seek the aid of the state in their desire to hinder or to 
abridge the rights of any other denomination thank God, our 
Catholic hands are pure from such an iniquity, and may they 
ever be so ! all legislators, irrespective of party, should treat 
their demands with scorn and indignation. Our country's coun- 
cil halls are no secret dens of plotters, nor open courts for 
persecutors. 

We say it boldly, that any political party which ventures to 
drag religion into politics, and to take sides with either Catho- 
lics or Protestants, except to exert its power at the polls to 
see that both religious bodies are left to enjoy the equal free- 
dom guaranteed them by the Constitution, is doomed. 

WE STAND UPON OUR CITIZEN RIGHTS. 

We say now, and let all interested take notice and lay it 
well to heart : We Catholics feel we are being politically, as 
well as religiously, threatened. We have a just right before 
God and man to defend ourselves. Our votes are free. No 
party shall own us, and neither party can expect us to be such 
base slaves as to slaughter our God-given rights at the polls by 
voting the ticket of a party which openly declares itself on the 
side of our would-be persecutors. 

It is high time the Republican party realized the fact that 
it cannot hope to keep within its ranks the very large number 



;o8 



THE COMING CONTEST. 



[Feb., 



of Catholic voters it now claims, unless it casts off this religious 
parasite which is clinging to it for support. And not only its 
Catholic voters, but we feel equally assured that there are hosts 
of fair-minded, just Protestants and other citizens who, coming 
to clearly understand the unrighteous, and, we say again and 
again, the un-American character of the politico-religious cru- 
sade we have denounced, will turn away with disgust and in- 
dignation from taking any lot or part with those who dare to 
make a party issue of it. 

We Catholics, as fellow-citizens, cannot but deeply deplore 
the ignorant and persistent animosity of those who differ with 
us in religious convictions ; but we smile at their impotent rage 
against us, and turn, with calm assurance of the rectitude of 
our motives, the justice of our claims, and the unblemished 
sanctity of our loyalty and patriotism, to what is, thank God, 
increasing day by day the popular sense of justice, right, love 
of truth, respect for sincere and self-sacrificing devotion to duty 
and to one's honest convictions, such as we Catholics dare to 
boast of as abundantly proven by our life, our doctrine, and 
our works, and by the blood we have generously shed upon 
the altars of our national liberties, as fully and as truly in this 
glorious Republic of ours as in every other land upon which 
the sun shines. 





1894-] THE CANONIZATION OF THE CURE D'ARS. 709 

THE CANONIZATION OF THE CURE D'ARS. 
BY REV. EDWARD MCSWEENY. 

N the Feast of the Most Holy Rosary I visited 
Ars, that French hamlet made famous for all 
future time by the virtues of one who was its 
parish priest in the forepart of our century. 
Those who have experienced it can tell what 
feelings possess one who thus treads literally in the footsteps of 
the saints, or at least they understand you when you speak of 
these things ; for indeed as to giving expression so that the un- 
initiated may share them, this I think is beyond human power. 
I had read his life, that simple, eloquent narrative by his at- 
tached disciple, Father Monnin ; was captivated by the sublime 
yet simple story, and my longing to visit the place where it 
had been passed was at last gratified. 

The little church which he sanctified and made famous with 
his work and his words was still standing a rude edifice of no 
architectural beauty, something like our ancient temple on St. 
Mary's Mount, Emmitsburgh. The ceiling was about fifteen 
feet high, the length from the door to the sanctuary about 
forty feet ; the width of the nave about twenty, with some ten 
or fifteen feet extra on either side under the clerestories, 
where are four side chapels. One of these is that of St. Phiiu- 
mena, the young martyr-patroness of the holy priest, and a 
hundred crutches hung around it, left there by those who had 
been cured at her shrine. 

The altar on which he used to say Mass is now in his liv- 
ing-room, and you walk through the old sanctuary into the 
splendid new addition which has been built behind it. 

Before satisfying your pious curiosity, however, you instinc- 
tively kneel, and remain still fascinated by the general appear- 
ance of things in the old part of the edifice. Its utter poverty, 
contrasting somewhat with the tasty decoration of the side- 
altars, touches the very depths, of your soul, and reminds you 
of Nazareth as it must have been. No wonder the people 
swarmed into the little building, and remained there from one 
o'clock in the morning till eleven at night waiting to get speech 
of this other Christ " Sacerdos alter Christus." No tesselate-d 




(i) THE CURB'S BEDROOM. 
(3) THE OLD CHURCH. 



(2) NEW CHURCH OF ARS. 

(4) REAR VIEW OF NEW CHURCH. 



T*,,,.T^-T> T T A n , 



1894-] THE CANONIZATION OF THE CUR D'ARS. 711 

floor was needed to beautify this temple ; no precious marble 
columns with veins of gold and carving more precious than 
gold ; no damask hangings looped with silver galloons were 
required ; no paintings of rare masters to fill the mind with 
heavenly images; no splendid organ and artistic singers to help 
those people praise the unseen God : they saw, they heard, 
they felt Jesus walk, speak, bless, in the person of this his 
brother (St. Matthew xii. 50). 

When you have yielded to this overpowering sense of the 
divine poverty of this house of God, and revelled in the sweet- 
ness of the memories of the place where, like Thabor, "it is 
good to be," you further avail yourself of your happy privi- 
lege and enter the little sacristy, about eight feet square, in 
which for forty years the Cur d'Ars exercised the authority of 
Christ in the tribunal of penance. O what a confessional ! 
The most wretched substitute for the ordinary article put to- 
gether by a rustic tradesman were more sightly and more com- 
fortable than this. Evidently the cur6 wanted to remain as near 
the cross as possible while filling the place of the Son of Man 
in forgiving sins. No smoothness, no paint, no cunning grace 
of art about it ; no door, no curtain ; yet the highest intellects 
of Europe knelt here before the shepherd's son the beauty and 
culture of France, Italy, Ireland, England, Spain, Germany, Po- 
land prostrated itself here, after hours or even days of waiting 
to obtain the boon of telling its sins and pouring its troubles in- 
to the sympathetic, merciful ear of the humble village pastor. 

There is a little pulpit at the side of the sanctuary rising 
about six feet from the floor. This attracts the attention of 
priests very much, and makes them realize the extreme mortifi- 
cation of the cure, who of course suffered more from the thick 
atmosphere the higher he was raised in the unventilated build- 
ing. 

THIS OLD CHURCH 

forms the nave of the present edifice, a splendid octagonal apse 
having been erected, as we said, behind the former sanctuary. 
It is of parti-colored stone in the French style ; has a fine altar, 
closely surrounded, except in front, by a high-railed enclosure 
with bench for the choir, so that the celebrant was always fac- 
ing either the clergy or the people. You walked all around it, 
the space being quite large, and elegant chapels of the Sacred 
Heart, of the Blessed Virgin, and of St. Joseph filling the re- 
cesses in the walls. 



712 THE CANONIZATION OF THE CUR D'ARS. [Feb., 

A High Mass was going on when I entered, and the con- 
gregation was pretty large. Indeed, the village was so quiet 
that I suppose most of the inhabitants were at Mass. At the 
usual time a priest went up into the pulpit of the new edifice, 
and sitting down, taught the people. The French call the pul- 
pit la chaire, and have a chair in it, so that the occupant may be 
said literally to teach ex cathedra ; the Roman tribunes also have 
a seat for the preacher, which he uses more or less during the 
sermon. I was very much impressed by this. It reminded me 
of the father among his children, or of the teacher among his 
pupils, and must make both at ease during this time at which 
it is so important that every one, both the master and the 
scholar, should feel quite at home. 

The sermon was exceedingly impressive, to me at least, and 
I carried it all away, perhaps because I recognized in the 
preacher one of the disciples of the holy cure ; perhaps from the 
fact that it was in the church sanctified by his labors ; perhaps 
for this circumstance of the chair ; but chiefly, I think, on 
account of its extreme simplicity of matter as well as of man- 
ner. Indeed, the manner was so unaffected that I scarce noted 
it at all, while the matter was as familiar as could be, being no 
other than a homily on the joyful mysteries of the Rosary. 

AFTER MASS 

I had the supreme happiness of visiting the cure's house. 
Going up the poor staircase, you found a door covered with a 
close wire netting to prevent the further depredations of those 
who used to whittle it away for relics. Its upper half was 
glazed, and allowed us to look into the plain, whitewashed room, 
which was the living, sleeping, and dining room of the cur. I 
don't think there was a chair ; a little table stood in the middle 
on which was a bowl and a spoon, service enough for the cold 
potatoes, rye bread, or griddle-cakes which formed the usual 
repasts of the man of God. His bed was in the corner, and was 
the most wretched mattress imaginable, though perfectly clean 
and neat. On the mantel was a plain lantern which lighted the 
weary steps of this most extraordinary man, as he every morn- 
ing for forty years left his room at two o'clock, and went 
over to the church to adore Jesus in the Sacrament of the Al- 
tar, and to face the eager penitents who, from midnight almost, 
had crowded the humble house of the hidden God. The bed 
is just as it lay under his dying person, and everything is sealed, 
numbered, and catalogued ; his poor suit of clothes, bowl, spoon, 



1894-] THE CANONIZATION OF THE CURE D'ARS. 713 

shoes, all remain as when he left them on the 4th of August, 
1859. I placed my beads in the plain rustic shoes of this apos- 
tle, reflecting " How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of 
the messengers of peace ! " Some of his blood is preserved in 
a small vial; it is perfectly liquid, as one saw when the vessel 
was moved, and has the rich dark look, with the bubbles, you 
notice in that which St. Januarius shed fifteen hundred years 
ago for the Truth, and which liquefies annually at Naples on 
the I9th of September. 

The venerable servant of the cure was still living and passed 
near us, but looked as old and withered as a mummy, and bore 




THE CURE IN DEATH. 

the expression of one whose thoughts were no longer concerned 
with this world, but who held converse with the unseen. An 
exquisite statue, life-size, in white marble, represents the holy 
priest at prayer. Attached is the legend, " I will pray for those 
who help me to build a beautiful church in honor of Saint Phil- 
umena." 

THE LIFE 

of the Cure d'Ars has been written, as I said, by his associate of 
many years, Father Monnin, and also by an Englishwoman, not 

a Catholic, named Geraldine ; for although the servant of 

God was the humblest and quietest of men, he could not prevent 
his name and fame from spreading out of this obscure hamlet, 
throughout the length and breadth of Christendom ; and even 
the erring children of the church were struck by the blaze of 
his sanctity, and arrested by the wonderful works God performed 



714 THE CANONIZATION OF THE CUK D'ARS. [Feb., 

at his hands. It is sad indeed to notice how they try, while 
compelled to admit the existence of these marvels, to escape 
attributing them to the finger of the Almighty ; but it is a glo- 
rious testimony to the divine institution of the church that they 
who love and seek the beauty of holiness are fain to leave their 
own households and find their ideals realized in her faithful 
children. Much has been written of those great and good men, 
outside her pale, who evidently loved our Saviour and strove 
to spread his kingdom ; yet their biographers never are em- 
barrassed with explaining away miraculous occurrences in the 
lives of such as Wesley, Hooker, Heber, and Henry Martyn. 
No ; the gift of miracles belongs to the Catholic Church, and is 
a proof of her identity with the church of which Christ spoke 
when he said : " The works which I do they shall do, and 
greater than these, because I go to the Father" (St. John 
xiv. 12). 

THE CURE D'ARS 

was declared Venerable in 1872, thirteen years after his death; 
and the process of his canonization is advancing in Rome by 
the cautious and slow process of the sacred tribunals. My 
object in offering this little narrative of a visit to his shrine is 
to enlist the interest of the readers of THE CATHOLIC WORLD in 
procuring for him the title of Saint, because, as things go, the 
process is expensive. Testimony must be taken of facts in his 
life, secretaries hired, postage and telegrams paid, judges select- 
ed and requited for their services, a vast amount of correspon- 
dence done, printing, travelling, etc. You know how costs 
mount up in ordinary legal matters. Well, this is a legal mat- 
ter, and of the nicest, most exact nature. There is a great deal 
of evidence taken, and discussion without end, before a miracle 
can be proved and accepted as such ; and all this must needs 
have doctors, priests, and other specialists to deliver their 
opinions in the most technical and formal way. In short, the 
expense reaches tens of thousands. We want to get the vener- 
able priest raised to the honors of the altar ; not for his own 
glory what is earthly glory to him ? but in order to attract 
more attention to his wonderful career, to incite others to in- 
voke his intercession and imitate his zeal, even from afar off ; 
to bring more souls to God through the sacrament of which he 
was such a faithful minister. Canonization is not necessary, 
perhaps hardly expedient, in the cases of holy men whose life 
is hidden from the people. Hence the Carthusian monks, " who," 
as Cardinal Vaughan says, " belong to the highest state of 



8 9 4.] 



THE CANONIZATION OF THE CURE &ARS. 



probably from their lives being hidden and unobserved, and 
from their known unwillingness to admit the distraction inci- 
dental even to the promotion of causes for canonization." 
The Benedictines also, though more before the public, have 
had no saint canonized for five hundred years ; nor have the 
Lazarists, a mis- 
sionary order, 
even ; nor the 
world-famous Sis- 
ters of Charity 
presented any 
member for can- 
onization, except 
their founder, St. 
Vincent de Paul 
himself the 
property rather 
of all France 
than of any par- 
ticular society, 
however renown- 
ed. Still, it is 
mainly by the 
efforts of the so- 
cieties to which 
they belong that 
saints are canon- 
ized, no matter 
how holy they 
may have been ; 
and therefore 
parish priests, 
the memory of 
whose life and 
works is hardly 
preserved with 
the necessary care 

by the stranger who, after their departure for heaven, enters upon 
the field of their labors, have but slight chance of obtaining this 
temporal distinction. And yet it is desirable that by publishing 
the merits and magnifying the glory of one of these latter 
attention should be attracted to the exalted nature of their call- 
ing, so that the people may hold it and them in greater rever- 
ence, and so profit the more by their ministry ; and they them- 




STATUE OF THE CURE. 



716 THE CANONIZATION OF THE CURE D'ARS. [Feb., 

selves may gain in self-respect, in zeal for souls, and the acquire- 
ment of those virtues which are needed for those who are fellow- 
workers with Jesus Christ. 

Let us glorify the parish priest of Ars, and thus magnify the 
Lord by whose grace he is what he is. " We once heard," says 
Father Monnin, " a distinguished but somewhat sceptical phil- 
osopher exclaim in his enthusiasm, ' I do not believe anything 
like this has been seen since the stable at Bethlehem !' . . . 
He spoke truth in this sense, that the life of the Cure of Ars, 
as the lives of all the saints, was but the continuation of the 
life of our Lord." A celebrated poet was so overcome by the 
emotion produced by his presence that the words escaped him 
unawares : " I have never seen God so near." Another distin- 
guished pilgrim said : " The Cur6 of Ars is the very model of 
the childhood which Jesus loved, . . . therefore it is that 
God is with him." One of the famous painters of France 
stayed about several days trying to get a perfect sketch of his 
features. " It has been one of the great blessings of my life," 
he said afterwards, " to have known the Cure d'Ars. We must 
have seen saints to be able to paint them." " What did I see 
at Ars ? " said a prominent author to one who inquired of him. 
" I saw John in the wilderness ! I was one of the eighty thou- 
sand or so who went there last year. People tell me of mar- 
vellous things which go on at Ars. I doubt not the power of 
God ; it is as great in this nineteenth century as in the first 
days of Christianity. I am convinced that the prayers of the 
holy priest can obtain surprising and even miraculous cures ; 
but to recognize the presence of the supernatural there I have 
no need of all this. The great miracle of Ars is the laborious 
and penitential life of its cure. That a man can do what he 
does, and do it every day, without growing weary or sinking 
under it, is what surpasses my comprehension ; this is to me the 
miracle of miracles." 

Read one of his lives, then, if you have not already done 
so, and "taste and see" that the Lord is with his church in 
these latter days even as of old. And then, if you think well 
of it, give an alms " to build a beautiful church in honor of St. 
Philumena," or rather just now, as that church is already suffi- 
ciently advanced, to pay the expenses of raising upon the lofty 
pedestal of sainthood this native of glorious, apostolic France, 
who in his character and life revealed to the nineteenth century 
the simplicity, the neat poverty, the gentle, powerful love, the 
divine holiness of the Son of God, who is " wonderful in his 




1894-] FATHER OHRWALDER' s NARRATIVE. 717 

FATHER OHRWALDER'S NARRATIVE.* 

BY HENRY HAYMAN, D.D. 

HE narrative of the sufferings in and escape from 
captivity of the Reverend Father Ohrwalder, 
and of the sisters his companions, is at full 
length before us in English, rewritten in that 
language from the father's personal record in 
German. That record was written from recollection after his 
escape, which forms its last chapter. This English version is 
by Major F. R. Wingate, R.A., of the Intelligence Depart- 
ment, Cairo, who has himself written upon Mahdiism and the 
Sudan. It is amply illustrated by photographed portraits and 
scenes of the deepest interest, and furnished with adequate and 
well-executed maps and plans. 

In a century rich in all the picturesque and revulsive con- 
trasts which the outer zone of savagery offers to the widening 
area of civilization, no more sensational tale of heroic endur- 
ance has illuminated the annals of humanity. To the great 
world which, after a gasp of indolent astonishment, again goes 
on its way of worldly venture and risk, the story serves merely 
as a thrilling stimulant as the latest novelty of the strange and 
the terrible. But to all who hold " the Faith once delivered " 
it is a career of modern confessorship which may compare with 
any since the record of persecution first began. 

It is not long since an attempt was made by a certain 
Canon Taylor, of the Church of England, to vindicate the Mos- 
lem faith and practice as specially adapted to the backward 
races, as conveying the one germ of truth, however adulterated, 
which their minds are capable of receiving, and as securing on 
a stern and rugged but still firm basis such moral elements as 
can be brought home to their consciences. More especially on 
the broad ground of ethnical characteristics the races of Africa 
have been selected as fit for that creed, and in their present 
stage for no other. Here we have a native regenerator for 
such the Mahdi professed to be of the Mohammedan religion, 
and the result, a horrible depravity and an inbred destructive- 

* From the original MSS. of Father Joseph Ohrwalder, late priest of the Austrian Mis- 
sion at Delen, in Kordofan. Fourth edition. London : Sampson Low. 1892. 



FATHER OHRWALDER'S NARRATIVE. 



[Feb., 



ness, attested by entire tribes exterminated, desolation spread- 
ing like a cancer over provinces, and savagery triumphant. 
Take the following sample as regards the treatment of the suf- 
fering natives when sick from the 'small-pox : 




FATHER OHRWALDER, THE SISTERS CHINCARINI AND VENTURINI, AND THE 
SLAVE GIRL ADELA. 

" This disease was then very prevalent, . . . and horrible 
sights continually met our eyes. These unfortunate sufferers 
had no one to help them, and they were left to die either 
of the disease or of hunger; they lay about under the trees in 
the market-place, shunned by every one ; often, when still liv- 



1894-] FATHER OHRWALDER'S NARRATIVE. 719 

ing, they were dragged off by men who tied ropes round their 
bodies and pulled them along the ground till they were beyond 
the outskirts of the town, and there they were left to be de- 
voured by the hyenas." 

These were the tyrant's own people, might even be his own 
tribesmen ; were suffering from a human affliction which might 
be the lot of any, perhaps of himself, next day ; yet we see 
from this horrible treatment how the hearts of those in author- 
ity were steeled by selfish panic or superstition against the 
last rudimentary instincts of human feeling. After this speci- 
men of the moral standard current under the then existing rule, 
what need to give details of captives dying under the lash ; of 
wretches, famine-stricken and plundered to the last shred, 
scratching in the floors of ruined huts in the hope of scraping 
up a handful of gum with which, unwholesome as such food 
was, to sustain a miserable existence ; of the cold-blooded mas- 
sacre of brave garrisons ; of the survivors of a defeated tribe 
hanged by the hundred together and the corpses flung into a 
well ; of cruel mutilations inflicted as an ordinary punishment on 
the remnants of another tribe hunted down and destroyed ? 
After the arbitrary execution of one who boldly denounced the 
Mahdi as an impostor we read that 

" According to Moslem law, if an unbeliever be discovered, 
all his neighbors within a forty yards' radius are considered 
guilty, and their houses may be plundered and destroyed." 

The stupid intolerance which thus revels in widening the 
area of destruction is by Ohrwalder here ascribed, not to the 
impulse of a fanatical mob, or to the arbitrary caprice of a 
despot, but to the deliberate voice of " Moslem law." The 
genius of that law seems to abet, and even license, the destruc- 
tive instincts of barbarism. 

All the while that these typical horrors were being enacted 
before their eyes, the father and the sisters had their own 
share of them. Their calendar of suffering runs parallel to the 
history of the career of the Mahdi and his successor. Early in 
the narrative the members of the mission were brought before 
him and threatened with death, sentenced to execution, and 
reprieved at the last moment. Led as captives through a camp 
of nomad Arabs, 

" The inquisitive and motley crowd derided us and heaped in- 
sults upon us ; the ugly old women, whom one could only com- 



720 



FATHER OHRWALDER'S NARRATIVE. 



[Feb., 



pare with hyenas, were perhaps the most bitter in their disgrace- 
ful taunts." 

Of course the abandonment of their faith would have re- 
leased them at once from all this contumely and ill-treatment, 




FATHER OHRWALDER'S INTERVIEW WITH THE MAHDI AT RAHAD. 

amidst which "the thought of death was a comfort to us." 
Again, we read that 

"The strain of the last few days, the tiring journey, . . . 
the continual uncertainty as to our fate, anguish, fear, din, 



1894-] FATHER OHRWALDER'S NARRATIVE. 721 

tumult, bad food, had already considerably affected our health ; 
. . . the reaction came and we fell a prey to disease. The 
infected atmosphere . . . brought on a burning fever and 
constant diarrhoea. Besides all this . . . we had become 
covered with horrible vermin. It was impossible to get rid of 
them ; they seemed to increase daily. We had no clothes to 
change, and as we had scarcely enough water to drink, wash- 
ing was out of the question. With a feeling of utter despair 
we lay helpless and comfortless on the floor of that miserable 
black hut. Our maladies became worse, and ere a month had 
passed three of our number were dead ; . . . while we four 
who still remained, hovering between life and death, lay help- 
lessly side by side with our dead brothers and sisters. It was 
a terrible exertion to us to sew the corpses in mats and drag 
them to the door of the hut. At length some slaves, much 
against their will and on the promise of good pay, removed 
the already-decaying bodies, and buried them in shallow pits 
which they covered up with sand. . . . We were too ill to 
move, and so they were carried away to their last resting-place 
without prayer or chant ; and even to this day I cannot tell if 
the slaves really buried them, or merely dragged the bodies be- 
yond the huts, and left them lying there on the ground." 

Fifty pages later we find the sisters forcibly torn away from 
their only protector, and every means of barbarity used to 
shake their faith even to slitting the nose of one of them ; 
and they were then distributed as slaves amongst the emirs, 
and compelled to travel in the burning sand and sun from El 
Obeid to Rahad. On the journey we read that 

" They suffered greatly; they were obliged to walk the whole 
distance barefooted over thorns. . . . They underwent the 
agonies of hunger and thirst, and some of them had to carry 
loads ; one of them for a whole day had not a drop of water 
to drink. These brutal savages were continually beating, insult- 
ing, and abusing them, and when tired and weary they sat down 
for a moment, they were driven forward under the lash of the 
cruel whip. On their arrival at Rahad they scarcely looked 
like human beings, with their faces all scorched and peeled by 
the burning sun; and. here new tortures awaited them. One of 
them was suspended from a tree and beaten on the soles of 
the feet until they became swollen and black, and soon after- 
wards the nails dropped off. In spite of all this suffering, and 
notwithstanding the continual threats of these barbarians of the 
VOL. LVIII. 48 



722 FATHER OHRWALDER'S NARRATIVE. [Feb., 

last inhuman outrage upon womanhood, these sisters clung firmly 
to their faith and belief." 

The marvel is how, under such treatment, any have survived 
to escape and tell the dismal tale. Over and over again death 
would clearly have been a welcome relief from the long-drawn 
agony of physical suffering, in nearly every form of which our 
nature is susceptible. The Christians exposed in the arena 
ad leones enjoyed happier terms. To them death was swallowed 
up in victory. 

To pass for a moment from the stand-point of the captives 
to that of their tyrant, the economic stay of Mahdiism lay in 
the slave-trade. Gessi Pasha, Gordon's able helpmate, tore out 
whole nests of these man-hunting miscreants, trained to every 
device of savage war, as pirates to every insidious manoeuvre at 
sea. These were drawn to the Mahdi's side by the prospect 
of unstinted loot and a license to ply their abominable traffic. 
But beyond these motives he succeeded in imbuing them with a 
frantic ardor of fanaticism, which, at a word from him, made 
them rush on certain and sudden death in the hope of a pass- 
port straight to Paradise. Such was the chief feature of inter- 
nal policy in this novel Sudanese regime. The treasury and the 
slave-market are the leading departments of its civil service, 
and they stand in Omdurman, the capital, side by side. 

Bribery and corruption, the usurers' baneful trade, brigand- 
age and thievery of all grades down to pocket-picking, with 
slaves trained to be expert practitioners in all, formed the inci- 
dents of every-day life in Omdurman. But, worse yet, the enor- 
mous waste of male life, through the havoc of ceaseless warfare 
and the consequent disproportion of the sexes, made the ele- 
mentary basts of all sexual morality insecure. Sternly repressive 
edicts were issued in vain. The women were denounced, of 
course by the men, as the source of this ever-spreading taint. 
A council was held with the result that 

" It was decided to make an example of one, and the victim 
selected was an unfortunate who had borne two illegitimate 
children. The poor creature was led into the woman's quarter 
of the market, and there she was lowered into a grave with 
her last child tied to her bosom, and both stoned to death by 
a cruel and hard-hearted crowd, who seemed to take a fiendish 
delight in this inhuman piece of work." 

Here then we see Mohammedanism, as it is at home, when 
doing its special work on the morale of the less advanced races 



1894-] FATHER OHRWALDER' s NARRATIVE. 723 

a far truer test of its native genius than can be found where, 
as in India, it stands counterchecked by Christianity, Brahminism, 
and Buddhism as rival social forces. 

But we have now only space for the final episode, the escape 
of the captives. That of Father Bonomi in itself a passage of 
thrilling interest had been accomplished six years earlier, 
before the Mahdi's death. And now the climax of pathos in 
this tale of suffering seems reached just as deliverance is at 
hand, and the chief question to have been, Would their frames 
of flesh and blood hold together long enough for the effort to 
be made, and would they then have staying power to live 
through that effort? Father Ohrwalder points out how the 
escape of himself alone could have been effected with compara- 
tive ease : 

" As a man, I could have stained my naturally brown com- 
plexion, dressed in rags, and begged my way along the banks 
of the Blue Nile to Abyssinia ; but I could not leave the poor 
sisters behind, and therefore resolved to wait patiently till a 
deliverer should come." 

Repeatedly during their captivity had Archbishop Sogaro 
sent from Cairo money to relieve their wants, but, through the 
dishonesty of the Arabs employed, none had ever reached them. 
This fact shows that the furtive and mercenary vices are as 
much stimulated by the prevailing form of Islam as the blood- 
thirsty and ferocious ones. The archbishop would naturally 
select those who were least likely to betray trust by embezzling 
the money and deluding the hapless captives' hopes. But in 
no one instance so far was his confidence justified. " Bad were 
the best." Another attempt to reach and rescue the captives, 
or at least improve their positions by working on the trading 
cupidity of a native emir at Dongola, also miscarried for the 
same reason. The indefatigable archbishop was the spring of 
this as of other efforts, but the last link in the chain of com- 
munication was an Arab emissary, who never returned. At 
length the same native cupidity supplied a motive on the other 
side. It was known that the Cairo government were holding 
out rewards for any letters brought through from the prisoners, 
as these might throw some light on the now unknown situation 
in the Sudan. This brought out a volunteer, " a young Abab- 
deh Arab," one Ahmed Hassan, who came with the offer to 
take a letter from Ohrwalder to Cairo. After the natural delay 
caused by suspicion and cautious inquiry, a letter to the arch- 



724 FATHER OHRWALDER'S NARRATIVE. [Feb., 

bishop was written by him and entrusted to this Arab, who had 
now so won the father's confidence that a project of escape 
was discussed between them, although it involved a whole year 
before it could be matured. But previously to this, 

"In fact ever since 1884, our good archbishop had never 
ceased in his efforts to assist us and to make our captivity 
more bearable. He left no stone unturned, and moved Mos- 
lems, Christians, the government, and indeed his Holiness the 
Pope, on our behalf, and one of the missionaries was maintained 
on the Egyptian frontier with the special object of endeavoring 
to procure our release." 

Ahmed Hassan, although a volunteer as stated, could not be 
regarded as flawless in his faith, and was entrusted with the 
letter to the archbishop with many misgivings. He however 
delivered it, and received in return a commission, under agree- 
ment, with one hundred pounds in hand to purchase camels, 
arms, and all needful items for the escape, and assist it to the 
utmost. But while he was absent in Cairo on this errand 
Sister Concetta Coosi, long suffering from ill health, died of 
typhus. They buried her in the native fashion which super- 
sedes coffins (an impossibility in that region), by a shroud and 
a mat, " in the warm desert sand, protecting her body from 
the ravenous hyenas by a few thorns," and thinking how soon 
they might be laid beside her. " But I felt," adds Ohrwalder, 
" that my life was in God's hands." Sorely trying was the an- 
guish of suspense which followed ; but she had hardly been 
dead a month when Hassan reappeared. Then follows an 
account of the manoeuvres of the party to insure secrecy and 
disarm suspicion. Hassan had to purchase his camels by stealth, 
and singly, at outlying farms. They were further encumbered 
by a little slave-girl, presented to the father by a native friend. 
To leave her would have betrayed their plans. She rode be- 
hind him on his camel. A series of hairbreadth escapes from 
threatening frustrations at last allowed them to start. Fortu- 
nately all the riding camels in the town had been requisitioned 
for some expedition shortly before, so that immediate pursuit 
was impeded. It further appeared later that, when their escape 
was known, the pursuers started on a false scent, surmising 
that they had departed by the river, and lost time in attempt- 
ing pursuit by boats. The fugitives started in the dark when 
the moon had gone down ; and the moment of starting was 
the most perilous of all, owing to the restiveness of the camels, 



1894-] FATHER OHRWALDER'S NARRATIVE. 725 

well-fed and fresh; as also to the nearness of a well, with the 
usual concourse of laughing and chattering slave girls about it, 
whose noise, however, drowned any made by the travellers. 
Then came the desperate ride for freedom and life of five 
hundred miles in seven days across the great Nubian desert. 
Hassan, with two Arab attendants ; Sisters Chincarini and Ven- 
turini, and Ohrwalder with the slave-child en croupe, formed the 
cavalcade. 

At early dawn they left the last village (generally reckoned 
at two days north of Omdurman) behind and started for the 
wild, avoiding the river, although glimpsing it occasionally with 
its edging of green-sward in the dry, bare landscape, and shun- 
ning all known tracks. A sister fell from her saddle, was picked 
up, spla/shed with water to restore her, for she had fainted, and 
firmly tied upon it again. Among other precautions, Hassan 
had adopted that of feeing heavily a native magician, who 
thereon foretold that the journey " would be as white as milk," 
i.e., without mishap ; thus reassuring, besides solemnly swearing 
to secrecy on the Qoran the few whom he was forced to take 
into confidence before starting, Hassan's resources in lulling the 
suspicions of Arab shepherds or such villagers as they could 
not avoid were always prompt and adequate ; but as their 
route was to some extent conjectural, he once miscalculated 
the nearness of the river, and before they knew it they had 
plunged into a village. Here, however, his ingenuity brought 
them off. With eyes red and swollen from the desert glare, and 
" our clothes sticking to the wounds we had received when rid- 
ing through the bush," with limbs cramped and stiffened by the 
attitude in which alone it is possible to sit (or rather squat) a 
camel, maintained for many hours together they pushed on, 
past " Gubat on the Nile, where the English had encamped in 
1885 " when pressing forward to the too late rescue of Gordon ; 
past Metemmeh and towards Berber, near to which Hassan had 
a friend, and where he thought of crossing the Nile. Suddenly 
a stranger started up in front, but since 

" In the desert no man meets a friend," 

he was as much alarmed, taking the party for robbers, as they 
could be. Hassan, however, tranquillized him. On the third 
day Berber was sighted, and by the evening they filled their 
waterskins in the river opposite to it. But tidings were unpro- 
pitious to the attempt to cross there, so they started again into 
the desert a stony plateau now which their guides knew not ; 



726 FATHER OHRWALDER'S NARRATIVE. [Feb., 

then a deep gorge strewn with huge blocks and boulders ; then 
a sudden alarm of three camel-men in the distance ; a hurried 
concealment, a council of war, the two attendants sent out to 
reconnoitre; during whose absence, after three days and a half 
in the saddle, a few hours' sleep was snatched by the rest. 
They returned with reassuring news : the camel-men were not, 
as surmised, pursuers, but natives on their own errand ; also the 
transit had been secured at the ferry. This proved at first de- 
lusive, the ferryman declining to put them over until daylight. 
This was too great a risk ; but two native boys, looking out for 
a chance of backsheesh, came to the rescue and took across the 
party, camels and all. At midnight they pushed on, and rode 
without check through the weird solitude until the next even- 
ing, with an occasional herd of antelopes pricking their ears in 
the distance, and here and there a hyena crossing their track. 
The weather, cold when they left Omdurman, became oppres- 
sively hot ; mirages haunted and deceived them ; the camels 
wasted and their humps dwindled, they were footsore and 
showed signs of exhaustion, and the males of the party dis- 
mounted and led them in turn. On a broad plain, dotted with 
shrubs, Hassan espied and killed a snake, and then jumped 
thrice over its body with great excitement. His Arab comrades 
hailed the omen, confident that success was now assured; an- 
other snake after nightfall, hissing at them in the dark, turned 
their confidence as easily into mistrust, " and curiously enough, 
when close to Abu Hamed, an event did occur which quite con- 
firmed their superstitions." They took a line too far to the 
east in making for a mountain landmark which was to guide 
them to the river, and it was midnight instead of midday when 
they reached its pass. On descending to the river a rifle-armed 
camel-man was heard and seen, being a native guard from Ber- 
ber to check Egyptian contraband practices. This incident was 
at first alarming, the guard insisting on their going to the emir, 
who would probably have sent them back to Omdurman. 

" I gave Hamed my long knife and told him to do what he 
could to win the man over with money, but that if he found 
this was useless well ! we were four men to one." But the 
persuasiveness of the more precious metals appears to have 
made a resort to cold steel unnecessary. One of the sisters was 
so agitated by an unwary exclamation of Hassan's that she fell 
off, but was caught by careful hands ere she reached the rocky 
ground. This matter arranged all remounted, mutual oaths 
were exchanged between Hassan and the guard that neither 






1894-] FATHER OHRWALDER'S NARRATIVE. 727 

would betray the other, and we " rode for our lives night and 
day; the poor camels were reduced to skeletons, and we our- 
selves were nothing but skin and bone." Then followed a day 
of intense suffering ; a flat, shrubless plain beneath a fierce sun, 
then "great bare hills and solitary valleys," where "the wind 
had driven the sand almost to the tops of the hills." But, 
" once within the hills, our courage returned, for we knew we 
should be able to defend ourselves ; so we dismounted and ate 
our last mouthful of biscuit." 

Of they went again, riders and camels both " utterly ex- 
hausted ; my right arm ached from continually whipping up the 
poor beast." But the guides lightened the way, being now bold 
with hope of safety, by desert anecdotes mostly of death and 
deadly peril. Here was a track on which four of a party of 
seven, escaping, had died of thirst when Berber fell. There was 
a spot where Rundle Bey had reconnoitred in 1885 "the road 
was plainly marked by the bones of camels and donkeys." 
Along it Ali Pasha had ridden under the guidance of a sheikh, 
who forbade him to dismount at a spot where he wished to, 
saying " I am commander here"; and the pasha complied, know- 
ing that anything might befall him in that awful wilderness if 
the sheikh's directions were not precisely obeyed. In this last 
stage of utter exhaustion 

" Our worst enemy was sleep. It is quite impossible for me 
to describe the fearful attacks this tyrannical foe made upon 
us. We tried every means in our power to keep awake ; we 
shouted and talked loudly to each other, we tried to startle 
ourselves by giving a sudden jerk, we pinched ourselves till the 
blood ran down ; but our eyelids weighed down like balls of 
lead, and it required a fearful effort to keep them open." 

And so "nature's sweet restorer, balmy sleep," became the 
greatest peril. It was impossible at last to shake it off. They 
found their muscles fail them, 4 their tongues stood still in their 
heads ; they nodded, they dozed, and after an unknown inter- 
val started awake, and when just about to lose, regained their 
equilibrium and "sleep vanished." Their haven of safety was 
now Murat, in the midst of the great Nubian waste ; and, as 
they sighted it, the guide came out with a pleasing anecdote, 
how the dervishes had once pursued and killed a fugitive even 
there ! But as the flag on the fort could now be clearly seen, 
Hassan woke the echoes by shot after shot from his rifle. This 
soon " fetched " the garrison, who of course took them at first 



728 FATHER OHRWALDER'S NARRATIVE. [Feb., 

for a hostile advance guard, and turned out armed ; then dis- 
covered their error, and returned the friendly salute. 

" But," writes our rescued confessor, safe at last, "the effects 
of hunger, fatigue, and the sights and scenes we had gone 
through during the last month did not disappear so easily ; all 
our senses seemed dulled, and Our first thought on entering the 
commandant's hut was to lie down on the floor and go to 
sleep, but, strange to say, that wonderful restorer would not 
come. We sat gossiping with the Ababdehs, who could scarcely 
credit that we, especially the sisters, could have survived such 
a ride. . . . Poor Ahmed Hassan had dwindled down almost 
to a skeleton, and when he dismounted at Murat was overcome 
by a fit of dizziness, from which he did not recover for an 
hour." . 

After two days' rest they resumed their route for Korosko 
and thence to Cairo. The last stages were by Nile steamboat 
and train ; but while they were yet on their camels a party of 
the garrison of Murat, returning from Korosko, " seeing us, took 
us for dervishes, rushed to their arms, took up a position 
against a rock, and levelled their rifles at us." The mistake 
was speedily explained by the guide Hassan, and they at once 
fraternized with their expected enemies. Hassan seems well to 
have earned the pay covenanted for his services, and we hope 
he has obtained promotion from the government. The sudden 
change to civilized and educated society, after all the fearful 
scenes of unmitigated barbarism, through a ten years' expe- 
rience, raised emotions of enjoyable thankfulness, only qualified 
by the thought of dear companions still pining in the bonds 
which the refugees had shaken off. The ride herein recorded 
is the most momentous and adventurous of all in recent history. 
Father Ohrwalder concludes: 

"I have pined ten years in bondage, and now, by the help 
of God, I have escaped. In the^ names of the companions with 
whom I suffered ; in the name of the Sudan people, whose 
misery I have seen, and in the name of all civilized nations, I 
ask this question : How long shall Europe and above all that 
nation which has first part in Egypt and the Sudan which 
stands deservedly first in civilizing savage races ; how long shall 
Europe and Great Britain watch unmoved the outrages of the 
Khalifa and the destruction of the Sudan people?" 

All the faithful will echo his words, with an appeal to a 
higher power " How long, O Lord! how long?" 







1894-] BRAHMANISM. 729 



BRAHMANISM DOES NOT ANTEDATE THE MOSAIC 

WRITINGS. 

BY THE RIGHT REV. FRANCIS SILAS CHATARD, D.D. 
i 

HE period in which we are is generally consid- 
ered to be one of transition, and those who go 
by the name of " advanced thinkers " are pro- 
nounced in their views, and are in a hurry to 
throw aside the past. While it is true the 
world is always changing, it seems to us that, in studying these 
changes, we do well to remember that human nature does not 
change, and that the- temptations to evil and to error do not 
change ; and that therefore it is wise to look to the experience 
of the past and to the canons of sound reasoning to guard 
against both evil and error. We wish to invoke these in the 
remarks we subjoin ; for we are desirous of putting before the 
public what may tend to stay the downward course of many 
minds that are throwing aside Christianity and deceiving them- 
selves with the idea that they have found a source of enlighten- 
ment in the ancient religious teaching of the Hindus. While 
we are striving to do this, we feel sure that what we shall say, 
or rather present from weighty sources, will confirm the believer 
in Christianity in his faith and in his conviction that he has 
nothing to fear from the most learned opposition. 

A HINDUPHILE AUTHORITY. 

The principal source whence we present the reasons which 
will serve our purpose is a work written not long ago by a 
zealous and learned missionary bishop, Monseigneur Laoue- 
nan, Vicar-Apostolic of Pondichery, India, printed at the Press 
of the Catholic Mission in Pondichery, in 1884. The author of 
this most interesting book, which met with such approval that 
it was honored by a public act of the Academy of France, or, 
as it is technically said, " couronne" was born in Brittany. He 
studied for the priesthood in the house of the " Missions Etran- 
geres " in Paris, and went as a missionary priest to India. 
During his studies he had been impressed with the force of the 
arguments against Christianity derived from the traditions and 
sacred books of the Hindus, although not to the extent of 



730 BRAHMANISM DOES NOT [Feb., 

causing him to waver in that faith which rests upon the Resur- 
rection of Christ. He had read Cardinal Wiseman's lectures on 
the relation between Science and Revealed Religion. He had 
admired the manner in which the great cardinal laid bare the 
pretensions to excessive antiquity put forward by those who 
were carried away by their enthusiasm for everything Hindu ; 
citing the labors of astronomers, for example, to show that the 
state of the heavens described in the epic poem, " The Rama- 
yana," as accompanying the birth of Rama, could only have 
taken place nine hundred and sixty-one years before Christ, and 
not in fabled antiquity ; or that the birth of Krishna or Kristna, 
the pretended prototype of Christ, at which the position of the' 
planets is given in his Janampatra, could only have occurred 
August 7, A.D. 600 (Lect. VII.) 

The young priest resolved to consecrate himself to the work 
of still further examination into the claims of Hindu theology, 
or rather mythology, and to study it on the spot. This resolu- 
tion was carried out, and the result is the book we have before 
us, with the title Brahmanism and its Relations. In writing 
it he spent thirty-five years, availing himself of the researches 
of the most successful writers of all nationalities on the Sacred 
Books of India. Such a work is valuable from the information 
it gives, and is rendered more so by the temperate manner in 
which the author of it speaks. For he lets us understand that 
he does not pretend to have cleared up all the obscure points 
of Indian chronology. 

VAGUENESS OF INDIAN LITERATURE. 

In his introduction he says : 

"We do not flatter ourselves with the idea that we have 
entirely succeeded. The special characteristic of all Indian 
literature is that it has almost absolutely no chronology ; so all 
who have written on ancient India up to the Mohammedan in- 
vasion in the eleventh century are reduced to conjectures more 
or less risky. Our condition is the same. Certain facts, how- 
ever, seem to us indubitable ; among others, the successive 
transformations in the Brahmanical doctrine and worship, the 
last of which is only a few centuries back : whence it follows 
that Brahmanism in its present form is relatively modern, sub- 
sequent not only to Judaism, but also to Christianity. Now, it 
is especially in the books which have been inspired by the pre- 
sent, actual form of Brahmanism, or have been created by it, 
that are to be found the traditions and doctrines relating to 



1894-] ANTEDATE THE MOSAIC WRITINGS. 731 

Christianity. In like manner it is principally in the laws of 
Manu that are contained the traditions and the institutions 
which resemble the recitals and the prescriptions of the Penta- 
teuch, and it is to-day established that the Manava-Dharma- 
Sastra is much after the time of Moses " (p. ix.) 

Before going further into the matter of this book, it will be 
useful to hear what others have to say regarding the time in 
which the sacred writings of the Hindus were written, and with 
reference to the books themselves. 

Professor Julius Eggeling, Ph.D. and Professor of Sanskrit 
and Comparative Philology in the University of Edinburgh, in 
his article on Brahmanism in the Encyclop&dia Britannica, may 
be said to give an opinion representing the conclusion of scho- 
lars on the subject. This is what he says: 

" The Hindu scriptures consist of four separate collections, 
or Sanhitas, of sacred texts or Mantras, including hymns, incan- 
tations, and sacrificial forms of prayer; viz., the Rich or Rig- 
veda, the Saman or Sama-veda, the Yajush or Yajur-veda, and 
the Atharvan or Atharva-veda. Each of these four text-books 
has attached to it a body of prose writings, called Brahmanas r 
which presuppose the Sankitas, purporting as they do to explain 
chiefly the ceremonial application of the texts, and the origin 
and import of the sacrificial rites for which these were supposed 
to have been composed. Besides the Brahmanas proper, these 
theological works, and in a few isolated cases some of the San- 
hitas, include two kinds of appendages, the Aranyakas and Upan- 
ishads, both of which, and especially the latter, by their lan- 
guage and contents, generally betray a more modern origin than 
the works to which they are annexed." 

The Aranyakas, like the Brahmanas, explain the text and 
" give somewhat more prominence to the mystical sense of the 
rites of worship." The Upanishads " are taken up to a great ex- 
tent with speculations on the problems of the universe, and the 
religious aims of man." "The hymns of the Rig-veda constitute 
the earliest lyrical effusions of the Aryan settlers in India 
which have been handed down to posterity. They are certainly 
not all equally old : on the contrary they evidently represent 
the literary activity of many generations of bards, though their 
relative age cannot as yet be determined with anything like 
certainty. The tenth and last book of the collection, however, 
at any rate has all the characteristics of a later appendage, and 
in language and spirit many of its hymns approach very nearly 
to the level of the contents of the Atharvan." " Several im- 



732 BRAHMANISM DOES NOT [Feb., 

portant works, the original composition of which has probably 
to be assigned to the early days of Brahmanism, such as the 
Institutes of Manu, and the two great epics the Mahabharata 
and the Ramayana, in the form in which they have been handed 
down to us, show manifest traces of a more modern redaction." 
We have here first the Sanhitas or sacred books, next the 
Brahmanas, then appendages, the Aranyakas and the Upanishads. 
The most ancient of all is the Rig-veda, which was the work of 
many generations of bards ; the relative age of its hymns can- 
not be determined with anything like certainty. The Institutes 
of Manu, and the epics the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, 
as handed down to us manifest traces of a more modern re- 
daction, or editorial compilation. It will be well to bear these 
statements in mind as we proceed. 

MAX MULLER'S OPINION. 

Professor Max Miiller, in his Lectures on the Origin and Growth 
of Religion, p. 145 (ed. 1879, Scribner), says : " I ascribe the collec- 
tion and the systematic arrangement of the Vedic hymns and for- 
mulas, which we find in four books, or the Samhitas for the Rig- 
veda, the Yagur-veda, the Sama-veda, and the Atharva-veda, to 
the Mantra Period, from the year 800 B. C. to the year 1000." 
" The Brahmanas belong to a period from 600 to 800 B. C." 
" The Sutras, treatises on phonetics, etymology, exegesis, metre, 
customs, laws, geometry, astronomy, and philosophy, are of a 
period subsequent to these, B. C. 500." " It is therefore before 
1000 B. C. that we must place the spontaneous growth of Vedic 
poetry, such as we find in the Rig-veda, and in the Rig-veda 
only. . . . How far back that period, the so-called Khandas 
period, extended, who can tell ? Some scholars extend it to 
two or three thousand years before our era, but it is far better 
to show the different layers of thought that produced the Vedic 
religion, and thus to gain an idea of its long growth, than to 
attempt to measure it by years or centuries, which can never be 
more than guesswork" (italics ours). " One thing is certain: 
there is nothing more ancient and primitive, not only in India, 
but in the whole Aryan world, than the hymns of the Rig-veda." 
He tells us that these hymns were handed down by memory 
entirely, as likewise all the sacred books, the Brahmanas and 
the Sutras, for " few Sanskrit MSS. in India are older than the 
year 1000 after Christ ; nor is there any evidence that the art 
of writing was known in India much before the beginning of 
Buddhism, or the very end of the Vedic literature." 






1894-] ANTEDATE THE MOSAIC WRITINGS. 733 

A DEFINITE LANDMARK. 

The mention of Buddhism brings us to an interesting period. 
Here we are no longer in the dark as to time. History comes 
to our aid. We are able to fix dates, at least approximately, 
and surely. At the time of Alexander the Great, Professor 
Miiller tells us, "the whole drama of the ancient literature of 
the Brahmans had been acted. The old language had changed, 
the old religion, after passing through many phases (italics ours), 
had been superseded by a new faith." Alexander in his inva- 
sion of India, an. 325 before Christ, after the defeat of Bessus, 
received into his service an Indian chief by name Sisycottus, 
according to Thirlwall (ed. of 1845, Harper & Brothers, 
p. 232). This chief, whom he made commander of the impor- 
tant post of Aornus, on the right bank of the Indus, not far 
above the junction of the Cophen, seems to be the same as the 
Sandrocottus or Kandragrupta mentioned by Professor Max 
Miiller and by Monseigneur Laouenan, who afterwards became 
the founder of a dynasty at Magadha. The grandson of this 
potentate, Asoka, held the great council of the Buddhists in 
the seventeenth year of his reign, or in the year 245 or 242 B. C. 
(p. 130), and " 162 years were supposed to have passed between 
Buddha's death and Kandragrupta's accession in the year 
315; therefore 315+162=477 B. C. is the date of Buddha's 
death." Again, "218 years were supposed to have passed be- 
tween Buddha's death and Asoka's inauguration in the year 
259; 259+218=477 is the year of Buddha's death." "Further 
confirmation of this hypothesis has been lately added by two 
inscriptions discovered by General Cunningham, and published 
by Dr. Biihler in the Indian Antiquary." All fabled assertions 
of antiquity on the part of Buddhists we see by these citations 
are out of the question, for we are now in certain historic 
periods. 

THE QUESTION OF INSPIRED WRITING.^ 

Before leaving Professor Miiller's book it is interesting to 
note what he says about the inspiration of the Rig-veda and 
other books. Page 132 he writes: "At what time the claim of 
being divinely revealed, and therefore infallible, was first set up 
by the Brahmans in favor of the Veda is difficult to determine. 
This claim, like other claims of the same kind, seems to have 
grown up gradually, till at last it was formulated into a theory 
of inspirations as artificial as any known to us from other re- 



734 BRAHMANISM DOES NOT [Feb., 

ligions. As it is not our purpose to detain the reader with 
more lengthy extracts from the learned and distinguished pro- 
fessor's work, we refer him to the proofs given of this. We 
simply sum up here what has been quoted : The compilation of 
the Rig-veda from spontaneously developed hymns and from tradi- 
tions he deems is not to be assigned to an earlier date than 
the year 1000 B. C. When they were first uttered he cannot 
tell; to measure the growth of the Vedic religion, by years 
" can never be more than guesswork'' All these hymns and com- 
positions, and all the books, down to about the year' 500 were 
handed down purely by memory ; writing being, as far as evi- 
dence goes, unknown in India before that time. Again, San- 
skrit MSS. as a rule are not to be found before 1000 years 
after Christ. Moreover the Vedic religion passed through many 
phases by the year 500 B. C. As for inspiration, it was an after- 
thought. 

BRAHMANISM COMPARATIVELY MODERN. 

Let us now go back to Monseigneur Laouenan's book, and 
see how he treats of the subject we are considering. In search 
of the information he needed, he tells us, he lived in close re- 
lations with Indians of every class ; that he was able to visit 
the whole of India from Cape Comorin and Ceylon to the Him- 
alayas ; from the Malabar coast and Bombay to Chittagong in 
Bengal and Rangoon in Birmania. He studied attentively every 
thing he saw, read everything treating of the people and their 
religions. As a result he says : 

" What I gathered by observation on the subject of Brah- 
manism made me see that this form of religion has not been 
as immovable as is pretended and believed ; that it has under- 
gone transformation, modifications many and profound, of which 
some are modern ; in fact, that the Hindu cult, as it exists to- 
day, is with its books and sacred monuments of an origin rela- 
tively recent. I found that these transformations are all after 
the time of Moses, and that the last occurred parallel with the 
preaching of Christianity in India " (Preface, p. vii.) 

" My observations led me to another result less expected : the 
non-Aryan races of India have exerted a considerable influence 
on the changes of the Brahmanic doctrines and worship. Thus 
we see the Brahmans borrow their human sacrifices from the 
Dasyus, and unclean practices from the Saktas ; from the Cha- 
mitic tribes the worship of demons and of the Phallus ; from the 
Scythic races the worship of the serpent; from the aborigines 



1894-] ANTEDATE THE MOSAIC WRITINGS. 735 

the modern characters of Siva and of Vishnu ; from Iranian 
philosophers, or more probably from the Jews scattered about in 
Asia, the notion of the one God, the Creator, the knowledge of 
the history of the creation and of the deluge and so many pri- 
mordial traditions ; from the Christians finally what is most pure 
and most elevated in their doctrines and institutions " (ibid.) 

ABSENCE OF CHRONOLOGY IN INDIA. 

" I owe the reader," he goes on to say, " another very im- 
portant explanation. He will not find dates in my book, or he 
will find but few, which fix in a precise way the epochs to 
which belong personages, events, and periods mentioned. India 
has no history, or rather it possesses no chronology ; historical 
facts abound, but they have no dates ; so that it is by confront- 
ing them with events in the history of other peoples who had 
relations with it that it is possible to determine in an approxi- 
mative manner the time when the persons existed or the events 
took place." And he gives the following instance. I may state 
that a Brahman in a discourse published in the Madras Mail 
of May 23, 1884, quoted by our author, says: " The Hindu 
religion was established in India, several thousand years ago, in 
the place of the old Buddhist worship, the followers of which, 
after their defeat, had emigrated into the neighboring countries 
of Thibet and China." Mark how Monseigneur Laouenan meets 
this boast of antiquity based on the antiquity of Buddhism. 

" In the historical portion of the Vishnu-Purana, which is, by 
the acknowledgment of all Indian scholars, the most trustwor- 
thy of the Indian works, there is a list of the kings of Magadha 
of which here is the abridgment : First appears the dynasty of 
Vrihadratha, composed of eighteen princes who reigned one 
thousand years ; which would give to each one a mean reign 
of fifty-five years, a thing not very probable. To the dynasty 
of Vrihadratha succeeded that of Pradyota, which counts five 
kings and held sway one hundred and thirty-eight years ; then 
came that of the Sesha-nagas, who ruled three hundred and 
sixty-two ; then that of the Nandas, who retained the crown 
only one hundred years. After these came the Mauryas, to 
the number of ten, who reigned one hundred and thirty-seven 
years ; the Sungas, who reigned one hundred and twelve years ; 
after the Sungas the dynasty of the Kanwas, who governed 
forty-five years; finally that of the Andhras, numbering thirty- 
three princes, and held the supreme power four hundred and 
fifty-six years. That is all the historian gives, except the names 



736 BRAHMANISM DOES NOT [Feb., 

of the kings. How are we to fix the dates of these dynasties? 
The history of Alexander the Great and of his expedition into 
India furnishes us the means. 

ALEXANDER'S CONQUESTS IN INDIA. 

" The historians of Alexander make mention of an Indian 
adventurer, a guide, by name Sandrocyptus or Sandracottus, 
who had relations with the prince. After he left India Sandra- 
cottus became king of Magadha and of nearly all northern 
India ; Seleucus Nicator, one of the generals and successors of 
Alexander, made a treaty with him and sent to him, as ambas- 
sador, Megasthenes, who resided several years at Palibothra 
(Patoliputra or Patna), his capital. The expedition of Alexander 
into India took place 327-325 B. C.; the treaty between Seleu- 
cus and Sandracottus was concluded about 312 B. C.; Megas- 
thenes resided at Palibothra from the year 306 to the year 
298 B. C. 

" It remains now to find this Sandracottus mentioned here, 
who was sovereign of Magadha. He has been identified with 
certainty as Chandragrupta, head of the dynasty of Mauryas, 
who furnished ten kings to Magadha. It follows that Chandra- 
grupta reigned between the year 320 and the year 290 B. C 
This chronological point once established has served to fix 
several others, and among others the date of Buddha's death. 
This reformer was a contemporary of Vidmisara or Bimbisara, 
and of Ajata-satru, who Were converted to his teachings and 
who belonged to the Sesha-nagas dynasty mentioned above. 
Between this dynasty and Chandragrupta was the dynasty of 
the Nandas, who were in power one hundred years. The 
Sesha-nagas had reigned three hundred and sixty-two years, 
which gives a mean of thirty-six years to each member of the 
dynasty. Between Bimbisara and the first of the Nandas there 
were five kings, whose combined reigns would give us, 36 years 
x 5=180 years. If now we add the 100 years of the Nandas 
to the 1 80 of the five kings of the Sesha-nagas, we have 280; 
to this add 320 A. C., the approximative year of Chandragrupta's 
accession, we get the year 600 B. C. as the date of Buddha's 
death. But as Buddha died in the eighth year of Ajata-satru 
we must deduct eight from this figure, which gives us the year 
592 B. C. as the year approximative^ of Buddha's death. We 
shall see farther on that others, taking different calculations, fix 
the death of Buddha, some in 543, others in 477, and even in 
472 B. C." (p. xi.) 



1894-] ANTEDATE THE MOSAIC WRITINGS. 737 

THE AGE OF THE RIG VEDA. 

This is a very instructive piece of calculation, for it shows 
us how difficult, even with so certain a date to start from as 
that of Alexander's expedition into India, how conjectural every- 
thing in Indian chronology must necessarily be. As Professor 
Max Muller has said, there is much guesswork. The calcula- 
tion, however, is quite enough to leave the Madras Brahman in 
an embarrassing position. Not only this, it has an element o'f 
certainty about it, and if the Vishnu-Purana is really reliable, 
as it is looked on to be by the Brahmans, we are on a sure 
road to determine much that regards the Rig-veda and its an- 
tiquity with historic correctness. Our author shows this as 
follows: "The hymns of the Rig-veda often cite the name of a 
king of Benares or Casi, by name Divodasa, whose sons Pratar- 
dana and Parutshepa are the authors of several of these hymns. 
On the other hand the Brahmanic legends agree unanimously 
in saying that this Divodasa was converted by Buddha. He 
was then a contemporary of Buddha, and lived in the sixth, or 
even in the fifth, century before our era. It follows from this 
logically that the hymns of the Rig-veda which speak of him 
and those which were composed by his sons are subsequent to 
that time, and cannot be assigned to the fourteenth century, as 
is generally done. 

" Likewise, Prasenajit, king of Sravasti, was instructed by 
Buddha and embraced Buddhism. Now this Prasenajit was the 
father of Renuka, who was the mother of the famous Parasu- 
Rama. This personage was therefore a contemporary of 
Buddha. Prasenajit was the brother of Druvasandhi, king of 
Ayodhya, the sixteenth descendant and successor of Ikohwaku, 
founder of that city. From Druvasandhi descended the divine 
hero Rama-Chandra. According to a list of the kings of Ayo- 
dhya, Rama-Chandra was the twenty-third successor of Druvas- 
andhi ; according to another list, he was the twelfth; however 
that is, he was much posterior to Buddha and to the sixth 
century before Christ ; consequently the Ramayana, which sings 
his exploits, cannot have been composed at an epoch as far 
back as pretended." 

Reading this categoric statement of facts as they are given 
in the Rig-veda and other books of India, one cannot help 
thinking that those who put faith in the assertion that these 
sources of religious information are the earliest the human race 
has, are not only running a great risk, not only taking a leap in 

VOL. LVIII. AQ 



738 BRAHMANISM DOES NOT [Feb., 

the dark, but really go against the first dictates of common 
sense. 

THE ARYAN AVATAR. 

After a minute and careful weighing and examination of the 
opinion of the most reliable Indian scholars, often widely differ- 
ing, Monseigneur Laouenan gives his conclusions, with regard to 
the descent of the Aryans into India, and then with reference 
to the earliest epoch to which the Rig-veda is to be assigned. 

"We think that without fear the fifteenth or the sixteenth 
century before Christ can be adopted as the epoch at which 
the royal families of the Aryan race permanently established 
themselves in the north of India ; and the eighteenth or the 
nineteenth century as that in which this people descended from 
the high plateaux of Asia into the fertile plains watered by the 
Indus and its affluents. We are thus nearly in agreement with 
William Jones, Colebrooke, P. A. Dubois, and Heeren, whose 
authority is so weighty in this matter. Three thief considera- 
tions confirm us in this opinion. 

" (a) We have seen elsewhere (part ii. c. iii., Of the Aryans) 
that according to the data of the Rig-veda itself, the Aryan 
nation was for a long time without kings, probably all the 
time they dwelt in the Sapta Scindhu (at the affluents of the 
Indus). Would it be excessive to put that period as three hun- 
dred years ? 

" (b) The commencement of the so-called solar and lunar 
races (when the kingdoms were founded) dates from the estab- 
lishment of the Aryans on the banks of the Yamuna and of the 
Ganges. We have seen (Ancient Geography of India) that the 
most ancient of the cities where the kings reigned do not appear 
to reach beyond the fourteenth century before Christ. 

"(c) We have said (part ii. c. ii., The Turanian Races) that as 
a result of the obstinate struggles on the high plateaux of 
Asia between the Iranians and the Turanians, the one and the 
other, according to the vicissitudes of the strife, sought peace 
in India. These wars reach as high as the fifteenth and even 
the eighteenth century before the Christian era. We can there- 
fore fix on one of these dates as that of the immigration of the 
Aryans into India." 

Having given these conclusions Monseigneur Laouenan goes 
on to show, by citations from Indian scholars, that the greate; 
part of the hymns of the Rig-veda were composed on the 
plains of the Sapta Scindhu. His final conclusions with reference 
to the time to which the Rig-veda is to be assigned are as follows : 



1894-] ANTEDATE THE MOSAIC WRITINGS. 739 

" 1st. The doctrines taught by the Vedas on the existence 
of God and on his nature, on the creation of the world, on the 
soul of man, its immortality and existence in a future life, doc- 
trines on the other hand, without form or certainty, offer abso- 
lutely nothing that is beyond the not-well-defined circle of the 
traditions found among all peoples and even among savages ; 
whence it follows that, even if they were anterior to the books 
of Moses, they could not have furnished him with the data so 
precise, so sublime, which shine out at every line of the Pen- 
tateuch. 

"2d. If the Vedas, certainly ancient in part, reach a high an- 
tiquity, we have no historic proof of their real age ; the calcula- 
tions, or rather the most favorable conjectures, do not place 
them in a period beyond the seventeenth or eighteenth century 
before Christ that is, the time when Moses lived and wrote. 

"3d. Several hymns of the Rig, Sama, Yadjur, and Atharva- 
veda are after that date and even after the sixth century be- 
fore Christ ; and it is generally agreed on that the hymns of 
the Rig-veda which treat of the Supreme Being or Spirit, of 
creation, of man's soul, of the future life, belong to this latter 
period, are subsequent to the sixth century before Christ. 

" 4th. It is recognized that the Vedas, and especially the 
hymns of the Rig, have undergone several successive compila- 
tions or arrangements, the dates of which are unknown ; and it 
is extremely probable, not to say certain, that the Vyasa (or 
compiler) who was the last to arrange them lived in the eleventh 
century of the Christian era. 

" 5th. If therefore we meet with some analogies with the 
doctrines of Judaism and of Christianity and there has been 
borrowing, we have the right to assert that it is the Vedas 
that have borrowed from the Bible, and not the Bible from the 
Vedas." 

THE LAWS OF MANU. 

This sketch of the learned labors of this zealous prelate, 
little as it does justice to his great work, would be entirely 
wanting in completeness did we omit reference to what he says 
about the Laws of Manu, and of the social, commercial, and 
diplomatic relations Asia has had with Europe. 

The Laws of Manu is only another name for the Manava- 
Dharma-Sastra, which book is a treatise on justice, virtue, and 
the duties of man. Manu means not so much a person as the 
intelligent thinking principle. This collection of books is made 
up by a compiler who has drawn pretty much from every source 



740 BRAHMANISM DOES NOT [Feb., 

of Hindu learning, even from Buddhism, and is therefore of a 
period subsequent to the latter. Monseigneur Laouenan tells us 
(page 341, vol. i.) : "It is to-day generally admitted that the 
compilation of the Manava-Dhanna-Sastra could not have been 
begun before the fifth century before Christ, and that it was 
finished towards the seventh century of our era that is, after 
Christ, and perhaps later." After giving the various opinions 
regarding the origin of this collection of laws, our author sums 
up : " None of these opinions, even the most favorable to its 
antiquity, assigns the composition of it to a period as far back 
as the time of Moses. It is therefore impossible that the Legis- 
lator of the Hebrews copied anything from it." It is a very 
curious thing to examine the text of the citations from the Laws 
of Mann, and see how they are like to the words of the Penta- 
teuch. In the work we are reviewing the texts from both are 
side by side, and the resemblance is more than striking; the 
copying of the Bible is evident. Thus, for example, the Bible 
tells us of the ten patriarchs, from Adam to Noe, including 
them : Maim " Desiring to give birth to the human race, I pro- 
duced ten eminent lords of creatures." " There were giants in 
those days " we find thus in Manu : " giants, vampires, titans, 
dragons." The first men, according to Genesis, lived several 
hundred years ; Mann says : " Me.n exempt from disease ob- 
tained the accomplishment of all their desires, and lived four 
hundred years in the first age." Again, God, the Bible tells us, 
shortened the period of man's life, and Manu tells us, "in subse- 
quent ages man's span of life was shortened." When the ob- 
servances of the ceremonial law and of the prescriptions of legal 
purity are examined, one sees what has all the appearance of 
identically the same expression. Thus ch. xxv. v. 5 : 

" DEUTERONOMY. " MANU. 

When brethren dwell togeth- When the husband of a young 
er, and one of them dieth with- woman happens to die after 
out children, the wife of the they had been affianced, the 
deceased shall not marry to brother of the deceased shall 
another; but his brother shall take her to wife." 
take her and raise up seed for 
his brother. 6. And the first 
son he shall have of her he 
shall call by his name, that his 
name may not be abolished in 
Israel." 



1894-] ANTEDATE THE MOSAIC WRITINGS. 741 

Our author gives many such citations, the effect of which is 
a demonstration that the compilers of some of the sacred books 
of India made copious use of the Bible. 

ANTIQUITY OF INDO EUROPEAN COMMERCE. 

The account our author gives of the commercial relations of 
Asia with Europe is based on historic facts. The city of Tad- 
mor or Palmyra was built by Solomon, in the desert, to pro- 
tect the caravans which came from India by way of the Eu- 
phrates to Palestine. He quotes Strabo telling of the exports 
from Ceylon to the Indian continent of ivory, tortoise-shells, 
and merchandise, which reached Europe by way of Cabul, Ari- 
ana, Hyrcania, the Caspian Sea, the Cyrus and the Black Sea. 
Strabo also speaks of the Arsi of the Caspian coasts who 
transported on camels the products of India and of Babylon. 
The usual way from India was by Candahar, where the cara- 
vans from India and from Persia were wont to meet. He men- 
tions too the fact of the commerce between Alexandria in 
Egypt and India by way of the Nile to Coptos, thence by 
camels to Myoshormos on the Red Sea, and by vessels to India, 
and states that he saw one hundred vessels going from Myc- 
shormos to India. He says that this commerce had existed for 
a long time, and was perfectly organized ; it had benefited 
greatly Alexandria, and under the Romans had increased a 
hundred-fold. Monseigneur Laoucnan also quotes Pliny (book i. 
vi. 26), showing the commerce between Egypt and India, and 
says that India every year got from the Romans about 

$2 I ,OOO,OOO. 

We shall not trespass on the reader with the account given 
by Monseigneur Laouenan of the embassies to Augustus and 
Claudius, and of the presence of Indians in Europe. We judge 
it best to close these remarks by a brief reference to the rela- 
tions of Jews and of Christians with India. Our author cites 
the fact of the deportation of the people of Israel into Media, 
by Salmanasar, in the year 719 before Christ, and of the people 
of Judaea by Nabuchodonosor, in 606 and 588, into the various 
parts of his vast empire. The colony of black Jews at Cochin 
dates from this epoch. Claude Buchanan says that the black 
Jews in the interior of Malayala have a copy of the Pentateuch, 
written on a roll of leather, patched where worn with parch- 
ment, and that the Jews in China have several on soft flexible 
leather of a red color. Also, Artaxerxes (B.C. 464-424) styles 



742 BRAHMANISM DOES NOT [Feb., 

himself "the great king who rules from India to Ethiopia," 
and Darius the Mede orders all the empire "to fear and 
respect the God of Daniel." It is not strange, therefore, that 
the ideas and even practices of the Jews should have been 
adopted by the Asiatics, not only in the countries mentioned 
but elsewhere, for ideas follow commerce and immigration. As 
for the relations of Christians with Asia, there are many docu- 
ments existing to show that, as is most fully made evident in 
the book before us. 

THE RELIGIOUS SYSTEM OF THIBET. 

Perhaps most capital is made against us of Lamaism in 
Thibet, its close resemblance to the organization of the Roman 
Catholic Church, in the temporal power of the Grand Lama, 
and in its monastic institutions, and its manner of chanting and 
its ceremonies. Let us see what history tells us. In 1176 the 
Grand Khan of the Tartars, Thogruel-Ung-Khan, who was a 
Christian, wrote to Pope Alexander III., and the Pope an- 
swered on the 28th of September, 1177. Gengis-Khan (A.D. 
1203) had Christians, Jews, and Mohammedans at his court. 
In 1245 Pope Innocent IV. sent Dominican and Franciscan mis- 
sioners to Tartary. St. Louis, A.D. 1249, received an embassy 
from that country, and he sent, both in that year and in 1253, 
embassies of Dominicans and of Franciscans to the Khans. 
After the death of Mangou-Khan, Kublai-Khan, or Tchi-Tsou, 
succeeded him. Mr. T. W. Rhys Davids, LL.D. (Encyclopedia 
Britannica, art. " Lamaism ") tells us that he " became a convert 
to the Buddhism of the Thibetan Lamas. He granted to the 
abbot of the Sakya monastery in southern Thibet the title of 
tributary sovereign of the country, head of the Buddhist 
church, and overlord over the numerous barons and abbots, 
and in return was officially crowned by the abbot as ruler over 
the extensive domain of the Mongol empire." Of this Monseig- 
neur Laoucnan thus speaks : "After the death of Mangou-Khan, 
Koublai, or Tchi-Tsou, succeeded, A.D. 1260. This prince added 
to his empire southern China, Tong-king, Cochin China, Pegu, 
and Thibet. It was he who raised to the royal dignity the 
BodidJiarma, or living Buddha ; and as the one who was living 
then was a Thibetan, Koublai assigned him a principality in 
Thibet, with the title of Dalai-Lama, or supreme Lama." He 
then quotes Rohrbacher (Hist. CJnircli, vol. xix. p. 123) to show 
that in the countries contiguous to Thibet at that time Chris- 



894-] 



ANTEDATE THE MOSAIC WRITINGS. 



743 



tians were numerous, and that the ceremonies, altars, ornaments, 
and paintings of the Catholic Church were in use among them. 
It is no wonder, then, that just as the Mithraic worship of 
Rome copied the Christian rites, the Buddhists of Thibet and 
elsewhere made use of what they saw among their Christian 
neighbors. 

We have given here but a meagre account of the valuable 
work of the Vicar-Apostolic of Pondichery. We cannot praise 
it too highly ; nor will he be flattered by the praise, for he has 
gone to Him whose religion he valiantly and ably defended in 
this sceptical age. We recommend the careful study of the 
book to our young men, and hope that soon a translation will 
put it within the reach of those who do not understand French. 
May it serve to stimulate some able and thoroughly equipped 
missioners of India to form an association for the further and 
yet more complete study of the writings of the Hindus, that 
God's truth may dispel the clouds which still remain, and shine 
forth with all the brilliancy of the noon-day sun ! 





IT is becoming quite the fashion to have biogra- 
phies furnished by the relatives or descendants of 
, those who are presented to the public. While we 
'may smile at the vanity, we may not altogether 
deride the results of the system. It makes for 
truth. If we are overburdened with details which do not repay 
the trouble of reading, errors of fact into which public histori- 
ans may have unwittingly fallen by reason of their relying upon 
newspaper statement or popular rumor are sure to be corrected. 
An instance of this kind of rectification is furnished in the life 
of Bishop Polk,* just given to the public by Dr. Polk. 

In Lossing's Field Book of the Revolution it is stated that 
Colonel Thomas Polk was one of those who in the War of In- 
dependence took " protection " from Lord Cornwallis. The his- 
torian, on being challenged over this statement by Leonidas 
Polk, in 1854, acknowledged the error; the individual who did 
take " protection" was another Polk, Colonel Ezekiel, of that ilk 
an old man then, and a non-combatant. Colonel Thomas 
Polk bore a distinguished part in the war, and made heavy 
personal sacrifices for it, as now appears ; and it is only just to 
the memory of a brave man to have this cloud removed from 
the page of history. 

Leonidas Polk, the subject of this memoir, was a remarkable 
man. He played a very prominent part in the war of secession, 
and was killed at Kenesaw Mountain, while reconnoitring the 
Federal position. He combined within his person at the time 
the twofold office of a general in the Confederate Army and 
a bishop in the Episcopal Church. There was something of 
what is known as the irony of fate about this anomaly. Polk 
in early life had left the army to join the church; when the 
war came on he left the church, at least for the nonce, to join 
the army; or rather, as he said himself, to buckle the sword 

* Leonidas Polk, Bishop and General. By Wm. M. Polk, M.D., LL.D. New York : 
Longmans, Green & Co. 



1894-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 745 

over the cassock. As he appears to have been a conscientious 
man, he is not much to be wondered at for his return to his 
earlier and perhaps more fitting vocation. Like most of the 
Southern leaders, he had satisfied himself that secession was the 
course of patriotism in the South ; but some of the reasoning 
by which he arrived at this conclusion seems paradoxical. 

An illustration of this conflict of logic is found in one of 
the reports embodied in the appendix to chapter vii. It is that 
of an address delivered by Bishop Polk at an ecclesiastical con- 
vention in Louisiana. Here the question of the right of Louisi- 
ana as a State to secede from the Federal Union is discussed 
from a canonical point of view. The bishop cites the dictum 
of the Redeemer in the well-known case of the tribute-money. 
Obedience to "the powers that be," as ordained of God, is 
what Bishop Polk commends but only to the individual Louisi- 
anian. The state itself, he shows by his action, is perfectly 
justified in treating the outside "powers that be" as not or- 
dained of God ; and so the southern part of the Episcopal 
Church, while maintaining spiritual communion with the north- 
ern moiety, was at liberty to cut adrift and change the formu- 
laries of the Book of Common Prayer in accordance with the 
altered constitutional conditions. Obedience to the divine law, 
he declared, necessitated such an alteration. 

These intellectual eccentricities would have for us now only 
the negative interest of long-past and ineffectual transactions, 
were it not for the present-day fact that Catholics have it flung 
in their faces that their church seeks a connection with the 
state by means of which to control it. It is in vain they repel 
the accusations ; when the lie is lopped off in one quarter, up 
it starts again in another, like the ubiquitous heads of the 
hydra. The documents adduced in this biography show clearly 
enough that there was something more than a sentimental con- 
nection in contemplation between the Episcopal Church and 
the recalcitrant South as a result of the civil war, should the 
rebellion be successful. 

In other respects the "aristocratic" character of the move- 
ment was well enough defined. The founding of a great univer- 
sity, with which the name of Bishop or General Polk is intimately 
identified, was a great forward step in this bold revolutionary 
project, as the correspondence in these volumes clearly enough 
demonstrates. From what perils the Union escaped by the 
defeat of this tremendous conspiracy it is no difficult problem 
to surmise. The gradation from aristocracy to dictatorship, 



746 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Feb., 

from dictatorship to monarchy and empire, is no novel experi- 
ence in the history of decadent states. Had the South succeed- 
ed, there can hardly be a doubt that some of the heroes of the 
rebellion would have been ready to act the Bonaparte some 
one with the fascinating ways and ambitious mind of Aaron Burr. 

The study of the character of Leonidas Polk, as presented 
us by his consanguineous biographer, must be largely helpful to 
those of the present generation who desire to gain an intelli- 
gent grasp of the causes which led to the great civil war. With 
the extensive prevalence of such views as Bishop-General Polk 
held, and with the additional factors of the strong tenacity of 
purpose and despotic will which were inevitably begotten of 
the slave-holding habit of mind, it was impossible that a strug- 
gle at some period could be averted. The sentiment of free- 
dom as personified in the North, and the sentiment of inalien- 
able right in the slave, must as surely at some time come into 
violent collision as the lighted spark with the foul air in the 
mine. How far the Protestant Episcopal Church in America 
was responsible for the fomentation of the arrogance and stiff- 
neckedness of the Southern aristocrats, we may glean some idea 
from the story of Folk's life and labors. It is, further, shown that 
it was not on any ground of superior intellect that the South 
based its claim to preponderance in the affairs of the American 
Union. Intellect was represented in the struggle by the North- 
ern States; the South took its stand on "property." In the 
story of the attempt of Bishop Polk to found his university 
we have ample confession of the fact that what was dreaded 
in the South was the downward wave of intellect from the 
North. 

Much is heard, by suggestion and innuendo, in these days of 
the deep designs of Rome with regard to a union of church 
and state in this free country. Those who attach any weight 
to such Machiavellian rumors would do well to read what is 
contained in this biography. The fall of Richmond nipped 
more than mere personal ambitions in the bud. What magnifi- 
cent dreams of aristocratic glory in church and state were 
shattered in that great collapse may never be known in full, 
but they may be remotely imagined. With the conviction that 
for the best interests of the country it was essential that they 
should once for all be dispelled and destroyed, it is consistent 
with truth and justice to admit that many of those who held 
them did so, as General-Bishop Polk did, in all sincerity, in all 
devotion, however mistaken, to conscience and duty, and with 
all a soldier's bravery. 



1894-] TALK ABOUT .NEW BOOKS. 747 

One word upon a side issue before we close. In tracing the 
derivation of the Polks, the biographer finds in the fact that 
his stock were originally Pollocks of the " Scotch-Irish" breed 
an apparent satisfaction. The poor pride that seeks to exalt 
itself in this now stale device is cousin-german to downright 
ignorance. Every ethnologist knows that the Celts or Gaels of 
Scotland and Ireland are the self-same race, speaking the same 
archaic tongue, and distinguished by identical traits of tem- 
perament and intellect. Whether the Pollocks belonged to this 
Celtic stock, or whether they owed their ancestry to the de- 
spised and mongrel Southrons of the Scottish lowlands, 'we 
cannot say. But from time immemorial there had been con- 
stant intercourse and intersettlement between the Ulster Celts 
and the Celts on the western shore and islands of Scotland, 
whose original consanguinity was often and often renewed by 
marriage. For centuries the Ulster kings recruited their armies 
as freely from Scotland as from their own principalities, and 
held their own, with Scottish help, against Plantagenet and 
Tudor. The most reliable ethnographers hold the opinion that 
it was from Ireland came the Celts who peopled Scotland ; and 
the undoubted fact that in the days of the Roman occupation 
of Britain and for long afterward Ireland was as well known by 
the name of Scotia as Hibernia ought to be a strong argument 
in favor of its being the parent-country. So much for the silly 
and ignorant distinction between Irish-Irish and Scotch-Irish. 

We have received the third and concluding volume of a new 
edition of Pepys Diary* To the general run of readers this 
work is well known, most probably; but for the information of 
those who have not gone through it, it is well to say that it 
possesses a distinctive value as the minute daily record of a 
keen, shrewd, and methodical gentleman who filled the respecta- 
ble post of secretary to the admiralty at a very interesting 
period in English history namely, that of the Restoration. It 
was written in a shorthand of the writer's own, and consequent- 
ly was intelligible to none but himself, because in it were noted 
down many facts relative to the court and government, and the 
profligate society of the day, which it would not be convenient 
to have brought home to his door had they been discovered 
to the public. But as these transactions of the Stuart times 
have long passed " into the tomb of all the Capulets," few of 
them possess any value save to the painstaking historian. The 
record derives its chief value now because of its unconsciously 

* The Diary of Samuel Pepys, M.A., F.R.S. With Lord Braybrooke's notes. Edited, 
with additions, by Henry B. Wheatley, F.S.A. New York : George Bell & Sons. 



748 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Feb., 

amusing style, its quaint phraseology, its ingenuous self-revelation, 
and the light it throws upon the true character of the well-fed 
Briton, and the every-day life of the English metropolis, at the 
time when the writer was in the flesh. Pepys shows himself to 
have been a man who, very fond of his own pleasure, was de- 
sirous of enjoying it at as cheap a rate as possible ; one who, 
while apprehensive of his wife's conjugal fidelity, was not a little 
inclined to clandestine flirtations himself. The artless simplicity 
with which he sets down all these things is intensely amusing 
at times ; but, on the other hand, the details committed to the 
confidence of the diary are not infrequently disgusting. In short, 
Mr. Samuel Pepys appears to have been an 'easy-going, self-in- 
dulgent, smug sort of person, not devoid of a certain good-nature ; 
one who went to the theatre because he liked it, and went to the 
church sometimes on Sundays because it was fashionable ; kept 
a keen eye to business, and thanked God for the fat salary he 
had got a pretty fair type of a considerable class of English- 
men during his own time and in our days as well. 

The " Notes" appended to the volume by Lord Braybrooke 
are of value to scientific men occasionally, no less than to the 
historian, as they contain exact dates and references, as well as 
memorabilia concerning prominent personages of the time. 

The Bog of Stars* is the seemingly grotesque title of the 
second book selected for publication by the New Irish Library 
Society. It is so called from the first of a series of short talcs of 
which the book is made up ; and the connection between bogs 
and poetry is established by the author's explanation. This 
particular bog, it seems, was a place full of little pools which at 
night-time reflected the starlight, so that really the place was 
not the lucus a non lucendo the uninitiated might imagine. 

Mr. Standish O'Grady is the author of the book. The tales 
it contains relate to the period of the Elizabethan wars in Ire- 
land the process which English historians call the " Pacata 
Hiberniae" a vast orgie of murder, perfidy, and robbery by the 
English commanders and garrisons, amongst a people whose 
sole crime was their religion and their nationality. Mr. O'Grady 
selects three or four of those tragic episodes, and by his art of 
writing makes the tragedies affecting as well as horrifying. 

Mr. Standish O'Grady occupies a very peculiar position. He 
is an apologist of the Elizabethan horrors, whilst he calls for the 
tears of the readers of them. He weeps for Hecuba, whilst he 
claps the blood-stained Pyrrhus, the cause of her woes, on the 

* The Bog of Stars, and other Stories of Elizabethan Ireland. By Standish O'Grady. 
New York: P. J. Kenedy. 



1894-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 749 

back. He is a Tory with an Irish name a Queen's O'Grady. 
He is a literary trafficker in Irish tragedy a virtuoso in the 
high art of writing, whose attitude reminds one a good deal of 
the popular notion of the emotional crocodile. His history of 
the escape of Red Hugh O'Donnell, published some years ago, 
is strongly suggestive of this simile. 

The directors of the New Irish Library ought to be careful 
what pens they utilize. Art of the kind employed by such 
writers as Standish O'Grady is like the science of the vivi- 
sectionist, without the excuse that it is for the profit of hu- 
manity. It is simply cold-blooded word-weaving, done for 
literary kudos and perhaps revenue. 

A fresh volume of poems from Aubrey de Vere* bears evi- 
dence in its pages of the error of a dictum often reasseverated 
that a poet's powers usually decline when he has passed the 
meridian of his age. The flower of poetry has no time-limit, 
so long as the mind is clear and the faculties active. Whilst 
in some the gift had faded after a great and dazzling but brief 
period, others may be pointed to, and these by no means 
few, upon whom the touch of Time had no perceptible effect, 
so far as their power of beautiful conception went, and certainly 
added polish to their art of expression. 

Most of our readers are familiar with Mr. De Vere's style 
and trend of idea. Those pieces from his pen which from time 
to time appeared in the pages of this magazine have revealed 
the grave and lofty tone of mind in which he generally ap- 
proaches his themes. A quiet elegance pervades his rhythm, 
and his dramatic effects are produced by measured and gradu- 
ated strength rather than by epigrammatic contrast, or singu- 
larity of phrase or thought. This is the rule of his more regu- 
lar verse; his sonnets, a considerable number of which are pre- 
sented at the end of this volume, furnish the exception. We 
regret to perceive amongst these some in which the poet has 
allowed the poison of political rancor to embitter his song. 

The present volume deals chiefly with mediaeval themes. Mr. 
De Vere, having joined the ranks of the landatores temporis acti, 
prefers to sound the praises of a period when the qualities of 
loyalty, faith, and heroism were, in his view, more conspicuous 
than at present. This is simply a matter of opinion ; other 
poets have viewed the ages of chivalry with more microscopic 
eyes, and found that chivalry often but a synonyme for brutal- 
ity the steel hand encased in the velvet glove. There is more 

* Medieval Records and Sonnets. By Aubrey De Vere. London : Macmillan & Co. 



750 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Feb., 

true chivalry, in our opinion, in the endeavor to right the wrongs 
of a long-oppressed people than in fighting in the lists for the 
smiles of a lady. Take the tinselled scarf of romance off the 
armored knight of the days of chivalry, and you usually find 
the armored robber. 

If such considerations be not befitting the review of a liter- 
ary work, the blame for their intrusion lies upon the poet. He 
ought not to raise them by direct issue or by innuendo. The 
cause of human liberty is a nobler theme for his song than the 
worship of dead ideals. We would not give any one of the 
heroes of our War of Independence for all the knights of the 
Round Table, with King Arthur, Roland, and the Cid thrown 
in. There was as much heroism about the sacrifice of Nathan 
Hale as was ever shown upon the more public theatres of war 
where paladin or crusader wrought those feats which have been 
handed down in song and story. 

It is no derogation to the glory of the middle ages to say 
that what there is within our own knowledge shines with a 
lustre that we believe could not be surpassed in any other age 
or at any other time. And we may add, from all we have been 
able to learn, that there is less cruelty in our own age, and far 
more humanity at least amongst civilized peoples. 

There is no necessity to quote from the new volume in 
order to exhibit Mr. De Vere's method. A considerable portion 
of the work is occupied by his poem on "The Cid," with which 
the readers of this magazine are familiar, as it appeared not 
long ago in successive issues. 

It is recorded of Cato that he did not begin to study Greek 
until he was eighty years of age. Mr. Le Fanu thinks seventy- 
eight not too late a period to begin a career in the field of 
literature, and although he has not utterly failed, we cannot 
conscientiously say that the world has lost much by his advent 
being late instead of being early. He gives us a good many 
personal recollections of events and personages in Ireland dur- 
ing his long life,* together with some stock jokes of prehistoric 
origin and doubtful veracity. The stories which he vouches for 
as matters of his own experience are, in many cases, pointless 
and unmeaning. Mr. Le Fanu is a surviving brother of an 
eminent literary Irishman, Mr. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, known 
as the author of 'some good novels and a spirited poem called 
" Shamus O'Brien "; and perhaps the most interesting things in 
his book are the particulars he gives of his more eminent 

* Seventy Years of Irish Life. By W. R. Le Fanu. New York : Macmillan & Co. 



1894-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. . 751 

brother. The author of " Shamus O'Brien " developed his poeti- 
cal talent at a very early age. Some examples of his work, 
written when he was but fifteen years old, are characterized by 
a skill in phrase and a brilliancy of idea usually associated with 
persons of much maturer minds. 

The Le Fanus were of Huguenot descent. The father of 
the author was a clergyman of the Anglican Church in Ireland, 
and from much that oozes out through the book we are made 
to wonder how, brought up amidst the atmosphere of such a 
home, young Le Fanu, the literary man, could have imbibed 
the patriotic sentiment which enabled him to write the stirring 
things he did. He appears to have been an ardent Irishman, 
in his way ; it cannot be said of the author of this book that 
he has much feeling towards the Irish peasantry but that of 
contempt. He dwells upon some incidents of the memorable 
struggle known as the Tithe War in a very bitter spirit, as if 
the peasantry were in the wrong in the stand they took against 
the payment of tithes to an alien church, and makes little refer- 
ence to the provocations to violence given by several of the 
Anglican parsons in going about armed, and personally seizing 
the tenants' property. This is a side of the picture which is 
kept out of sight very carefully. 

One of the stories told by Mr. Le Fanu ought not to be 
allowed to pass without challenge. He denounces O'Connell as 
" unscrupulous," and he gives an instance of this quality. It is 
supposed to have occurred in the early portion of O'Connell's 
Parliamentary career. The Liberator was defending a former 
Irish rebel, and one whose integrity has often been doubted 
Mr. Archibald Hamilton Rowan from some attacks made upon 
him by the ultra " loyalists." Mr. Le FanU states that O'Con- 
nell deliberately misinformed Parliament that so far had Mr. 
Hamilton's conduct been condoned on his return to Ireland 
that the government had given him the commission of the peace. 
Marvelling at his audacity, a friend of O'Connell's asked him 
outside how he could venture to tell the House of Commons 
what he knew to be untrue. O'Connell laughed, and replied 
that if it served his purpose it did not matter, as it would take 
three days to find out that it was false. This story bears its 
condemnation on the face of it, as it is an offence involving ex- 
pulsion and disgrace to wilfully deceive the House of Commons. 
It is probably twisted from a saying of O'Connell's, in his attack 
upon the mendacious Times, about the impossibility of over- 
taking a lie when it had got twenty-four hours' start. The 



752 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Feb., 

Liberator's watchful enemies were to be counted by the million, 
and if he had been guilty of any such conduct as Mr. Le Fanu 
imputes to him he would have been instantly brought to book 
for it. 

On the whole Mr. Le Fanu spent, we may take it from 
his own account, a tolerably pleasant seventy-eight years amongst 
the Irish people, and he might have spared them this literary 
Parthian dart before bidding them a final adieu. 

A little volume of poems by John Myers O'Hara* reveals 
some, at least, of the indispensable equipments of a would-be 
poet. He possesses, along with a keen desire to express himself 
in numbers, a copious fluency in words, a rhythmical ear, and 
a rather graceful fancy. When he has learned to restrain the 
sometimes dangerous wealth of words which some mistake for 
a higher gift, he ought to be able to produce work deserving 
of permanency. As it is, there are some pretty things amongst 
his collection, along with some that border on the grotesque, as 
far at least as word-coinage goes. 



THE DIVINE ARMORY OF HOLY SCRIPTURE.f 

The clergy and laity of America owe a debt of gratitude to 
the Catholic Book Exchange for having so promptly issued a 
reprint of Father Vaughan's valuable work, and placed it with- 
in their reach, at a low price, yet in a very attractive form. 
The book itself, originally published in England not two hun- 
dred years ago, as its old-fashioned name might suggest, but 
quite recently is already widely diffused, and seems destined 
to become, among the more cultivated in English-speaking 
countries, a popular manual of religious instruction and devotion. 

Books of instruction and devotion we possess already in 
abundance in the Catholic Church ; yet, owing to the varying 
needs of each generation, there is a constant demand for new 
presentations of what in its substance cannot change. Just now 
there is a disposition to go back to the earlier form of things 
and get doctrine and piety at their fountain head. Both, in- 
deed, are reached in a more complete and a more accessible 
form through the ordinary channels of Catholic belief ; but 
after securing them in that shape, it is both comforting and 
strengthening to the Christian soul to meet them as they issue 
forth from the inspired Word itself. 

* Twilight Songs. By John Myers O'Hara. 

t The Divine Armory of Holy Scripture. By Rev. Kenelm Vaughan. With Introduction 
by his Eminence Cardinal Gibbons. New York : Catholic Book Exchange, 120 West 6oth 
Street. 



1 894.] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 753 

Here lies the special interest of the work before us. It 
covers the whole field of Catholic theology, gathering around 
each doctrine the passages of Scripture upon which it original- 
ly rests, or those which serve best to expand and illustrate it. 
God and his attributes ; the Trinity and its mysterious depths ; 
the Incarnation and its blessed purposes ; Christ, his person 
and his work ; the Church, the Sacraments, man and the pur- 
pose of his being ; the whole scheme of moral duty and of the 
Christian virtues all is set forth in the very words of Sacred 
Writ. 

To the thoughtful reader unacquainted with technical theolo- 
gy, though instructed in Catholic doctrine, the book will prove 
of peculiar interest, as showing the perfect harmony of the 
teachings of the Bible itself with those he had received from 
the church. The busy pastor of souls will find it especially 
helpful. In one shape or another the assiduous study of the 
Bible is a primary duty of his position ; the inspired Word 
being at all times equally " profitable to teach, to reprove, to 
correct, to instruct in justice " (II. Tim. iii. 16). In his recent 
encyclical, Leo XIII. has called attention to the need in our 
day of a deeper and more scientific knowledge of holy Writ. 
But he does not forget that there is also a familiar knowledge 
of it, born of the constant perusal and meditation of the sacred 
text, such as St. Jerome recommended to his disciple : " Divi- 
nas Scripturas saepius lege, imo nunquam de manibus tuis lectio 
sacra deponatur "; and that the latter, while more necessary to 
the greater number, is at the same time more accessible to all. 
Yet how many, after repeated attempts to keep up the prac- 
tice of reading the Bible daily and of gathering in and putting 
together its teachings on each subject, according as they pre- 
sented themselves, have relinquished the task, either through 
lack of time, or because of the difficulty of making the proper 
selections, or of placing them in the proper order ! 

To such the present volume will be most welcome, for they 
will find in it almost all that is practically useful in the Old 
and New Testaments, with the additional advantage of its be- 
ing connected with every subject upon which they may have to 
instruct or to exhort their people. Once accustomed to its use 
they will feel little need to look elsewhere for inspiration ; and 
if they be gifted with fluency of speech and facility of ordering 
their thoughts, an hour or two of meditation on the texts 
gathered round any of the subjects will enable them to set it 
forth with a fulness of doctrine and a strength of conviction 
VOL. LVIII. 50 



754 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Feb., 

which nothing can impart to the mind like its immediate con- 
tact with the Word of God. 

The work of Father Vaughan will serve, and is doubtless 
meant by the pious author to serve, another important purpose. 
Priests are often inquiring after new books of meditation, 
those they are familiar with having lost their power to im- 
press them. Now, in The Divine Armory they will find an 
almost inexhaustible supply of subjects, dogmatic, moral, ascetic, 
and mystical in short, the whole teaching of the Bible on the 
spiritual life. 

Not only that, but they will ;find well-nigh all the favorite 
devotions of pious souls most ingeniously and happily illus- 
trated by apposite texts of Scripture : the Litany of the Blessed 
Virgin, the mysteries of the Rosary, the Stations of the Cross, 
St. Joseph, St. John, the holy angels, etc. As might be expect- 
ed in a book coming from the founder of " The Work of Expia- 
tion," an exceptional development is given to such subjects as 
Sin, Atonement, the Blessed Sacrament, and the holy Sacrifice 
of the Mass. 

In such an elaborate work, touching on hundreds of sub- 
jects, the reader would easily get lost, unless special care had 
been taken to maintain a distinct order and distribution of 
parts. This has been done by clear and multiplied headings, 
corresponding to which an abundant analytical table at the 
beginning and an alphabetical index at the end of the book 
remove all confusion, and make its nine hundred pages as con- 
venient to handle as an ordinary manual of devotion. 

A truly beautiful manual of devotion itself, it will prove 
serviceable, as we have suggested from the beginning, to the 
pious faithful no less than to the clergy. Through its pages 
they may converse, as it were, with God himself at any hour 
of day, every sentence of the inspired word being like a direct 
message to them from above. Each divine truth, each duty, 
each virtue thus taught them will impress itself more deeply on 
their minds and on their lives, and if the unusual character 
of the book makes it at first a little strange as a means of 
spiritual instruction and piety, we venture to predict that it 
will soon become familiar and delightful, and never afterwards 
lose anything of its usefulness or of its charm. 

J. HOGAN. 

Catholic University, Washington, D. C. 




BY the death of Professor John Tyndall Eng- 
land lost a man of very considerable scientific 
repute and ability. Tyndall was not merely a 
man proficient in science, but also a prominent contributor to 
it ; his investigations and results, particularly on acoustics and 
on glacial phenomena, are of permanent value. Yet he was 
probably chiefly known as a popular lecturer and writer ; his style 
was very clear and interesting, and in this department he was 
remarkably successful. It is this which principally caused his 
renown in England and this country, and it is this which 
naturally must form the standard of popular appreciation. 

We happened to see a paragraph in one of the daily papers 
amusingly illustrative of this. The writer seemed to take for 
granted that Tyndall was the foremost scientific man in Eng- 
land, and that now he was dead, Huxley would take the lead. 
He was right in one respect : that of putting Huxley lower in 
the scientific scale than Tyndall ; but though both, of course, 
have a reputation not altogether unearned, and have done 
something toward the advancement of science, we imagine few 
who get their information first hand would think of comparing 
either of them to such men as Lord Kelvin (Sir William Thom- 
son) or other eminent workers whose labors are not, as it were, 
performed in public. The mistake was somewhat similar to the 
ludicrous one, perhaps almost universal in this country among 
unscientific men, of considering Flammarion as the great French 
astronomer. Such he might have been if he had kept on as he 
begun ; but he is now nothing more than a writer of fanciful 
speculations for the newspapers. It must be acknowledged that, 
except from a popular point of view, it would be unjust to 
compare either Tyndall or Huxley to him. 



The article on the school system in Canada in this month's 
issue of THE CATHOLIC WORLD possesses a special value from the 
fact that the writer, the Hon. T. W. Anglin, has had exceptional 
opportunities for acquiring a thorough knowledge of the sub- 



756 EDITORIAL NOTES. [Feb., 

ject. Mr. Anglin is a statesman and journalist of high standing. 
He was the founder of the Freeman of New Brunswick, so far 
back as 1849, anc * for many years conducted that organ on the 
basis of Catholic rights and the independence of the provincial 
legislature. He was elected five times as the representative of 
those views in Parliament, and was also honored with the post 
of speaker in the legislature more than once. His opposition 
to the policy of Confederation, however, brought him much en- 
mity, but undeterred by this circumstance he continued with 
unflagging energy to fight the battle of Catholicism all through 
his public life. It will be seen that strict impartiality distin- 
guishes his presentation of the case with regard to the schools, 
and that the Catholics never demanded anything that they were 
not fully prepared to concede to the adherents of other beliefs. 



Mr. Gladstone celebrated his eighty-fourth birthday on the 
29th of December last. He was in splendid health and spirits 
all the day. An avalanche of congratulations, personal, postal, 
and telegraphic, poured in upon him, from Queen Victoria down 
to the most obscure local political leader. 



The internal affairs of Italy are fast drifting into a state 
which may involve a European complication. Instead of a con- 
dition of peace and prosperity, the " unification " of Italy has re- 
sulted in a financial impasse. As a last resort, Signor Crispi was 
called in again to try to save the monarchy. His advent does 
not seem to have effected much. All Sicily seems to be in a state 
little short of anarchy. Anti-tax riots on an alarming scale have 
broken out in many places, and many towns have been almost 
entirely burned down by the rioters. 



The Colorado Catholic of Denver, Col., has had printed one- 
half million copies of the Encyclical of his Holiness Leo XIII. 
on the Study of Sacred Scripture, which it will send gratis to 
all who will forward postage for the same at the rate of five 
two-cent stamps for every twenty-five copies. 



FOR BISHOP PAUL OF TARSUS. 

Previously acknowledged, .... $1,288.60 

A Friend, ....... 10.00 

Susquehanna Council, C. B. L., 384, . . 7.80 

Anonymous, ...... 10.00 

Madison Council, No. 4, C. B. L., . . . 5-OO 



1894-] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 757 



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. 

APART from the adornments of style the chief merit to be found in the writ- 
ings of Brother Azarias consists in this, that he has taken his stand on the 
common ground where philosophy and literature and religious doctrine meet; and 
from this elevated position he sought to interpret authors and systems. In his 
philosophical analysis of The Imitation and The Divine Comedy he is at his best. 
That he knew the secret forces controlling modern literary criticism is plainly 
manifested in an article published in the Seminary, which has not yet appeared 
in any of his books. In the following passage boldly yet gently, as was his cus- 
tom, he explains how critics, like other mortals, may make blunders : 

" It is in commenting upon contemporary books and authors that the critic 
is in greatest danger of being misled. Public demand is no criterion of merit. 
Books of a high literary character, books appealing chiefly to leaders of thought, 
must needs be limited in their circulation. Any printed matter that touches the 
popular fancy or caters to depraved tastes is sure to have a wide circle of readers. 
Now, the critic, as well as the ordinary reader, may be carried away by that ele- 
ment giving the book its temporary popularity, and may, in consequence, praise it 
far beyond its deserts. Living in the same intellectual atmosphere with the au- 
thor, thinking more or less under the same dominant set of opinions, it is not an 
easy task for the critic to dissociate himself from time and season, and distinguish 
between the perishable and imperishable ingredients that enter into the composi- 
tion of the book under review. We have heard Mr. Birrell tell us that it would be 
unkind to refer to some later judgments of Matthew Arnold's. We have the same 
authority assuring us that ' Sainte-Beuve was certainly happier snuffing the ' par- 
fums du passee ' than when ranging among the celebrities of his own day.' If this 
be true of the French luminary and his revolving planet, how much more applicable 
is it not to the critical stars of lesser magnitude ? How misleading may not the puf- 
fings of a mutual admiration society of authors become ? Or, mayhap, it is a co- 
terie of critics who have combined to write down a certain author, damning his 
noblest efforts with faint praise. Temporary injury may be done the author, but 
the spite and the malice aforethought that dictated such criticism ultimately be- 
come unmasked ; the genuine literary work survives the little jealousies, and shines 
all the brighter for having passed through the crucible. The severe attacks made 
upon Keats have not dimmed the lustre of his genius. Jeffreys prophesied that 
Wordsworth's Excursion would never do. Somehow The Excursion is doing 
nicely, and the genius of Wordsworth is looming up with the progress of time in 
more magnificent proportions, Jeffreys' prediction to the contrary notwithstand- 
ing. There was no gall in Jeffreys' pen, as there was in that of Gifford or Lock- 
hart. It was intellectual purblindness that prevented him from seeing the real 
greatness of Wordsworth. Sometimes a coterie indulges in the practice known 
as log-rolling; that is, it endeavors to create a favorable opinion for the writings 
of a friend. The recent quarrel between Mr. Churton Collins and Mr. Edmund 
Gosse revealed a great deal of log-rolling in England. You can seldom be sure 



758 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [Feb., 

of critical judgments of a book in the British monthlies and quarterlies. Their 
unanimity may be the result of concerted action on the part of a few friends who 
are manufacturing opinion in favor of the author. Tennyson at first sprung into 
notoriety by means of the log-rolling process ; but in this case the friends who 
wrote him up showed their discernment of true poetic worth. His genius was 
too great and too well balanced to be spoiled by praise. He continued to delve 
and study and practise, always profiting by the censures of a Coleridge, and even 
of a crusty, fusty Christopher North, until he rose to his more recent giant-like 

dimensions." 

* * * 

While admitting that any book from a Catholic pen containing wholesome 
thoughts may be beneficial on account of its subject-matter, however mediocre in 
style, Brother Azarias was firmly opposed to the policy of giving lavish praise to 
every writer even of spiritual books regardless of personal qualifications. He 
recognized that the English language contains some very defective explanations 
of Catholic doctrine, prepared by good men who had no ability to write with 
clearness or elegance. His practical rule on this point was thus expressed : 

"As Catholic literature increases in variety and extent our critics can be- 
come more discriminating. It is not necessary to establish two weights and two 
measures of criticism for our Catholic authors. Recommendation is one thing, 
laudation is quite another thing. Catholic reviewers must plead guilty to the 
impeachment of having been in the past too laudatory of inferior literary work. 

" The varying fortunes of some Catholic books would make an interesting 
chapter in the history of English literature. Catholics have been not infrequently 
apathetic towards Catholic books of merit, even while their non-Catholic neigh- 
bors showed full appreciation of them. It was not a Catholic publisher who 
first issued an American edition of Cardinal Wiseman's great work on the Con" 
nection between Science and Religion ; that book was first printed in this country 
by the faculty of Andover College for the benefit of the students. The most 
searching study of Hamlet ever made on this continent was made by the Catholic 
poet, George H. Miles. The criticism first appeared in two consecutive numbers 
of the Soitthern Review when it was under the editorship of the late Albert Tay- 
lor Bledsoe. There is a noble piece of Shaksperian criticism buried out of sight 
simply because it is not better known. The other works of the same author are 
no less neglected. Nor is he alone. It took a Ruskin to discover the merits of 
The Angel of the House, by Coventry Patmore ; how many Catholic readers ap- 
preciate the poem ? Catholics reading Catholics with no slight pretensions to 
culture have been known to question whether Aubrey de Vere was really a poet 
or only a pretentious verse-maker. The reply made to such was : ask Long- 
fellow, ask the critics of the London Athenaum the measure of Aubrey de Vere's 
greatness as a poet. The sanction of The Dublin Review had no weight with 
these people, but a non-Catholic approval quieted their doubts. So the story 
runs. We are the last to appreciate our own. Take up the old catalogues of 
books published by Richardson of Derby, Dolman of London, and Dunigan of 
New York, and note the number of Catholic books well worth preserving which 
died out of sight with the breakup of these houses. Remembering the past, it 
must be admitted that in the cultivation of a taste for Catholic literature, and in 
the patronage of Catholic books, there is room for improvement. 

" Our range and scope of Catholic literature are now sufficiently large for our 
critics to recommend nothing but the best. Our magazines and reviews should 
be up to the top notch of excellence. If, after a fair trial, any among them can- 



1894-] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 759 

not reach that position if there is no definite reason for their existence then, 
why should mercy be shown them ? They only block the way for something 
better. The namby-pamby and the goody-goody have no place in modern 
thought. Our journals are not under obligation to make their pages receptacles 
of school-boy essays and school-girl romancings. The waste-paper basket is the 
proper place for such articles. Young writers, be they young in years or be they 
young in the use of the pen, should put in a long and severe apprenticeship before 
appearing in print. What Pierre Loti has recently said of the higher forms of 
literary art applies here with equal force. ' I do not claim,' he says, 'that in con- 
structing any work in any manner whatever, a writer can always achieve a real 
success, even if he is possessed of the keenest sensibility. It is evident that 
there must be in addition a thorough preparation ; he must, by the instruction he 
has had, by the education he has received, perhaps by a thousand fruitless pre- 
liminary efforts, have unconsciously accumulated in himself a power of artistic 
expression equivalent to the power of emotion that is the mainspring of all.' 
Even if the expressions were fluent while the ideas remained commonplace or 
worthless, there should still be no room for their efforts. Why burden the read- 
ing public with so many words in which to clothe so insignificant a thought ? 
And in this regard there is room for reform even among the higher literary 
circles. It is pitiful to note the weak dilutions of thinking and good sense that 
men with a ' drawing ' name pour into the pages of our best periodicals. Place 
beneath their essays an obscure name and the editors would not consider them 
worth the return postage. Could such men realize the fact that they have written 
themselves out, or that they have gone beyond their last ne sutor ultra crepidam 
and were they to keep silent for one, two, ten years, they might save themselves 
from the premature literary extinction towards which they are fast approaching." 

* * * 

Our Catholic writers and the reading public can learn most important lessons 
from Brother Azarias as a teacher of literature. The best monument to perpetu- 
ate his memory would be a complete, uniform edition of his works. We hope 
that every Catholic Reading Circle will arrange within the present year to hold 
an Azarias meeting; June 29, 1847, was his birthday. Arrangements are already 
made to have his biography written by one who knew him intimately. The 
members of the Columbian Reading Union can render a service of love by copy- 
ing from his books favorite passages. We shall be pleased to get communica- 
tions on this subject with the passages most suitable for quotation. Notices of 
Brother Azarias may be found in Lippincott's Dictionary of Biography (new 
edition); Applet on' s Cyclopaedia of American Biography ; and the Stedman-Hut- 
chinson Library of American Literature. Excellent biographical sketches have 
been written by Rev. John Talbot Smith in the Catholic Family Annual for 
1894, price twenty-five cents (Catholic School Book Company, 28 Barclay Street, 
New York City) ; and by Mr. George E. Hardy in the Educational Review for 
December, 1893, price twenty-five cents (Henry Holt & Co., 29 West Twenty- 
third Street, New York City). Teachers will enjoy Mr. Hardy's article, which 
contains many personal reminiscences of Brother Azarias, indicating the honor 
shown to him on public occasions by the leading minds of the educational 

world. 

* * * 

The American Railway Literary Union has issued an urgent appeal to all 
Christian workers, patriots and friends of the home, requesting their co-operation 
l n preventing the sale and circulation of vicious and vulgar literature on trains and 



760 NEW BOOKS. [Feb., 1894. 

boats, at news-stands and through the mails. The aim is to arouse public senti- 
ment regarding pernicious publications for the protection of all, but especially for 
the thousands of young readers. Prominent men of all denominations have given 
letters encouraging the work, which was highly commended by the Columbian 
Catholic Congress recently held at Chicago. In Great Britain the railway book- 
stalls, under the management of Messrs. W. H. Smith & Son, have done a profit- 
able business on the high-grade principle. Mr. J. White, the general manager, 
thus writes : 

" When in the earliest days of railway book-stalls an impulse was first given 
to the publication of cheap books, it was the most eminent house in the trade who 
produced the article the travelling public required, and the high tone and style of 
these works has been, practically, the model followed in all similar productions to 
the present day. The more recent rapid developments in newspapers and periodi- 
cals which have originated mainly from the requirements of railway travellers 
have similarly aimed at being of an instructive, or if amusing, of a pure and 
wholesome character, and the determination of both publishers and contractors 
at the outset of this enterprise to adhere to these principles has always been 
thoroughly sustained by the railway companies and appreciated by the public. 

" Of scarcely less importance in the conduct of railway book-stall business 
here has been the employment in it of the most competent young men in the 
book-selling trade who could be attracted to the service men in full sympathy 
with the aims and principles of their employers, and who find it their interest to 
make their duties their life-work. By this means an intelligent and valuable ac- 
quaintance is formed with regular travellers and with the special wants of each 
district, as well as with the changing needs of the business as a whole. 

" It may be said in brief that these two factors the literature and the selling 
staff constitute the very warp and woof of a creditable and profitable railway 
book-selling trade, and a large experience has shown that no profit is of any en- 
during value that has not credit with it." 

Circulars giving plans and methods of co-operating in the excellent work 
proposed by the Railway Literary Union may be obtained on application to the 
superintendent, Mr. Yates Rickey, 1512 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, Pa. 

M. C. M. 



NEW BOOKS. 

OPEN COURT PUBLISHING Co., Chicago: 

The Redemption of the Brahman. By Richard Garbe. 

The Diseases of Personality. By M. Ribot. 
CASSELL PUBLISHING COMPANY, New York: 

Can Such Things Be? By Ambrose Bierce. 
SKEEN, BAKER & Co., Chicago : 

Father Junipero Serra. An Historical Drama. By Chester Gore Miller. 
B. HERDER, St. Louis : 

Venerable Mother M. Caroline Friess. By P. M. Abbelen. 

PAMPHLETS. 

JOHN MURPHY & Co., Baltimore : 

The Church and the Age: a Sermon. By Archbishop Ireland. 

BENZIGER BROTHERS have published a very remarkable list of new and at- 
tractive books. 




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ASTKR, BY SOMK, IS HKKIVFI' FROM EASTRA, THF GO! 



THE 



CATHOLIC WORLD. 



VOL. LVIII. 



MARCH, 1894. 



No. 348. 




THE DAWNING OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 
IN EUROPE. 

BY QUASIVATES. 

YEAR 1900 begins in Europe with a frightful 
retrospect and a hopeful future. It witnesses 
the close of the greatest war of modern his- 
tory, and the beginning of a new era of peace 
which, owing to the foundations on which it 
rests, promises to be durable. In its extent 
and in its ravages the war was without parallel. Almost every 
state in Europe, great and small, was involved. Torrents of 
blood have been shed ; the torch and the cannon have levelled 
many of the fairest places of the continent. An armistice was 
at last agreed upon ; a new congress of Vienna was held, and 
the terms of a general peace were at length arranged. 

This peace might not differ from any of its predecessors, 
only in the probability of its being of greater length, were the 
dynastic conditions which marked its beginning at all similar 
to those which obtained at the outbreak of hostilities. Those 
" Spanish marriages " have been at the bottom of nearly every 
great international complication in Europe for the past three 
centuries. Why the populations of the most civilized quarter 
of the globe should have so long endured the imposition of a 
frightful periodical blood-tax and a no less monstrous money- 
drain, that the personal ambition of a half-a-dozen blue-blooded 
families might be gratified, must for ever remain a thing inex- 
plicable to the historian. The fact that in a democri tic age 
three or four ambitious individuals styled emperors were en- 
Copyright. VBRY RBV. A. F. HBWIT. 1894. 
VOL. LVIII. 51 



762 THE DAWNING OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. [Mar., 

abled, in furtherance of these matrimonial intrigues, to turn 
the whole continent of Europe into one vast series of military 
camps, taking millions of men away perennially from the pur- 
suits of industry, can never be reconciled with the claim for 
superior intelligence which is advanced on its behalf. But it 
seems to be as useless to conjecture about the past as about 
the future. There are always " missing links " in history as 
there are said to be in physiology. We must be content to dis- 
pense with them, and contemplate things as we find them. 

The new treaty of Vienna differs from all its predecessors 
in the extent of its international character. It is the joint 
agreement of all the European great powers, as well as that of 
Turkey, which can no longer be reckoned in that classification. 
The high contracting parties represent the alterations which have 
taken place in the form of European governments as a consequence 
of the war. 

BIRTH OF NEW REPUBLICS. 

To the list of European republics the names of Italy and 
Spain are now added. The houses of Bourbon and Savoy, 
whose vicissitudes and intrigues had so long kept a whole 
continent in a state of turmoil, no longer exist as regnant 
dynasties. The respectable old house of Braganza has fol- 
lowed suit. Geographically, Europe may be said to have re- 
verted to its primitive divisions. Once more the Rhine is the 
boundary between Germany and the states on the north-east of 
France, with the Vosges and the Jura ranges of mountains tak- 
ing the line down to the Swiss frontier. The confederated 
states of Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Alsace-Lorraine 
form a barrier against aggression by either France or Germany, 
as neutralized territory under international guarantee. Repub- 
lican Spain rules the whole Peninsula from the Pyrenees to 
Gibraltar for the Mediterranean powers have compelled Eng- 
land, by a united blockade of the Suez Canal, to relax her grip 
upon the celebrated fortress. The Kingdom of Portugal has 
disappeared from the map. England has succeeded in retaining 
the island of Malta as a recognition of her right of way in the 
Mediterranean. 

POLAND REDIVIVUS. 

So much for the western part of Europe. On the north-east 
a change no less significant is visible in the territorial arrange- 
ments. The ancient kingdom of Poland has reappeared upon 



1894-] THE DAWNING OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. 763 

the map a strong state wedged in between Germany, Austria, 
and Prussia, stretching from the Baltic Sea away down to the 
Black Sea, with Odessa as an entrepot at the one extremity, 
and Memel and Riga on the other. She has her "scientific" 
frontier, on the west in the river Vistula, and on the east by 
the Dwina and the Dneiper. 

To Italy Austria has ceded that ancient bone of contention, 
the Tyrol. Greece has had her national aspirations at length 
almost realized in the recovery of the old Byzantine territory 
from the Turk, whose only footing in Europe now consists in 
a small zone around Constantinople, the city of Adrianople, 
and the fortress of Varna. 

THE PARTITION OF ASIA. 

These not inconsiderable " rectifications " in Europe were 
not brought about without some sympathetic perturbations in 
other portions of the western hemisphere. Russia made com- 
pensations in Asia for her losses of territory in Europe. She 
was enabled, by means of her transcaucasian railway system, 
to throw enough troops into Khorassan to overawe Persia while 
she sat down before Herat. After a siege of six months that 
famous stronghold fell into her hands. This accomplished, she 
was within easy striking distance of Candahar. The ruler of 
Afghanistan, thus finding himself "between the devil and the 
deep sea," had to make his election. There was never much 
love in Afghanistan for the conquerors of Cabul ; the memory 
of the mollahs hanged there by General Roberts was burned 
deep into Moslem hearts. Russia, on the other hand, had 
never said or done an unfriendly thing to any Afghan, gentle 
or simple, but had always, on the contrary, been lavish in send- 
ing gifts Grecian ones, perhaps, as it might turn out to the 
rulers of Afghanistan. What wonder, when the alternative of a 
choice of masters, under the . euphuistical designation of allies, 
was put before the ameer, that he should choose those who 
had given him political sugar-stick instead of those whose policy 
had always been " more stick " ? Practically, then, Afghanistan 
is now a Russian province, and the Moscovite and English sen- 
tries can " almost receive the secret whispers of each other's 
watch," as they walk their respective rounds on either side of 
the Indus. 

OPENING UP OF DARKEST AFRICA. 

The development of Africa has received a new impulse in 
more than one direction. France had shown a degree of enter- 



764 THE DAWNING OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. [Mar., 

prise in colonization altogether unexpected. She had estab- 
lished a firm hold upon the important but somewhat mysterious 
city of Timbuctoo, enabling herself thereby to control the 
navigation of the Niger River. The degree of energy which 
she exhibited in this formidable enterprise recalls to the memory 
her former wonderful triumphs as the founder of colonies. 
We may look forward with certainty to the speedy connection 
between her Algerian possessions and the newly-conquered 
territory by means of a railway across the desert. Once the 
locomotive makes its appearance in North Africa, the long- 
deferred induction of that region into the domains of civiliza- 
tion will have fairly begun. The great success of France as a 
colonizer, by reason of the easily assimilable and winning Cel- 
tic temperament, opens up the vista of a bright future at last 
for the darkest portion of the " dark continent," as well as 
prosperity for the mother country as a result of her enterpris- 
ing spirit. 

At the opposite side of Africa the work of civilization is 
being steadily pushed on by means of the English hold upon 
Egypt. As a compensation for her surrender of Gibraltar the 
other powers were unanimous in conceding to Great Britain 
the privilege of extending her influence as far south as she 
found it practicable, and as far west as the borders of the 
Sahara desert. By an international agreement this desert be- 
comes the property of France, to be converted into an inland 
sea, if the project be found feasible. 

A SPANISH MARRIAGE AGAIN. 

It was, as if to prove the irony of fate, out of the very 
precautions taken to preserve the general peace that the great 
explosion at last came about. As usual, there was a Spanish 
marriage in it. 

A young lieutenant, a relative of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg, 
who is in the anomalous position of being an English prince 
with a German patrimony, had gone to Spain for a holiday. 
There he met at court a young lady related to the Duke de 
Montpensier, whose beauty at once captivated him. On his 
return he disclosed the state of his feelings to his ducal 
relative, who saw no objection to the match, if the lady 
were agreeable, but the question of finances. This prince, 
though reputed to be very wealthy, owing to an inherited par- 
simoniousness of character, was unwilling to bear the burden of 
a matrimonial provision for his beloved relative, and the Mont- 



1894-] THE DAWNING OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. 765 

pensier family, having only a short time before lost the greater 
portion of their revenue through the failure of a bank in which 
it was chiefly deposited, were in no position to give the lady 
a suitable dot. Hence both the Spanish Cortes and the elec- 
tors of Saxe-Coburg were appealed to, to furnish funds for the 
matrimonial enterprise. 

Whatever the differences between French Republicans, Im- 
perialists, and Monarchists, they are alike agreed upon the prin- 
ciple that any strengthening of German influence in Spain must 
be resisted by France at any cost. They have sufficient trouble 
in defending their eastern frontier against their hereditary foe ; 
to have him established in any guise on their southern flank also 
would be a deadly danger, in their view, to the security of 
France. Hence the French Republic was found repeating the 
performance of the French Empire in 1870, in promptly send- 
ing an energetic protest to the court of Berlin. . 

ANOTHER WAR CLOUD. 

The elements for a very pretty international quarrel were 
here, then, in abundance, but the tangle was still further com- 
plicated by the action of Great Britain. That power and 
France had been on little more than terms of the most formal 
courtesy ever since Great Britain had begun to increase her 
navy. The fact that to the union of an English prince with the 
lady of his choice so decided an objection had been shown by 
the French government was taken as a deadly affront to the 
royal family of Guelph, and as the popular mind in England 
had been already prepared by a judicious course of war-scare 
treatment, there was little difficulty in winning over the popular 
House of Parliament to the endorsement of a war policy which 
had for long been a foregone conclusion. 

Had the struggle which was inevitable from the clashing of 
those discordant forces been limited to a certain circumscribed 
theatre, as in former European wars, there would not, for the 
historian, have been more to chronicle and deplore than in the 
records of the past conflicts of that continent. But there were 
forces at work in this volcanic upheaval some making for right 
and some for evil which distinguished it from every one of its 
precedents. There was a war within a war. Not only was 
every country at war with its neighbor, but was at the same 
time waging a fierce internecine strife within its own borders. 
Anarchy made war upon government and society, while govern- 
ment endeavored to grapple with the foreign foe. The terrible 



766 THE DAWNING OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. [Mar., 

character of this vast international conspiracy, more deadly in its 
working than cholera, or Black Death, was the fact which at 
last opened the eyes of the passion-blinded combatants and dis- 
posed them towards the peace which the Sovereign Pontiff, at 
the first moment that his voice could make itself heard amid 
the roar of battle, counselled. 

THE POPE SOLVES THE PROBLEM. 

The system of neutral zones between contending countries 
is of ancient origin. But the application of such a principle to 
the separation of the great divisions of a whole continent was a 
gigantic thought capable of being conceived only by a master- 
mind. None but a sovereign occupying the exalted position of 
the spiritual ruler of Christendom could have the boldness to 
propound such a solution of the ever-living European pro- 
blem. 

The crown and apex of this herculean work is the settle- 
ment of the question of the Roman sovereignty. In this por- 
tion of the European scheme there is revealed a wisdom which 
seems almost superhuman. The question is now for ever re- 
moved from the region of temporal disputation and placed in 
such a position that no plots or intrigues can ever assail its 
security. 

THE AMERICAN EXEMPLAR. 

To the American Constitution Mr. Gladstone, some time ago, 
paid the flattering tribute of imitation when framing his plan for 
the formation of the Second Chamber in an Irish Parliament. 
To America the Holy Father likewise looked when evolving his 
plan for the settlement of the Roman difficulty. All the con- 
ditions necessary for the removal of the question from the re- 
gion of debate for ever he found in the arrangement of the 
American Constitution providing for the immunity of the site 
of the national capital. 

But before elaborating the mode by which the Holy Father 
worked out this proposal it is necessary to glance at some of 
the principal events which had their culmination in the greatest 
European war since the days of Gustavus Adolphus. 

Those who conceived the much-talked-of plan of the Triple 
Alliance believed that it was the surest means of securing peace, 
but, as it proved, no more certain means could have been de- 
vised of provoking war. The Triple Alliance was looked upon 
by the states outside as a perpetual menace, and opportunities 
were eagerly looked for, while it lasted, for inserting the thin 



1 894.] THE DAWNING OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. 767 

end of the wedge into the first perceptible chink or fissure in 
the fabric. 

But it was not from any external force the disruption came. 
In the conditions of the bond itself the seeds of disintegration 
were latent. The enormous army which each member of the 
alliance was bound to maintain perpetually proved to Germany 
and Austria a fearful strain upon the people and the national 
resources ; but to Italy, the most impoverished and the most 
deeply involved country in Europe, it proved intolerable, and in 
fact crushing. Do what it might to collect the taxes to maintain 
this army, the taxes did not come in. Year by year the deficits 
in the treasury grew alarmingly greater. In ten years the bud- 
get receipts had fallen off from four hundred million dollars to 
three hundred and fifty millions. Not a dollar could be raised 
by the government from outside by loan or otherwise. Bank- 
ruptcy came, and with it came revolution. 

THE CRASH IN ITALY. 

Grim poetical justice attended every phase of the new move- 
ment. It was against the successful fomenters of revolution that 
the arms of revolution were now turned. It began in the island 
where Garibaldi and his filibusters began to play the jackal for 
the Piedmontese wolf. The people of Sicily were told by Vic- 
tor Emmanuel that he had come to put an end to the era of 
revolution ; after a few years of the House of Savoy they found 
themselves in a state of pauperism more frightful than that of 
the Egyptian fellaheen. Seventy-five per cent, of the Sicilian's 
earnings went either into the pockets of the landlord, the state, 
or the local government ; he was not left sufficient to provide 
himself and his family with even the miserable handful of dried 
grapes and the scrap of coarse bread and garlic which is the 
only food of his class. In his misery he sighed for the days of 
the much-abused " King Bomba," when at least he got enough 
to keep body and soul together, and was not subject to that 
modern outcome of peace-preserving " alliances," the conscrip- 
tion. 

But it was not in Sicily only that the iron of plunder and op- 
pression had eaten deep into the people's life. Many parts of the 
mainland were in still worse plight. In Rome a nest of high- 
placed robbers, with the king and his ministers at their head, 
had for years been systematically stealing the people's money 
from the banks. The scandals were so frightful that many times 
the populace were on the point of open revolt in the streets, 



768 THE DAWNING OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. [Mar., 

and the Chamber of Deputies became daily the scenes of wild- 
est uproar and passionate denunciation. Ministry after ministry 
resigned. Even Crispi, who as a last resource had been recalled 
from an enforced retirement to try to stave off ruin, was unable 
to carry on government in the face of the gathering storm. At 
last the crash came. There was no money to maintain the army ; 
the troops fraternized everywhere with the rioters; the cry 
"Down with the house of Savoy!" resounded in the streets, 
and the crowned hypocrisy which had installed itself with rob- 
ber insolence in the Pope's palace of the Quirinal was forced to 
fly through the gates which a few years before it had brought 
its cannon to batter down about the ears of the gentle Pius the 
Ninth. Surely the whirligig of time has strange revenges. 

THE TRIPLE ALLIANCE INVOLVED. 

This was the first blow for the Triple Alliance ; another 
quickly followed. Austria, mindful of her old supremacy in 
the peninsula, began pouring in her troops, on the pretence of 
restoring order ; but the Italian garrisons in the Quadrilateral re- 
gion stood firm for the newly-proclaimed Italian republic. The 
German government endeavored to deter the Austrian states- 
men from interfering in the internal affairs of Italy, but was 
met with a stern rejoinder. This was the signal for which the 
impetuous kaiser had been waiting. Bismarck's return to power 
had been signalized by a step for which the world was quite 
unprepared. Contrary to all the traditions of the past half-century 
Great Britain had again taken a hand in the affairs of the Con- 
tinent, and the outcome of her interposition was a secret treaty 
with Germany. And now developed a drama for which no par- 
allel was ever found' upon the stage of the world's theatre. 

The reply of the German emperor to the French note pro- 
testing against the Spanish alliance was a haughty refusal to 
be bound in any way by the wishes of his Gallic neighbor, and 
an immediate strengthening of the garrisons of the Alsatian 
frontier. Simultaneously came a note from England protesting 
against any interference by France in a matter of such concern 
to the English royal family. France, which had for years been 
hungering and thirsting for a war of revenge, was not in a 
mood to take such fillips tamely. A mobilization of six army 
corps in the east and south was her reply to the German men- 
ace, and the dispatch of one iron-clad squadron from Cherbourg 
to the English Channel, and another from Toulon to the mouth 
of the Suez Canal. 



1894-] THE DAWNING OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. 769 

SPAIN BECOMES A REPUBLIC. 

In Spain the emissaries of Germany began a movement 
with the view of exciting a hostile sentiment towards France. 
The Montpensierists endeavored to bring about an understand- 
ing with the Conservative and Unionist groups, in order to 
carry through the Cortes a declaration favorable to the German 
alliance, and in this they were successful. The Republican 
groups acted together in order to defeat the scheme, but they 
were outvoted by a narrow majority. When the resolution 
came up a second time for ratification they left the chamber 
in a body, and, returning to their constituencies, began a cam- 
paign of open hostility t the monarchy. Insurrectionary move- 
ments followed with lightning rapidity. Barcelona, Santander, 
Cadiz, became the theatres of sanguinary struggles, with disas- 
trous results for the royalists ; the garrisons of Seville and Madrid 
made a simultaneous pronunciamiento in favor of the republic, and 
the Escurial being threatened by the insurgents, an immediate 
flight of the young king, the princess regent, and the royal 
household followed. The republic was formally proclaimed, 
and being immediately recognized by France, an alliance offen- 
sive and defensive was at once entered upon between the two 
countries. A similar movement took place in Portugal. Bands 
of Spanish Republicans crossed the border to aid their breth- 
ren, the royal family took refuge in the castle of Belem, and 
were glad to capitulate when the fortress was threatened with 
bombardment by the iron-clads which had gone over to the in- 
surgents. They were taken on board an American vessel which 
lay in the Tagus, and having been permitted to get some of 
their personal property together, sailed in a few days for the 
United States. The Iberian Peninsula was now republican from 
end to end, with Zorilla as president and Pi y Margall as 
prime minister. 

THE FRENCH CROSS THE RHINE. 

France, having thus secured her southern frontier, now en- 
tered upon the war with tremendous energy. Leaving two 
army corps to keep the garrison of Metz in check, Marshal 
Canrobert, under cover of the guns of Belfort, crossed the 
Rhine with the army of the east, and fought a decisive battle 
with the Bavarian forces, led by the king in person, at Sultz- 
burg. A week later his army had surrounded Munich and 
beaten back the division led by the king of Saxony. The 



770 THE DAWNING OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. [Mar., 

army of the north meanwhile had closed in around Strasbourg, 
thereby preventing any attempt on the part of the German 
forces there to join hands with the army in Metz. A division 
led by the emperor attempted to force the passage of the river 
from the fort of Kehl, but the superiority of the new French 
field artillery rendered the effort futile. The French forces, 
under cover of their strategic works, gradually closed in around 
the city, and prepared for a regular siege. The fortress of Bel- 
fort being free to keep open the passage of the river below, 
within a fortnight six more army corps had crossed into Swa- 
bia, and the united force, taking town after town on its way, 
soon occupied Stuttgart and prepared to march on Berlin. 

Everything had miscarried with the plans of the Triple 
Alliance. The events which had transpired in Italy completely 
upset all the calculations of the allies. Austria was powerless 
to help Germany with her land forces, for she found in the 
campaign in Lombardy and the guarding of her northern fron- 
tier quite sufficient to tax all her energies. 

RUSSIA KEEPS HER TOULON PLEDGES. 

Hitherto Russia had done nothing to show that there was 
any reality in the reported alliance between the czar and the 
French Republic. The first signs of activity were, however, 
characteristic. A hurried massing of British troops in the 
Pishin Valley indicated in what quarter the Muscovite blow was 
likely to descend. The demand of England for an explanation 
of a simultaneous movement of Russian and Persian troops up- 
on Herat was met by an ambiguous reply from both czar and 
shah; a movement of the English Mediterranean squadron 
towards the Black Sea was checked by the announcement that 
the passage of the Dardanelles had been forced by the belted 
cruisers of Russia, which had been joined by the French Medi- 
terranean squadron in the ^Egean Sea. The Austrian fleet was 
held in check by the Italian iron-clads, and the combined Rus- 
sian and French squadrons suddenly appeared before Suez and 
began a blockade of the head of the canal. 

The flames of war now lighted were not all those of mere 
international rivalry and the wantonness of armed power. The 
conflicts of tyranny are the opportunities of the oppressed. 
Long-suffering Poland saw her chance in the outbreak of a gen- 
eral struggle. Aided by the brave Bulgarians, who had learned 
to their cost what it was to be indebted to Russian help, they 
raised the standard of revolt in Cracow, Warsaw, and several 



1894-] THE DAWNING OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. 771 

other places. The garrisons had been drawn off to swell the 
armies massed on the German and Austrian frontiers, and only 
detachments were left to man the fortresses. These were easily 
overpowered by the eager insurgents, and for the first time for 
a century the standard of Sobieski was -unfurled over the walls 
of the Polish capital. 

This movement was totally unexpected. It disconcerted the 
plans of the czar most materially. The Cossack advance on 
Afghanistan was checked, and many regiments were drawn off 
for European service. But a most unaccountable paralysis 
seemed to overcome the Russian forces. Indecision was mani- 
fested in every movement ; troops ordered to one quarter were 
suddenly ordered back to another; every day there was some- 
thing startling. Rumors of court-martials, and wholesale shoot- 
ings, and banishments to Siberia began to leak out. At last the 
truth came to light the army could not be depended on ; it 
was honeycombed with Nihilism. 

To crown all, Greece, with the help of the French squadron 
in the ^gean, made a successful attack upon Turkey. 

For six months the conflict raged all around with varying 
fortunes but little substantial results to any of the combatants. 
A terrific fight between the French and English squadrons 
in the English Channel had ended in the sinking of half-a- 
dozen ships, by ramming and by the explosion of torpedoes. 
The losses were almost equally divided, and the result was a 
drawn battle. Horrified at the vast outpouring of blood and 
the frightful waste of material resources, the American people 
md press at last began to ask what was the use of it all. 

THE POPE AS ARBITER. 

The word " arbitration " was upon every tongue, and all 
eyes were turned instinctively towards the illustrious occupant 
of the Vatican. His was the only voice in the whole world 
rhich would have a chance of being listened to in that pande- 
lonium of passion and universal horror. 

The word was spoken, and was at length listened to. A 
general armistice was first arranged, and then a conference of 
>lenipotentiaries was convened in St. Petersburg. 

The propositions of each power were formally submitted, 
ifter full instructions from the home governments, and each 
>lenipotentiary gave a solemn assurance that he would be bound 
>y the decision which his Holiness, after three months' dis- 



772 THE DAWNING OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. [Mar., 

cussion of the proposals, with the help of two leading juriscon- 
sults from America, should render. 

As to the settlement of the Roman question, the suggestion 
came from America. The idea was to follow the example of 
the American Union with regard to the City of Washington 
and the District of Columbia. This is a sort of neutral terri- 
tory, whose affairs are controlled by commissioners nominated 
by Congress. There are no representatives for the district, and 
no elections in it consequently. 

The patrimony of the church has been restored, and the gov- 
ernment of the city and territory is placed in the hands of 
commissioners chosen by the Holy Father. Florence is the 
capital of the republic, and Rome once more the capital of 
Christendom. 

Now Europe, whilst retaining her ancient divisions, is tra- 
versed by a series of neutralized states which serve as barriers 
between the rival powers ; the right of free passage on all the 
high seas, including the Mediterranean and the Dardanelles, is 
guaranteed to the whole world, and the head of the Catholic 
Church is at last free to deal without let or hindrance with 
every portion of his wide-spreading domain. The Eternal City 
has wakened up from the fitful fever of Revolution, the money- 
changers have been driven from the temple, and an era of 
blessed tranquillity now seems to have dawned at last over 
long-distracted Europe. The Pope once more is free. 





1894-] ADIRONDACK SKETCHES. 773 

ADIRONDACK SKETCHES. II. 

BY WALTER LECKY. 

AVE you heard of Squidville, on the Salmon 
River? Of course you must. It was there that 
Bob Stevens fought his famous fight with the 
big Indian Jock. 

" The little stage over yonder at Ransom's 
runs through Squidville and stops at Porcupine 
Creek. You say you want fishing ; if you do, youngster, that's 
the place." 

The speaker was a tall, angular man with high forehead, 
indented cheeks, and gray, piercing eyes. He was still lithe 
and active, although past the forties. If was easy to see that 
he was a French-Canadian, and his tanned cheeks and shoulder- 
droop made the guessing of his occupation an easy task. A 
few days before the rain had come down in torrents, the river 
was swollen, and thousands of logs, like bits of kindling-wood, 
were carried down its angry current from Squidville and Por- 
cupine Creek. The rain had ceased, the river subsided, and 
the choppers had come down to Malone to have their logs 
measured, and to receive pay for their winter's work. One of 
them was the speaker, Frank La Flamme ; and the man that 
he wished to visit his mountain home was a clerk of the com- 
pany that had bought his logs. The clerk promised that his 
first vacation would be passed in Squidville ; and as the stage- 
man was hitching his horses La Flamme, with a " Mind your 
promise, youngster," hurried off and mounted the stage. An 
elderly lady, with a noticeable tinge of Sioux blood in her 
veins, was just then being politely helped into the stage by a 
grave, dignified, bald-headed merchant, while his business part- 
ner was barely able to place by her side a huge basket of 
groceries. 4< Comme se vu, grandmother. You're early getting 
ready for the dance." The old lady smiled, muttered "Oui," 
and settled herself to sleep. The bald-headed man, hearing La 
Flamme's voice, seemed glad. His face, at least, showed some 
lighter shades akin to laughter. 

" Hello, Frank ! ain't you comin' in ? " 
" I guess not, Mr. Ransom." 



774 ADIRONDACK SKETCHES. [Mar., 

" Well, Frank, you may do as you please. You promised to 
pay us the interest, at least, as soon as you sold your logs. If 
you break your promise I cannot keep mine." 

" Mr. Ransom," said La Flamme, holding down his head, 
" do give me a little time. Times are bad ; the new standard 
has destroyed us this year ; and if that was not enough, I had 
to lose my horse with a spavin. What was I to do ? I had to 
go in debt for another, so that I could skid my logs in time. 
You can wait. You know I'm as honest as the sun. Didn't I 
deal with you for twenty years, and didn't you always get your 
pay some time? " 

" I won't wait, Frank," was the gruff answer of Mr. Ran- 
som, as he politely bowed to his now nodding customer, 
Grandmother Croquet. It was not Croquet's way to notice 
what she disdainfully called " Yankee business touches." 

" Ransom, you're a scoundrel ; you told me to come and 
trade, and pay when I got ready ; now, because I am deep in 
your books, you throw away the glove and show your hand. 
I can't pay ; so do your best," was La Flamme's rejoinder, 
hissed through his teeth, while his dark gray eyes became feline 
in their expression. 

The crack of the stage-man's whip was the full-stop 
mark to the conversation. The old lady woke, rubbed her 
eyes, and noting La Flamme's sulk, that had spread over his 
face, muttered, " Devra avoir honte, Frangois "; then gave a 
sharp look at her basket, shut her eyes, and went asleep. A 
half-dozen of choppers, with their bright red stockings drawn 
tightly over their pants' legs, and their wide-brimmed hats set 
back on their heads, boarded the stage, talking loudly their 
patois, gesticulating, laughing immoderately, presenting to the 
casual observer that peculiar phase of the French-Canadian 
character present contentment. 

" Gee up," said the stage-man. 

"Get a gait on your horses," said one of the choppers. "I 
like that horse on the nigh, but his mate's a dandy," said an- 
other. " They are breeched and spavined," said a third. " I 
wouldn't give a dollar mortgage on them," said the fourth, 
pulling from his inside pocket a huge black bottle of Canadian 
high-wines. The bottle was carelessly passed around ; even the 
elderly lady with the tinge of Sioux awoke in time to take what 
Berry the driver called "a 'sky-flier' of a pull." La Flamme, 
with sullen look, held himself aloof from this growing weakness 
of the French Canadian who has made the States his home. 



1894-] ADIRONDACK SKETCHES. 775 

It was strange so strange to his fellow-choppers that little 
Piquet vowed that "Frank was coming to be an angel." 

" There's as much fear of that as a wood-chuck leaving his 
hole when you are around," said big La Jeuness, looking 
serious. 

" Hand him that bottle, Brie, and let him have an old-time 
swig ; it's the genuine thing. See how it opened Grandmother 
Croquet's eyes," cried Berry, turning on his seat to see if An- 
drieux, who hugged the bottle to his chest, would fulfil his 
commands. 

" Andrieux," said La Flamme, drawing his thin lips in the 
way of his teeth, " I will not touch that cursed stuff. It has 
been my ruin for many a day. Can't you fellows have fun 
enough without me ? I have bother enough. That miserable 
beggar, the horse-dealer, met me an hour ago and made me 
pay in full for that old horse that he ' palmed ' on me as a 
young beast yes, all the money that I had, even the interest 
due to Ransom. I guess it's always the way : if you're poor 
everybody wants to bite you." 

"How much did you give him?" said Berry, cracking his 
whip. 

"One hundred and twenty-five," was La Flamme's doleful 
reply. 

"Heavens!" said Piquet. 

"You were taken in," said Andrieux. 

" The horse ain't worth fifty dollars. The moment I saw 
him I told you that he was spavined. Didn't I, Frank?" 
shouted Brie. 

" You fellows know everything about a horse when somebody 
tells you. Why don't you air your wisdom before a fellow 
as poor as I be makes a trade ? " was La Flamme's sarcastic 
reply. 

" Well, La Flamme " and Brie pulled from his pocket a huge 
plug of newly-bought tobacco, carefully rolled in a deerskin bag 
" because you have the name of being a kind of horse-jockey ; 
and no matter how good a hand a man might be around 
horses, he's not such a fool as to give pointers to a jockey." 

The discussion came to an abrupt end by Berry jumping 
from his wagon, dancing and slapping his hands against the side 
of his big coat, shouting " Squidville ! All out for Squidville!" 

Squidville its origin is lost in obscurity, like that of most 
mountain towns in these regions. Billy Buttons, the guide, 
avows that it is named after a man named Squid, while Blind 



776 ADIRONDACK SKETCHES. [Mar., 

Cagy says that its name is Skidville, or the place where they 
skidded logs. The traveller has no escape between these rural 
historians, whose arguments pro and con. are the nightly fasci- 
nation of Squidville Hotel. Squidville I prefer the spelling of 
Buttons " is the easiest town in the State to find your way in " ; 
that is the first salutation of Jim Weeks, the jolly, fat proprietor 
of the " Hunter's Paradise." The town skulks along the Salmon 
River for a distance of half a mile. " The number of log-cabins 
in this our city," says Buttons, " is two-and-twenty, sir." 

" Mind, we are not counting the hotel, which be a frame 
house, sir, with nigh twenty beds as fine as silk," Cagy drops in 
to remark. 

There is but one street in this village Pleasant View. Coun- 
try folk have their ideas of beauty as well as their city brethren. 
When Squidville was laid out by Mr. Potter, the genial Weeks 
standing on the top of the brae that leads through the woods 
to Porcupine Creek, and looking at the Salmon River winding 
itself like a silver thread through the bits of green wood and 
marshy meadow-land, as if inspired, so says Cagy cried out : 
" Boys, a pleasant view ! " That exclamation named Squidville's 
only street, and immortalized the name of Weeks. The last 
house on Pleasant View looks like a cross between a Queen Anne 
cottage and a lumbering shanty. There is a liberty pole before 
the door, and a tattered flag flying from it. Swinging from a 
post, ornamented in lines of red and white, plainly telling of 
Weeks's love for his old trade, is a flaming golden sign : 

" Hunter's Paradise. 

Jim Weeks, Prop. 

Best Summer Resort in the Adirondacks." 

Before the door, shivering in the cold, ran two bow-legged, 
long-eared hounds, whining and waving their tails. Grand- 
mother Croquet, fiercely holding her basket, was the first to 
amble from the stage. Weeks, bareheaded and bowing, escorted 
her to the hotel, while Buttons remarked that he did not know 
where Croquet got the money to buy such a lot of things, and 
Cagy, hot with rage, avowed that Croquet's folks "have as good 
a right to money as any folks in this darned country." Mrs. 
Croquet and her basket safe in the care of Weeks, the wood- 
choppers sprang lightly from the stage and were soon busy 
helping the slow Berry to unhitch and feed his curdy-looking 
team. Kindness is a mountain virtue ; it is the golden link that 
unites these poor people and makes life pleasant during the 



1 894.] 



ADIRONDACK SKETCHES. 



777 



long, sullen stretches of the winter months. There are scores of 
men and women daily met with, up and down the road of life, 
who have a kind of philosophy that tells them that every natural 
event in their lives is heralded by a supernatural one. The 
poet was in sight of this 

when he wrote " Coming ^Mh^ta 

events cast their shadows 
before." It is useless to 
argue with such people 
in the vain effort of con- 
verting them. Would it 
not be pleasant to be 
able to write of this 
superstition as a corn 
only found on the toes 
of the ignorant ? Very ; 
but would it be true ? If 
biography be not a grand 
conspiracy against truth, 
as some one said of his- 
tory, many prominent 
agnostics wore a tight- 
fitting shoe. 

La Flamme was the 
last to jump from the 
stage, and when he had 
done so he leaned against 
the stage-shafts as if 
dazed. His ordinary hab- 
it would have been to 
lend Berry a willing hand 
to unyoke his team. Brie, 
noticing this, shouted 
" La Flamme, are you 
dreaming?" 

Yes, he was dreaming. 

A few days before a 

blackbird, during a heavy snow-storm, had beaten its way 
through the paper pane and sought safety and rest on the 
shoulder of his wife, as she busied herself preparing the 
brown Johnny-cake and the thick, black coffee for her hus- 
band. La Flamme in the natural goodness of his heart, 
instead of killing the drooping bird and averting ill-luck, caught 
VOL. LVIII. 52 




WEEKS BOWING AND SMILING.' 



778 ADIRONDACK SKETCHES. [Mar., 

it, gave it something to eat, tenderly nursed it, and when the 
storm was spent restored it to liberty and its native haunts. 
Dreaming there by the stage-shaft this bird once more crossed 
his vision. We are but the sport of thought. His Canadian 
mother had often sung to him, what a dire messenger of ill-luck 
was the blackbird. Her teaching had not been lost. The kind- 
liness of the man's heart had saved the bird, but in that very 
act he saw the beginning of his misfortune. Why did the horse- 
dealer, who lived in Belmont, happen to be in Malone ? Why 
did Ransom, in whose store he had traded for twenty years, 
threaten him with law? He could not answer these questions a 
few minutes ago ; now it was easy to do so when the scene in 
his cabin a few days ago came to his memory. It was his 
failure to kill the blackbird, and black superstition drove kind- 
ness from the wood-chopper's warm heart. " Why didn't I kill 
that cursed bird?" he muttered; "misfortune is on me and 
mine." How often has an accident, taking place at the right 
moment, confirmed as a life-long truth the silliest superstition. 
It was to be so with Frank La Flamme. 

Brie led one horse to the stable, Berry another. As they 
did so the stage-shafts fell to the ground. 

The dreamer woke and walked over to Weeks, the two dogs 
executing a kind of dance around him. It was at this moment 
that Buttons, sitting on an empty soap-box on the piazza, re- 
marked to Cagy " that it was the first time in his life that he 
had seen Frank slow to make of his dogs." 

" And look at them," says Cagy, " with their front paws on 
his vest, as if they were Christians." 

La Flamme took no notice of his dogs, but bidding bon 
voyage to Andrieux, mounted the piazza. Buttons had a dozen 
questions ready for him ; when Cagy, with a knowing nudge, 
brought Buttons' ear close to his mouth and whispered : " La 
Flamme's little girl is in the store, crying." 

" You don't say so ! " was Buttons' reply, as he and Cagy craned 
their necks striking an attitude peculiar to an Adirondack guide. 

"Is pa here, Mr. Weeks?" said the dark-eyed, scantily-clad 
little maid, looking piteously in the landlord's face. 

"Yes, dear, he has just put his foot on the piazza. And 
what's the matter with my girl, to-day ? You have been 
crying," said the landlord, rubbing away the child's tears with 
the back of his big hand. 

" Because mamma is sick, very sick. The priest and doctor 
are with her, and she wants my papa," sobbed the child. 



1 894.] 



ADIRONDACK SKETCHES. 



779 



La Flamme stood in the doorway ; the words smote his 
heavy heart. " Aily ! Aily!" he cried. 

" Papa mamma ! " sobbed the child, as she fell in her fa- 
ther's arms. 

About a quarter of a mile from the village hostelry, in 
one of the two-and-twenty low, shambling log-houses, lived La 
Flamme. His house was built in Squidville's only style logs 
mortised togeth- 
er, with here and 
there a huge iron 
clamp, "to steady 
her a bit," as 
Cagy used to re- 
mark. The space 
between the logs 
was filled up with 
rough mortar. 
The effect of 
such a house on 
the eye was far 
from pleasing ; 
yet in point of 
comfort it far ex- 
celled the ordina- 
ry country frame- 
house. It was 
one of Buttons' 
ordinary remarks 
that "such houses 
were native to 
the soil," and 
there was much 
truth in this ob- 
servation. 

When dark 
clouds teem on 
the mountain's 
brow, and fierce 

winds drive the sleet over the lowlands, making it as prickly 
as sharp-pointed needles, there is an indescribable comfort in a 
log-cabin, with its laughing fire of crackling pine logs. A stran- 
ger would easily guess that there was something wrong in 
this cabin from the continual opening and shutting of the dooi, 




THE SMOKE CEASED IN BUTTONS' PIPE. 



780 ADIRONDACK SKETCHES. [Mar., 

and the dozen or more women, with black shawls closely drawn 
about their heads, that formed themselves in little knots before 
the door, talking in a subdued voice. One of them, a woman 
of coarse features and rugged build, leaving the others, pulled 
the latch string and entered. 

"Glad to see you, Mrs. Poulet," said Buttons, who had led 
the village in its race to the sick-house. 

" Will she be at herself again ? " inquired Cagy. 

Throwing her head back, and letting the shawl fall on her 
broad shoulders, Mrs. Poulet scornfully rejoined, "You fellows 
here, drinking up all the air that the poor woman should have "; 
and then with stately step advanced to the sick woman's bed. 

" That's a tomboy for you ! " was the only remark that 
slipped the tongue of the crestfallen Cagy, 

" Poor Milly !" said Mrs. Poulet, bending over the sick woman ; 
then turning to La Flamme, who was kneeling by the bedside 
of his wife, pillowing her drooping head o.n his tawny arm : 
" Better send Aily to some of the neighbors. She is breaking 
her heart, poor thing." 

Aily was leaning over her mother's face kissing the damp 
sweat from her forehead. La Flamme did not hear ; his eyes 
were fastened on a rough print representing Christ as the good 
pastor bought years ago from a Jewish pedlar, and pinned to 
the side wall near his bed. 

" She is getting worse," said Mrs. Poulet, turning away her 
head to hide her tears. 

At this remark the young priest, who had stood by the foot 
of the bed, now knelt by the side of it and commenced to 
pray aloud in French. He was joined by a dozen voices ; even 
those out-of-doors knelt on the cold, damp ground to utter, in 
response to the rich, bass voice of their priest, a prayer for 
Milly La Flamme. The doctor, a thin, talkative man, whose 
hero was Thomas Paine, removed his fur cap. This doctor 
used to take my place when the roads between Snipeville and 
Squidville were blocked. It is told to this day in Squidville 
that his lips moved as if in prayer. 

*' I think it would ease her to have warm bottles to her 
feet," said Mrs. Croquet, panting from her quick walk. 

" You can have all the bottles you want in my store," said 
Weeks. 

" I'll have them in a jiffy," said Buttons, opening the door. 

" It's useless," said the doctor. 

" Ay, useless sure," muttered Mrs. Poulet. 



1 894.] 



ADIRONDACK SKETCHES. 



781 



La Flamme's wife looked at her husband ; his eyes were still 
fastened on the print ; then her eyes wandered to it. Aily, 
wondering, looked at her parents' faces and set hers in the 
same direction. 

" Bon Pasteur," said La Flamme. 

" Ardez ma mere," responded Aily. 

"She is dead," said the doctor. 

"Dead," repeated the priest. 

" She was a good woman," said Mrs. Croquet. 




"THE LITTLE BRICK CHURCH." 

" Good and bad all together must go," said Mrs. Poulet, pull- 
ing the shawl over her head. 

" It's a hard one for poor Frank," ejaculated Weeks, with 
tears running down his cheeks. 

"She died like an angel," said Brie. 

"She went off in the crack of a whip," said Berry. 

" Here's the bottles," said Buttons, opening the door. 

" Yer too late, Buttons; and she don't want bottles on the 
other side. God rest her," said Cagy. 

"Amen," replied Buttons; "but you don't tell me it's all 
over with her." 

" She's as dead as a nail," said Cagy with a long-drawn sigh. 



782 ADIRONDACK SKETCHES. [Mar. 

"Ay, sure, Billy Buttons," put in a dozen voices, " Milly 
La Flamme is dead." 

Squidville has a graveyard on the Porcupine road, a good 
half-mile from the village. It is a bit of clearing of about three 
acres in the heart of the woods, fenced in with huge burnt logs. 
In the centre stands a rough wooden cross, and here and there 
a black pine stump, looking like sentinels of the dead. To this 
quiet spot came the body of Milly La Flamme, borne on a 
rough country wagon, drawn by Weeks's pair of four-year-old 
bay colts, followed by Berry and the Squidville stage, carrying La 
Flamme, the weeping Aily, and their relatives. 

Behind the stage came the people of Squidville mounted on 
all kinds of rigs. 

The last prayer said, and the first shovelful of clay thrown 
on the coffin by Pere Monnier, La Flamme led his little girl 
from her mother's grave. Before he had reached the stage a 
hand was lightly laid on his shoulder. 

He turned around. " Good-day, Frank." " Good-day, Sheriff 
Matson." " I am sorry for your troubles, Frank," continued 
the sheriff, "and had I known of them I would not be here to- 
day. Poor fellow ! you have trouble enough without me bother- 
ing you, but " and the sheriff's voice was troubled " have 
courage, Frank. I will go home." 

" Sheriff, I know it is not your fault to be here to-day. 
You must do your duty. You come from Ransom. Well, 
there's no use in putting you to a second trip. All I have is 
the two horses and wagon that La Jeuness is driving. Take 
them ; they will pay the debt. There's no luck for me in this 
place. Tell Ransom, sheriff, that it's the old story : get on a 
store-keeper's books and slavery begins. That was Milly's con- 
stant warning, sheriff ; she often used to say * It is better, Frank, 
to do without something than go in debt for it.' But Milly is 
dead, dead ! sheriff, and my motherless child and I, as soon as 
we say good-by to Pere Monnier, will start for the West. Some 
day Aily and I might have money enough to buy Milly a 
head-stone." 

" Go away, papa, and leave mamma here ? " said the child. 

" No, mamma is in heaven, Aily ; and heaven is in the West 
as well as here." 




LAME AT THE BEAUTIFUL GATE. 

(Acts of the Apostles, Chapter Hi.) 
BY JOHN J. O'SHEA. 

N the portals of the Temple sate I crouching all the 

day, 
Heart of gall e'er throbbing 'neath a haggard face 

of dole, 
A bright living growth arrested, a fair manhood shrunk 

away, 
Craving death, yet clinging to .a life without a soul : 

So I deemed it in my numbness when I heard their doctors 
lie, 

And in speech sophistical enshroud the holy law 
Insisting still on form when the essence had gone by ; 

Cold and callous-hearted, yet all men without a flaw ! 

Alms, no doubt, they flung me, but 'twas in the public view, 
That the world might witness how they lived up to the rule ; 




784 LAME AT THE BEAUTIFUL GATE. [Mar., 

And they swept into the Temple with the mien of men who 

knew 

That their lives were always godly and their doctrine of the 
school. 



But their largesse ever cut me, though my lips cold thanks 

expressed, 
For I knew the scorn that filled them all the while they 

gave ; 
And I cursed the fate that doomed me to be the proud man's 

jest 
And my life to rot thus idly till I filled a beggar's grave. 

Oft I thought to cast it from me as a heritage of shame, 
And the demon whispered, "End it; dost thou dare?" 
Still a hope divine withheld me, and full soon the answer 

came : 

"God hath given, God's to take it; fiend, get thee to thy 
lair." 

'Twas not thus in glad life's morn, when the tender . hand of 

love 
Helped on my falt'ring footsteps and cheered my darksome 

way, 

Father, mother, friends, and kindred and one all these above ! 
But swift ruin swept our household, and love ah, well-a- 
day ! 

In Love's temple there are portals fair as that on Zion's hill, 
In Love's temple vot'ries false as some who pray up there ; 

Vows are pledged and smiles greet ever when the sails of for- 
tune fill, 
But in tempest and disaster these become as things of air. 

Thus I found ; and thus my spirit grew as cold as frozen 

brook, 

And a hate of men possessed me, hate of self the most 
Hate that, scorning those who gave it, I should, crouching in 

my nook, 

Take the sordid coin they flung me, of their sanctity to 
boast ! 



1894-] LAME AT THE BEAUTIFUL GATE. 785 

Yet the shadow of the portal oft consoled me as I pined, 
And a subtle incense as the cool airs swept therethrough, 

Whilst outside the white streets, scorching, seemed to beg one 

breath of wind 
From a heaven hot and cloudless, and blinding in its blue. 

And the quaintness of the carving and the beauty of the lines 
Which the builder of the gateway showed in all his plan 

Touched oft a hidden fountain which still, in God's designs, 
Springs up in darkest moments to cheer the heart of man. 

I had heard the doctors telling of one singular and odd, 

Who had never stood on forms, but always gladly mixed 
With the vulgar and the sinners, yet who claimed to be our 

God, 

And spoke with such a glamour all who heard him were 
transfixed. 

But his voice had never reached me, nor his magic glance of 

love, 

Nor was I ever touched by his blest shadow as it passed, 
For my feeble frame was stricken so that limb I could not 

move, 
All the days he wrought in Zion, till he died for us at last. 

But soon two came with faces made radiant with his fire 
One prince of the apostles, our Peter, strong and brave ; 
John the other, the beloved of Spirit, Son, and Sire, 

And they lingered in the portal as an alms they heard me 
crave. 
r 



" Gold and silver I possess not," answered Simon, as his eye, 
Full of soft compassion, was now fixed upon my face ; 

Slow moved his lips in prayer, then commanding all stand by r 
" But what I have I give thee, O afflicted, with God's grace. 



" In the name of my Lord Jesus here I bid thee rise and go, 
Hale in body, glad of spirit, full of strength, and free ; 

Now, give to God the glory, not to any here below, 

He hath come to heal the world as he now healeth thee." 



786 



LAME AT THE BEAUTIFUL GATE. 



[Mar., 



Oh the sweetness of that moment that delight as keen as 

pain ! 

Like a thrill of fire it seared me, made my senses reel; 
But my pulses soon throbbed gladly as with new blood in each 

vein, 
And up I sprang exultant, with a bound like tested steel. 



How I danced and laughed and shouted in the joyance of my 

glee, 

Till the dazed multitude fell back before my flight. 
Stiff of neck and stubborn, they who set Barabbas free, 

Signs and wonders might appal them, but they saw not 
the light. 

Praise for aye to Great Jehovah! praised be aye the Three in 
One! 

To the Lamb all spotless, O hosanna yet and yet ! 
And the glory of old Zion is the Maid who calls him Son, 

The peerless Child of Judah, whose star shall never set ! 





1894-] How TO SOLVE ONE OF THE PROBLEMS OF SCIENCE. 787 



HOW TO SOLVE ONE OF THE HIGHEST PROBLEMS 

OF SCIENCE. 

BY WILLIAM SETON, LL.D. 

nothing, perhaps, does our generation differ more 
from the generations that have gone before it 
than in the view which it takes of animated na- 
ture. There are, no doubt, many persons who 
do not yet call themselves aged who never in 
their college days heard the word Evolution spoken. All the 
different kinds of animals and plants had been, in their eyes, 
specially created from the beginning, and the idea that 
one organism has developed by slow and imperceptible de- 
grees from another organism, would have seemed to them not 
only absurd but heretical. It is true that some scientists had 
already questioned the old-time belief in special creations, but 
even the genius of Lamarck had made little impression on men's 
minds. But to-day all this is changed. In every civilized coun- 
try not only is natural science the one study to which, more 
than to any other, the majority of young collegians are turning 
their thoughts, but the professors whose lectures they attend 
are, with very few exceptions, upholders of the doctrine of evo- 
lution. 

Now what, it may be asked, has mainly brought about this 
widely different view of Almighty God's work ? It is, in our opin- 
ion, Darwin's theory of Natural Selection, which gives the first 
plausible explanation of how change of species may be effected, 
and whether we agree with him or not his hypothesis is most 
ingenious, and one which cannot be disproved. Darwin teaches 
that more individuals are born than can possibly survive ; and 
that in the battle for life, which the fauna and flora have been 
fighting during the millions of years since their first ancestors 
were created, those varieties which possess the smallest advan- 
tage of structure, color, or otherwise are preserved, while those 
which do not possess any advantages perish ; and he also shows 
that all organisms vary in every one of their parts to an 
extent quite enough for natural selection to act upon. We 
know that in domesticated animals and plants there is marked 
variation, and that it is by selecting from varieties to breed 



788 How TO SOLVE ONE OF [Mar. r 

from that all the different kinds of plants and animals useful 
to man have been begotten. This is called artificial selection. 
Now, what gardeners, dog-fanciers, and cattle-breeders have 
been able to do, Nature has done, and her method is called 
natural selection. But Nature works much more slowly than 
man, and it is because we cannot see the changes which she 
produces coming about in one life-time that so many persons, 
not scientists, do not believe that any changes take place. What 
these doubters need above all things is to close, at least for a 
brief period, their books of grammar and rhetoric, to cut loose 
from old methods and old ideas, and to cultivate their observ- 
ing powers by studying the Creator's work under the blue sky. 

An American naturalist, Professor J. A. Allen, has recently 
discovered among the birds of the United States an even 
greater amount of variation in color, size, length of bill and 
wing, between individuals of the same species, than anybody had 
imagined.* And it is now admitted that variation takes place 
not only externally but internally : every part of the organism 
varies ; there is variation in the deepest cells, and without this 
natural variability natural selection could not operate. And we 
may add that fossils indicate that in past geological ages varia- 
bility also existed, and that from one species several varieties 
branched off just as they do to-day. In fact the study of the 
life-system as revealed by fossils in the rocks everywhere strength- 
ens the hypothesis of evolution. We are able in not a few 
cases plainly to mark the transition from one group of animals 
to another group. Far back in the Jurassic strata, for instance, 
we light upon the earliest bird, Archaeopteryx, which has not 
yet entirely cut loose from the reptile stem ; and nearly all 
scientists are agreed that birds have developed from reptiles; 
and, moreover, no naturalists have done more to establish in- 
termediate, transition forms than our American investigators 
Hyatt, Marsh, Cope, and Leidy. 

The curious facts, too, of embryology cannot be explained 
except by the theory of evolution. Embryology gives in an 
abridged form the whole history of the organism. Just as the 
primitive amphibians had their origin in fishes, so does embry- 
ology show that all the higher vertebrates have been evolved 
from fishes : it distinctly reveals the tracks of this long devel- 
opment. We may express it by a zoological rule-of-three, in 
the words of the Catholic scientist, St. George Mivart: "As the 
young of living kinds are to living adults, so are animals of 

* Mammals and Winter Birds of Florida, 



? 



1894-] THE HIGHEST PROBLEMS OF SCIENCE. 789 

more ancient periods to those of recent times -and of our own 
day."* Evolution gives the only plausible solution of these 
facts of embryology, and when confronted with them the be- 
lievers in special creations have nothing to say. Nevertheless, 
despite their silence, they may rightly challenge us to give an 
unmistakable proof of our theory, although they cannot give us 
a proof of theirs. Now, in order to convince them that evolu- 
tion is true, we must begin by experiments, and we must not 
stop short of transforming one animal or plant into an entirely 
new plant or animal hitherto unknown. 

To do this we must establish among us a school of original 
research, and let it work on the lines laid down by Professor 
Henry de Varigny in his lectures delivered before the summer- 
school of art and science in Edinburgh, two years ago.f In 
these lectures he earnestly encourages believers in evolution to 
put it to the test of experiment : and why should we not begin 
to make experiments here in America ? The field to be inves- 
tigated is a wide one. What is the cause of variability ? What 
is the modifying influence of environment ? Here we quote 
from Darwin's Origin of Species, p. 107 : " When a variation is 
of the slightest use to any being, we cannot tell how much to 
attribute to the accumulative action of natural selection, and 
how much to the definite action of the conditions of life. Thus, 
it is well known to furriers that animals of the same species 
have thicker and better fur the further north they live ; but 
who can tell how much of this difference may be due to the 
warmest-clad individuals having been favored and preserved 
during many generations, and how much to the action of the 
severe climate ? For it would appear that climate has some 
direct action on the hair of our domestic quadrupeds." Heredi- 

hybridism, and sexuality also demand a thorough study, and 
many things in nature which are now mysterious will be made 
clear when more light is thrown on these subjects. Changes 
which merely strike the eye may be more significant than we 
imagine. We know, for instance, that change of environment 
and change of food may change the color of an animal ; but 
variation of color is something more than a mere outward 
change : there are underlying it modifications of a chemical 
order, and these accompanying, underlying changes offer a most 
tempting field for investigation. We do not know why food 
and environment should influence animal coloration (Wal- 

* Evolution and Christianity, Cosmopolitan magazine, June, 1892. 

t Since published in Nature Series under the title Experimental Evolution. 



790 How TO SOLVE ONE OF [Mar., 

lace holds that color changes have their root in protective 
value), yet it is certainly a step in advance to have as- 
certained the chemical phenomena which go along with these 
outward changes. It is interesting, too, to find a relation be- 
tween color and constitutional strength. De Varigny tells us 
that certain poisonous plants produce no effect on dark-colored 
animals ; while to light-colored animals the same plants are 
deadly. Climate also affects the size of animals and plants. 
But a change in dimensions is accompanied by other changes. 
When dimensions vary, sexual fertility not seldom varies with 
them. External influences have also much to do in determin- 
ing sex. When tadpoles, for instance, are left to themselves 
the females slightly outnumber the males ; but when they are 
fed on beef, the proportion rises from 54 to 78 per cent.; and 
when given frog-flesh to eat, the proportion of females increases 
to 92 per cent. Bees, too, are similarly influenced : among 
them the birth of queens, workers, and drones is largely a 
question of food. Now, the external factors which determine 
sex in these and in many other cases require careful study. 
It may be asked, why fish are small in small streams ? Here 
the experiments of De Varigny rather go to show that dimin- 
ished size is owing to diminished space to move about in : im- 
pediments to movement would seem to have a tendency to 
dwarf the organism. 

May not this also be the reason why animals living on 
islands are smaller as a rule than the same species living on 
continents ? The elephants whose fossil remains have been dis- 
covered in Malta were exceedingly small. But here again 
more exact experiments are needed. It is also interesting to 
find that in regions where thorny, spiny plants abound the 
snakes in such places evince a similar tendency, as Professor 
Cope tells us of the horned rattlesnake of New Mexico and 
Arizona. What is the mysterious bond existing here between 
the plants and the rattlesnakes? It is also interesting to observe 
how subject the perfume of flowers is to variation. In rich 
soil the increased strength of the plant is accompanied by in- 
creased perfume ; while in poor, sandy soil a contrary effect is 
produced. The hairy covering of a plant grown on a mountain 
disappears when it is transplanted to a valley ; but the hairs 
reappear when it is brought back to its mountain home. 

Wallace tells us that the skeletons of animals vary, espe- 
cially the skeletons of whales ; and St. George Mivart finds that 
the number of ribs in the ape and in man is subject to varia- 



1894-] THE HIGHEST PROBLEMS OF SCIENCE. 791 

tion. De Varigny says that in certain cases individual evolu- 
tion may be modified. Thus we can prolong the gill-bearing 
period of some amphibians by artificial means. During more 
than twenty-four months he kept toads in the tadpole state by 
giving them little food. Other naturalists assert that by pro- 
longing the gill-bearing period of newts and salamanders the 
evolution of other parts of their bodies is not arrested, and 
that these amphibians may become sexually mature while they 
are still tadpoles. But with toads and frogs this cannot be 
done. Here again further experiments are called for; and De 
Varigny says in Experimental Evolution, page 113 : " If it could 
be shown that sexual maturity may occur although the tadpole 
state is lengthened and that sexual reproduction may take 
place, although this is on obvious a priori grounds very im- 
probable, we might perhaps try to obtain a new species which 
would exhibit very marked physiological features." 

We believe that experiments made on the embryo of certain 
animals may result in a modification of these animals without 
injury to life. We know that when the cocoons of Attacus 
Pernyi are suspended vertically the butterflies come forth in a 
normal state ; while if the cocoons are placed horizontally the 
butterflies are abnormal. 

We know by experiment that the stomach of a carnivorous 
bird (owl, sea-gull, raven) can be hardened so as to resemble the 
stomach of a grain-eater, if it is given grain to eat for a suffi- 
ciently long time. And the converse is true : a pigeon fed on 
meat for a long enough period has its stomach softened till it 
becomes like the stomach of a carnivorous bird. What may be 
the limits of the variations induced by the direct influence of a 
certain kind of food we do not know: it is possible that other 
parts of the organism may vary at the same time. It would 
also be interesting to learn whether change of food in other 
animals might not bring about more fundamental changes than 
have been produced in the stomachs of the pigeon and gull ; 
for we know that different kinds of animals react in different 
ways under identical influences. Our ignorance on this point is 
owing to the fact that no systematic experiments have been 
made. 

Another subject full of interest is the mode in which the 
organ of respiration may be made to change its function : how 
to transform a water-breather into an air-breather. 

Nearly all aquatic animals are devoid of special organs for 
breathing air when they come out of the water, and in their 



792 Ho w TO SOLVE ONE OF [Mar., 

native element they breathe by absorbing the air contained in 
solution in the water either through their skin, or through some 
inner organ (gills or intestinal canal) which lets the water pass 
freely and constantly in and out. But while it has already 
been proved that the water-breathing organs of invertebrates 
may be made to breathe in the air, we do not yet know whether 
such a change of function as comes with the change of a gill- 
cavity into a lung is ever accompanied by a definite change 
in the structure of the breathing organ.* And here is a good 
field for experiment. 

It would also be interesting to investigate the causes which 
bring about the destruction of sight. Many moles, we know, 
have their eyes covered by skin and outwardly invisible ; never- 
theless they have true eyes, but so inefficient that when in 
cases where the eyes are not entirely concealed and when they 
have an opportunity to use them, they are all but useless. 
This comes from the fact that the optic nerves are degenerated. 
Sometimes, however, a mole may have the optic nerve of one 
eye in good condition, so that this eye is able to transmit to 
the animal's consciousness the images formed in this one eye. 
In the embryo of the mole both eyes are always, without 
exception, connected with the brain by perfect optic nerves ; 
and this is considered a proof that the mole is descended from 
ancestors which lived above ground and whose eyes conse- 
quently were of use to them. What unfavorable conditions 
finally led the mole to take up a subterranean existence we do 
not know ; just as we are ignorant of the causes which changed 
the whale and the porpoise from land mammals into water 
mammals. 

Of course if species were fixed and unchangeable in structure 
and functions, then experiments tending to a modification in 
type and to the transformation of one animal or plant into an 
entirely new plant or animal hitherto unknown, would be futile. 
But it is proved that no organism is so fixed in type that it 
may not under certain conditions more or less depart from it. 
We know that all organisms admit of some variability (and 
variability increases with variation), and we believe it is because 
this God-given tendency to variation exists that natural selec- 
tion and environment (in what proportions we do not know) 
have been able to exert a potent influence on the life-system 
and to bring about in the course of ages the change of one 

* See Professor Semper's Animal Life as affected by the Natural Conditions of Exist- 
ence, chap. vi. 



1894-] THE HIGHEST PROBLEMS OF SCIENCE. 793 

species into another. The fossils in the rocks point to evolu- 
tion, and embryology adds its testimony to paleontology. They 
tell us that from the few germs of life first planted on our 
earth by the Creator have sprung the numberless plants and 
animals which we see around us to-day. But, as we have said, 
in order to convince unbelievers of this fact, we must have re- 
course to experiment. We must try to do artificially what na- 
ture in her slow way has done by natural means. 

And here we quote again from De Varigny's Experimental 
Evolution, p. 240 : 

". . . Scientific investigation being the only aim, the only 
point in view, it seems advisable to undertake the study of the 
influence of selection be it on animal or on plant without any 
particular forethought at all. I mean by this that such investi- 
gations should be begun without any view of obtaining a varia- 
tion and variety in any particular direction. For instance, sup- 
pose Lysimachia nummularia ... is made the subject of 
investigation in selection. Well, it would not do to decide be- 
forehand to seek for a new variety having such or such a pecu- 
liarity in the roots, or stems, or leaves : one should merely 
cultivate the plants, and if among them some offered any inter- 
esting or curious variation in any part whatever, one ought to 
begin the process of selection, and try to consolidate in the 
progeny this particular variation. This method offers the ad- 
vantage of opening a wider field to investigation. ... In 
fact we must try to craze the plant, to make it vary as much 
as possible in all possible directions. . . . One must not 
forget that in experiments of this kind, especially with wild or 
uncultivated plants, a long time is sometimes required before 
any important variations occur; the species seems for a long 
period to resist all inducements to variation, and then, all of a 
sudden, it begins to vary considerably and in many different 
directions." 

Not in one generation, nor perhaps in ten generations, 
may the work we have here suggested to the hoped-for 
school of experimental evolution bring about any marked re- 
sults. But the idea of such a school is not original with us, it 
is not Pickwickian : Professor Romanes hopes to have one es- 
tablished in connection with the University of Oxford ; and why 
not, as we have said, begin the experimental study of this high 
problem in science here in America? We have the talent, we 
have abundant means, and all that is needed is enthusiasm. 
Let us begin. 

VOL. LVIII. 53 




794 THE SPIRIT OF THE EARLY MISSIONARY. [Mar., 

THE SPIRIT OF THE EARLY MISSIONARY. 

BY REV. S. B. HEDGES. 

'OMPARED with the field offered for research in re- 
gard to the wondrous apostolic labors of the 
early missionaries in the United States, the 
sum total of investigation is as nothing. Nor 
is saying this a reflection on the invaluable and 
exhaustive labors of John Gilmary Shea. Standing in Bishop's 
Hall at Notre Dame University, in November, 1890, conversing 
with Dr. Shea on the many and valuable historical relics there- 
in contained, and of the vast field of historical study pertaining 
exclusively to Catholic subjects open to the American scholar, 
the distinguished historian said: "This is but a beginning for 
us as Catholics in the way of collecting relics. The real inves- 
tigation as to facts by Catholic scholars is hardly begun." 

These words from the lips of John Gilmary Shea struck me 
as more than significant in view of his own extensive works 
appertaining to these subjects ; nor does it seem less significant 
how slight an impression Dr. Shea's writings seem to have 
produced. Nor less significant is the fact that the distin- 
guished historian's most exhaustive work in this field, the re- 
sult of ten years of labor, was undertaken at the suggestion 
of the eminent non-Catholic scholar, President Sparks. Doubt- 
less the awaking of a zealous missionary spirit so evidently 
present among all classes of the clergy, the more ample oppor- 
tunity for study and investigation offered by our seats of learn- 
ing as they pass from the formative stage to a securer and 
more permanent establishment, will in the near future be pro- 
ductive of fruit-bearing studies. Of the two, the historian and 
the missionary, the latter is not the least interested. The 
unflagging zeal, the absolute disinterestedness, the burning love 
for souls, the heroic labors, the hardships, the lonely wandering 
from tribe to tribe through the forest primeval, the sickness and 
lonely death under the trees on the banks of some unknown 
stream, or worse, an awful burning at the stake or death from 
the cruel blow of a tomahawk, surely all this may inflame the 
missionary's heart with divine love and a zeal for souls. Nor 
should what would seem the utter failure of the noble efforts 



1894-] THE SPIRIT OF THE EARLY MISSIONARY. 795 

of these heroic men so much as offer discouragement. They 
labored amidst the wilds of the forest for the souls of the 
Indian. The Indian is gone, and we know him only by the 
name of his tribe or his chief preserved to us in the name of 
river, hill, or plain, or town. So, too, the missionary. There 
may be a city in the West called Marquette, or a hamlet in 
the glades of Florida' named Velascola. This were lamentable 
were it all. Shea, commenting on the results of the prodigious 
labors of the early missionary, says : " One fact will at all events 
appear, that the tribes evangelized by the French and Spanish 
subsist to this day, except when 'brought in contact with the 
colonists of England and their allies or descendants." 

The existence to-day of a miserable remnant of half-civilized 
people were a pitiable showing as the result of years of labor 
and life and treasure were it all. Why these efforts came to 
naught in the civilization and permanent establishment of the 
Indian tribes is the historian's field of research. What their la- 
bors were, what their sacrifices, what their zeal, what their hope 
and consolation ; who were the men, and whence came they, 
and whither did they go, and how did they work, and what 
did they glean from those accessible fields for the granaries 
of God these and the like are the questions that interest the 
missionary of to-day, who labors among the fair cities that now 
stand where the forest stood when Marquette and Roger came 
to these shores to engage in the self-same work. And so we 
come to the men and their labors. Let us take one at random, 
ind not the most distinguished Father Louis Cancer de Bar- 

istro. Apostolic zeal for the missionary life led him to Mexi- 
:o in 1514. There he labored for the conversion of souls for 
thirty years. What a marvellous record does not this short 
>iographical notice given by Shea in a book note afford : 
" Father Louis Cancer de Barbastro was a native of Saragossa, 
ind had at an early age entered the Dominican order. He 

ime to America in 1514 as superior of a band of missionaries. 
His labors were at first almost unsuccessful ; his companions 
lied around him of want, disease, and violence, and at the 
expiration of nearly thirty years he stood alone. He then, 

'ith Fathers Rincon and Las Casas, undertook to evangelize 
the district called Tierra de Guerra Land of War ; but having 
:onverted and gained all the native tribes, the missionaries gave 
it the name of Vera Paz True Peace which it still bears." 
After so long and so arduous, and finally successful, term of 
labor, one would naturally think him inclined to rest and enjoy 



796 THE SPIRIT OF THE EARLY MISSIONARY. [Man, 

the fruits of his labors in the region of Vera Paz. Not so, for 
in 1547 he undertook the Florida missions, going first to 
Europe to obtain a royal commission. 

The noble character of his mind is set forth by the fact 
that he had it stipulated in his commission that every native of 
Florida held in bondage in any part of the Spanish dominions 
of America should be set free. Worthy precursor he of those 
noble men and women who in a' later day should do and say 
and suffer so much to liberate another race enslaved amid these 
same everglades. The Florida mission brings him to the United 
States and to our especial notice. He was destined to gain 
his crown of eternal life here. Warned of his danger as he 
was about landing, and of the martyrdom of his companions 
with all its attending horrors, he makes this noble speech : 

"All this is terrible indeed and very affecting to us all, but 
not surprising; such things cannot but happen in enterprises 
for the extension of the faith. I expected nothing less. How 
often I have meditated upon the execution of this enterprise, 
and felt we could not succeed in it without losing much blood. 
So the apostles died, and at this price alone can faith and reli- 
gion be introduced." True missionary of Christ ; true apostle 
of faith ; his blood the seal of religion. 

Considering the vast strides of religion in the United States, 
her wondrous growth from year to year, the beauty of her tem- 
ples, the extent of her schools, her institutes of charity of so 
many kinds and so extended, may we not ascribe this growth 
to that precious watering given the land in the sacred blood of 
Louis Cancer de Barbastro and his many confreres? Landing 
from his vessel on Jane- 24, the feast day of St. John the Bap- 
tist, he met his death on the shore, a martyr to zeal, love, and 
faith. We know, then, who they were. Spanish gentlemen, from 
out the halls of the universities, from the courts and palaces, 
from the scenes of home and friends and a cultured civilization, 
come to the wilds of America to preach Christ and Christ cru- 
cified. We know then, too, how they labored. 'Twas in season 
and out of season. It was in the midst of dangers and perils, 
It was in sickness until death. It was for thirty years without 
success. It was in the midst of great success, so that they called 
the region Vera Paz True Peace. It was to begin again and 
to fail and to be cruelly murdered. But more a thousand times 
it was to wear at last the crown of everlasting life. The mis- 
sionary of to-day, in the region included in what is termed the 
Spanish Mission, will find a docile, intelligent keenly so indeed 



1894-] THE SPIRIT OF THE EARLY MISSIONARY. 797 

and cultured race. We think we are right if we include, not 
only Florida and Texas, Louisiana and Mexico, New Mexico 
and California in the West, but also Tennessee, Mississippi, 
Kansas, Arkansas, and the Carolinas in the Spanish Missions ; 
for who can tell how far they penetrated the wilds ? for of some 
of them no tidings ever came back. The field is indeed a broad 
one, but here are a people who hunger for the word of God ; 
and who is to break for them the bread of life? Take away 
Louisiana, and New Mexico, and California, could there be 
found a region so needful of the knowledge of the Christian re- 
ligion, so ignorant of the truth of the Catholic faith, as is here 
presented? If one would seek a virgin soil for missionary la- 
bor, let him go to the Tennessee mountains, among the hardy 
mountaineers, some of whose sturdy traits of character, much of 
whose woful ignorance, Miss Murfree has so graphically de- 
scribed to us in her stories. But would the game be worth 
the candle ? For answer turn to the lives of these great-hearted 
Spaniards, to De Barbastro of Saragossa. Only, perhaps, the 
missionary of the Tennessee mountains would have less to hope 
for, less to aid him ; not even the novelty of entering an unknown, 
land and meeting an unknown people ; nor would there be a 
hope of anything like martyrdom save in the wretchedness of 
lonely vigils and the certainty of failure. But Christ died for 
these men and women and children, who live on these cloud- 
;wept hills amidst their poverty and ignorance, as much as he 

lid for the savage of the woods. Verily there will spring from 
:he seed of the blood of De Barbastro an apostle to these newer 
:hildren of the woods. 

Not many miles from where I write, in the foot-hills of the 

idirondacks, I happened on some "children of the forest," 
mly they were white children of American stock. I was taking 
mid-day meal, seated in the shade of a great forest tree, 

'hen two urchins came into view. They regarded me with sus- 

)icion and aversion, for I had invaded their domains, a trout 
stream near by. By kind words and the offer of some dates and 
figs from out my lunch I induced them to come forward and 
stand and watch the process of my meal. So laconic were they 
that I found it impossible to engage them in conversation. 
Neither trout, nor squirrel, nor blue-jay, nor robin, nor eagle, 
nor dog, nor horse seemed to interest them, and their replies 
were "no" and "yes." At last it was this: "Do you go to 
school?" "No." "Why not?" "Too far away." "Can you 
read?" "No." " Have you any school-books ?" "No." "Do 



798 THE SPIRIT OF THE EARLY MISSIONARY. [Mar., 

you go to church?" "No." "To what religion does your fa- 
ther belong?" "Don't know." "Did you ever see a minister ?" 
"No." "Are you baptized?" No answer. " Who made you?" 
" Don't know " with a queer smile. " Did God make you ? " 
"I guess he did." "Who is God?" "Don't know never seed 
him." Alas poor lads ! they were twelve and nine years of age, 
two of a brood of eight. Some day hunger will drive you from 
these hills, either to win your way upward, or to force you 
into the great stream of hundreds who toil and surfer and 
die, not knowing God or the hope of happiness when the 
struggle is done. And I saw you not many miles from that 
placid lake which Jogues discovered on Corpus Christi day, and 
named it for the feast, as he threaded his way along the 
forest trail to seek the heathen Indian that he might tell him 
of Christ. Perhaps he passed under the very shadow of the 
mountain whereon you dwell. Perhaps he raised that holy hand, 
which for faith's sake was so cruelly mutilated, and blessed those 
hills; and so perhaps some day another apostle may follow in 
his footsteps and thread the forest wilds anew, seeking here a 
house and there a house and the isolated inmates, to tell them, 
as that holy missionary told the Indian in bygone days, the 
sweet story of the life and death of Christ to save all poor sinners. 
Engaged in missionary work in November, 1892, at the Ca- 
thedral of Vincennes, Indiana, certain things came to our no- 
tice that vividly brought to mind the heroic labors of the great 
missionaries of early times in this country. First was the ven- 
erable Dean Gueguen, the present rector of the Cathedral of 
Vincennes. His name, his blood, his ancestry, his missionary 
work in his diocese, his present rectorship at old Fort Vincen- 
nes, link him to that earlier day, and have brought him an in- 
heritance of glorious memories and deeds of which he is not 
unworthy. His flock, too one-half, we should judge, of French 
descent, Creole mostly in origin, their progenitors coming up 
the river from New Orleans, or being descended from the early 
French traders; some of them being of mixed blood, the In- 
dian strain being plainly noticed in their features point to the 
presence of the Indian missionary, who was ever in the vanguard 
of the march of civilization. Then the tombs of the venerable 
and distinguished Brute, of the mild and gentle and hard-work- 
ing St. Palais, of other prelates too which lie in the chapel 
crypt beneath the high altar ; the written records of the old 
station, going back to the time when Vincennes was a French 
military post nigh two hundred years ago all these spoke, as 



1894-] THE SPIRIT OF THE EARLY MISSIONARY. 799 

written or printed pages cannot speak, of the apostolic deeds 
of those early times, of the spirit that actuated those heroic 
soldiers of Christ : of Marquette, of Rasle and Father Gravier, 
of Ren Goupil and his sainted biographer, Isaac Jogues, of 
but who may name them all, or find words to tell of their glo- 
rious doings, that Christ and his church might be known ? It 
is not so much of these men that I am thinking, nor of the re- 
gion of their labors, as of the missionary spirit they so gloriously 
set forth. And as I think there comes the conviction that of 
this spirit will be born a new apostolate in the ancient fields 
of their work an apostolate to the non-Catholic people of Illi- 
nois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. 

In the cathedral yard at Vincennes there stands an old, long, 
one-story brick building, much dilapidated and .long unused. It 
was once the diocesan seminary. In that humble building some 
of the older priests who now minister in the diocese were edu- 
cated. The young seminarist of to-day would laugh to think 
it a building fit to use as a place of studies. We have moved 
into grander halls 'tis true, but the spirit of the missionary life 
was there; that burning zeal for souls which led the cultured 
physician, Goupil, even as a layman, to leave France and go as 
a donne a companion catechist to the missionary to the wilds 
of America. Nor do I believe that our young men, when the 
time is ripe and the field has been opened up for such labors, 
will be found wanting in spirit and zeal and readiness to work 
in this portion of the Lord's vineyard ; else were they recreant 
to the true ministry of the priesthood and unworthy of the in- 
heritance left us by those stalwarts of old the missionaries of 
the earlier day. 

Engaged last season in the diocese of Peoria the very writ- 
ing of the name Peoria shadows forth a picture of the untiring 
labors of Father Gravier in missionary work, our labors took 
us to the banks of the Illinois at Spring Valley. Near by are 
the cities of La Salle and Ottawa, and between them the historic 
spot Starved Rock, situated at the entrance of a series of caftons 
vast and wonderful all the more so as one finds them hidden 
here in the midst of a prairie country. They are not unlike some 
of those vaster canons that one meets with along the La Platte 
River in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. Here, in front of 
Starved Rock, in the valley that skirts the river, many thousand 
Catholic braves on one occasion heard Mass men to whom the 
faith came at the preaching of the word of God by the mis- 
sionaries in those heroic days. 



8oo THE SPIRIT OF THE EARLY MISSIONARY. [Mar., 

La Salle County, in Illinois, wherein is situated this historic 
spot, is markedly Catholic, containing many parishes and a large, 
flourishing Catholic population. But of this earlier conquest 
for the kingdom of God there lingers hardly so much as a 
tradition ; the name a tribe is designated by, the name of the 
commonwealth, Illinois, and a clan by the name of the city of 
Ottawa, and the city of La Salle holds the name of one of the 
great heroes, and Starved Rock recalls the inhuman horrors of 
a savage warfare, and all this is vox et prceterea nihil. 

There is left not a cross of stone nor a chapel to mark 
and record the heroic deeds there done. The busy farmer turns 
his furrow and scatters his grain ; in the bustling manufacturing 
cities of La Salle, Peru, and Ottawa may be heard the hum of 
the wheels of industry ; but of Gabriel de la Ribourde, Zeno- 
bius Membre, of Claude Allouez and James Gravier, priests of 
God's church, true soldiers of Jesus Christ, tireless and ever 
active missionaries, scarce a thought. But who will say they 
labored in vain? Out of the many thousand braves who 
heard Holy Mass that bright summer day there in the valley 
of the Illinois, out of the countless other thousands to whom 
they came with the word of life, there are many, many blessed 
souls who this day bear them witness before the throne of God, 
a monument more priceless far than one builded by the hands 
of man. 

While at Spring Valley, before the work of hearing confes- 
sions had begun, myself and companion walked out to St. Bede's 
College, the new and splendid foundation of the Benedictines in 
the West. As we left the college grounds we saw the students 
returning from the campus, splendid specimens of the youth of 
the great agricultural States, manly fellows, sons of farmers, with 
splendid physiques. Perhaps from these will spring that new 
race of missionaries. In their studies they will come to read 
the histories of the men who threaded their way along the 
river, across the grassy prairies, enduring hunger and thirst, 
yielding even life itself, in the region where now stands their 
noble Alma Mater ; and thus influenced by the stirring tale of 
heroic deeds for Christ, a desire, born of love of God, will 
come to them to go forth and preach the self-same word of 
God to their non-Catholic neighbors. They will see before them 
this new apostolate, as did those noble men of that earlier day 
as they looked across the sea to this new land, and, like them, 
burn to make Christ and his kingdom known to all men. Espe- 
cially am I hopeful that out of the West, where there is a freer 



1894-] THE SPIRIT OF THE EARLY MISSIONARY. 80 1 

and broader life, where men are less hindered by custom 
and tradition, where they dare greater and nobler things, 
where failure once is but an incentive to greater effort, will 
come the first organized band of missions of the word of 
God to all non-Catholics. And I deem it true that this 
shall especially be the apostolate of the secular priesthood. 
The absorbing work of money-getting, building churches, schools, 
asylums, hospitals is past, and year by year growing less, so 
that the secular priest begins at last to have leisure for other 
works, to heed those words of our Lord, " for other sheep I 
have." The regular clergy are but their auxiliaries in this as 
in other great works of the priesthood. Dominicans, Jesuits, 
Redemptorists, Benedictines, Paulists will hasten at their call 
to render what aid is in their power. Significant is the fact 
that among the first missions to the land not a few were of the 
secular clergy. As the settlement of the country nears its com- 
pletion, as the number of clergy increases, more and more will 
opportunity be afforded for work in this apostolate. 

Were there need of further example of zeal and work in the 
mission life, we might turn to Maine and .follow the life of the 
saintly Rasle, or to the English missions in Maryland, where 
Father Andrew White and Father Roger so wonderfully illus- 
trated the missionary apostolate, or to that inexhaustible store- 
house of faith, martyrdom, love, zeal, suffering, and death, and 
where, amidst all these, astounding success crowned the labors of 
the missionary California. 

Some time ago one of our popular magazines published an 
article from the pen of a non-Catholic lady on one of the more 

Eustrious missions of California, and illustrated it with draw- 
gs of some of the old mission stations in their present condi- 
Dn. It is worthy of note how very extensively that article was 
:ad by Catholic readers everywhere. And yet it was but a 
issing glimpse of the picture, and the subject but one of 
many whose names are high in the wonderful annals of that 
great missionary work. Somewhere about the year 1679 at In- 
golstadt, in Germany, a distinguished professor of mathematics, 
a man accounted the best astronomer of his day in Germany, 
was ill unto death. He made a vow that should he recover he 
would devote his life to missionary labor. On the advent of 
his return to health he fulfilled his vow by coming to America, 
where he devoted his life to the Pimos Indians in California, 
learning several languages, writing catechisms in these new 
tongues, composing vocabularies and grammatical treatises for 



802 THE SPIRIT OF THE EARLY MISSIONARY. [Mar., 

the use of his companions and successors ; and all this during 
the fatigue and weary labor of active missionary work in preach- 
ing the word of God and instructing the ignorant. From the 
halls of the university of Ingolstadt, from the composition 
of logarithmic tables, and star-chart searching in the dome 
of his observatory, to the wilds of California, to the midst of 
a savage people, was surely a great stride. But Father Euse- 
bius Kiihn had been touched by that divine fire which set 
his heart all aglow with love for souls, infusing into him a 
zeal which did not let him rest till he yielded his spirit to 
God in the midst of glorious success in 1710. And to-day 
from lower California to Puget Sound there whitens a field 
ready for the sickle of the reaper, a harvest ripe for God 
a new people again in a new land, waiting the advent of 
those who will bear them the glad tidings who will come as 
came Junipero Serra and Eusebius Kiihn honest men with an 
honest and true word to tell of Christ and his kingdom. 

Everywhere, in every diocese in the land, there are noble 
priests, especially among the younger native clergy, whose edu- 
cation, whose sympathy for their non-Catholic neighbor, which 
is born of friendship and daily intercourse, whose piety and 
zeal eminently fit them for this work. That the work in the 
way of a formal, organized mission has begun is now a fact. 
Let them watch it. Look to the methods used.. Let them aid 
it, too, by their earnest prayer and warm word of encourage- 
ment. Better still, let them offer themselves to their bishop as 
missionaries in his diocese to those who are as yet not of the 
fold of Christ. 





1 894.] FLOWERS THAT SPRING IN DESERT PLACES. 803 

FLOWERS THAT SPRING IN DESERT PLACES. 
BY L. W. REILLY. 

'WO men were travelling together in a parlor car 
on its way from Brooklyn to Chicago. They 
had the air of refinement ; they were well 
dressed one in a suit of dark blue flannel, the 
other in a fine brown serge ; the man in blue 
wore spectacles, the man in brown had beautiful bright eyes 
that sparkled as he spoke. They talked on many themes de 
omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis from politics to progress and 
poverty, and from choirs to cholera and the last comet. A stu- 
dious-looking person in the seat behind them found as much 
diversion in their conversation which he could not help over- 
hearing, as they had to pitch their voices above the roar and 
rattle of the train as he did in the magazine that he was hold- 
ing out before him. 

Finally the man in brown asked : " Do you think that any- 
body ever received a grace that was at first intended for an- 
other ? " 

A moment's silence, then came the brief reply : " Esau and 
Jacob, for instance." 

" Oh ! that is ancient history ; besides it was exceptional." 
"All such occurrences must be exceptional. But, since you 
protest against remote instances, let me tell you a story, and 
you shall decide whether or not it be a case in point." 

In a tenement-house in Greenwich Street, New York City, 
not very far from the Battery, a man-child was born about forty 
years ago ; his parents were immigrants, exiles of Erin, poor, 
hard-working, full of faith. They had had nine children before 
him, seven of whom had died in infancy, aged from one week to 
one year. One day, about five years before his birth, the father 
was walking along Barclay Street, and halted before a second- 
hand book-stall to examine some volumes that had caught his 
eye. He bought two of them a Life of St. Alphonsus and The 
Youth's Director, that contained a portrait of St. Aloysius Gon- 
zaga with a sketch of his career. Taking them home to his 
wife he said : " Mother, if we should have any more boys, I'll 
name the first of them Alphonsus and the second Aloysius." 

When the next baby came it was duly named after the 



804 FLOWERS THAT SPRING IN DESERT PLACES. [Mar., 

great Redemptorist. Two years later another son was born. He 
was called Michael, after his father, and died in a couple of 
months. Then a daughter entered the humble home and was 
christened Elizabeth. Next appeared the man-child I am telling 
you about. He was the Benjamin of the flock. 

The old women among the neighbors clustered around the 
new-born infant, saying : 

" What a lovely child ! " 

" He looks as if he had a halo around his head ! " 

"Glory be to God and his holy Mother, but you've got a 
priest for a son." 

" He'll be a bishop, sure." 

The mother pondered these predictions in her heart and 
built a hope upon them. She would be proud to be the bear- 
er of a priest. What would she not give to see the fruit of her 
womb at the altar ! From that moment, in her thoughts, she 
consecrated him to God and resolved to make clear his way to 
holy orders. 

"What's his name to be?" queried one old gossip. 

" Aloysius." 

" What an outlandish name ! " cried one rude crone ; " just 
like his brother's. None of his kith or kin was ever called by 
such a name ez that." 

But the mother made no answer, for she wanted the boy to 
live and she remembered her husband's broken promise and 
the fate of Michael. 

Ten days later, in old St. Peter's Church, Aloysius received 
his baptismal innocence and his patron saint. 

The father of the family was kept poor by lack of the 
money-making faculty, by ill-health, and by a big heart that 
made him give to the church, to the poor, and to needy 
acquaintances more than a fair share of his income. 

"We're givin' it to God, mother," he used to say to his 
wife, " and sure, alanna, our children will get it back with in- 
terest, if we don't." 

So when he was carried off unexpectedly with pneumonia 
he left his dear ones unprovided for, with the exception of a 
little home in Brooklyn. Aloysius was then aged nine. Neces- 
sarily the widow had to go out to work the week after the 
funeral to earn bread for her destitute children. She tried vari- 
ous occupations. No honest labor was degrading to her. No- 
thing was too hard or too low for her, because it was sancti- 
fied as a means of support for her orphans. The friends that 



1 894.] FLOWERS THAT SPRING IN DESERT PLACES. 805 

had known her in the days of her prosperity fell away and 
forgot her. She was too high-spirited to beg from them while 
she had strength to stand and labor. Finally she opened a 
small store in the big city, to the income of which she added 
the rent of the Brooklyn house and some money that she 
earned betimes. Alphonsus, too, was earning a few dollars a 
week as errand-boy in a publishing house. The other children 
were kept at school. 

In this way the fatherless family struggled along for several 
years. Then, as the mother's health began to break down, 
Elizabeth was taken from school to help with the housework. 
But Aloysius, who had passed from the parochial school to the 
Brothers' Academy and then to college, was kept at his books. 
" He is to be a priest," replied his mother, when times were 
extra hard with them and Alphonsus urged her to put him at 
a trade. " No, no," she would say; "I would work my fingers 
to the bone first, and live on bread and water." 

At last, when Aloysius was sixteen years of age and in the 
sophomore class at school, his mother died. 

The little home was kept together until the next vacation. 
Then the doctor ordered Alphonsus to the West Indies, as his 
lungs had become affected in the confinement of the book-store, 
of which he was now next to head salesman, and in the trying 
air of New York. 

Elizabeth went to live with friends down-town and Aloysius 
had his first experience of life in a boarding-house. He soon 
found employment, and spent a year as stock-clerk in a whole- 
sale Yankee notion store. But the work did not agree with 
him nor did he suit the work ; so, in the following September, 
he made an arrangement with the college whereby he went 
there to live, teaching a class by day and continuing his own 
studies at night. 

At the close of the next school year he made application 
to be received into a religious order, was admitted, and went 
to the novitiate. 

" Mother's prayers will be heard," he thought, as he was led 
by the novice-master to his cell. 

He was a novice for a year, a month, a week, and a day. 
Having been told by three physicians that a deafness that had 
been growing upon him since his thirteenth year was incurable, 
and likely to become rather worse than better, he placed him- 
self in the hands of his superiors in the order and asked them 
what he should do. They answered that if he had had his 
hearing they would have bidden him stay where he was, but 



806 FLOWERS THAT SPRING IN DESERT PLACES. [Mar., 

that in the uncertainty in which he would be placed in case 
his deafness should become complete, and his course to the 
priesthood be barred, they were reluctant to take the responsi- 
bility of rendering a decision. He then resolved to go forth 
and await the development of his infirmity on the outside. 

He had hardly gotten well settled in a newspaper office in a 
neighboring city when Alphonsus returned to the metropolis and 
died of hasty consumption, in the twenty-seventh year of his age. 

All this time Elizabeth had been with the friends to whom 
she had gone upon her mother's death. She showed no special 
aptitude or inclination for any calling in life. She was light- 
hearted, fond of amusements, eager for the dance, but pious 
and full of good sense. She had two offers of marriage, one of 
them from an excellent parti, who pressed his suit with ardor 
for a year or two, and to whom she more than once was on 
the point of saying Yes, when something or another always in- 
tervened. Strange to say, too, whenever she attempte'd to do 
anything for herself in the way of seeking employment she fell 
sick with fevers and strange symptoms of an ailment for which 
medical men could not account, and which they could not cure. 

The burden of her support, that had hitherto been borne by 
Alphonsus, now fell upon Aloysius for the Brooklyn property 
had been let run down and the tenants paid when and what 
they pleased and he considered that his exit from the novi- 
tiate in time to care for her was more or less providential. 

Five years passed by. Aloysius' deafness remained about 
the same as when the aurists whom he had consulted had given 
up his case, and Elizabeth's queer malady still followed her 
into every situation that she sought. One day her confessor 
said to her, without forethought on his part and with bewilder- 
ment on hers : 

" Did you ever think of entering the convent ? " 

"No, indeed, father." 

" Something seems to tell me that you have a vocation. 
Would you be willing to find out ?" 

"Yes, certainly." 

" It can't harm you to make a retreat to ascertain the mind 
of God in your regard. Therefore go, in His name, to the 
Ladies of the Sacred Heart next Monday morning. I'll speak 
to them meanwhile and arrange for your stay with them as a 
guest for a week. Go through the spiritual exercises, decide 
what to do with your life, and let me know the result." 

Before Monday came Elizabeth had read Lady Gertrude 
Douglas's Linked Lives, which was then fresh from the press 



1894-] FLOWERS THAT SPRING IN DESERT PLACES. 807 

and which had been sent to her, unread, by her brother, who 
knew not that it was to have an influence on her life. In it 
there is mention of the perpetual adoration of the Blessed 
Sacrament. 

At the end of her retreat Elizabeth returned to her confessor 
and said : 

" I'm going to be a nun, father, in some convent of strict 
observance, where the perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sac- 
rament is kept." 

" Well, may God be praised, what a coincidence is this ! 
When the bell rang for me to come to the parlor to see you, 
I had in my hand a letter received this morning saying that 
several Sisters of St. Dominic are on their way from France 
to the Diocese of Newark to found a monastery in which the 
Lord of Hosts shall be worshipped continually night and day, 
and in which the life will be about as severe as it is among the 
Carmelites. Possibly there is your appointed place." 

There was her place. She is there now, happy in her high 
and hard and holy calling. 

Aloysius is married, the father of four children, a writer for 
newspapers. ...... 

The man in blue paused for a full half minute, looked out 
of the window the while at the flying scenery, and said in con- 
clusion : 

" No one could convince me that the prayers, the tears, the 
sufferings, the sacrifices, and the labors of that mother have 
gone without their reward, and no one could persuade me that 
that reward did not consist, directly, if only in part, in the call 
to the counsels, not indeed of the son for whom they were 
offered, but of the daughter who has valiantly responded to 
her sublime vocation. The mother obtained the grace from 
God. Of that I have no doubt. By her it was proposed for 
her boy ; by Heaven it was disposed to her girl." 

" Do you think that the boy first received and then lost the 
grace?" questioned the man in brown. 

" God only knows the secrets of hearts. But the deafness 
coming upon the boy without fault of his, and acting as a bar 
to his path towards the altar, would appear to answer that 
question in the negative." 

" That's so," said the man in brown. 

And the studious-looking person in the next seat buried his 
face in his magazine as he muttered to himself: "Who in the 
world could have told that man my life's story, and what would 
he say if he only knew that I am Aloysius ! " 




8o8 PASCHALE GAUDIUM. [Mar., 

PASCHALE GAUDIUM. 
BY WILLIAM L. GILDEA, D.D. 

HE Ritual of the church, like some magnificent 
instrument of music in the hands of a skilful 
player, can generally represent and body forth 
every mood of every human soul. But, read 
the Ritual proper to Easter week upwards, 
downwards, backwards, forwards, and you will find no note or 
tone there but the tone and note of joy. " This is the day 
which the Lord hath made," over and over again : alleluias ; till 
the head is well-nigh reeling. The church would seem to be play- 
ing the part of the unfortunate widow of the parable ; insisting 
on joy, till, if joy cannot come to us otherwise, in spite of our- 
selves we be joyful. 

My intention is to justify this joy exceeding of the church. 
I find the justification in the various names by which the church 
designates the Easter day and season. " A name or word," 
says St. Thomas, "is a thought of the mind, outwardly ex- 
pressed." The true word is the inward word, the word spoken 
within the mind. The word which sounds in the ear is a word 
only in a secondary sense; deserves to be called word only in 
so far as it suitably portrays the mental word. Words and 
names used by men are often meaningless, mere beatings of 
the air. Not so words and names used by the church. Pon- 
der them, and you will find them abysses of mystery. Press 
them, and the honey of devotion will run out. 

Now, the church uses three names to designate the Easter 
day and season ; one an English name, one a Latin name, and 
one a Hebrew name Easter, Resurrectio, PJiase. Some have 
never thought it worth while to inquire why this season is 
called Easter-tide. 

Just add the letter " N " to the word, make it " Eastern," 
and we have the solution. Some, indeed, derive from " Eastra " 
the Goddess of Dawn ; this season being dedicated to that 
goddess in pagan, Anglo-Saxon days. But these have only pur- 
sued the inquiry half way. Why was the Goddess of Dawn 
called Eastra? Because the dawn of day is in the East Mor- 
genland as the musical, mystical Germans call it morningland. 



1894-] PASCHALE GAUDIUM. 809 

The church took the pagan philosophy and made it the 
buckler of faith against the heathen. She took the pagan, Ro- 
man Pantheon, temple of all the gods, and made it sacred to- 
all the martyrs ; so it stands to this day. She took the pagan 
Sunday and made it the Christian Sunday. She took the pagan 
Easter and made it the feast we celebrate during this season. 

Sunday and Easter day are, if we consider their derivation, 
much the same. In truth, all Sundays are Sundays only be- 
cause they are a weekly, partial recurrence of Easter day. The 
pagan Sunday was, in a manner, an unconscious preparation 
for Easter day. The sun was a foremost god with heathen- 
dom. Balder the beautiful, the White God, the old Scandina- 
vians called him. The sun has worshippers at this hour in Per- 
sia and other lands. "Some of you," says Carlyle, "may 
remember that fancy of Plato's. A man is kept in some dark, 
underground cave from childhood till maturity ; then suddenly 
is carried to the upper airs. For the first time he sees the sun 
shining in its splendor overhead. He must fall down, sajs 
Plato, and adore it." There is, in truth, something royal, king- 
ly about the sun, making it a fit emblem of Jesus, the Sun of 
Justice. Hence the church in these countries would seem to 
have said, " Keep that old, pagan name. It shall remain conse- 
crated, sanctified." And thus the pagan Sunday, dedicated to 
Balder, became the Christian Sunday, sacred to Jesus. The 
sun is a fitting emblem of Jesus. The Fathers often compared 
Jesus to the sun ; as they compared Mary to the moon, the beau- 
tiful moon, the beautiful Mary, shedding her mild, beneficent light 
on the darkness and night of this world not light of her own ; 
no Catholic says this ; but light reflected from the sun, Jesus. 

I am stating a scientific though very elementary fact when 
I say that all the light and heat in the world come directly, 
or originally, from the sun. The warmth and light which are 
hidden in the wood and the coal are bottled sun-light and sun- 
eat. The noble tree, as it rears its stately head and extends 
its spreading branches, is drinking sun-light and sun-heat at 
every pore. Let the tree fall to the ground, be covered with 
crusts of earth, undergo chemical changes till it be converted 
into coal. The light and heat remain there still ; remain like 
imprisoned genii ; but at the "open sesame," the right spoken 
word of command, they will manifest themselves again. The 
warmth which we enjoy, as we sit by our cheerful fires in the 
cold evenings of winter, is sun-warmth set free again after a 
captivity of ages ; the gas-flame over-head is sun-light. 
VOL. LVIII. 54 



8io PASCHALE GAUDIUM. [Mar., 

And Jesus is " the true light which enlighteneth every man 
that cometh into this world." He is the exemplar cause of all 
things. Before creation the world, both in its large outlines 
and in its least details, rested in the mind of God. Each crea- 
ture has its archetype in an idea present to the Divine Wisdom 
an idea which is one of the infinite phases of the divine 
imitability. But the Wisdom of God is Jesus, his Eternal Word. 
And, when the decree of creation went forth, it was the Art of 
God which gave birth to things ; and Jesus is the Art of God 
"per quern fecit et scecula" by whom he made also the ages. 
Creation is the partial utterance " ad extra " of Jesus the 
Word of the Father. God spoke and the world was made. 
Hence, ancient Greek writers call creation "logos prophorikos" 
the Word begotten without, generated in time generated, that 
is, by external manifestation. And thus the world cannot be 
adequately known except in the light of Jesus. " I am the 
Light of the world," he said. 

But if Jesus is the exemplar cause of all things ; if each 
thing is what it is because it participates of him, in an especial 
manner is this true of intelligences, of angels, and of men. 
Things irrational are mere vestigia, footprints of Jesus tokens 
that his spirit has passed by and has blessed. But intelligences 
are in the image of Jesus. These represent not the mere work- 
ing of their cause, but the principles of its operation the mind 
and the will. Our light of intellect is a participation of the 
light and wisdom of God that is, a participation of Jesus. 
Hence it was that, when our light of intellect became obscured 
by sin, God the Word, and not the Father or the Spirit, took 
flesh to restore us. "The art," says St. Thomas, "which made, 
restores the work when it has become impaired." He is 
the true light which enlighteneth every man that cometh 
into this world. He is the light of our natural intelligence ; 
and he is the light of our faith guiding us heavenwards, home- 
wards. And he will be our light in heaven, for the " light of 
glory" is yet another participator of the light of Jesus, and we 
shall see God in the vision of the Word, for he is the inaccessi- 
ble light in which the Father dwelleth. " In lumine tuo videbi- 
mus lumen" 

The sun gives life as well as light. Go to the frozen loins 
of the north. What life will you find there ? Mosses, lichens, 
berry-shrubs at most. Advance towards the sun ; come a little 
more south. You meet with trees the solitary fir and the 
hardy pine. More south again ; and you come upon the oak, 
the elm, the beech, and the lime towering in thick-set forests.. 



1894-] PASCHALE GAUDIUM. 811 

Again more south ;. and the trees bear fruit the apple, the 
pear, the cherry, and the plum. You must go more south still 
if you seek the delicate fruits the orange, the lemon, the olive, 
and the fig, and the home of the vine between the parallels of 
latitude thirty and fifty. Arrive at last at the torrid zone ; and 
the vegetation there is characterized by a wealth, variety, and 
magnificence nowhere else to be found. Under the beams of 
the tropical sun the most juicy fruits and the most powerful 
aromatics arrive at their perfection. The largest trees there are 
adorned with flowers larger, more beautiful, more odoriferous 
than those of herbaceous plants in our own zone. The sun is 
life to man as well as to plant. The old man says, " If I can 
only get through the winter I shall be all right." Some of 
ourselves no doubt look to the coming summer to restore to 
health some loved one. The wealthy invalid seeks a southern 
clime when the first step of winter is heard. He goes to Nice 
or Madeira and, seated in an easy chair where the sun's rays 
may fall on him, finds relief if not cure. We, who must pass 
our winter far from the genial south, what do we do ? Just as 
we eat preserved fruits, so we bask in preserved sunshine. In 
short, we light a fire, and extract the sun-warmth which is 
enchained in the coal. 

Jesus is the life of the world as well as its light. I restrict 
myself to proving that he is the life of man. Life is the intrin- 
sic principle of movement ; and the principle is perfect only 
when it is in actual movement ; and the highest movement is 
that of intellection. Hence, Aristotle says, in his Ethics, that 
intellection is life of the highest grade. But, as has been 
shown, the light of our intellect which, in its actual working, is 
our highest natural life, is a participation of the light of Jesus. 
Jesus is our life too in the supernatural order of grace ; for 
grace is a participation of his Sonship, the dwelling and work- 
ing of his spirit in us ; so that St. Paul could say, " I live now, 
no, not I, but Christ liveth in me." Jesus is our life in the 
order of glory also. Even pagan Aristotle knew that man's 
eatitude lay in the exercise of his highest faculty, the specula- 
ive intellect, on the highest object, the infinite good. In the 
after-life of bliss there will be a " comprincipium" of native in- 
telligence and of light of glory, and, through this medium, 
union with the highest object the Summum Bonum. This is 
essential life, eternal life. " This," said our Saviour, " is eternal 
life, that men may know thee, ,the only true God, and Jesus 
Christ, whom thou hast sent." And the "light of glory" is yet 
another and a fuller participation of the light of Jesus; and the 



8 12 PASCHALE GAUDIUM. [Mar., 

Object of Bliss, in which we shall see the Trinity in unity and 
the unity in Trinity, the unutterable mysteries, and the exhaust- 
less depths of the Godhead, is the Word the expressed species 
or image of the Father, Jesus. 

The sun is the gladness of the world as well as its light and 
life. Why is the spring-time buoyant, jubilant ? Because it 
gives promise of the summer. Everything which stands related 
to the summer stands thereby ennobled. We would sooner 
see the swallow than the bird of paradise, and we prefer the 
cuckoo's plaint to the music of the linnet. The summer's sun 
touches the earth with its magic wand, and the earth is covered 
with golden corn. All nature is out a-holiday, and smiles as 
though it would last for ever. But autumn approaches ; and 
nature grows first serious, then melancholy. The sward forgets 
its verdure. The leaves fall from the trees, like tears shed over 
departed glories. Nature casts aside her holiday garb, as though 
she would say, " What use in these ornaments ? This is no 
time for rejoicing." Then comes rough, scowling winter, and 
with ruthless hands strips the earth of any beauty which may 
still linger. Winter is nature dressed in rags; no need to put 
scarecrows in the fields then. 

Jesus is the gladness and the joy of the world, even to those 
who know him not. Slaves emancipated, torture abolished, 
prison-life ameliorated, woman dignified and ennobled, Little 
Sisters of the Poor, Nursing Sisters ; what joy all this brings 
to the world ! And all this is the work of Jesus. The very 
name of Jesus is mirth and joy. No more the " tetragram- 
meton" the unpronounceable name ; but Jesus, Saviour. No more 
the Omnipotent speaking in the thunders and lightnings of 
Sinai ; but the Word made flesh, an infant, as one of us in all 
save sin. Jesus is our joy in life, our joy in death, our joy 
beyond the grave. In heaven our joy shall be full, and our 
joy no man shall take from us ; for there the sheep will be 
gathered to their Shepherd, and Jesus will be for ever our re- 
ward exceeding great. 

No wonder, then, that the church sanctions that old pagan 
Saxon word Sunday as the sign of the Lord's day. 

But the Sun went down. Jesus the light, the life, the joy of 
the world died on the cross, crying out, " It is finished." And 
there was darkness over the whole earth from the sixth to the 
ninth hour. The image, the figure, the symbol was eclipsed 
when the reality sank down. The Pharisees, doctors of the law, 
princes of the people make merry over this. "Yes," they cry, 



S 1J 

ni { 
up 

> h a 

u~ 



1894.] PASCHALE GAUDIUM. 813 

" it is indeed finished. We shall see the sun in the heavens again 
to-morrow ; but the King of the Jews, Son of God, True Light 
and True Life, as he called himself, we shall never see or hear 
of more. Each man to his work and his station with a light 
heart. The impostor, the stirrer-up of sedition, is dead." 

Foolish Pharisees, doctors of the law, princes of the people ! 
Yours is such a triumph as hell gives short-lived, apparent only. 
Ye war against Heaven. Ye prophesy against God. He will not 
suffer his Holy One to see corruption. By his omnipotent right 
hand he hath sworn it. When the sun shall be darkened, and 
the moon refuses her light, and the stars fall from the sky, this 
Jesus, the Lamb Immaculate, whom ye have slain, shall be the 
splendor of that heaven whereof our sun is but the porch-lamp. 

" Post tres dies resurgam " After three days I shall rise again. 

The third day has come. Our light, our life, our joy has 
returned to us ; and we shall never lose him more. Our Sun 
has dawned on us again, and eternity shall not know his set- 
ting. " Christ, being risen from the dead, dieth now no more. 
Death shall no more have dominion over him." 

I left the harbor one night. During three or four days and 
nights previously dense fogs had hung over the waters. Col- 
lisions, serious accidents had occurred. The night promised fair 
as we started, but as we reached the open sea a thick, heavy 
pall settled over us. The speed of the vessel was slackened. 
We slowly crawled along. The mournful fog-signal, like some 
wild banshee cry threatening doom, sounded at frequent inter- 
vals. Suddenly the dense curtain lifted somewhat. A transient 
glimpse of the moon. Then, slowly at first but with ever-in- 
creasing speed, the heavy folds rolled away, till the fair orb of 
night shone in her full splendor upon us. A loud cheer went 
up. Joy filled the soul of every man on board. This for a 
passing glimpse of the far-off moon ! No wonder, then, if the 
urch be intoxicated with joy when the Sun of Justice is given 
back to us for evermore. " This is the day which the Lord 
hath made; let us rejoice and be glad in it." Alleluia! Alleluia! 
Alleluia! Our Sun, and our Chief and Leader, too: he has 
wrestled with principalities and powers nay, with the wrath of 
God which had endured for four thousand years and has come 
off the victor. What is any Wellington victory or Nelson tri- 
umph compared with this ? And yet we think much of them ! 
Forget all about them. Forget everything but one thing during 
Paschal season. ''This is the day which the Lord hath made; 
let us rejoice and be glad in it." Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! 




814 PANGE LINGUA. [Mar., 



PANGE LINGUA. 

(A new translation from St. Thomas Aquinas?) 
BY REV. C. A. WALWORTH. 

ING, my tongue, the wond'rous story ; 

Sing the mystery divine ; 
Sing the Saviour's precious body, 
Royal grape of Mary's vine, 
Bleeding, for a world's redemption, 
Costly drops of saving wine. 

Wond'rous boon to earth from Heaven, 
Mary's virgin womb the mean ; 

In our desert, thrifty Farmer, 
Sowing truth in golden grain. 

Wonderful the solemn mission ! 
Wonderful the closing scene ! 

At the Paschal feast reclining 
'Midst the tearful brotherhood, 

All that ancient rites prefigured 
Closing in a newer code, 

Jesus, with His own hand min'stering, 
Gave Himself to be their food. 

With a word, the Word incarnate 
Bread as living flesh doth hail ; 

Wine becomes a bleeding fountain. 
Oh, if thought and senses fail 

To confirm the heart that loveth, 
Let a simple faith avail. 

Bow we then with souls adoring ; 

Low before the mystery fall. 
Let the ancient institution 

Yield to nobler ritual ! 
Let firm faith supply, where folded 

Sense is ineffectual. 

Now to Thee, O Sire eternal, 

And to Thee, eternal Son, 
And to Thee, co-equal Spirit, 

Everlasting praise be shown ! 
Equal be the salutation 

Where the life is always one. 







1894-] HER LAST STAKE. 815 

HER LAST STAKE. 

BY T. L. L. TEELING. 

CHAPTER I. 

T was only the month of May ; yet the season 
was already almost August-like in its sultry heat, 
and shops were beginning to put up their shut- 
ters with the customary notice, "Ouverture le 
ire Octobre," and hotel omnibuses to convey 
huge mountains of trunks and portmanteaux to, instead of from, 
the unpretending little railway station which, like all its fellows, 
has welcomed so many illustrious strangers to the Riviera. 

Just as the day was at its hottest, and the "butterflies of 
fashion," as some one calls them, had presumably folded their 
wings to rest until sundown for few, if any, were to be seen 
flitting in and out of the gorgeous hotels which seem to con- 
stitute modern Mentone two slender, black-robed figures ad- 
vanced somewhat timidly up the footpath leading to one of 
the largest of these, and, after a brief parley with the porter, 
were ushered into a large and luxuriously furnished salon. 

To them there entered, after a few minutes delay, a quiet- 
looking, middle-aged lady with gray hair and placid expression, 
who cast an inquiring glance upon her visitors as she advanced 
with a little bow towards them. 

" You speak English ?" she inquired hesitatingly, as the two 
nuns rose to receive her. 

" We are English," was the unexpected reply from the elder 
of the two, given in rich, round tones ; " that is to say, we are 
Irish." 

" Irish ? Oh !" and the lady's face brightened as she held 
out both hands to her visitors. " Irish nuns ? What an unex- 
ected, welcome sight !" she went on, drawing a chair close to 
hem. " Where did you come from, and how came you here?" 
" Indeed, it doesn't seem the place for us, does it ?" laughed 
the nun. " I never felt more out of my element. But the fact 
is, we are on a begging tour." 

" What order do you belong to ?" asked Mrs. Mortimer, 
glancing at their black habits and white coifs as if seeking 






8i6 HER LAST STAKE. [Mar., 

some indication which might guide her. " Nazareth nuns, 
Little Sisters of the Poor, Sceurs de Nevers you seem to look 
a little like each, and yet to be unlike all." 

" Well, we are a new nursing order, founded not many 
years ago our foundress still lives with houses in England 
and in Italy ; and we have been sent out from the latter coun- 
try to collect subscriptions all along this line." 

" Principally from the English visitors, I suppose ?" 

" Well, yes ; for we are not very strong in French, either 
of us." And the good-tempered Irishwoman smiled across to 
her companion in placid contentment with her own linguistic 
shortcomings. So they chatted on for awhile of their houses, 
their order, and their work ; and then they rose to go, as Mrs. 
Mortimer pulled out her purse. 

" Here is my little offering, sisters," she said, as she laid a 
small gold piece in Sister Raphael's hand. " I wish it were 
more, for I feel quite interested in your work ; but you know 
even a quiet, lone body like myself has many calls on the 
purse." 

" Do you stay here long ?" asked Sister Raphael of her, just, 
as it seemed, for the sake of conversation as she ushered them 
across the big, palm-decked hall. 

" I have been here all the winter for my health, but I am 
leaving to-morrow. By the bye, how did you come to hear of 
me ?" she asked, stopping short in the middle of the hall with 
an amused glance back at them. 

" Oh ! we manage to hunt up all the English names every- 
where you are the only English person now in this hotel, are 
you not ? " 

"Yes. There are still a good many people here, but none 
of them English except ah, yes ! . . ." She stopped short 
as she caught sight of two men advancing towards them, who 
were whispering gravely and earnestly together. 

" Bon jour, Monsieur Grosjean," she called out pleasantly 
to one of the two a big, heavy-looking Frenchman, who was 
knitting his brows and biting his lips in evident perplexity as 
his companion talked. " How does Monsieur le Medicin find 
his patient to-day?" 

Monsieur Grosjean, who in fact was no less than the pro- 
prietor of the hotel, advanced towards the little group, slowly 
shaking his head. 

" Ah, madame, it is a terrible business a dreadful thing 
indeed, for me." 



1894-] HER LAST STAKE. 817 

" What, is she worse ? " said Mrs. Mortimer quickly. 

" Monsieur le Medicin will tell you," he replied, with a 
theatrical gesture towards his companion. 

"What is the matter with the lady at number 27?" asked 
Mrs. Mortimer of the vivacious-looking little doctor, who was 
drawing on his gloves. 

With a glance at the hotel proprietor, which was answered 
by an affirmative nod, the doctor pronounced " Typhus fever, 
madame, of the most virulent type " 

" But oh, madame, I implore you, let it not be known among 
my pensionnaires! " breathed the proprietor; "it would ruin 
simply ruin my hotel." 

"And the worst of it is, that there is not a nurse to be 
had ; I can't have my patient left to die alone," muttered the 
doctor discontentedly. 

" Your own compatriot, madame," murmured M. Grosjean, 
turning his big black eyes plaintively upon Mrs. Mortimer, as 
though he sought to transfer the burden of responsibility from 
his own shoulders to hers. 

All this time the two nuns had stood patiently apart under 
the palm-boughs, wondering whether they might slip quietly 
out and so take their departure, or whether Mrs. Mortimer had 
any more last words to say. 

" Well, monsieur, if she is my compatriot I can hardly be 
expected to nurse her myself, can I ? Oh ! stay, though," she 
went on, as her eyes fell upon the waiting pair ; " look here, 
these nuns are English nursing sisters ; suppose you set one of 
them to nurse the sick lady?" 

" Nurses, are they ? " exclaimed the little doctor ; and he 
darted quickly to their side and broke into voluble explanations 
and entreaties. The sisters turned to Mrs. Mortimer in utter 
bewilderment. 

" My dear sisters, yes indeed it is most urgent. You have 
just been telling me that your work is to nurse the sick in their 
own homes, rich and poor alike ; to go wherever you are sum- 
moned, irrespective of creed or position, and without fixed fee. 
Here is a case which calls for charity as loudly as any. A 
poor lady, staying in this hotel all the winter, has been taken 
ill with typhus fever, and now lies unconscious upstairs. No 
nurse can be found to undertake the case ; and I fancy the 
proprietor does not care to make himself responsible for the 
payment and maintenance of one of the expensive style of 
English nurses who are the only ones to be found hereabouts. 



8i8 HER LAST STAKE. [Mar., 

But no doubt the lady's friends will come forward later, when 
they can be communicated with." 

The sisters hesitated, and then began to consult together in 
low tones, the youngest nun apparently objecting, and the elder 
urging her arguments. Presently the latter, Sister Raphael, 
turned to Mrs. Mortimer, the proprietor and doctor both stand- 
ing expectantly aside. 

"I think," said Sister Raphael, "that it seems as if we ought 
to do something for the poor lady. But you see, we cannot 
definitely undertake the case without orders. I propose that 
Sister Gabrielle here should remain with the patient for a few 
days, while I continue my journey homewards, as I have busi- 
ness to transact en route, and meanwhile we can write to our 
mother for further orders." 

"Any help, even for a day or two, will be most welcome, I 
am sure," said Mrs. Mortimer ; and she repeated the proposal 
to the two men, who immediately turned to Sister Raphael 
with profuse expressions of gratitude. 

" We had better go to the patient at once," then said Sis- 
ter Raphael ; and the little doctor turned to accompany them 
upstairs and install his new-found nurse. 

" O sister, my heart fails me indeed it does ! " whispered 
Sister Gabrielle, as they followed him up the wide marble stair- 
case. " It's not the nursing I am afraid of, but being alone in 
this great big place, and not a soul to speak to in my own lan- 
guage." 

" Now, Gabrielle dear, you mustn't speak like that. Sure, 
Our Lady will take care of you." 

"Yes, I know," somewhat plaintively assented the younger. 
"But I haven't got any of my nursing things, you know 
aprons, sleeves, and so on. If if I stay, will you write for 
some for me ?" 

" I'll settle all that, never fear ! " said cheery Sister Raphael. 
" I wish I could stay myself, but you know I am bound to go 
back with all the money and business letters and accounts to 
mother." 

So they mounted beyond the " premier e ttage" and higher 
still beyond the " deuxtime" and finally passed along the corri- 
dor and paused at a door before which hung a white sheet duly 
soaked in disinfectants. 

" I have put that up already, you see," remarked the doctor, 
touching it. " Dangerous thing to do, though might arouse 
suspicion told the chambermaid it was to keep out draughts." 



1894-] HER LAST STAKE. 819 

He lifted it for them t pass, and they went on into the 
sick-room. 

A close, sickening odor the peculiar effluvia of typhus was 
the first thing of which they became conscious on entering the 
apartment. Then they found themselves standing beside the 
bed whereon lay, tossing and muttering in fevered delirium, a 
woman of some forty years old, whose thin hands wandered 
feebly to and fro over the coverlet, while her dark hair, streaked 
with gray, streamed in tangled masses over a soiled and tum- 
bled pillow. A table beside the bed was crowded with medi- 
cine bottles, half-empty cups and glasses, and other paraphernalia 
of a neglected sick-room ; clothes and soiled linen lay upon 
every chair, and a travelling trunk, dragged into the middle of 
the room, stood half-open. 

" If you will just glance round and see what you are likely 
to want, I will order it as I go down," remarked the doctor. 
"And I will look in again this evening in fact, I think for 
the future I shall pay my visits only after dark, as the proprie- 
tor objects to a doctor being seen too often about the place." 

The nuns, after a hasty glance round, mentioned some pro- 
bable wants : a spirit-lamp, cups, and so on, and then the doc- 
tor and Sister Raphael turned to go. 

" Good-by, dear sister," whispered the latter ; " keep up your 
heart, and send us news of you soon." 

And then Sister Gabrielle found herself alone. 

She began by opening the window for a moment, to let in 
some of the pure fresh air which seemed so sadly needed in 
that fetid sick chamber ; and then, after one brief, refreshing 
glance at the glories of sea and sky, mountain and olive-yards, 
which were spread out before her as she closed the casement, 
she proceeded to set in order the neglected apartment. The 
tumbled bedclothes were smoothed, the pillow straightened, with 
deft and gentle touch ; soiled clothes and empty plates and 
glasses cleared away, and a look of cleanliness and order diffused 
over everything. By-and-by a knock came at the door, and a 
tray was handed in to her with some dinner for herself and a 
basin of very watery-looking beef-tea for the invalid, with an 
inquiry as to whether anything further was required for the night. 
" I am not allowed to go in," whispered the coquettish-looking 
chambermaid, " but you can ring if you require anything." 

Meanwhile the sick woman lay quietly on her narrow bed, 
tossing her hot hands a little from side to side as though in 
search of some cool spot whereon to rest them, and muttering 



I 



82o HER LAST STAKE. [Mar., 

faintly unintelligible sentences in French and English from 
time to time. " There will be no change yet," pronounced the 
doctor at his evening visit, " so make yourself a bed on the 
sofa and get some rest ; you may need it later on." And so 
night fell upon the silent room. 



CHAPTER II. 

The days passed on and still the change, for life or death, 
delayed its coming. Patient Sister Gabrielle still watched be- 
side her unconscious charge, sometimes slipping outside the 
heavy curtain of that carbolized sheet which shut them off she 
and this stranger together from the world without, to breathe 
for a few moments the purer air of the corridor and its open 
window looking towards the mountains, until the pert chamber- 
maid who waited on them whispered to her that " M. le Pro- 
prietaire requested that la sceur would not show herself outside 
the room, lest other visitors should suspect illness there." So 
that even that faint relaxation was taken from her. One morn- 
ing he sent word to her to come to his bureau ; and she went 
wondering and somewhat anxious, for she knew that he re- 
ceived his daily report from the doctor, and asked herself where- 
in she could supplement it. 

" Bon jour, ma sceur; how goes your patient? The same? 
No worse, no better? Ah! it is trying, this." He spoke in 
halting yet not altogether bad English, knowing that the nun's 
command of French was but slight. " Look here, I have some 
word to say to you. Have you found, among the lady's pos- 
sessions, any such things as letters, papers, Jiein ? " 

" I have not looked, monsieur," replied Sister Gabrielle, 
with some indignation. 

" But it would be well that you should do so," he returned. 
" Look here : we must find out her friends we must know more." 

" Do you know nothing of them, then?" questioned the sister, 
opening her mild blue eyes a little wider as this new and start- 
ling fact presented itself. 

"Well, it is this. Of course when she first became ill be- 
fore you came I examined her things, and took away all 
money, and jewelry, and any letters I could find. That I was 
bound to do, naturally, in my own interest," he added, seeing 
that the nun looked somewhat startled at his announcement ; 
" I was obliged to see that there was some money forthcoming 
for the expenses." 



1894-] HER LAST STAKE. 821 

" Oh, yes, certainly ! " stammered poor Sister Gabrielle as 
he paused and looked for approbation. 

" Well, now, the money which I found has come to an end. 
I looked for an address to which to write, among her papers, 
and found one only. I wrote, and here is the reply." He handed 
an open letter to the nun. It ran as follows : 

" Mrs. Hillyard begs to acknowledge the receipt of Monsieur 
Grosjean's communication with respect to Miss Falconer. She 
encloses a post-office order for ten pounds towards the expenses 
which , M. Grosjean may have incurred, and at the same time 
wishes to state that no further application will be entertained. 
Any letters from Miss Falconer, or from others on her behalf, 
will remain unanswered." 

" Voila ! " commented the proprietaire, as Sister Gabrielle 
folded and handed him back the letter. "No further hope in 
that quarter, you see." 

"And is that the only address you have been able to find?" 

" Absolutely the only one. Now, you see, this money will 
carry us on for a few days my own expenses, I mean, nothing 
more ; and for you, ma soeur, there is nothing ; I wished to 
point it out to you." 

" That does not matter ; we are never paid. I mean we 
make no fixed charge ; all whom we nurse, rich or poor, are 
expected to make some offering to the convent, according to 
their means, and the offerings of the rich pay for the expenses 
of attending on the poor." 

Still, as Sister Gabrielle so bravely explained this, there was 
fading from her mind a hopeful little vision which she had 
been entertaining all this time, of her own triumphant return 
to the convent home bearing a substantial " offering " from the 
inmate of one of the biggest and grandest hotels in the Riviera. 

"Well, we must await the course of events," sighed M. Gros- 
jean in a dissatisfied fashion. " If the lady dies, which would be 
the simplest solution of the difficulty, I shall bury her with this "- 
waving the ten pound note in his hand " et tout sera dit. If 
she lives helas f there will be a long convalescence." 

"Does not the consul sometimes help in these cases?" sug- 
gested the nun. 

"If she were well, he could have her conveyed back to Eng- 
land as a pauper; I do not know of anything else that he can 
do. However, I will see. Meanwhile please see if you can find 
any letters or papers among her things which may give us some 
clue to her friends. Bon jour, ma soeur." 



822 HER LAST STAKE. [Mar., 

Sister Gabrielle went back to the little north room au trois- 
ieme with a sad heart ; and as she approached the bed to ad- 
minister some nourishment at the appointed hour a thrill of 
pity and compassion came to her as she passed her hand under 
the hot, restless head, and held a spoon to the parched lips. 

" Poor thing ! poor thing ! " she whispered to herself. " Home, 
less and friendless I wonder why?" 

As if the words had touched some chord in the sufferer's 
mind, she began to murmur some words, more connectedly than 
any the nun had heard hitherto. " Why ? Why ? Who knows 
why? Was it my system? It is a good one, yes! Yet listen: 
Rouge perd perd encore toujours le rouge qui perd and those 
others, they win, and they do not need it as I do. . . . Which 
do you say is the lucky man ? . . . I will ask him to give 
me a number a number " and her voice trailed away again 
into silence. 

" I suppose she has been to that dreadful Casino," innocently 
thought the nun. "Will she die, I wonder? Perhaps I ought 
to say something to her about it, if a gleam of consciousness 
comes. It is useless to send for a priest, as, no doubt, she is 
a Protestant. Is she, though ? Well, if she were a Catholic 
there would surely be something to show it some medal, scap- 
ular something.'.' 

So, seeing that her patient had lapsed into quietude, she set 
to work to empty the big trunk which, with innate delicacy, she 
had hitherto refrained from touching, though M. le Proprietaire's 
rough hands had already tossed and tumbled about its contents. 
Now, knowing that for its owner's sake it was incumbent on 
her to seek information, she carefully examined every corner. 
Dress pockets, the little work-case, an empty card-case, two or 
three French novels of the usual yellow-covered kind, some torn 
sheets of paper dotted over with figures, the meaning of which 
Sister Gabrielle did not fathom, and vaguely supposed them to 
be " accounts," old concert programmes was there nothing of 
the past among all these tumbled heaps of fine linen and lace, 
gloves and wraps, mostly old and worn, but still dainty in tex- 
ture ; no scrap of identity to be found anywhere? 

As she pondered and puzzled over this strange absence of 
any clue to the sick woman's identity, which she began to think 
must be intentional, the feeble voice began again its monoto- 
nous, broken words. 

<l It is only life that can fear dying. Possible loss means pos- 
sible gain . . . gain ? I never gain it is all loss, loss, loss ! ' 



1894-] HER LAST STAKE. 823 

"Could I not reach that bewildered brain?" thought Sister 
Gabrielle, rising from her kneeling position beside the trunk 
and going over to the bed. She took in her hands the crucifix 
which hung at her side and pressed it to the parched lips of 
the sufferer, whispering in low tones the word " Jesus." To her 
surprise the touch of the crucifix seemed to come to those 
babbling lips as a familiar thing, or perchance an awakening 
memory ; the fevered hand clasped it round, and the murmuring 
voice began anew : " Sacred Heart . . . Heart of Jesus 
. . . mercy ! " 

" She is a Catholic ! " said Sister Gabrielle to herself, speak- 
ing aloud in her astonishment. " No one but a Catholic would 
say that. And yet no scapular, no medal, no slightest token 
of religion anywhere. Poor soul ! I fear she has forgotten 
God." 

Presently she gave food again, and noticed afterward that 
the patient seemed falling into a stupor. 

" Yes," said the doctor, who came in shortly afterward ; " it 
is the crisis. If she awake from this stupor she will be 
saved." 

"Otherwise . . . she will pass away in it?" 

" Probably." And he nodded farewell with a cheery air, 
as if to say that their watching would shortly be over. 

Sister Gabrielle sat down beside the bed with an anxious 
icart ; doubly so now that she guessed, or fancied, that a soul 
there before her which, with all its sins upon it, was stand- 
ing very near to the threshold of eternity. She took up her 
rosary 'and half mechanically began to say it, watching the 
with eager eyes lest any change should come. But hours 

>ed on, and the long night ; and it was not until the morn- 
ig sun was pouring its full flood of radiance through the un- 
laded pane that the sick woman opened her large, languid 
r es wearily, but with full, tired consciousness, upon her watch- 
er, and whispered faintly " Who are you ? " 



CHAPTER III. 

So the crisis had passed and she was saved ! 
Many a better life, to all human seeming, cherished and 
r atched with passionate devotion, might have failed to struggle 
through the hour of trial ; but this woman, whom apparently 
no one wanted, with no place in life as it seemed, no means 
even of subsistence, had retained her hold on life and was now 



824 HER LAST STAKE. [Mar., 

slowly but surely coming back to strength, and to what ? Was 
it, as Sister Gabrielle thought to herself as she watched her 
patient, lying propped up by pillows, with sad and troubled 
eyes turned towards the window, hardly speaking save to ut- 
ter a brief word of thanks from time to time for services ren- 
dered ; was it for the " one more grace " so often given that she 
had been thus brought back from the very gates of death? 

One often wonders, watching beside a sick bed or mourning 
some irreparable loss, why, where " one is taken and the other 
left," an Infinite Wisdom seems to choose those whom human 
love and human needs most cling to, rather than those who, 
like this sad-faced patient, seem of little use. Perhaps, like the 
subject of that unconsciously bitter remark which haunts one in 
its very simplicity of truth, they have " outlived their useful- 
ness "; as was said of some old woman, a mother who had 
toiled all her life out for children and home, and now was no 
longer wanted there " because, ma'am," said one for whom she 
had spent herself in youth, " she is of no more use she has 
outlived her usefulness ! " 

" You will soon be able to get up now," said Sister Gabrielle 
encouragingly, as she took from the patient's hands an empty 
cup and lowered her pillow. 

"Yes?" was the listless answer. 

" Do you not care to recover?" 

"Why should 1?" And the dark eyes were turned on hers 
with an unutterable look of hopelessness in their depths. 

The sister laid one hand upon the thin, trembling one before 
her, as she said, half shyly, half gravely, but very earnestly : 
" Do you not remember that God has been very, very good to 
you in letting you live ? " 

"Would he not have been better to me in letting me die?" 
returned the other bitterly. 

"Were you so ready to die then?" questioned the nun, half 
fearing her own temerity, yet longing to speak the words that 
had been trembling on her lips for days. " You are a Catholic 
I know you are " 

" How did you guess it ? " broke in the other, sharply. 

"You told me yourself, without intending it, in your deli- 
rium." 

" Ah ! that's true . . . that wretched fever ; . . . tell 
me, did I say anything more anything about my past, about 
myself? " 

Sister Gabrielle shook her head. 



1894-] HER LAST STAKE. 825 

" Nothing that I could understand. But what has been 
troubling me was was the thought that you might die unpre- 
pared." 

" Has it ? You poor good little nun ! " And the dark eyes 
softened for a moment as they turned an amused, half-sarcastic 
glance upon her. "You have been thinking of my poor soul, 
have you? Don't it is not worth it!" 

" Oh ! do not say that ; do- not speak so. What would have 
become of you if you had died?" 

The sick woman turned upon her pillow to look full into 
Sister Gabrielle's face. 

" You remind me of a little pious story I once heard I 
wonder whether you know it? Listen. Give me that glass of 
water at your side. A girl who was well, not a very good 
girl was dying, and the friends round her bed spoke to her 
well as you want to talk to me. One of them asked her 
' where she thought she was going ? ' She dipped her finger in 
some water, like this " she touched the water with her own 
"and held it up before them all, one sparkling drop hanging 
on its tip. * I am going,' she said, ' where I shall call in vain 
for one drop of water to cool my burning tongue.' And as she 
spoke the words she fell back and died ! " 

Sister Gabrielle could not repress a shudder at the picture 
thus set before her; but she quickly turned the subject by 
fetching from a table near a cup of beef-tea which had been 
farmed over her little spirit-lamp, and which was gratefully, 
r en eagerly consumed by her patient. 

That evening she was again summoned to M. Grosjean's bureau. 

" So it seems that your patient is recovering ?" was 'his 
eeting to her. 

" She has passed the crisis, yes, monsieur." 

" Does she talk ? Does she tell you anything about her- 
self? You should encourage her to do so. And look here, 
ma soeur, I must ask you to speak to her about money matters 
now my payment ; it is time that she should write to her 
friends, if she has any, for I need not tell you that ten pounds 
has very nearly come to an end, even in hotel expenses ; and 
how the doctor will be paid, I know not." 

Poor Sister Gabrielle! She felt that she had never in all 
her life, even through the hardships of her two years' novitiate, 
had so painful a task to perform as on the following morning, 
when she essayed to convey the message of M. Grosjean to her 
patient. Yet she had but few words to say. " I understand," 
VOL. LVIII. 55 



826 HER LAST STAKE. [Mar., 

was her listener's calm comment, as she strove to convey as 
delicately as possible the proprietor's demand. " He wants to 
be paid naturally. And I I have nothing to pay him with. 
He has already taken all that was here, you say?" 

" Everything of value except your watch ; that is here," 
answered Sister Gabrielle, lifting it from the mantel-piece as she 
spoke. 

"Ah, that is well! Give it to me here, please. I may need 
it yet." And she hid it carefully beneath her pillow, and lay 
back, evidently thinking painfully, for some time. 

" Will you get me some paper, and a pen and ink, please ?" 
she said at length with a visible effort. They were brought to 
her, and slowly, writing evidently with as much mental as bodi- 
ly pain, she traced a few lines on two separate sheets of paper, 
and placed each in an envelope, which she addressed. 

" Will you ask the proprietor to stamp these and send 
them ?" she asked. 

" I will go down with them myself," said the nun, glad to 
show that her mission had been so far successful. And she ran 
lightly down the three long flights of stairs to the tiny bureau 
where M. Grosjean sat all day long, like a merry spider in the 
centre of his web. 

"What do you think now?" he exclaimed as he saw her; 
" that unfortunate patient of yours is destined to bring me 
nothing but misfortune. Her opposite neighbor has caught the 
fever ! " 

" Dear me, that is dreadful ! " agreed the nun. 

" I think the doctor wishes to ask you to undertake the 
case," went on M. Grosjean ; " you see it is very difficult to find 
a nurse now ; there is so much illness about that they are all 
engaged." 

" My present patient is hardly well enough to be left yet," 
objected Sister Gabrielle. 

" She will have to be left, however," retorted the proprietor, 
" for I do not intend to support a nurse for her any longer. It 
is hard enough for me to have to keep her which, of course, 
I shall only do until she is well enough to leave." 

Sister Gabrielle felt somewhat bewildered and shocked at 
this new turn that things were taking. She had not realized 
before that her very presence there was, in the eyes of the pro- 
prietor, an extra and uncalled-for expense, added to the burden 
which poor Miss Falconer was already felt to be. As she was 
extremely anxious to remain near her lonely patient, she began 



1894-] HER LAST STAKE. 827 

to review the circumstances in her mind, and to wonder whether 
she might venture to undertake a second case which, being so 
near her former patient, would enable her to give an occasional 
helping hand or -word of comfort to the silent, lonely woman, 
about whom there hung an air of mystery and sorrow. 
" Who is the new sufferer ?" asked she, after a pause. 
" A young gentleman who, with his bride, is here on their 
wedding tour," was the reply. " The lady is not strong enough 
to nurse him alone, and the present epidemic of influenza has 
taken away all the nurses. I should be very glad if you would 
stay, since you are already familiar with the situation, and do 
not fear infection." 

So the end of it was that Sister Gabrielle found herself 
transferred to the opposite room a large, sunny south one, 
under strict injunctions not to divulge the nature of the 
illness which she had lately tended, as well as to take 'every 
precaution to isolate and disinfect the sick-room. Her patient, 
a tall, fair young man, of some five-and-twenty years, seemed 
much less seriously affected than was the case with Miss Falco- 
ner, and had the advantage of every appliance and comfort 
that money and the drugs from a fashionable English phar- 
lacy could bestow. The room was shut in by carbolized 
sheets ; one leading to the corridor, and one to the bedroom 
idjoining where his young .wife remained, Sister Gabrielle whis- 
>ering bulletins from time to time of his progress. 

Every morning about nine o'clock before entering upon his 
isual round of visits the doctor, one of the fashionable Eng- 
lish physicians of the place, would make his appearance by the 
>edside, and, cautiously pulling up his sleeve, touch with two 
:imid fingers the sick man's pulse. 

" Fever slackening ? Ah, yes ! That is right ! Tongue, 
>lease?" and tiptoeing as far as possible from the reach of in- 
fected breath, he would cast a hasty glance at that member. 

" Now, nurse, the carbolic !" And a vigorous application of 
carbolic soap to his hands would follow before with nervous 
haste he nodded farewell to his patient, and retired outside to 
:ontinue his directions in the corridor. " Open the window, 
)lease, there ! Ah ! everything is going on well, I think, nurse ?" 
"Quite well, yes." 

"We can do no better than continue present treatment er 
-trust to nature to er restore vitality. (I beg your pardon, 
nurse, but will you keep on the other side of the current of air, 
letting it pass from me to you, do you see ?") 



828 HER LAST STAKE. [Mar., 

"You are rather nervous about infection, I think?" remarked 
Sister Gabrielle one day, tired of his endless fidgetty precautions. 

" Well, you see " he was a pompous little man, and talked 
in a consequential tone very irritating to the bystander " I 
must consider my other patients. I have important cases on 
hand most important. I am at present attending the Duchess 
of Oxford's little boy with measles, . . . and it is a respon- 
sible position most responsible ! " 

" But your passing through the fresh air carries off any harm- 
ful possibilities, surely ?" urged she. 

"Ah! infection is a subtle thing!" he rejoined, dolefully 
shaking his head. " One may catch disease anywhere ; cabs, 
railway carriages, narrow streets all these are so many traps 
for the unwary. I assure you, nurse, when my wife and I go 
to England from here we carefully abstain as far as possible 
from touching the sides of the railway carriage, and never, 
never lean back in it ! ... There is nothing more you 
would wish to ask with reference to the patient, is there ?" 

This was a delicate hint, repeated each morning, intended to 
convey the fact that the good man was ready for his fee, 
which, to avoid any misunderstanding, he preferred to pocket 
at the close of each visit ; and accordingly Sister Gabrielle 
would disappear for a moment into the adjoining room, and 
come out with the regulation twenty-franc piece in her hand. 

" Good morning !" And Sister Gabrielle would retire behind 
her p/otecting sheet, and nurse her patient by the light of her 
own judgment for the next twenty-four hours. 

Sometimes, when he was asleep and she knew that she could 
leave him safely, she would go quietly out, and steal into the 
dull little back room where Marion Falconer sat day after day 
in a broken arm-chair, essaying her strength by pacing slowly 
and painfully from chair to bed and bed to window, gazing 
out with large and melancholy eyes upon the changeful hues of 
the mountain beyond and the cleft valley, whence a snow-swollen 
rivulet trickled downwards to the sea ; the only breaks in the 
monotony of these long, dreary hours being the infrequent trays 
of comfortless meals thrust into the doorway by a hasty hand, 
and the few moments' chat with her former nurse. The doctor 
had ceased his visits, having pronounced her out of danger, 
and, perchance, perceiving small chance of obtaining his fee. 
Every day when Sister Gabrielle entered she would turn her 
wistful looks towards the doorway, with " Are the letters come, 
do you know? No letter for me, sister?" 



1894-] HER LAST STAKE. 829 

And Sister Gabrielle would shake her head, with some hope- 
ful word which indeed she hardly felt. But the silent, almost 
awful reserve which encased the sick woman was a barrier 
which few, and certainly not that timid little nun, could break 
through. She would hover round her wistfully, and glance at 
her with shy, appealing looks as she talked in broken sentences of 
unimportant matters, longing all the time to speak to her of 
what in very truth she was zvaiting to say but waiting in vain. 

"Is there any English confessor here, I wonder?" she sug- 
gested one day as an opening for conversation. " Or perhaps 
you go to confession in French ? " 

"Or perhaps not at all?" suggested her questioner, with a 
faintly ironical smile. 

" Would you not like to see a priest, after having been in 
such danger of death ? " 

" I ? Oh, no ! not at all. Besides, I thought the danger was 
past ? " 

44 The more reason you have for gratitude," returned Sister 
Gabrielle quickly, glad even of this slight opening for speaking 
out her heart. 

" This is a great deal to be grateful for, is it not ? " spoke 
Marion, Falconer, with a quick little sweep of her hand round 
the bare room. 

" Life is a great thing to be grateful for," she answered, 
" and the future lies in your own power." 

' The future ? " For once Miss Falconer's indifferent reserve 
iemed broken through, as she rose and paced with weak, un- 
:ertain steps about the room. " What is my future, do you 
think ? Oh, you poor little innocent, ignorant soul ! do you 
mow what my life is what my future is? Look at me! Have 
I a friend in the world ? Is there one single hand that I can 
grasp or cling to for help, in all the universe ? Have I an ac- 
quaintance even who would not, if they heard of my death to- 
night, say * What a mercy that she is gone ' ? Look ! I am 
waiting waiting in a sick despair for answers to my last ap- 
>eals for help ; and they will not come I know that ! And 
>y-and-by, when I am a little stronger, or the landlord is a 
little more tired of waiting for the money that never comes, I 
shall be politely told to go, and leave my worldly goods behind 
me such as they are," she added with a dreary little laugh: 
"and then when I walk away from this door what do you 
propose that I should do then ? " 

Sister Gabrielle was silent. 



830 HER LAST STAKE. [Mar., 

"What is left to me but to do what the fever failed to do? 
I am thinking over it, every day as I sit here, trying to decide 
how it is to be. Will it be poison ? That is very painful and 
besides, I shall have no hole of shelter to crawl into to die ; 
one can't die out in the open street. Will it be the sea? I 
don't like the sea ; it is shallow and difficult to reach, and one 
is ignominiously rescued. I am not a man, and I have not the 
stereotyped revolver of Monte Carlo usage ; so 

" Oh, please ! " gasped Sister Gabrielle, " don't talk like that. 
I know you don't mean it, but ' 

" Not mean it ? " returned the other with a grim little smile, 
which somehow carried conviction with it. "Well, I hope the 
proprietor will 'not mean it' when he turns me out into the 
streets, in a day or two. Perhaps you will kindly make that 
remark to him ? " 

Sister Gabrielle stood dumbly looking at her for a moment, 
feeling as if no words were adequate to touch that profound 
despair. Suddenly her hand, moving mechanically downwards, 
encountered the rosary at her side, and with an impulsive move- 
ment she unfastened and laid it upon Miss Falconer's lap ; then, 
putting both arms round her neck, she kissed the unresponsive 
cheek ; and turning, hurried from the room. 



CHAPTER IV. 

In very truth Sister Gabrielle did not in the least guess at 
her former patient's past or even present life. The ravings of 
fever, the pencil notes and jottings lying here and there, every 
indication which would have enlightened a more "worldly" per- 
son, passed by her unnoticed and uncomprehended. All that 
she did take in, however, of the poor wanderer's pitiful and 
solitary state made her yearn, with the tenderness of a true 
womanly soul, over that forlorn one to whom by some myste- 
rious overruling of Divine Mercy she had been brought to min- 
ister. In after years she used to say that she had never realized 
until then the terrible inequality of rich and poor against which 
so many thousands have impotently and wrongly rebelled. In 
one room sunshine, and comfort, and love all combining to 
make human suffering light in the other poverty, want, despair; 
within a stone's throw, each to each. And in both rooms the 
same great, underlying need which, if supplied, would have en- 
riched and ennobled both the same lack of faith and God. 

The mission of those who have devoted their lives to the 



1894-] HER LAST STAKE. 831 

service of the sick and dying is, without doubt, primarily the 
healing of the body; but there is surely with them also an un- 
derlying apostolate of ministration to souls. Among the poor 
this work is ostensible, almost easy, we would say. With pa- 
tients of the upper class it is hardly less needful, and requires 
far more tact, delicacy, and courage for its exercise. If all 
were known, there have been not a few conversions from heresy 
as well as those from indifference and sin, wrought by the min- 
istrations of a "nursing sister"; and even those who seem to 
reap but little benefit from the spiritual side of -their ministra- 
tion, are loud in praise of its temporal advantages. 

The second patient whom Sister Gabrielle had been called 
to tend was a big, light-hearted, muscular young Englishman 
who, when his time of convalescence began, seemed to live in a 
perpetual state of half-amused annoyance at the untoward ill- 
ness which, for the first time in his cheery, irresponsible life, 
had come upon him. " Queer, isn't it ? to feel so weak," he 
would ejaculate, lifting a feeble hand and arm into the air and 
pinching its softened muscles amazedly. " How much longer 
is this sort of thing going to last?" 

" Oh ! you will soon be sitting up by the fire if you go on 
as you are doing," the sister would assure him. 

"Yes, and then begin to crawl out-of-doors, wrapped up in 

shawls, like all the rest of the poor creatures Minnie and I used 

to laugh at ! " he continued. " The idea of my being laid by 

the heels in this wretched place, where three-quarters of the 

>eople are consumptives, and the fourth Monte Carloites ! " 

"What, do you mean gamblers?" ejaculated Sister Gabrielle 
r ith awe. "Are there any of those here? Not in this hotel, 
surely?" 

Well I should think you might tell that better than most ! " 

"I?" 

" Considering that you have been nursing one of them have 

j not? " 

"You don't mean " and then all at once a light broke up- 
>n her bewildered brain, and she understood the meaning of 
ler perplexities. 

"That lady opposite, whom you nursed; she is one of the 
egular old stagers frequenters of 'the tables,' you know." 

"I did not know it. How did you?" 

" They told me down-stairs the landlord, I think. I declare 
I should like to make her acquaintance, and get her to teach 
me the ins and outs of these wonderful ' systems ' they talk so 



832 HER LAST STAKE. [Mar., 

much about. Don't seem to have done much for her, though, 
do they? I heard she was just about cleaned out!" 

" I am afraid she is," answered Sister Gabrielle, gravely. 
And her thoughts went off again to the problem which was ex- 
ercising them night and day: how to help that soul which lay 
at her door, as it were, in sore need of rescue. 

" Can you spare me for half an hour, do you think, to go 
into the town ? " she asked of her patient. 

" Oh, dear, yes ! by all means, nurse. And you might get 
me some papers at the same time."- 

So she hurried off ; for a thought had come to her of the 
way to continue her apostolate of souls. Her destination was 
a well-stocked " librairie," or book-shop, which she had noticed 
once before, as announcing itself to speak English and provide 
the newest English books. 

" Do you sell rosaries ? " she asked them ; but they only 
stared in perplexity, and showed her a variety of objects, from 
penholders to artificial flowers. 

" Rosaries * chaplets,'" she insisted, and could not show them 
her own, because she had left it on Marion Falconer's lap. 

" Madame demande un cJiaplet" explained the shop-boy, re- 
tiring to giggle with his confrere at the back of the counter. 

"No, we do not sell * des objets religieux,' " explained the 
master, coming forward. 

"Where can I find some?" 

" Ma foi ! jc ne sais pas. Perhaps up in the old town not 
here." 

No, not there. Not where the English church, with its par- 
sonage and garden ; English-speaking shops which ' closed on 
Sundays,' and held notices of every variety of Protestant ser- 
vice ; where the English influence and English religion were 
paramount, and Catholicism a thing of the people, a supersti- 
tion of the aborigines, to be sneered at like Hinduism in India, 
and its attributes kept well out of sight. 

So she left the fashionable quarter the Mentone as it is 
known to the world of to-day and toiled up a steep little dingy 
street to the vicinity of the parish church, where, after some 
difficulty, in an odd little shop, which sold wools and gloves 
and a few fly-blown old religious pictures, she succeeded in find- 
ing the object of her search. 

"I .am later out than I expected to be," she explained as 
she made her reappearance, rather breathless and tired, in her 
patient's room. " I could not find what I wanted except in 



p 



1894-] HER LAST STAKE. 833 

the old town. And now, when I have made you comfortable, 
may I leave you again for a few minutes ? " 

And soon she was knocking at the door of Miss Falconer's 
room. 

By this time, it should be said, Marion Falconer had suffi- 
ciently recovered strength to be able to put on her walking 
things each morning, and creep slowly down-stairs and out in- 
to the bright, warm sunshine. Sister Gabrielle had managed to 
disinfect her room, and she was only deterred from taking her 
place with the rest of the world down-stairs by the dread of 
receiving her sentence of dismissal from the landlord. So that 
on this still, warm and sunny afternoon Sister Gabrielle was not 
surprised to find her standing before the tall gilt mirror over 
the mantel-piece arranging her bonnet and veil to go out. 

" I have come to redeem my rosary by bringing you an- 
other," said the nun, smiling brightly as she entered; "you will 
not mind my giving you one, will you ? For as I have not seen 
one among your possessions I fancy you must have lost yours." 

" I have indeed lost it many years since," replied Miss Fal- 
coner, with a wan little smile, as she turned from the glass and 
took the sister's two outstretched hands in hers with a sort of 
grave tenderness with which she now always received her. "You 
are very good to think of it and of me, as you do." 

" It is a poor, commonplace little one," said the former speaker ; 
" only for your use until you have a better one." And she 
laced a small red rosary in the other's palm. 

"Red! Rouge gagne ! " exclaimed Miss Falconer, almost 
gaily, as she took it. " Is it an omen may I take it so, I 
wonder ? " Then, seeing the shocked look on Sister Gabrielle's 
ace: "Oh! I horrify you, I know, dear sister. I cannot help 
it; all my thoughts turn one way! Will it please you better 
if I tell you that I actually used your rosary last night ? " 

" Yes indeed, I am glad. But do not let me keep you now ; 
you are going out." 

A shade fell over the transient brightness of Marion Falco- 
ner's face as these words recalled her to herself. " Yes, I am 
going out," she said, "and you will not like to hear where!" 

" Tell me." 

" In the first place, the sentence has been pronounced ; the 
landlord informed me this morning that I must leave to-morrow." 

"Oh!" gasped Sister Gabrielle, "what will you do?" 

" I am going to try one last chance one last throw for 
fortune." 



834 HER LAST STAKE. [Mar., 

"What do you mean?" 

" Listen. I pawned my watch this morning, and got this 
for it," showing some gold-pieces in her worn, shabby purse. 
" With this I am going, for the last time, to Monte Carlo." 

"Oh, dont!" broke in her listener. 

" I shall stake it all in a way that will double, treble itself, 
if it wins ; and if I win I promise you I will play no more ; yes, 
I know that is what you are asking me. I shall have enough 
then to support myself for a few days while gaining more 
strength to seek employment." 

" And if you lose?" 

" Then . . . don't ask ! " she answered abruptly. 

" But but why not live for those few days on what you 
have there ? " 

" Because I must, must, must have one throw more ! I 
cannot help it, the madness of it is upon me ; you cannot un- 
derstand the irresistibleness of the temptation." 

" I am afraid you are resisting grace," said Sister Gabrielle 
sadly. 

" Don't say that, but wish me good luck ! There ! Good- 
by and and, pray for me ! " She bent down and kissed the 
cheek of her new-found friend, and taking up the long-handled 
sunshade, with which she supported her still somewhat uncertain 
footsteps, she quitted the room. Sister Gabrielle took up her 
own large rosary, which lay upon the table near, and knelt 
down to say a portion of it " for that soul which is in danger of 
losing grace," as she whispered, before she left, with slow and 
saddened steps, that dull and cheerless room. 



CHAPTER V. 

It was somewhat early on the following morning perhaps 
about eight o'clock or so that Sister Gabrielle, coming for a 
moment out into the corridor into which all the rooms opened, 
found herself face to face with, almost knocking against, in 
fact, a little group of men who were entering the room in 
front of her, No. 27. " Why, that is Miss Falconer's room," 
she thought; "surely that unfeeling landlord has not turned her 
out already! " 

In another moment the identical individual himself appeared, 
his usually smiling appearance having given place to one of 
grave concern ; and, without noticing the looker-on, he passed 
her and went after the others into the room. A vague feeling 



1894-] HER LAST STAKE. 835 

of uneasy surprise drew Sister Gabrielle to linger just within 
the doorway of the room she had quitted and now re-entered, 
with some faint idea of catching and interpellating the landlord 
at his exit. Presently they came out, talking low, and still not 
observing her ; and she heard M. Grosjean address the fore- 
most gentleman, a quiet-looking, elderly Englishman, as " Mon- 
sieur le Consul." Presently, much to her surprise, she saw them 
close and lock the door, and a young man, who acted as the 
consul's aide or secretary, proceeded to affix seals to it in a 
very business-like manner, while his superior slowly paced up 
and down the corridor conversing in a low voice with the land- 
lord. When the official seals were duly affixed they departed, 
and silence again reigned throughout the place. 

Sister Gabrielle went back into the room and rang the bell 
once, twice, for the femme de chambre ; then came outside to 
avoid speaking in the invalid's room. 

" Did you ring for hot water? Here it is, ma sceur ! " said 
the lively chambermaid, whose services had considerably im- 
proved in attentiveness since Sister Gabrielle had begun to re- 
quire them on behalf of a rich Englishman instead of a lonely 
and impecunious " demoiselle." 

" What does that mean?" whispered the nun, pointing to 
the sealed-up door. 

" Ah, yes ! It is dreadful, is it not ? " 

" I do not know ; . . . what is it? What has happened ? " 
almost gasped her listener. 

" Quoi, vous ne savez pas ? She is dead, that lady who was 
there." 

"Dead?" 

The girl nodded. " Some accident, I do not know what it 
was rightly. Some say, indeed, that she destroyed herself. 
Anyhow she was to have left to-day, and now voila / . . . 
Are you ready for the coffee yet ? " 

" Yes no I mean yes, bring it," said Sister Gabrielle con- 
fusedly, her eyes still fixed upon the two great splotches of red 
wax, stamped with the English arms, which seemed to grow 
larger and larger before her eyes. And then she had to con- 
trol herself and go in and attend upon her invalid, who was 
rery vivacious, and talked of going for a drive, and getting 
lisinfected, and casting aside this horrid old fever. And then, 
for the first time, she found herself hailing with positive plea- 
sure the doctor's well-known tap at the door, listened patiently 
to the scraps of chat and questions of news with which the 



836 HER LAST STAKE. [Mar., 

patient plied him, as the only representative of the outside 
world whom he could at present reach, and followed him as 
sedately, to all outward appearance, from the room as on any 
other occasion. 

"Ah!" he exclaimed, as on closing the door behind him he 
caught sight of the red seals opposite, "that is the room, is 
it? Sad business, eh?" 

" Tell me what it is, please; I do not quite understand what 
has happened. Have you heard it all ? " 

" Just met the consul as I was coming up here, and he 
told me. Some lady, one of those regular Monte Carlo people 
who come to stay here and go up every day to 'the tables'." 

" To to gamble, you mean ? " 

" Yes, yes, roulette and rouge et noir, and so forth, you 
know. The sort of people who go in for it as a profession, a 
means of livelihood, you know." 

Yes well?" 

" Well, this person it appears used to go up there every day 
(only she had been ill lately and had not gone), and yesterday 
evening, as she was returning home, on arriving at the station 
and alighting from the train she well they don't know whether 
accidentally or on purpose, but at all events she got entangled 
as the train was moving on and killed." 

An exclamation of horror broke, involuntary, from the lips 
of the nun. The doctor suddenly turned and faced her. 

" Why why wasn't that the very woman you were nursing 
before you took my patient the first case, from whom he was 
supposed to have caught the fever ? " 

She nodded, unable for a moment to speak. 

"Then, bless my soul! you'll be wanted at the inquest most 
likely. They are trying in vain to find out anything about her 
who she was her relatives, friends, anything. I must remind 
the consul ! " 

" Oh,- pray, pray don't ! " breathed the nun, to whom the 
word "inquest" meant unutterable horrors. 

" But you must, you know ! " he persisted. " I suppose you 
know all about her ? " 

" Indeed I know nothing, nothing. Ask the landlord if I 
am not fully as ignorant as himself." 

" Oh! well, excuse me, but that's not possible. You who were 
with her, night and day, for weeks ... At all events, I shall 
tell the consul ! " And, full of importance, he hurried away down 
the stairs, and she heard his footsteps die away in the distance. 



1894-] HER LAST STAKE. 837 

An hour or two passed, and she went about her work as 
usual, with a sickening horror at her heart and a dreary longing 
to hear more of the tragedy which lay, as it were, at their door. 
Then a tap and a whispered summons came, and she found 
herself standing before M. Grosjean beside the still sealed door. 

"You know what has happened?" he said to her very 
gravely. " Can you tell us anything about her ; anything 
which may be of use at the inquest ? " 

She shook her head. " You know that I never heard any- 
thing of her past or of her friends; you asked me that before." 

" When did you see her last?" 

" Yesterday." 

"Morning or afternoon?" 

" Afternoon. I went in to see her, and found her dressed 
to go out. She went while I was there." 

" So you were almost the last person to speak to her, here- 
abouts at least. Well, how did she seem?" 

" Much as usual. Perhaps rather brighter than usual." 

" Did she tell you that I had given her notice to leave ? " 

"Yes." 

"What did she say about it?" 

" She said that she was going to ' try her luck ' once more." 

"And did she say what she would do if she lost?" 

" No." Thankful indeed was Sister Gabrielle to be able to 
speak that " no." She knew what was the underlying thought 
in the questioner's mind, the scarcely denned dread in her own ; 
and there rose up in her mind a wild desire to combat that 
suspicion. 

" Well, you can tell me nothing more ? " questioned M. 
Grosjean. " It is very perplexing. One does not know what to 
do. The consul has telegraphed to the lady who wrote once 
before you remember? The only address we have." 

"You . . . they will not want to question me else- 
where, will they?" 

" Oh, I suppose not, unless the consul wishes to see you." 

" Do tell me, please " she hesitated as to how to word her 
inquiry " how do they think it happened ? " 

"They say that either she missed her footing and fell under 
the carnage, or " he shrugged his shoulders with a significant 
gesture. 

"She fell down, I am sure of it!" responded the nun 
eagerly ; " you know she was still very, very weak from her ill- 
ness ; I have often seen her stumble in going upstairs." 



838 HER LAST STAKE. [Mar., 

"Ha! yes, that is true. I must tell them that! You see, 
it is very disagreeable for me ; people saying that she was in 
despair that that I was hard upon her, in fact. I do not 
think so; do you? I really could not keep her for ever." 

" No," said his hearer mechanically ; and within herself she 
was thinking, " one cannot expect a hotel-keeper to be merciful ; 
but what an awful, awful thing it would be to drive a fellow- 
creature to despair !' ' 

" Monsieur Grosjean," she called softly after him as he was 
turning away, "one thing I should like to ask you." 

"A votre service, ma s&ur f '" 

"Where iss/ie?" 

"The body, you mean? In a room near the station. It will 
be buried to-morrow." 

" I should like to see her once more. Would it be possible?" 

" Why yes, I suppose so. I will write a line which you 
can present to the people of the house, and they will admit 
you. Come to my bureau down-stairs when you want it." 

" Thank you." 

She went in to her patient, who was tranquilly unconscious 
of the tragedy, and told him she was going out. Then, ex- 
changing her indoor for an outdoor veil, she set forth duly fur- 
nished with an order for admittance from the landlord. It was 
a lovely morning, the sunlight sparkling on a thousand ripples 
over the sea, the clear blue headlands standing out distinct and 
fair along the coast, Bordighera and San Remo and all the 
Italian coast on the one hand, and on the other the white 
gleam of fair, foul, Circe-like Monte Carlo, like some vile, beau- 
teous traitress, laughing beneath the warmth of the sun. 

" What a beautiful world God has made, and how man has 
destroyed it ! " she thought to herself, as we all have thought 
when we gaze on the loveliness of earth and sea and sky which 
men call " the Riviera." Even Sister Gabrielle though she was 
a somewhat prosaic little soul felt uplifted for a moment into 
a feeling of that delight in living, that contentment in the mere 
sense of existence, which so seldom visits the inhabitants of any 
duller clime, and which one pictures to one's self as the true key- 
note of human joy in the old Greek times. And this all-per- 
vading beauty and entrancement of nature in early summer 
helped to bring a sharp, painful shock to her mind as she 
crossed the threshold of the darkened house indicated in her 
paper of directions, and knew herself in the presence of death. 

"You knew the povera donna?" questioned the gaunt, black- 



1894-] HER LAST STAKE. 839 

haired woman who guarded the death-chamber, and reached 
down with one hand a key from the wall above her, while the 
other arm supported a little swarthy " bambino " swaddled in rags. 

"Yes, I knew her," answered the nun, gathering, though im- 
perfectly, the sense of the patois speech. 

The woman turned the key and signed to her to enter the 
room beyond, where, on a humble bed, lay a shrouded form. 
Yes, it was Marion Falconer. The sad, dark eyes which she 
had watched so often turning in hopeless longing towards the 
light were closed now, in everlasting rest. The poor, thin 
hands were folded peacefully upon her breast, and as Sister 
Gabrielle laid her own warm one upon them she started, for 
there beneath her touch, twined tightly among the stiff fingers, 
was the little red rosary she had given. 

"Yes," nodded the woman, noticing her start of surprise, 
" it is a chaplet. It was found clasped in her hands when she 
died, and I placed it there. One would have thought she had 
been a Catholic, would not one ? Only it is not so, of course, 
for she was an Inglese, and they are not Cristiani" 

" She was a Catholic," answered the nun, in her broken 
Italian. " You must tell them so." And then she knelt and 
prayed, with a strange, dream-like sense of sorrow and loss, 
for the soul whose earthly tenement she had so long tended, 
until the woman grew impatient at her stay, and she knew 
she must return to her own work. " You will no more come 
back to that dull room, to sadness and pain, and weary wait- 
ing and anxious fears," she whispered, leaning over the quiet 
dead form. " Do you know now how I prayed for you ? I 
will still pray, all my life, for your soul ; and God is very mer- 
ciful. Good-by, dear ; good-by ! " And she kissed the white, 
cold lips, and went back into the southern sunshine. 

And this was all all that Sister Gabrielle ever knew ; for 
one's prayers are not always visibly answered in this world. 
And so it was that the tender-hearted little nun had never the 
consolation of learning (until, perchance, it was told her by an- 
gel voices in the hereafter) how the trembling footsteps had, even 
as she hoped, turned backwards like those of the Prodigal, to 
"arise and go to the Father," with a last plaintive appeal to Mary 
on her lips and in her heart as she clasped the little rosary, when 
the Divine Mercy, more merciful than its creatures, answered that 
appeal by a brief and all but painless death. 




840 HOLY WEEK IN SPAIN. [Mar., 

HOLY WEEK IN SPAIN. 

BY ALQUIEN. 

HO has not heard of the Holy Week ceremonies 
and processions of Seville ? the most gorgeous, 
the most extraordinary, the most interesting in 
the world ! Formerly, before the usurpation of 
Rome by Victor Emmanuel, the Eternal City 
stood first, as is natural, not only with its Holy Week but 
with all its religious ceremonies ; but since the dominions of 
the Holy Father have been wrested from him, and he is virtu- 
ally a prisoner in his own capital, they have been discontinued, 
and Seville stands unrivalled in the Catholic world for the 
pomp and diversity of its Holy Week pageants. 

Spain, although each day becoming better known, as each 
day she is taking a higher and more important place among 
the countries of Europe thanks to the noble and wise policy 
of the late, deeply lamented King Alfonso XII. and the years 
of peace and prosperity she enjoyed under him, and still enjoys 
under the regency of his virtuous widow, yet stands sufficiently 
out of the beaten track to be but comparatively little travelled 
even in these days of steamboats, express trains, Cook's tourists, 
and universal sight-seeing. 

It may not come amiss, therefore, to those who have not 
had the opportunity of visiting the country and seeing the 
ceremonies for themselves (particularly now, when the eyes of 
all the world are fixed on the land which played so important 
a part in the discovery of Columbus), if I copy for their enter- 
tainment a few of the jottings from my journal in Spain relat- 
ing to the celebration of Holy Week, both -in Seville and 
Madrid. I give the precedence to Seville, having chanced to 
spend my first year in Spain there. 

PALM SUNDAY. 

This afternoon the first of the processions took place. We 
had seats in one of the fine balconies of the Ayuntamiento 
(Town Hall), overlooking the Calle de San Francisco. All 
the balconies and windows were hung with colored velvets 
and stuffs, and filled with people waiting to see the pro- 



1 8 9 4-] 



HOLY WEEK IN SPAIN. 



841 



cessions pass. Down below, too, a dense human mass surged 
backward and forward at both sides of the street, each small 
unit in the great whole struggling and pushing in frantic en- 
deavor to get the best place in front. The long tiers of wooden 




THE GIRALDA A FAMOUS OLD ARABIAN TOWER IN SEVILLE. 

>enches and iron chairs, erected for the occasion and hired out 
at fancy prices for the week, were also packed as tightly as 
human ingenuity could devise. 

It was past five o'clock before the first of the processions 
made its appearance. First walked two men dressed in white 
VOL.LVIII. 56 



842 HOLY WEEK IN SPAIN. [Mar., 

robes, the long trains of which they carried over one arm, dis- 
playing white stockings up to the knees and buckled shoes. 
On their heads were high, peaked, sugar-loaf-shaped purple caps, 
with a flap or mask of purple silk falling over the face and 
completely concealing it, having only two holes for the eyes. 
In one hand they carried a long, lighted candle, in the other a 
white wand. These were the Nazarenos (Nazarenes), who came 
to clear the way for " Christ to pass." 

When they reached the spot where the Queen Mother, Isa- 
bel II., was sitting, they bowed low, and asked her in a loud 
voice if " Jesus may pass." Her Majesty, having made a sign 
to signify. "Yes," they turned back to desire the procession, 
which was waiting a short distance off, to proceed. They then 
returned with several other Nazarenes, some running, some 
walking, all clearing the way right and left with their wands. 
Behind them came an enormous gilt altar or stand, on which 
were the life-size figures of our Saviour bound to the pillar, 
and a Jew with uplifted scourge, surrounded by lighted wax 
candles in gilt candlesticks. The lower part of the altar was 
draped with black velvet, which concealed the thirty or forty 
men who were carrying it. 

The Nazarenes tapped the altar with their wands, and it 
stopped opposite to the queen's balcony. After a few moments 
her Majesty made a sign for them to go on ; the Nazarenes 
tapped again with their wands, and it was borne slowly away 
on the shoulders of its invisible bearers. After it marched 
from fifty to one hundred men dressed as Roman soldiers, in 
magnificent costumes ; short tunics and cloaks, heavy with gold 
fringe and embroidery, long, white silk stockings and gold sandals. 
A military band, its members in similar attire, marched at their 
head, playing a requiem. 

Then followed incense-bearers and clergy with crosses, ban- 
ners, etc., each person carrying a lighted wax candle. 

After an interval of about a quarter of an hour the next 
procession began to come in sight. It consisted of two pasos 
(as the images are called) ; one, our Lord before Herod ; the 
other, the Blessed Virgin accompanied by St. John. Both 
these images are real works of art, being exquisitely carved in 
wood by the celebrated sculptor, Roldau ; but they are dis- 
figured, like all the statues in Spain, by being dressed in real 
velvets, silks, and laces. Our Lady's costume on this occasion 
was of black velvet, with a long train of the same, embroidered 
with angels in gold relief ; a white coif like a nun's covered 



1894-] HOLY WEEK IN SPAIN. 843 

her head. St. John was decked out in crimson and gold ; our 
Saviour in a white robe, with a gold cord round the waist. 

The custom of dressing the statues in Spain dates back for 
centuries. It was introduced by one of the first Christian kings 
and has been kept up religiously ever since by the people, who 
consider it the greatest mark of respect they can show them. 
So their want of taste must be forgiven in consideration of their 
faith and simple piety. 

After these pasos came the usual Nazarenes (with white in- 
stead of purple caps), soldiers, Jews, high-priests, clergymen, 
crosses, banners, and incense as in the preceding procession. 

During Holy Week each parish church sends out a proces- 
sion consisting of one or more pasos, with accompanying Jews, 
Romans, and Nazarenes (who are members of the different 
charitable confraternities, and parishioners of that particular 
church), and each procession forms one entire scene or tableau 
of the whole Passion. The costumes, etc., often cost thousands. 
The parishes vie with each other as to which procession shall be 
most gorgeous and brilliant. All start from their parish church- 
es, passing through the principal streets to the cathedral, where 
they end. They make one great mistake, to my mind, in the 
order of the processions. As they are sent out according to 
the precedence of each parish church, it often happens that, 
instead of beginning with the first stages of the Passion, going 
consecutively through them and ending with the Crucifixion and 
Burial, as they could so easily do, the effect is spoiled by some 
of the later scenes being represented before the former ; the 
taking down from the Cross, for example, before the Prayer in 
the Garden, and so on. These processions being intended to 
place before the faithful, in the most vivid manner possible, 
during Holy Week, the sufferings endured by our Saviour in 
the various stages of his Passion, it would seem natural that 
the very secondary question of precedence should be put aside, 
and the parishes come to an understanding between themselves 
that the pasos should be sent out, not according to the anti- 
quity of the church that owns them, but according to the order 
of the scenes which they represent. But the parishioners con- 
sider their dignity, or rather the dignity of their church and 
pasos, is involved in the matter, and absolutely refuse to give 
up the rights they have enjoyed from time immemorial. 

On Monday and Tuesday there were no processions. 

On Wednesday the ceremonies began at five o'clock A.M. in 
the cathedral and lasted till eleven. One of the most 



844 HOLY WEEK IN SPAIN. [Mar., 

and beautiful sights I have ever seen took place there during 
High Mass the Breaking of the Veil. As the priest pro- 
nounced the words of the Gospel, " And the veil of the Tem- 
ple was rent in twain, from the top even to the bottom ; and 
the earth quaked and the rocks were rent," a roar of cannon 
shook the cathedral to its very foundation, and the white veil 
which hung from roof to floor at the back of the altar was 
torn down the centre from "the top even to the bottom." 

Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! went the cannon overhead, 
from the wide cornice overlooking the dismantled, black-draped 
altar, shaking the church like veritable thunder ; each flash 
lighting up the rows and rows of pillared arches and long, 
majestic aisles, always sombre and solemn, but doubly so to- 
day when, instead of the usual blaze of light from the innu- 
merable lamps and candles of feast days, the darkness was 
made more perceptible by the three mournful-looking black 
candles that stood on the altar. The effect was startling won- 
derful! The sudden explosion in the midst of profoundest 
silence ; the momentary flood of light ; then darkness denser 
than before, silence more profound from the contrast, to be 
followed by another flash and crash again and again, was al- 
most terrifying. In the afternoon we again went to the Ayunta- 
miento to see several processions pass. They lasted from three 
o clock till dark, and were so much like the Sunday's ones that 
they do not need description. There were three Crucifixion 
pasos, the Blessed Virgin again with St. John, and Nuestra 
Seilora de la Piedad (Our Lady of Pity) surrounded by the other 
holy women. Behind each Crucifixion walked a man in a pur- 
ple habit, with a rope round his waist, bare feet, and a mask 
on his face, carrying a ladder. The usual Nazarenes, soldiers, 
music, clergy, incense, etc., accompanied each procession. 

As each paso went by a voice in the crowd sang a few bars 
of an extraordinary kind of Andalusian chant or lamentation 
(saeta), which had a most striking and plaintive effect. The 
singer, whoever he was, had a very powerful voice, which rose 
high above the murmuring of the crowd, and could be heard 
distinctly all round. After each couplet he stopped (in the 
Andalusian style), and a shrill female voice took up the chant 
and sang another couplet. This was to represent the. women of 
Jerusalem lamenting over our Lord. 

The day's ceremonies finished with the Miserere in the 
cithedral at ten o'clock at night. It was exquisitely sung, and 
most impressive. 



1894-] HOLY WEEK IN SPAIN. 845 

HOLY THURSDAY. 

I 

This morning up again betimes, and off to the cathedral. 
After High Mass the Blessed Sacrament was carried in state 
from the high altar to the sepulchre, or monumento, prepared 
for it. Cardinals, bishops, and priests accompanied it in sol- 
emn procession, as also Queen Isabel and the infantas, with 
white mantillas on their heads and carrying lighted candles 
in their hands. 

The sepulchre, erected temporarily in the middle of the 
cathedral, was an immense structure of white and gold, reaching 
from floor to ceiling. It was composed of three stories, each 
of a different style of architecture the first Doric, the second 
Ionic, and the third Corinthian. Each story was supported by 
sixteen pillars, four at each side, the four sides being exactly 
alike, with figures of the patriarchs all round. The figures at 
the top were, of course, of colossal size, the cathedral being so 
lofty. The great cross at the top touched the roof. In the 
lowest story was a magnificent solid silver tabernacle of the 
same shape and style as the momunento, with its three stories 
and its four sides alike, in the centre of which the Blessed Sac- 
rament was deposited. Three hundred and thirty-six lamps 
hung round, which with the thousands of wax candles with 
which all available space in the three stories was filled, made 
the sepulchre one blaze of light, gold, and silver. 

From the moment the Blessed Sacrament is placed in the 
sepulchre on Holy Thursday here, as in Madrid no carriages 
or vehicles of any kind are allowed to pass through the streets ; 
the soldiers carry their arms reversed, as for a funeral ; nor can 
they salute with them even the king. The flags are hoisted 
half-mast high, the trumpets are muffled, and the bells silenced 
a great clapper being used instead until the Gloria is sung 
on Holy Saturday. 

All through the afternoon there were processions through 
the streets, much the same as those of the preceding days. 
The pasos were different, the same ones never being sent out 
twice during Holy Week ; but there was nothing particularly 
remarkable about them to need description. 

We were told that the most gorgeous and interesting of all 
the processions would take place at three o'clock in the morn- 
ing ; and we accordingly decided, in spite of our really hard 
labor of the days before, and all that we still would have to go 
through until Easter Sunday, to go to see it. 



846 HOLY WEEK IN SPAIN. [Mar., 

The streets through which we walked on our way to the 
Ayuntamiento were as crowded as if it were three o'clock in the 
afternoon instead of three A.M. 

This procession is called the Silenciosa, every one in it keep- 
ing strict silence from the time it sets out until it finishes. 
Many of the nobles and grandees of Spain walk in it dressed 
as Nazarenes. As they wear masks over their faces nobody 
knows who they are, and they are most careful not to let them- 
selves be recognized even by one another. 

The pasos were splendid, and the costumes of the Roman 
soldiers of extraordinary magnificence. The heels of their 
boots and hilts of their swords were of gold, and their tunics 
embroidered in gold and precious stones. 

GOOD FRIDAY. 

To-day throughout Spain every one dresses in deep mourn- 
ing. In the morning there were the offices and Mass of the 
Presanctified in the cathedral, and in the afternoon some 
very interesting processions, one of which, the Santo Entierro, 
I must describe. 

After pasos of the crucifixion and taking down from the 
cross, came a superb mausoleum of solid silver gilt, containing a 
crystal case, through which could be seen Montaire's exquisite- 
ly carved figure of the dead Christ. 

This was followed by a number of women dressed in black, 
with thick veils covering their faces, carrying lighted candles; a 
woman dressed in white, with a bandage over her eyes, to rep- 
resent Faith ; another as Veronica, with an open handkerchief in 
her hand, and her long hair falling to her feet and covering 
her face completely. These were people who came to fulfil an 
ofrecemiento, or vow, they made to obtain some favor, or in 
thanksgiving for one already granted. 

Next came a guard of Roman soldiers ; at their head a little 
boy mounted on a beautiful horse, which he sat splendidly, al- 
though he rode without stirrups. The horse was unshod on 
account of its being Good Friday. This was the Centurion. 
His dress was superb, his tunic and cloak literally blazing with 
precious stones. As he passed the queen his horse went down on 
its knees, as a royal salute, then rose and passed on. Soldiers 
followed, playing a requiem, with muffled trumpets and drums. 
Then came another paso, Nuestra Senora tie la Solidad (Our 
Lady of Solitude), dressed in black velvet ; her mantle, six or 
seven yards in length, was held up by four or five women, 






1894-] HOLY WEEK IN SPAIN. 847 

dressed in black and with veils concealing their faces, who 
walked behind. Then bishops, priests, and acolytes with incense, 
crosses, and banners. 

The queen and we of the royal party left our seats and, 
with candles in our hands, accompanied the procession until it 
reached the cathedral. 

HOLY SATURDAY. 

The Holy Week ceremonies finished this morning by the 
taking away of the black veil in the cathedral. 

A long black veil hung from roof to floor, concealing the 
altar. All was dark and sombre ; no lights, flowers, or orna- 
ments relieved the gloom. 

Suddenly, as the priest intoned the words Gloria in excelsis 
Deo, a volley of cannon thundered through the cathedral, and, 
as if by magic, the great black veil was drawn aside, and there 
stood the altar white and dazzling, one blaze of light, gold, 
and flowers, while a thousand sweet-toned silver bells were set 
ringing, the organ pealed forth a flood of harmony from its 
metal tubes, and the choir triumphantly sang " Glory be to 
God on high ! " 

HOLY WEEK IN MADRID. 

Madrid celebrates her Holy Week ceremonies in quite a dif- 
ferent manner from Seville. 

There are no gorgeous pageants or processions through the 
streets, except the royal procession on Holy Thursday ; every- 
thing is carried on inside the churches. All is devotional, stately, 
royal, as befitting the capital of Spain and the headquarters of 
"his most Catholic majesty." 

The most interesting of all the ceremonies are those which 
take place in the Chapel Royal of the palace. The following 
pages from my journal were written dur ing the Holy Week, 
April, 1885, when King Alfonso XII. was alive* and assisted at 
them in state, with the queen and royal family. 

PALM SUNDAY. 

This morning there was what is called capilta publica in the 
Chapel Royal ; which means that the king, queen, and royal 
family assist at Mass publicly and in state in the Chapel 
Royal, instead of privately in their tribune or oratory. 

The ceremonies began at eleven o'clock. A few minutes be- 
fore the hour the king and queen passed in procession through 

* King Alfonso died November 25, 1885. 



848 HOLY WEEK IN SPAIN. [Mar., 

the long gallery leading from their apartments to the chapel. 
In front walked one of the king's own servants ; after him the 
gentile S'hombres de casa y boca, the mayor domos de semana so 
called because each one is a week at a time on duty at the 
palace and the grandees of Spain. Then came the king, queen, 
and infantas. The king wore his gala uniform of captain-gen- 
eral, with the orders of the Golden Fleece, the collar of Charles 
III., and Grand Cross of San Fernando. The queen and in- 
fantas were richly dressed, and wore white mantillas. Imme- 
diately after them came the camarera mistress of the robes in 
England the mayor domo mayor (lord high chamberlain), da- 
mas and chamberlains in attendance, aides-de-camp, and the 
colonels of the halberdiers and horse guards to-day " on guard " 
at the palace. Last of all came the band of the halberdiers, 
playing a march. The gallery was hung with splendid tapestry, 
and lined on both sides with halberdiers, dressed in snow-white 
breeches, black gaiters, and red-faced uniforms, with halberds 
presented as their majesties passed. 

At the door of the chapel the royal corttype was met by the 
Cardinal-Archbishop of Toledo, the Patriarch of the Indies, and 
chaplains of honor. A raised dais, with a crimson velvet canopy, 
richly embroidered with the royal crown and arms of Spain in 
gold relief, stood a little below the altar, at the left. On it 
were two arm-chairs, or thrones, covered in crimson and gold 
like the canopy, for the king and queen ; and a little to one 
side, facing the altar, two cushions for them to kneel upon. 
On the right of the dais were chairs for the king's sisters, the 
infantas, and two rows of velvet- covered benches for the cama- 
rera, damas, grandees, etc., etc. On the other side, facing the 
dais, sat the mayor domos de semana, whose duty on this occa- 
sion was to serve the cruets, etc., during Mass. These function- 
aries only serve Mass when either a cardinal or a bishop offi- 
ciates, which always is the case at capillas publicas. At each end 
of the bench upon which the mayor domos sat stood two hal- 
berdiers presenting arms. They were relieved by others every 
quarter of an hour. The Cardinal-Archbishop of Toledo and 
the Pope's nuncio sat nearer to the altar, in front of the mayor 
domos, and at the end of the chapel, facing the altar, a bench- 
ful of chaplains of honor, in their crimson silk robes and long 
trains. While the High Mass was being chanted, the Patriarch 
of the Indies stood at the foot of the dais, and repeated aloud 
for their majesties the words of the ordinary. A chaplain of 
honor did the same for the infantas. 



1 894-] 



HOLY WEEK IN SPAIN. 



849 



So far the ceremonial of to-day was the same as that usual 
at all capillas publicas. After this comes the part peculiar to 
Palm Sunday. 

After the blessing of the palms, which took place before 
Mass began, the king and queen went up to the steps of the 
altar and received each a palm from the hands of the Cardinal- 
Archbishop of Toledo. When they had kissed his eminence's 
ring, and made a low reverence to the altar, they returned to 
their seats on the dais. Then two and two, the infantas, the 
ladies and gentlemen of the household already mentioned, and 
the chaplains of honor, all went up and received palms. The 
infantas, as well as the ladies in attendance, curtseyed low, 




THE TORRE DEL ORO IN SEVILLE. 



*~ ' : - -*Si- =7 

wice to the altar (coming and going) and each time they passed 

he king and queen. The poor ladies who have, of course, to 

urtsey to the infantas as well, find it no easy matter sometimes 

o achieve this feat gracefully ; as between trying to manage 

cheir trains and the long palms, which are so flexible that they 

keep perpetually bobbing up and down in their hands, it is quite 

a tour de force. 

The effect of these long, waving, golden palms during the 
procession, which took place after the first gospel, was splendid. 
The church seemed a moving forest of them. The cardinal- 
archbishop carried the Blessed Sacrament under a magnificent 
canopy, embroidered with gold and precious stones, the four 
gold poles of which were held by halberdiers, a guard of the 
same walking behind. After them came the Patriarch of the 



850 HOLY WEEK IN SPAIN. [Mar., 

Indies, cardinals, bishops, and officiating clergy, the nuncio, 
chaplains of honor, and acolytes with incense. Then the king, 
queen, infantas, ladies, gentlemen, mayor domos, and officers, all 
with long golden palms. It is impossible to give any idea of 
the brilliant effect of the procession as it went slowly down the 
church and out into the tapestry-hung gallery. 

The mingling and blending together of so many colors and 
hues, the rich vestments, the gorgeous uniforms, the burnished 
halberds bristling in the midst of a forest of golden palms, was 
dazzlingly beautiful. 

Having gone all round the gallery, the procession again 
entered the church and High Mass proceeded as usual. 

HOLY THURSDAY. 

To-day's ceremonials are the most interesting of all. 

Of the capilla publica with which they began it is needless 
to speak, having already described one. 

Immediately after High Mass was finished came the lavatorio 
in the grand Sala de Columnas, when the king washed the feet 
of twelve poor old men, and the queen those of twelve old 
women. 

At two o'clock precisely their majesties and the infantas 
entered the Hall of Columns, accompanied by all the cardinals, 
bishops, and clergy who had assisted at the capilla publica, the 
grandees of Spain, mayor domos, chamberlains, ladies and gen- 
tlemen in attendance ; the king in uniform of grand gala, with 
orders, crosses, and decorations ; the queen in full dress, her 
long court train borne by her lord high chamberlain, a magnifi- 
cent diadem of diamonds on her head and wearing a white man- 
tilla. The infantas and ladies who accompanied them were also 
in full dress, with court trains, jewels and ornaments; the 
trains of their royal highnesses being borne by mayor domos de 
semana, while the ladies carried theirs over their left arms. 

Round the hall several tribunes had been erected for the in- 
fantas, their suites, and the members of the corps diplomatique 
in Madrid, who are always invited to see this ceremony. 

Down the centre of the hall were two raised platforms. On 
the one at the right sat the twelve old men in a row, dressed 
in a complete suit of new clothes given to them by the king. 
A long table, laid for twelve persons, stood at some distance. 
On the other side sat the twelve old women, also dressed in 
their new clothes, the gift of the queen, with their table laid 
before them. A little way off was an altar with a crucifix and 



1894-] HOLY WEEK IN SPAIN. 851 

two lighted candles on it. Standing before it, the Patriarch of 
the Indies read aloud the words of the Gospel relating to the 
washing of the disciples' feet by our Lord. When he had fin- 
ished reading, the lord high steward tied a little embroidered 
band, fringed with gold, round the king's waist, as a symbol of 
the towel which our Saviour girt about him, and his majesty, 
followed by the lord high steward carrying a gold basin and 
ewer, ascended the platform. 

Then, kneeling down before each old man in turn, he poured a 
little of the water from the ewer over the feet, which he then 
wiped and kissed. At the other side the queen was performing 
the same office for the old women, in exactly the same way, 
attended by her camarera mayor. When the last foot was 
washed the king led the old men, one by one, to the table, 
and put them sitting at it ; while the queen did the same with 
her old women. 

Then their majesties served the twenty-four fortunate old 
mortals to a sumptuous fish dinner (it being Holy Thursday 
no meat was allowed), consisting of fifteen dishes and fifteen 
entremets for each one of the twenty-four. They were allowed 
to take the eatables away with them, as also the plates, dishes, 
knives, forks, spoons, glasses, and the loaf of bread and large 
flagon of wine which was given to each. 

The grandees of Spain in attendance on the king, forming a 
chain, passed each dish from one to the other till it reached 
his majesty, who laid it down before its owner; then a servant, 
who waited at the other side of the hall, took it and packed it 
ito one of the twenty-four large baskets prepared to receive 
The queen and her ladies did the same on the other 
le. 

Considering the number of dishes that had to pass through 
icir hands (1,400) their jnajesties got through their work in a 
wonderfully short time. By half-past three all was finished, the 
>t dish packed up, and the old people sent home with their 

>kets and a purse each, with twelve gold-pieces in it. Many 
>f them sell their baskets just as they are, before leaving the 
ilace gates, preferring the money they get for them (an onza, 

>ut 3 155.) to so many delicacies that they can neither un- 
derstand nor appreciate. There are always more people to buy 
than baskets to be bought, as it is not every day one can have 
a dinner such as the king has, and dressed by his own cook. 

Before finishing with the tavatorio I must relate a little 
anecdbte illustrative of the well-known generosity of the queen 



852 HOLY WEEK IN SPAIN. [Mar., 

mother, Isabel II., which was told to me by one of her own 
ladies, who was present at the scene. 

Years ago, when Queen Isabel was on the throne, one Holy 
Thursday, as she was washing one of the old women's feet, a 
magnificent diamond bracelet which she wore fell into the basin. 

The old woman picked it up and gave it to her majesty, 
but the latter, with her characteristic large-heartedness, handed 
it back to the astonished old dame, saying, " Keep it, hija mia ; 
it is your luck." 

At four o'clock in the afternoon the great event of the day 
takes place, when the king and queen, accompanied by their 
entire court, go on foot, in state, through the streets of Madrid, 
to visit seven sepulchres or churches where the Blessed Sacra- 
ment is exposed. The same churches are visited every year- 
San Isidore, Santa Maria, San Gines, Santiago, San Justo, La 
Incarnacion, and the Chapel Royal, which is always the last. 
Once the procession sets out, all the seven churches must be 
visited ; it never turns back even if it begins to rain, as some- 
times happens. If it rains before the hour fixed for the pro- 
cession to start, then of course it does not take place ; but 
once started, it makes the round of the churches despite the 
weather. 

As the clock struck four the royal cortege walked down the 
grand staircase of the palace, between two lines of halberdiers, 
and out into the Plaza de Armas, where, as also all along the 
route by which they have to pass, the troops are formed at 
both sides. Fresh sand is laid down in the middle, so that the 
ladies' long-trained dresses and light shoes may not be soiled 
as they walk over it. 

The windows and balconies are hung with colored velvets 
and cloths, and crowded with dark-eyed Madrilenas, with white 
mantilla and ever-fluttering fan. Down below the crowd is so 
great, at both sides of the streets, that the troops and gnardia 
civiles have hard work to keep the centre clear for the proces- 
sion. No wonder all Madrid is out-of-doors to-day, in her holi- 
day attire. It is not every day such a sight can be seen. 

As the stately procession slowly moves along, under the 
large arch which leads from the Plaza de Annas into the Calle 
de Santiago, one mass of light and color as far as the eye can 
reach, let me try to give an idea of the effect of the whole, 
by describing how it is formed and in what order. 

First walk the kings-at-arms and heralds, the ushers, gentiles- 
Jwmbres, mayor domes de semana, grandees of Spain, chamberlains, 



: 



1894-] HOLY WEEK IN SPAIN. 853 

and aides-de camp not on service to-day, the chaplains of honor, 
monsignores, bishops, archbishops, cardinals, the Patriarch of the 
Indies, and the king and queen her majesty's train borne, as in 
the lavatorio, by her mayor domo mayor. Behind the king and 
queen come the infantas, their trains borne by their mayor do- 
mos ; and after them the ministers, the lord high steward, the 
camareras, damas, chamberlains, and aides-de-camp on service. A 
line of halberdiers, with halberds on their shoulders, walk at 
each side of the royal party, and their fine band marches behind 
playing a requiem. 

As no carriages are allowed through the streets on Holy 
Thursday, the king's splendid state carriages, the finest in any 
European court, are absent from to-day's procession ; but the 
royal stables, etc., are represented by the coachmen, postilions, 
outriders, and grooms, in their gala liveries and powdered wigs, 
who, with the master of the horse and the equerries at their 
head, close the procession. Six beautifully carved and painted 
antique sedan chairs are carried, ostensibly in case any of the 
royal party should get tired or ill, but really because they are 
objects of art, and add greatly to the beauty of the procession. 
The escolta, or royal escort of horse guards, ride behind, with 
their long, white-plumed helmets and their brilliant armor gleam- 
ing in the sun. 

The effect of so many different uniforms and bright colors, 
the rich dresses of the ladies, their magnificent diamonds and 

ther jewels, sparkling and shimmering as the sun's rays touch 
em (for the sun is shining up above in the perfectly cloudless 

lue sky on this April day as only it can shine in the sunny 
south), is wonderfully fine. 

As each church is reached, those at the head of the proces- 

ion wait at the door till their majesties, infantas, and ladies 
pass in ; then all follow. They go out in the same order ; and 
so on until the seven churches are visited. 



GOOD FRIDAY. 

Every Good Friday the king pardons some prisoners con- 
demned to death. 

The names of all under sentence are brought to him by the 
ministers some days before, when his majesty carefully goes 
through their different cases and selects those whose crimes are 
least aggravated. 

The ceremony of pardoning them takes place in the capilla 
publica, during the Mass of the Presanctified, when the king 



854 HOLY WEEK IN SPAIN. [Mar., 

goes up to kiss the cross. The Cardinal-Archbishop of Toledo 
brings him a bundle of papers on which are the names of those 
he has decided to pardon, tied with black ribbon, asking him 
at the same time if he wishes to pardon them. 

The king takes off the black ribbon, and, handing the papers 
back to the cardinal, answers in a loud, clear voice that can be 
heard distinctly through the whole church : " I forgive them, as 
I hope God will forgive me." 

Never did the young king look more noble and kingly than 
when he pronounced these words, which came straight from the 
depths of his kindly, generous heart. 

During the afternoon, from twelve till three, the " seven 
words on the cross " are preached. 

The Chapel Royal is so dark that on entering one can see 
literally nothing. After awhile, however, as the eyes become 
accustomed to the darkness, one begins to distinguish, far in the 
distance, the outlines of three life-sized crucified figures, our 
Saviour between the two thieves. The altar has been taken 
away, and nothing is to be seen but mountains and rocks be- 
hind the three mournful figures. After each " word " is preached 
the choir sings, to full orchestral accompaniment, Haydn's 
"Seven Words." 

During the last, " Into thy hands I commend my spirit," 
there is a rolling as of thunder, and flashes as of lightning 
through the church. 

On Easter Sunday there is a curious custom in the palace 
worth mentioning the eating of the paschal lamb. 

When the capilla publica is over, their majesties and infantas, 
accompanied by all who have assisted at it, go into one of the 
rooms, where a table is laid with a white cloth covered with 
flowers, in the centre of which stands a whole roast lamb. 
Plates of many-colored eggs, bread, and salt are placed here 
and there on the table, and a crucifix between two lighted can- 
dles. One of the chaplains of honor holds a missal, from which 
the Patriarch of the Indies reads a blessing over the lamb, eggs, 
bread, and salt. The servants then cut up the lamb, and their 
majesties and all present are helped to a small bit of it, which 
they eat standing. The rest of the lamb is always given to the 
halberdiers. It is their right from time immemorial. 



1 8 9 4-] 



UNDER THE TI-TREES. 



855 




UNDER THE TI-TREES. 

A CONVERTS STORY. 

HE teacher sat in the quaint little school-house, 
with the hum of the children's voices in her 
ears and a vision of straight desks and parallel 
forms before her eyes, but she neither saw nor 
heard. The blackboard was opposite her, with 
its quotation from Longfellow's " Psalm of Life " written with 
white chalk in a round hand ; the modulator and its hieroglyph- 
ics stared her in the face ; there were the customary school 
works of art marvellous samples of black and white hung on 
the wooden walls, and the daily routine went on as usual. But 
the children knew that the school-mistress was dreaming through 
her mechanical task ; some of the younger and more mischiev- 
ous were taking advantage of her listlessness ; an older one, 
who had buried a little sister last year, said : " Hush ! her heart 
is down among the ti-trees." 

She did not hear. Nothing reached her save the rustle of 

the wind through the sedges, and that was carrying her back 

to the days when a tiny voice used to whisper " Mother." 

When the children left those other children who called some 

me else mother she roused herself, conscious of relief with 

the unwonted stillness, and crossed over to the high window. 

'he blackboard met her glance as she moved, and the words 

Life is but an empty dream " struck her. " Empty dream !" 

she moaned, standing with drooping hands by the window, 

yes, all an empty dream a bitter dream down there among 

the sedges." 

And the wind sighed among the reeds, bearing along with 
an aromatic perfume like that of the old English black cur- 
rant ; a flock of white cockatoos floated and screamed over the 
iistant range ; the mocking laugh of the kokaburra pealed from 
te trees near by ; and, down below, the creek was murmuring 
ts little tale to the sedges and maiden-hair. 

She had thought it a lovely scene the first time she gazed on 
it, just three years ago that very day. Time was, indeed, when 
the notion of spending her life in such a dull nook would have 
appalled her ; but life changes us all, and she saw rest and peace 



856 UNDER THE TI-TREES. [Mar., 

in this characteristic Australian valley, with its grazing cattle 
and its fields of golden maize shut in by precipitous, rocky yet 
wooded hills. Rest and peace for herself, and a happy home 
for little Willie. 

They had been gentle and kind, these homely valley people, 
though they sometimes glanced curiously at her and her baby 
boy. None asked for the explanation that she never volun- 
teered. It was enough for them that the low-voiced school- 
mistress had a sad face and was a devoted mother, though 
looking but a girl herself. They were all human enough to 
detect a history lurking in the soft, dark eyes, and to decide 
privately among themselves that Willie's father, whether alive 
or dead, was a ne'er-do-well. The teacher never spoke of him, 
perhaps had folded his memory away with her girlish visions of 
happiness ; he was only a name now only " little Willie's 
father," and little Willie was her world. 

The few men of that thinly populated valley seemed to 
realize this. In their freest moments there was never any jok- 
ing about the quiet little teacher winsome though she was and 
" too good for the place," as they averred. " Little madam " 
stood on a higher level, and made them feel sheepish. But 
little Willie was the pet of the valley, and not a man in it but 
would have risked his life to save mother or son. 

So life had run on placidly and monotonously till that race 
day when the champion rider of the valley, dashing past to be 
in at the fun, pulled up suddenly in front of the school-house to 
watch the children filing out, while the sunshine fell on the fair 
hair and black dress of their teacher. She glanced up with in- 
terest, guessing him to be the hero of the hour ; he gazed back 
gravely, with a sense of old memories dimly stirring within 
him. For the " Rider " had not always been a rough bushman ; 
his childhood had been spent with people of culture and refine- 
ment in the old country, and something about this simply 
dressed woman recalled associations that had been cast aside 
in a wild youth. The Rider was unprecedentedly thoughtful 
all that day, and was considered quite mean in the matter of 
"shouting," which had hitherto been one of his most attractive 
points. A week later he exhibited still more extraordinary 
symptoms : he was to be seen one morning walking through the 
orange plantation up to Mrs. Sims's cottage, where the school- 
mistress lodged, and there he deliberately inquired for a room. 

Mrs. Sims's breath was taken away ; when recovered, she 
used it with withering effect " as how 'tis but one spare room 



1894-] UNDER THE Ti- TREES. 857 

I have, and that's little madam's ; and more betoken we don't 
drink round this way, and the hotel's the better place for you." 

To which the Rider responded meekly that he had lost his 
old thirst, and wanted to talk farming with Mr. Sims ; and if 
the good mistress had no objection, he would make free to spend 
a night or two in the corn-shed 'twas fine weather. 

Mrs. Sims was silent with amazement, till the sudden sight 
of toddling Willie brought a dark flush to the Rider's cheek ; 
then her woman's wit divined the truth, but she hesitated and 
glanced at her guest. 

"Are you sure it's all right about well, about his father? 
You know we never heard aught or asked aught " 

"Tut," interrupted the Rider; "blank the father! 'Tis the 
mother I want to win. You'll say a kind word for me, Mrs. 
Sims? I've been wild enough, God knows, but a woman like 
that could make anything she liked of me if she loved me ; I've 
had no such chance before. You'll say the word ? " 

Mrs. Sims debated ; she was reckoned prudent and worldly- 
wise, but contact with the school-mistress had brought out the 
slumbering spiritual side of her bush-woman's nature and the 
Rider's words touched her; true enough he had had no such 
chance before, the chance of a sweet woman's purifying influence, 
and there was no saying what it might do for him. Heaven knew 
he had sown enough wild oats to settle down upon for life, and 
his selection might be made the finest in the district if he chose, 
and there was little madam too, who would be none the worse 
for a good home and a protector ; so at last she spoke : 

" I'm thinking there's one might say a better word than 
mine ; she dotes on Sonnie there." 

From that moment little Willie's staunchest friend was the 
bearded, rough-handed Rider. "Sonnie" revelled in city toys, 
rode on the backs of mighty steeds, went to market a-cock-horse 
on a pair of broad shoulders, and clutched the oars of the 
Rider's gray-and-red boat* Small wonder then if Willie's mother 
took kindly to the boy's chum, whose ways sometimes reminded 
icr of the city manners she had once dearly prized ; and at 
last it became understood all over the valley that the wild 
.ider was wearing the curb, and that the school-house would 
soon lose madam. 

It was all so sweet to her, to this girl for whom life had 
seemed to lose its illusions, who was living in a child's future 
at an age when others live in a rosy dreamland. So sweet to 
be wooed and watched over by one who would care for the 
VOL. LVIII. 57 



858 UNDER THE TI-TREES. [Mar., 

boy too; so sweet to note the Rider trying painfully to divest 
himself of his acquired bush ways, and know that this was done 
for her; so sweet to wander down by the creek, or in the un- 
natural moist stillness of the ti-trees, and listen to the tender 
words of which her young life had been empty; so sweet that 
perhaps well, little Willie was not less dear than before, but he 
was no longer her all. 

And one fair autumn eve they three had wandered down to 
the creek, down where the maiden-hair hung in pale-green 
masses over the reflecting water ; the hum of the locusts was in 
the air, a kingfisher flashed across the rushes, a faint sound 
reached them from among the ti-trees as the echo of a passing 
bell. At last little madam's voice broke the silence : 

" I must go on ; I have a message to give for Mrs. Sims/ 1 

" Let Sonnie go," said the Rider ; " he knows his way about." 

" 'Es, moder," lisped the child, " 'et me do 'ike a big boy." 

She demurred with a mother's tremors. 

" The child's safe enough," urged her lover ; then he added 
in a whisper : " we are never really alone, darling." 

She gave in at that ; with one last kiss the boy sped away, 
and the mother listened to the Rider's love-tones, which the 
sedges caught up in rustling whispers. How beautiful life was, 
with the evening's hush and the morrow's hope upon it ! 

Suddenly the mother's heart stood still: "Hush! what was 
that ? " 

The Rider laughed : " The crows, my girl ; 'tis their hour." 

She shook her head : " No, something has happened; I heard 
or felt something. Oh! if the child Willie ? little Willie ?" 

She had bounded away with that cry, rushed through the 
adjoining paddock as fast as her beating heart and failing limbs 
could carry her, and there yes, there, by the fence, was her 
darling, pale, senseless, a great bruise on his sweet forehead, 
and the Rider's favorite mare standing close by ! 

She had him buried down among the ti-trees. She was 
sorry afterwards to have laid him in so sad and sunless a spot ; 
but at the time the oppressive gloom harmonized with her own 
misery ; the cry of the bell-bird seemed to her like a church's 
chime near her darling, and she knew of a spot close by where 
she could gather golden immortelles to lay on the tiny mound. 

So they left him beneath the ti-trees where the wild doves 
gather. 

When she came back, with her set white face in its black 






1894-] UNDER THE TI-TREES. 859 

frame, good Mrs. Sims took the shrinking, girlish figure into her 
big, motherly arms and burst out crying for sheer sympathy : " My 
poor dear, my poor dear!" she sobbed, "don't take on like this; 
you've been the best mother that ever was, that we'll all 
say, and what has to be has to be, my dearie, and fretting 
won't mend it ; and 'tis for the best, sure, sure, and mayhap 
you'll see it by-and-by." 

" For the best ! " broke passionately from the pale, stiff lips ; 
" my darling's murder for the best ! " 

" Eh, my poor dearie, who knows ? he might have come be- 
tween your happiness another man's child, you know I've seen 
it myself. But there ; here's one that can talk to you better than 
I, and comfort you too in time ... it takes time, dearie 
and and I'll just leave you together." 

Then, for the first time, little madam noticed the Rider 
standing beside her, and felt his strong arm about her; she 
turned, bewildered. 

" What did Mrs. Sims mean ? " she wailed. 

" My poor girl, my poor darling ! she put things badly. Of 
course that could never be dear little Sonnie could never have 
come between ; but now you see he has brought us closer than 
ever." 

"Sonnie! my Willie?" 

'* Yes, sweetheart ; I loved him dearly, and he has left you 
to me . . ." 

She pushed him away and stood like a stone : " He has come 
between us ! Surely you understand ? " 

". . . Margaret ! " 

" He has come between us for ever. I sent him to his death 
while I stayed with you your mare killed him ; do you think 
I can forget ?" 

" My girl, my own girl, this is madness ! It was an accident 
his own father might have caused it in the same way." 

"His own father? A brute who never cared for mother or 
child ? Yes ! But you you I forgot the child for your sake ; 
we murdered him between us. ... Go ! " 

" Margaret, will you murder me too ? Has your sorrow 
killed your love this sorrow that binds us closer, that makes 
you dearer than ever? I will not believe it; don't ask me to 
give you up you, my one life's blessing ! " 

" Go I think I am dead. I feel nothing, see nothing but 
my boy's face ; . . . my darling, killed by me by you. 
Go!" 



86o UNDER THE TI-TREES. [Mar., 

After that she knew nothing for days. When she grew 
strong again, able to renew school duties, they told her she 
had been light-headed with fever, and that the Rider was going 
mad with the drink. 

And all this was what she was thinking of that summer af- 
ternoon as she stood at the open window. At last, growing 
restless, she put on her hat and wandered down to the ti-trees. 
Yes, there it was among the ferns and mosses and lurid red 
lichen of the morass, the tiny mound that was the one sacred 
spot on earth for her ; the yellow immortelles she so often re- 
newed were smiling brightly beside a bunch of faded maiden- 
hair and flannel- flowers, while the church chime of the bell-bird 
rang through the overhanging gloom. In the far distance sound- 
ed the heavy thud of horse's hoofs. 

And this was all life held for her. 

Back to the school-house, wearily remembering some neglected 
duty back to the dreary forms and desks that show up shadowy 
in the twilight. Was life to be all forms and desks till she 
reached that rest under the ti-trees ? She strikes a light, and it 
falls on the dismal regulations hanging on the dull walls the 
instructions to visitors, to teachers, to parents, the everything- 
by-rule system of her halting, dragging lot. Suddenly she falls 
on her knees, and, with streaming eyes uplifted to heaven and 
hands raised in supplication, she wails : " O holy Mother of 
God, help me ! Thou who hast known all sorrow, be a mother 
to thy sinful child ; intercede for me, for there is naught but 
stubbornness in my heart, and bitterness against the will of my 
Heavenly Father ! Blessed Virgin ! the child was my all ; the 
light of my existence, a very part and parcel of my being ; 
what is there for me to live for now ? " . . . The blackboard 
comes within her range of vision, and then, lit up by the dazzling 
rays of the full moon, she sees the heaven-sent message : " The 
grave is not the goal. Let the dead past bury its dead." She 
bows her head and murmurs, "Thy will be done." Awestruck, 
she gazes on the heaven-sent message, and heeds not a form 
which silently enters the room and kneels at her side. " Mar- 
garet," whispers a voice, " thy God shall be my God. Wilt 
thou not save my soul from perdition ? " 

Silently she puts her hand in his, and from the ti-tree mo- 
rass comes the knell of the bell-bird. 



I 894.] 



EASTER CAROL. 



86 1 




EASTER CAROL. 



ALLELUIA! He has risen, 

Christ the Lord and Christ our King ! 
Alleluia ! He has risen ; 

Triumphant joy ! 'Tis so we sing. 

Out of the night of sorrow He cometh, 
Out of the grave of silence and woe. 

Lo ! see the light of the day as it dawneth- 
Glorious Easter joy doth bestow. 



Alleluia ! He has risen, 

Christ the Lord and Christ our King ! 
Alleluia ! He has risen ; 

Triumphant joy ! Tis so we sing. 



HENRY H. NEVILLE. 



New York. 




SULPICIAN CHURCH AND SEMINARY AT OKA. 



A RETREAT AT LA TRAPPE. 




BY W. L. SCOTT. 

! N the picturesque shores of the River Ottawa, 
before it divides to embrace within its mighty 
arms the island of Montreal, there stands, nest- 
ling in among the Laurentian Hills, the Trappist 
Monastery of Notre Dame du Lac des Deux 
Montagnes. The nearest village is Oka, about three miles 
away, conspicuous from the river by its pretty church and semi- 
nary, monuments to the zeal of the good Sulpician fathers, 
and its Stations of the Cross, planted on the steep and rugged 
mountain-side by the early missionaries, and still visited yearly 
by thousands of pious French-Canadian pilgrims. Coming from 
Ontario, where everything is so new, one is impressed and even 
overawed by the antiquity of the Oka mission, with its parish, 
register running regularly back for over two centuries, its silver 
statue of the Virgin and Child, presented to this very mission 
by Louis XIV. himself, and its numerous old French paintings, 
sent here for preservation from the vandals of the French 
Revolution. But at the monastery, where some twelve years 
ago all was in a state of nature, and where the present build- 
ings are scarcely more than two years old, one is nevertheless 
carried back by the life one sees to an antiquity compared 



1 8 9 4-] 



A RETREAT AT LA TRAPPE. 



863 



with which the oldest records of the mission are but of yester- 
day back for twelve hundred years before the first Sulpician 
grounded his canoe on the shore of the Ottawa ; back far into 
the dawn of Christianity, into the beautiful ages of faith ! 

I had frequently heard of the monastery on the shores of 
the Lake of Two Mountains, and had formed a vague idea 
that a visit to it would be likely to prove interesting ; but it 
was left for a chance journey of pleasure in the summer to 
bring this about. 

August of that year found a party, of whom I was one, en- 
camped on an island in the Ottawa not far from Oka, and a 
trip to the monastery was naturally looked forward to as one 
of the chief features of our visit. Accordingly, one beautiful 
summer morning we set out in our canoes, and after a paddle 
of five miles arrived at Oka village, where we easily obtained 
conveyances to carry us on to our destination. Arriving there 
we saw before us a long, narrow, two-storied wooden building 
standing in the centre of a very considerable vegetable garden, 




IN THE NEW STONE MONASTERY ONE WING is SET APART FOR GUESTS. 

every part of which, even to the refuse4ieap, was neatness it- 
self ; and where might be seen, here and there, a white or brown- 
robed figure patiently laboring at his silent task, but with a 
look of perfect peace and contentment shining from his counte- 
nance, such as is not often found outside the cloister. 



864 



A RETREAT AT LA TRAPPE. 



[Mar., 



We were received by the "guest-master," or monk charged 
with the reception and entertainment of visitors, and were by 
him shown over the building, our innumerable inquiries being 
answered with a patience and good-nature surprising when one 
remembers that the ordeal must be for him one of constant re^ 




THE WORKING-DRESS is WHITE, 
WITH A BLACK SCAPULAR. 



currence. For here let me say that hospitality is a traditional 
characteristic of the order, and one right royally carried out at 
the present day. Whether your visit extend for hours, days, or 
weeks you are most welcome, and the best that the monastery 
can afford is at your disposal. In the new stone monastery, of 
which I shall speak presently, one whole wing, called the hos- 
pice, is set apart for guests ; and the first question asked by 
the porter is, "How long do you intend to stay?" not, as one 
might suppose, in an inhospitable spirit, but with a view to the 
making of immediate preparations for your accommodation. 
Nor is the hospitality of the monks by any means confined to 
Catholics ; all are indeed welcome ; and I may mention that a 
well-known Anglican clergyman of extreme High-Church views, 
and himself somewhat of an ascetic, occasionally retires there 
for a week of prayer and mortification, and, not content with 
the ordinary rule prescribed for guests who are making a re- 



8 9 4-] 



A RETREAT AT LA TRAPPE. 



treat, conforms rigorously during his stay to the severe rule of 
the Trappists themselves. 

Probably the first thing that strikes one on entering the 
monastery is the bareness of the rooms and walls. If we ex- 
cept the rooms set apart for guests, which are comfortably 
furnished, there is scarcely even a chair or table to be seen, 
and not a picture, save that in the cloister there is a set of 
Stations of the Cross of the very simplest and plainest pattern. 
But even more striking still is the quaintness of everything one 
sees the wooden latches to the doors, .the wooden spoons and 
forks in the refectory, the carved wooden stalls in the little 
chapel, and, most picturesque of all, the enormous leather and 
brass-bound breviaries, with the lines of the chant nearly an 
inch wide, and some of them printed entirely by hand by means 
of stencil-plates. 

As the old wooden monastery through which we were then 
shown has since, thanks to the untiring exertions of the monks, 
been replaced by a handsome stone structure more in keeping 




THE TRAPPISTS ARE FARMERS, AND EXCELLENT FARMERS THEY ARE. 

with the growing needs of the rapidly-increasing community, it 
will be more to the point to describe the latter than the for- 
mer. The monastery when completed will form a hollow square 
enclosing a considerable courtyard, but at present only two of 
the sides and a portion of the third have been erected. Of 



866 A RETKEAT AT LA TRAPPE. [Mar., 

these the western wing forms the hospice already alluded to, 
while the central and eastern portions are occupied by the 
monks themselves. The remaining wing will be devoted to a 
handsome chapel, or rather church, when the funds at the dis- 
posal of the monastery will permit of its erection. Meanwhile 
a temporary chapel in the upper story of the east wing is used. 
The three great centres of monastic life within the building are 
the chapel, the cloister, and the chapter. The cloister, the 
study of the monks, is a long, narrow room or hallway running 
around the three sides of the building and looking out on the 
enclosed courtyard already referred to. The chapter, the offi- 
cial meeting-place of the community, is a square room forming 
a sort of annex to the chapel, and bare of furniture save for a 
wooden bench fixed around the walls, and a rough wooden 
throne or seat in the centre for the abbot. 

At one side of the main building stand ample and extensive 
barns and stables devoted to the accommodation of the stock, 
of which the monks possess an exceedingly fine show, and to 
the storing of the produce of the farm. On the other side, 
turned by a picturesque little mountain stream, are grist and 
saw mills, for the community supply themselves with both flour 
and lumber. There are also creameries, cheese-presses, and 
wine-vats, besides other necessary outbuildings, the whole form- 
ing quite an imposing array. At the entrances to all the build- 
ings are affixed notices to the effect that women will, under no 
circumstances, be admitted, this forming the one exception to 
the universal hospitality of the monks. From the enumeration 
of their outbuildings it will be evident that the Trappists are 
farmers, and support themselves by the sale of the produce of 
their farm. And excellent farmers they are. I have been told 
that in the time that they have been at Oka they have worked 
quite a change in the appearance of the whole country-side, not 
alone within the limits of their own demesne, but likewise in 
the farms of the habitants for miles around, who have adopted 
their methods and followed their example with most gratifying 
results. That their example is worthy of imitation will be evi- 
dent from the merest glance at their neat and well-kept fields, 
their trim and regular stone fences, and the marked absence of 
waste and rubbish from about their premises, to say nothing of 
the excellence of their stock, and in fact of all the several 
products of their farm. The success they have met with will 
be the better appreciated when I say that twelve years ago 
they came to Oka, a party of ten without money or capital of 






1894- A RETREAT AT LA TRAPPE. 867 

any kind. From the Sulpicians they obtained a free grant of 
about one thousand acres of land, but almost entirely unculti- 
vated and even uncleared, and so rough as to make profitable 
cultivation appear little short of an impossibility. Charity 
brought them a few head of cattle, some seed and food for 
immediate use, and from this humble beginning they have 
grown to a community of some sixty souls, occupying a mon- 
astery which cost over eighty thousand dollars, having about 
five hundred acres cleared and under cultivation, over two hun- 
dred head of cattle, besides horses, sheep, pigs, and poultry, 
and employing during harvest-time about sixty or seventy 
hands in addition to the members of the community. They 
are, moreover, at present arranging for the establishment of an 
offshoot at Lake St. John, P. Q., where a considerable tract of 
land has been donated by the government. 

Although our visit lasted only about an hour, it created in 
me so deep an impression that before it was over I had fully 
made up my mind to take the first opportunity of returning 
and spending a few days of quiet retreat in the holy solitude 
of La Trappe. What a beautiful thing is a retreat! a time 
devoted exclusively to prayer, and to a careful examination of 
ourselves and of how we are progressing in the great business 
for which we were sent into the world. Yet to those who 
have never spent any time in a religious house the real beauty 
and value of a retreat must be largely unknown. Many of the 
secular confraternities, happily so common among us, hold 
annually what is called " a retreat," but which is more proper- 
ly a short " mission." Incalculable, indeed, is the good brought 
about through the instrumentality of the mission ; yet to my 
mind no mission, however eloquent the preacher, is capable of 
producing the lasting impression that is frequently the result of 
a retreat in a religious house. For in the latter case one is 
entirely cut off from home, business, friends, and daily avoca- 
tions, and has, in short, for the time being severed every tie 
that binds him to the world. The advantage of such seclusion 
for the purpose of entering into one's self is obvious. 

It was some months before time would permit of my carry- 
ing out my intention, but at length, in November, I wrote ask- 
ing whether I could spend a few days at " Notre Dame du 
Lac." The answer was not long in coming. " Our doors and our 
hearts," they wrote, "stand open to receive you "; and so indeed 
I found it during the two retreats I have since had the happi- 
ness of making there, one in the old wooden monastery and 



868 A RETREAT AT LA TRAPPE. [Mar., 

one a year later in the handsome stone building I have just 
described. And it is in the hope that some among my readers 
may be induced to share that happiness that I have essayed a 
description of my experiences. 

Before, however, attempting to describe those days of holy 
quiet, let me say a few words respecting the order whose guest 
I was. 

Many are the errors passing current even among well- 
informed Catholics regarding the life at La Trappe, and of 
these one, perhaps, of the commonest is the idea that the 
Trappist rule is a novelty, tolerated indeed by the church, but, 
owing to its extreme severity, refused the formal approval of 
the ecclesiastical authorities. Nothing could be further from 
the truth. The rule followed by the Tra>pists is the oldest of 
all rules first both in time and excellence, the model of every 
religious legislator, the rule laid down for his followers by St. 
Benedict at Monte Casino nearly fourteen -hundred years ago. 
The visitor to Oka, at the end of the nineteenth century, sees 
realized before his eyes the life of Saint Benedict and his com- 
panions at the beginning of the sixth. How vividly does this 
thought bring home to us the lasting good that, under the 
grace of God, one man may accomplish Saint Benedict after 
fourteen centuries still living in his works ! Who shall be able 
to calculate the extent of sanctity and self-mortification, of 
glory to God and peace to men, born of his rule during the 
long course of fourteen centuries? 

For the benefit of those of my readers who may be unfa- 
miliar with the history of monastic institutions, I may perhaps 
be here permitted a short historical digression. The monastic 
life, as is well known, is at least as old as Christianity, but for 
the first five centuries of the church such congregations of ceno- 
bites as existed were without fixed rules, were practically mere 
voluntary segregations of pious laymen, and were subject to 
very great fluctuations both in numbers and fervor. Saint Bene- 
dict, through the instrumentality of his famous " rule," drafted 
at Monte Casino, in Italy, in 529, wrought so radical a change 
in monastic institutions, and placed them on so firm and satis- 
factory a basis, as to deserve to be considered the founder of 
monasticism. But time too often dulls the first fervor of a reli- 
gious community. Saint Robert, when, in 1098, he became 
Abbot of Molesme, found the Benedictines, excellent men it is 
true, but interpreting their rule in a milder sense and living a 
life much less mortified and austere than that of the companions 



I894-] 



A RETREAT AT LA TRAPPE. 



869 



and immediate followers of Saint Benedict. He accordingly re- 
solved to exert himself to renew the rigor and fervor of the 
rule as followed in the early days of the order, and with that 
end in view retired to the desert of Citeaux, and there founded 
the Cistercians, or Order of Citeaux. With this order the rule 
of Saint Benedict was retained without alteration or addition, 
but was interpreted in its original and strict sense. As, however, 
the decadence of the Benedictines had been largely due to the 
complete independence of each monastery, a new system of 
government was adopted by which all their monasteries were 




IN THE CHAPEL. 

united under one head, the Abbot of Citeaux, and were sub- 
mitted to a system of mutual visitation. The dress also was 
changed from black to white, and devotion to the Mother of 
God was made a special feature of the new order, it being 
adopted as an invariable practice to dedicate every monastery 
to her honor. Under St. Robert and his immediate successors, 
St. Alberic and St. Stephen Harding, and especially under the 
great St. Bernard, the new order developed with such prodi- 
gious rapidity that at the death of the latter saint it numbered 
some five hundred monasteries, scattered over the whole of 
Europe. So great was the influence of St. Bernard on this de- 



870 A RETREAT AT LA TRAPPE. [Mar., 

velopment that he may justly be looked upon as one of the 
founders of the order. 

But all things human are subject to decay, and a day came 
when even the austere and saintly Cistercians had need of a 
reformer to recall them to their first fervor. The cause, how- 
ever, which operated most powerfully in bringing about this 
decadence was one beyond the control of the monks the sys- 
tem, namely, of the appointment of "abbots commendatory" 
by the temporal rulers of the state. Under the rules of the 
order an abbot is elected by the monks of the monastery over 
which he is to rule, and the election must then be confirmed 
by the pope ; but with the increase in wealth of some of the 
monasteries the right of appointing the abbot was frequently 
usurped by the king, and the title conferred on some court 
favorite without any regard to his fitness for the office. The 
result may easily be imagined. Men were appointed who were 
priests only in name, and frequently not even that. Disorder 
reigned supreme, and the enforcement of the rule became im- 
possible. Strange to say, the reformer came at length in the 
person of one of these very abbots commendatory. Armond- 
Jean le Bouthillier de Rance\ created in 1638, while yet in his 
fourteenth year, titular abbot of the Cistercian monastery of 
Notre Dame de la Maison-Dieu de la Trappe, after a youth 
spent in pleasure and debauchery, was at length converted, and 
in 1664 instituted a vigorous reform of the order. He restored 
the greater part of the primitive austerities in all their origi- 
nal rigor, and demonstrated by personal practice that the peni- 
tential life of the monks of the middle ages was no less suit- 
able to and possible in modern times. 

No summary, however brief, of the history of the Cistercians 
or Trappists, as they are now more commonly called would be 
complete without at least a passing reference to the preserver 
of the order during the trying times immediately following the 
French Revolution Louis Henri de Lestrange, known in reli- 
gion as Dom Augustin, Abbot of La Trappe. Expelled from 
France, the wanderings over Europe of the little band of 
Trappists, with Dom Augustin at their head, reads like a ro- 
mance. But the sun at length came out from behind the clouds, 
and he lived to lead them back to France and to La Trappe, 
lived to see the order spread in a way that, considering the 
austerity of the life, is almost phenomenal. 

De Ranc had departed somewhat from the Cistercian con- 
stitutions, and had introduced some slight changes in govern- 



1 894.] A RETREAT AT LA TRAPPE. 871 

ment. Dom Augustin abandoned these and restored the con- 
stitutions in their entirety. The difference gave rise to two, or 
rather three, branches of the order, two of which followed the 
form of government laid down by De Ranee, and the third that 
of the Cistercian constitutions pure and simple. Happily our 
Holy Father, Leo XIII., now gloriously reigning, has brought 
about the fusion of these branches into one harmonious and 
powerful whole. 

The growth of the order during the present century has 
been, as I have said, phenomenal. The nineteenth century is 
not usually considered an age of severe mortification, nor might 
it be thought that any rule of life could survive fourteen cen- 
turies and still retain its popularity. Yet, while at the fall of 
Napoleon the order was almost extinct, it has in the seventy 
succeeding years grown to a membership (including Trappist 
nuns) of over three thousand, living in some fifty-five abbeys 
and priories. The greater number of these are in France and 
Germany, but there are two in Ireland, two in England, two in 
Italy, one in Turkey, one in Algiers, two in the United States 
(Gethsemane, in Kentucky, and New Melleray, in Iowa), and two 
in Canada. These last are Little Clairvaux, at Tracadie in Nova 
Scotia, founded in 1814, and that at Oka. To these are short- 
ly to be added two new foundations: that at Lake St. John 
already referred to, and one at St. Norbert in Manitoba, an 
offshoot from the Abbey of Bellefontaine in France. 

But what is this " rule " so often referred to ? Time will 
not permit of a lengthy description of it, but a short summary 
cannot prove otherwise than interesting. Probably the most 
striking feature of the life is the silence, which is absolute and 
perpetual. The idea of this is very beautiful. The voices of 
the monks are put to one use, and one only, that of prayer! 
How little need they fear that terrible account of "every idle 
word " that we shall all one day be called on to render. 

There are, of course, some necessary exceptions to the rule 
of silence, but they are strictly limited. The abbot, prior, and 
sub-prior are allowed to speak and may be spoken to by all, 
but none of the monks may speak to each other ; when some 
such communication becomes absolutely necessary, the two monks 
who require to speak go before one of the superiors and com- 
municate the desired message through him. It might be thought 
that while at work in the fields or in the outbuildings the ex- 
change of words connected with the work on hand would be a 
matter of constant necessity, but such is not the case. While 



8 7 2 



A RETKEAT AT LA TJRAPPE. 



[Mar., 



engaged in their labors the monks are grouped in parties of five 
or six, and one of their number is placed in temporary authority. 
He indeed may speak to the others whenever the nature of the 
work imperatively requires his doing so, but they cannot under 
any circumstances speak to him, even to ask him for directions. 




THE RULE is OF ALL RULES 
THE MOST SEVERE. 



The officers of the monastery are permitted to speak to stran- 
gers in the course of their ordinary dealings with the outer 
world, and the guest-master is not only allowed to speak to the 
guests of the monastery, but is even obliged by the rule to 
make himself as entertaining to them as possible. But there 
are five places in the monastery the dormitory, the refectory, 
the chapel, the cloister, and the chapter where even the few 
exceptions I have enumerated do not prevail, and where the si- 
lence may not be broken even by those in authority, unless, 
of course, in a case of urgent necessity. 

The time of the Trappist is divided between prayer, manual 
labor, study, and sleep. An hour, or even a moment, devoted 
to recreation is a thing entirely unknown to his calendar. I 
might add eating to the list, but he devotes so little time to that 
very necessary occupation as to make it hardly worth mentioning. 
His meals vary in number and time with the various seasons 
of the year. In summer, when his out-of-door work is of course 
the hardest, rising at two in the morning (as he does all the 
year round), he takes his first meal, which you may call as you 
please either breakfast or dinner, at half-past eleven ; partaking 
at four of a light collation, consisting as a rule of a little dry 



1 8 9 4-] 



A RETREAT AT LA TRAPPE. 



873 



bread and water, though other articles of diet, such as fruit or 
vegetables, may occasionally be added, at the option of the 
abbot. From September 14 until Ash Wednesday he takes his 
first and only meal of the day at half-past two in the afternoon, 
when he has been up for twelve hours and a half. During Lent 
his fast is still more rigorous, his one meal being postponed un- 
til half-past four, when he has been up singing his office, work- 
ing, studying, and praying for fourteen hours and a half. And 
yet we in the world, when indeed we fast at all and do not 
find a pretext for exemption, grumble at having to wait for our 
breakfast from seven or eight until twelve ! I used particularly 
to pity the monk who was cook for the hospice, and was obliged 
to prepare breakfast for the guests at six, and dinner for them 




THE VILLAGE CHURCH. 

at half-past eleven, and had still several hours to wait before 
tasting food himself. 

Nor is the fare of the Trappist, when his meal hour does 
come, calculated to tempt the palate of the fastidious. It is 
composed on alternate days of a thick soup or broth made of 
VOL. LVIII. 58 



874 A RETREAT AT LA TRAPPE. [Mar., 

vegetables of various kinds boiled in water, eked out with 
coarse dry bread, a little salt, and a cup of water ; or of boiled 
rice and milk. Occasionally home-made cider is substituted for 
the water. Meat he never tastes, unless while in the infirmary ; 
nor fish, butter,, cheese, or eggs, although the last three are pro- 
duced in plenty at the monastery. I can easily imagine the 
thoughts of some of* my readers, who perhaps were beginning 
to think of a visit to Oka, at this recital; but let it not be 
imagined that the Trappists restrict their guests to their own 
meagre bill of fare. Meat they do not serve to any one in the 
monastery, unless he be an invalid ; but amid the abundance of 
the menu I, for one, never missed it. Milk, butter, and eggs, 
such as one gets only in the country ; excellent bread ; vegetables 
of every variety and in every form ; soup ; stewed, fried, boiled, 
etc., etc., and really most tastily done. Most delicious boiled 
rice, cheese, fruit, both preserved and fresh, tea, cider all find 
a place on the hospitable board which the Trappist lays for 
his guests. While in the monks' kitchen the sole aim seems to 
be to provide what will sustain life, the cook of the hospice 
has, on the other hand, apparently studied cooking as a fine art, 
and brought his studies to considerable perfection. I can there- 
fore promise that visitors to Oka, whatever else they may do, 
will certainly not starve. 

But to return to the daily life of the Trappists. The hours 
for the several offices, prayers, and works vary with the varying 
seasons and with the amount of work to be done on the farm ; 
but I will do my best to give a general idea of a day at the 
monastery, choosing in preference the fall of the year, as that 
was the season when I made both of my visits. Two o'clock in 
the morning is, as I have said, the general hour for rising. On 
Sundays, however, when Matins are sung instead of being merely 
recited, they rise at one, and on special feasts, called " doubles," 
when the office is unusually long, they rise at midnight, and 
are then, it must be remembered, up for the day. As the monks 
sleep in the habit worn during the day, their toilet does not 
occupy much time, and at five minutes after the ringing of the 
bell for rising every monk is in his place in the chapel, ready 
to commence the office. And here let me say that this sleep- 
ing in their habits is one of their severest penances. The guest- 
master, who had been forty-six years in the order, told me that 
it was the only rule that he could never grow accustomed to. 
The Trappists, before each portion of the canonical office, re- 
cite the corresponding portion of the " Little Office of the 
Blessed Virgin," and their first duty on going to the chapel in 



1 8 9 4-] 



A RETREAT AT LA TRAPPE. 



875 



the morning is to recite the Matins and Lauds of the latter. 
This occupies half an hour, and is followed by half an hour 
of silent meditation. The monks are obliged by their rule 
to commit to memory the " Little Office," and also all por- 
tions of the canonical office of frequent recurrence, and to 
recite or sing them without lights. The chapel is, there- 
fore, for the first hour in darkness, broken only by the 
flicker of the tiny flame that tells of the presence of Him 
to whom they speak. Nothing can be imagined so weird 
and at the same time so devotional and impressive as this 




I 



THE SILENCE is ABSOLUTE AND 
PERPETUAL. 

scene. The dim chapel, the altar-lamp serving only to accen- 
tuate the darkness; the ghostly white-robed figures, with their 
graceful folds of drapery scarcely visible in the surrounding 
gloom, and through it all the plaintive yet ardent voice of 
most devout supplication, combine to produce an impression 
not easily effaced. Even in the daylight the voices of the 
Trappists lifted up in prayer preach a sermon to the heart 
more eloquent and more effective for good than many a one 
decked out with brilliant thoughts and rounded periods. For 
while the recitation of the office is one of the Trappists' most 
ordinary duties, it never seems to become a matter of mere 



876 A RETREAT AT LA TRAPPE. [Mar., 

routine. There are sixteen distinct offices during the day, each 
of which begins with the words " Deus in adjutorium meum in- 
tende ; Domine, ad adjuvandum me festina," and yet every time 
these words are uttered very slowly, the monks standing, but 
with their bodies bent down to a horizontal position they con- 
vey a depth of heartfelt supplication which is touching and edi- 
fying in the extreme. 

The "Gloria Patri" at the end of each psalm is said or sung 
in the same manner, and with an air of humility and devotion 
well befitting the sacred words, but unfortunately not always 
found accompanying them in the world. 

After the " Little Office " of Matins and Lauds and the half- 
hour of meditation, that is at three, two, or one o'clock, accord- 
ing to the day, the lamps are lighted and the canonical Matins 
are said or sung, and are followed by the Lauds, the whole last- 
ing until four, when the monks separate, those of them who are 
priests to say Mass at the various altars, and the others to 
serve or assist, or else to attend to some other duty of the 
day. At half-past five all reassemble for the office of Prime, 
lasting about twenty minutes. At a quarter past seven Tierce 
is said, and is followed by the conventual Mass, at which the 
whole household assist. This is usually a low Mass ; but in win- 
ter, when time will permit, grand High Mass is sung. During 
this Mass a custom prevails which struck me as very beautiful 
and devotional, and which I think might be followed with great 
profit in our parish churches. Immediately after the elevation 
the whole community bursts forth simultaneously, and as if in- 
stinctively, into the hymn " O salutaris Hostia," in joyous wel- 
come of the Guest who has just descended upon the altar. At 
Masses in honor of the Blessed Virgin the "Ave Verum," and 
at Masses for the dead the " Pie Jesu Domine," are respectively 
substituted for the " O salutaris." 

After Mass the manual labor of the day begins for the 
choir monks. The lay monks, who are exempt from attend- 
ance at most of the offices, have already begun theirs at 
three, after the morning meditation. During the summer 
months they are also exempt from attendance at the con- 
ventual Mass, and attend instead a Mass said at three for 
their especial benefit. All or most of the skilled labor about 
the monastery, such as butter-making, cheese-making, etc., as 
well as the exclusive care of the cattle and live stock, is en- 
trusted to the lay monks, the choir monks reserving for them- 
selves only the most ordinary labor. And this is shared in by 
all from the highest to the lowest. A friend of mine once 



I894-] 



A RETREAT AT LA TRAPPE. 



877 



called to see the abbot and found him in the act of carrying a 
couple of pails of water to the cook. On one of my walks 
over the farm I came on five of the brethren filling in with 
clay a trench in which a water-pipe had been sunk; they were 
all choir monks, the party including the prior and other priests. 
Although it was then about one o'clock, and they must there- 
fore have been up and fasting for nine hours, they seemed to 
be working with at least as much energy and effect as average 
laborers. At a quarter to twelve the monks again assemble in 
the chapel for the office of Sext and the Angelus, after which 




AT TEN MINUTES PAST Two NONE is SAID. 

they return to their work. At ten minutes past two None is 
said, and the monks repair to the refectory to partake of their 
well-earned repast, the first, as I have said, of the day. The 
remaining two offices are Vespers and Complin, said at a quar- 
ter past four and twenty-five minutes past six respectively, ex- 
cept in summer, when the latter office is said an hour later. 
After Complin follows the most striking and characteristic 
prayer of the Trappists, the singing of the " Salve Regina." 
This it is that invariably impresses the visitor far more than 
anything else at the monastery. I will not attempt to describe 
its beauty, for to me it is beyond description. It is a chant 
peculiar to the Trappists, and one which I have never heard 
elsewhere very, very slow and solemn, but with a fulness and 



878 A RETREAT AT LA TRAPPE. [Mar., 

earnestness which fairly raises one out of one's self. The effect 
is heightened by its being sung without lights, with the excep- 
tion of two candles placed on the altar. 

Perhaps some musician following in my footsteps, too criti- 
cally cultivated to appreciate a chant whose chief attraction lies 
in that tenderness and pathos which flow from the heart, may 
consider that I have painted in too high colors the evening 
hymn of the saintly Trappists to their Mother. To such a one 
I would recall (but with no intention of thereby disparaging the 
excellent voices of the Oka brethren) a legend, old no doubt 
but none the less beautiful, of a certain monastery where the 
monks, aged and worn with prayer and mortification, yet never 
failed, as their closing duty of the day, to lift up their poor 
weak voices in loving salutation to the Mother of God. One 
day a novice came craving admission to their house and order 
a novice with a fine, clear, rich voice, so powerful and yet so 
sweet that when he raised it in the " Salve " the poor old 
monks were fain to hold their breath and listen, fearing to mar 
the beautiful effect with their harsh croakings. But if the voice 
of the novice was beautiful, the novice knew it and was pleased 
and gratified to note the impression its beauty created. That 
night, when the monastery had sunk to rest, there came to the 
cell of one of the poor old monks a messenger radiant with the 
brightness of the skies, saying : " I have come from the Mother 
of God ; she bids me to ask why this evening you omitted your 
wonted hymn of praise. Every evening, in all the years that 
the monastery has stood here, the 'Salve Regina' has ascended 
from it like sweet incense before her throne ; but to-night she 
heard it not ! " 

At seven in winter and eight in summer the Trappist re- 
tires, but even in his sleep his mortifications follow him. I 
have already spoken of his sleeping in his habit; but this is not 
all. It is popularly said that the Trappist sleeps on boards. 
This is a fiction, but a fiction so near the truth that it is 
scarcely worthy of correction. In fact his bed is of straw ; but 
had I not seen it and felt it, I would scarcely have believed 
that straw could pack so hard. 

In giving this sketch of a day at La Trappe I have not, in 
all cases, filled in the time between each of the offices, as the 
duties vary so much at the different seasons, but such time is, 
in each case, taken up with either manual labor, study, or pri- 
vate prayers, the hours of study being shorter and those of 
work longer among the lay than among the choir monks. 

There are numerous other interesting features of the rule 



1 894.] 



A RETREAT AT LA TRAPPE. 



879 



to which I should like to refer, but I have, I fear, already 
drawn too largely on the patience of my readers in this con- 
nection. I will, however, mention one thing not in the rule, 
though it is one of the customs one hears of most frequently 
as characteristic of the Trappists. It is said that they are 
obliged to dig a little of their graves each day, and to sleep 
in them at certain intervals. This tale is entirely without foun- 
dation. It may possibly have originated from the fact that when- 
ever one of the community is buried a grave is opened next to 




TWO O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING IS THE 
GENERAL HOUR FOR RISING. 

his to the 'depth of a foot or so, 
and left in that condition await- 
ing the next of the brethren 
who may go to his long rest. 
But I must not omit to de- 
scribe the picturesque dress of 

the order. The working dress of a professed monk is white 
with a black scapular. During the hours devoted to study, 
and while in the chapel, a very full white garment is worn over 
this, descending in graceful folds to the ground, and with wide 
and long flowing sleeves; the whole presenting, as I have al- 
ready said, a most graceful and picturesque appearance. In the 
novices the scapular is white instead of black, and the over- 
garment is a sleeveless white cloak reaching almost to the ground. 
The dress of the lay monks is of similar make, but dark brown 
in color, the over-mantle being a sleeveless cloak, short in the 
novices and long in those already professed. 



88o A RETREAT AT LA TRAPPE. [Mar., 

And now I have, as far as space will permit and words 
allow, described the Trappist and his daily life, yet the sketch 
gives no just idea of the actual man himself. The reader has 
doubtless pictured him as unsociable, gloomy even perhaps 
morose and severe. Nothing could be further from the truth ; 
and this is one of the greatest of the many surprises awaiting 
one at La Trappe. He is the very picture of peaceful happi- 
ness and contentment, nay even of gaiety, and his smiling bow, 
when he meets you by chance in the corridor or on the farm, 
is so friendly and sociable that, though he may never address a 
word to you during your visit, yet when you leave you feel 
that you are parting with a friend. 

The Trappist, too, is an enduring and conclusive answer to 
the objector who, when fasting and other forms of penance are 
spoken of, cries out against the sin of voluntarily injuring one's 
health. The Trappist rule is of all rules the most severe, and 
of the novices who attempt to enter the order a large propor- 
tion are forced to withdraw before completing their novitiate. 
Yet of those who persevere the majority are strong and healthy, 
are rarely ill, and live to an extreme old age. At the time I 
last visited Oka there had been only two deaths in the commu- 
nity in the eleven years that had then elapsed since the estab- 
lishment of the monastery, and the one death I have since 
heard of was due to an accident. The latter case was that of 
a novice who had both legs taken off by some machinery with 
which he was working. He lived only long enough to receive 
the last Sacraments, and to pronounce his final vows, which he 
begged to be allowed to do in order that he might die a Trappist. 

But what has become of the " retreat," the subject of this 
article? I fear I may be accused, and with some apparent 
reason, of deviating from the proper subject of my paper. Yet 
do I not plead guilty to the accusation ; for the impression 
created by much of what I have been endeavoring to describe 
forms, in my opinion, by far the most important factor in the 
success of the retreat. To go to La Trappe and see its in- 
mates see their piety, their mortifications, the holy peace of 
their lives ; hear their heartfelt prayers and their exquisite 
chants, and experience the saintliness which is stamped on all 
their actions, and which seems to pervade the very air you 
breathe in common with them all this, even with nothing else, 
is calculated to create an impression more vivid and more last- 
ing than any other form of religious exercise I have experi- 
enced. But there is much else besides this. The conducting 
of private retreats is the direct way their constant prayers and 



1 894.] 



A RETREAT AT LA TRAPPE. 



881 



their powerful example being the indirect in which they give 
spiritual succor to the outer world ; and one of the first ques- 
tions you are asked on arriving is whether you intend to make 
a retreat. On answering in the affirmative the abbot assigns 
you a spiritual director, who will thenceforth do all in his power 
to aid you in reaping abundant benefits from your visit. One 
of his first pieces of advice will doubtless be that you are not 
to attempt to follow the fasts of the monks, or indeed to fast at 
all ; but that you are to eat three good meals a day, in order 
that you may not be dis- 
tracted or disturbed in 
your devotions by the en- 
deavor to practise severi- 
ties to which you are not 
accustomed. He will then 
lay down a little rule of 
life for your guidance, 
conforming more or less 
to the general rule of the 
house. In the matter of 
getting up in the morning 
you may largely consult 
your own inclinations. If 
you do not propose to at- 
tend the various offices 
in the chapel you need 
not get up till five ; but I 
would strongly advise any 
one with any knowledge 
of Latin to follow all the 
offices with the monks, 
and your director will lend 
you a breviary for that 
purpose. The prayers laid down by the church for the daily use 
of her priests can hardly be improved on ; and the beauty of the 
words is, as I have already said, immeasurably enhanced by the 
touching pathos of those pious voices. It would, however, be 
useless to attend the little office of Matins and Lauds at two, 
as the chapel is in total darkness, and you could not therefore 
follow the text. I was told I might have my own lamp lighted 
during this office, but my little light down at the foot of the 
chapel seemed such a desecration of the holy darkness that I 
put it out and never brought it again. The best hour to get 
up at is half-past two. This gives one half an hour to dress, 




THE TRAPPIST is THE VERY PICTURE OF 
PEACEFUL HAPPINESS. 



882 A RETREAT AT LA TRAPPE. [Mar. r 

and be in the chapel at three for the commencement of the 
canonical office. Half-past two sounds rather startling as an 
hour for rising, but it must be remembered that one goes to 
bed at seven, which gives seven hours and a half for sleep. 

The most important office performed for you by your 
director is what he calls preparation for meditation. Three 
times a day he comes to your room and spends half an hour 
in an instruction which practically amounts to a sermon 
preached for your special benefit. When he leaves you you go 
on your knees and meditate for an hour on what he has said. 
This sounds alarming, and is certainly difficult at first. I shall 
not soon forget my first experience of it. I went carefully 
over all the points in the discourse, amplified them, enlarged on 
them, found the floor getting very hard and my knees very 
sore, felt that I must have been kneeling for at least an hour, 
and thereupon looked at my watch, to find that I had been on 
my knees just fifteen minutes! But that was only the first 
time, and one soon gets used to it ; and I need hardly say 
what a very excellent practice it proves to be. Then there is 
free time which one can spend in private devotions, in walking 
over the farm, or else, if so inclined, in giving a helping hand 
with whatever work is just then going on. 

Of the interior delights the spiritual joys and consolations 
of the retreat, how can I speak ? Let them rather be imagined 
by my readers, or better still, experienced by those of them 
who are fortunate enough to be able to do so. One thing 
I will say. It has frequently been declared, and I firmly be- 
lieve it to be true, that no one can go to La Trappe and re- 
turn home unchanged. The change wrought by your visit may 
be greater or it may be less, but it will be sufficient to mark 
an epoch in your life. You will have received an impression 
too profound to be easily, if indeed ever, effaced. They tell of 
a young man, not many years ago, a votary of fashion and 
pleasure and an unbeliever, who, seeing a Trappist on the 
street, and being attracted by his peculiar dress, was led from 
pure curiosity to pay a visit to the monastery of Aiguebelle, in 
France. Struck by what he saw he decided to remain, first for 
a day, then for a time sufficient to allow of his instruction and 
reception into the church, and finally for his novitiate. He has 
never passed out of those gates he entered so lightly on his 
mission of curiosity, and is still a happy inmate of the monas- 
tery of Aiguebelle. 

And now for a few practical instructions as to how to get 
to the monastery. N. D. du Lac is situated on the road be- 



I894-] 



A RETKEAT AT LA TRAPPE. 



883 



tween Oka and St. Eustache, and may be approached from 
either of these points. St. Eustache is a station on the line of 
the Canadian Pacific Railway, but is eighteen miles from the 
monastery. Oka, the better objective point, is on the Ottawa 
River, and may be reached in summer by steamer either from 
Montreal or Ottawa, or at any season via Como, a station just 
across the river on the Montreal and Ottawa Railway. From 
the village of Oka to the monastery is an easy walk of about 
three miles; or if you do not feel inclined for walking, you may 
get a lift on one of the abbot's farm-wagons if one chances to 
meet the boat, or a conveyance may be hired for a reasonable 
sum. If you go it would 
be advisable, though not 
perhaps strictly necessary, 
to write to the abbot be- 
forehand to ask when it 
will be convenient to re- 
ceive you, as guests are 
many and the accommoda- 
tion, though considerable, 
is of course not unlimited. 

You will be received 
as a guest, and absolutely 
no charge will be made 
for the accommodation af- 
forded you. Neverthe- 
less, as the monks have 
had a hard struggle to pay 
for their new monastery 
and other improvements, 
and are extremely poor, 
I would strongly urge a 
donation, in keeping with 
your means, to the funds of the community. 

And now I must bid a reluctant farewell to the Oka monas- 
tery and its silent but saintly and happy inmates ; yet not, I 
trust, without having awakened in my readers some slight in- 
terest in this most interesting of religious orders. Would that I 
could, moreover, hope through the medium of this imperfect 
sketch to be the happy means, under God, of inducing even 
one of my readers to partake of the spiritual feast which I have 
found awaiting me on both the occasions when 1 have been 
happy enough to enter on " a retreat at La Trappe." 




MAKING THE STATIONS OF THE CROSS. 




884 MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE CELTS. [Mar., 



MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE CELTS.* 

BY M. E. HENRY-RUFFIN. 

LIEN by birth and speech, this scholarly Saxon 
has yet the insight and the instinct of the liter- 
ary scientist so keenly developed that he delves 
down into the rich mines of Celtism deeper than 
many whose sympathy must be nearer. In this 
age of remorseless practicality, when utilitarianism ruthlessly 
crushes out the mellowing influences of more merciful days, the 
student turns his hunting eyes towards a gracious, inviting 
past. Nowhere does there seem greater attraction to the 
apostle of sweetness and light than in the old regions of 
Celtism. With the unerring judgment of the poet, scientist, 
and scholar, he appraises at their true value the literary re- 
mains of a people once the intellectual giants of Europe ; and 
makes a strong plea for the preservation, if only in the interest 
of science, of the language and literature of the Celts. 

In his inimitable, crystalline diction Mr. Arnold enumerates 
the many attractions of this study ; the rich prizes awaiting the 
researches of the seeker in ancient Celtic lore. His Celts are 
those of the broader meaning Irish, Welsh, Breton ; and from 
the voices of all their past he gathers grand harmonies to 
sound through a shallow age. Back into that deep, dim history 
he goes, bringing us enchanting pictures of a picturesque, 
poetic people ; and proving to us, with his gentle logic, that 
much that we prize in our later literature had its genesis in 
that ancient race. While his researches among the literary 
relics of Celtism must be particularly fascinating and precious 
to those who are heirs to, and hold in name and descent the 
Celtic genius, yet must they prove almost as enticing to those 
divorced by race or language from any Celtic sympathy. For 
it is not as a national, patriotic, or local study that Mr. Arnold 
gives us his erudite exposition of Celtic literature, but as the 
exodus of a vital truth, or a procession of truths coming down to 
us from a too unfrequented past. 

Users of the English tongue, and wedded to the belief of its 
supremacy and its solitary grandeur, we make little account of 

* On the Study of Celtic Literature. Matthew Arnold. 



1894-] MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE CELTS. 885 

the Celtic influences that still linger in our intellectual life, 
notably in our literature. But Mr. Arnold, with the savant's 
wizard power, sends his divining rod down the depths of our 
literary elements, and brings up traces of the Celtic vein in some 
of our richest ores. Shakspere ! The priceless mine of English 
thought. Where Shakspere is most fascinating Mr. Arnold 
detects the Celtic influence: 



" The Celt's quick feeling for what is noble and distinguished 
gave his poetry style ; his indomitable personality gave it pride 
and passion ; his sensibility and nervous exaltation gave it a 
better gift still the gift of rendering with wonderful felicity 
the magical charm of nature. . . . Now, of this delicate 
magic Celtic romance is so pre-eminent a mistress, that it 
seems impossible to believe the power did not come into ro- 
mance from the Celts. Magic is just the word for it the magic 
of nature ; not merely the beauty of nature that the Greeks 
and Latins had ; not merely an honest smack of the soil, a 
faithful realism that the Germans had ; but the intimate life of 
nature, her weird power and her fairy charm. As the Saxon 
names of places, with, the pleasant, wholesome smack of the 
soil in them Weathersfield, Thaxted, Shalford are to the Celtic 
names of places with their penetrating, lofty beauty Velindra, 
Tintagel, Caernarvon so is the homely realism of German and 
Norse nature to the fairy-like loveliness of Celtic nature. . . . 

" Shakspere, in handling nature, touches this Celtic note so 
exquisitely that perhaps one is inclined to be always looking 
for the Celtic note in him, and not to recognize his Greek note 
when it comes. . . . 

" We have the sheer, inimitable Celtic note in passages like 
this : 

" ' Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead, 
By paved fountain or by rushy brook, 
Or in the beached margins of the sea.' 



Or this : 



The moon shines bright. In such a night as this, 
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees, 
And they did make no noise in such a night 
Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls. 
. . . "in such a night 
Did Thisbe fearfully o'ertrip the dew. 



886 MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE CELTS. [Mar., 

. . . " in such a night 
Stood Dido, with a willow in her hand, 
Upon the wild sea-banks, and waved her love 
To come again to Carthage' 

" And those last lines of all are so drenched and intoxicated 
with the fairy dew of that natural magic which is our theme 
that I cannot do better than end with them. 

" And now, with the pieces of evidence in our hand, let us 
go to those who say it is vain to look for Celtic elements in 
any Englishman, and let us ask them : first, if they seize what we 
mean by the power of natural magic in Celtic poetry; secondly, 
if English poetry does not eminently exhibit this power; and 
thirdly, where they suppose English poetry got it from ? " 

Rhyme, Mr. Arnold tells us, we owe to the music-loving 
Celts. Then a spirit that hovers over our poetry and makes it 
wonderfully enchanting, where the sweep of its mystical wings 
is heard, has flown down to us from the days of the Celtic 
division. " Titanism " Mr. Arnold calls this power. 

" Its chord of penetrating passion and melancholy again, its 
' Titanism,' as we see it in Byron. What other European poe- 
try possesses it like the English, and where do we get it from ? 
The Celts, with their vehement reaction against the despotism 
of fact, with their sensuous nature, their manifold striving, their 
adverse destiny, their immense calamities the Celts are the 
prime authors of this vein of piercing regret and passion of 
this Titanism in poetry. A famous book, McPherson's Ossian, 
carried in the last century this vein, like a flood of lava, through 
Europe. I am not going to criticise McPherson's Ossian here. 
Make the part of what is forged, modern, tawdry, spurious in 
the book as large as you please ; strip Scotland, if you like, of 
every feather of borrowed plumes which, on the strength of 
McPherson's Ossian, she may have stolen from that vetus et ma- 
jor Scotia, the true home of the Ossianic poetry, Ireland ; I 
make no objection. But there will still be left in the book a 
residue, with the very soul of the Celtic genius in it, and which 
has the proud distinction of having brought this soul of the 
Celtic genius into contact with the genius of the nations of 
modern Europe, and enriched all our poetry by it. Woody 
Morven and echoing Sora and Selma, with its silent halls! we 
all owe them a debt of gratitude, and when we are unjust 



1 894.] MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE CELTS. 887 

enough to forget it, may the muse forget us ! . . . There is 
the Titanism of the Celt, his passionate, indomitable reaction 
against the despotism of fact; and of whom does it remind us 
so much as of Byron ? 

" ' The fire which on my bosom preys 
Is lone as some volcanic isle ; 
No torch is kindled at its blaze 

A funeral pile ! ' 
Or this : 

" ' Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen, 

Count o'er thy days from anguish free, 
And know, whatever thou hast been, 
Tis something better not to be.' 

Where in European poetry are we to find this Celtic passion of 
revolt so warm, breathing, puissant, and sincere ; except, per- 
haps, in the creation of a yet greater poet than Byron in the 
Satan of Milton? 

. . . " ' What though the field be lost ! 
All is not lost ; the unconquerable will, 
And study of revenge, immortal hate, 
And courage never to submit or yield, 
And what is else not to be overcome.' " 

"There surely speaks a genius to whose composition the 
Celtic fibre was not wholly a stranger." 

I wish I could dwell on Mr. Arnold's graceful outlining of 
the characteristics of the Celtic genius, as most clearly shown 
in its poetry. To use his own words : 

" To know the Celtic case thoroughly one must know the 
Celtic people ; and to know them one must know that by which 
a people best express themselves their literature. Few of us 
have any notion what a mass of Celtic literature is extant and 
accessible ... Of Irish literature the stock, printed and 
manuscript, is truly vast ; the work of cataloguing and describ- 
ing this has been admirably performed by another remarkable 
man, who died only the other day, Mr. Eugene O'Curry. Ob- 
scure Scaliger of a despised literature, he deserves some weigh- 
tier voice to praise him than the voice of an unlearned belle- 
tristic trifler like me ; he belongs to a race of the giants in 
literary research and industry a race now almost extinct." 



888 MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE CELTS. [Mar., 

Mr. Arnold gives some charming translations, both from the 
Welsh and Irish MSS. ; some quaint legends that show much of 
the strange mingling of childish simplicity and lofty sentiment 
in the ancient Celts. He relates a suggestive story of Thomas 
Moore, who, with a poet's superb assurance, undertook to write 
the history of Ireland ; but when confronted with the mere list 
and the array of voluminous works left by Celtic writers, without 
consulting them at all, told his friend Dr. Petrie: "Those huge 
tomes could not have been written by fools for any foolish pur- 
pose. I never knew anything about them before, and I had no 
right to undertake the history of Ireland." 

Then follows a most valuable account of the best Celtic lit- 
erary remains, suggestive extracts, and some passing notice of 
the patient, patriotic, or scientific compilers, Zeuss, O'Curry, 
and others. Then he gives a few philological hints, showing 
the relationship, the nearness of kinship, of several leading 
species of scientific research, Persian, Greek, and Scandinavian, 
with the vocabulary and the legendary lore of the Celts. It is 
like drawing aside a thick curtain to admit to our unsuspecting 
vision a series of enchanting prospects. 

While Mr. Arnold, true Briton at heart, disclaims all the politi- 
cal hopes and aspirations of the Celts, even deprecating the efforts 
of the Welsh to preserve the common use of their language, 
considering only its claim to scientific and not practical value, 
he is still too conscientious a critic to overlook the immense 
possibilities of thorough scientific and scholarly search in the 
rich fields of Celtism. He gives in one succinct sentence a 
true key-note to some of the difficulties of Saxon supremacy : 

" My brother Saxons have, it is well known, a terrible way 
with them of wanting to improve everything but themselves off 
the face of the earth ; I have no such passion for finding noth- 
ing but myself everywhere ; I like variety to exist and to show 
itself to me ; and I would not for the world have the lineaments 
of the Celtic genius lost. . . ." 

Perhaps, if some of this spirit of intelligent appreciation were 
a little more diffused, it might lighten the Saxon yoke that lies 
so heavy on Celtic shoulders, borne down by the Briton's pur- 
blind self-sufficiency and eagerness " to improve everything but 
himself off the face of the earth." But I fear even a touch on 
the sore spot of politics is foolish in the pen that aspires to 
dip into the beautiful ideas that Mr. Arnold awakens around 



1894-] MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE CELTS. 

the memories of Celtic genius. It would be almost as harsh as 
to bring in the noisy, blatant political speaker to rout the sacred 
quiet of the temple ; for almost like a religion is the service 
that highest culture can give to the ennobling study of a mag- 
nificent, reverent past. 

I will lay down the audacious pen that aspires to follow 
Matthew Arnold with the plea that it was tempted beyond its 
strength, by the beauty of his theme and the charm of its 
treatment. 

I will close with his own conclusion, assured that after read- 
ing it there need be no excuse for the length of the extract : 

"A man of exquisite intelligence and charming character, 
the late Mr. Cobden, used to fancy that a better acquaintance 
with the United States was the grand panacea for us; and 
once in a speech he bewailed the inattention of our seats of 
learning to them, and seemed to think that if our ingenuous 
youth at Oxford were taught a little less about the Ilissus, and 
a little more about Chicago, we should all be the better for it. 
Chicago has its claims upon us, no doubt; but it is evident, 
that from the point of view to which I have been leading, a 
stimulation of our Anglo-Saxonism, such as is intended by Mr. 
Cobden's proposal, does not appear the thing most needful for 
us ; seeing our American brothers themselves have rather, like 
us, to try and moderate the flame of Anglo-Saxonism in their 
own breasts, than to ask us to clap the bellows to it in ours. 
So I am inclined to beseech Oxford, instead of expiating her 
over-addiction to the Ilissus by lectures on Chicago, to give us 
an expounder for a still more remote-looking object than the 
Ilissus the Celtic languages and literature. And yet why should 
I call it remote, if, as I have been laboring to show, in the 
spiritual frame of us English ourselves a Celtic fibre, little as we 
may have ever thought of tracing it, lives and works. * Aliens in 
speech, in religion, in blood!' said Lord Lyndhurst. The phi- 
lologists have set him right about the speech, the physiologists 
about the blood ; and perhaps, taking religion in the wide but 
true sense of our whole spiritual activity, those who have fol- 
lowed what I have been saying here will think the Celt is not 
so wholly alien to us in religion. But, at any rate, let us con- 
sider that of the shrunken and diminished remains of this great 
primitive race, all, with one insignificant exception, belongs to 
the British Empire only Brittany is not ours ; we have Ireland, 
the Scotch Highlands, Wales, the Isle of Man, Cornwall. They 
VOL. LVIII. 59 



890 MATTHEW ARNOLD AND THE CELTS. [Mar. 

are a part of ourselves ; . . . and yet in the great and rich 
universities of this great and rich country there is no chair of 
Celtic, there is no study or teaching of Celtic matters ; those 
who want them must go abroad for them. It is neither right 
nor reasonable that this should be so. Ireland has had, in the 
last half century, a band of Celtic students a band with 
which death, alas ! has of late been busy from whence Oxford 
or Cambridge might have taken an admirable professor of Cel- 
tic ; and with the authority of a university chair, a great Celtic 
scholar, on a subject little known, and where all would have 
readily deferred to him, might have by this time doubled our 
facilities for knowing the Celt, by procuring for this country 
Celtic documents which were inaccessible here, and preventing 
the dispersion of others which were accessible. It is not much 
that the English government does for science or literature ; but 
if Eugene O'Curry, from a chair of Celtic at Oxford, had ap- 
pealed to the government to get him copies or the originals of 
the Celtic treasures in the Burgundian Library at Brussels, or 
in the library of St. Isidore's College at Rome, even the Eng- 
lish government could not well have refused him. . . . At 
this moment, when the narrow Philistinism, which has long had 
things its own way in England, is showing its natural fruits, and 
we are beginning to feel ashamed and uneasy and alarmed at 
it ; now, when we are becoming aware that we have sacrificed 
to Philistinism culture and insight and dignity ; ... at 
such a moment, it needs some moderation not to be attacking 
Philistinism by storm, but to mine it through such gradual 
means as the slow approaches of culture, and the introduction 
of chairs of Celtic. But the hard unintelligence, which is just 
now our bane, cannot be conquered by storm. . . . Let us 
reunite ourselves with our better mind and with the world 
through science; and let it be one of our angelic revenges on 
the Philistines, who among their other sins are the guilty authors 
of Fenianism, to found at Oxford a chair of Celtic, and to 
send, through the gentle ministration of science, a message of 
peace to Ireland." 




YEARS ago the nom-de-plume " Lageniensis " 
was familiar to the readers of periodical literature 
in the United States. It was chiefly to be found 
subscribed to metrical pieces concerning the folk- 
lore and the historical traditions of Ireland ; and it 
was prized by many an enthusiast in this interesting field of re- 
search for the light which it shed on a fast-vanishing host of 
Celtic memories. In after years it transpired that Lageniensis 
was none other than the Rev. John Canon O'Hanlon, now the 
venerable parish priest of Irishtown, Dublin. The fugitive 
pieces which then excited so much interest have been since col- 
lected by the author. 

Father O'Hanlon's tastes seem to have always lain in the 
direction of archaeology. He is a very distinguished antiquarian, 
and his works on pre-Christian and Mediaeval Ireland are con- 
sequently highly prized, more for their matter than for their 
manner. If the gentle and venerable priest had as winning a 
style in literature as in personal disposition and converse, he 
would occupy a topmost pinnacle of fame. But he is of the 
homely and circumlocutory school in his prose, and his poetry, 
while in many places displaying a graceful fancy and a deep 
sympathy with nature and humanity, 'sometimes chooses some 
very awkward vehicles of expression. When it takes the epic 
shape, however, and tells of the warlike doings of the early 
chiefs of Leix in the memorable struggles of the Elizabethan 
wars, it becomes graphic and thrilling. Many of the fairy 
legends, too, possess a quaint and pleasant flavor, and transmit 
the spirit of Irish peasant humor in as delicate a way as the 
medium of an uncongenial alien tongue allows. 

The profusion of notes which elucidate the topographical and 
historical references in these poems display the reverential anti- 
quarian spirit in which the author always set about his work. 

* The Poetical Works of Lageniensis. Dublin : James Duffy & Co., Wellington Quay. 



892 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Mar., 

They give them a distinctive value for all those who seek illu- 
mination on the incidents and personalities of a great racial and 
religious struggle which has no proper parallel in European his- 
tory, and out of which have flowed consequences which have 
deeply affected the course of history on two continents. 

Dr. Nansen is one of the very few who at the present time 
are still filled with enthusiasm for Arctic exploration. In 1888 
he made the first journey across Greenland, former explorers 
having been content with skirting the coasts, and at the present 
moment he is in the midst of an altogether unexampled attempt 
to reach the North Pole by following what he believes to be a 
current flowing from the north of Siberia to the north-east of 
Greenland. He spent a year among the Eskimos. The volume * 
now published is not merely an account of their life and habits 
based upon this experience, but also an attempt to awaken the 
public to a sense of the wrongs which have been inflicted upon 
this race by the representatives of modern civilization. The 
book is on this account written in a somewhat pessimistic and 
despairing tone, which may perhaps defeat the object of its 
author. He is also somewhat too severe upon Christianity, as 
he allows himself to condemn it as a whole on account of the 
failure of some of its least qualified representatives. But the 
fact that it is written with a moral aim places it above a mere 
book of travels or description, and the fact that Dr. Nansen is 
its author renders it deserving of serious attention. 

To the young or old there is, after all, no species of fiction 
that satisfies so well as that of well-told adventure. So long 
as human nature is what it is, the epic, in the hands of the 
skilful narrator, will hold the field against all other comers, and 
the more real and human it is the more it must interest. Mr. 
W. Clarke Russell's novels stand in the forefront of this class 
of literature. They are chiefly of the sea, and while they 
abound in the technique of the sailing ship, the phraseology is 
at all times the necessary complement of the incident. In this 
adjustment of method and intention Mr. Russell shows con- 
summate skill. In his latest work, The Emigrant Ship,\ his gift 
shines conspicuously. But in other respects the work is ill- 
balanced. For the first hundred pages or so the interest is well 
sustained ; but in the latter part the tale drags so heavily that not 

* Eskimo Life. By Friedjof Nansen. Translated by William Archer. New York : 
Longmans, Green & Co. 

t The Emigrant Ship. By W. Clarke Russell. New York : Cassell Publishing Com- 
pany. 



1894-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 893 

all the author's literary art can save it from the suspicion of 
having been written merely to fill up a certain number of pages 
according to contract. The leading idea worked out is one 
which will be received with very mixed feelings by the advo- 
cates of the rights of women. Mr. Russell shows it to be feasi- 
ble to train the softer sex to the hardships of p a life at sea 
climb to the top-gallant yards, clew up sails, haul at cables and 
chains, and all the rest of the manual drudgery. This is almost 
the rediLctio ad absurdum of the argument, and perhaps it is 
with such an intent it is propounded. The literary style of the 
book is faultless. In it the strength of the Anglo-Saxon ele- 
ment in English is chiefly relied on, and the sesquipedalian 
monstrosity ignored as much as possible. The reading of such 
a book is in itself a choice exercise in the English language, 
leading into pastures which, to the vast multitude of English- 
speaking people, are entirely fresh and strange. The more the 
pity. There is a sturdy expressiveness in those short nouns 
and adjectives which none can fail to admire. Taking the work 
with all its drawbacks, it is bracing and healthful to read after 
a course of wishy-washy, finicking, drawing-room trash, full of 
psychological subtleties and thinly-veiled appeals to the passions 
of the overfed and the idle. 

A seasonable gift-book has just been issued by Benziger 
Brothers. It is a very tasteful edition of the work of Dr. Gil- 
mary Shea, entitled Little Pictorial Lives of the Saints* The 
binding is in a rich combination of gold, blue and black, in ap- 
propriate emblematic ornamentation, and the work, abounds 
throughout with excellent wood engravings of the chief subjects 
treated. Besides the hagiologic narratives, the volume contains 
pointed and suitable reflections in connection with them for 
every day of the year. 

A gift-book, we suppose for the bereaved, is the collection of 
threnodies entitled A Symphony of the Spirit.^ It is a tasteful 
little volume in its dress, but the contents lead us to think that 
they have been selected with the idea of giving balm to minds 
steeped in fantasies of spiritualism and theosophy. The extracts 
culled for mottoes on the frontispiece smack not a little of 
blasphemy, so far as it may be conveyed by the collocation of 
the Divine Name with that of one of its rankest enemies Maz- 
zini to wit. 

* Little Pictorial Lives of the Saints. By John Gilmary Shea, LL.D. New York : Ben- 
ziger Brothers. 

\ A Symphony of the Spirit. Compiled by George S. Merriam. New York and Boston : 
Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 



894 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Mar., 

The Angelas Domini* is a compilation of many poems on 
the Blessed Virgin made with discrimination and good judg- 
ment. The compiler, a Protestant lady, has gathered from 
many gardens the flowers that she arranges, with good taste, 
into a pretty bouquet, and places them at the shrine of the 
Blessed Virgin. It gives us peculiar pleasure to read the praises 
of our Blessed Mother bespoken by one who, though not of 
our faith, yet has a high appreciation of the beauty of the de- 
votion. 



I. THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS.f 

The High-Church Anglican movement has produced a series 
of writers whose earnestness and devout spirit one can but ad- 
mire, and whose work would be of permanent value had they 
the fulness and certainty of the Catholic faith. But their writ- 
ings exhibit the faults and inconsistencies, as well as the better 
qualities, of that movement of which they are the outcome. 
They are tentative Teachings out after the Catholic faith, but as 
there is no authoritative standard of doctrine in the Anglican 
communion, each writer decides for himself what he will con- 
sider " Catholic," and feels his way along with no absolute cer- 
tainty. To a Catholic, therefore, such a book as this is only 
of value as indicating one stage of the High-Church advance. 

The author has a charming literary style, and shows evi- 
dence of wide reading and very devout feeling. But even the 
party divisions in the Episcopal Church have further sub-divi- 
sions, and he has only reached the second of the three stages 
through which High-Church opinion has gone on the subject of 
Purgatory and the Communion of Saints. He therefore rejects 
the Catholic belief affirmed definitively at the Council of Flor- 
ence, that those saints who have finished their purgation are 
reigning with Christ in heaven. He does not explain why those 
who have no further need of suffering should still be detained 
in Purgatory. To vindicate his Anglicanism to his Protestant 
readers he speaks often of the " primitive church" and "medi- 
aeval corruptions." He includes in the latter the belief in a 
treasury of merits, on which the doctrine of indulgences de- 
pends, and incorrectly speaks of it as having been condemned 

* Angel us Domini ; with Legendary Lays and Poems in Honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary. 
Edited and compiled by "A Daughter of the Church," author of St. Luke, etc. New York : 
Baker, Taylor & Co. 

t The Communion of Saints : A Lost Link in the Chain of the Church's Creed. By 
Rev. Wyllys Rede. New York : Longmans, Green & Co. 



1894-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 895 

by the Council of Trent. He mars his work again by assert- 
ing the absolutely false Protestant charge that many Catholics 
give to Mary the worship due to God alone. When he objects 
to our asking so many things through her, we answer him, as 
he himself tells us the ancient fathers answered the heathen 
who challenged their oft-repeated invocations of the saints, by 
pointing out that such prayers have been " so evidently and 
abundantly answered as to prove that they were in accordance 
with the will of God." One need not go to Lourdes and the 
marvels wrought at that famous shrine to learn what the Blessed 
Mother can do for us. Every devout Catholic heart can bear 
witness to many blessings asked for and received through Mary's 
prayers. 

It is almost pathetic to find an author like this assuring his 
readers that " the church is our guide and teacher " in this 
matter. What church? The Anglican? If this writer's doc- 
trine is true, then the majority of Anglican divines have been 
heretics ; if they are right, then he is a heretic. The author 
unconsciously deals a severe blow to his own theory of the 
Anglican communion's being a portion of the true church by 
the second title of his book, " A Lost Link in the Chain of 
the Church's Creed." Undoubtedly Anglicanism did lose the 
doctrine of the Communion of Saints ; but that church against 
which the gates of hell should not prevail, that church which 
our Lord promised to guide by the Holy Ghost into all truth 
the Catholic Church never has lost and never could lose any 
part of its divine faith. 

2. MANUAL FOR FRENCH AND ENGLISH MISSIONS.* 

A book much needed by the clergy engaged in mission-work 
where the population is partly English and partly French 
has been published by the Right Rev. Bishop of Burling- 
ton. The manual contains a series of short instructions in 
both languages, for all the Sundays and feasts in the year, 
chiefly derived from LAppendice ou Compendium of the Arch- 
bishops of Quebec. As that work is mostly composed of de- 
crees and ordinances proper to Canadian provinces, it has been 
found unsuitable for church purposes in the United States ; 
hence the necessity of Bishop de Goesbriand's excellent adapta- 
tion. The fact that its publication is accompanied by the bene- 
diction of the Holy Father gives it a peculiarly distinctive value. 

* Manuel du Pretre aux Etats- Urn's, en Anglais et en Fran fat's. Par Louis de Goes- 
briand, Eveque de Burlington, Vt. New York : Fr. Pustet. 



896 TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. [Mar., 

3. THE SPIRITUAL LIFE.* 

There is something very charming in the clear, simple, and 
direct treatment of the inner processes of the soul's conversion 
and perfection, given to the English public in this new volume 
on the spiritual life. It is very simple, yet at the same time 
it is masterful. Like a skilful surgeon, with no flourish of trum- 
pets or any great ado, the author sets to work with the keen, 
sharp spiritual scalpel to dissect the various conditions of mind 
and states of soul, laying bare one after the other the spiritual 
states, and all the time the reader feels that he is looking on 
and following a master, one who has made the spiritual life the 
subject of his most intimate study. 

Many people nowadays are quite satisfied with themselves 
if they are able to keep the Commandments, and as a conse- 
quence never strive for anything more. These same people 
will say that it is hard enough to keep the Commandments, 
never for a moment thinking that it is so hard simply because 
they never strive to do a little more. 

We would recommend for just this class of people the study 
of the spiritual life, and as a text-book we know of none more 
charming, simple, and direct than this work that Father Dono- 
van has given us. 

4. THE STUDY OF PASTORAL THEOLOGY.f 

This book is one of three volumes comprised in a treatise 
on Pastoral Theology which has run into its ninth edition with- 
in a very short while in Germany. It is not merely a transla- 
tion from the German, but is rather an adaptation, putting aside 
what was purely local in the original book and introducing the 
advices and recommendations of the Baltimore Councils. The 
English language has been singularly devoid of professional 
treatises on Pastoral Theology, and in the curriculum of studies 
in the seminary its place has been filled by some lectures by a 
professor; yet when we consider the importance of the field it 
covers, nothing less than the cure of souls in the external order, 

* A Treatise of Spiritual Life, leading man by an easy and clear method from the com- 
mencement of conversion to the very summit of sanctity. Translated from the Latin of 
Monsignor C. J. Morozzo by Rev. D. A. Donovan, O.Cist. Poplar Bluff, Mo. 

t The Priest in the Pulpit : A Manual of Homiletics and Catechetics. Adapted from 
the German of Rev. Ignaz Schwech, O.S.B., by Rev. Boniface Luebbermann, Professor at 
Mount St. Mary's Seminary, Cincinnati. With a Preface by Most Rev. William H. Elder, 
D.D., Archbishop of Cincinnati. New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago : Benziger Bros. 



1894-] TALK ABOUT NEW BOOKS. 897 

we wonder that more time and place have not been given to it 
as a scientific study. Years are spent in the study of dogmatic 
and moral theology. Ascetical theology is taught in conference, 
and practically learned in daily meditation and weekly counsel 
of the director of souls ; but the application of all this sacerdo- 
tal knowledge in the practical work of a priest's life has been 
left more or less to the good sense of each priest in the circum- 
stances in which he finds himself, or the bishop makes for him. 
It goes without saying that this good sense may be informed 
to a very great advantage by the experience of men who have 
gone through long years of work, and who, by their wisdom 
and prudence, are in a position to advise. This is the special 
province of Pastoral Theology. For this reason the work of 
Father Luebbermann is of very great value at the present 
juncture. It treats particularly of the "teaching office," how 
the duty of preaching and catechising should be fulfilled, and 
for practical detail the advice is very minute. It would be 
pleasing if it could be said that the standard of preaching could 
be raised no higher in Catholic churches. As the generation 
of church-builders passes away, the new generation, with sharp- 
ened intellect and heart craving for religious nourishment, will 
demand a more abundant supply of mental and spiritual food 
from the pulpit. This supply must be afforded them. The new 
generation of priests will, therefore, be obliged to cultivate more 
and more the preaching instinct. According to the wise coun- 
sel of the Holy Father, the sacred Scripture must be more 
thoroughly absorbed and more completely assimilated, that its 
life-giving lessons may animate the souls of the hearers, and, 
moreover, the manner of conveying these salutary truths must 
be more and more "perfected, so that the light of the Holy 
Spirit may not be dimmed or refracted as it passes through 
the medium of the preacher's mind. To achieve the former 
the acquisition of a better knowledge of Holy Scripture the 
latest and best book is the life-work of Father Vaughan, The 
Divine Armory of Holy Scripture;* to cultivate the latter, we 
may recommend this new work, The Priest in the Pulpit. 

* Catholic Book Exchange, 120 West 6oth Street, New York. 




BISHOP RADEMACHER has rendered a signal 
service to the cause of religion and the cause of 
social order by taking one of the unblushing liars 
of the A. P. A. cult by the collar and dragging him to the pub- 
lic pillory. He did not do so without ample provocation. It 
was when the foul tongue of the libeller directed its malice 
against the spotless fame of the sisterhood who conduct the or- 
phanage at Fort Wayne, and the clergy who officiate there, that 
he deemed it his duty to intervene. It was in a local sheet 
called The American Eagle that the villanous aspersions ap- 
peared. The bishop deemed it his duty at once to take the 
matter up, and the result has proved that the bishop was right 
in relying upon the justice and manhood of an American jury 
to protect the interests of decency and truth. He has been 
awarded five hundred dollars damages against the editor of the 
Eagle, one William P. Bidwell. All honor to Bishop Rade- 
macher ! 






The aspirations of many a lover of purity and patriotic va- 
lor will be gratified by the intelligence that the Congregation of 
Rites have just found that the case for the beatification of 
Jeanne Dare has been proved. The evidence has long been in 
process of sifting, and a special meeting was held at the begin- 
ning of February to put the question to a vote. Cardinal Pa- 
rocchi went over the whole case in an exhaustive speech, detail- 
ing the proofs of the miracles attributed to the Maid of Or- 
leans and dilating upon her extraordinary virtues, her childlike 
innocence and simplicity, and the wonderful story of her be- 
havior before the executioners who called themselves her judges. 
There are in existence, fortunately, the most ample records of 
her trial (so called), as also a detailed report of the rehabilitation 
proceedings which took place about thirty years subsequent to 
her execution, at which latter many of the witnesses at the 
original indictment were re-examined ; and the documentary 
evidence, which has been kept with the utmost care, is ex- 
traordinarily clear down t0 the smallest verbal detail. The 



1894-] EDITORIAL NOTES. 899 

Pope, acting on the report of the Congregation, now gives 
leave for the introduction of the process of beatification, 
using, according to immemorial custom, his baptismal name 
of Joachim, reserving his pontifical name for the following 
decrees. The members of the Congregation of Rites present 
on this memorable occasion were Cardinal Aloisi-Masella, Pre- 
fect of Rites ; and Cardinals Parocchi, Bianchi, Melchers, 
Ricci-Paracciani, Ruffo-Scilla, Mocenni, Verga, Macilla, Macchi, 

and Langenieux. 

- * 

That remarkable address of Archbishop Ireland's upon " The 
Church and the Age," spoken at the jubilee celebration of Car- 
dinal Gibbons at Baltimore, has been printed as a pamphlet by 
the Catholic Truth Society, and published by Murphy & Co., 
of Baltimore. Its price is fifteen cents a copy, but the Buffalo 
branch of the Catholic Truth Society is distributing it gratis in 
that city, and is ready to supply any non-Catholic who wishes 
to ask for it. This is a most commendable course, and one 
deserving of extensive imitation. The stimulus of a trumpet 
blast is the feeling induced by the reading of the eloquent arch- 
bishop's address. It is bracing and rousing, and stirs up all the 
sluggish energies. The church which produces men who write 
and preach as Archbishop Ireland preaches, the candid reader 
must say, is not an effete thing but as full of life as the circling 
universe. 

Events of the gravest importance, in a moral as well as a 
political sense, are passing before our view in Great Britain. 
One of those great national crises has arisen there, and the out- 
come cannot but be a momentous alteration in the condition of 
political parties, and perhaps in the very constitution of the 
country. The crisis is a dual one. There is a religious and 
moral struggle going on simultaneously with a deadly political 
tug of-war. 

The religious question is being fought out at the school 
boards. It was impossible that the system' of bringing up chil- 
dren in ignorance of religious and moral duties could go on 
for ever with such spectacles before the eyes of the English 
people as its results on the Continent. Every death-dealing 
bomb which has been flung amongst innocent people, since the 
anarchist movement began, was the horrible reply to the demand 
for an infidel education for the children. We, who are confront- 
ed with a similar trouble here, may well observe what is being 
done over the question by the thoughtful English people. The 



900 EDITORIAL NOTES. [Mar., 

London School Board may be taken as perhaps the highest ex- 
ample of intelligence and earnestness in its work ; and we find 
that body now passing a resolution to the effect that it is neces- 
sary that " Christian religion and morality " be taught in the 
public schools of the metropolis. 



The full significance of this victory can hardly be grasped 
all at once. It means the overthrow of the formidable Non- 
conformist power on the school board a force which for so long 
appeared to be as unassailable as the mass of Gibraltar. There 
was no greater paradox in the world than the opposition of the 
Nonconformists to religious teaching in the schools. The raison 
d'etre of Nonconformity was supposed to be religious zeal, and 
desire for truth and freedom in spiritual concerns. How this 
motive came to be reconciled with the negation of all religion 
in the bringing up of the young is one of those amazing mys- 
teries of human reasoning which drive philosophers mad. 



In the political realm things have come to that sort of im- 
passe which always ends in a burst-up. That long-impending 
fight between the two Houses of Parliament has at length be- 
gun, and begun in grim earnest. All over the country meetings 
of exasperated citizens are clamoring for the removal of the ar- 
rogant and irresponsible obstruction known as the House of 
Lords. It is little wonder that such a sentiment has been at 
last generally evoked. Indeed, it would seem as though the 
Lords were determined to prove to the people that they were, 
as a legislative body, nothing short of a dangerous nuisance. 
Nothing could possibly be more fatuous than their course of 
late. They have taken every occasion to demonstrate that 
they exist only as the defenders of class power and selfish in- 
terest. Every popular measure sent up by the present Parlia- 
ment has either been flung out by them in derision, or so dis- 
sected and mutilated as to be utterly unserviceable for the pur- 
pose intended. This has been the treatment awarded the Em- 
ployers' Liability Bill and the Parish Councils Bill. Blooded 
by their immunity over the rejection of the Home-Rule Bill, 
they have set to work to " amend " the two latter measures in 
the interests of the employer and the local squire in a way that 
shows that their creed is that property may have duties, but it 
certainly has rights. Hence the feeling against these represen- 
tatives of a detested principle is one of white heat. 



1894-] NEW BOOKS. 901 

At the head of the movement against the House of Lords 
stands the National Liberal Federation. This powerful body 
has issued its programme for the coming campaign. It is sig- 
nificant beyond any of its predecessors in that for the first time 
it takes cognizance of the deadly liquor-traffic in its platform. 
It demands the principles of one-man-one-vote, the payment of 
popular representatives, reform of the machinery of Parliamentary 
registration, a single day for general elections all the country 
over, and local control of the liquor-traffic. 



These, or the more important ones of them, are the measures 
which it will be necessary to pass before the battle of Home 
Rule is finally won for Ireland. The battle may now be said to 
have really begun. All the signs and tokens point to the ap- 
proach of a dissolution of Parliament and a rousing appeal to 
the country by Mr. Gladstone. 



NEW BOOKS. 

FR. PUSTET & Co., New York: 

Officium Hebdomadce Majoris a Dominica in Palmis usque ad Sabbatam in 

Albis. 
CASSELL PUBLISHING COMPANY, New York: 

A Superfluous Woman. Anonymous. 
FREDERICK WARNE & Co., London: 

History of England and the British Empire. By Edgar Sanderson, M.D. 
LIBRAIRIE FISCHBACHER, Paris: 

Vie de St. Francois d 'Assist. Par Paul Sabatier. 
GEORGE H. ELLIS, Boston : 

The Spirit of God. By Protap Chunder Mozoomdar. 
MACMILLAN & Co., London and New York : 

Witnesses to the Unseen, and other Essays. By Wilfrid Ward. 
LONGMANS. GREEN & Co., New York : 

The Little Sisters of the Poor. By Mrs. Abel Ram. Speculum Sacer- 
dotum ; or, The Divine Model of the Priestly Life. By the Rev. W. C. E. 
Newbolt, M.A., Canon and Chancellor of St. Paul's Cathedral. 
CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY of Ottawa: 

Anglican Claims in the Light of History. By Joseph Pope. Pamphlet 

No. 5. 
BENZIGER BROTHERS, New York: 

The Prison Life of Marie Antoinette and her Children, the Dauphin and 
the Duchess d'Angouleme. By M. C. Bishop. New and revised edition, 
with portrait. Joan of Arc. By John O'Hagan, late Judge of the Su- 
preme Court of Judicature. At Home near the. Altar. Second series of 
" Moments before the Tabernacle." By Rev. Matthew Russell, S.J. The 
Household Poetry Book. An anthology of English-speaking poets from 
Chaucer to Faber. Edited by Aubrey de Vere. With biographical and 
critical notes, and portrait of the editor. 



9O2 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [Mar., 



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. 

r PHE Librarian of Congress, Mr. A. R. Spofford, is a reliable authority for the 
\_ statement that in no other period of American literature has there been so 
much writing and publishing as at the present time. Formerly authors relied al- 
.most wholly upon the book publishers ; the modern literary syndicate had no ex- 
istence. The United States had ten years ago less than half the number of 
reviews, magazines, and periodicals now in the market. The total for 1893 is 
ten hundred and fifty-one, as contrasted with a total of four hundred and twenty- 
eight in the year 1883. The best writers are sought for by the magazines ; many 
excellent productions of recent years cannot be found in book-form. Among 
librarians it is a common experience that the latest and best information on many 
subjects is sought for by readers, not in books but in the back numbers of current 
periodicals. Our Reading Circles will find ample opportunities for profitable 
work in magazine literature. We wish to recommend again the practice of hav- 
ing passages from magazines and newspapers read and discussed at meetings, in 
addition to the regular order of exercises. 

* * * 

We are indebted to Helen Raymond Grey for the following notice of a re- 
cent book by a Catholic author, which has won high praise from the most compe- 
tent judges. It is entitled The American Girl at College, by Lida Rose McCabe, 
and is published by Dodd, Mead Co., New York. The facts set forth are the 
result of a personal visit to each of the colleges under consideration Vassar, 
Smith, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Harvard Annex, Mt. Holyoke, and the Woman's 
College. While a vast number of American girls are possessed of the desire of a 
college degree, few of them understand how to make the choice of an Alma Ma- 
ter ; also, while many parents are willing enough to let their daughters study to 
their hearts' content, objections to and uncomplimentary valuations of the college 
girl are so numerous upon all sides that older people are apt to doubt for a while 
and ultimately conclude their girls will be better off at home, safe from being 
thought " queer " and " masculine " and being christened "cranks." Miss Mc- 
Cabe does not shrink from the points either for or against a college education for 
girls ; but it would take an exceptionally biassed mind not to realize that, grant- 
ing some faults which are still to be overcome in some college-bred women, the 
advantages more than atone for them. Remember the girl at college is still the 
exception rather than the rule, although all the women's colleges are rapidly 
growing. The conservatism which used to exist is rapidly disappearing, and 
" Progress " is now the motto of those in charge of the higher education of wo- 
men. Whatever narrowness might have been decried in former times as ham- 
pering both the faculty and students of women's colleges is happily a thing of the 
past, and if anywhere a vestige of the early condition remains, it will soon be ut- 
terly swept away in the energetic effort of all interested in this advanced move~ 
ment to give girls in every sense a " liberal " education. We should especially 
recommend Miss McCabe's book to parents who are prejudiced against women's 
colleges. 






1894-] THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. 903 

However, the book is not an advertisement, nor merely an argument in favor 
of what may still be deemed a new departure. It is full of information relative to 
the course, requirements, rules, and expenses connected with Vassar,Bryn Mawr, 
Wellesley, etc. Almost any one can learn something from it. For instance, we 
imagined we knew a great deal about girls' colleges, yet it took The American 
Girl at College to acquaint us with the fact that at Bryn Mawr there are not only 
the usual classes of students /. <?., graduate-students and undergraduates but a 
third class called " hearers." This last class is a fine opportunity for women who 
have left their first girlhood behind them and who would not care to attempt the 
matriculation examinations. A hearer must be at least twenty-five years old 
and qualified by certain certificates of former study. 

That the book fills a want is indisputable, and that it is calculated to help 
many a girl to decide upon which college she might be fit to enter, giving her an in- 
telligent outline of what she may expect at each, we feel certain. Catalogues are 
all very well in their way, so are the enthusiastic praises of girl friends lauding 
their own Alma Mater. For those who want a concise account of the merits and 
requirement of all the favorite colleges for women, and also of the co-educational 
institutions, there is no better source of general information and practical sugges- 
tion than The American Girl at College. 

* * * 

The many students and friends of the Catholic Summer-School will be 
pleased to learn that a cable from Rome was received announcing that Bishop 
Gabriels, in an audience with Pope Leo XIII., had obtained from His Holiness 
a formal approval of the Catholic Summer-School. 

Rev. Thomas J. Conaty, D.D., President of the Catholic Summer- School, 
has issued a circular in which he urges active work : 

I am proud to transmit this good news to all who are interested in our 
work, and especially to the students of the school. 

They will hail the news with joy, as another evidence of the unceasing inter- 
est with which the great Pontiff watches the intellectual movements of the age, 
and especially in the church in America, which claims so large a share of his love 
and pride. 

This word will give cheer to our students and courage to our leaders. We 
never had any doubt as to the ultimate success of our movement. We are now 
certain of success, as God's blessing is on it in a marked degree, in the blessing 
of His Vicar on earth, to whom our school has pledged its best love and strongest 
loyalty. 

Our hearts fill with gratitude to God for this unexpected blessing, coming to 
us just when our hands are lifted to lay the foundations of our material structure. 

We earnestly pray that the school may be always true to the ideals placed 
before it, that it may be a blessing to our people and a pride to our church and 
country. 

In God's name, under the inspiration of the immortal Leo XIII., let all unite 
to make it worthy of the people who have called it into existence, worthy of our 
bishops who have commend it, and worthy of the Pontiff who stretches forth his 
hand to help and guide us in its work, as an aid to our church and our citizenship. 

* * * 

In a communication to the Catholic Times of Philadelphia Rev. J. F. 
Loughlin, D.D., declared very plainly the form of co-operation, besides good 
wishes which are without cash value, that is most urgently needed. His words 
were : 



904 THE COLUMBIAN READING UNION. [Mar., 1894. 

The question of the future life and success of the Summer-School is now en- 
tirely in the hands of the wealthier class of the faithful. We have demonstrated 
that able lectures and earnest students are forthcoming in abundance, if the 
managers receive sufficient financial backing to enable them to change their 
four hundred and fifty acres into a fitting dwelling-place for the school. All 
that we ask is that those who can afford the expense hasten to buy building-lots 
from us and erect cottages. The prices .of the lots range from two hundred dol- 
lars upwards, and even from a business stand-point the investment is quite safe 
and desirable. But here more than ever the proverb is verified : 

" He giveth double who giveth quickly." 

We have already received much (some of it good) advice. Now for the men who 
are willing to venture a little money in a great cause. 

* * * 

We wish that many of our friends would take the time to write an account 
of rare books for this department such as is contained in this letter : 

Members of Reading Circles must delight in good books of all kinds. The 
more cultivated the' taste for good reading the deeper the interest in good books. 
The more one concerns himself about books, editions, publishers, catalogues, 
writers, magazines, papers, etc., etc., the stronger and stronger grows the 
attraction toward libraries and books, till at last one becomes infatuated and 
takes on that quiet mania not a bad mania to have if ills of any kind be good 
bibliomania. If this does not suit you, I will say that by reading and studying 
and seeing and talking about books one becomes a bibliophile. I have just had an 
evidence of this in a Reading Circle man I mean a man deeply interested in the 
success of the Reading Circle work. By gradual process he has arrived at that 
stage of " bibliophileness" to seek for the rare edition. He recently put in my 
hands a book published by subscription in 1800, at Liverpool, by J. McCreery, 
Haughton Street, The Life of Robert Burns, being Volume I. of the Works of 
Robert Burns in four volumes. Alas ! three volumes are missing, being given 
away by the father of my friend to whom these volumes once belonged. By the 
way, did you ever notice that a love of books goes along with a love of men ? 
The volume contains that admirable letter of Burns's, written to Dr. Moore, giving 
a sketch of his own life, written while Burns was suffering from that fatal illness 
which cost him his life written, as Burns says, " to divert my spirits a little in 
the miserable fog of ennui" Those of your readers who find pleasure and pro- 
fit in the study of the composite in character, let them read the life of Burns. By 
the way, there is an interesting bit of history recorded in the volume before me in 
regard to the effects of the legal establishment of parochial schools in Scotland. 
In 1646 the Parliament of Scotland made provision for the establishment of a 
school in every parish in the kingdom. Under Charles II., in 1660, this statute 
was repealed, but was re-enacted by the Scottish Parliament in 1696 "and, "says 
the author, who wrote in 1800, " this is the last provision on the subject." Appen- 
dix I., Note A, gives an interesting account of these legislative provisions, 
in which reference is made to the beginning of our common-school system. 
"There is now," says the writer, "a legal provision for parochial schools, or 
rather for a school in each of the different townships into which the country is 
divided, in several of the Northern States of North America." There is much 
that is interesting and instructive in this old volume published in 1800. 

M. C. M. 



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